SAIL map balance

Here’s a new table I haven’t generated before, at least not in this form: Map balance for each race, from the 20000 SAIL games. The left-side columns give win rates for the 3 matchups. The right-side columns give game counts and win rates for each race in all non-mirror matchups. (A mirror matchup always has 50% win rate, one winner and one loser of the same race, so including those would only pull the numbers closer to 50%.)

map	TvZ	ZvP	PvT	T games	T %	P games	P %	Z games	Z %	R games	R %
Benzene	50%	54%	48%	516	51%	654	48%	657	51%	231	50%
Destination	46%	49%	50%	498	49%	652	50%	627	52%	205	45%
HeartbreakRidge	43%	55%	41%	533	50%	588	44%	637	56%	222	50%
NeoMoonGlaive	40%	51%	48%	546	46%	652	49%	656	53%	232	53%
TauCross	47%	48%	48%	529	49%	668	51%	678	51%	229	47%
Andromeda	44%	49%	51%	506	47%	627	52%	646	52%	223	47%
CircuitBreaker	43%	51%	52%	550	46%	693	51%	692	52%	233	49%
EmpireoftheSun	47%	52%	48%	492	50%	612	49%	613	52%	227	49%
FightingSpirit	45%	52%	57%	535	45%	676	52%	694	52%	217	49%
Icarus	42%	54%	47%	543	48%	600	47%	650	54%	207	53%
Jade	44%	55%	50%	519	49%	611	48%	655	54%	211	46%
LaMancha	48%	51%	43%	501	52%	619	47%	613	52%	213	47%
Python	44%	49%	50%	521	47%	624	50%	642	52%	197	51%
Roadrunner	47%	46%	50%	557	49%	648	52%	716	51%	231	42%
overall	45%	51%	49%	7346	48%	8924	49%	9176	52%	3078	48%

Compare this to the race balance tables posted a couple days ago. Overall, there are no giant imbalances; the largest imbalance is 40%-60%, a 3:2 win rate for zerg over terran on Neo Moon Glaive. Terran has a small but consistent disadvantage against zerg on all but one map (Benzene came out even). That is a genuine race imbalance in current bot play: Z > T. But averaged across all the maps, the imbalance is only 55% zerg to 45% terran, 11:9, not a value to complain about. You can look back at the older tables to see which bots are responsible for the imbalance. By no means are all terran bots worse against zerg, or all zerg better against terran, but Krasi0 and Iron do show the pattern, and so does Steamhammer.

The other matchups have some pink and some blue, but tend to approximately balance out on average. Past investigation showed that the map race balance for pro players and bot bot players were pretty much uncorrelated in AIIDE 2015: See comparing pro and bot balance. I expect that it is still true. Bots have not gotten much better at exploiting map features.

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Jay Scott on Sunday, May 6. 2018:

The terrans need to step up their game! Few zergs use defilers yet, and those that do are poor at it. That will change in time.

Anon on Sunday, May 6. 2018:

How do you think bots would/could exploit map features with confidence in a non-hardcoded (not map-specific) way?

Jay Scott on Sunday, May 6. 2018:

In tactical analysis. Many bots believe that attacking across a bridge is just as easy as attacking on open ground. IceBot is the only bot with the smarts to drop tanks on top of a cliff, when one is available. No bot has good understanding of proxy locations, or knows how to exploit backdoors on maps like Destination. Many bots have hardcoded knowledge that the main choke or natural choke is a place to defend, but few work out the map topology to understand which choke can be used to defend what other areas. Those are just a few examples. All of them can be figured out by map analysis, and exploited by feeding the results into tactical analysis.

krasi0 on Wednesday, May 16. 2018:

Maybe, at the current level of bot play, it would make more sense if bots foremost try to not fall victim to some map adversary features (like the low ground main on Jade or the neutral building blockings on Benzene) rather than attempting to exploit any complex map features. At least the former appears to be a lower hanging fruit to pick. Of course, such generalizations rarely make sense, so each item should be considered on a case by case basis :P

Jay Scott on Wednesday, May 16. 2018:

That’s a good point: Avoid mistakes first.

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