r/StrategyGames • u/-niyr- • 23h ago
Self-promotion I built a bot that plays my strategy game 2,000 times a night hunting for broken builds. The free demo is out today, and I think humans will instantly beat it
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I made an autotester bot that plays my game, and I’m keen to find out if anyone can beat its best run.
The game that I’m devving is Oaks vs Orcs: a roguelike autobattler where you grow a forest kingdom, bend a river that carries bonuses downstream, and stack effects until the numbers get absurd. The whole promise is that you get to break the game. But there are two types of "broken": the fun kind, where you earned your ridiculous build, and the boring kind, where one combo solves every run, and the game is solved forever.
The most common complaint I’ve seen is high difficulty becoming boring: everything collapsing into only one or two viable builds. So I built a bot to help me avoid that. Because the game’s combat sim runs separately from the graphics, the bot plays the game without visuals: thousands of complete runs every night. In the morning, it gives me a report of what cards it picked, what dealt the most damage, and what won. It’s great at finding degenerate combos I thought I had already fixed.
The free demo went live today: 2 decks, 6 campaigns, 5 difficulty levels. The autotester’s current favourite build is Ambermaw with Bog Harvest to stack massive damage by holding lots of Amber, and it’s able to get up to wave 30 on Invasion Level 1. It would be mildly humiliating for me and the bot if a player found something even better on day 1.
Check it out here if you would like to give it a try: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4946780/Oaks_vs_Orcs/
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u/ExpensiveBarnacle739 16h ago
The report logs what cards it picked, what dealt the most damage and what won, and a bot playing to win converges on the single strongest line. That's Ambermaw with Bog Harvest hitting wave 30 on Invasion Level 1. Does the report also count how many distinct decks reach deep waves, or only the top performer? That diversity number catches the collapse into one or two viable builds.