[Ottawa-pm] Lacuna Expanse: A massively multiplayer online strategy game built with perl

[Dave O'Neill]

On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 03:19:44PM -0500, Clayton Scott wrote:
> The Game has turned out to be very cool. There is an API for
> automating away a whole bunch the drudgery letting you concentrate on 
> the strategy which is pretty appealing in one of the games.

I had a lot of fun automating away the drudgery in another web-based
strategy game (Tribal Wars) a few years ago.  The constraints were a bit 
different -- the game allowed add-on tools, browser extensions, etc, but 
did not provide API access and forbade unattended bots.

So, how to automate the boring bits without violating their ToS?

The solution was to write a pluggable proxy to intercept traffic to and 
from the game server with HTTP::Proxy. The plugins scraped specific 
pages for useful game state and inserted into a local database of all 
game activity.  Then, some additional pages (force-served in the game 
domain via the proxy) used the known state to plan future actions, and 
provide simple links for kicking them off (ie: optimized raids on nearby 
villages based on available units and the target's expected 
replenishment time, building more units once resources were available, 
etc).

Of course, once I ran out of features to add, I quickly got bored with 
the game and stopped playing.  :)

I've still got the proxy code somewhere if one of you Lacuna players 
might find it useful.

Cheers,
Dave