In a fast moving game though, this is completely unrealistic. Any professional Terran player can technically kill a Lurker (a very expensive, high-tech unit) with a single Marine (the cheapest and most low-tech unit for Terran). The damage starts near the Lurker and travels forward with the animation of spikes going ahead. The Zerg Lurker is a long ranged splash unit that sends out a row of spikes, hurting everything in its path.

While every professional will micro their units to minimize this damage somewhat, an AI could completely nullify it. Units in StarCraft automatically clump up when walking around the map, and Splash damage is the most efficient way to punish this. Splash damaging units are ways to punish your opponent for moving around with a large army. Here's a couple of examples: Splash (Area of Effect) damage units.

Infinite APM? Artosis on DeepMind and StarCraft - Part 2Īn AI with perfect micro-management (control of units) and near-unlimited speed would make many units obsolete.

This would completely break the entire game, and it would look nothing like it is intended, as it was intended to be played by humans. Let's say for a moment that we have an infinitely quick and precise AI playing StarCraft. Because the game is played in real time, with both players playing simultaneously, speed is an important factor when analyzing StarCraft. Hiding what you are doing and figuring out what your opponent is doing are huge parts of the game, something that should be very hard for a computer to figure out.īeyond all of this, there are some real problems with creating an AI to beat the best players at StarCraft. But then add in the fact that it's a Real Time Strategy game, where both players are playing at the same time, and the fact that it's a game of incomplete information. With three distinct races and countless professionally played maps, it already seems extremely tough. While Chess, and especially Go, are known as games with near infinite possibilities on the ways that they can play out, StarCraft should be even harder to create an AI for.

It is really the natural next step after Chess and Go. This doesn't surprise me at all, as StarCraft is the most strategically deep competitive video game in the world. The probable next game according to the people in charge? The original StarCraft. With the amazing performance of AlphaGo beating the best Go player in the world, Lee Sedol ( and Lee also striking back), Google DeepMind's next game to tackle has been the talk of the town. Can an AI like AlphaGo achieve similar results in StarCraft as in Chess and Go? Note: This is part one of a two-part series.

Starcraft melee vs free for all