Comment by BeaverGoose
3 days ago
They should benchmark it against Pluto. It's a artificial neutral network bot that can easily take games off the best broodwar players.
3 days ago
They should benchmark it against Pluto. It's a artificial neutral network bot that can easily take games off the best broodwar players.
I did a live stream where Astra played Pluto. Astra went 0 - 1000 https://x.com/kaimcpheeters/status/2106782151622504911?s=20
It's a 51 hour video but I still don't think that's enough time to play 1000 games. How did it work?
Up to 30 games could be played simultaneously - this makes it easier to test the impact of strategy changes.
I noticed Pluto is running on a simple CPU? If so, that's very nice for future RTS games. You just ship (or use a server-client arch) a bunch of models of various difficulty levels to let players practice. Could we even get models tuned to specific campaign levels? I wonder how costly the creation of Pluto was.
In any game that requires reflexes and muscle based twitch accuracy and so on, usually the hard part is making the ai lose.
The top players were losing a bunch to Pluto when it first came on the scene because they didn’t realize it was not a human and were playing normal strategies against it. Once they realized it was an AI bot they developed strategies to exploit it and can now win very reliably against it.
Pluto is very good at assessing relative army strengths based on units within its vision and will always engage when it judges that its army strength has an advantage, and it uses superior micro and targeting to win battles efficiently. The key weakness of Pluto is that it has no memory of units that are not in its line of sight, so it can be easily exploited with fast skirmishing and harassing units, drops, and spreading out artillery units to deny it from seeing the full army strength all at once.
Its other big weakness is that once you get an army advantage you can force it into a turtling position where it will never try to attack you and you can safely colonize the entire map with expansion bases, giving yourself an insurmountable snowballing resource advantage.
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StarCraft is in between, where faster actions can be a big advantage but choosing good enough actions for that to matter is hard enough that it took many years to achieve.
Can't that be fixed just be setting levels of reaction speeds?
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