Starcraft AI blog

I was surprised to see AIIDE entrant EggBot by Nathan MacNeil make its debut on SSCAIT rather than waiting a few days for the AIIDE deadline. It makes sense, though: For a new bot that can make big progress in a short time, earning some experience to make that progress is way more important than holding your secrets in hope of surprise wins.

EggBot describes itself as “a (not great) cannon rush bot built from scratch that follows up with a gateway and zealots.” And in fact its play has the air of a typical beginner’s bot. On SSCAIT it seems affected by a bug and struggles to place cannons at all. On BASIL it seems to play more nearly as intended, and has scored 7-19 for a rating of 1901 elo with zero crashes, which is not bad at all for a first cut.

EggBot places its cannons near the enemy’s base entrance in containing position. It doesn’t creep the cannons forward to win; only outlying enemy buildings are likely to come under cannon fire. Occasionally it places the cannons somewhere outside the natural instead; so far I’ve seen that happen only when the enemy base location is known before the base is seen, and not usually then. It follows up with 1 gateway and makes zealots to win.

The cannons are often in plain sight, so an enemy that reacts in time will have good chances. Even an old bot like Tomas Cere can pull workers to stop the attack (in this game, EggBot placed one cannon defensively in its base). An opponent that has no defensive reactions is likely to lose hopelessly (in this game, EggBot seemed to hit a bug and did not follow up with zealots, but it still won on points).

EggBot is not efficient at spending its money and tends to let its mineral bank grow out of control. Besides bug fixes, that’s what I would work to improve if I were tuning it for AIIDE: Get each cannon down as soon as resources allow, then make the right number of gateways to grow the zealot count as fast as possible.