It struggles with camera placement like real players :) And uses popular divert-attention tactics, which shows it understand that part of the game - for example when it sends oracles to mineral line at the same time as it attacks in front. Previous versions didn't do that, because they were taught playing vs cheating AI - so no point diverting attention of something that has instant access to any unit on the map :)
It also struggles to defend against adept harras beacuse it has "tunnel vision" - controls its oracle instead of defending probes at home. Mana actually managed his attention budget a lot better (this is a crucial pro-player skill in starcraft - harras is effective because it trades little of your attention for a lot of attention of the enemy, it's a skill that becomes irrelevant when opponent doesn't really have "attention" and can perceive and interact with all units on the map at once like previous version of alphastar).
This one is much more human, and much lower level. In my opinion it lost unfair advantage, so the mistakes in its errormaking are revealed. Previously it never was behind and never had to react to human player strategy - it rarely even scouted because what's the point - it wanted to build mass stalkers anyway.
Or, what if we slow down the game, so that the human can actually pause the game each second and consider what to do next. That's basically what the computer is allowed to do
While this would make it more fair, it would just make the micro game more similar to chess or go. I don't think humans would necessarily win in the end.
The former is an interesting AI challenge/achievement, the latter is a space in which computers are already known to outperform humans.
Starcraft is like chess in some sense. The largest fundamental difference is that it isn't a perfect information game.
But ofc, there’s no tbs or grand strategy currently out there with a real tournament scene, so you can’t really count on the devs implementing an AI-API, or even properly balanced / bug-free (far more user-testing goes into sc2/dota2 than say civ, simply by virtue of its playerbase).
That's the primary benefit imo. The bigger action space is largely composed of non-strategic elements, at least in the sense of long-term strategies, eg micro and mini-skirmish tactics, that I don't think are as interesting. Ofc its clearly a conflict of interest, but my feeling was the most interesting aspect of Go/Chess is the AI making unintuitive discoveries that benefit the long-term. The human-collective machine is pretty good on its own at finding the shorter-term strategies; I don't think AI will make much significant impact in that space.
games as a medium to study upcoming real-world applications (eg cars), RTS makes sense; but as a medium to study AI beating humans, TBS is more appropriate (their ability to explore large search-spaces is far more interesting/potentially impactful). Studying both would be ideal ofc, but in a pick-one situation, TBS is better imo. But only RTS are even really viable atm, which is disappointing.
Upgrade building 3 comes available when you have enough resources.
A separate tab with insufficient resources gives you an overview with what you need to finish a,b,c.
A red alert appears when an enemy is spotted. You can click nearby units attack or a FSM with the attack strategy.
An finished building automatically will be placed near the town center.
Not working farmers can search for resources.
A wall is suggested by your current buildings, you can set an margin of eg. 20 meters.
The question is, how much programming will the custom UI need ( and how deep) to make it a lot more efficient
Macro-wise, it would be like an unwieldly minimap which already exists so people can get a sense of where the enemy is moving. With a giant screen, information is not focused on a small area, so you are limited to your FOV. Minimap which shows unit strength in terms of armor hp or shields as well as placement would be ideal information.
Micro-wise, it would be like sitting in front of a giant text display looking at a whole book. You still have to focus on a small section to read it.
I would like to see a setup akin to that of Ender Wiggin, with one commander overseeing and recommending overall strategy, and, say, five others managing different areas or groups. That seems like the way to get the best human performance, and might be enough to beat the AIs—at least to nullify chunks of their advantage.
As an aside, a few pro gamers prefer to play on windowed mode for exactly this reason.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but 6 posts with no profanity is hardly "uproar" by blizzard forums standards.