Starcraft AI blog

I see this question occasionally, and my first reaction is: “Why are you asking the internet?!? Shouldn’t you know what you want more than we do? Yeesh, kids nowadays!”

I’ll skip over my second reaction, “What’s your real question?” and my third reaction “Of course you should.” Pay attention to my fourth reaction, that’s the one that counts.

It depends on what you have in mind. The world already has enough zerg rushbots that 4-pool or 5-pool or 6-pool, enough protoss bots that go mass zealots, and enough terran bots that go straight bio every game. Those are all monotonobots. The world does not have enough of the other kind, the funbots that have any other strategy.

The reason we have so many monotonobots with the same strategies is that those strats are relatively easy to code and relatively successful. They have good bang for the buck. But they are lazy, they offer nothing to the community, they are boring to watch and boring to talk about, we learn nothing, and the top bots can beat them because you have to beat the common strategies to become a top bot. Also, they can psychologically hold back the authors: Once you’ve done pretty well with a modest amount of work, it’s discouraging to put more work into a more ambitious strategy and have it turn out less successful at first. If you want to climb a mountain, climb it and don’t make a foothill your first goal.

Well, decide for yourself what you want to climb. If you aim for the peak, prepare for a lot of hard work and never get discouraged. If you just want a fun hike, it will be more fun to set out in a direction that strikes your fancy and blaze your own trail. Either way, a monotonobot isn’t worth it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with rushes in themselves. If your bot is strong but zergling rushes from time to time to butcher weak enemies efficiently or to remind strong opponents not to fast expand without defense, I won’t complain.

Plenty of the funbots are more interesting than successful. I like Jakub Trancik’s “MOAR CANNONS PLZ” bot for its uniqueness (and it’s hilarious when it wins despite building cannons in plain sight in the enemy base). I like Vladimir Jurenka’s bot for its occasional blind reaver drop coordinated with a 4-dragoon attack, even though it fails to start up half the time. I like Roman Danielis’s bot for its rich late game army, when it manages to live that long. I like Henri Kumpulainen’s PenaBot for its big army play even though it’s slower than an ensnared reaver (I hope he keeps working on it), and I love Aurelien Lermant’s GarmBot for its absurd and creative extreme macro game where it spends more effort distracting the enemy than fighting. The funbots spin a galaxy of ideas, and each idea adds a different challenge for other bots to meet. That’s how to contribute to the community, and how to have fun, and how to find the way to a stronger bot.