Calculating the "power" of a player in a "Defend Your Castle" type game

Posted by Jesse Emond on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Jesse Emond
Published on 2011-03-11T19:24:28Z Indexed on 2011/03/12 0:19 UTC
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I'm a making a "Defend Your Castle" type game, where each player has a castle and must send units to destroy the opponent's castle. It looks like this (and yeah, this is the actual game, not a quick paint drawing..):

enter image description here

Now, I'm trying to implement the AI of the opponent, and I'd like to create 4 different AI levels: Easy, Normal, Hard and Hardcore. I've never made any "serious" AI before and I'd like to create a quite complete one this time.

My idea is to calculate a player's "power" score, based on the current health of its castle and the individual "power" score of its units. Then, the AI would just try to keep a score close to the player's one(Easy would stay below it, Normal would stay near it and Hard would try to get above it). But I just don't know how to calculate a player's power score. There are just too many variables to take into account and I don't know how to properly use them to create one significant number(the power level).

Could anyone help me out on this one?

Here are the variables that should influence a player's power score:

Current castle health, the unit's total health, damage, speed and attack range. Also, the player can have increased Income(the money bag), damage(the + Damage) and speed(the + speed)... How could I include them in the score?

I'm really stuck here... Or is there an other way that I could implement AI for this type of game?

Thanks for your precious time.

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