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Comment by daemonk | Hacker News Reader

I want an AI assisted mode with API hooks where people can code their own sophisticated "macros" that can be activated with a command/button. Limit the code to X number of characters. It would be awesome to see a tournament with this.

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There is some stuff like this, you would see it on the ladder in SC2. Hacks that would perfectly split your marines against incoming banelings (they explode and do splash damage so the more you split the less effective they were), or auto burrowing/unburrowing roaches (which hides them from the enemy and they heal underground). It sounds cool but it’s way cooler when you saw a pro doing all that stuff themselves almost as good and still going back and building units etc.

Check this out. 100 zerglings vs 20 siege tanks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs

Interesting. It seems that this is possible mostly by the lag time between target acquisition and firing by the siege tanks, compounded with the relatively high speed of the zerglings - most any other unit in the game wouldn't be able to react in time.

I appreciate the manual dexterity, but imagine the amount of strategy that AI assisted play would open up.

If you're looking for more strategic gameplay instead of micromanagement, Starcraft isn't the best game to pick. Lowering the importance of high APM for a game like Starcraft through the use of smart macros is just a hack, why not just play (or design) a game that doesn't need any of that. Of course, the obvious choice is any turn based game.

But even if you want to stay in RTS land, one of the more recent titles that comes to mind where micromanagement is not as important and strategy/planning is very important is Ashes of the Singularity. Spoiler: the game may seem "slow" compared to Starcraft but that's also part of reducing the importance of high APM.

I agree with d1zzy, if you don't like the micro part of Starcraft, there are plenty of strategy games that cater to a more strategy-focused style of play.

I like the micro just as much as anyone else. But I don't agree that there is just one way to play a game and that if someone wants to deviate from it, somehow that goes against the purity of the established way. Blizzard has benefitted greatly in the past by letting the public mod their games (dota). I don't see anything wrong with extending that to Star Craft.

https://github.com/Blizzard/s2client-api is at least a thing

if this were available in true form, would that reduce the game to the fastest unit no matter what the damage.

as an example see the zerg vs tank below.

I understand the idea of code manipulation but what might be better is just having human programmed AI's fight each other (which I am fairly sure is going and can be viewed live but I do not have the link handy.

When playing humans though the AI's can be limited in certain fashions, such as by lowering the available actions per minute (overall), or per unit; which lowers their non-human skills.

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