"It's amazing what we can do with computers these days." -- Wallace Wells

Catan RL

• Great game, gonna code it terribly then put some terrible AI on top of it

TO DO

• implement roads

• harbors

• bank

• turn tree

• resource cards

• turns

• robber

• usage of development cards

• bank and maritime trades

• interperson trading

• building

• victory points tracker

• longest road and largest army cards

• finally, front end to make troubleshooting and playing against AI a little more doable

Notations

• Settlement and city locations are denoted by the number of the corner they sit on
  • it is 1D starting from top left as 0, there are 54 possibilities
  • internally determining neighbors is done by if you are on a row on the lower half of the board, your even numbered ones must look downward, and vice versa
• Road locations are denoted by a single number
  • there are 72 possible road locations
  • starting from top left at 0
• Harbor locations are stuck in place as they are in the base game
  • 0 is the top left
  • there are 9 total

Roads

• what a pain
• there are 72 possible road locations on a base catan game
  • that is in fact more than 54

72 > 54 # True

• the numbering method is going to be the same as the settlements just 0-71 from the top left
• rather than individually numbering which edges contact which im just going to have each road label which two vertices can have roads from the same player build out of them.
• the fucking if statement I wrote for the roads might be the most abysmal thing I have ever written and that is saying something

Harbors

• actually a lot easier than I thought they would be
• only one person can own a harbor(because the 2 entrances(?) are within one vertex) so that simplified things a lot
• most of the issues will arise when I have to make the trading interface but cross that bridge

Resource Cards

• originally I was just going to add these into the board class but its already a bit large for my liking
  • plus I gave the development cards their own class and that just seems unfair
• Most of this shit was already established its just resource mgmt
  • although I got to use an embedded dict so thats... pretty cool
• honestly not having to fuck with the map and that stupid numbering system was such a needed break

Turn Tree

• data structure that is not really a tree but I like aliteration
• everytime a settlement or city is build check every tile it is touch and add the resource+number to the array
• should make dissing out resources on each turn a little faster
• GODDAMN IT I HAVE TO MAP THE VERTICES TO TILES
  • making a vertex map that is a 54 dimension array where each vertex lists its connecting tile(s)
    • do not care if this is wrong, call it an alternative rule set

Turns

• thanks to the turns tree this should be super simple
• roll the two dice, add em up and look up through the turn tree

GUI

• originally I was gonna procrastinate the front end til the very end of the project but at this point most of the things I am programming will be simplified by its existencefor troubleshooting purposes

• gonna use pygame because I am simply that guy

  • I have never used pygame before

• gotta do the little glowing effect whenever something needs to be placed

  • the chess.com arcade effect whenever you click on a piece yknow

• im actually having so much fun using pygame, might be the best library I have ever used

• corners are programmatically generated, implementing working with screen rather than numbers now

• show settlements on board

• do edge touch detection for road placement

  • kill me now
  • wasn't that bad, very similar to corner drawings

• rewrite at some point using sprites

Fair Board Generation

• I stumbled upon this article a while ago while looking for some balanced catan boards to play on with my roommates
• It had some interesting insights as to what a balanced board and doesn't have a lot of solutions but the article does contain a lot of the correct questions.
• if I can get a pretty good catan ai up and running then figuring out what boards are balanced is very easy, just see which games last the longest and come closest to a draw

Misc.

• I have just stumbled across perhaps the most annoying Python behavior I have ever seen
  • why is there just some random C bullshit interjected into python 2D lists?
• This project is the reason why I disabled the clock in ubuntu