Games and AI Group

StarCraft is a real-time strategy game developed by Blizzard Entertainment. Both the original game and the expension pack "Brood War" got released in 1998. In StarCraft, each player controls a base and has to gather resources to produce military units. The goal of the game is to destroy all the buildings of the opponent. The goal of the StarCraft AI competition is to create an agent (computer player) that is able to win a game of StarCraft under the standard tournament rules. A StarCraft agent can be created with BWAPI.

Building a StarCraft agent that is able to win against other players involves handling several issues:

• There is fog of war that prevents the agent from seeing everything that the opponent can see.
• The game is played in real time. The agent only has 55 milliseconds per frame to perform all its moves.
• There is a chance that shots miss. Thus the agent has to handle non-deterministic actions.
• The state space is large (larger than Chess or Go).

Due to these issues, StarCraft agents are currently only capable of defeating beginner human players.

Our agent LetaBot finished third at the CIG 2014, AIIDE 2014 and CIG 2016. It won SSCAI 2014, SSCAI 2015 and SSCAI 2016. It finished first in the SSCAI 2014 mixed division and SSCAI 2016 mixed division.

Key Publications:

• Soemers, D. (2014). Tactical Planning Using MCTS in the Game of StarCraft. B.Sc. Thesis. Department of Knowledge Engineering, Maastricht University.