Starcraft AI blog

New terran bot Trident plays on BASIL, bypassing SSCAIT. It seems to be a trend.

I watched some games. Trident seems to play similar—not identical—fixed strategies versus each race. There may be adjustments depending on what the opponent does; I wasn’t sure. But the strategy is at least mostly fixed.

It always starts with a defensive bunker that it fills with 4 marines. It builds up an initial force and makes an attack apparently at a fixed timing. After that it makes more frequent small attacks—maybe the idea is to send reinforcements.

Versus terran, the initial force is marines and vultures. It soon adds tanks.

Versus protoss, the initial force is firebats with some marines mixed in, and vultures. It’s effective against zealots, weak against dragoons. It seems to switch to tank-goliath-vulture later, which is more general-purpose.

Versus zerg, the initial force is again firebats with marines mixed in, and vultures. Zerglings can’t touch it, anything else can. Much later it adds wraiths in small numbers.

The initial attack would be much stronger with some medics added, but medics need special control and it’s reasonable for a new bot to leave them out at first. Trident usually (not always) makes exactly one turret near its main command center, which is its only detection for the entire game. It’s helpless against dark tempar or lurkers. I expect it’s because comsat is difficult to use well; it’s another skill that a new bot can reasonably ignore for a while.

Trident seems to have a fixed repertoire of research. It gets speed and mines for the vultures, and lays mines along the path between bases, a nice skill. It gets armor +1 for its infantry, then lifts the engineering bay (but doesn’t float it around to scout). The lifted e-bay means that you can’t win by simply making DTs or lurkers; you need a unit that can shoot up. It gets cloak for its wraiths and cloaks them sometimes. Wraiths tend to hang around over burrowed lurkers, discouraging the lurkers from unburrowing but making themselves easy targets for scourge. Trident knows how to repair burning buildings, another nice skill.

All in all, better than average for a brand new bot. Keep up the good work, whoever you are!