Starcraft AI blog

I thought this release of Steamhammer would take only a few days, but I had “some” scope creep. It is no longer a small release to restore terran and protoss to their shabby glory, but a full release with improvements and a range of fixes. Instead of version 2.2.1, I’ve renamed it version 2.3.

Today I added a feature which changes the current “main base” at times when it makes sense. New buildings go into the main base by preference. Formerly there was a feature that changed the main base at random times, in order to spread out buildings and alleviate the protoss construction bug. It led to a lot of poor decisions.

Now the building placer attempts to maintain at least one pylon near each nexus, so it can build there if necessary. It keeps track of how often building placement fails at each base—how many times the building ends up not placed because no available space had pylon power, or placed outside the base because there was no room inside. When a failure happens at one base, it looks around to see if there is another base which has fewer placement failures, and if so, switches to that as the main base. I hope that switching when necessary will work better than switching randomly.

I just finished a series of tests on the map Transistor, which has small starting bases with room for few buildings. Steamhammer protoss usually overflows into the natural before it puts a nexus there. I got a modest number of slow frames when building placement failed, but nothing disastrously bad. It’s getting close to good enough for now.

I have one more building placement feature to add for protoss, which I expect will make it actually good enough for now. Then I need to review the last few protoss openings. It shouldn’t take more than a few days, so based on recent experience, come back in a couple months.

After that will be Steamhammer 3.0, unless I change my plans again. Release schedule undecided. I’m planning to work on production goals next, a key part of turning abstract strategies into concrete build orders.