Starcraft AI blog

A quick note on my busy weekend. Today I am testing a change to micro targeting. Steamhammer scores the possible targets and picks the highest score. For a long time, the score has included a measure of “how close is this target to the goal location?”—that is, to the position the squad has been ordered to attack toward. It was never a convincing measure, but it was what I came up with to push the squad toward its goal. I changed it to a simple bonus for targets which are closer to the goal. I also changed melee units to allow them to reject all possible targets; it used to be that they were forced to acquire a target if one was in sight anywhere on the map, which made the units super easy to distract.

I had become convinced that zergling micro was systematically off, and this change seems to show I was right. Zergling micro is visibly improved against Wuli and Killerbot by Marian Devecka, and win rates are up. Theoretically, zealot play should be improved too, but I haven’t tested it yet. Micro of ranged units is affected, but it’s not clear yet whether the change is an improvement.

The no-forced-targeting change makes zerglings play more forthrightly against Stone’s distracting SCV maneuvers. The wins didn’t take as long. We’ll see how it does against Tscmoo.

1.4.2 is looking to have several critical improvements. It should be good.