State-of-the-Art and Open Challenges in RTS Game-AI and Starcraft

Abstract

This paper presents a review of artificial intelligence for different approaches used in real-time strategy games. Real-time strategy (RTS) based games are quick combat games in which the objective is to dominate and destroy the opposing enemy such as Rome-total war, Starcraft, the age of empires, and command & conquer, etc. In such games, each player needs to utilize resources efficiently, which includes managing different types of soldiers, units, equipment’s, economic status, positions and the uncertainty during the combat in real time. Now the best human players face difficulty in defeating the best RTS games due to the recent success and advancement of deep mind technologies. In this paper, we explain state-of-the-art and challenges in artificial intelligence (AI) for RTS games and Starcraft, describing problems and issues carried out by RTS based games with some solutions that are addressed to them. Finally, we conclude by emphasizing on game ‘CIG & AIIDE’ competitions along with open research problems and questions in the context of RTS Game-AI, where some of the problems and challenges are mostly considered improved and solved but yet some are open for further research.