Audamir

Colony

A hexagonal duel without dice: a piece copies itself or jumps and flips the enemy pieces around it.

A game of Colony in Rokgard under way: a hexagonal board, the pieces of two players and the cells a piece can copy to or jump to
A solid ring is a copy to a neighbouring cell and a dashed ring a jump two cells away; after the move the neighbouring pieces of the opponent change colour.

Colony is a duel of two players, you and an AI, on a hexagonal map. It has no dice and no chance. It is one of the two games of the realm Rokgard (the other is Lines) and opens from its hub.

Rules

  • One move per turn, and it is compulsory: you pick one of your pieces and then an empty cell.
  • The cell right next to a piece is a copy: a new piece appears and the old one stays (a solid ring).
  • The cell two away is a jump: the piece moves (a dashed ring), and a jump may cross blocked cells.
  • Every enemy piece around the cell you land on becomes yours. This happens once, with no chain.
  • No move? You pass. When nobody can move, whoever has more pieces wins; equal is a draw.
  • The game also ends when one side has no piece left. After 400 turns (passes included) it stops and whoever has more pieces wins.

Setting up a game

The game setup of Colony: the opponent, who starts, the start position, the board and the choice of who gets the empty cells; the button under the choices starts the game.
Each choice has its own buttons and the selected button is highlighted; Start game starts a game with what is selected.
OptionValues (the first is the default)
OpponentNormal, Weak, Strong
Who startsyou, the opponent, random
Start positionthree pieces each, one piece each
Board58 cells (3 blocked), 61 cells (plain)
Empty cellsoff, on

With the last option on ("When one player cannot move, the empty cells go to the player who still can") the game ends as soon as one player cannot move and the other can: the empty cells go to the other, and whoever has more pieces then wins. The choices are remembered while the page is open; after it is closed or reloaded they are the defaults again. A game in progress is saved after every move, and Restart asks first.

Opponents

The AI has three levels. In the measurement the Weak AI did not win a single game of 100 against the Normal or the Strong AI, and the Normal AI won 1.3% of 40 games against the Strong one.[1] The player who starts has no advantage: with equally strong AI opponents the starter won 44.1 to 54.8%. On the 58-cell board 3.5 to 4.5% of the games of two Normal AI opponents and 19 to 21% of the games of two Strong AI opponents end in a draw; on the 61-cell board no draw happened in the measurement.

Score and rewards

Rokgard has no score, only the number of pieces is shown. A win (also on points) pays 0.5 XP per move of the player, multiplied by 0.5, 1 or 2 for the Weak, Normal and Strong AI; a draw pays half; a loss, a game you left, a game the AI finished and a watched game pay nothing. A typical win pays 13, 30 and 58 XP, and each XP gives one Golden token (The hero, level and coins). The achievements of Colony (the ladder, the crushing win, the streak) are on the page Achievements.

Notes

  1. See (forthcoming article no. 21). ↩︎

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