williamaredal/catan-simulator

Every Catan player's playground for simulating N games and looking at the simulation's stats and strategy to prepare for your next Catan game. The simulations explore possible strategies by random choices, sheer numbers and sorting functions to reveal strategies hard to think of on your own.

Catan-Simulator

Running Catan Simulator

1. Make sure you have the latest versions of Node and Python installed, and clone this repository.

Links for Node and Python if you don't already have them installed: https://nodejs.org/en/download/ https://www.python.org/downloads/

2. Start venv from /src/api/ and install packages

Run venv\scripts\activate followed by py -m pip install -r requirements.txt to install the required python packages.

Install the required node modules by running npm i

3. Start the website

You will need two terminals to run the website, one for the frontend, and one for the backend (with venv activated). To start the frontend run npm start To start the backend run npm run start-api

Using the website

The website requires you specify the number of Catan simulations to run, which loads until they're displayed. The N limit is currently set to 100 000 000 as it takes a while to run all 100 million simulations, and probably doesn't end up adding more. Except time waiting.:watch: To find out more about any of the simulations simply click on it's row to view all of the simulation's relevant information and stats. Information and stats available for viewing are: victoryPoints, cardsToVictory, spentResources, villages, cities, roads, devCards, decisionTree, longestRoad and largestArmy. Most are self-explanatory, while others aren't.

cardsToVictory refers to the number of resource cards spent to achieve victory in the simulation.
spentResources refers to the number and types of resources spent during the simulation.
devCards represents all development cards bought during the simulation.
decisionTree is the linear history of choices logged.

The virtualized table also supports column sorting in ascending and descending order. So you can run a large set of simulations and sort them to find strategies that focusing on or ignore certain aspects of Catan. The column 'cardsToVictory' can also be sorted to find different strategies requiring the most cards to win, for those interested in loosing in the funniest way, or the strategies requiring the fewest number of cards to win.

Perhaps you will find something to surprise your friends the next time you play a game of Catan. Or mabye just a conversation topic about 🐱 🅰️ N