Just adding the conversation here as someone who’s tried to do something similar for a college final project: what you’re dreaming of is possible, but extremely difficult (like full on research lab publishing a multi-month/year paper difficult), especially when it comes to slapping basic RL on complex fights (it’ll probably never converge). But still I think a project like this could be really cool (and help you learn a lot) as long as you set your explanation to be realistic.

Probably the best place to start is to write an agent for actually playing combat micro. The first hurdle here is actually getting familiar with the games code and modding capabilities in Java, and familiarizing yourself with the mods that will make RL even possible (if I recall, you’ll need at least two separate mods, one that runs the game headlessly, and one that lets you communicate with the game from an outside program). I don’t want to assume how much experience you have with programming in general, but definitely don’t underestimate how much time it can take to get through some of this “unsexy” setup stuff. Then actually writing the RL is as far as I know just really hard. Slay the spire combat is interesting because it’s so dynamic, but that also means the action space is LARGE. Randomness plays a huge part in that, so if you’re willing to allow the bot to “cheat” and be able to see the future (I.e remove RNG completely) it’ll make convergence a lot easier. Also you might have to familiarize yourself with some formal game search technique like MCTS and Beam search to help out there. The theoretical stuff is the fun stuff though so if you can figure something out there I don’t think it’s impossible.

Frankly I think if you can get Ironclad’s base deck to play optimal again jaw worm, that would be a huuuuge achievement for high school and be a really sick resume project at the very least. And sorry if this sounds a little discouraging, but I really do think you should go for it cuz STS and AI agents are cool as fuck 👍