Artificial players with agents

An artificial player is a player that is not you. In Machinations it is called an agent. An agent plays inside your diagram and makes its own choices while you press Play.

An agent has three parts:

• Personality. Traits such as Patience or Greed, each with a weight from 0 to 100.
• Goals. Pools or Registers in your diagram that the agent cares about, each with a target value and an importance.
• Control. The nodes the agent is allowed to activate. These are its target actions.

Think of it as an automated trigger with a character. Instead of a fixed rule that always fires a node, the agent decides each step whether to fire it, based on who it is and what it wants.

Real players do not all behave the same. Some save, some spend, some give up early. A fixed random rule cannot show you that.

With agents you can create a careful player and a reckless player, give both the same economy, and see how each one moves through it. You can spot where the careful player gets stuck, or where the reckless player breaks your balance.

1. Open the Agents tab in the header.
2. Choose Add manually for an empty form. Choose Add with AI if you want the form filled in from your diagram. You can edit everything afterwards.
3. In Personality, give the agent a name. Press Add trait and set a weight for each trait. A stronger trait makes the actions linked to it more likely.
4. In Goals, press Add goal. Pick a Pool or a Register in your diagram, then set its Target value and its Importance. The further the value is from the target, the more the agent wants to act.
5. In Control, press Add target action. Pick the Diagram node the agent controls, then choose its Linked traits and Linked goals. The panel shows the estimated decision chance for each action.
6. Save the agent, then use Select agent so it shows as Active. Only the active agent plays.
7. Press Play.

A node can be a goal or a target action, not both. Registers cannot be target actions.

At the start of every step, the agent looks at each node it controls. For each one it works out a chance from the linked traits and the linked goals, then rolls the dice. If the roll succeeds, the node fires on that step. If not, it waits.

Two things follow from this:

• A node the agent controls fires only when the agent decides. Its own activation mode no longer starts it.
• The agent can fire several nodes in one step, and the same agent can behave differently from one Play to the next. The choice is a weighted chance, not a script, and no AI model makes it while you play.

• Goal lines. Add the Pools and Registers you used as goals to the chart. Does the line climb toward its target value, or stall?
• Timing. When does the agent start to act? A goal far from its target pushes harder, so early steps usually show the most activity.
• Personality. Change one trait weight and play again. If the chart barely moves, that trait does not matter much in your economy.
• Several agents. Make a few agents with different personalities and switch between them. Compare their charts, and use a Forecast to see the spread across many Plays.

The full list of agent settings, with a worked example of how the chance is calculated, is in the agents documentation.