RTS for Agents

Youngsters may not know about Core War, a competitive game for agents that debuted in 1984, and it's predecessor Darwin from 1961.

The difference in compute scale between the Darwin winning program (44 machine instructions) and an agent today that calls into an LLM is rather mind boggling.

https://corewar.co.uk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(programming_game)

Man, I could see the next Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander-like game where rough orders/instructions are given to commanders and they carry out those commands.

The scale of those games was already nuts, but that would 10x things.

I wish there's a RuneScape server for bots. A game where it is both fun to play manually, and automated. Quests, for example, is a one-off thing where it could be fun for the player and not really useful to automate since it is a one-off task (unless you're running bot farm).

I don't think the main game would encourage that - the more obscure the protocol, the less bot in the actual game (even though I don't think it's hard to find protocol documentation or just plug into an official client). OpenRSC, a revival of RuneScape Classic do have botting worlds, but personally RSC is not "fun" for me.

There are programmer games like Screeps (which the new Arena version just launched at the end of last year), but those game usually do not allow manual play or only indirect play. I tried Screeps, but I'm not good at strategy games, so once I get the runtime working I lose interest and none of my friend would want to help me strategize in game that they do not understand.

Tokens are actually a very good RTS resource. If you allocate a fixed amount of tokens per map, a side with more of them would be able to spawn more agent units, or a few smarter hero units (with /think).

I imagine this also works in multiplayer

I've been developing an rts using coding agents https://egeozcan.github.io/unnamed_rts/ - lots of borrowed ideas from red alert.

it's super buggy and yet doesn't work on mobile but it's been my childhood dream to make an rts and I have something I can have fun adding different dynamics.

it's much more fun to watch the agent struggle developing an AI instead of play the game itself (tried that at the beginning too).

I think this is a really cool idea.

What would stop us from making it multiplayer and having two or more human players compete over common resources & goals?

Release coming soon! Many of the ideas here are actually in the roadmap :D

For more context: https://x.com/idosal1/status/2011886884830789808

Reminds me of the project https://neuralmmo.github.io/_build/html/rst/landing.html

Very nice! I am working on something very similar at www.viberia.net

My take was that it’s easier to trace who is doing what (and what the agent hierarchy looks like) when agents’ locations are fixed.

This is like if the game in Severance was fun

I wonder if this is a fork of gas town...

Prompt-prompt!

The cool thing is these kind of agents don’t run on LLMs, they run on classical methods like GOAP and utility AI, etc.