Starcraft AI blog

MadMix protoss lived up to its name and went to 4 bases before its first gateway against Steamhammer. You can’t beat Steamhammer that way, but you may make a very entertaining game!

Actually it would have been a short and boring game if Steamhammer opened with one of its mass zergling openings, as it often does. But Steamhammer went macro style, with 12 hatch 13 pool (squeezing out extra drones early) aiming for hydralisks. Also Steamhammer didn’t understand that the enemy had gone overboard and should be drowned for it (it’s an easy adaptation to code but not needed because Steamhammer wins those games anyway). Zerg thought, logically enough, “That’s a lot of bases, I’d better make a ton of drones to keep up!”

Steamhammer still made enough units to keep the pressure on and repeatedly kill probes. It didn’t take many; 4 bases before gateway is amazingly reckless. Despite concentrating on drone production, zerg was never in trouble.

Finally Steamhammer reached its goal of 75 drones and army production turned on full. The fury of the swarm swept away the fragments of the protoss bases.

Against TyrProtoss, Steamhammer played the same hydralisk opening. Despite playing on its worst map and messing up its macro, Steamhammer had (as I expected) an almost adequate army and held a chance to stop the big timing attack. Instead (as I also expected) it decided to move its forces through the enemy army without fighting and lose everything for nothing—the weakness is related to paths on the map. Steamhammer still makes many fatal blunders in big army fights.

Against ZurZurZur, Steamhammer got in trouble but managed to slowly claw ahead with better decisions. This could be an instructive ZvZ to study, with mistakes all around and all through.