Gamazons Help

# Gamazons

Rules of the Game
Strategies
What the Buttons Do
Settings Menu
Future Enhancements

## Rules of the Game

An amazon moves in a straight line in any direction, just like a chess queen. When an amazon moves to a new spot, she's required to fire an "arrow", which again travels in a straight line in any direction. The square the arrow lands on becomes an impenetrable wall, which neither amazons nor arrows can move over or land on. You also can't move or fire over other amazon pieces.

Game play alternates turns, starting with the white player. Each turn an amazon moves and fires an arrow, thus each turn another square becomes unusable. The winner is the side that moves last.

## Strategies

One way to judge a good move or position is by determining the number of squares you can move to vs the number your opponent can move to. You can exert good control over your opponent by limiting his options. The bad news is, the computer can calculate this a lot faster and more accurately than you can. If this is your only strategy, you're going to get wupped.

I've had good success by starting out with a full out attack on one amazon and then working on positioning the rest in good locations. Try not to put your amazons too close to each other, try and move them to separate places so they own different squares.

The computer AI is a pretty decent player. It has a decent board evaluator, but since there are so many different options to evaluate, it can't look very far ahead until late in the game. It also can't plan strategies, like, "Ok, I'm going to try and claim this area for myself, so I'll block this guy here and then block that guy over there..." You can. Use it to your advantage.

## What the Buttons Do

UNDO

> Sometimes you may accidentally drop a piece in a spot you didn't mean to. It's especially touchy on laptop touchpads if you're not familiar with them. If you've made an accident like this, you're in luck. Just click on Undo and your amazon will move back. If, however, you fired your arrow, you're out of luck. Once you've done that, the turn is officially over and there's no going back (at least for now. If I hear from enough whiners^H^H^H^H^H^users who feel this would be a useful feature, I'll raise the priority of multiple undo.

FORCE MOVE

> Ok, it seemed like a good idea when i first designed the game, but it's probably not all that useful right now. It's designed for the impatient user who gets tired of waiting for the AI to move. Right now, you can specify the maximum time for the AI to think each turn, so if you don't like waiting, just set that to a low value. Eventually I'd like to give the AI a variable time limit, perhaps within an overal set game time (ie - it has 5 minutes to play its entire game, so budget that time as best as possible). Then this button might come in handy if it gets stuck on one move too long and you get impatient.

AUTO FINISH

> Ah, one of the most annoying parts about Amazons in general is finishing the game. Once you get to the point where all the pieces are in their own little areas, the game is pretty much decided. It's just tedious filling in the squares until one side runs out. This button is meant to remove this boredom. Technically, all it does is set both sides to AI with only 1 second to think. Generally, filling in squares is pretty brainless stuff. The only problem is, it doesn't always find the optimal fillin method. It's entirely possible (and in weird complicated areas, likely) that it will seal off squares you could've used. If you've got a close game, you could lose because of such an error. Eventually, I'll fix this to fill in the squares perfectly. But for now, use at your own risk.

REPLAY

> This button will allow you to load a saved history file, and will let you watch a game that the history file describes. In theory, you should be able to load games from major tournaments, and be able to watch them in Gamazons. Minor massaging of their notation might be necessary for Gamazons to recognize it though.

STOP

> This will stop a running replay of a game. This will allow you to go back to a game that might have turned out differently if you did something else.

REPLAY DELAY

> This sets the delay between moves in a game being replayed.

MOVEMENT SPEED

> This sets how fast the pieces slide across the board. For slower machines, the sliding might be painfully slow. Incrementing this value may make it more tolerable.

## Settings Menu

PLAYER

> Here you have the ability to choose whether a side should be a human or AI. You can also set some strange settings for how the AI works: how long he thinks, how far ahead he should look, and how many options he should evaluate. Really, all you need to worry about is how long you want the AI to think. However, if you really want to see how the other setting affect its gameplay, here's what they mean.

> The AI works by generating a search tree out of all the possible moves it can make. First, it gives evaluates all of the moves it can make this turn. Then it sorts them in a line, best move first, worst move last. Then it looks at what its best move and what kind of moves its opponent can make in response. Then the second best move, etc... all the way down the line. A move's true value is not based solely on the your move, but also what kind of move your opponent can do in response.

> The max search depth means how far deep it will look (ie - moves it can make, then moves its opponent can make, then moves it can make from there ...).

> The search width specifies how far down the line it will look evaluate response values for. For instance, if there are 3000 possible opening moves, what are the odds that the absolute worst opening move will really turn out to be the best? Some theories say it's best to evaluate all possible moves just to make sure there's not some trap in ignoring something further down. So the default search width is 3000. However, by evaluating the response of fewer moves, say 15-50 you reduce the amount of work done at each level of the tree, thus you can see much further ahead. Obviously, there's a balance to be made. And the options exist so one can research the trade offs between searching wide vs searching deep.

THEME

> Now you can select from a variety of themes that show give your gameboard a different appearance. The theme files are very simple and just contain the type of image and its location. If you're feeling creative, go ahead and experiement with your own themes. If it looks halfway decent, send it to me and I'll probably include it in the next release. Note: Square images are 40x40 pixels, and the game pieces should fit within that size.

FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS

> Soon you will see different difficulty levels for the AI. If you're new to the game and sick and tired of getting your can kicked every time, you'll be able to choose between several levels of difficulty (I'll even throw in a level that plays completely random so there's almost no way you could lose. Speaking of which, remind me to add a feature that will detect if someone loses against a random AI and have it email me the loser's name & email so I can come back and taunt him). I would also like to break the AI up into two different parts. So you could have black at level 9 with a high max depth & high max width search play against white at level 6 with a low max depth & max width search. It's really hard for me to tell if a new heuristic is an improvement unless I can play it against the old version, so I'm not even going to try to make a smarter AI until these features are in.