Programming 1: Familiarization with SEPIA

EECS 391: Introduction to AI  Programming Exercise 1
General Instructions:

The redmine system used by csevcs has issues with some Unicode characters. Please ensure
your git names use only standard ASCII characters.
Your commits are due on csevcs.case.edu by 11:59pm on the due date specified after the
question. You will receive a 10% bonus for any solution turned in a week or more in advance
of the due date. You must notify us of such a commit by email. You can use one late day
each week (up to Saturday 11:59pm) with a penalty of 20%. Submissions after Saturday
11:59pm for any week will not be graded. Other bonus points may be awarded for
exceptionally well-written and commented, easy to read, clean and efficient code.
These programming exercises will use SEPIA (“Strategy Engine for Programming Intelligent
Agents”), a game environment written by other CWRU students tailored to writing AI
players. SEPIA is a real-time strategy (RTS) game (though we will not use the real-time
aspects in these exercises). RTS games generally have “economic” and “battle” components.
In the economic game, the goal is to collect different types of resources in the map. Typical
resources are “Gold” and “Wood.” Resources are collected using units called “Peasants.”
Having resources allows the player to build other buildings (Peasants can be used to build
things) and produce more units. Some of these units are battle units that can be used to fight
the opponent. Games generally end when one player has no more units left; however, in
SEPIA, a variety of victory conditions can be declared through XML configuration files. For
example we can declare a victory condition to be when a certain amount of Gold and Wood
have been collected, some number of units of a certain type built, etc.
You need Java 1.8 to run SEPIA. Note that, although the components of SEPIA you will use
have been fairly well tested by now, there is still a possibility of bugs remaining. If you
encounter behavior that seems strange, please let me or the TAs know.
Programming 1: Familiarization with SEPIA (Due 2/7 (50 points))
This assignment must be done by each person individually.
Read the documentation at http://engr.case.edu/ray_soumya/sepia/html/ and go through the
exercises of building and compiling a simple resource collection and combat agent. Using the
same framework, write simple extensions to the resource collection and combat agent. For
example, you might try building a Farm (500 gold, 250 wood), a Barracks (700 gold, 400
wood) and a Footman or two (600 gold) in the resource scenario (25 points), or coming up
with a smarter attack strategy in the combat scenario (25 points).
If you see errors such as “No class found” or “Unable to instantiate” when trying to run
SEPIA, check that (i) you are running Java 1.8, (ii) your classpath is correctly specified, (iii)
code for your agents and the enemy agents provided are in the correct locations as expected
by their packages and (iv) you are using the correct XML config file (the maps are also
XML, so check that you did not specify the map as the config).
Your git repository is located at https://csevcs.case.edu/git/2020_spring_391_N, where N is
your Canvas group number. Each person should create a separate subdirectory
“P1agents_abc123” in your git repository, where abc123 is your CWRU ID. Place your agent
code in it and push to csevcs. Include a short README file containing a brief description of
what your modified agents do, your experience with the documentation, and anything you
found confusing. Do NOT commit any files other than the java files containing your agent
and the README.