Starcraft AI blog

I thought this picture was funny. In a game yesterday against Iron, McRave fast expanded and walled off one of the bridges to its natural, but left the other bridge open. Vultures cannot pass the wall, but they happily took the other bridge and Iron won easily.

McRave seemed to mess up its build, getting dragoons too late. (The underlying mistake may have been taking gas at the natural instead of the main.) But the idea is sound. McRave is narrowing the entrance to its natural, making it easier to defend against vultures. A small number of dragoons can block a narrow entrance, either early in the game when there are only a few dragoons on the map, or later when the main army is away and the only dragoons around are those rallied from the gateways.

Its next game against Iron was on Roadrunner. McRave won using the same idea of narrowing the entrance.

McRave’s dragoons beat Iron, so they played well by bot standards. But I see room for improvement. Vultures can pass either left or right of the upper gateway. I think the first 2 dragoons should plug the gaps so that vultures are physically blocked. Iron will lay mines to force its way in, and then the dragoons can retreat to the defense line McRave actually held, the gap between the lower gateway and the nexus. The farther away the vultures and their mines are kept from the probes, the better.