

Postmortem: Intelligence Engine Design Systems' “City Conquest” - politician
http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/186088/postmortem_intelligence_engine_.php

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politician
"The first [advantage] was our optimization-based approach to the core design.
The defensive towers and unit types in City Conquest were not based on
arbitrary creative decisions: nearly all of the decisions around their
functional aspects were guided by an explicit decision modeling process."

"The second advantage was Evolver, which we discussed in an earlier interview
with AIGameDev.com. Evolver was an automated balancing tool based on
coevolutionary genetic algorithms. Every night, it would run a huge number of
simulated games between red and blue opponents, with each opponent evolving a
"population" of scripts (each script being essentially a fixed build order of
buildings within the game)."

The good stuff starts on page 2.

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seanmcdirmid
> The good stuff starts on page 2.

FYI, Gamasutra provides a "printer friendly" version that is not paginated:

[http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/186088/postmortem_intellig...](http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/186088/postmortem_intelligence_engine_.php?print=1)

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csense
From the article:

> a market opportunity for games that combined elements of tower defense games
> like Kingdom Rush with the depth of real-time strategy games like
> Star[c]raft

Ironically, the first tower defense games were custom maps in Starcraft. I
probably still have my copy of the Art of Defense on a backup drive...

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cpeterso
I love Gamasutra's postmortem articles. I wish more software projects would
share their lessons learned, helping others avoid the same pitfalls.`

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PavlovsCat
They're also often brutally honest. I read many postmortems of games that
failed, either commercially and/or in respect to their original vision, and
the postmortem explored the how and why of that more than "what we learned
from this and how this will make our next product more awesome". A postmortem
is best when it's clinical and conducted under an unblinking neon light, and
some of the ones on Gamasutra are truly something to aspire to. They're
written by and for developers, they're not marketing, I love that.

