Starcraft AI blog

The new zerg bot Pathos is JJJJJ renamed.

New protoss Sune Rasmussen is another development from Dave Churchill’s StartCraft starter bot, like Pathos. We can guess that the authors may be classmates.

As I write, the bot has 10 losses and no wins on SSCAIT. I think that’s because the voters have been feeding it difficult opponents. On BASIL it has a 60% win rate, which is good for a brand new bot. It has wins over tscmoo random and tscmoo terran, and has laid down a picket fence of wins over its low-end opponents.

Sune Rasmussen opens with 7 pylon (not the efficient 8 pylon) then two gateways at 10, and produces zealots. At some point it gets gas and makes a forge and cyber core, starts mixing dragoons into its army, and gets +1 attack. I’m not sure what the switch criterion is; it doesn’t seem to be a simple timer or unit counter. For some reason it never gets dragoon range, though it is more valuable than +1. That seems to be its entire production plan. It’s fancier than many brand new bots!

The army appears to choose its targets by a strict priority list. One enemy unit with high priority can lure the army out of position. And if the army does not find a target, it gets stuck somewhere useless—that’s a bug. On the other hand, it has a pattern of building pylons in bunches near its gateways. It’s hard for the enemy to unpower a gateway, and if one is unpowered, a later pylon will probably repower it again. It’s a cute way to approximate an advanced skill.

Sune Rasmussen is brand new, and surely doesn’t have much development behind it yet. It’s doing fine for a new start; Steamhammer has had worse bugs.