Starcraft AI blog

Steamhammer 3.0 will be coming out “real soon now,” as we used to say, meaning “later than I ever thought,” thanks to my ambition to throw too many features into it. I originally wanted Steamhammer to participate in AIST S3, but I think I will probably skip it. I don’t expect Steamhammer to be upgraded to BWAPI 4.4.0 and working reliably by then. The last day to register is 15 February, so I have time to change my mind. But I want to concentrate on new features rather than on tightening the bolts for tournament play.

Here’s the main new stuff. I chose to delay work on pathfinding, overlord control, and scouting for now, though they are high priority features for good play, and are on my must-complete list for AIIDE 2020. (No plan survives contact with the next minute.) I suppose they’ll go into versions 3.1 and following. I was more interested in the skill kit and other infrastructure additions; they hardly help Steamhammer in the short run, but lay a foundation for faster improvement in the future. That’s what seems important now, foundation laying.

• The skill kit to make the opponent model extensible.
• Basic proxy skills, including new macro locations like @ enemy natural.
• Resource tracking to remember minerals and gas on the map.
• Followup on burrow, with many new burrow openings and tweaks to the Watch squad skill.
• Followup on queens, with slightly improved behavior and support for larger queen numbers.

The skill kit feels like my best new idea in a long time, so I was excited to do it right away. The initial skills will be gas steal (replacing the current opponent model code with something a little smarter) and a unit timing skill which doesn’t control anything in itself but only records information for the rest of the program to refer to. They both fit into the framework. I expect the skill kit to speed up strategy work and to help make Steamhammer more and more adaptive over time.

Proxy openings are amazingly complex to execute well. A bot needs building placement skills, the right worker control, and special unit production and tactical skills. Steamhammer 3.0 will have only some of the skills it needs, but it should at least be able to pull off a simple plan like building a barracks in the center and then bunkering the enemy natural. Even that takes infrastructure work that I haven’t finished yet (partly because I changed plans in the middle). The work will bring extra flexibility that will be useful in other situations too. For complex proxies that can’t be written in data as opening build orders but require code—write a skill for the skill kit, that is one of its purposes.

There are also, of course, the usual new openings and small fixes and tweaks.