Few questions about greed

1
  1. Will deducing the rng seeds / hardcoding gems positions and times be treated as cheating?
  2. Some low-level solutions (like spawning the army without building any collectors) can sometimes beat the top-ranked solutions. Do you plan to use those rare low-level players for the final ranking?
  3. How do similar battle simulations influence the ranking? Sometimes i see 8 battles with the same player in a row. I guess this happens because fetching the battles from the queue is not synchronized.
2
  1. You get a separate random seed per match, and if you want to try to reverse-engineer your seed at runtime in order to predict gem placement, be my guest; that sounds pretty badass. (Although if you do it too easily, we may patch it.) If your opponent uses Math.random(), it’ll foil that attack.
  2. I’m guessing that the top-level players will all be able to harvest gold efficiently enough to always defeat the all-in rush, but if that’s not possible with some seeds, then maybe we’ll nerf that a bit.
  3. We were simulating extra matches on demand, and it would pick the nearest enemy opponent, but we just switched it to pick a random opponent instead. It’s also possible that a bug is causing multiple simulation chains to exist, but we really try to prevent that from happening. Let me know if you keep seeing this.
3

For #2, This isn’t too hard to code against and I agree it’d be cool to see a mix of those types of attacks in the final ranking.

4

About #3: i still see something like that, less often and less time repeated, but it still happens. And now i see some weird pairs of battles - first battle is a tie, subsequent ones are wins. When I open those ties with ‘defeat the ???’ link, i see that there’s no tie in the replay. Are those first simulations valid? Does the replay reproduce the seeds that were used in original simulation?

5

The replay does reproduce the seeds, but it’s possible that either the player resubmitted their code, or that there is a Simulator out there (like an old browser tab) which is maybe running an old version with an old bug that doesn’t function properly. Or, perhaps there is a current bug in the Simulator that is still producing disagreements. It will be helpful if you post the team and opponent session if you see a current match where the Simulator disagrees with reality.