IceBot Strategy

[OmegaSheep]

Update our team on IceBot's strategy and your opinion on if we can imitate any of its behavior with our bot.

[bigchipbag]

Will have a full report by Thursday afternoon. In the works on finding some more replays of IceBot, if you know of any youtube links post them here, can't hurt.

[OmegaSheep]

No worries about the issue deadlines if you happen to be really busy, I just put this weekend as a tentative deadline. It's more just so people have a quick way of checking what's next on the list so to speak. If I find any youtube replays of IceBot I'll be sure to post them.

For now, this one might give insight on their build order: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eKW5WPpQyU

[bigchipbag]

This is a link to icebox source code
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23817376/AIIDE2014/bots/IceBot.zip

[bigchipbag]

I downloaded the huge pack of replays from Icebot's rounds in the last tournament, and watched the couple youtube videos available.

Icebot did a lot of Goliath/Siege Tank offenses against zerg when zerg was using ground units (it seems like tanks is IceBots's go-to strategy) which won against zerg when they didn't make mutalisks.

Icebot didn't properly swap tech back to defend against air in the first youtube match versus Zerg. the bot did properly set up stealth defense against Zerg -- something we need to make sure we do with comsat and missile detectors, and a science vessel for our troops. In the first two games versus Bakuryu, Icebot was really susceptible to attacks from flying units over the mineral fields.

A good thing IceBot does a lot is set up siege tanks on a ledge above while getting vision and a missile turret on the lower level, letting the siege tanks destroy everything that the missile detector sees.

A main threat to us could be a quick zealot rush before we have a solid wall/bunker setup with some marines, so it might be a good idea to devote some time to building an early game defense versus all the protoss teams we will be facing in our tournament. IceBot fell in a couple matches to this protoss attacks, because it looked like he was planning on doing an early expansion.

I'll watch a few more replays and add some more stuff to this in a bit.

[OmegaSheep]

That's pretty good actually. We have a pretty reliable way to deal with early Protoss teams in the works, so if that's a weak point we could be ok for imitating.

[OmegaSheep]

I'm willing to close this also.