Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

There was this simple game where you were supposed to conquer all planets on the 2d map. You started with one planet that gradually built up ships over time. Then you could send some to any other planets but travel took time. Neutral planets had some fixed number of ships on them. If your fleet had more you captured the planet and it started building ships for you.

To make the game fair maps were symmetrical and your opponent started with the same planet on the opposite side.

There was a Google game ai competition in 2010 where you could submit your program and it was ran against programs submitted by other players. At every time step your program was deciding how many ships to send from where to where and the opponent was doing the same.

Was that operations game?

It was called Planet Wars.

Dude who won did it in Haskell and wrote a nice post mortem. The winner of the second place wrote one too. Links here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ef40x/google_a...

Apparently there are some modern incarnations: https://cog2025.inesc-id.pt/planet-wars-ai-challenge/

I also thought about this type of game!

I have more experience with the discrete version - e.g., Konquest[0].

I think it's not very operational, as getting your ships to battle is as simple as saying go from A to B. Your operational choices boil down to whether you want to pass through planet C, to trade time for flexibility.

While it has perfect information over your own ships, I think the core idea can be easily adapted to have separate players controlling separate planets, with delayed communication, both for people playing this game and for an AI competition.

[0] https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/konquest/

> Your operational choices boil down to whether you want to pass through planet C, to trade time for flexibility.

I don't think that's true, at least when programs play it. Key to victory was making sure that you have enough of forces to capture the planet you are sending your forces to. It was always about having the right sized fleet ready and sending right sized fleet sometimes from multiple sources to capture the planet and increase your production as a result.

It's true that the game had perfect information, instant communication and no randomness in battle outcome. Are those necessary elements for something to be operations game or are those just elements that particularly interest you?

That's a good point, the matter of timing different fleets from different sources to arrive at the same time is definitely an operational challenge.

I think it's a bit difficult to describe a game as purely strategic/operational/tactical.

Games can contain strategic/operational/tactical elements or choices, and I would say that a game where the vast majority of choices are operational can be called an "operations game".

When I played Konquest/Galcon, I felt that the biggest challenge was figuring the correct timing and order of expansion, which to me feels like strategy. It's very possible that AIs would disagree with me.

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