I wonder if we will see any advanced cheese strats come out of this. I'm assuming some implementations will eventually develop micro control that is far beyond any human player's capabilities, which would make things like all-in probe rushing much more viable. Instead of playing the normal meta in a computer-vs-human, I imagine an advanced AI would simply send all of its workers off the mineral line as soon as the game starts, and attempt to out micro the human opponent before they can build an army-producing building.
I know this isn't the exact same as the article, but when genetic algorithms were introduced to solve for build orders, the "seven roach rush" was in vogue, something that was unexpected at the time and "discovered" using GA.
I think there is a space for finding strategies that have more leeway in execution and thus are more suitable for humans to pilot rather than have machine level micro.
I love the story of the Seven Roach Rush. To quote the linked article, "The most interesting part of this build, however, is how counter-intuitive it is. It violates several well-known (and well-adhered-to) heuristics used by Starcraft players when creating builds."
I'm fairly certain that this application of machine learning will present some surprising strategies.
Part of the problem SC2 units are not very balanced and each patch tries to make them "more balanced". SC2 design settled on making unique units at cost of balance.
Roaches in fact are quite overpowered, with very fast regen and quick ranged attack(they move as fast as hydralisks). A versatile and low-cost unit(cheaper than a Hydralisk). And the reason they're so powerful, SCII units of other races in general are more powerful than broodwar units and have less weaknesses.
Broodwar instead has weak, easy dying units that force micro to extend their lifespan. SC2 units always have easy regen/heal/repair and the player just masses them in huge attack groups with minimal micro(their blocking boxes are tiny and pathing is good enough). The rock-paper-scissors from broodwar(which ephasized soft-counter) morphed into hard counters to everything, which lowered the strategic depth to "make whatever kill the majority of enemy unit type"(since its the best cost-effect decision at any point).
SC2 "pro matches" are never decided in micro battles, they're most a competition on who can more effectively spend resources. SC2 micro is laughably unoriginal and tactically irrelevant(resource competition is far more important).
..And the reason SC2 can't have good micro in principle is not the 3D engine overhead, its server latency and lag. Perfect LAN games in broodwar with sub 10ms latency and millisecond reflexes can't exist within central servers hosting hundreds of players.
SC2 is very balanced when you look at the total game across a range of skill levels. Each unit is balanced around costs, attention, utility, requirements, and other units. Ex queens are awesome early game as they hit air, don't take gas or larva, and have high HP, but late game it's all about healing ultralisks plus anti air.
Roaches take a lot of supply, are armored so take more dammage from tanks and can't hit air which is their counter. They are also ranged so they don't share dammage upgrades with lings or ultralisks. Late game players will sacrifice them for more useful units and they need a larger investment in overlords.
PS: If you watch some high level games units generally have their time to shine as part of individual games progression.
Currently bot micro can perfectly time hit and run "dance" maneuvers on all their attacking units independently (several top bots are Terran and do this with Vultures). But solving this in a way that takes terrain into account is much, much harder, and a skilled human could chase the whole army into a wall and kill it.
Similarly there are worker rush bots that do some impressive things against other bots, but positioning is hard and a skilled human can beat the bot by clumping its workers up in the right shape.
I think this definitely needs to be the case if this is going to be an interesting research project at all.
Edit: Nevermind, my intuition in this seems to be wrong - someone more knowledgeable about this claims below that computer mechanics are still not as good as a good human's in the SC1 version of this.
In SC1 it's trivially easy to make a bot that spams so many actions it prevents your units from functioning properly. In fact it's easy to do accidentally. A lot of my early efforts into making a bot have been trying to find ways to reduce its APM without making it harder to code.
"More actions = better" makes sense because we're used to human players who are using all their actions for something relatively effective and because (I'll assert) they're well below the optimal APM. But the optimal APM is probably something like 1000, not the 10k a bot can easily reach.
I'd say we're certainly going to see crazy advanced cheese strats - ones that humans wouldn't be able to hope to pull off. This could definitely be done with computer micro and wouldn't be defendable with human micro.
An example would be moving probes around in such a way to maximize their shield regen - or switching the top clickable unit while stacked - who knows...
But if that's all the AI can do, and people know it, then defending should be pretty easy. Any worker or land-based rush can be fairly trivially defended by walling off.
A sensible thing for human-AI matches is to enforce a maximum number of actions per second and/or actions over period of time, which would be in line with a standard human player.
