Starcraft AI blog

Since I got in trouble by not uploading often enough, until the release I decided to move closer to a “give us this day our daily fixes” model. Arbitrary version number 1.2.5 is now up.

The last Steamhammer upload fell in rating to about the same as Randomhammer, a little above 2100. I think the worst new bug is a new production freeze that didn’t happen before. It didn’t show up in my testing, but it seems sort of common in real games. Chasing the enemy scout too much doesn’t help either.

Anyway, for this test version I fixed a bunch of easy weaknesses.

• Fixed 2 possible causes of production freezes.

• If no buildings are in the building queue, recover any idle workers. It’s a quick fix so drones don’t stay idle forever.

• Since early days, Steamhammer has canceled uncompleted buildings that are about to be destroyed. I extended it a little to include lurker eggs and zerg cocoons. Recovering most of the gas from a lurker egg that’s about to die should make a difference.

• Photon cannons count as evidence that lurkers may be a bad idea. I made a few other tweaks to what-counters-what.

• Irradiated air units advance, hopefully leaving their non-irradiated colleagues behind. It’s a quick hack, and I’m not sure how well it will work. Also irradiated burrowed units try not to unburrow, to avoid exposing their friends to the radiation. An irradiated lurker will wait underground until it dies—not ideal, but maybe an improvement.

• Lurkers in small numbers try to burrow out of photon cannon range. It’s crude and definitely doesn’t always work, but I hope the effect will be to set up a containment until more units are available.

• Fixed a bug affecting the terran BBS opening: Units collected at home sometimes stayed there after "go aggressive". It was an interaction with unsticking units, which ironically caused marines to stick.

• InformationManager knows that lurker eggs mean the enemy has cloak tech. It didn’t realize until now.

• If we’re planning to make gas units, hurry up and collect gas. If gas was turned off, the bot used to wait until the first gas unit came to the front of the queue.