Compwar
Compwar is the painfully bland working title of an artificial life and battle simulator. While at first this seems like the realm of RTS games, such games usually have very simple combat AI, mostly to give the player(s) more control over battle orders and a greater role in the progression of the battle.
For example, a RTS player might send out scouts to find a large concentration of enemy units, then use that knowledge to bombard those units with artillery. A more intelligent military force would be able to communicate this information automatically within itself.
As a programming exercise, an experiment in AI, and the possibility of making yet another game that plays itself, we give you Compwar.
Development Process
First we will look for similar projects or projects which solve some of our subgoals, such as map generators for RTS games and RPG games. After fleshing out a preliminary edition of the basic mechanics of the units, the battlefield, and the combat, we can map out the major portions of the software. It would be nice to be able to package AI routines in collections, and have them compete. At this time, the platform will need to be chosen. Given the popularity of the Web, it may be desirable to implement in Flash, Java, or another Web-borne blatform. With each military unit acting more or less independently, we may be able to parallelize, and our platform of choice should make this easy and efficient. The first version of the combat simulator will focus on turn-based combat with utilitarian graphics if any. A consistent logging format will be required, possibly similar to but likely more complex than chess notation.