Starcraft AI blog

Steamhammer 3.4 is uploaded. The previous version was uploaded only 6 days ago, so changes are few. Nothing here should have any big effect on playing strength. Most of the work went to opening data, but I also made some other tweaks, mostly affecting queens. I turned on the zerg strategy boss info display for stream watchers.

opening timing data

Steamhammer records in its files data useful for choosing openings, in a way similar to my original post. In later games it parses the saved data into a form that the rest of the program can use, but nothing uses the data yet. I have to collect enough first. I’ll post details later.

• New skill “battles” added using the skill kit. It records summary info about the first 2 “significant” battles of the game, by its own definition.

• New skill “opening timing” added using the skill kit. It records summary info about the results of the opening played.

• The “unit timings” skill, which records scouting data about the enemy, is updated slightly to mark enemy buildings whose completion time is known, because the building was seen under construction. Most buildings are scouted after completion, so it can only record the scouting time. Known times are negated; the minus sign is the flag.

scouting

• As I predicted, I have further relaxed the condition to release the scout worker early. The location of the enemy base need no longer be known. If the worker still sticks around at the front beyond when it will see anything new, I may loosen the condition one last time.

• An early game overlord—usually the second one—now scouts the main and natural, instead of only the main. Steamhammer should notice cannon contains and some proxies earlier, at least on average.

queens

• Steamhammer formerly limited its queen count until queen research was started, either ensnare or broodling. I was afraid that it might spawn a bunch of queens and then change its mind and have no use for them.

• I dropped the mechanism that used to leave a time gap (30 seconds) before remaking queens when all of them were destroyed. I decided that if it overmakes queens and needs to learn better, then I’d prefer a more general mechanism.

• Be more willing to get ensnare versus protoss.

• If terran doesn’t have any bases left, don’t make a queen in hopes of infesting a command center. It looked silly.

• Steamhammer is slower to research queen energy. I thought it was spending on that too often. It now insists on either having at least 4 queens, or having a target of at least 4 queens. I doubt it’s worth it even then. I’ve seen analyses which try to figure out the number of queens before it is economically worthwhile to buy +50 queen energy, and they came up with 8 to 12 as the minimum.

• The strategy boss debug display shows Steamhammer’s target queen counts for each purpose, parasite, ensnare, and broodling. If queens are desired, the line that used to say something like “0/1 queen” (zero queens made of a target of one queen) now says “0/1 queen (1 0 0)”, with the three numbers in parentheses. The overall target number of queens is the maximum of those three numbers. Steamhammer will try to research both ensnare and broodling if it wants queens for both purposes.