Bereaver’s curious weaknesses
Bereaver was reuploaded today, and apparently the new version introduces bugs because its play is worse in obvious ways. Until today Bereaver had been holding the #1 rank with seeming ease. I expect the problems will be ironed out before SSCAIT closes submissions for the tourney!
Even without bugs, Bereaver’s play is curious because it is a top bot, yet some of its weaknesses look simple to fix. Usually the weaknesses of top bots look difficult or time-consuming or at least troublesome to correct. I’ll give a couple examples.
1. Bereaver gets the reaver capacity upgrade, so that a reaver can hold 10 scarabs. Bereaver eventually makes a lot of reavers, so an upgrade makes sense—but the capacity upgrade? The way I see it, the main purpose of the capacity upgrade is to make reavers usable when your hands are too slow. Expert players don’t even use up the normal capacity of 5 scarabs, at least not until later in the game when micro becomes more demanding. It’s normal to send a reaver into the fight with 3 or even 2 scarabs in the magazine, because every scarab is a sunk cost and you never know when the reaver will die. Bereaver invests 200/200 for the upgrade and then builds 5 extra scarabs for 75 minerals more per reaver, and I don’t think it earns any return.
I imagine it would be a 1-line change to order the reaver damage upgrade instead. Instead of more expensive, the reavers would become more lethal.
2. Bereaver makes corsairs against terran, apparently to counter science vessels or dropships. There are times when it could make sense, but mainly on island maps. I have never seen Bereaver’s corsairs pay off in a game against a terran.
Again, it seems like a 1-line change to skip corsairs. It would be a different story if the corsairs used disruption web, but that’s for later in the game and it’s not half as simple.
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LinesPrower on :
As for the corsair, Bereaver only builds one vs Terran, and its purpose is scouting for new Terran's expansions. It seems, however, that sometimes the corsair forgets about its responsibilities and gets into fight...
And the new version, I hope that it is actually better in a lot of ways (it addresses a number of problems, mainly in PvP, and has a few bugs fixed), it just hit a spell of bad luck losing three matches in a row, and that has nothing to do with the update (but has something to do with the bugs I've yet to fix).
P.S. How do you insert line breaks into comments here?
Jay Scott on :