Levels of Difficulty

[johnanvik]

As Program Wars is intended to teach programming concepts to a wide range of people, a challenge is meeting the different experience and aptitude levels. One of the ways that we addressed this was the introduction of cybersecurity/cyberdefense principles. Another is increasing the goal number of instructions.

However, as we add new features and capabilities, we need to consider if these introduce unwanted complexity to the game, especially for novice players. A suggestion is to have different skill levels where the skill level determines what cards or features are available.

Also, changing the goal number doesn't seem to work well. With the introduction of cybersecurity cards, a "short" game can now take up to 30 min depending on the interactions.

The following is a proposal for the different game levels:

Basic

• only basic instruction and repetition cards.

Cybersecurity

• repetition with variables
• basic cybersecurity and defence cards

Planning

• advanced cyber attack (i.e. "steal information" see Information Thief card #468)
• look ahead (i.e. see what the upcoming decisions will be. see Show upcoming decisions #469)

[johnanvik]

This change would help address #458

[johnanvik]

@hastar07's work is a move in this direction.

[johnanvik]

@maimoona-bashir - Could be a summer project.

[strinsberg]

This is sort of available with the deck presets and new beginner mode in version 3.

Beginner mode AI just plays a random card from it's hand so it is less likely to make the best play. The choosing of different decks changes the games difficulty depending on how complicated the card concepts are. In the future we could create custom AI to go along with these levels.

[strinsberg]

What do we think about this issue with the new levels and modes available in version 2.5?