some bugs are very strange
Steamhammer has a particularly weird bug on the map Jade. Jade is a 4-player map with bases in the corners. Each base is on low ground, surrounded by a ring of high ground. A ramp leads up to the natural at one end of the ring of high ground, and at the other end of the ring is a third base.
If Steamhammer starts in the lower left base, then it is unable to take its third on the high ground. A drone on its way to start the third will travel most of the way there, then turn around and go home. BuildingManager then sends another drone, which behaves the same, and so on forever. Starting at a different location is OK. Taking the third of another start location is OK. Only that specific start location has trouble with taking that specific base.
The bug has affected Steamhammer since early days. I’ve never looked into the cause because it only comes up 1/4 of the time on 1/14 of the maps. It’s a game-losing bug, but low on the list. Presumably some detail of the map, or maybe some error in BWTA, is triggering a mistaken decision.
It’s such a surprising bug that I thought it deserved its own post. Maybe somebody has an idea about the cause? I could be mistaken, but I vaguely recall that I’ve seen other bots with the same error.
In the meantime, Steamhammer lost against Roman Danielis today by starting off strongly. Roman Danielis repeatedly tried to take its natural, and Steamhammer repeatedly stopped the nexus from warping in. The strategy boss mistakenly went into a panic, “Oh no, the enemy just took a ton of bases, I’d better make a ton of drones to catch up!” Steamhammer made all drones and no combat units and lost. Now that’s a bug I’ll dig into.
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Arrak on :
I know I fixed what I called the "Ghost Base" bug some time ago when I added Infested Command Centers and building cancels. When a resource depot is infested, canceled, or in some cases simply missing (perhaps the enemy lifted it or killed their own CC under fog of war) it would not record the base as being lost. I'm not sure if this would count as the enemy having multiple bases, though, if the nexus is continuously built in the same location.