Starcraft AI blog

With the new Steamhammer 3.1 version running only on the Starcraft AI Ladder, I played over a bunch of ladder games to see how it is doing. The ladder runs games at a high rate, so after one day there were already plenty to see. As I expected, so far the overall win rate is not much different, though that might change with more time or a larger variety of opponents. I was amused that the ZvZ games tended to be the longest (due to Microwave’s cautious play style); the ZvT and ZvP games were more aggressive and shorter.

I’m pleased with the new feature to sunken bases which are at risk of vulture raids. Some games versus Halo by Hao Pan looked tighter; Steamhammer could take bases and retain most of their drones in the face of the fast-roaming vultures (it lost drones mostly in transferring between bases, the next worker safety issue I should address). It seemed to make the sunkens at a reasonably efficient timing, including against protoss, early enough to help and not wastefully early. A small step, but a good one.

For AIIDE 2020, submission deadline at the end of September, I’m thinking of uploading test versions to the ladder as I go. I expect to get more work done before then than went into version 3.1. In fact, already today I wrote 2 new reactions to enemy cheeses that cause trouble, and each by itself is more complex than the sunken feature of 3.1. (It will take longer than a day to test them, though.) Steamhammer will become more robust. For AIIDE, I’m still considering whether to concentrate more on basic skills, or more on sneak attacks from my bag of tricks, techniques that bots may be unready for because no other bot has played them yet.

For all who want to participate in AIIDE, I strongly recommend joining the Starcraft AI Ladder. I wrote up the signup process. It runs the same tournament software as the AIIDE tournament, and enforces the same strict time limits. It is the best way to find out whether your bot will run correctly in the tournament. The games become public, and nothing else. If you worry that the games themselves may give away your secrets (other bots might use the ladder as training data), you can work around that too: Deliberately weaken your strategy. You’ll still test correctness and adherence to the time limits, but you don’t test your strength so you don’t give away your true weaknesses to others.