Review: Wiz-War 8th Edition

I finally got a chance to play the 8th edition of Wiz-War. Some of my friends had a homemade copy of the 5th edition which was a blast to play. It was a very light game. The purpose was to kickback, relax and hopefully have some awesome stories to tell. The minimalistic design of the older version really emphasized this as the cards had no art and the tokens simply had the name of what they were. All the visuals were inside your imagination. I was really excited to play the new 8th edition because of how great the previous version is.

Overall my reactions are mixed to the game. It is still a fun game to play, but it doesn't capture the spirit of the 5th edition that I was hoping for. Granted, I only played the 8th edition with 2 players and this game really shines with 3+. But I think that I got a good taste of the modern mechanics to make a decent judgement.

What I liked was there was still an emphasis on being creative with spells. Things that manipulate the board were especially fun like Rotate Sector or Destroy Wall. The creation elements were a bit lack luster by comparison because of the new maintaining spells rule. But this can be easily corrected using a variant or two at the end of the rules.

The flavor of the game also stays very true to the original. All the new, fancy art and high quality pieces really bring you into a fantasy world. Nothing really seems out of place for a wizard battle royal. The card art has a lot of anime influences. But this is not a bad thing as it reminds you not to take the game too seriously.

My main complaint is this game is not swingy enough. While most modern games aim for balance by having nothing really overpowered, the strength of the 5th edition was balance achieved by extremely overpowered cards. Essentially all the cards that were not utility cards in the 5th edition were extremely powerful. It wasn't hard to torch someone within an inch of death. But the balance came in they would be able to return the favor in the not to distant future. In the 8th edition, all the advantages and cool plays build on marginal advantages over a number of turns. Doing something to absolutely wreck another player is much harder now. Overall the cards are at a more uniform power level and the counters are more prevalent than in the 5th edition.

I think this leads to a less memorable play experience. It is still very enjoyable to build up small advantages until the win is inevitable. Especially trying to do it under the nose of other players who have the same goal. I love Magic: the Gathering for this type of play, but am not really looking for it when I break out Wiz-War. I would prefer more swing and randomness. This generates much better stories. No one remembers the time that you kept a card advantage over your opponent and just won because you had more actions. But everyone remembers the time you were fried almost well done, but managed to teleport to safety and then fry the offending player with lightning to return the favor a few turns later.

There is still a lot of strategy and creativity in the latter type of play, just far less planning due to the chaos that multiple players can unleash. It feels good to not have to feed the Spike in me all the time. Sometimes Timmy wants his time with the massive attacks and flashy tricks. And the 5th edition of Wiz-War was just such a game. While I like the new 8th edition, there is just too much room for Spike to come out. Hopefully, this is less of a case when playing with more than 2 players. But I think that with the flattening of the spells' power Spike still has ample room to come out an play.

EDIT: There is a fan art version of the 5th edition with both official expansions and a community expansion which looks really nice on Board Game Geek. I recommend that those interested in making there own copy use that over the scans linked previously.

Money in Catan

One of the people that I play Settlers of Catan posed the question on whether one could introduce gold as money, not any of the gold variants in the expansions, into the game so that people actually use it to trade with. This would remove one common friction to trade, namely there won't have to be a double coincidence of wants. In addition, it would serve as a good economics lesson on how money works, despite being inherently valueless. Unfortunately, I don't think it is possible to graft money onto Settlers in a way that makes prices endogenous. The structure of Settlers makes trade non-essential and any additional frictions would completely shut down trade.

Before going into detail on the issues, I would like to formalize how gold would be added to Settlers. Gold's purpose is solely to be a medium of exchange. This means that there will be nothing to buy from the game for gold, only the other players. So any gold that enters the hands of the players will never leave. As we want the players to use gold instead of relying on barter, all trades must have just gold on one side of them. To remove the loophole of players swapping gold back and forth to simulate barter, we will further restrict trades to only be the active player. Things like can more gold be generated or how much gold each player starts with can be left up in the air and isn't really important for discussing what goes wrong.

I think that most people who have played Settlers notice that the end game tends to turn into a game of solitaire. Once you have your production upgraded enough through cities and settlements, there is usually no need to trade with other people. How ever you have built will generate the necessary points to win. Even early game, trade is not essential with things like sufficient diversification in starting resources and 4:1 with the bank. This means that if trade becomes more difficult it will vanish from the game.

How difficult trade is really depends on who you are playing with. Some groups trade a lot, others never do anything that is not 2:1 or better. In the former case, trade might still exist with gold due to the high level of reciprocity already present in the group. Though there is the added layer of trust needed that people will trade back for gold on your turn, which makes trade less likely by making it more risky. Those who are already stingy traders will completely shutdown because gold is literally a worthless resource and they will not trust that anyone will trade back for gold.

In addition to the trust issues, gold is extremely undesirable in the late game. It doesn't help you to win and no one is trading, so there is no need of a resource to facilitate trade. In this way gold becomes a hot potato and anyone left with more gold than he started with is the sucker for giving up actually useful resources. I would expect that this would cause gold to hyper-inflate as the game progresses. If there is a way to generate gold, one might see trade later in the game as enough exists to pay the exorbitant prices. But in games with no gold production, trade will cease when prices exceed the available gold.

Given that adding gold to Settlers would not achieve endogenous prices, is there any game out there that we could graft gold onto to get them? While my knowledge of games isn't perfect, I would highly doubt such a game exists. Mostly because this endogenous price requirement seems like it would have to be a core game mechanic to function, not something grafted on by hobbyists. Though I do think that it is possible to create a game with money and endogenous prices. It would have to encourage or require specialization so that trade is necessary and benefits both parties. But not a cooperative game like Arkham Horror where any prices are simply mechanisms to get the appropriate items to each player. I think something like a vertical production chain or a medieval king's council could have the desired features.

Grokkable Moment

I have been thinking a bit about good games to introduce people to Eurogames. Settles of Catan was my introduction to them and was my go to for sharing Eurogames with others. Recently, I acquired 7 Wonders and feel I have had more success with it. My friends ask to play 7 Wonders more often than any other game. In thinking over the differences between the games a few things pop out, namely the length of the game and the complexity of the rules. These features end up combining in such that new players grok 7 Wonders just as it ends, so they are ready to play again and use their new found understanding. Whereas in Catan, new players tend to grok the game when it becomes obvious they are going to lose. This usually leaves a good 15-30 minutes of them playing a game where they know they are completely irrelevant, which is a decidedly un-fun experience.This leads me to believe that the best games to teach people about Euorgames are shorter games where the moment of grokking occurs just as the game ends.

I am sure that not everyone is familiar with the word grok. It loosely means "to intuitively understand." That light bulb that just went off in your head where you "got" what grok means is what if feels like to first grok a new concept. It is that experience that helps draw people into a game. When a person learns something new, they immediately want to apply it. The moment when a player sees a new strategy or how the rules interact clicks is one of the times when that player will be most engaged with the game. They will want to both test their knowledge and show off their new understanding.

Capitalizing on the desire to try new knowledge is one way to draw people into a game. One way a game can use this feature of human psychology is through presenting players with same situation repeatedly. This way players can immediately make use of knowledge gained in the previous iteration. Another use, and the point of this post, is to structure the game so new players grok the rules right at the end of the game. This way the players will immediately ask to play again to use the new knowledge from the first play.
 
7 Wonders does this by having most of the points scored in Age III. Most new players are confused in Ages I & II because they mostly setup Age III. Once the player sees the value of the Age III cards and how expensive they are everything falls into place for them on how the game should flow. The rest of Age III tends to be spend gathering more information by reading up on what different cards do so the new players have a more complete picture of what to anticipate in Age III next game. Luckily each age is fairly quick so new players don't have time to get bored or discouraged about losing as they are still actively learning. Add in that each play of 7 Wonders is about 30 minutes and you have a perfect receipt for how to make new players want to play again.

In contrast, Catan has a much longer end game. It could easily be 15-30 minutes from the point at which a player is inevitably going to win and the game actually finishing. When this point arrives, most new players realize the large mistakes they made in the early game which constrain them from wining now. Moreover, there is little learning for new players at this point as only extremely tight play can save them, which they are not experienced enough to preform. Combine this with an average game of Catan taking a hour or more and it is easy to see how 7 Wonders provides a nicer new players experience.

I think these differences in the moment of grokking a game plays a large role in new players asking to play again. From my limited sample, everyone immediately asks to play 7 Wonders again, whereas I usually have to prod for the second game of Catan. To me this means that 7 Wonders and other short games with late moments of grokking are the best to teach on. These games will end up in more people asking to play again which results in more long term casual gamers.  So while I do like Catan, I don't think that it will be my go to game for introducing players to the world of Eurogames.

Catan No Trade Theorem: Take 2

Yesterday I posted about how the Milgrom-Stokey No Trade Theorem applies to the Settlers of Catan game. It was a little technical and very stream of conscious, so I wanted to take another crack at it after thinking about the problem some more and coming up with some interesting implications. Including not only a new No Trade Theorem variation and the result that trade is possible in Settlers, but also trades can occur where everyone knows that one player is getting screwed over! In covering this ground we see that one of the rules of Settlers that looks like it restricts trade is actually key to enabling it.Well done Mr. Teuber, well done!

Though first I have to admit I made a mistake in applying the theorem yesterday. One big difference between the Settlers' universe and the Milgrom-Stokey theorem is player's utility depends on the players' hands and buildings in Settlers, but this is not allowed under Milgrom-Stokey. I gave a convoluted argument about how to fix this in the previous post which is wrong. Luckily one can simply expand the Milgrom-Stokey setup to include utility that depends on the other players' consumption and all the math still works. Overall not too big a deal.

This extension does limit the potency of the resulting theorem though. For example, consider a trade between 2 players that they both agree to. In the Milgrom-Stokey world, the other players are indifferent between this trade happening and not because it doesn't affect their utility. Therefor all players approve of this trade, which means that neither of the two players involved in the trade actually benefit. In the standard setup this result has a lot of bite. Now consider the same 2 player trade, but in a Settlers' world where this can affect the the utility of players not party to the trade. Here we don't have that the other players must be indifferent. Moreover if at least one of the 2 players that are party to the trade is made strictly better off by the trade it must be that one of the players not party to the trade is made strictly worse off. This is a directly implication of the No Trade Theorem in this setting as if some player was not made worse off, all players would agree to the trade and hence no player is made better off.

The insight that both players involved in a trade in Settlers could be made better off, but make some other player worse off is key to understanding how trade could exist in the game. For example consider a trade between players 1 & 2 in Settlers where player 1 gives 2 an Ore in exchange for a Wheat. As a result of this trade Player 1 builds a city on his turn and during Player 2's turn she also builds a city. It is not hard to imagine a board setup where this would put both players far ahead of the remaining player or two not part of this trade. Granted this is a pretty rare occurrence for a trade to so clearly benefit both parties at the expense of the other players. But this partly explains how trade could occur in Settlers even if players are perfectly rational and have perfect understanding of the game.

Personally this is not a fully satisfying answer. Particularly because of how much weaker the no trade theorem is in an environment where utility depends on all players' consumption. A No Trade Theorem which applies to trade that any number of players approve of would be closer to the spirit of the Milgrom-Stokey result. One of my colleagues suggested how to do this. Consider a trade in Settlers that benefits both players and hence harms a player not party to the trade. Assuming he is not budget constrained, this 3rd player would be willing to offer a trade to one of the two players considering trading that would cause him to be hurt less and the other player to gain more than she would under the current trade on the table. This trade then blocks the original trade as one of the players who was part of the original trade prefers it. Clearly if one can construct such a blocking trade for any trade, no one can trade because it will always be blocked. In the language of cooperative game theory the core of this game is empty.

A theorem of this form would prevent trades which don't involve all players as the other players could find a way to block it. Such a theorem would be a true analogue to the Milgrom-Stokey result. At the moment I haven't proved that such a theorem is true, but lets assume that it is and applies to Settlers. Would this theorem actually imply No Trade?

As hinted at in the introduction, such a Theorem would not be able to prevent trade in Settlers. In the motivating example we had the 3rd player offering a different trade to one of the two players involved in the trade on the table. There is nothing that says which of the two players this 3rd player could present an appealing trade to. It could be that the only trade the 3rd player could use to block the trade on the table is with the non-active player. This would violate the rules of Settlers. Only trades in which the active player is one of the parties are allowed. Thus a rule that restricts the possible trades actually breaks a No Trade Theorem, which enables more trades to happen!

The forward thinking reader might object citing the possibility of this blocking trade happening on a latter players' turn. There are two key features which might inhibit the promise of future trades. First and foremost the rules of Settlers explicitly state that agreements are non-enforceable, only spot trades are recognized by the rules. The 3rd player doesn't have to follow through when time for the blocking trade comes around, especially if the blocking trade is harmful to him but was simply less bad than the trade on the table. Secondly, the state of the world has changed by the time the blocking trade is available. Players possibly have new resources and structures. This changes their incentives possibly making the blocking trade unattractive at the future date. Given players are risk averse there are very strong incentives pushing them to accept the trade on the table instead of a future blocking trade.

I promised that I would prove that trades actually happen in Settlers where every player knows one is getting screwed over and can do that now. As motivation, I am sure we have all seen a trade about to happen then some 3rd player makes a better offer out of the blue. For example player 1 is trading two Bricks to player 2 for an Ore and Player 3 offers 1 Ore for 1 Brick. He is not doing this because it a good trade. But he knows that player 1 is going to city and player 2 is going to road and settlement and simply wants to block one so he doesn't fall even further behind. In addition this is a better trade for player 1 because she keeps one brick and doesn't give a road and settlement to player 2. This is exactly the original blocking argument where the 3rd player offers a trade that is harmful to block an even worse one. Therefore by using a one trade to block another, we can actually have trade occur where everyone knows that one of parties to the trade is screwed.

Veterans of Settlers will note that the active player will always benefit from a trade on her turn, assuming perfect playing and knowledge. The only way to get trades which negatively impact one of the parties is when they block another trade. The active player must be party to both the original and blocking trade due to the rules, so must always be made better off by such trades. This means that if you trade when not the active player, odds are you are the sucker. Though if players are budget constrained due to having small hands it is less likely that a block trade could be found, implying that a non-active player could benefit in addition to the active player from a trade.

Between this post and the previous, we have analyzed in detail the classic Milgrom-Stokey No Trade Theorem in the context of Settlers of Catan. With a minor tweak the theorem applies, but doesn't have the same bite as the original. In particular, we don't get that there is no trade, but that any trade which occurs must harm someone, and not necessarily one of the players party to the trade. We also looked at a possible stronger No Trade Theorem for Settlers using a blocking trades argument. Fortunately for Settlers, the rules restricting who can trade cause such a theorem to fail. But using this logic we uncover some interesting implications about trade in Settlers, including the fact that there can be trade where everyone knows the non-active player gets screwed.

Catan No Trade Theorem: First Blush

A very common question that comes up when I play with my friends is "Why do people trade in Settlers of Catan? Shouldn't some No Trade Theorem cover it?" (I am sure this says I play with too many Economists...) We tend to puzzle over it for a bit, but never reach a true conclusion about if there is a No Trade Theorem that applies. In this post I will look at why, or why not, a No Trade Theorem applies to the Settlers of Catan universe.

To do this we are going to start at the beginning with the Milgrom-Stokey No Trade Theorem. No I don't expect you to read the paper to understand what follows. Though I will be relying on many concepts in economics and will link the Wikipedia articles on them when they first appear. This theorem has a couple of parts.

1. Utility function depending on the state of the world and one's consumption
2. Agents are risk averse
3. Beliefs are updates from a common prior
4. Initial endowments are Pareto Optimal
5. Agents observe some private information
6. There is a "trade" preferred by all agents after they receive the private info

If all 6 conditions (plus some more technical conditions) hold then the "trade" preferred by all agents provides identical utility to the initial endowment.

The first thing to look at is a technical  issue condition 6, which is why "trade" is in quotes. The reason I didn't say trade is the "trade" in the paper is more complex than those defined by the rules of Settlers. In Settlers a trade is between 2 players and must include each player giving some amount of resources to another. The "trades" in the Milgrom-Stokey are far more general and could involve resources moving between multiple players. This really isn't a huge issue as we could construct a sequence of Settlers trades that result in the Milgrom-Stokey trade, and this could certainly be done to satisfy the constraint that only the active player can trade. I will return to condition 6 later, but need to examine the other conditions first.

Conditions 2, 3, and 4 are clearly satisfied in Settlers. Most people are risk averse, which satisfies condition 2. Condition 3 essentially says that everyone has the same model of how the world works. There is no reason that players should disagree on how things in the game work or the likelihood of events because everything in a board game is completely defined, assuming that people know the rules of Settlers and understand probability. Condition 4 is true because players utilities can be thought of as their probability of winning the game. These probabilities must sum to 1. Hence anytime one player's probability improves another's must necessarily decrease. Therefore every endowment must be Pareto Optimal because any change in endowments that positively effects one agent must negatively effect another.

Condition 1 is the most technically difficult to translate. I think there might be way to apply it to Settlers, but there are 2 big issues with condition 1 relative to the Settlers of Catan universe. First, Settlers is not a one shot game like the Milgrom-Stokey theorem. Players take turns until one wins, so even the length is endogenous! Normally I would just suggest that everything could be considered an Arrow-Debreu securities but the other issue with utilities would prevent this from working and also suggests an alternative way to utilize the Theorem.

Utilities only depend on the state of the world, essentially on how the rolls dole out resources which affects who wins. But the state of the world intimately depends on the resources and buildings each player has. Buildings directly determine most points in the game and alter resource production. Resources change what actions players can take by affecting the available buildings. So there is a feedback loop that depends on how players play the game, which is affected by the trading! Essentially this means that an agents' utility depends on his endowment and the endowments of everyone else. But on any particular player's turn, the other players' can't buy anything so the cards in hand only affect utility through future actions and the buildings on the board make sense as the state of the world. Hence we can apply the theorem to each player's turn individually and simply use backwards induction style argument to calculate utilities from the continuation game. This means that trade should never happen in Settlers... or would mean that if not for issues with the other conditions.

Condition 5 is very odd in the Settlers of Catan world because there is actually very little private information. Any resources rolled are known by all as we can see the numbers and where all the buildings are, even though you may not look at other player's hands. Really only when the Robber moves so a player can steal from another or a Development Card is drawn is there any private info. So most of the time trade occurs in Settlers after not new private info, but new public info! This is even weirder than trade after new private information because every agent already knows how their probabilities of winning have been updated, so there is no information revealing effects of trade to leverage in these cases. Any explanation of trade in Settlers much account for this weird feature.

Condition 6 is where everything breaks down in the Settlers world. We already saw that Milgrom-Stokey "trades" could be reproduced by Settlers' trades. This is not the problem with the condition though. The issue is all players must agree to the trade. In Settlers only the two players on either end of the trade must agree. Hence we could see trades in which the players not party to the trade wishing it didn't happen. Moreover any "trade" that all players agree to must not shift the probabilities of winning because one player would have to be worse off and disagree if they did. This means that the theorem applies, but uses the word "trade" in a different fashion than Settlers does! (Yep, kind of a cop out...)

Overall the Milgrom-Stokey Theorem is very general and flexible. It just takes some work to transform the situation into one that matches the conditions. The truth about Settlers of Catan is the environment does satisfy the conditions of the No Trade Theorem. Unfortunately the theorem does not exclude trades which fewer than the entire set of agents are party to. Thus making it useless for answering the real question of "Why do 2 players ever trade in Settlers? Isn't one of them getting a better deal?" Exploration of this question will have to wait for another post, as this is long enough already. If you have any ideas on how to answer this revised question please let me know in the comments.

Game Expansions: Greedy or Optimal?

One near universal constant in both physical and virtual games is the expansion. Especially in realm of board games it is hard to think of ones which don't have an expansion. And most of those are probably flops or too new to have an expansion out. Often these expansions completely alter mechanics in the basic game. For example the new expansion to Pandemic, the In the Lab expansion, completely reworks the mechanics for curing a disease. It changes it from simply turning in 5 matching cards to manipulating the infection cubes in a lab to sequence the disease. The new mechanics are super thematic, but also add a lot of additional complexity to the game. The expansion forces the players to do things that are unlike anything in the base game.

Pandemic is not an isolated incident. 7 Wonders: Leaders, King of Tokyo: Power Up!, and Wiz-War: Expansion Set* each introduced brand new mechanics which add complexity to the base game. In all these cases the new rules in the expansions could have easily been included in the base game. For some of these games the expansion tends to be a critical part of experienced players enjoyment to the point where they won't play without the expansion. Personally I consider the Cities & Knights expansion key to interesting play in Settlers of Catan.

The question is why weren't these expanded versions of the games simply the base game? It is not just that they were developed later in response to fan demand. I remember reading that Klaus Teuber intended ships and sea exploration to be part of the initial release of Settlers of Catan. But this feature was not added until the Seafarers expansion. So why was Seafarers not included in the base Settlers game? Are all these designers just money hungry wanting you to buy multiple $40 to $60 boxes to have the full game? Or is there a reason why releasing a simpler game could be better?

The obvious answer is of course it is about the money. But it is not as simple as simply wanting a reliable revenue stream with yearly expansion. Releasing a simple base version of a game actually increases the rate of adoption and reaches a wider audience than releasing the full game in all its complexity. Not everybody is a hard core gamer and wants to spend 30 minutes or more learning the rules and setting up the board to then play for 2-3 hours. Especially when they might find themselves in a helpless position a hour in and have to suffer through the rest. Arkham Horror, I am looking at you. This lower barrier to entry will make people more willing to try it as the rules are both more understandable and there is less risk of wanting to quite before the game is over.

Having this lower barrier of entry through releasing a simpler game increases the spread of the game through 2 mechanisms. First more people are willing to purchase the game to try, reaching a more casual audience. The last time I was in Target, they had Settlers of Catan, Pandemic, and Ticket to Ride base games. This is a huge recent development. Games like those used to only be found online or in hobby gaming stores. Now they are main stream enough for big retailers to carry. What is notable is the expansions are usually not found at big box retailers. This implies that it is the simplicity of the base games which attracts customers, not the depth found in expansions.

The other way a lower barrier to entry helps is through providing an easy way to teach non-gamer friends how to play. This might not seem like a big deal, but presenting people with something they can easily grasp in one play is huge. People then feel like they get it and want to play again. I think this is a huge reason 7 Wonders is such a favorite with my more casual gaming friends. The base game is simple and fast so it tends to click quickly and make people want to play again.

Most games I will teach without the expansions because there is no reason to add the complexity for new players. This is especially true with Settlers of Catan, which has a surprising complex base rule set. There is a lot going on to acquire resources and then build more of your colony. Compare this to the simplicity of matching cards to build routs in Ticket to Ride and it is easy to see that the addition Knight mechanics and city improvements are unnecessary complications when teaching the game.

Clearly starting with a simple base game is the optimal way to release a board game. This is not just from a money perspective but also from an enjoyment perspective. Game designers, in general, want to share their creation with as many people as possible and want to see that people are engaged and enjoying themselves. It is this passion to create things that brings people together that really makes a designer great. Note that the simple versions have a bigger penetration than the expansions because they are easier for players to digest. Which is fine. If a casual gamer just plays the basic version and doesn't have interest in the extra complexity of the expansion that is one more person enjoying time playing than if the game had been released as one big compilation. And the hardcore gamer is happy because he has the extra rules to add depth for him to analyze.

*Yes I did reference the original Wiz-War game and not the recent 8th edition by Fantasy Flight Games. The reason is 2 fold. First there are no expansions for the new version. Second the first expansion for the early editions of Wiz-War added creatures, the upcoming expansion for the 8th edition does not. I am still super excited about getting my hands on a copy of the new edition, but it didn't work as well for this example.

Using Evolution to Keep PvE Interesting

One of my friends and I were talking about how to make PvE more interesting in MMOs. Right now things get pretty repetitive in many MMOs because PvE doesn't tend to vary that much. After running through a mission or raid a few times things become predictable and known. Granted some have extreme variance in spawn composition but this tends to be very swingy or requires lots of developer time to balance. To make truly interesting PvE without requiring each instance to be individually balanced by hand one needs to leave the paradigm of fixed distributions and allow the game to evolve.

I know that evolve tend to quickly enter the realm of unbeatable by human players, which is completely contradictory to the idea of PvE. One needs players, of appropriate level and properly equipped, to be able to consistently conquer PvE content. Further they should be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time for the type of mission or raid it is. So instead of optimizing the computer to kill the player, each PvE event should try to optimize itself so that the player leveled & geared for the content finishes the event in a specified amount of time on average. Essentially the computer is trying to optimize what spawns to get as closed to the desired experience as possible which still having some variation to keep player's on their toes.

Lets look at an easy example from EVE Online: Incursions. In particular consider the Vanguard Incursion sites. These are high level raid events requiring around 10 people to complete. Vanguard sites require a mix of 2-3 Logistic Ships, the healer ships in EVE, and the rest are Damage Dealers. Right now they take about 10 minutes per site for a fleet of minimally skilled and equipped pilots. The problem is Incursions are very predictable. There are only 3 types of Vanguard sites and the spawns in each site have a fairly constrained set of possibilities. It is clear that right now each wave always has certain NPC ship types and simply chooses a random amount within a specified range for each.

Incursion sites become very mechanical after awhile. After enough sites one can call targets before a new wave spawns and an experienced fleet doesn't even need target calling because of how predictable things are. Overall this is a poor state of things as a top level event in EVE can be explained by a simple kill order list looked up online. Some variance to get players thinking and adapting would make Incursions more interesting and something that players actually want to keep doing instead of burning out an only using them to make ISK, the EVE currency.

Using an evolutionary program to alter the spawns and tactics of the NPCs would be a good way to add variance without having to hard code each possible spawn. The game should monitor the composition of each fleet that does a site, keeping track of relevant skill levels, ship fittings, and NPCs spawned in each wave in addition to the time the fleet takes. Then the game can preform a standard numeric minimization algorithm to generate spawns that it thinks will keep a minimally skilled fleet busy for 10 minutes. (This is done my minimizing the absolute value of completion time minus 10 minutes.)

To illustrate consider a simple Incursion site with 3 waves of NPCs where each spawn has a fixed point. Then the evolutionary algorithm is given a set of NPCs that may be used in this site. Every time a fleet enters an Incursion site it generates a set of three waves from the NPCs it is allowed to use. Given the large number of times fleets do these sites, it will allow the game to quickly go through the search space and find the collection of waves which, on average, take 10 minutes. To keep things interesting the algorithm would also do a certain amount of random experimenting which will enable it to eventually catch up with any new tactics the players devise. Thus forcing the players to keep experimenting and not rely on simple online guides.

I know that this post is a bit on the vague side and just provides a lofty overview of the idea. Over the next few posts I will try to unpack the idea more and go into the details of how it could be applied in practice.