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I've collected quite some papers about RTS bots. From time to time I'll present here either a recently published one or one otherwise interesting. Research on agents in RTS games is very active, because the time constraints and the broad range of needed AI technologies is challenging. Doesn't doing science by playing RTS games sounds like an acceptable job description?

I'll start with the 100 page thesis BDI agents for Real Time Strategiy games It is about an 0AD bot written by Andrea Dallatana. Unfortunately he no longer works on the bot. He describes in detail the mechanics of his bot. One idea I especially like is the job market to avoid units standing around doing nothing. Here is the module structure of ABot:

0adbot.png


Currently discussed at HackerNews is A Survey of RTS Game AI Research and Competition in StarCraft (2013), 19 pages. The authors specifically analysed bot versus bot games and state: ... the top three ranked bots in the competition (Skynet, Aiur and UalbertaBot) do not change their strategy at all depending on their opponent. For example, the Skynet bot (both in 2011 and 2012), always uses the same opening (two gates), except when playing a Terran opponent, when it uses nony. This reflects the trend that the performance of bots is still more dependent on carefully handcrafted and non-adaptive behaviors, ...
The paper includes and describes a long list of detected bot strategies. Might be interesting to some human 0AD players too.

Very technical is Kiting in RTS Games Using Influence Maps. Kiting is a trick bots can do easier than humans, because the micro management is overwhelming. In short a unit does a ranged attack on another unit and flees out of the range of the attacked unit before it reacts.

kiting.png

I'm eager to implement this in Hannibal.

Have fun reading!

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