Combining Utility AI and MCTS Towards Creating Intelligent Agents in Video Games, with the Use Case of Tactical Troops: Anthracite Shift

Tactical Troops: Anthracite Shift is a squad-based tactics game with complex environment. It is a commercial game released on the Steam platform. This paper is authored by its original developers. It presents how the AI -driven players, that are featured in the game, have been designed and implemented. Their procedure of operation is based on a hierarchical combination of Monte Carlo Tree Search and Utility AI. Although these methods alone have already been applied to video games, there have not been published works that employ such a combination. Solutions to creating the AI in commercial games are rarely open to the public, which motivated us even more. The quality of the AI agents has been assessed from two perspectives: playing strength and believability.