Starcraft AI blog

I am still working on squad tactics, as I mentioned some days ago. I wouldn’t say the tactical play is adept (I’m not far enough along to test for strength), but as I fix problems it is slowly starting to resemble decent play. There is more to straighten out, but the strange Steamhammer misbehaviors of darting sideways for no reason, trying to retreat through the enemy, hanging back from the front, or losing groups of rear units in bad fights—those problems are all gone. The potential for tactical skill is much higher, and the question is how much of the potential I can realize. More polishing to do!

As I make progress with the play, the code is growing messier. There were already too many special cases (see Steamhammer’s squad structure 1: awkward points), and I had plans to rewrite squads entirely (see the followup post Steamhammer’s squad structure 2: design ideas). Now the special cases need to be carefully stacked in the right order to stand up at all, and the structure is growing dangerously shaky. The rewrite is needed more than ever, and I have a firmer idea of what is needed.

This has me thinking of plans and priorities for after the AIIDE deadline on 1 October. I feel a need to return to basic infrastructure work. Steamhammer 2.0 for AIIDE will be zerg only, because I am deliberately ignoring terran and protoss skills. So the first order of business will be version 2.1 that can play all races again—it will take some work, I’d guess a few days. After that, probably the top infrastructure priority is to finish the map analysis work and drop BWTA. There’s only one big feature to go, chokes and regions, and I think I can finish it in one more step in version 2.2. After that, the major infrastructure needs are the squad rewrite and getting rid of BOSS, both of which will take longer and should probably be done in stages.

I hope that the AIIDE Steamhammer will be the strongest ever by a good margin. But after that I have to get into plumbing repairs. The version for the SSCAIT tournament in December should have cleaner code and be easier to work with, but it is not likely to be much stronger than the AIIDE version.