Bereaver status

Bereaver continues to score wins against its top rivals, but I’m not sure whether it has reached #1 on SSCAIT. Krasi0 and Iron dominate the weaker bots, winning nearly all games, while Bereaver still drops some games to them. It takes time and effort to make a bot solid against all the different strategies!

Bereaver loses some games to protoss bots with strong macro, such as Skynet, when Bereaver takes its natural too late. It can also lose to unusual strategies like XIMP’s carriers. Here Bereaver storms the carriers and takes their shields off—it wasn’t enough, they still had all their hit points. After a long fight, XIMP recorded the win.

Bereaver’s zergling rush defense seems to work well against ZZZKBot, but shows weaknesses against variations. Here Zia opened 5 pool and, unlike ZZZKBot which suffered some pathing errors, immediately broke Bereaver’s ramp. The cannon-probe defense was firm and Bereaver held easily. So far so sound.

But while ZZZKBot does the fastest possible 4 pool and can only follow up by sending more lings, Zia switched to drone production and teched to mutalisks off of 1 hatchery. There is no strong followup to a failed 5 pool and Bereaver could have shrugged off the weak air attack... if it hadn’t restricted its production to zealots. Even so, the zealots could have won the game if they had attacked instead of holding their ground.

Bereaver’s zealots stand around under air attack

Bereaver still put up a fight, but Zia added to its mutalisk numbers and finally won.

Against Overkill’s 9 pool, Bereaver still canceled its gateway at the first sight of the spawning pool, before the scouting probe had traveled far enough to see the drones. It was not a sound reaction to 9 pool. After losing the blocking probes, protoss was already behind in economy. Overkill aggressively went after more probes, and despite poor play later was ahead the whole game and won as it should.

Notice Bereaver’s supply. With only 6 probes, it was impossible to catch up.

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Comments

LetaBot on Friday, October 21. 2016:

Bereaver seems to have some problem with the Deep Six push of my bot as well.

krasi0 on Wednesday, October 26. 2016:

Not anymore it seems. There was an update to Bereaver last night and I scheduled a few games against the most prominent opponents out there and Bereaver won all (including the match against your bot) but one game. Really amazing!

Jay Scott on Friday, October 28. 2016:

I looked at replays to see if I could tell what had changed. It looks about the same to me... maybe it has a higher tendency to lure its enemies into unsound attacks with small pokes?

Jay Scott on Friday, October 28. 2016:

Ah, here is a difference: In its anti-rush strategy it follows up with a variety of tech as usual, not with zealots only. That should fix the weakness that lost the game versus Zia.

krasi0 on Saturday, October 22. 2016:

That's one of the good things about SSCAIT in 2016. There are so many different playing styles, so many different openings and BOs (most of which are executed rather well), that a bot that could handle all that would surely be rather good.
On a side note, nothing even remotely similar to this variety could be observed on either AIIDE or CIG. There one is inclined to hardcode strategies against a handful of opponents.

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