how to dominate
Protoss is going strong right now. Locutus is #1 by a mile. Both PurpleWave and BananaBrain have moved up the chart. Among the other races, only zerg Proxy has shown a similar rise in strength lately, and Proxy remains lower in the ranking.
Does this mean that it is easier to reach the top with a protoss bot? Maybe it is; I can’t disprove it. But I notice that, as years go by, the dominant race keeps changing. Protoss has been on top before, and rotated out. Terran and zerg have had their turns looking down on the other races, and I suppose they will again.
I think the story is that the protoss authors have been working harder on the important skills. As the community learns, bot skills that once took creativity and sweat to implement have become familiar and simple. Some beginner bots, like Bereaver and Proxy when they were brand new, started out above the level of champions of earlier years, which is possible only by building on the past. The upshot is that the skills a winner needs—the ones you spend creativity and sweat on—change over time. To score better you need to invent new skills, or polish old skills so highly that it amounts to the same thing. The points on which it is most important to make progress change as we make progress.
Steamhammer, by the way, is another bot that saw early success, in part because it built on UAlbertaBot and in part because it was one of the first zergs to play efficient pressure openings. An early version with only a few weeks of work finished #16 in the SSCAIT 2016 finals, and version 1.2 from March 2017 (a little more than 3 months after I started) was ranked a stable #3 on SSCAIT. After the first several months I begin to pay more attention to the destination than to the road, and other racers slowly passed me by. (I of course believe that my plan is the high road that will get me ahead in the end.)
Anyway, the moral sounds self-evident: You have to be strong in 2 areas. First, get the basics down, and keep up with the current level of play (this is what Steamhammer has been neglecting). And second, think up the right new ideas for today, the ones that other bots will react incorrectly to or will not be able to keep up with. Whoever does it the best wins, and right now protoss is doing it the best.
Alternately, you could try for a breakthrough idea. Nobody has succeeded at that yet, but eventually somebody will. I think that in every game where computers started out weak and became strong, one time or more an author implemented a breakthrough idea which set a new paradigm, laying the foundation for a taller building. Starcraft will see a breakthrough too.
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Antiga / Iruian on :
Yeg on :
Tully Elliston on :
I really like the measured approach you take with expanding SH, but I don't think the skills you work on are often those that most increase effectiveness. For example, you recently spent time on Defilers; many games are over before Defilers ever come out.
For competitive results, perhaps weight the time you spend on any skill or feature against what percentage of games and how much within those games that feature is used.
Following that logic, I think you could afford to spend a lot of time on this point on general micro, tactics and operations as these are universal to all games. Unit specific skills/pathing/handling for Overlords, Drones and Zerglings would also be a prime candidate.
One thing I liked about CherryPi was that unlike most other Zerg bots it could use Zerglings more than half decently. Zerglings have the greatest offensive potential of all units in Starcraft (High speed and greatest DPS for cost), so mastering Zergling skills is a fast road to making your bot more capable of upsets and exploiting early pressure.
Arrak on :
I would agree, though, that the next big breakthrough for the zerg Steamhammer family is, as Jay mentioned before, zerg tactics - some things on my to-do list were flanking, runbies, defense, attack/flee decisions, optimized concave forming, cohesive squad movement, terrain analysis - and for zerglings in particular.
Jay Scott on :