Starcraft AI blog

I have wrapped up work on the last feature for the CIG version of Steamhammer. No more changes unless testing turns up a last-minute critical bug.

I’m pleased with how much I got done in a short time. With perfect planning I could have done more, but hindsight is like that. Looking through my change log, I feel I’ve done a good job improving play as much as I could with small changes. I also found a few good bug fixes. Steamhammer should do well enough in CIG.

Zerg got more work than the other races, of course, but most of the changes are not specific to zerg. The changes were intended to help zerg and were only tested with zerg, but the other races should benefit too. I even added a strong new protoss opening versus zerg (which I used in testing zerg).

Expect the SSCAIT upload of this version on Wednesday, more or less. I’ll test with terran and protoss first, and make any necessary tweaks (so it might be a slightly different version). In recent releases most of the important work has been on the opponent model and points of strategy. Those changes made Steamhammer smarter, but to a stream watcher, the play looked as though it had hardly changed. This release will be different. Plenty of familiar old weaknesses remain, because there was only so much I could do, but some very visible problems are reduced and I have changed long-standing patterns of play. Watchers should notice. Steamhammer’s play should look different.