Starcraft AI blog

GarmBot was reuploaded twice recently on SSCAIT. It looks as though it is under development again. Woohoo! Its description has added the message “Now with some lurkers. Big update coming to upgrade to BWAPI 4.1.2.” And I did see it build lurkers, which could spell trouble for some opponents (ones that GarmBot didn’t already overwhelm, I mean!).

GarmBot’s strategy is unsound, of course, but it’s also unique and delightful. It has a lot of room to improve without varying from its extreme macro, every-unit-for-itself game plan, so I’m interested to see how far Aurelien Lermant will go. Will some units get better micro or better decision-making? Will it make cleverer choices about which units to make where, such as not hatching drones to die instantly at a base that’s under attack? I would be interested to see whether it helps at all to build defensive units at a base that’s under light harassment and to waste as few resources as possible at a base that’s under massive attack—improvement or “so what?”

Not to put impossible expectations on anybody, but I can hope.

Update: The current GarmBot seems cleverer in some ways. For example, it is smarter with overlords. It’s also less aggressive about expanding and less successful overall. That’s OK—when adding ideas to a performance program it is normal to make the program worse at first, even when the ideas are good. The rest of the program may be optimized for the old behavior, and then you need a lot of updates.