[christiangenco]

So excited for this. I got really into Starcraft last year, but eventually hit the APM (actions per minute) wall (good starcraft players can maintain over 10 actions per second for a half hour match). I could hold my own against players that could make ~1.8 times more actions per minute than I could, but above that meant there was very little I could do strategically that could displace the sheer amount of things the other player was accomplishing simultaneously.

I found myself wishing I could just tell my SCVs (an economic unit that spends the game harvesting minerals, which are used to build everything else) to scatter away if they saw an enemy attacking them, or to send several units out in very targeted missions (sneak around the outside, go to this spot, run away after killing N units or if there's a defensive unit in place, repeat at another location), or to hit a button and run a preprogrammed set of movements with my selected units (like scattering marines - basic offensive units very vulnerable to splash damage - in the presence of banelings - suicidal units with very high splash damage). Given the advantage of time and automation, I'm willing to wager I could hold my own against some of the best Starcraft players in the world.

After playing through the simulation playground, Screeps looks like it perfectly scratches my itch for a game like this. It remains to be seen, as was commented in the first announcement Screeps thread, if the "write your code and forget about it" model will be engaging enough to be entertaining, but I'm very optimistic.

[hnmcs]

Worth mentioning here, again (I learned of it from someone in the Screeps thread a week ago) is the Brood War API project:

https://code.google.com/p/bwapi/wiki

http://bwapi.github.io

It let you write C++ to define an AI to control the StarCraft units. Competitions used to be held.

And of course making something similar for StarCraft 2 would be a harder project by an order of magnitude, as they discuss in the FAQ.