Starcraft AI blog

Steamhammer has played another good game against PurpleWave. This seems to happen regularly. See Steamhammer-PurpleWave games for a few older games (which are not as good as this one).

I don’t want to do the blow-by-blow for this game, but here’s a little of the story. 2 games ago, PurpleWave played its worker rush against Steamhammer and won. 1 game ago, Steamhammer countered the worker rush and, partly because the map was more favorable, held it off to win. PurpleWave’s worker attacks are coordinated and Steamhammer’s worker defense is not, so PurpleWave can often win even when Steamhammer plays an ideal counter build. Anyway, having lost, PurpleWave switched to its forge expand opening. Strategically, it’s the opposite of a worker rush.

Steamhammer continued to counter the opening of the previous game, and played its anti-worker rush build. It’s a cautious opening that expects cheese, and it goes so far as to make a sunken colony. It’s the opposite of how you want to play against a big economy build like forge expand. So, after an early fight where Steamhammer didn’t quite figure out how to exploit PurpleWave’s poor cannon placement, zerg was behind.

I want to make 2 points about the game. 1. Steamhammer’s ZvP is much improved. When PurpleWave moved out with its big army, zerg was still behind. Steamhammer put up a fierce fight and eventually wore down the attack and held, losing some drones but not enough to die. And zerg continued to play well after that. Earlier versions won the big fights only when PurpleWave overextended, which did not happen here—thank economy improvements. And earlier versions did not follow up as nicely after the big fight—thank tech improvements.

Point 2. Near the end of the game, Steamhammer expanded to a mined-out base. :-( This version was supposed to fix the last way that that could happen. There is a bug in choosing the base to expand to. I am walking the Path of Bugs and the path continues over the horizon.