A Review of Real‐Time Strategy Game AI

This literature review covers AI techniques used for real‐time strategy video games, focusing specifically on StarCraft. It finds that the main areas of current academic research are in tactical and strategic decision making, plan recognition, and learning, and it outlines the research contributions in each of these areas. The paper then contrasts the use of game AI in academe and industry, finding the academic research heavily focused on creating game‐winning agents, while the industry aims to maximize player enjoyment. It finds that industry adoption of academic research is low because it is either inapplicable or too time‐consuming and risky to implement in a new game, which highlights an area for potential investigation: bridging the gap between academe and industry. Finally, the areas of spatial reasoning, multiscale AI, and cooperation are found to require future work, and standardized evaluation methods are proposed to produce comparable results between studies.