Alien Diplomacy

Software	Java or C++ or Smalltalk or another object oriented language with good GUI facilities
Covers	Graphic application development, AI
Skills Required	Programming, some interest in graphics, some interest in artificial intelligence, ideally some interest in geography
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ???? Programming ?????

Brief Description

Diplomacy is the best board game in the history of the planet, but it has one big limitation: it's set in Europe, in the same scenario every time. Of course, as Diplomacy is a political game, and people are always different, there's enough complexity in the scenario for dozens of games. However experienced players have a good understanding of what's an effective military strategy. So there are a lot of Diplomacy players out there who would welcome the chance to try their Diplomatic skills in the different geopolitical environments of alien planets.

The objective of this project is to develop a system that creates environments (essentially, continents) in which to play Diplomacy on alien planets. The game mechanism will be taken from Diplomacy, either completely or with appropriate modifications as determined by you. The system should be tailorable to fit the number of players who wish to participate in the game. The challenge of the project is in two parts.

The first challenge is the development of methods for generating a map of a continent comprising areas of land and sea and perhaps impassable regions, using algorithms incorporating random elements that produce geographically realistic results. The land areas on the map need to be divided into political regions, first into countries and then into districts, and some of these regions need to contain cities. These maps need to be displayed graphically.

The second challenge is the development of AI methods for choosing game maps that are likely to produce reasonably fair games, possibly including methods for guiding the division of the land area into political regions. This involves choosing maps that have countries and regions that are reasonably well balanced and which allow reasonably well balanced movement of units).

Extensions

The system should generate maps that have the number of participant countries that the users ask for, so that the game scenario suits the number of players. (One trouble with Diplomacy in Europe is that the adaptations to numbers other than seven aren't ideal.)

A useful extension would be the implementation of a feature for printing out the game map at a reasonable scale, or at a choice of scales. Ideally with a choice of black and white shading or colour.

It would be desirable to have an interface that allows users to play Alien Diplomacy on the computer, or possibly distributed over a number of different computers in different locations. This should ideally include mechanisms for checking the legality of moves and performing conflict resolution to determine the state of the game after each round. But this in itself is a big undertaking, that has been done separately as a student project by Denny De La Haye at DMU Milton Keynes. I've dropped that project proposal as Denny's work left no scope for other approaches.

Variant

If you're a Risk player, rather than a Diplomacy player, create worlds in which to Risk all.

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