Starcraft AI blog

If you want to beat Steamhammer without really trying, I have a suggestion. All you have to do is maneuver your army to the other side of Steamhammer’s and put yourself on the path between Steamhammer and its base. You leave your base wide open, but you’ll probably win. It works versus ground units and versus air units.

At some point Steamhammer will want to retreat. Even when winning, it sometimes retreats for no apparent reason (I haven’t looked into why yet). It pays no attention to its surroundings when it decides to retreat, so if you are on the path between Steamhammer and its base, it will retreat through your army. And Steamhammer does not fight when it retreats—the units are on move command.

Here Steamhammer forced its way into Carsten Nielsen’s base, started in on the probes, then got scared for no good reason and left, giving the zealots free kills. If more zealots had been near the ramp, all the zerglings could have been caught.

The next one is even more infuriating. Sometimes, Steamhammer retreats from a threat but does not retreat out of weapons range. It seems unpredictable when. It’s most glaring with mutalisks and goliaths: Mutalisks approach, take hits, retreat without firing, turn around before escaping goliath range and approach again, continue to take hits, retreat without firing... it doesn’t go on long, soon they’re all dead with nothing accomplished.

Here Steamhammer’s mutalisks are moving back and forth in goliath range, offering free lunch. The mutas did eventually escape, only to get caught again.

It also happens sometimes with mutalisks and bunkers, zerglings and bunkers, and zerglings and tanks. And probably other unit combinations. But it doesn’t happen every time, only sometimes.

I don’t have immediate plans to fix either of these weaknesses.

Later: I’ll have at least one more post about bugs and weaknesses in Steamhammer 0.2.