Team Composition in PES2018 using Submodular Function Optimization

With the development of computer game technologies, gameplay becomes very realistic in many sports games, therefore providing appealing play experience to game players. To get the victory in a football pitch, the team composition is pretty important. There is little research on the automatic team composition in sports games particularly in a popular game of Pro Evolution Soccer (PES). In this paper, we consider the team composition as one team player recommendation problem since a team is composed of several players in a game. Subsequently, we aim to recommend a list of sufficiently good football players to game players. We convert the team player recommendation into one optimization problem and resort to the greedy algorithm-based solutions. We propose a coverage function that quantifies the degree of soccer skills to be covered by the selected players. In addition, we prove the submodularity of the coverage function and improve a greedy algorithm to solve the function optimization problem. We demonstrate the performance of our techniques in PES2018.