Implementing a Wall-In Building Placement in StarCraft with Declarative Programming
This addresses a specific skill gap for StarCraft bot developers, offering a practical guide, but it is incremental as it applies an existing declarative method to a new domain problem.
The paper tackled the problem of implementing wall-in building placement for StarCraft bots, which current bots lack, by presenting a declarative solution using answer set programming (ASP) to find appropriate placements that block base entrances.
In real-time strategy games like StarCraft, skilled players often block the entrance to their base with buildings to prevent the opponent's units from getting inside. This technique, called "walling-in", is a vital part of player's skill set, allowing him to survive early aggression. However, current artificial players (bots) do not possess this skill, due to numerous inconveniences surfacing during its implementation in imperative languages like C++ or Java. In this text, written as a guide for bot programmers, we address the problem of finding an appropriate building placement that would block the entrance to player's base, and present a ready to use declarative solution employing the paradigm of answer set programming (ASP). We also encourage the readers to experiment with different declarative approaches to this problem.