Hi, I am writing bachelor thesis about different approach of AI in clone of Bomberman game. My clone is simplified with few things. Every player has to make some action every second and moves are discrete from one tile to another.
First approach that I tried was A* pathfinding. At the start of game cycle, player checks if he isnt in range of some bomb. If he is, A* for hiding is started. If no bomb is around and he cannot kill anybody with placing bomb right now, he try to find best way to nearest player. This approach is good enough and player is quite smart.
Next approach i was planning to try was with game tree algorithms - minimax, alpha-beta pruning... At this point i realized that every article i found about minimax assumed that players alternate with moves. In bomberman this isnt true, everybody make action at the same time. With that information. If i have 4 players and 5 actions (moves and bomb place), at every cycle there could be 5^4 possibilities of actions. It is quite a large number and in game tree with depth 3 it is impossible to search.
So my question is - is there any better way? Or any algorithms that are based on this type of game where everyone make move at the same time? Or game tree is in this situation bad idea?
Thanks for all suggestions.