Metagross31

I'm about to go live! Due to technical problems I will stream on Youtube instead of Twitch:

The Skylords Reborn PvP AI Programming Contest - The Next Chapter Hello fellow Skyladies, Skylords, and other Sky-beings! As some of you might remember, around two years ago we held a contest about who can program the strongest PvP bot using the then newly added bot programming API. If you want to read up on what we did back then, check out the forum posts for phases one, two and three of that event. While that event gained a lot of attention and some people were desperate for a followup, not many players competed. A reason for that was that the given task was very much to ask for: Work on your own, get used to a newly released API, figure out how to write a bot, and make it as good in PvP as possible. In order to make the followup a bit less intimidating, we will start a new event and change up the format. What will be happening now? The goal of this event is twofold. First, we want to reduce the technical entry barrier and make the API a bit less scary for non-experts. To do that, I will be doing development streams over the course of the coming few days, starting today. I will keep posting in this thread and on Discord to notify you of my streams. In these streams, I will show you live how to start with bot programming and maybe develop a small bot together with people on stream. Second, we want to break down the big task of "make a good PvP bot" into much smaller individual bots. These "single-strategy" bots are short self-contained tasks, that should be much easier to handle. I will post some examples further down in this post. These single-strategy bots can also serve as training tools for players later on. Lastly, this event is not about competition, but about collaboration. If you want to team up with a friend, or need help in setting up the development environment, or just want to do a smaller contribution, you are free to do so! There will not be a tournament at the end of this, but instead we want the community to work together to get some useful PvP bots. Examples for single-strategy bots Tier one "rock-paper-scissors" counter bot Tier one spacing champion Shaman "Ball of Death" bot Tier one extra well defender Tier one extra well attacker How can I start working on a bot? You are free to just download the bot API and start right away! Ideally, you can also join the Skylords-PvP-Bot Discord server to get in touch with others and to get further instructions. You will find all relevant links there, as well as in this forum post. If you want to team up with others, you can either do so here in the forum, over on Discord, or during the coding streams. Even if you don't want to work on a bot yourself, you are still welcome to make suggestions for further single-strategy bots, that others can work on. Streams Later today, I will be hosting an introduction development stream, where we go over the example bots I described above, potentially collect ideas for further single-strategy bots, go over the setup of the bot API and maybe even start coding a little. My goal is to have daily streams over the next couple of days to get the ball rolling and get the community involved into this project. The streams will be held on twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/metagross31 Rewards Since this is not a competitive tournament, there will not be traditional rewards for 1st-Xth place. We still want to give a small reward to players participating in the event, so every player, who participates in writing/designing a bot (either solo or as part of a team) will receive one General Booster as participation reward. Can we use AI coding agents/LLMs/chatbots to help programming? Some players have already asked, if they can use AI tools to help code a bot. If you manage to teach a chatbot/agend to use the bot API in your preferred programming language, then yes, you may use such tools to generate code for your bot. Please make sure though, especially when working in a team with others, to check the code the tools produces, if it makes sense, test if it works and manually adjust it if you find it to either not work or be bad coding. Special Thanks Big thanks to @Kubik for providing the technical stuff necessary to make this happen! Another big thank you to everyone, who joined the Discord server and provided constructive feedback to make the API better. And finally, a big thank you to everyone who wants to participate yet again. Questions? Reply in this thread if you have questions. We will answer them as soon as possible. Best regards, The Skylords Reborn Team

Oh no, I completely overslept the deadline! Time sometimes flies! Anyways, I was trying to do a piano arrangement of the BattleForge theme, but didn't find the time to practice it further or finish the score. Here is my best recording after ~15min of practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRIiTxw9ZBQ Here is my unfinished version of the Sheet Music, in case anyone here wants to try it themselves. I can also send you the MuseScore file, if you want to finish transcribing it 🙂 Lords_of_the_Sky.pdf

Cool new card! Is the chain lightning damage significantly higher than the normal attack with splash?

Hey there, welcome back! I still remember your name from the old PvP replay casts by Farrock 😄 In terms of playing the game, feel free to play as much as you like and enjoy your time 🙂 If you want to jump into PvP right away, the team has added a "Free PvP deck" feature, which grants you two solid PvP decks with fully upgraded cards, that can only be used in PvP, and the decks can be freely changed with cards you own and can be switched once a day. See the wiki for more details: https://skylords-reborn.fandom.com/wiki/Starter_Decks#PvP In terms of PvE, you still have to obtain the cards yourself, but there is no more real money involved to get BFP, you earn everything by playing the game, beating maps, doing achievements, daily quests and seasonal quests. There are quite a number of achievements/quests, so an experienced player should have no problem getting a solid deck of one or two factions in a rather short time. If you want to help out the team, we are always happy to onboard new members who want to contribute. A good starting point would be this post: Glad to have you back and enjoy the game! 🙂

I get your point, but I think with a few touchups it could fit. It does seem a little "unfinished/unpoliahed" of sorts, but I have no clue about 3d modeling/texturing and I could imagine it taking lots of work to fully polish a 3d model/texture to the standard OG BattleForge models like Battleship.

Yes, see these threads for guides and to ask for help:

Yo, the new model is great news! I remember back in the day, before the open stress test, when the devs thought things like "questionable, if we get PvP to work. 12p maps will probably never work. New cards? That's just a pipedream!", and after years and years of trial and error, reverse engineering and hard work by many volunteers, we have lots of new cards, new maps, completely new systems, and even unique models and animations! Big kudos to everyone involved!

Which way did you try to run it thus far? Using wine or proton/steam?

Holy shit, I never expected one of those to actually still be around! Also, it wouldn't be the first time around of skylords helping each other out with physical copies. I once bought a used copy of the game and mailed it all the way to Dutchy 🙂

Hey all, I just found out, that there once were physical copies of the game's OST on CD, which were labelled as "Marketing only". Has anyone else seen this before and has any further info on them or knows, if there are still physical copies of them around? Here are some pictures of one: https://musicbrainz.org/release/028f7b32-d3ab-35f9-bc4d-3dc74863af0d/cover-art

Probably a PvP balance thing. WIndhunter also costs 120 power compared to Skyfire Drake's 100. And they are commonly used in different decks and have different counters. Offering also takes up a slot, and you might need offering targets (e.g. rifle cultists at T4), so even more slots. The point about offering is, that it is one card by one faction, which can bypass charges (plus I think Evil Eye?), while double slotting spells can in principle be done by each faction.

I also really liked its healing. But with the large range, you can place a few backup root units at the back of your base and cast Forest Vim (p) on them for MASSIVE healing for the entire network.

- Regarding maps, I don't have much insight personally, but the team has thus far been very careful with bringing changes to existing maps, since they are quite iconic and we have speedrun rankings, which would change with most map changes. - Tower range indicator would be great! For effects, this is sometimes already there (e.g. Sylvan Gate/Root Nexus radius, Mortar Tower range), but I don't know how easy it would be to implement. - There was talk about Moloch reworks in the past in the balancing Discord, but none made it into the game. I think none were really satisfactory and if someone would come up with a great rework, it might make its way into the game. Feel free to join the Balance Discord and propose something 🙂 - For Unholy Power, maybe an ammo bar like the one Mountaineer uses could work? But then what if Mountaineer gets buffed with UP? - Vilebloods mostly appear in Expert missions, which are difficult by design. Its often helpful if you already know where a Vileblood will attack so you can e.g. proactively root it and focus it down before its close to your wells. There might have even been some changes in the past, where early vilebloods have been switched for other units, but I am not 100% sure if I am remembering stuff correctly. - Power pickups are already a thing. If I'm not mistaking, in Dwarven Riddle for example you get a boost in power once the first bandit base is destroyed. They are also used in several (featured) community maps.

Sweet! I wonder how Aftershock will fare in PvP. Finally a cheaper siege option than Mountaineer and maybe an interesting alternative to Burrower.

Finally some new activity after 5.5 years: New first places in Army of Darkness and The Conquest by KampfkeksBOSS and Lord_of_Bread, and new second places in Icedessert and Rogan's Treasure by KampfkeksBOSS.

Some of things you mentioned already have been added to the game. There have been a total of three new campaign maps thus far, several new cards, some being reskins/retextures, others being unique spells, and the Amii faction has been greatly expanded, effectively adding a new faction with its own colourscheme to the game. The limiting factor with the card models being reskins is that we currently can't add completely new models with unique animations and everything to the game yet, but some people are actively working on that, so recolouring and retexturing is the best we can do as of now mostly. Adding new maps is generally possible and has benn done before (Unexpected Visitors, Into the Jungle and Heart of Trouble), but creating, scripting, designing, decorating and balancing maps is a hugely time intensive task, usually taking months of time from many people, which all just work on it in their free time.

I think a problem with Amii spells is that the dual offensive/defensive nature of them makes it hard to decide between arcane and spell. When they are arcane, you have an offensive spell that doesn't need ground presence, when they are a spell, you have a heal/buff, that does need ground presence. Both kind of defy the usual conventions of the game. Would it be technically doable to have the offensive usage require ground presence, but the buff/heal usage require none?

There are some on YouTube. Many are outdated, but some of the strats could give you an idea on what runners usually do. The Skylords Speedrunning community channel: https://www.youtube.com/@sr_speedrun RadicalX's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@radicalx4205 Some other video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VgI88qZqnE There are also some replay casts from older events, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZFhv80iF4A&list=PLOGMzVQue-AZ492AxuxAuqeHufqGkhHUm

I just double checked, it is 7:30 in the morning on Wednesdays (Central European time), expected downtime is usually 10-15 minutes.

IIrc its usually on Wednesday morning, downtime is not long, probably a few minutes?

Also, I think what Cocofang meant was that its not a good idea to train an AI model to e.g. sound like Rogan Kayle's voice actor, since that might lead to copyright issues. But using a generic AI Text-to-Speech tool should be fine.

There was even a question towards the community in the most recent feedback survey on how they stand in regards to using AI tools when making new cards: (See the most recent Community Update for the full survey result)

Yes, I think it was for a booster, but only valid for a limited time (1 month probably). While it sounds fun, it would probably be way too much work and not really viable 😄

Hey there, AI is quite the broad topic, so maybe give you a short overview. In general, some AI tool are sometimes used for specific tasks. For example, when translating the game into German, French and Russian, a first draft is always done with some AI translation tool and then our human translators work over that draft and review it to ensure correctness and consistency with existing texts. For art, I don't know if our artists use it to get inspiration, but generally all the art (card artworks, models and textures, loading screens etc.) is done by humans. When it comes to voicelines, official campaign maps use voicelines recorded by actual voiceactors from our community, partly because it allows for higher quality and partly because the copyright situation of training AI on existing voicelines is unclear. For community maps, there have been ones, which use AI voicelines, most notably "Thirsty Journey Home". To my knowledge, using AI voicelines for community maps is fine.