Quick disclaimer: nothing is rigged. Bots don't get lucky dice rolls and have no hidden advantages. Everything available to a human is available to a bot, and vice versa.
Players Only Win 25% of Matches
I recently looked at the stats for every game played and stumbled on a number that surprised me: real players win only 25% of matches.
When I wrote the bot logic, I never expected this outcome. They were meant to fill empty lobby slots and give people a chance to practice before playing against humans, not to become the final boss.
Either the bots play noticeably better than I thought during development, or people are making far less optimal decisions than I assumed.
If you want to test yourself, the game lives here: rastushiy-gorod.ru. It'll be interesting to see whether you can improve humanity's overall stats.
Why I'm Not Adding Difficulty Levels Yet
My first thought, of course, was to add a difficulty selector. But the more I think about it, the less I like the idea.
This isn't a shooter where you can just lower the enemy's aim accuracy. In an economic card game, almost all the difficulty comes from decision-making. I want the bot to play honestly, and for players to beat it by understanding the game and building a strategy, not because the developer deliberately made it dumber.
How I Even Found This Out
I recently rebuilt the analytics dashboard from scratch. Before, it mostly answered questions about the game itself: which cards get picked more often, which modes are more popular, and so on.
It turned out to be far more interesting to look at the players: who wins, who loses, how many matches people play, where people drop off. Sometimes a single number tells you more about a product than a hundred of the developer's own impressions.
I'm planning to write a separate article about the dashboard itself. If you have questions, leave them in the comments, I'll address them in one of the next articles.
Now There's a Different Problem
Most matches right now are one human plus several bots. When I first designed the game, I pictured it very differently. I wanted people to play against each other, with bots simply filling out the roster.
In practice, a lot of people just start a game with bots.
No matter how good the bots are, they're still bots. After a while their style becomes predictable, and the game gets less exciting. The real fun starts when you play with friends or random players, that's the experience I ultimately want to deliver.
The game is still live at rastushiy-gorod.ru. If you play and beat a bot, consider it your personal contribution to a stat that currently isn't looking great for humanity.
As always, I'm collecting feedback and would love to read your comments.
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