LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO

Published by [ Cranio Creations ]

Developed by [ Studio Clangore ]

Steam

About

Lorenzo il Magnifico is a deep strategic board game set in Renaissance Italy, where players lead noble families competing for prestige and power. By placing family members around the city, they gather resources, acquire territories, sponsor buildings, and recruit influential characters to build their legacy. Dice determine the strength of actions each round, creating tense tactical decisions with minimal luck. Through careful planning and clever engine-building, the most influential family will rise to dominate the Renaissance.

Designing a competitive AI

In Lorenzo il Magnifico, success rarely comes from following a single predetermined “winning strategy.” The game is less about executing a fixed plan and more about recognizing and exploiting opportunities as they arise. The available cards, the values of the dice, and the actions taken by other players constantly reshape the strategic landscape each round. Because of this, strong play revolves around building an efficient engine—combining buildings, characters, territories, and ventures in ways that generate resources, discounts, or bonus actions over time. The goal is to assemble a system that scales better than your opponents’ engines, allowing you to convert limited actions into increasingly powerful turns. Players who stay flexible, adapt their plans to the evolving board state, and capitalize on synergistic combinations will typically outperform those who try to rigidly pursue a single strategy.

There are, however, some golden rules for a good start. For example, evaluating the requirements of your Leader cards and which Excommunications have been drawn can give you an indication of which strategy to pursue, or at least which elements of the game you should begin focusing on. Buildings and Ventures (the yellow and purple cards, respectively) are usually reserved for the endgame, when the economic engine has already developed enough to allow for these types of purchases.

System constraint

Lorenzo’s Artificial Intelligence operates on multiple evaluation layers, whose output is to produce a move optimized for the current state of the game. The first layer evaluates the resources currently available, discarding any actions whose cost is unattainable. The second evaluates the strength of the Familiars (i.e., the value of the dice, plus bonuses, plus the possible number of Servants that can be used to increase the value). Finally, the third layer handles the actual strategic evaluations.

Strategic evaluations in the third layer are done through a weight system, where every action starts with a weight value which is subsequently increased, decreased or multiplied through a set of Rules specified by the team. Eventually, the action with the highest weight is actually performed.

The goal of the design team was thus to identify as many rules as possible for the third layer, reinforcing the weight system in finding the optimal output on a turn basis.

Designing the rules

After a heavy round of playtesting, we were able to identify some categories that summarize the possible “changes” a rule can apply. These categories are essentially evaluations of a specific part of the game state, and they are associated with a bonus or penalty applied to the weight of a specific card or action. Examples of such categories include:

A specific card is owned by the player;
A specific card is available for purchase;
The "Vatican report" phase looms, and the player is still missing Religion Points;
Dynamic values calculated by combining simpler rules.

Completed rules therefore takes the form of Category + input > Weight output + target action; some examples are as follows:

Since Territories (Green cards) are usually at the base of many economic engines, favor picking Green cards as long as you have 2 or less (the first two Territories cost nothing).
Many Characters (Blue cards) provide a bonus to another action; if that action is favorable for the current engine (e.g. I have many Territories, so the Harvest action is favorable), the increase its value.
Certain cards have a similar output in terms of resources. If you have a card that already produces a type of resource (e.g. wood), then give a malus to other cards that produce the same resource.
Territories and Characters (Green and blue cards) provide an exponential reward in Victory points when you have 6 of them. If you reach the fifth card, then increment the weight of the whole card category.
If the amount of resources a player has is low, increment the value of the Harvest/Production actions according to which type of resource they can actually produce.