Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
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Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#2My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you're ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you've already won.
The other game I play a lot of is League of Legends, and sadly the community around my skill level has not learned this gospel yet. If it looks like we have 30 seconds of advantage, the team of 5 almost invariably either does nothing or goes for a decapitating stroke whose downside risk is loss. A better tactic is probably "Get more ahead so we win the next skirmish, too, snowballing until we win by concession or overwhelming force."
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#3My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you're ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you've already won. The other game I play a lot of is League of Legends, an…
Your brother is quoting the author of this article, in fact.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#4For those that aren't familiar with it, the teamliquid.net forum typically has very high-quality posts (i.e. heavily moderated) and a great resource for anyone interested in e-sports. I recommend you check out the front page if you haven't before.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#5My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you're ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you've already won. The other game I play a lot of is League of Legends, an…
As someone who's been watching professional Korean SC competition for almost 10 years, the strategy described by your brother can be found from many high class players. Unlike Warcraft3 or other RTS, units in SC have very low health. Even if you have 5% more units, you can easily lose a fight within seconds from bad unit control, bad fighting position or just bad luck. It's never a good idea to attack just because you have 5% more units. Good players will continue play cautiously to make sure the opponent never gets a chance to take those 5% back. In the end, they win by the accumulated bits of advantages from various battles or economy advantages. You don't always need an glorious "final battle" to win the game, as long as your advantage is big enough (say 50%), you opponent will know that he lost and leave the game.
This is probably why SC has become very popular and still remains very popular. There are constant conflicts throughout the game trying to increase or take back the small advantages.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#6As many of the sc2 players here might know, the guy who wrote this (day9) is one of the famous person in esports right now. He used to be a professional player of sc, but since sc2 appeared (2010) he dedicated to analyze the game, and has even a daily show about it.
The interesting thing about starcraft is that it's played _so_ much (in s. korea is a profession, kids actually go to live in "pro houses" were they play all day), that the game has/is evolving to a point where every little thing matters. In the highest levels, you can't really fight a straight up battle and hope to win, it's a game of getting little advantages (like removing %1 of his income) and trying to get ahead, and push those advantages much later on. Increasing your economy, building up you army, the execution and management of your units in the fight, everything counts.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#7My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you're ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you've already won. The other game I play a lot of is League of Legends, an…
Your brother is quoting the author of this article, in fact.
I thought he was quoting Dan 'Artosis' Stemkoski? Although both Day9 and Artosis are great analytical commentators and have a great knowledge of the game, but I believe Day9 usually cites Artosis on this.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#8My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you're ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you've already won. The other game I play a lot of is League of Legends, an…
Your brother is quoting the author of this article, in fact.
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Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#9Sean "Day[9]" Plott (the author of the article) is probably the best analytical Starcraft II caster around. His "Day[9] Dailies" cover everything from the absolute fundamentals ("here's how you set up your hotkeys, here's how you keep your money low") to more advanced topics like build orders, expanding, tactics, and micro. He also throws in "Funday Mondays", where beginner and experienced players alike try to win with unorthodox constraints (usually with funny and/or insightful results).
Bronze league matches often end up being a contest of who can win with the first rush or the earliest "cheese", but most pro-level play does end up being a careful balance between aggression, defense, and expansion. The winner is usually the one who can stay just slightly ahead of their opponent until they can seize a clear advantage.
Re: Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.
#10If I remember correctly from my college AI days, thinking about upcoming turns and minimizing your opponent's gains is called minimax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax
I'm surprised that there was only one AI in the competition that did this. We were all expected to use this strategy in my class. Once everybody's figured this out, it becomes a game of:
- Who can think ahead the most turns? - Who has the best "am I winning?" heuristic function? (For Mancala this function is fairly obvious, but for many games it's not.)