Starcraft AI blog

Steamhammer’s elo stabilized over 2300 before the last mini-tournament. It is clearly the strongest version yet. Randomhammer’s elo rose to around 2100, as I forecast. All races are stronger than before.

Then Steamhammer’s elo crashed during the tournament. 5 Pool had just learned how to beat it, and Tscmoo protoss finally settled on its winning opening too. Also of course it was playing a larger proportion of games against Iron and Krasi0, and against Killerbot by Marian Devecka, which this Steamhammer scores about 50% against.

After the tournament, with 5 Pool disabled, Steamhammer’s elo still hasn’t recovered. It hovers around 2200. Tscmoo protoss hasn’t forgotten its winning opening. Also the zergs Ailien and Microwave have improved to beat it more often, getting better air defense and reducing their strategy mistakes. Even lower-ranked protoss Lukas Moravec has been winning games with its zealot rush, stealing gas in some games. Steamhammer doesn’t work around the BWAPI geyser bug and its game plan is derailed by a gas steal. I think Steamhammer’s #3 rank (since lost) and its status as the handle of a fork with many tines made it a target, and since it has plain weaknesses, people have figured out how to exploit them. Or maybe they’re trying to reprioritize my to-do list, “This is the important weakness, please help.” :-)

Meanwhile, I’ve been spending most of my effort on skills for protoss and terran. The next Steamhammer will come with protoss DT drop and terran vulture drop, but no zerg drops. Overlords are more complicated, and I decided to save it for later. (Getting drop to work at all needed a mess of code changes across classes: CombatCommander, Squad, SquadOrder, MicroManager, other micro classes, StrategyManager—and that is accepting the limitation of dropping a fixed set of units, once, from one dropship or shuttle, and then transitioning out.) Terran will track its use of scan and have more infantry skills and smarter tanks, protoss will support more unit types and use them, both will have more transitions and other improvements. Also I’m making micro changes for all races which add flexibility but require tuning, so there may be new micro weaknesses until I figure out what works.

I hope to get in zerg specific improvements to overcome the biggest weaknesses. I know what to do, but the list is long and I’m not sure how far I’ll get. Anyway, the bottom line: I can’t promise that the next version will be stronger. What I know for sure is that it will be more interesting.

And I can’t wait to get back to zerg.