Starcraft AI blog

SSCAIT 2016 is beyond the halfway point, and Steamhammer’s score ratio has been holding steady near 2:1, good enough to place it in the bottom half of the top 16. It will probably make it into the finals (no guarantee; some tough games are still ahead). Its rate of upsets suggests a 30% chance that it could win in the round of 16 and make it through to the round of 8. It is unlikely to get further than that.

I’ve seen a few people wonder how a brand-new bot could do so well. Steamhammer 0.2 has less than 3 weeks of my development effort in it. I can answer that!

1. Steamhammer builds on a strong foundation in UAlbertaBot. I changed the openings and the strategy followup, and fixed bad play where I had time to, but most of Steamhammer’s play comes straight from UAlbertaBot. Tactics are only slightly changed; micro has modestly improved targeting but is otherwise nearly identical.

2. I know the game and I’ve been following the bot scene for a long time. I was able to make choices that both fit within UAlbertaBot’s limitations and pose challenges to other bots. Knowledge is power. Most new bots play inefficient builds; Steamhammer builds inefficiently only to work around other problems.

3. Strong new bots usually show good results at first and then decline as other bots adapt. I’ve seen it before and I see it now with Steamhammer. The opening learning bots find the right openings to play; I played a test match versus Zia in which Steamhammer scored 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0, switching from wins to losses when Zia hit on the right opening. The actively developed bots get fixes to any weaknesses that the new bot reveals; both Krasi0 and LetaBot have mentioned improvements to mutalisk defense.