Build order optimization in StarCraft

In recent years, real-time strategy (RTS) games have gained interest in the AI research community for their multitude of challenging subproblems - such as collaborative pathfinding, effective resource allocation and unit targeting, to name a few. In this paper we consider the build order problem in RTS games in which we need to find concurrent action sequences that, constrained by unit dependencies and resource availability, create a certain number of units and structures in the shortest possible time span. We present abstractions and heuristics that speed up the search for approximative solutions considerably in the game of StarCraft, and show the efficacy of our method by comparing its real-time performance with that of professional StarCraft players. Copyright © 2011, Association for the Advancement of Artificial.