Starcraft AI blog

Yesterday’s game Simplicity vs Locutus on Andromeda on BASIL starts out as one of the most entertaining bot games I have seen. The pictures show some of the cool stuff that Simplicity tried—with success. Then, after a tremendous fight where each side pressed temporary advantages and maxed its army, the replay loses sync and OpenBW cannot show the last half of the game.

Queens with broodling. The Research tab shows broodling research, and there are broodlings on the ground. Simplicity made 8 queens early and even researched queen energy, and the queens paid for themselves with interest. When Locutus attacked, zerg sent out as many queens as had energy to simultaneously spawn broodlings, helping to break the attacks. It’s a simple way to coordinate the queens to get tactical results, and is more effective than the common bot approach of using the queens as attrition weapons. Simplicity’s queens eventually died to corsairs; with more careful play, they could have lived to the end of the game, because Locutus was not skilled with its corsairs.

Island base with static defense. The overlord on the left has just dropped off another drone to join the miners.

Drops. Simplicity repeatedly dropped small numbers of units into the far end of Locutus’s base, and Locutus did not react properly. The drops were not decisive, but were cost-effective.

Both sides maxed their supply, or nearly so. At that point, Locutus had better upgrades but Simplicity had a larger army. Locutus could not keep its natural safe. Luckily for protoss, it was already mined out.

But Locutus had a stronger economy with more bases and a large bank of resources, and Simplicity ran out of resources. The desync hides the end of the game, which timed out after an hour. I believe that Locutus wiped out all zerg it could reach on the ground, and then had no answer for the island base. When the game timed out, BASIL gave the win to Simplicity on points. Moral: You need at least enough island skills to make air units to attack inaccessible bases.