Slay-C

C port of the Slay hex strategy engine — performance-focused, headless, with alpha-beta search and AI arena.

Repo: https://github.com/chrisaacson69/slay-c Links: Slay (Python), Slay — Evaluation & Search (the 1v1 eval + search theory this engine implements), Vault Index

Overview

C11 rewrite of the Slay Python engine, targeting raw performance for deep search and large-scale AI self-play. Fully headless — no renderer, just engine + AI + arena. Compiles with GCC (make / make debug).

Architecture

• hex_grid — hex grid storage, adjacency, land/water
• territory — territory detection and economy (income, upkeep)
• units — unit types, placement, combat resolution
• game_state — full game state with clone support for tree search
• actions — legal move generation and application
• search — alpha-beta with iterative deepening, apply/undo, evaluation functions
• arena — AI vs AI match runner with seed control and side-swapping
• rng — deterministic PRNG for reproducible games

AI Players

• RandomAI — uniform random legal moves
• GreedyAI — 1-ply lookahead with rich evaluation (territory size, income, unit strength)
• AlphaBetaAI — iterative-deepening alpha-beta with time limits and configurable max depth

CLI

slay.exe --benchmark [--seed N] [--map-size small|medium|large] [--max-depth N]
slay.exe --arena --ai1 TYPE --ai2 TYPE [--matches N] [--verbose] [--map-size SIZE]

Tags

c, ai, game-ai, games