DigitalOcean: I made 4 LLMs fight a naval war. They signed treaties first.

Four LLMs command fleets in Flotilla, a naval resource-gathering sim. Every 100 ticks, each model rewrites the program that runs its ships. They can also message each other to negotiate non-aggression pacts, and they can break them.

Best of five: GLM-5.3, DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K3, and Qwen3.8-Max.

What the models did:

Qwen3.8-Max signed non-aggression pacts and violated them within seconds, repeatedly, to get at open fishing grounds.

Kimi K3 won games 2 and 3 on blockade tactics and northern lane control, then shipped a bug that froze its entire fleet in open water. It never diagnosed the bug and hit it again in game 5. Game 4 ended with Kimi on zero points.

DeepSeek-V4-Pro played a pure economy game, leaned on passive trawlers, and scuttled its own ships when it fell behind. That left it exposed to a late betrayal.

GLM-5.3 focused on diplomacy and early resource control. When its trawlers jammed at the docks, it scuttled the stuck ships and rewrote its program. It was the only model that consistently used dispatch cutters to redirect ships already at sea.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Game 1 — The Bounty Series
1:46 Game 2 — Kimi's Answer
3:25 Game 3 — Qwen's Knives
5:41 Game 4 — The Silent Collapse
7:03 Game 5 — The Decider
9:02 Final result

HOW FLOTILLA WORKS
Trawlers collect resources. Attack ships fight. Dispatch cutters carry strategy updates to ships already at sea. The admirals never steer anything directly. Every 100 ticks they submit code, and the fleet runs whatever they wrote until the next window. A bug in that code stays in the water until the model notices and fixes it.

Built by Darian Wilkins, Senior Manager of Solutions Architecture at DigitalOcean.

#LLM #AIagents