Strategy atlas
A well-rounded player needs several kinds of judgment. Explore an idea, inspect its mechanism, and follow it to the experiment that could support or disprove it.
Proposed and tested directions in resource planning, uncertainty, learning, trading, and cooperation.
Showing 17 of 17 ideas
The islandTested
Opening portfolios
Should you maximize production, diversify, or commit to a powerful specialization?
The islandTested
Build tempo
Which next build converts your current resources into progress fastest?
The islandTested
Expansion and races
When is an expensive road worth buying before an opponent closes the route?
The islandTested
Ports and market power
How does an outside option change what you should accept in a trade?
UncertaintyTested
Beliefs about hidden hands
How much should a player infer from production, spending, and refused trades?
UncertaintyTested
Search under uncertainty
What should expectimax average over, and where does opponent choice enter?
UncertaintyTested
Risk and timing
When should a player prefer reliable progress or a volatile route to victory?
UncertaintyTested
Development and surprise
When does a hidden option justify delaying a visible build?
UncertaintyTested
Learned pattern values
Can lookup tables of small board patterns, learned from self-play, replace the hand-written leaf and save a ply of search?
The conversationTested
Bilateral bargaining
How do you make a mutually useful trade without funding the winner?
The conversationProposal
Truthful signals
When does an honest explanation persuade more effectively than silence?
The conversationProposal
Bluffs and disclosure
What is the value of a bluff after you count lost credibility and revealed information?
The conversationTested
Reciprocity and reputation
Can a small concession buy enough future cooperation to recover its cost?
The conversationProposal
Bounded pliability
Should social context change expectimax itself, or rerank a bounded set of alternatives?
The tableTested
Leader containment
Who should pay to slow the leader, and when should you decline to help?
The tableTested
Opponent adaptation
How quickly should a player change its strategy when an opponent behaves differently?
The tableTested
Population and self-play
Does an approach remain strong when the table stops resembling its training partners?
Start with the player’s guide for the big picture, or the pliability laboratory for the tradeoff between a search recommendation and future cooperation. The experiment program turns these directions into controlled comparisons.
The registered fast and eta opponents come from the server’s Rust policy crate. legal-first is a legality and protocol example. expectimax-v1 is the frozen reference search and expectimax-v2 the tunable search studied under search. The other study briefs are proposals; they do not imply implemented policies.
Each approach keeps its bounded investigations in studies/. Their dated findings
appear below the approach explanation and in the experiment log.
See the research workflow when adding or continuing a study.