Starcraft AI blog

I’ve been thinking about how to get Steamhammer to keep trying the gas steal, so the code doesn’t bitrot again. Writing separate gas steal openings for each race doesn’t sound like much fun, and also doesn’t gain the full advantage. I might do a little of that, though.

I decided to build it into the opponent modeling mechanism. I’m not sure about details, but the basic idea is that, against any opponent that is causing trouble, it will try stealing gas to see whether it works. It will record the gas steals in its game records. Over time, the opponent model could learn many things: 1. Which opponents fail to cope; steal gas and win. 2. What opponent builds it is effective to steal gas against. If you see 2 gates and zealots out already (whether or not you’re playing Wuli) then you have the opportunity but there’s little point. 3. How to follow up a gas steal. The point of stealing gas is to channel your opponent’s play into a direction that you can exploit. Then you have to exploit it!

I would also like the opponent model to handle scout timing, but I’m not sure whether I can get to that for the next version.

Gas steal, by the way, is more or less working in my development version. I still have bugs to fix and testing to do, but it’s basically back again. It took a lot of changes.