Steamhammer next steps
Progress has been delayed by exhausting events in some kind of “real world” that I don’t fully understand. But whatever, it’s only a temporary distraction. A public repository should be up soon-ish; I have made some decisions but not all.
After that I will be, as anyone could have guessed, splitting versions again. I was planning for the next version 1.2.4 to be a mass bug fix release, but with the new SparCraft out, that doesn’t seem like the best plan.
• 1.2.4 - I’ll try the new SparCraft and incorporate it if it seems like an improvement. I expect it to be. Besides that, I plan to work on about a half dozen of the most critical bugs and weaknesses.
• 1.2.5 - Fix as many of the remaining bugs as possible. My list is way longer than I can get through.
• 1.3 - Start on opponent modeling.
I promised some form of opening learning or other opponent modeling for CIG 2016, and it is coming up fast. I have to get onto that soon and delay mutalisk work yet again. I regret the delay, because mutalisk micro is a key zerg skill and all bots are clumsy at it. When I finally get it implemented, terran bot authors in particular will be dismayed to see how hard mutalisks can hit when they are Less Stupid. But opponent modeling is also key.
I have already implemented a couple of fixes to regrouping. I corrected a conceptual error in weapon ranges versus ground distances. It remedies one case of mutalisks holding their position while under enemy fire, as well as less visible but related misbehavior. Also medics retreat with their squad when they should, instead of staying behind to “hold off the enemy while you escape.”
If I ever want to finish ahead of tscmoo in a tournament, zerg will have to learn how to survive terran early pressure. To make testing easier, I added a terran BBS opening. Like Tyr’s, it defeats Steamhammer’s mutalisk openings 100% of the time. So far, my attempts to react to it are too slow and zerg still loses. The BBS is so effective that I could not resist adding a “go pull workers” command to pull SCVs into the combat squad and make it even more vicious. Now it is easy to write all-in strategies like Oleg Ostroumov’s marine-SCV attack, or the zealot-probe all-in that Pinfel used to play.
Trackbacks
No Trackbacks
Comments
Joseph Huang on :
Jay Scott on :
Tully Elliston on :
I'm involved with the AI scene over at Zero-K RTS. Our challenges are more tightly focused on unit grouping and control than economy, macro and build order (much easier to manage in Zero-K) but a lot of your points have been useful food for thought, so thank you!
krasi0 on :
Tully Elliston on :