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Comment by h4nkoslo | Hacker News Reader

It's a misconception that StarCraft is a strategy game. If you look at how it's actually played by human pros, it looks closer to a fighting game; very reflex-driven & heavy on micro-interactions. You would expect an un-gated AI with effectively infinite actions per second to do very well.

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It seems like most people in this thread are claiming that high APM and the ability to have perfect control over everything happening on the map will give the AI an advantage that will force a win.

Here is a video of one of the best current StarCraft bots losing to an D-rank (low skill) human player. The bot's APM is ~5500 while the human's is ~200. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztNYOnx_YQo

The fact is, no AI has ever beaten even an amateur player in a tournament. Even with great micro, if your play is too predictable then the human will learn it and exploit it.

I, for one, am very excited to see the development of new StarCraft AIs. And especially SC2 AIs so that it can challenge the current world champions.

Well, it literally is a real time strategy game. It's just that once the meta stabilizes, macro advantages become fewer and fewer and micro skills become the deciders. Perhaps at this point it might be better to refer to it as a real time tactics game. The AI would presumably not fail at micro so it would dominate at this point in the game's lifecycle, but it might be able to be taken advantage of at a macro level.

Are you not just generalizing from only watching pros vs pros where the skill gap between them is probably very small thus making it seem like the only difference is in mechanical ability?

It works on several different levels. You're talking about what competitive players call 'micro', which could be considered the implementation of the strategy.

I haven't played for a while, but usually there are a few basic 'builds', which are essentially memorized openings-- and there are 3 types of openings -- Macro builds where you focus on building an economy, while sacrificing military resources for a long-game, 'all-in' builds, which sacrifice your economy to build an early military advantage and win within the first few minutes, and various mid-range builds that try to do a little bit of both.

An all in is largely just down to micro and execution and it either wins or it doesn't, but the other two types of builds have a large strategic element-- for example, you need to scout to check if your opponent is all-in-ing, you can do harassment to distract your opponent from implementing his strategy by interrupting his economy, and then there's planning for the end game, building defenses, and the whole question of what you do if your original plan fails for one reason or another. There's a lot of thinking involved on multiple levels simultaneously, both spacial and temporal.

After the most recent top Starcraft tournament (gsl code S), they asked the loser why he lost. He said, "I worked hard to prepare for this tournament, but my opponent prepared better."

What kind of things did he prepare? It wasn't reflexes, it was strategy. What kind of strategies was he preparing? He watched his opponent's past games, and came up with some build orders of course, but in this case, the primary strategy he came up with was an army composition hoping to counter what his opponent had been doing recently. When the opponent had the proper counter to that strategy, he won the rest of the games easily.

I think you are confusing the focus that is apparent in the micro of the game or micromanagement which requires high APM to the macro such as getting enough bases to keep on creating units to fight and troop composition.

It's a misconception that fighting games aren't strategy games. The term that conflates both is tactics, if I got my vernacular right. Ofc, strength and reactivity is a tactical advantage.

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