My previous two posts were about human versus bot matches in the Brood War scene. This post will be about two human versus bot matches in the Starcraft2 scene. Keaneu Tan shared these replays about two weeks ago on Discord. The replays can be downloaded here. The bot is 5minBot by Archiatrus, which is currently at the top of the Starcraft 2 ladder.
The bot is called 5minBot because it goes for a 5 minute Medivac stim timing. The first game highlights two important weaknesses in 5minBot:
- It doesn’t understand liberators.
- It gets its workers killed trying to defend against cyclones.
To deal with liberators you need to stay outside of their liberation zone. 5minBot clearly has no concept of the liberation zone. It will happily keep its workers mining and send its marines inside the liberation zone to attack the liberator. This is understandable, since 5minBot is a fairly new bot (I am using Brood War bot standards; by those standards all Starcraft2 bots are fairly new). There are no other bots which use liberators, so little reason there to implement specific skills to defend against them. I suspect that for now, defending against liberators will remain a low priority skill to implement.
Proper worker defense is much more important. This is also something the Brood War bots do fairly well. Some of the weaker bots will send their entire worker force to defend against any attack, but the smarter bots will weigh their options. Can my workers even defeat this attack? should they try to stay away and hope they can survive? I expect that this skill will soon be improved in the Starcraft2 bots as well.
The second game features a proxy reaper opening by the human player. As I mentioned in my previous post, I expect to see Starcraft2 bots implement rushes, since they are easy to code and hard to hold off. In this game we see how effective a good rush can be. The reapers quickly kill all the worker of 5minBot, without suffering much damage. The game is easily won by the human player.
We have seen that there is still a long way to go, before bots can defeat human players in Starcraft2. Matches like these allow a bot programmer to improve obvious weaknesses. They also can give you ideas for creating a new bot. I would love to see a bot perform a proxy reaper rush, or for them to use liberators. Having bots use these skills will push the other bots to develop their defenses against them.
Tyr 
Hi Tyr,
Thanks for featuring my bot (and for all the blog posts in general). Just two remarks:
It was only originally planned to do a 5 min stim timing with my bot. But due to the current cheese focused bot meta I decided to try a more save, macro style. The name just stuck.
It actually understands liberators. The problem is it only tells combat units to not run into them. So yes, all workers don’t hesitant to work in the circles of death. But there shouldn’t be any marines running into the circles.
Nevertheless, you are right with the worker defense. I am a bit pessimistic whether you can 100% reliably beat a human with a bot that is just scripted. But we will see.
I am looking forward to your next post.
Archiatrus
P.s: Any progress with your bot?
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Ah, I see. Indeed there were no Marines running into liberation zones.
I haven’t had much time to work on my own bot. I did open an issue for the problem I am having with the Ladder manager.
https://github.com/Cryptyc/Sc2LadderServer/issues/16
I hope Cryptious will be able to help with that.
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