Dominiate is a Dominion simulator, in which you can program bots to follow strategies that you define and see which one wins.
It is inspired by Geronimoo's Dominion Simulator. It shares the feature that, to define many possible strategies, you may simply list cards and conditions in which to buy them in priority order.
The code is meant to be open and extensible. Many other aspects of a strategy can be overridden, including its preferences for how to play actions. If this system doesn't allow you to define the strategy you want and you're okay with writing more code, I encourage you to fork the simulator and change it so that it does.
Dominiate is written in CoffeeScript, which compiles to JavaScript. This means it can either run at the command line using node.js, or it can run natively in a Web browser!
I did most of my work on this in 2014. CoffeeScript was a beneficial thing at the time, because JavaScript before ES2015 was a bad language.
Now there are better ways to write nice JavaScript, and also there are several more Dominion packs that I never accounted for. I'm permissively licensing the code so that anyone who is interested can pick up the pieces.
The docs
directory contains documentation in the "literate programming" style
-- that is, it shows you the code in parallel with explanations of what it
does.
To use the command-line version, you will need a reasonable development environment with a command line.
First, acquire node.js (v0.4 or later) and npm (the Node Package Manager). The best way to do this differs by operating system and changes a lot.
Enable CoffeeScript by running sudo npm -g install coffee-script
(or whatever
the equivalent is on Windows). Now node.js will understand CoffeeScript source
files.
Running "./play.coffee bot1 bot2" will load the bots with the specified names and play them against each other. For example:
./play.coffee strategies/BigMoney.coffee strategies/ChapelWitch.coffee
The Web version of Dominiate is built using CoffeeScript and Less CSS.
On a reasonable UNIX computer (including Linux and Mac OS):
Follow the instructions above to set up CoffeeScript. You should also install
Less CSS with sudo npm -g install less
.
Then, type make
to build the JavaScript and CSS files that will be used
on the Web.
Do not edit the computer-written JavaScript directly! That way lies madness.
On Windows: you can now compile the CoffeeScript files on Windows, using an
included CoffeeScript compiler, windows/coffee.exe
. (Being an .exe file
downloaded from the Internet, you of course run this at your own risk.)
Running windows/compile.bat
should do the Right Thing, but I haven't tested
it. See windows/README
for more information.
Dr. Mitchell Morris is working on an exciting version of Dominiate that can evolve new strategies using genetic algorithms. You can find this version at https://github.com/Narmical/dominiate.
Short-term planned features include:
- Implement almost all the cards
- Don't buy cards that make you instantly lose
- Test cases, making sure the simulator keeps working in weird situations
Some specific features I hope for Dominiate to eventually have appear tagged with "feature" on the Issues list.