Starcraft AI blog

In the tournament, the ranks are starting to resolve. Outside the collapse of McRave, I don’t see any big surprises. Locutus has played fewer games than other bots, so the top position is less clear than others. Steamhammer is likely to finish around rank #10-#12, in the range of past performances, so it is safely in despite my worries.

In development, resource tracking was soon working. When destroying an enemy base you normally get to see the resource counts, so used bases should be evaluated accurately.

I started writing a scout boss, then I got distracted by another project. I am refactoring gas steal into one skill in a skill system that retains data in the game records of the opponent model. You subclass a Skill object, fill in around 8 virtual methods of which most are simple, and you get opponent modeling that estimates when the skill is useful against whoever you’re playing now. Since it’s implemented in code, it’s highly flexible. You can choose what data to record, including measurements of how successful a skill was in the current game, and how to interpret the data.

The immediate effect I hope for is better gas steal decisions. Steamhammer’s new queen skills are also good candidates, because queens vary from useful to wasteful. Will a queen be good? How many queens? Will ensnare be good? Even tactical decisions like “play defensively until time t” should be possible, with t adjusted in real time as the opponent model watches the game unfold. I like the idea of learning to adapt tactical play to the opponent.

The game record file format will change. The format has to change soon anyway, because it doesn’t record all the information needed for some important strategy decisions. I designed it so that I can add new format game records without having to discard old ones.