Starcraft AI blog

I decided to accept McRave’s challenge to find the fastest possible lurker rush, ignoring all else. The goal is to find a build order that morphs at least 1 lurker at the lowest possible frame count, and attempt to show that it truly is the fastest possible. I can’t do the whole analysis in a day, though, and still get it right. I can get a faster lair by reducing the drone count, but with a low drone count I can no longer assume that there will be enough resources to get lurkers without waiting on mining. I have to test full build orders, and that means carefully tweaking each build to add exactly the necessary drones at the right places, get the overlord timing perfect, and so on.

As an appetizer, here is my baseline build, based on the 9Pool8GasLair fast lair build from the analysis of McRaveZ’s buggy opening. I think it is the fastest possible lair with 9 drones. In my test run, the 3 lurkers morphed at frame 6355—that’s the timing to beat.

"9Pool8GasLurker" : { "Race" : "Zerg", "OpeningBuildOrder" : ["go nonadaptive", "5 x drone", "spawning pool", "extractor", "drone", "overlord", "drone", "lair", "2 x drone", "hydralisk den", "lurker aspect", "drone", "3 x hydralisk", "3 x lurker"] }

There are no zerglings; that’s not part of the goal. The build includes 3 drones after the lair which are not on the critical path to get lurkers, but they fit into gaps and use available resources, so they add no delay (not even to get an extra overlord). "go nonadaptive" prevents Steamhammer from altering its build order in response to the opponent’s static defense, so I can be sure that I am testing the intended build and not another one. I turned off other adaptations elsewhere.

As a bonus, once I think I’ve found the fastest build, I’ll make a competitive version of it which produces as many zerglings as possible without delaying the lurkers. A rush build like this is all-in, so in a real game you want zerglings instead of drones as much as possible (and you may want to pull workers, though I’m not sure about pulling drones for a lurker attack). If the build looks good, I’ll configure it to be played in competition.