| > intuiting what your opponent isn't ready for I haven't played AOE2 so I don't know if the mechanics are similar enough to translate, but my goal for my Starcraft bot is to do precisely this. If you can enumerate the possible builds (what's available when) and assess the matchups between builds, you can make this happen using some intuitive expansions on adversarial search. > Your moves must be cohesive and planned and flow continuously without time to ponder, each connected to the last. Recomputing the entire plan from the current state works in RTS too, but only if your decision-making takes every already-in-motion thing into account and has no internal discrepancies. That's a pretty big if; this sort of weakness accounts for a lot of bot weakness currently. Units spinning around due to slight changes in perceived state cause lots of wasted resources. > Can an AI agent learn to appreciate the power of distraction? Despite multitasking theoretically being one of the strengths of an AI, a lot of the current field can't handle more than one military situation at a time. In this year's SSCAIT a lot of bots completely fell apart when confronted with one of the top bots (Bereaver) doing reaver drops. I'm not sure a bot can meaningfully learn distraction, but I'm not sure it's necessary - attacking on simultaneous fronts is optimal anyway. The army can only be so many places at once. |