Game strategies for The Settlers of Catan

We present an empirical framework for testing game strategies in The Settlers of Catan, a complex win-lose game that lacks any analytic solution. This framework provides the means to change different components of an autonomous agent´s strategy, and to test them in suitably controlled ways via performance metrics in game simulations and via comparisons of the agent´s behaviours with those exhibited in a corpus of humans playing the game. We provide changes to the game strategy that not only improve the agent´s strength, but corpus analysis shows that they also bring the agent closer to a model of human players.