Below is another fantastic article from The Boardgames Chronicle, this time discussing the use of bots in Time of Crisis. You can check out his previous series discussing the major and minor similarities/differences between Commands & Colors: Ancients and Commands & Colors: Medieval here. Enjoy! -Rachel

---

The Expansion

The expansion to Time of Crisis, The Age of Iron and Rust, brings many new, interesting additions. One of them is the new types of Emperors, and another is a new set of cards. Today, however, I would like to focus on the astoundingly well-designed and intuitive bots.

Time of Crisis is one of my favorite light wargames. I fell in love with it after my first game. Then I had the chance to play a Vassal campaign and one more face-to-face game, but I really anxiously awaited the expansion. When it came, I immediately organized a session to test the new game mechanics—more about it in following post and its continuation—but I neglected to test the expansion with bots. Finally, I got enough time last week during a couple consecutive evenings to play the full campaign with them.

Bots

First of all, as you probably know, Time of Crisis is fueled by cards, played for influence points and events. Bots come in three types—military, populace, and senate. The game accommodates up to four players, so it was only intuitive to create three bots (allowing for solo play), each of them focusing on a different strategy. The three AI bots are characterized as Emperors from the Year of Six Emperors (238 AD):

• Maximinus Thrax focuses on Military aspects
• Gordian III prefers Populace area
• Pupienus and Balbinus focus on Senate influence

Each AI has a dedicated player mat used to track main actions and development progress:

Each bot has three areas of influence, with a preferred one at the top. Each turn, a bot will have points to spend in two areas of influence, determined by the mode box that is selected for the bot. One area of influence will be the primary one, providing more points to spend, and the other area of influence will be secondary, providing less points to spend. The bot will generally increase its power in the preferred area fastest and will therefore tend to focus more on actions that use these points.

The AI turn consists of phases similar to the human player’s:

• AI Crisis Phase– a standard 2d6 roll, which activates barbarians or cases and events to jump in
• AI Take Actions Phase– as mentioned above, two influence point types are taken into account; their exact usage is defined very neatly by an A4 size instruction, prepared for easy reading
• AI Buy/Trash Cards Phase– instead of actually determining specific cards for the AI bot to buy or trash, the improvement of the bot’s deck is represented by determining if it can increase the value of one or more of its influence areas.

Gameplay

Having read the rules and played the first two turns with three Bots, I decided to continue. I was green, playing against Thrax (Red), Pupienus and Balbinus (blue), and Gordian (Yellow). A short session report and some of my impressions are below.

And now a quick glimpse of the main events of the game:

Results:

Me (green) – 89

Pupienus and Balbinus – 71

Gordian III – 62

Thrax – 40

Summary

I played many games in solo mode, but this is the one I will come back to most often. The bots are very intuitive, well written, and fast to play without sacrificing depth of strategy. It is pure fun to play against them. Sometimes you need to decide for the AI player which action will be better (even though charts are very clear), but the number of uncertain situations was very limited.

Should you have a chance, I strongly encourage you guys to test the Bots! It is worth the devoted time!

---