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IMO it's a testament to how games like SC are collectively and thoroughly "solved" by the community, and how the games aren't that complex after all. I never followed SC or SC2, but my observation of the pro scene and competitive ladder for Warcraft 3 was that cookie cutter strats dominated. Pro players were typically those who executed best, not those who innovated best.

Personally I felt disappointed by the fact that real-time strategy played a pretty minor role in RTS games. If you left the well-beaten path of cookie cutting and tried something new you invariably gave up a pretty obvious advantage to do so.

because the real skill is in the micro

> my observation of the pro scene and competitive ladder for Warcraft 3 was that cookie cutter strats dominated. Pro players were typically those who executed best, not those who innovated best.

Warcraft 3 and broodwar were much more micro-oriented than sc2 (because ai was much worse for example if you let dragoons to walk to their target on their own they spend half the time fighting broken pathfinding while the enemy shoots at them :) This almost never happens in sc2, and microing units below master league is usually detrimental to the game).

I think the micro vs macro is not the full image, and sc2 lets player express themselves on what i would call mediumgame (something that is between buildorders and microing - like deciding when to expand, what tech-switch to make, how to position your army in between fights, etc).

There's lots of decisionmaking that isn't APM-limited but thinking-time limited in SC2, and it's not as codified as buildorders. But you can certainly simplify the games to "archon immortal vs bio terran", and then it's very repetative.

There is a lot of strategy in RTS's but alpha star doesn't need to exploit any of it because it can win on mechanics. It has perfect macro, and perfect micro, which allows it to beat players without having to learn strategies or tactics.

It's kind of like competing against a gorilla in boxing chess. Just because a gorilla is dominant doesn't mean boxing chess doesn't require chess skills, only that a gorilla doesn't need them.

Are you sure it has perfect micro? Can you even execute perfect micro on 30 actions per 5 seconds?

"Perfect" no, much better than any human yes. 30 actions per 5 seconds is 360 actions per minute. The very top players might have similar stats, but the similarities would end there. A lot of human actions are mindless spam clicking and those 300+ actions would contain several misclicks. The ai would never misclick. They can also do things like pull back every weakened unit before it died much more accurately than a human. A human knows to do these things but it has much less mechanical skill than the ai.

It's a bit more interesting when people play several matches against each other. They are forced to switch tactics.

Raw, spur of the moment, innovation probably isn't a good idea generally, as you'd be doing something with no practice. People do have a fairly big bag of tricks from older tactics that are less common these days.

Cookie cutter strats or the metagame changes over time. Knowing what strategies you are likely to face influences what strategy you are likely to try. The meta is different across regions. The europeans play differently to the americans who play differently to the koreans. Some people dedicate themselves to different playstyles and your 'cookie cutter' strat will have to grow with everyone else's. They patch the game often to update the balance.

Designing a game that is a fun and balanced experience whilst also encouraging true innovation is a difficult problem. Every game ever has this problem, putting thousands of minds on a problem and letting them confer about their results usually solves all the low-hanging fruit in about a week. Creating a game where you only play to share a new idea makes each match feel like a dice roll.

Former masters Zerg here. You are partially correct, but actual high level play involves a great deal of small variations to these cookie cutter strays, and these small variations lead to a constantly evolving metagame. A good example was the kespa league during hots where innovation and strategy played a big role.

It’s just that a lot of that strategy is irrelevant unless you have amazing mechanics - and the difficulty of those mechanics means that you can’t as easily think, plan, or adapt in-game (because your brain is busy)

A big part of the game is thinking about “how do I win against somebody who does that...” between games

> Actually not a single game made pro player realize something new about the game.

People are now over saturating their mineral line (making more probes than before), so I don't think that's true.

There were other cases of this such as 3 rather than 2 early air units. The AI seemed to anticipate losses in a way that is almost more rational than humans.

I remember it also built like 8 observers in one match, supposedly because the AI was so good at sniping them (and it trained on itself).

Why?

Is it because they expect to lose workers to harassment? Or is it so that they can saturate new expansions quicker?

In terms of total mineral output oversaturating would seem to be disadvantageous since being able to get more workers on the new mineral line is offset by the cost of not expanding sooner and then being able to build from both bases.

I'm interested to understand why Alpha did this since worker production seems like one of the most solved and optimized parts of the games and not where you'd expect innovation

Most people speculate it's to account for losses from harassment where it somehow finds easier to overprobe than bother with more defense.

This is wrong. See posts here from ptitdrogo: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/d4n3tw/alphastar...

> People oversaturated in wol and hots because you didn't expand a lot in these games and bases have a lot less minerals in LOTV, not because of some kind of lost knowledge like some comments seem to think here.

[...]

> Meanwhile alphastar was going 2 gate robo staying on one base making a fuck ton of probes to take a super late natural, it was bad, and anybody calling it the future really bothered me.

Alphastar has not introduced anything new. Its play is strategically poor.

Can confirm. I did experiments and math about this years ago- overtraining workers is only good if you know you are about to get severely harassed and plan to lose a bunch

> But most surprising is that it didn't make any "breathtaking" moves or actions, as opposed to AlphaGO.

I don't play any competitive StarCraft so my view might be moot but I was surprised at the number of siege tanks it uses. It made me wonder if there's some critical advantage to having so many tanks stacked up in a line so that the splash is spread out.

Also I find it weird that it did not build any marauders at all, in any of the games I've seen.

And just in general, no sexy units. No battlecruisers, no infestors, no swarm hosts...

>Also I find it weird that it did not build any marauders at all, in any of the games I've seen.

This is off-topic, but I was thinking about this the other day - couldn't AI be used to balance a competitive game in this sense? Imagine that the AI becomes so good that human players very rarely win against the AI in a best of 7 series. Then we find out that AI doesn't ever build a specific unit. That would be a pretty strong indicator that said unit isn't good enough compared to the rest.

You wouldn't be the first person to say this. But it only proves that the unit isn't useful __ as piloted by AlphaStar __.

Based on the initial AlphaStar against TLO/Mana, you would think that Stalkers are insanely OP and the only thing worth building.

I (and others) have wondered that if you continue to lower AlphaStar's APM, you would see a diversity of units. The money would be in where AlphaStar decides to spend its really tight APM budget. Is it worth casting that Psionic Storm?

I personally feel like it has an insane micro advantage by being able to select arbitrary units on the battlefield, as opposed to dragged squares or control groups. But I'm not a pro gamer, so I don't know what that feels like.

You can also do this directly with metrics on human games. It’s something that I know wizards of the coast does with Magic the Gathering decklists, just counts the copies of cards and keeps track of the “conversion rate” of them (how likely is this deck to pass some threshold, like have a positive win percentage, given that it has this card). They are doing it primarily to spot ban targets (the paper aspect of cards means you can buff without printing a new set of cards), but it is the same idea.

This sounds like it was posted before the link was changed, but at least one pro was impressed by its novel style:

> AlphaStar is an intriguing and unorthodox player – one with the reflexes and speed of the best pros but strategies and a style that are entirely its own. The way AlphaStar was trained, with agents competing against each other in a league, has resulted in gameplay that’s unimaginably unusual; it really makes you question how much of StarCraft’s diverse possibilities pro players have really explored.

- Diego "Kelazhur" Schwimer, professional StarCraft II player

yes indeed, it seems the most recent batch of games brings interesting new things

> Actually not a single game made pro player realize something new about the game. Which is really embarassing, because it suggests that the AI just was able to correctly reproduce existing strategies and build orders, that it probably "learned" from existing pro games in the training sample.

Why is it embarrassing if the AI behaved like a collection of all the knowledge of existing pro players?

Obviously it'd be more interesting if we also learned something new about the game. Or AI, or both.

Interesting.

I watched Dota2 first OpenAI 5v5 show at TI8, and they did had different actions, like which spells used to initiated, how some spells are used, etc.

But tht AI was very limited in Hero pool.