Starcraft AI blog

Today I went for a walk in the snowy woods, setting the first footprints on some of the paths. It’s kind of how I feel about working on Steamhammer: At some points I may leave the first prints, but the path was already there. And I feel as though I still have a lot of paths to walk before I can reach wilderness.

For the tournament, I have changed my plans. Trying to hit a deadline makes my code worse and messes with my motivation. Some people thrive on deadlines; I go wrong. So instead of turning on the next opponent model feature as I had been thinking, I’ll do whatever smaller fixes and features seem likely to help. I’ll have to comment out some stuff I’ve just done, but whatever. The tournament version will be 1.4a2 (anyone who’s not confused by the version numbers needs to get back to their real work), and hopefully not long after I’ll put out release version 1.4 with opening selection controlled by the opponent model. I expect that later 1.4.x releases will add more opponent model features, because the opponent model can do many things.

The switch is partly inspired by watching Steamhammer’s 2 recent losses to XIMP by Tomas Vajda. The loss on Heartbreak Ridge I can swallow, because Steamhammer has always played particularly poorly on that map. The loss on Icarus seems to show that Steamhammer is playing worse against the carriers (though it was a long, hard-fought game and many carriers blew up). Apparently delaying the hive, though often good, in this case left Steamhammer unable to batter down bases with ultralisks, because it used all its gas making scourge. Looking closely, I see that it was short of gas in part because it turned off gas for a full minute before seeing the carriers, seemingly due to a bug. Outside of emergencies, zerg should turn off gas only if gas piles up to at least 3 times the mineral count, and here it turned off gas with 1700 minerals and 300 gas. That should be possible only if the building manager reserved a huge pile of minerals to make buildings, and didn’t reserve any gas... it seems barely possible. This is something that can be fixed by a deadline.