README.md

Trademark-Free Naval Warfare!

Overview

Trademark-free naval warfare is a game of strategy and luck. The game is played on two 10x10 boards, with each player initializing their board before the game begins. Initialization consists of placing the players 5 ships around their board, and two ships cannot occupy the same square. The ships themselves are classed as "Aircraft Carrier" (5x1), "Battleship" (4x1), "Cruiser" (3x1), "Submarine" (3x1), and "Destroyer" (2x1). The gameboard axes are labeled 1-10 on the vertical axis, and A-J on the horizontal axis.

Gameplay begins with player A selecting a coordinate on player B's board on which to fire. Player B must inform player A whether their shot hit or missed one of their ships. Then player B takes their turn selecting a coordinate and firing. Gameplay continues like this until all the squares which a ship occupies have been hit by enemy fire, at which point the player must announce the sinking of the ship. The game is over once one of the players have lost all of their ships.

Each player is allowed to keep track of their shots and the subsequent results, and use this information when selecting where next to fire.

Your task

Your job in Trademark-Free Naval Warfare is to create a module which implements the AdmiralBehavior behavior. Create your module as an .exs file in the priv/admirals folder, alongside the two provided implementations.

Functions to implement

team_name/0 - This one's easy. It's the name you want displayed at the top of the screen during the game.

initialize/0 - This is the function called at the beginning of the game where you'll set up your game board, as well as set up an initial state you might want to keep track of.

fire/4 - This is the main driver of your game module. Here you'll choose what coordinate at which to fire next. The first argument is a board showing your previous shots, with "H" and "M" denoting previous shot results. The second argument is the list of previous shoot coordinates, order from newest to oldest (so the head of the list is the shot from the previous round). The third argument is the list of results, with a format like

{"A1", :miss}

{"B2", :hit}

{"C3", {:hit, :sunk, :battleship}}

{"A1", :duplicate_shot}

{"Z99", :invalid_shot}

This list, like the list of previous shots, is sorted newest-to-oldest. As the coordinate is included in the result tuple, the list of previous shots (the 2nd argument) is a bit superflouous, but I wasn't sure which form people would prefer.

The fourth and final argument to fire/4 is the optional state value you previously returned, either from initialize/0 or the previous call to fire/4.

The return value of fire/4 is either just a coordinate (like "A1"), or a tuple with the coordinate and the new state you want to track, like {"A1", %{total_shots_ive_taken: 3}}.

Testing Your Code

You can test your admiral's code by playing it against the two built-in admirals, RandomAdmiral and SmarterRandomAdmiral. Trigger a one-off game via $ mix run -e 'TFNW.start_one("random.exs", "[your filename].exs")'.

By the time you're done, you should be able to beat random.exs every time. You should also be able to beat smarter_random.exs almost all the time, but it might get lucky once in a while.