A Review of Real‐Time Strategy Game AI

Abstract

Games are an ideal domain for exploring the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) within a constrained environment and a fixed set of rules, where problemsolving techniques can be developed and evaluated before being applied to more complex real-world problems (Schaeffer 2001). AI has notably been applied to board games, such as chess, Scrabble, and backgammon, creating competition that has sped the development of many heuristicbased search techniques (Schaeffer 2001). Over the past decade, there has been increasing interest in research based on video game AI, which was initiated by Laird and van Lent (2001) in their call for the use of video games as a test bed for AI research. They saw video games as a potential area for iterative advancement in increasingly sophisticated scenarios, eventually leading to the development of human-level AI. Buro (2003) later called for increased research in real-time strategy (RTS) games as they provide a sandbox for exploring various complex challenges that are central to game AI and many other problems.Video games are an attractive alternative to robotics for AI research because they increasingly provide a complex and realistic environment for simulation, with few of the messy properties (and cost) of real-world equipment (Buro 2004;Laird and van Lent 2001). They also present a number of challenges that set them apart from the simpler board games that AI has famously been applied to in the past. Video games often have real-time constraints that prevent players from thinking extensively about each action, randomness that prevents players from completely planning future events, and hidden information that prevents players from

State-of-the-Art and Open Challenges in RTS Game-AI and Starcraft

“…Behavioral models based on "HMM" are presented where they are relatively found to be simple in behavior in terms of both observations and transitions [18], though some games are found to be the best test-beds for "AI" experiments such as Starcraft that outperforms others in this regard [2].…”

“…RTS games take a lot of previous strategy game troops and mechanics, focusing on units, building and resource management, usually during times of warfare. For most games of the genre, one generally has to generate resources [2] and to use them for creating buildings and buildings that spawn additional units. The units usually consist of different builder or farmers and combat-oriented different types of soldiers [5].…”

“…Its very first version was released in 1998 by Blizzard entertainment [2]. Starcraft is a science fiction based universe game introduces different combat teams like "Protoss", "Terran", and "Zerg" [5].…”

“…The balance stays complete via infrequent patches provided by "Blizzard". Each race relies on two resources to sustain their game economies and to build their forces: minerals and vespene gas [2]. Minerals are needed for all units, structures and are obtained by using a worker unit to harvest the resource directly from mineral nodes scattered around the battlefield.…”

“…Although "AI" is being applied successfully in a variety of games such as chess, backgammon or Checkers but real-time strategy decisions are expected to be made in games that do not seem too common and easy because predefined setups are usually used to simulate them that results in large search space and short real AI for learning [2]. So still some traditional planning approaches continue working in the real-time sense of games.…”