breaking scouting assumptions
Working on scouting reminded me: There is a trick that terran can play to mightily confuse the opponent’s early scout. At the start of the game, make SCVs as usual, then when it nears time for the opponent’s scout to approach, lift off the command center and move it out of sight. Of course you have to build any supply depots or other buildings out of sight too, or away from your base (you could proxy 8 rax, or build your first depot in an empty main base). It can only conceivably be a good idea if there is another base close by to land the command center at, so the trick should be saved for maps like Electric Circuit which have an inside “backdoor” base near the main.
The opponent will scout every main base and see you at none of them.
This trick has been used in one pro game to my knowledge, Boxer versus Yellow from 2003, where the CC move was meant to keep the proxy barracks unknown; a base without barracks would have given it away. If it were a good trick it would have been used since then. It’s objectively bad, and human players who see that all bases are empty are able to figure out what happened. But in bot play, you might fool your opponent into doing something nonsensical or even cause it to crash.
When UAlbertaBot’s scout is looking for the enemy base and finds an enemy building in a starting base region, is assumes that that marks the location of the enemy base. Steamhammer inherited the heuristic and still uses it. So a low-cost way to fool these bots is to build a supply depot or pylon next to the ramp of an empty main base before it is scouted. Zerg could build an extractor at the empty base, if the gas is toward the ramp. 50% of the time, the scouting worker will find the decoy building first and will not scout other bases. Nobody has tried this trick yet, as far as I have seen.
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