Mini Honor of Kings: A Lightweight Environment for Multiagent Reinforcement Learning

Games are widely used as research environments for multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL), but they pose three significant challenges: limited customization, high computational demands, and oversimplification. To address these issues, we introduce the first publicly available map editor for the popular mobile game Honor of Kings and design a lightweight environment, Mini Honor of Kings (Mini HoK), for researchers to conduct experiments. Mini HoK is highly efficient, allowing experiments to be run on personal PCs or laptops while still presenting sufficient challenges for existing MARL algorithms. We have tested our environment on common MARL algorithms and demonstrated that these algorithms have yet to surpass the performance of rule based policies, indicating that current MARL methods are not able to solve this environment. This facilitates the dissemination and advancement of MARL methods within the research community. In addition, we hope that more researchers will leverage the Honor of Kings map editor to develop innovative and scientifically valuable new maps.