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Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

llmskirmish.com

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Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#31
This is a really interesting direction. RTS games are a much better testbed for agent capability than most static benchmarks because they combine partial observability, long-term planning, resource management, and real-time adaptation.

It reminds me a bit of OpenAI Five — not just because it played a complex game, but because the real value wasn’t “AI plays Dota,” it was observing how coordination, strategy formation, and adaptation emerged under competitive pressure. A controlled RTS environment like this feels like a lightweight, reproducible version of that idea.

What I especially like here is that it lowers the barrier for experimentation. If researchers and hobbyists can plug different models into the same competitive sandbox, we might start seeing meaningful AI-vs-AI evaluations beyond static leaderboards. Competitive dynamics often expose weaknesses much faster than isolated benchmarks do.

Curious whether you’re planning to support self-play training loops or if the focus is primarily on inference-time agents?

Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#33

This is a really interesting direction. RTS games are a much better testbed for agent capability than most static benchmarks because they combine partial observability, long-term planning, resource management, and real-time adaptation. It reminds me a bit of OpenAI Five — not just because it played a complex game, but because the real value wasn’t “AI plays Dota,” it was observing how coordination, strategy formation…

> partial observability, long-term planning, resource management, and real-time adaptation

Note, this project doesn't have that best I can tell? Its two static AI scripts having a go. LLMs generate the scripts and they are aware of past "results", but I'm not sure what that means.

Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#34
I'd love to see text-only spatial reasoning. As in, the LLM is presented some kind of textual projection of what's happening in 2d/3d space and makes decisions about what to do in that space based on that. It kind of works when a writer is describing something in a book, for example, but not sure how that could generalize.

Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#36
This may sound like an insane take, but idc:

I swear people (esp here on HN) are actually blind to the weaknesses of Gemini.

I must be among the handful of people who know how thoroughly lobotomized any AI agent from Google must be given their extremely radical historical and contemporaneous practices of censorship.

Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#38
post #14

Yay, I love how we just keep coming up with magic tricks, like toddlers playing with velcro.. These magic tricks do nothing but convince people who don't know any better that LLMs are the real deal, when they simply aren't. This is just free propaganda for Anthropic && OpenAI who will leverage these (useless) capabilities to convince your boss to give your salary to them, or at least a substantial portion of it.

…while burning unreasonable amounts of energy for nothing.

Not a fan. Make games with in-game AIs that are interesting but are not large language models: that's wasteful and lazy. You probably had more large language models put this together for you. Lazy.

Re: Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

#39

This is a really interesting direction. RTS games are a much better testbed for agent capability than most static benchmarks because they combine partial observability, long-term planning, resource management, and real-time adaptation. It reminds me a bit of OpenAI Five — not just because it played a complex game, but because the real value wasn’t “AI plays Dota,” it was observing how coordination, strategy formation…

You would likely be interested in the Starcraft BWAPI: https://www.starcraftai.com

You can watch the matche videos from training runs: https://www.youtube.com/@Sscaitournament/videos

I don't think BWAPI has ever integrated modern AI models, but I haven't followed its progress in several years.

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