Agents of Change: Self-Evolving LLM Agents for Strategic Planning
Authors: name: Nikolas Belle, name: Dakota Barnes, name: Alfonso Amayuelas, name: Ivan Bercovich, name: Xin Eric Wang, name: William Wang

Recent advances in LLMs have enabled their use as autonomous agents across a
range of tasks, yet they continue to struggle with formulating and adhering to
coherent long-term strategies. In this paper, we investigate whether LLM agents
can self-improve when placed in environments that explicitly challenge their
strategic planning abilities. Using the board game Settlers of Catan, accessed
through the open-source Catanatron framework, we benchmark a progression of
LLM-based agents, from a simple game-playing agent to systems capable of
autonomously rewriting their own prompts and their player agent's code. We
introduce a multi-agent architecture in which specialized roles (Analyzer,
Researcher, Coder, and Player) collaborate to iteratively analyze gameplay,
research new strategies, and modify the agent's logic or prompt. By comparing
manually crafted agents to those evolved entirely by LLMs, we evaluate how
effectively these systems can diagnose failure and adapt over time. Our results
show that self-evolving agents, particularly when powered by models like Claude
3.7 and GPT-4o, outperform static baselines by autonomously adopting their
strategies, passing along sample behavior to game-playing agents, and
demonstrating adaptive reasoning over multiple iterations.