Flexible Behavior for Worker Units in Real-Time Strategy Games Using STRIPS Planning

In this paper we investigate how STRIPS planning techniques can be used to enhance the behavior of worker units that are common in real-time strategy (RTS) video games. Worker units are typically instructed to carry out simple tasks such as moving to destinations or mining for a type of resource. In this work we investigate how this interaction can be extended by providing the human player with the capability of instructing the worker unit to achieve simple goals. We introduce the ”Smart Workers” STRIPS planning domain, and generate a series of planning problems of increasing difficulty and size. We use these problem sets to evaluate the conditions under which this idea can be used in practice in a real video game. The evaluation is performed using a STRIPS planner that is implemented inside a commercial video game development framework.