Starcraft AI blog

Drop has countless uses. A lot of the uses are complex and tough to code, though (I dare you to do reaver drop with all the trimmings). Right now, a few bots do simple harassment drops. No bot has much fun with other drops. I’m going to spend a few posts on drop ideas that seem to me like cool next steps. Who knows, I might even be right!

If you have a macro bot, why not take island expansions?

The SSCAIT map pack, as distributed, includes 3 maps with island expansions, out of 15 maps total (20% of the maps have islands). In all 3 cases, to take an island, you have to drop a worker, mine out the blocking minerals, and then build or float in the expansion. It makes a pretty small state machine. Maps without blocking minerals are thought to favor terran because command centers can float, so they are little used nowadays.

The SSCAIT maps with islands:

• Andromeda
• Empire of the Sun
• Python

Probably the hard part is not taking the island, but populating it efficiently. You want to be able to schedule a task to transfer workers when the expansion is ready to mine—whether by drop, nydus, or recall. (And if you’re thorough, you might want to be able to transfer the workers elsewhere when the island mines out. Nydus and islands are in love and belong together.)

Since no bots take islands yet, surely few bots are capable of attacking islands—probably only bots that already go air. Against many opponents you can get one or two invulnerable expansions, which ought to be a winning edge.

Of course most maps don’t include islands, and if opponents do attack then islands are harder to defend. But a chance at a big macro edge on 20% of maps is nothing to sneeze at. How many opponents will even scout the island?