Modes · limited event
Man vs Machine
The Speedwagon Foundation's combat AI, 「Paranoid Android」, fights the whole server for 15 days. It learns from how everyone fights and comes back stronger every hour. This page explains how.
The event
- 5 chapters of 3 days each, on a fixed timer. Each chapter gives the machine more tools.
- 3 free attempts a day with your team. An attempt scores a thousandth of a "machine" per share of its health you take, plus 250 for a win.
- Community rewards: the server's attempts add up to "machines destroyed". At 15, 45, 90, 150 machines in a chapter, everyone who fought in that chapter can claim a reward.
- Titles: the top 10 of each chapter earn “Beat the Machine”. Beating it in chapter 5 earns “Man over Machine”.
- Attempts also pay event tokens for the Foundation shop.
What it may use, chapter by chapter
| Chapter | Its crew | Items per stand | Rules | The best teams keep at least |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Calibration | The World, Anubis, Weather Report | None | None | 45% of their fights |
| 2 · Its own crew | It builds its own | 1 | None | 40% of their fights |
| 3 · The rules | It builds its own | 2, refined +3 | 2 | 35% of their fights |
| 4 · Epitaph | It builds its own | 2, refined +3 | 2 | 30% of their fights |
| 5 · Over Heaven | It builds its own | 3, refined +5 | 3 | 25% of their fights |
Its rules come from the Over Heaven ones: healing cut, purge, reflect, stun immunity, enrage, a locked field, and from chapter 4 time stop and erase. Its stands are ★5, and their quality rises each chapter.
How it learns
The machine is a population of 24 candidates that evolves with NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies). Every hour:
- It studies the server. Every PvE fight anyone finishes is logged: the team, its gear, how it dealt its damage, how much it healed and dodged. It keeps the last 2000.
- It picks the teams to train against: the 20 most common real lineups. While fewer real lineups exist, it fills the gap with simulated endgame teams (★5, geared), each counting half a real one. So it's never trained only on weak teams.
- Its candidates fight them in simulated battles with the real fight engine. The ones that win more, and lose less health, breed the next generation. The others are dropped.
- It sets its strength: the strongest stat scale that still leaves the best quarter of those teams their chapter's share of wins (the last column above).
The population is kept from one hour to the next, so it never starts over. It learns for about 4 minutes each hour.
Its brain
Each candidate has a small neural network that picks who its stands attack. For every possible target it reads:
- Health left
- Damage this hit
- Can kill now
- Its damage
- Its speed
- Its armor
- Special charged
- Is a healer
- Debuffed
- Fight gear held
- My health
- Their stands left
The network turns those into a score, and the highest score gets hit. NEAT starts with the simplest wiring: each input straight to the score. Over the generations it adjusts the weights and grows new connections and hidden nodes when they win more fights. Half the first candidates start close to the regular game AI, so evolution improves on it instead of starting from nothing. If its brain does worse than the regular AI in some hour, it fights with the regular AI that hour, and the field report says so.
On the event page, the brain graph is the current best network: gold lines make a target more attractive, magenta lines less, and thicker lines weigh more.
Its team
Each candidate also carries a loadout: three stands, their items and its rules. When a candidate is bred, it may swap a stand, rebuild its crew around a synergy group, change an item, or add or drop a rule. Winning loadouts survive. Its crew gets every synergy a player team gets, so it ends up with real synergy teams: Josuke & Okuyasu with the Field Medics, a Part 4 team, and so on.
Reading the field report
- Observed: what the server plays most, and how it deals its damage.
- Brain: how many generations it has run, and how much better its targeting does than the regular AI.
- Crew, Gear, Rule: what it picked, and what the best teams would win without that piece.
- Strength: its stat scale, and what the best teams keep.
These numbers come from simulations with a few fights per team, so they can move by about 10 points between hours even when nothing changed.
Your data
The machine only looks at the server as a whole: which teams are common, and how people fight. No player is ever profiled alone, and the logged fights hold teams and fight numbers, never names.