Orbit Wars Competition

Conquer the void. Orbit Wars resurrects the ruthless strategy of the 2010 Planet Wars challenge with fresh, exciting mechanics. Launch massive swarms of ships across the solar system, outmaneuver your enemies, and claim absolute orbital supremacy.

Each day your team is able to submit up to 5 agents (bots) to the competition. Each submission will play Episodes (games) against other bots on the ladder that have a similar skill rating. Over time skill ratings will go up with wins or down with losses and evened out with ties. To reduce the number of bots playing and increase the number of episodes each team participates in, we only track the latest 2 submissions and use those for final submissions.

Every bot submitted will continue to play episodes until the end of the competition, with newer bots playing a much more frequent number of episodes. On the leaderboard, only your best scoring bot will be shown, but you can track the progress of all of your submissions on your Submissions page.

Each Submission has an estimated Skill Rating which is modeled by a Gaussian N(μ,σ2) where μ is the estimated skill and σ represents the uncertainty of that estimate which will decrease over time.

When you upload a Submission, we first play a Validation Episode where that Submission plays against copies of itself to make sure it works properly. If the Episode fails, the Submission is marked as Error and you can download the agent logs to help figure out why. Otherwise, we initialize the Submission with μ0=600 and it joins the pool of All Submissions for ongoing evaluation.

We repeatedly run Episodes from the pool of All Submissions, and try to pick Submissions with similar ratings for fair matches. Newly submitted agents will be given an increased rate in the number of episodes run to give you faster feedback.

Ranking System

After an Episode finishes, we’ll update the Rating estimate for all Submissions in that Episode. If one Submission won, we’ll increase its μ and decrease its opponent’s μ — if the result was a draw, then we’ll move the two μ values closer towards their mean. The updates will have magnitude relative to the deviation from the expected result based on the previous μ values, and also relative to each Submission’s uncertainty σ. We also reduce the σ terms relative to the amount of information gained by the result. The score by which your bot wins or loses an Episode does not affect the skill rating updates.

Final Evaluation At the submission deadline on June 23, 2026, additional submissions will be locked. From June 23, 2026 for approximately two weeks, we will continue to run games. At the conclusion of this period, the leaderboard is final.

Awards:-