I think games sometimes go through something like a phase transition, where strategy heuristics that serve you well on one side of the border abruptly stop working. I think this is typically because you have multiple priorities whose value changes depending on the circumstances, and the phase transitions are where the values of two priorities cross over; it used to be that X was more important than Y, but now Y is more important than X, and so heuristics along the lines of “favor X over Y” stop working.
I don’t think that these phase transitions can be generalized to anything as useful as the concepts of solid/liquid/gas—or at least, I’m not aware of any powerful generalizations like that. I don’t have a set of heuristics that I deploy “in the mid-game” of most or all games. Nor do I think that most games have exactly 3 phases (or exactly N phases, for any N). I think of phrases like early/mid/late-game as meaning “the phase that this particular game is usually in at time X”.
I do think you can make a general observation that some investments take a while to pay for themselves, and so are worth doing if-and-only-if you have enough time to reap those benefits, and that this leads to a common phase transition from “building up” to “scoring points” in many engine-building games. But I think this particular observation applies to only one genre of game, and explains only a minority of the use of phrases like “early game” and “late game”.
As an example of an unusually sharp phase transition: In Backgammon, if you land on a single enemy piece, it sends that piece back to the start. This is a big deal, so for most of the game, players spend a lot of effort trying to “hit” enemy pieces and defend their own pieces. But players have a fixed number of pieces and they can only move forward, so there comes a point where all your pieces are past all of my pieces, and it’s no longer possible for them to interact. At that point, attack and defense become irrelevant, and the game is just about speed.
I once read about the development of Backgammon AI using early neural nets (I think this was in the 70s and 80s, so the nets were rather weak by today’s standards). They found the strategy changed so much at this point that it was easier to train two completely separate neural nets to play the two phases of the game, rather than training a single net to understand both. (Actually 3 separate nets, with the third being for “bearing off”, the final step of moving your pieces to the exact end point. I think modern Backgammon AIs usually use a look-up table for bearing off, though.)
(Training multiple neural nets then caused some issues with bad moves right around the phase boundary, which they addressed by fuzzing the results of multiple nets when close to the transition.)
I don’t think this story about Backgammon reveals anything about how to play Chess, or StarCraft, or Civilization. Most games have phase transitions, but most games don’t have the particular phase transition from conflict-dominant to conflict-irrelevant.
Another example: I once told someone that, in a certain strategy game, 1 unit of production is much more valuable than 1 unit of food, science, or money, “at least in the early game.” The reason for that caveat was that you can use money to hurry production, and by default this is pretty inefficient, but it’s possible to collect a bunch of stacking bonuses that make it so efficient that it becomes better to focus on money instead of regular production. But it takes time to collect those bonuses, so I know you don’t have them in the early game, so this heuristic will hold for at least a while (and might hold for approximately the whole game, depending on whether you collect those bonuses).
Again, I don’t think this teaches us anything about “early game” in a way that generalizes across games. Probably there are lots of games that have a transition from “X is the most important resource” to “Y is the most important resource”, but those transitions happen at many different points for lots of different reasons, and it’s hard to make a useful heuristic so general that it applies to most or all of them.
A third example: The game of Nim has the interesting property that when you invert the win condition, the optimal strategy remains precisely identical until you reach a specific point. You change only one move in the entire game: Specifically, the move that leaves no piles larger than size 1 (which is the last meaningful decision either player makes). You can think of this as a phase transition, as well (between “at least one large pile” and “only small piles”). And again, I’m not aware of any useful way of generalizing it to other games.
I can’t remember if I said this already, but the way I’m looking at this is “take stock of various clusters of strategy heuristics or frameworks, and think about which-if-any apply to stuff that I care about.” So, less looking for universal principles, more “try on different strategic lenses and see what shakes out.”
I keep feeling like I’m on the edge of being able to give you something useful, but can’t quite see what direction to go.
I don’t have an encyclopedia of all my strategic lenses. (That actually sounds like kind of an interesting project, but it would take a very long time.)
I could babble a little?
I guess the closest thing I have to generalized heuristics for early vs late games are: In the early game, desperately scramble for the best ROI, and in the late game, ruthlessly sacrifice your infrastructure for short-term advantage. But I think those are mostly artifacts of the fact that I’m playing a formalized game with a strict beginning and end. Also notable is the fact that most games are specifically designed to prevent players from being eliminated early (for ludic reasons), which often promotes an early strategy of “invest ALL your resources ASAP; hold nothing in reserve” which is probably a terrible plan for most real-life analogs.
If I try to go very general and abstract on my approach for learning new games, I get something like “prioritize efficiency, then flexibility, then reliability” but again this seems like it works mostly because of the ways games are commonly designed (and even a little bit because of the type of player I am) and doesn’t especially apply to real life.
I don’t think this story about Backgammon reveals anything about how to play Chess, or StarCraft, or Civilization. Most games have phase transitions, but most games don’t have the particular phase transition from conflict-dominant to conflict-irrelevant.
I would say that Civilization, if anything, has the opposite transition, though still less sharp.
Early on, you’re far enough from your opponents that you can’t really meaningfully compete with them. You’re competing with the environment, and random events. It isn’t until you expand enough to actually run into each other and need to capture resources and territory from each other that conflict becomes significant.
Then again, maybe I’m wrong and this is why I’m not very good at Civ
Thanks for clarifying. I consider the pre-contact period to be a rather small portion of the game, but certainly you can’t attack people on turn 1 or turn 2, so there’s definitely a non-zero time window there.
(This varies somewhat depending on which Civ game, and yeah probably good players expand faster than less-good ones.)
I think games sometimes go through something like a phase transition, where strategy heuristics that serve you well on one side of the border abruptly stop working. I think this is typically because you have multiple priorities whose value changes depending on the circumstances, and the phase transitions are where the values of two priorities cross over; it used to be that X was more important than Y, but now Y is more important than X, and so heuristics along the lines of “favor X over Y” stop working.
I don’t think that these phase transitions can be generalized to anything as useful as the concepts of solid/liquid/gas—or at least, I’m not aware of any powerful generalizations like that. I don’t have a set of heuristics that I deploy “in the mid-game” of most or all games. Nor do I think that most games have exactly 3 phases (or exactly N phases, for any N). I think of phrases like early/mid/late-game as meaning “the phase that this particular game is usually in at time X”.
I do think you can make a general observation that some investments take a while to pay for themselves, and so are worth doing if-and-only-if you have enough time to reap those benefits, and that this leads to a common phase transition from “building up” to “scoring points” in many engine-building games. But I think this particular observation applies to only one genre of game, and explains only a minority of the use of phrases like “early game” and “late game”.
As an example of an unusually sharp phase transition: In Backgammon, if you land on a single enemy piece, it sends that piece back to the start. This is a big deal, so for most of the game, players spend a lot of effort trying to “hit” enemy pieces and defend their own pieces. But players have a fixed number of pieces and they can only move forward, so there comes a point where all your pieces are past all of my pieces, and it’s no longer possible for them to interact. At that point, attack and defense become irrelevant, and the game is just about speed.
I once read about the development of Backgammon AI using early neural nets (I think this was in the 70s and 80s, so the nets were rather weak by today’s standards). They found the strategy changed so much at this point that it was easier to train two completely separate neural nets to play the two phases of the game, rather than training a single net to understand both. (Actually 3 separate nets, with the third being for “bearing off”, the final step of moving your pieces to the exact end point. I think modern Backgammon AIs usually use a look-up table for bearing off, though.)
(Training multiple neural nets then caused some issues with bad moves right around the phase boundary, which they addressed by fuzzing the results of multiple nets when close to the transition.)
I don’t think this story about Backgammon reveals anything about how to play Chess, or StarCraft, or Civilization. Most games have phase transitions, but most games don’t have the particular phase transition from conflict-dominant to conflict-irrelevant.
Another example: I once told someone that, in a certain strategy game, 1 unit of production is much more valuable than 1 unit of food, science, or money, “at least in the early game.” The reason for that caveat was that you can use money to hurry production, and by default this is pretty inefficient, but it’s possible to collect a bunch of stacking bonuses that make it so efficient that it becomes better to focus on money instead of regular production. But it takes time to collect those bonuses, so I know you don’t have them in the early game, so this heuristic will hold for at least a while (and might hold for approximately the whole game, depending on whether you collect those bonuses).
Again, I don’t think this teaches us anything about “early game” in a way that generalizes across games. Probably there are lots of games that have a transition from “X is the most important resource” to “Y is the most important resource”, but those transitions happen at many different points for lots of different reasons, and it’s hard to make a useful heuristic so general that it applies to most or all of them.
A third example: The game of Nim has the interesting property that when you invert the win condition, the optimal strategy remains precisely identical until you reach a specific point. You change only one move in the entire game: Specifically, the move that leaves no piles larger than size 1 (which is the last meaningful decision either player makes). You can think of this as a phase transition, as well (between “at least one large pile” and “only small piles”). And again, I’m not aware of any useful way of generalizing it to other games.
Nod.
I can’t remember if I said this already, but the way I’m looking at this is “take stock of various clusters of strategy heuristics or frameworks, and think about which-if-any apply to stuff that I care about.” So, less looking for universal principles, more “try on different strategic lenses and see what shakes out.”
I keep feeling like I’m on the edge of being able to give you something useful, but can’t quite see what direction to go.
I don’t have an encyclopedia of all my strategic lenses. (That actually sounds like kind of an interesting project, but it would take a very long time.)
I could babble a little?
I guess the closest thing I have to generalized heuristics for early vs late games are: In the early game, desperately scramble for the best ROI, and in the late game, ruthlessly sacrifice your infrastructure for short-term advantage. But I think those are mostly artifacts of the fact that I’m playing a formalized game with a strict beginning and end. Also notable is the fact that most games are specifically designed to prevent players from being eliminated early (for ludic reasons), which often promotes an early strategy of “invest ALL your resources ASAP; hold nothing in reserve” which is probably a terrible plan for most real-life analogs.
If I try to go very general and abstract on my approach for learning new games, I get something like “prioritize efficiency, then flexibility, then reliability” but again this seems like it works mostly because of the ways games are commonly designed (and even a little bit because of the type of player I am) and doesn’t especially apply to real life.
I would say that Civilization, if anything, has the opposite transition, though still less sharp.
Elaborate?
Early on, you’re far enough from your opponents that you can’t really meaningfully compete with them. You’re competing with the environment, and random events. It isn’t until you expand enough to actually run into each other and need to capture resources and territory from each other that conflict becomes significant.
Then again, maybe I’m wrong and this is why I’m not very good at Civ
Thanks for clarifying. I consider the pre-contact period to be a rather small portion of the game, but certainly you can’t attack people on turn 1 or turn 2, so there’s definitely a non-zero time window there.
(This varies somewhat depending on which Civ game, and yeah probably good players expand faster than less-good ones.)