Big eyes

Steamhammer played a couple games against the new protoss Big eyes today. Big eyes opens with zealots, then adds some cannons while it techs to corsairs and dark templars (it plays about the same against all races). As usual for a new bot, the build is not efficient and doesn’t place much pressure on the opponent; good bots are hard and take a long time. But one point I notice in particular: Big eyes always makes pylons for twice as much supply as it needs. I think the author did not notice that BWAPI reports supply numbers double what Brood War shows. Fix that oversight, and the bot would suddenly become much stronger.

I would like to develop intuition about how much strength different bugs and missing features lose, so that I can do the important stuff first. Right now, Big eyes is rated 1754. I think this is a giant oversight, worth over 100 elo... but probably not as much as 150? I’ll call it 125. That’s my guess. I hope to find out how close I came. Does anybody else want to guess and help develop my intuition?

Tomorrow: TyrProtoss.

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PurpleWaveJadien on Wednesday, June 28. 2017:

The game plan of Big eyes -- Gateway units, into cannons + Dark Templar, into Carriers, all on one base -- is almost identical to that of DAIDOES. The execution details vary greatly, but amusingly they've landed on almost the exact same ELO.

krasi0 on Thursday, June 29. 2017:

I'd venture the ELO won't increase that much with the mentioned bug fixed. For the bot's style of play, the damage done isn't as severe.

Arrak on Thursday, June 29. 2017:

I think of elo as being the product of various factors. Significant factors: rush resistance, build order, army usage (micro/fight taking/retreating/etc.), adaptability, building placement, chance of crashing. If something's really bad, improvements will not be visible. So... fixing the pylon bug would have no effect whatsoever, but having a more sensible build would improve it by, say, 100-300 points (Wuli-style or Vajda-style or pure DTs with micro). Then, army usage "multiplies" the build-points by 0 to 4 times. The rest is either prerequisites, or icing on the cake.

jtolmar on Thursday, June 29. 2017:

The impact of certain bugs can completely hide other bugs. Building too many pylons is barely a problem if the bot is floating resources. It might work to think of the bot's ELO penalty as being the sum of its biggest economic bug, biggest micro bug, biggest engagement bug in determining whether to engage, and biggest bug in deciding what to build.

Jay Scott on Thursday, June 29. 2017:

Big eyes has reasonably good macro—actually quite good for a bot at its level, except for the supply bug. It lets its minerals float up sometimes, then spends them down again. But the supply bug means that it builds its first pylon at 4, before it can make a probe with its given 50 minerals, and has to mine 100 minerals before it can make the probe. Everything the bot builds is delayed for the entire game, and every new pylon that it makes too early (not all of them, despite my first impression) causes more delay. That’s my reasoning for why I expect such a big elo loss.

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