Groups don't like tight spaces

[Kirfkin]

I was watching your bot compete! I liked a lot of the fundamentals and data it presented, but I noticed an issue that I am not sure you are yet aware of.

With sufficiently large squads, your bot will try to move through a narrow space to attack or explore behind the bottleneck. However, it seems the bottleneck starts to separate your squad too much, which the bot appears to not like, and so instead gathers the squad up before trying again.

It may be worth trying to allow your bot to separate squads into smaller squads, and allowing multiple groups to work in tandem (thus a battle group would stay loosely together, while the squads could still stay tightly together). Hope it helps, but I don't know where else to throw this at you. :)

[fklemme]

Thanks a lot for your feedback, you posted it absolutely in the right place! :)

I noticed the bad behavior as well, particularly at chokes down to enemy bases where a bunker kills the first few marines. Then they start to retreat a little bit to regroup just to let the drama start all over again. I like the idea of splitting up groups into smaller pieces to prevent that behavior. I guess I’ll try it as an improvement - at least as long as there a only marines leaving my base.

You may have noticed that my bot is still in an early stage and I’m working mainly on a macro base at the moment. I haven’t found much time to continue my work lately but feedback like yours is always motivating so maybe I’ll spend a bit more time on the bot and you’ll be able to see some improvement on stream in the near future. ;-)

[Kirfkin]

I've noticed that, and that's a big reason why I felt I'd offer you feed back. I'm also considering setting aside time to write a bot for a more complex game like Starcraft; I've only made bots for simpler though still competitive games. Writing a bot for most competitive games is challenging!

Best of luck, I'll keep rooting for you.