[rkagerer]

Yeah that stalker micro really showcases a particular advantage leveraged by the AI.

I'd love to watch the results of constraining the AI so instead of seeing the whole map at once it has to pan around the same way a human would to get updated information on each battle. Counting those "info-gathering" window pans against the actions tally might yield slightly fairer APM metrics. (EDIT: Turns out they built a new agent for game 11 to do just that)

One of my biggest beefs with strategy games of this genre occurred around the time sprites went 3D and the player viewports got smaller (presumably to showcase all the cosmetic detail, and since it became harder to distinguish between visuals when zoomed out farther). I always feel too constrained on the modern games - like I can't see enough of the map at once. In my opinion that "full size viewport" gives a multi-tasking edge to the engine that the player doesn't share (beyond the human cognitive overhead from context switching you already pointed out).

On the other hand I find it fascinating our AI's have become strong enough at our games that we're having to handicap them to avoid players crying foul that they're not fair.

[fandango]

I agree. Most RTS games feel constrained because of the limited viewport. Supreme Commander has a nice feature where you can zoom all the way out at any time.

[yvdriess]

And a very important part to SupCom's zoom feature is that at a certain zoom level it switches to a rich visual overlay of unit icons and pending/queued orders.