Comment by WhompingWindows | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WhompingWindows | Hacker News Reader

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WhompingWindows

The main difference would come in the simultaneous control of all of the different units in Starcraft. Both MOBAs and RTS share many characteristics, since Warcraft 3 was the origin of MOBAs to begin with. For instance, micro, unit pathing, lowground highground, fog of war, spellcasting, etc. However, in a MOBA there is more emphasis on team-play, on the interactions of 5-hero team compositions, which is decided upon at the start of the game. There is also itemization, which is much more stylistic than anything that can be purchased in an RTS.

In Starcraft 2, it would be fantastic to individually control all 16 marines in your 2 medivac stim timing, pulling them back when they become the targets nearly instantaneously, perfectly shuffling them into/out of the medivacs, while focus-firing the defenses. Another example would be a reaper rush, a beastly AI could in theory micro 5-7 reapers individually, potentially breaking the game as human fingers/muscles/nerves have limits that CPUs and GPUs do not have.

The latter concern, about sheer speed and potentially limiting APM of the Starcraft 2 AI, is a very interesting one. It would be interesting to allow the AI to match the average APM of the Global Finals players, for instance, which might be around 300 actions per minute. If the computer was allowed to utilize 3,000 actions per minute, it could surely perform much greater feats of micromanagement.

The largest edge I see human players having vs the Starcraft AI would be something strategic, get a sense for how the AI plays then pull off a specific strategy which counters it. It may not work well in the current human-meta, but perhaps the AI will have its own meta that you can out-think it on?

> In Starcraft 2, it would be fantastic to individually control all 16 marines in your 2 medivac stim timing, pulling them back when they become the targets nearly instantaneously, perfectly shuffling them into/out of the medivacs, while focus-firing the defenses.

Single unit pullbacks, medivac shuffling, and focus firing, all together, are commonly seen in pro-level matches. The guys are superhumanly insane. The current pro players can sustain 500 APM during battles. The only reason they don't do this even more is that they are usually fighting on two or three fronts at the same time, while managing base and unit production to the second.

The real limit of the players is the single viewport and the single instruction input pipeline. Managing dozens of units with those heavy restrictions is pure madness. That's the main difference between RTSs and MOBAs. MOBAs are defined by strategy and tactics, teams win and lose because of those two factors (at pro levels). A game like Starcraft II adds another factor: players can simply break down when they're not able to keep up with the game. Even at pro level, players can be overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to process in tenths of a second, over and over again, for 15-25 minutes, or they can get into a spot where there's too much to do and not enough time to do it.

AI has two advantages. It has better information channels, in the form of perfect vision, while humans have a single pair of eyes that have to scan through the screen. It also doesn't get tired over the course of the game.

> Single unit pullbacks, medivac shuffling, and focus firing, all together, are commonly seen in pro-level matches. The guys are superhumanly insane. The current pro players can sustain 500 APM during battles. The only reason they don't do this even more is that they are usually fighting on two or three fronts at the same time, while managing base and unit production to the second.

Not to the level AI can do it. Did you see the video where zerglings dodge tank shot splash? a human could never do that

That zergling video depends on a zero reaction time, it's true that's an advantage of AI. No matter how high the APM, if the reaction time is high enough, some things just cannot be done.

Perfect micro against siege tanks is impossible for humans, because the time between the beginning of the shot and the moment the damage is applied is seen by us as instant. The game features other units where that time is bigger, and pro-level games usually feature perfect micro on those instances (e.g. widow mines, banelings, disruptors, locusts, hellions...)

> Even at pro level, players can be overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to process in tenths of a second, over and over again, for 15-25 minutes, or they can get into a spot where there's too much to do and not enough time to do it.

Consequently, limiting he AI's APM only adds a meta-game around APM planning that a human still would have a hard time to maintain.

> since Warcraft 3 was the origin of MOBAs to begin with.

Incorrect. It was with Starcraft 1, a custom map called Aeon of Strife (AoS).

https://web.archive.org/web/20101111183559/http://www.getdot...

Yes, although MOBAs were popularized with War3, specifically DotA All-Stars became utterly dominant and more popular than the base game.

When deepmind announced the project, they noted they were going to limit the machine's APM to something human-like

A problem I see with limiting APM to the same level as a human is that for that APM, a human will move units tightly packed together, while a computer will likely move a bunch of units at different ends of the map

The conclusion would be to patch the game's unit control with the new AI. That would augment human play and the implementation would need to be careful not to become the equivalent of auto-aim in first person shooters.

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