Three items.
1. Steamhammer is coming along nicely. Today I completed and tested new infrastructure that will make it easy to solve one of Steamhammer’s biggest weaknesses, and bring other play improvements closer too. There’s not much time before the AIIDE submission deadline, but even so, expect harder fights.
2. Blog comments turn out to not be the only problem with the blog. I need to do some sysadmin stuff that I find tedious, and I don’t want to be distracted from working on Steamhammer. I’ll get around to it sometime in September for sure. Sorry. :-( I miss the good comments.
3. CoG has not posted results on its website, not even summary results. If and when they appear, I’ll do at least some of my usual analysis.
ASL 16 round of 24 continues this week. Group D just finished as I write, and it has the best games of the tournament so far.
Game 2, Action versus Effort, was a hive tech ZvZ, always special. It went to ultralisks versus defiler-lurker. Recommended. The following two games were also exciting, and the final game was not bad.
To fill the dead air while I try to fix the absurdly undiagnosable comment bug, here’s a game I was pleased with.
Steamhammer - BananaBrain on Python was played not long ago. (Here’s the replay.) BananaBrain held the initiative for most of the game, and broke into the zerg natural at one point, but never destroyed a completed zerg base. The game has plague, parasite, and broodling.
Steamhammer’s favorite strategy is to overrun you in the late game. Even strong opponents lose if they let the strategy play out.
AIIDE. Steamhammer will play in AIIDE again this year. I expect to bring a new version—it has been too long. Steamhammer’s infrastructure for some important new skills is almost ready, so if all goes as it should I will shatter your futile hopes with lurker spines!
I like the map rules this year: Five chosen from last year’s maps, five from a long list of varied maps. It’s a compromise between the guaranteed quality of a fixed map pool and CoG’s historical plan of selecting the maps from a list with inconsistent quality, some of which bots struggle on. The AIIDE list is large but sorted by quality, and the allowed maps have relatively few features that bots can’t cope with. Well, the list is long enough that there are several maps I don’t recognize.
I have often tested Steamhammer on random maps from a large collection, including utterly nonstandard Blizzard maps. It’s not good (yet) at taking advantage of map features, but it’s solid and consistent on standard-ish maps. It may be to my advantage.
CoG. The conference runs from 21-24 August, so results should be out soon. The roster includes one new bot, ProtossPleb, whose name and information does not look promising in itself. But we’ll see. The other participants are several familiar top finishers.
ASL Season 16 started this week. No great games so far, but I enjoyed Calm’s clever play against Rain in group B of the round of 24. The best games are often in the round of 8.
I tried turning comments back on, but it seems the feature grew a technical problem on the new webhost. Stand by for repairs.