Steps toward Building of a Good AI for Complex Wargame-Type Simulation Games

One of the key areas for the application of Artificial Intelligence to the game domain is in the design of challenging artificial opponents for human players. Complex simulations such as historical wargames can be seen as natural extensions of classical games where AI techniques such as planning or learning have already proved powerful. Yet the parallel nature of more recent games introduce new levels of complexity which can be tackled at various levels. This paper focuses on the question of finding good representations for the AI design, which implies finding relevant granularities for the various tasks involved, for a popular historical wargame. This work is based on the partially automated use of the rules of the game, as well as some common sense and historical military knowledge, to design relevant heuristics. The resulting gain in representation complexity will help the application of techniques such as Reinforcement Learning.