Potential flows for controlling scout units in StarCraft

Abstract

Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games typically take place in a war-like setting and are accompanied with complicated game play. They are not only difficult for human players to master, but also provide a challenging platform for AI research. In a typical RTS game, such as StarCraft, WarCraft, or Age of Empires, knowing what the opponent is doing is a great advantage and sometimes an important key to win the game. For that, good scouting is required. As subsequent work for improving the scouting agent in our StarCraft AI bot-IceBot-the winner of the mixed division in Student StarCraft AI Tournament 2012, this paper proposes a method that applies potential flows to controlling scout units in StarCraft. The proposed method outperforms an existing scouting method as well as a modified version of this existing method and is comparable to scouting by human players.