Starcraft AI blog

Steamhammer continues its tradition of starting strongly: It has scored 7-0 in its first games. That is better than Stardust at 6-1. The winning streak will, I’m sure everyone agrees, unquestionably continue for the rest of the tournament, unless of course Steamhammer grows bored with winning. I imagine that many people have seen the Stardust loss, because it is interesting for more than one reason. To me, the key point is that Stardust took island bases.

The game is Stardust-BetaStar on Andromeda. Stardust started a shuttle immediately after its observatory, and the shuttle picked up a probe and headed out immediately, at about 8:10 into the game. By this time, Stardust had already fallen behind in worker count and army size, because its build was not as efficient—which is interesting too, since BetaStar was derived from Locutus. The shuttle headed straight back home to pick up 8 more probes, setting Stardust further behind in economy; after the transfer its main was not mining at full strength, and the timing was too early because the probes arrived at the island base before it was finished and couldn’t mine there at first either.

As soon as the island base finished and the 9 probes there had turned in their first mineral cargoes, the shuttle picked up one of them and carried it due north to the other Andromeda island base. That base too started as soon as minerals allowed, and the shuttle returned—not to the main, but to the south island base. It picked up a load of probes there, leaving the south island severely undersaturated, and flew north straight into BetaStar’s moving dragoons, being shot down with no attempt to evade. Ouch.

Meanwhile BetaStar was in Stardust’s main, starting to take things apart. Given that Stardust intended to take the second island, transferring probes from the main would have made more sense. The rest of the game was boring. BetaStar had only dragoons and never found the island bases, so they were invulnerable. Stardust mined its islands and watched dragoons move around the map with its observer, but never attempted to rebuild. At the end of the game, neither island had as much as a pylon on it. And, curiously, neither island mined gas. Overall, taking the islands contributed to Stardust’s loss, but it didn’t seem like an entirely bad idea because the islands were untouchable. In a longer game, the extra bases would have paid off.

That tells us something about the author of Stardust and Locutus. Bruce Nielsen is like me in one way: We are both willing to enable cool but half-baked features in serious games.

Here is a BASIL game where Stardust started to take an island, though the game ends before the nexus is placed: Stardust-XIAOYICOG2019 on Python. The SSCAIT maps include 3 maps (of 14 used) with islands: Andromeda, Empire of the Sun, and Python.