A Survey of Real-Time Strategy Game AI Research and Competition in StarCraft

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the existing work on AI for real-time strategy (RTS) games. Specifically, we focus on the work around the game StarCraft, which has emerged in the past few years as the unified test bed for this research. We describe the specific AI challenges posed by RTS games, and overview the solutions that have been explored to address them. Additionally, we also present a summary of the results of the recent StarCraft AI competitions, describing the architectures used by the participants. Finally, we conclude with a discussion emphasizing which problems in the context of RTS game AI have been solved, and which remain open.