New bot Zerg Hell (BASIL) by NiteKat describes itself as a “C++ client bot written in 8 hours to see what could be done with limited development time. Uses no additional libraries.” It has a repository. The name refers to Marine Hell, a bot developed in 5 hours and left up as an example of what it is possible to do in a short time.
Zerg Hell plays a fixed plan: overpool, 4 sunkens placed wherever to turtle up on one base, collect hydras while researching the speed and range upgrades and adding drones and hatcheries, attack at a fixed time. It gets a lair solely to research overlord speed, and moves its overlords to counter cloaked units. It doesn’t have many other skills. It never expands.
When its plan comes off, the mass of hydras can be dangerous. The hydras are reasonably good at staying together and deciding what area to attack. If the sunkens are misplaced, which is common, it may lose all its drones helplessly. On SSCAIT, its build usually gets stuck at one point or another and it stops producing units. That doesn’t happen on BASIL, but against Skynet by Andrew Smith it had a production freeze making it very late to replace lost overlords.
It beats Marine Hell head-to-head. Does it take 11 hours of coding to beat Zerg Hell?
I predicted Steamhammer to finish at #11 in SSCAIT this year, and hoped it would do a little better. It finished tied for #12-13. On the one hand, it’s only a little lower than I expected. On the other, the difference in games from what I expected is glaring, to my eyes. When I made the prediction, I didn’t realize that Steamhammer’s saved learning data had been reset at some recent time. In the games I saw, Steamhammer had about 8 past games of data on each opponent. I did not imagine that Steamhammer might lose 2 games in a row to XIMP by Tomas Vajda, and 2 games in a row to WuliBot, and other losses to fixed-strategy opponents—it simply doesn’t happen when Steamhammer is trained up.
I estimate that if Steamhammer had won its “easy” games at the rate it does on BASIL, it would have finished at #10, with a chance of reaching #9. It would have been as I hoped.
Today’s finals round 1 match against Halo by Hao Pan was awful. Steamhammer scores over 60% versus Halo on BASIL. In the SSCAIT round robin it scored 2-0 using a ling flood strategy, which won when Halo opened its wall prematurely. In today’s match the ling flood failed, though it was close. Steamhammer didn’t have much experience to back up its next choices, and made poor ones.
Steamhammer’s next match is in the loser’s bracket against #13 McRaveZ. I think its odds are under 50%.