Starcraft AI blog

I’ve uploaded the SSCAIT 2017 tournament version of Steamhammer, which is version 1.4a2. The reason for the strange version number: I promised that release version 1.4 would have a full-up opponent model, and even if I break every other promise, I can keep that one!

Randomhammer is disabled for the tournament (it took me a minute to figure out how to create an empty zip file, since zip refuses to do it directly...). For Steamhammer, I found a number of low-cost low-risk improvements that are enough to make a difference. The new version already has a win against McRave, for the first time in a long time, so I can’t have messed up too much.

• Fixed a crashing bug in assigning units to the Recon squad after losses in the main army require the Recon squad to be downsized. The bug only affected terran, and was related to medics.

• Ranged units target arbiters with a higher priority. By the way, in the strange world according to Steamhammer, scourge are ranged units.

• Fixed a bug in recognizing worker rushes. On one map, enemy workers busy mining could be recognized as “rushing”. Still a strange world.

• A few changes to zerg to be more careful in collecting gas. Turning gas off because there’s a gas excess compared to minerals now happens using the current minerals, not current minerals minus minerals reserved for buildings, so it is more conservative. If there are idle drones, always turn gas on (might as well put them to work). If short of gas, Steamhammer adds extractors faster—it always has, but now it is a little more eager.

• Account for gas usage in planned spending. Together with the gas changes above, this improves the midgame unit mix and army size. Watchers may not notice, but to me the difference is visible.

• Be more thorough in using all larvas. Steamhammer has long had a fallback rule to make zerglings with any spare larvas. I loosened the conditions, and had it also make drones if the army is “big enough” according to an arbitrary criterion. The rule usually fires later in the game, when there are plenty of hatcheries and Steamhammer wants to make more gas units than it has gas for. The result is a bigger army, and again, I can see the difference.

• Tweaks to make guardians less often. I think Steamhammer still makes guardians too often, but it should be closer to right.