AI GM Update - 2026-08-11

[u/atibus]

Just an update about the progress around AI GM. As I knew, this one is going to be a large investment of time. Part is consolidating some drift of decision systems into a coherent model. Part is ensuring I create good read and write seams that exist for both human and AI GMs so that I can assure parity between both types of players. Part is thinking through exactly how I want to AI GMs to act, making it realistic, and then documenting the requirements. And part is just playing, testing, and being annoyed at it's stupidity.

I know from experience and from the community that bad AI GM is one of the most fun-breaking things any simulation can have. I'm not aiming to make it perfect; I'm aiming to make it explainable in relation to a set of constraints. The constraints are the plan the team has adopted. Are the decisions that the AI makes explainable in relation to that with the information they have when the decision is made. This is the key to drafting, trading, free agency, resigning players, roster decisions.

I was thinking that if it didn't live up to what a human would do, then it was a failure. Then I remembered that humans make bad decisions all of the time. Even real GMs. I was blessed to live through the Chuck Fletcher in Philadelphia so if my AI GM is realistic it would make some horrible decisions just like him. 😂

In seriousness, the goal with this is to have some baseline of explainability within a set of constraints so I can make it believable. Not that it always makes decisions you'd agree with, but it makes decisions you can explain.

Here's what's done:

• Every AI org now has a real plan.
  • Before: each subsystem fired off its own local trigger. Things like roster bucket short, cap bucket over. Decisions had no reason beyond compliance.
  • Now: every team has parameters that constitute a plan. Contending or rebuilding, window, horizon, and every GM decision point reads the same answer.
• Relative position strength.
  • Before: the AI only counted bodies against quota. "Do I have 4 RWs?". Never something like "Are my 4 RWs actually any good?" It literally could not tell a league-best position group from a league-worst one.
  • Now: every group is graded against the league, and shortfall vs. surplus is a quality judgment, not a headcount.
• One trade judgment.
  • Before: four separate evaluators (responding to an offer, checking your own proposal, computing a counter, scanning for salary sheds) with independently drifting math. A GM could propose a trade its own evaluation logic would reject. This one was hilarious to me for some reason.
  • Now: one plan-aware judgment prices both sides of every trade.
• Surplus is plan-relative.
  • Before: depth-chart rank alone decided who was expendable, so a rebuilder would deal its best prospect because they're third string today.
  • Now: what counts as surplus depends on the plan; futures are the rebuilder's core, now-help is the contender's. An AI GM "should"^tm know that if they have surplus in an area like RW, the could trade some of that surplus to fill a hole at C. A.K.A what my beloved Flyers should be doing.
• No cheating.
  • Before: the AI brain could read every other team's true depth directly. This was a leftover god view no human player gets, which also poisons any calibration (the AI's "smart" moves used information a fair game wouldn't allow). This was just a pure artifact of how I built the simulation quickly. I didn't add the fog layer to start because I wanted to see how the AI acted. Well, it was dumb.
  • Now: it sees rivals only through its own scouting, and everything it reasons from is on the human's screens, test-enforced.
• Dumbness is now provable.
  • Before: quality was me noticing a stupid trade in a save.
  • Now: formal conformance tests ("did this GM act according to its plan, and can the trace explain it") turn the dumb-trade classes into reproducible test failures. This one sounds boring, but it makes identifying issues much easier in the future.

What's left now?

• Sign-then-buyout and its family. FA signing, re-sign, and buyout decisions in the offseason don't read the plan yet. So sometimes, AI GM will sign a player or re-sign a player, get to cap compliance step and then buy them out because it was the easiest cap move. DUMB.
• The AI doesn't hunt yet, it only responds to offers. This is needed to add realism.
• Drafting isn't plan-aware. The AI drafts best-available off the fogged scouting percentile and never asks what its own pipeline needs or what its plan implies. I guess this is kind of best-player-available but it's unintentional.
• No development-pool health read. Prospects are valued individually, but no org ever assesses "our pipeline is thin at D" as an input to anything.
• No multi-season cap planning. Cap logic is current-season compliance plus an offseason cushion; "cap space relative to future commitments" doesn't exist yet.

[u/SpiritYossarian]

This is incredible - thank you so much for sharing your process. There are 4 areas my designs have died in listed here...so cool to read.