Realtime Strategy (RTS) games are one of the major computer game genres and one of the few for which AI-based players (bots) have little chance to win against expert human players — if they are not allowed to cheat. StarCraft (by Blizzard) is one of the most popular RTS games of all time, and is known to be extremely well balanced.

This competition is part of the Computational Intelligence in Games conference 2010. Platform, API and software support is basically the same as for the AIIDE StarCraft Competition 2010 organized by Ben Weber (thanks, Ben!). However, we concentrate on a tech-limited Terran force 2-player battle.

The registration is informal and just meant to let us know how many bots we can expect. Code needs to be ready on August 9.

The competition will use StarCraft Brood War 1.16.1. You must possess a legal copy of the game.

Bots for StarCraft can be developed using the Broodwar API, which provides hooks into StarCraft and enables the development of custom AI for StarCraft. Interfaces in many languages are available to query the current state of the game and issue orders to units.

• Instructions for setting up the environment are available here.
  

Note that we will use the BWAPI version 2.8 for the competition as it provides some nice additions useful for automation. However, migrating from 2.6/2.7 is simple, there are no relevant interface changes.

• An introduction to the Broodwar API is available here.
  
• Instructions for building a bot that communicates with a remote process are available here.
  
• This is the Forum set up by Ben.

Specific ruleset for this competition.
Baseline ruleset (the same as for the AIIDE competition).

Here are two test maps (largely generated, some fixes done manually) that may serve to train your bots, we will use similar (not equal) maps for the competition.

training-map1.zip	training-map2.zip

AIIDE StarCraft Competition 2010

Johan Hagelbäck, Blekinge Institute of Technology
Mike Preuss, Technische Universität Dortmund
Ben Weber, UC Santa Cruz

For any comments or inquiries, please write to (johan.hagelback at bth.se) and/or (mike.preuss at tu-dortmund.de)

StarCraft®: Brood War®
Used with permission granted to CIG. Blizzard has consented to run the competition via the Broodwar API interface, which uses a back door of the game and is not in any form related to Blizzard. Thanks!

©1998 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. StarCraft, Brood War and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.