Hey everyone!
Terminal is going to be hosting a number of live school competitions in the fall recruiting season, and want to have more special configs to make each of these events unique and to ensure people make custom algos just for that competition. Creating a fun, balanced, and unique config takes a significant amount of resources, so we are looking to our community for help.
Submission
- Send the config file to games@correlation-one.com with the subject ‘Config’. Include a discussion of the roles of each of your units as well as a discussion about the other criteria (below).
- As a simple proof of concept, you should also provide a replay of a play by hand game simulating two different, reasonable strategies. You can download the replay after your game is over by clicking the ‘download replay’ button under the console after the game.
- If you want to go above and beyond, you can include an algo along with your submission
- We may have some discussion and back and forth, or make some changes. Once we reach a point where we agree that your config meets the below criteria, we will award them the $350.
Criteria
If anyone creates a config that meets the criteria below, we will award them $350. These criteria are fairly loose guidelines, as it is a difficult concept to quantify completely. We may have some back-and-forth discussion about these criteria during review/submission
- The config should be significantly unique, and encourage different strategies or styles of play from existing configs. A simple algo specifically designed for that config should be able to easily defeat a simple algo designed for a different config.
- All units should have a distinct and different role. Properly making use of the unit in the appropriate situations should be critical for the success of nearly all strategies.
- There should be multiple viable strategies, and both maco level and micro level decisions and optimizations that can be made. The core terminal engine is pretty good at this, so this mainly means that it should be difficult to find one clearly dominant strategy.
Helpful information
- Some macro strategies like saving up for big unit attacks, corner-focused attacks, strafing lines for long range units, and other such strategies seem fairly universal, and it might be worth discussing or thinking about these sorts of strategies would work with your config.
- For a general sense of how different it should be, use the difference between the ‘Classic’ config and ‘Season 3’ config as a point of reference. Preferably, the ‘difference’ made by your new config should be a bit more.
- These configs should remain secret, so people can’t develop for them beforehand.
- We don’t want anyone to feel ‘burned’ if they don’t get selected. We encourage you to only pursue this opportunity if the game design/balance aspect of things seems appealing to you, and to consider the cash prize as a bonus.
- This is probably fairly obvious, but for a config to have interesting pathing, at least one of your firewall units needs to be cheap enough to generate a solid handful each turn.
Good luck, and feel free to message me or reply below with questions!
