Stratagus is an open-source game engine that can be used for artificial intelligence (AI) research in the complex domain of real-time strategy games. It has already been successfully applied for AI studies by several researchers. The focus of this paper is to highlight Stratatgus’ useful features for AI research rather than compare it with other available gaming engines. In particular, we descr...

Professional competitive gaming has grown increasingly lucrative over the past 2 years since the release of Blizzard Entertainment’s real-time strategy game, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (SC2). Since there is no widely used SC2 map generator, most maps are hand-crafted by level designers who may not be in touch with the game’s intricate and shifting strategy, resulting in inconsistent game qu...

Planning in domains with temporal and numerical properties is an important research problem. In prior work, we presented an online planning architecture for resource production problems in RTS games. At every decision point, our planner constructs plans that achieve a certain fixed set of intermediate renewable resource goals. It then uses the plan with the smallest makespan to choose an action...

In this paper, we present a novel Monte-Carlo policy rollout algorithm (called MCRT-GAP) that uses a hybrid of focussed exploration of new actions and exploitation of promising actions to expand the lookahead search from the current state in a Monte-Carlo simulation model. The initial estimates of the action values are computed using a combination of the distance heuristic and a collision estim...

Simulation has been regarded as the third way to represent social models, alternative to other two symbol systems: the verbal argumentation and the mathematical one. Simulation can be processed by a computer and is particularly suited for complex systems, in which the aggregate behaviour is not necessarily the sum of the sincle parts. Agent Based Modelling (ABM) is for sure the most interesting...

In this paper, we propose ELF, an Extensive, Lightweight and Flexible platform for fundamental reinforcement learning research. Using ELF, we implement a highly customizable real-time strategy (RTS) engine with three game environments (Mini-RTS, Capture the Flag and Tower Defense). Mini-RTS, as a miniature version of StarCraft, captures key game dynamics and runs at 40K frame-persecond (FPS) pe...

A big challenge for creating human-level game AI is building agents capable of operating in imperfect information environments. In real-time strategy games the technological progress of an opponent and locations of enemy units are partially observable. To overcome this limitation, we explore a particle-based approach for estimating the location of enemy units that have been encountered. We repr...

Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games have shown to be very resilient to standard adversarial tree search techniques. Recently, a few approaches to tackle their complexity have emerged that use game state or move abstractions, or both. Unfortunately, the supporting experiments were either limited to simpler RTS environments (μRTS, SparCraft) or lack testing against state-of-the-art game playing agents...

With the rapid advent of video games recently and the increasing numbers of players and gamers, only a tough game with high policy, actions, and tactics survives. How the game responds to opponent actions is the key issue of popular games.Many algorithms were proposed to solve this problem such as Least-Squares Policy Iteration (LSPI) and State-Action-Reward-State-Action (SARSA) but they mainly...

With augmented reality, we can create interfaces that merge virtual objects and data seamlessly with the real world, potentially improving collaboration and interaction. This technology offers opportunities for games, allowing new designs that merge the diverse social and physical interaction of real world games with rapid interactivity and computing power of digital games. To date, research ha...