Starcraft AI blog

A funny game, a comedy of errors: Steamhammer versus Tyr terran by Simon Prins, on the map Tau Cross. Steamhammer opened with 2 hatch mutalisks, and Tyr bunkered itself in and went with infantry on one base.

Phase 1: Steamhammer fiddled around with its mutalisk force, picking off several building SCVs but mostly wasting time.

Phase 2: Steamhammer happened to notice that the terran mineral line was also a possible target. “Oh, look, terran has SCVs mining. I didn’t know that!” Tyr didn’t defend but moved out to counter instead and lost all SCVs. Steamhammer had 3 mining bases to 0, and only had to survive Tyr’s attack to win. Terran could not reinforce, so that was easy, right?

Phase 3: Instead of defending itself, Steamhammer decided to sacrifice every mutalisk against the meaningless bunker. It also wasted units piecemeal against the terran ball. Tyr destroyed the zerg main and natural. Steamhammer lost many drones by sending them to mine gas at bases that were under attack. That makes 3 big mistakes, more than enough to lose.

Phase 4: Tyr spread out to find the zerg 3rd base, found it after a few tries, and then—decided to send its army home to rest. “No zerg anywhere! Not that I’ll admit, anyway.” The marines in the picture saw the base, and that is when Tyr started to send its troops home.

Phase 5: Steamhammer slowly recovered from 7 drones at its third base. It restarted its tech from zero, put down 4 sunkens because it knew there was a scary army out there, and belatedly switched to lurkers. Steamhammer made far too many drones before moving out, but finally sent a lurker and won easily because Tyr had no detection. The mutalisks had also killed the comsat.

In the picture, nothing can stop the lurker, and more lurkers will come. You can see in the minimap that Steamhammer has retaken its main and natural and a mineral only base as well.

Both sides showed a lack of resilience. This time, Tyr turned out to be lacking a little more. Besides its opportunity to attack and win, Tyr had an unfinished science facility that it could have canceled (it’s in the upper right of the last picture). Then it would have had the resources to make an SCV and get back to mining.