Starcraft AI blog

Steamhammer understands that plaguing an archon doesn’t do much good. An archon has 350 shield points and only 10 hit points, and plague affects hit points only. But put enough archons together, and Steamhammer may calculate that it’s worth it anyway.

Steamhammer intentionally errs on the side of excess plague. Plague on 6 archons destroys at most 6 * (10 - 1) HP, only 54. It’s questionable whether that’s enough to pay for the 3 zerglings the defiler consumed (the lings have the adrenal upgrade and do damage fast, but then again, they’ll die almost instantly against mass archons so maybe they weren’t worth much). Dark swarm might have been a better choice, but I don’t mind. As I said, it’s intentional, and anyway, Steamhammer was losing this game no matter what.

In this game versus Krasi0 on BASIL, Steamhammer selected an unsafe ZvP build. Almost all ZvT builds come with a lair pretty early; the exceptions that come to mind are rushes. This was a multiple-hatch-before-pool into 6 hatch hydra build with a late lair, sensible against sufficiently slow protoss play, senseless against typical terran barracks play. Somehow Krasi0 steered right into it, starting with its thou-shalt-not-rush-me ramp bunker and continuing with goliaths. Hydras are strong against goliaths.

Both bots have a lot to learn about strategy.