[Leherenn]

I disagree, at least for fast paced strategy.

For instance in Age of Empires 2, the best way to improve is to look at a replay of your games, and analyse what went wrong. Stuff like "my economy was idle because I was focusing on the fighting" is much more flagrant then, during the game you often think it was just a few seconds, when in reality it could be a whole minute. I could see a lot of value in having an assistant that analyse your game after the fact and give you hints like: you focus too much on fighting, you have too much resource float, you have a big army but it's doing nothing, your army composition was subpar, you should have anticipated the switch to X, ... You could have it run real time as well, but then you get into the "is it cheating?" debate.

Action games are certainly more skill based as you said, and it's harder to give actionable advice.

[avisser]

Agreed. A product that tells me to build a pylon 10 seconds before I get supply-blocked would be amazing. Or if I have too much money and my production buildings are idle.

I've stood over friends' shoulders and done similar live-coaching. It definitely helps.

[Nimitz14]

His point is it doesn't matter much if you hear that advice you still need to spend hundreds of hours improving your mechanics to actually execute that advice.

[Leherenn]

And my point is that there are many things beginners should and could do that they do not know about. Yes of course, once you have the advice you need to train and not everything is actionable. But for beginners something like a build order is actionable, and if you don't know about them, inventing them by yourself is going to take a while.

[ZephyrBlu]

> I could see a lot of value in having an assistant that analyse your game after the fact and give you hints like: you focus too much on fighting, you have too much resource float, you have a big army but it's doing nothing, your army composition was subpar, you should have anticipated the switch to X

You're making this sound easy, but in reality it's very complicated.

How to you measure how much someone is fighting? What if they're playing a very aggressive style? What if the opponent is turtling?

What is "too much" resource float? What time period should it be measured over? What if the player correctly prioritized more important tasks over spending resources?

What is a "big army" and what does "doing nothing" mean? What if they're playing a passive style? What if they're actively roaming the map but not fighting?

Etc.

I have tried to create an analysis tool that does similar things for StarCraft 2, and it's extremely difficult because of how variable and contextual everything is.

It's easy for humans to look at these things and interpret the situation. It's way harder to create rules that accurately reflect human interpretation.

[Leherenn]

I am not saying it is easy, just that it can have value. If anything, the fact it is hard makes it more valuable.

I don't think it's hopeless though, the AI already does something similar. As a very naive implementation, you could for instance run your AI logic on the current state of the game and compare your move to the expected AI move. A bit like with a chess engine.