http://www.wargear.net/boards/view/Finite+State+Machine

Finite State Machine is a map in the educational map-making contest, so it is a bit more complicated than other wargear maps.  It uses many factories and plays very much unlike other boards.  It has elements of the 'snake' game where your tail grows and you have to avoid it, but you do not control your snake directly.  The map description explains in detail how it works and gives some tips for the beginning of the game.

If you are not already familiar with the concept of Finite State Machines, I strongly suggest you play a private game of the 'training' scenario first.  Feel free to invite me to a game if you want someone to help walk you through it.

In addition to the map description, I have put together an elaborate walk through with screenshots online:

https://sites.google.com/a/prestopnik.com/wgame/map/finite-state-machine/how-to-play

If you want a graphical example of how to play, or just want to see what a game looks like in action, check out that link.

I am playing a game now.

The fact that my bits do not recharge caught me by surprise.  It seems that I get to flip 10 bits on over the game, and flip them off, then I'm done.

Starting as the second player, trying to find a route forward, I wound up using up a *lot* of bits really fast before I realized that I was using up a finite and valuable resource. :-(

You do get 2 more bits every 3rd turn (tracked by the clock cycle near your bit bank).  I think bits have to be a scarce resource or it is too easy to stay alive.

So the goal is to not do any of the following:

a) run into the other guy

b) run into a wall

c) run into yourself,

Correct?

You don't want to run into the enemy tail.  That will kill you.  If you somehow manage to put your head on top of theirs, you would win.  You also don't want to run off the board.

Also:

* Don't run into enemy tail

* Don't run into my own tail

* Don't run into a wall

are all basically "Don't run into any  wall", because the walls & tails are exactly the same.

So, Tron.

Cramchakle wrote:

So, Tron.

Tron with REALLY complex controls.

Am I the only one who thought of Rattler Race? All you are missing are the apples.

I don't find the controls to be overly complex. The key is to realize that your next move is already determined (the current state). You are planning 2 moves out.

Definitely influenced by Tron.  I tried to make the heads look like Tron bikes, but gave up in frustration.

I don't find the controls to be overly complex. The key is to realize that your next move is already determined (the current state). You are planning 2 moves out.

Yep - this is basically the hardest part of it.  In theory I could have the move take place in the next turn, instead of 2 turns out.  But this would require taking the bits at the current state into account and that means 20x as many factories, which gets above the limits for the wargear XML sizes.  Also, I think the forward planning makes the game a bit more challenging.  I'm a little concerned that once you understand it well, it will be too rote (and would be even worse without the delay), but I'm not sure.

I am several moves into a training game (with btilly) now -

Some thoughts -

1) The board could be smaller for training.  I get the idea now (15 turns in or so), but I think this game could drag out for awhile.

2) Fog so I don't know what the opponent is doing (for bits) may be cool.

3) Similarly a simulgear option may be cool.

4) It could support more than two players.

5) Very nice job.  I don't think anyone envisioned what could be done with factories when we asked for them originally.

I agree about fog.  Having to decide now how you will respond to your opponent's unknown next move would be a fun challenge.

Definitely more players can be supported.

A factory question.  We know what order factories run in.  If factory A is an autocapture factory, can it be used to trigger factory B?  If it could, then we could have one factory capture an arrow, the arrow causes the head to move, and then the arrow eliminates a troop from there to leave a blank slate for the next turn.  This strategy could let the move take place in the next turn without 20x more factories.

I suspect that this doesn't work though (and making it work causes potential issues for people who use factories to create a timer).  But asking for a factory type that can work that way might be a reasonable feature request.

Amidon, those are all good ideas.  I wish I had enlisted you in the testing.

1) - This would take a bit of work, so I probably won't get to it.  I suggest players terminate once they understand and then start a game on one of the more interesting scenarios.

2) - These seems pretty doable.  I just need to add a always owned territory for each player and give it view borders to the board & their own bits.  I'll try to get that done in the next few days. 

3) - I don't know much about simulgear.  Would it be as simple as turning on simulgear?  Want to try a test game with me? 

4) - Makes sense, but probably won't get done unless their is a real demand for it.

btilly - Factories don't work like that.  They do a first pass to see what gets triggered based upon current ownership of territories and then a second pass to apply the factory results.  Tom mentioned before that doing it in one pass could lead to infinite loops or something, but I don't see how that would happen.  Might be nice to have an option for factories to work either way.

I know how to make factories work either way.  But it would probably mess up the code.

Tom's infinite loop issue could happen if a later factory made him realize an earlier factory could run, and then he tried to run that.  However the issue can't happen with the behavior that I described where each continent, when it's turn came, decided whether it could run.  That said, adding my behavior would break existing boards.

Also the behavior that I describe would prevent some potential optimizations.  Specifically you can take the list of continents, and turn that into a decision tree where you look at specific territories, and at certain point would realize that you own certain continents.  The win here is that if a particular territory is part of multiple continents, you don't have to check it multiple times.

I doubt that Tom is using that optimization.  It would be a somewhat tricky and potentially buggy piece of logic to code, and on most boards would save you absolutely nothing - just provides a confusing way for things to break.

There are a lot of things that would be nice to be able to do with a single pass system. As you said, I don't see how a single pass system could loop. To have an earlier factory run, wouldn't that require more than one pass? Also could this be solved by adding factories that are activated upon capture instead of at the beginning of the turn? Factories activated at the end of the turn might be nice too...