While I was watching some of these replays, I was thinking to myself of all the things a bot needs to keep track of and all the things it could potentially try, and it just seemed so overwhelming. There are just too many things you can try, and your resources are limited.<p>StarCraft is a very, very deep game. It seems like it would be very easy to waste time on paths that lead to no real gains. And that rather than using interesting AI techniques, the most important thing might in fact be the StarCraft knowledge of the author. And how good they are at distilling the game down to the parts that is going to yield the biggest returns.<p>Also, StarCraft has very distinct early, mid, and late stages to the game. Focusing only on the early game, and going with a single strategy eliminates a ton of complexity. If you spend all your time on getting an all-or-nothing rush perfected, you've essentially "skipped" all the sophisticated techniques some of the other authors spent their time creating for the mid and late stages. In fact, it seems like some authors did just this and were quite successful.<p>But even an all-or-nothing rush has a surprising amount of depth, and perfecting that would be a quite a feat. The biggest thing being micromanagement/unit control and knowing what to target first (this is actually very hard). If you don't perfect that, beating a pro doesn't seem like it would be even remotely possible.<p>I was a huge StarCraft BW fan, and it's the only game where I got to the point where I could sometimes hold my own against pro players. I'm tempted to try BWAPI. Creating a full bot seems like a huge amount of work that I probably don't have time for, but creating a unit control AI sounds like it would be fun. I remember there used to be micromanagement custom game maps that people used to create (basically a series of situational challenges where you have a bunch of units and you could face other human players 1v1). Doing a competition for that as well would be pretty cool I think.