A Scouting Strategy for Real-Time Strategy Games

Abstract

Real-time strategy (RTS) is a sub-genre of strategy video games. RTS games are more realistic with dynamic and time-constraint game playing, by abandoning the turn-based rule of its ancestors. Playing with and against computer-controlled players is a pervasive phenomenon in RTS games, due to the convenience and the preference of groups of players. Hence, better game-playing agents are able to enhance game-playing experience by acting as smart opponents or collaborators. One-way of improving gameplaying agents' performance, in terms of their economicexpansion and tactical battlefield-arrangement aspects, is to understand the game environment. Traditional commercial RTS game-playing agents address this issue by directly accessing game maps and extracting strategic features. Since human players are unable to access the same information, this is a form of "cheating AI", which has been known to negatively affect player experiences. Thus, we develop a scouting mechanism for RTS game-playing agents, in order to enable game units to explore game environments automatically in a realistic fashion. Our research is grounded in prior robotic exploration work by which we present a hierarchical multi-criterion decision-making (MCDM) strategy to address the incomplete information problem in RTS settings.

DefogGAN: Predicting Hidden Information in the StarCraft Fog of War with Generative Adversarial Nets

“…A poor observation in general can hurt macro-management (Weber, 1 https://github.com/TeamSAIDA/DefogGAN Mateas, and Jhala 2011;Xu et al 2018). Scouting is the most straightforward defogging technique (Park et al 2012;Si, Pisan, and Tan 2014). Interestingly, Justesen & Risi (2017) propose a deep learning-based approach to learn the opponent status from units and upgrades information.…”

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

“…There are plenty of RTS games duking it out for a spot on the list in which some of them include 'The Lord of the Rings: the battle for middle-earth-II 6 ", "command & conquer: red alert III 7 ", "Age of empires-III 8 ", "Total war: shogun-II 9 ", "command & conquer: generals 10 ", "Empire earth-II 11 ", "Sins of a solar empire 12 ", "world in conflict 13 ", "Rise of nations 14 ", "Medieval II: total war 15 , etc. Real-time strategy games have had a huge fan following since their inception.…”

“…The "USP" of such games is that there is no specific way to complete a mission. The players themselves have to devise strategies and plan out their approaches to ensure victory [6]. There are numerous RTS games out there that have received success, but Starcraft the most successful and popular is worthy to mention here.…”

“…Real-time strategy games are realistic with dynamic and time constraints game-playing by abandoning the turn-based rule of its ancestors [6]. Playing with and against computercontrolled players are a pervasive phenomenon in RTS games because of the convenience and the preference of groups of players.…”