Are there any Steam clients?

[MaximBkv]

I thought about playing Go, when I searched on Steam, I found only a couple of games where you need to play with bots, then I remembered about online Go - maybe there is already some client on Steam? It would be very convenient

[shinuito]

You can play on OGS through steam games like:

the Conquest of Go

The Conquest of Go – A Videogame Featuring Go Gameplay

Here are some new updates since my last post. I’ve also had the original post for this thread edited with more recent information since the game has exited Early Access and is now fully released. The Conquest of Go is currently on sale for 25% off for the Turn Based Thursday Fest which ends on the 16th. Version 1.2 of The Conquest of Go was released this week which was focused on the features listed below. The full release notes can be found here. A new analysis feature was added called Move …

and Just Go

Just Go on Steam

I feel like I’ve raved about this previously, but I don’t see a thread anywhere so in case not… ‘Just Go’ on Steam has a nice look and feel even if the analysis tools are not the greatest according to some people. (I am some people). Tried the OGS interface today, didn’t play but even in observe mode it’s pretty slick. Behold : screenshots from random OGS games… [chinese garden.PNG] [commentaryRoom.PNG] [match room.PNG] [washitsu.PNG]

as far as I know.

[AllanFelipe]

I have “Just Go”, linked by @shinuito, and unfortunately the connection with OGS is not reliable and a lot of critical features are missing, although there are plenty of well organized exercises and the overall aesthetics is nice.

[Regenwasser]

Yeah, I’ve experienced that too. Which is a shame because Just Go looks really nice.

The Conquest of Go works much better. The connection is pretty stable and many of the OGS features are implemented. On top of that you can even integrate the OGS games into the game’s campaign mode. Then again, what’s the point of all that? I did try this out just for fun but the game’s graphics aren’t as amazing as Just Go and even though it has many OGS features implemented it’s not feature complete. So in the end the experience on OGS is just better. As for the integration into the game’s campaign, I wrote this review a while back:

@Regenwasser

The automatic campaign difficulty adjustments after playing matches and reviewing matches will not take place for online campaign matches since online ranks are separate from AI difficulty and handicaps.

This is kind of an issue. I think the game’s campaign works great when playing against bots, there are resources that can be used, the difficulty is adjusted in a way that is meaningful to the campaign and going through reviews gets me stone advantages. This is all great. But it does not work well with humans. When I just go through standard matchmaking I will always just get an opponent that fits my rating. There are no stone advantages through reviews, there are no resources and the strength of my opponents continuously adjusts to my strength instead of integrating with the campaign. The experience lacks the continuity you would expect from a campaign.

So my advice would be to just play on OGS directly BUT if your goal is to play through a steam client and nothing else matters then go with The Conquest of Go.

[Chinitsu]

Oh this looks pretty nice!

Could someone share how the campaign is like? Is it a good resource to give my friends/children so they can self-learn the game for a decently long period?

[Regenwasser]

Yes, it is great for beginners and children. I’m a big fan but, as OGS knows, as someone who worked in software testing quite a while I also tend to see a lot of potential here and there. But let me first go into the Good and then into the Potentials.

The Good

• The game makes Go actually feel like a game. You play campaigns on a map that you need to conquer.
• For the campaign you can set the strength of the bots you will play against and also how many districts of the map will be 9x9 or from other board sizes. You can also finetune the ressources if you want to but you don’t have to do that.
• In each match against the opponent you will have ressources available (stones, weed, gold, or whatever like middle age themed stuff) and you can use these ressources to activate powers.
• Powers slightly help you to win but are not OP either. You can for example see the best AI move but that’s quite expensive. Or you can undo a bad move. Or stuff like that. Pretty fun actually.
• After each battle for a district on the map you can go through game reviews having to find the best move at points. Doing these reviews gives you additional ressources for your next battles, so it motivates the player to actually review the game.
• There are also situations where the enemy empires strike back and/or you have to fight from a preexisting board state which is also fun.
• Furthermore everything integrates quite well with OGS and you can even play against humans in thr campaign.
• Then there is also a steam workshop for community story mods where you can actually play story campaigns with characters and events and stuff.

The Potentials

• There is a very limited number of bot strengths available. So if you happen to fall in the middle of those that can be bad. The ressources somewhat tackle that but only to some degree. → Apparently there are way more AI strengths than I thought, I think they are a little hidden.
• I think the default ressource tuning isn’t optimal if I’m about as strong as my opponent I usually don’t want to use ressources because I want to win on my own. If the enemy is much stronger than me then I easily burn through the ressources. So I either have way too many or not enough.
• There are not that many different powers and some, e.g. getting a feel for the areas in control, only make sense for beginners.
• The campaign itself is fun but gets repetitive, the map is always the same, there is no story whatsever, the steam workshop idea is great but last time I played I think there was ONE single story campaign.
• The integration with OGS is nice and all but like I explained in detail above it just doesn’t work for the campaign currently.
• Finally, and I think that’s one of the biggest potentials, at some point I disliked playing against bots. They just play too mechanically and it doesn’t feel like playing against humans. I think a cooperation between this game and the Omoyo guy would be great to give the bots a more human feel.

[wolfeystudios]

Thanks for the write-up about the game. It may have been a while since you’ve last played, so I’ve included a couple additional points below regarding your list of potentials.

• There are 5 different built in AI that you can play against, each with their own set of difficulty levels. The KataGo-Human opponent (KataGo’s human-trained model) was added into the mix in the middle of last year, which gives a larger range of difficulty levels (~20K-9D). In addition to those AI opponents, you also have access to the dozens of other AI available via OGS. With all of these combined, there should be a good opponent for the vast majority of people.
• There are settings to control the starting resources and resource availability when creating a campaign. Adjusting these will help if you’re looking to use more resources against more difficult opponents where you’ll need them.
• The Omoyo project looked interesting at first glance, but feedback thus far doesn’t seem too positive. I understand that it has only just come out though, so perhaps things will improve in the future.

[Regenwasser]

@wolfeystudios

There are 5 different built in AI that you can play against, each with their own set of difficulty levels. The KataGo-Human opponent (KataGo’s human-trained model) was added into the mix in the middle of last year, which gives a larger range of difficulty levels (~20K-9D). In addition to those AI opponents, you also have access to the dozens of other AI available via OGS. With all of these combined, there should be a good opponent for the vast majority of people.

Thanks for telling me this. I had no idea about this and I think it’s too hidden. Maybe I’ll go for another campaign soon and try out the KataGo-Human AI!
I corrected my previous reply accordingly.

@wolfeystudios

There are settings to control the starting resources and resource availability when creating a campaign. Adjusting these will help if you’re looking to use more resources against more difficult opponents where you’ll need them.

I know this feature exists but the player needs to know the strength of the AI in relation to his strength as well as the resource system in this game pretty well to make a good decision on this. I’ll play around with this when I’ll do my KataGo-Human campaign but I still think it leaves some potential.

@wolfeystudios

The Omoyo project looked interesting at first glance, but feedback thus far doesn’t seem too positive. I understand that it has only just come out though, so perhaps things will improve in the future.

True, I guess we will have to wait and see. Although, one cool feature it has presented are AI that engage with the player verbally based upon the game state. That could be interesting for the game. Currently in terms of story or conversations there is not much going on during the campaign.