June 24th 2025 Why hello Reader, While adding my build to my bot and deploying it to the ladder, I was reviewing a replay from a Protoss bot. In that replay, the bot completely countered mine. Naturally, I jumped into solving that problem — tweaking things, adjusting timing — only to review another replay where a Reaper harass tore my bot apart. And then another one. Before long, I was reacting to everything and making no real progress. I didn’t even feel like working on the bot anymore....
22 days ago • 2 min read
June 10th 2025 Why hello Reader, Ever watch your disruptor fire a perfect shot... right into your own units? Yeah. RIP my army. You know, when I started I thought I had everything figured out. Disruptors look simple—just aim for the biggest group of units and boom, free wins. But turns out, in StarCraft, disruptor shots aren’t even spells. They’re units in the API. Which means the bot needs to steer them. Every. Single. Frame. This is nothing to say the risk factor of 100 true damages it does...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
May 28th 2025 Why hello Reader, I was catching up on Andor Season 2 (fantastic show btw, highly recommend), and there was this scene that caught my attention. K-2SO, everyone's favorite sarcastic security droid, was struggling at a poker-like game, totally baffled by the concept of bluffing. Which had me thinking: how is it that an AI like K-2SO can stomp an enemy in combat, but put him across a table from someone trying to mislead him, and he falls apart? In Case You Missed It Progress made...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
May 14th 2025 Why hello Reader, Do you remember that Zerg Bot Rush tutorial I did? The YouTuber, LaughNGamez, picked it up and decided he'd give it a try. He's not a professional programmer by any means, and he's pretty open about that. He had one clear goal: build a simple bot that executes a straightforward zergling rush. And that's exactly what he did. His bot barely mines any gas; it just cranks out zerglings and sends them straight at enemy bases. It's literally only 450 lines of code....
2 months ago • 3 min read
Apr 30th 2025 Why hello Reader, You’re scrubbing through the replay, watching that final fight, and you get that familiar feeling — thinking, yep, this is where it all fell apart. Pause, rewind. Actually, the match was lost way earlier, somewhere in the opening few minutes. In our recent Debug clinic, yup, same story: Dogtato’s Botato was technically solid, but still got flattened by an early proxy rush. A couple of things we picked up on could have set up a different outcome. In Case You...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Apr 16th 2025 Why hello Reader, During last year’s Roundtable, Timo mentioned that the key to making Reinforcement Learning work in SC2 was breaking the problem into smaller chunks. That idea stuck with me. And now that we’ve kicked off a new Terran bot for the MicroLadder this week, it feels like the right time to finally give RL a shot. The MicroLadder is all about small, focused challenges—exactly the kind of environment where this kind of experimentation might actually stand a chance. RL...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Apr 02nd 2025 so yea, I am really really in love with Sora ❤️lolol Why hello Reader, There are only 24 hours in the day, 8 of that hopefully spent sleeping (lol), that leaves the rest to get all the things you have to get done. Between work, social life, and everything else, that leaves limited time to make progress on your SC2 Bot. Last week in our very first Debug Clinic, we went over community member Dogtato’s bot, Botato, and as we rattled off all the things to work on it dawned on...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Mar 19th 2025 Why hello Reader, I remember the first time I tried to build an SC2 bot. I figured, Hey, AI is superhuman—why not just slap down buildings, pump out units, and let it brute-force its way to victory? So I coded it to max out as fast as possible, thinking raw mechanics would carry the day. Then I threw it against a human player in a max-out challenge. And I got wrecked. Turns out, speed doesn’t mean much if your bot isn’t building the right things at the right time. While my AI...
4 months ago • 2 min read
Mar 4th 2025 Why hello Reader, When AlphaStar first went up against pro StarCraft II players like TLO and MaNa, it didn’t just win—it crushed them. Perfect micro. Instant reactions. Stalkers blinking with machine precision. But something felt off. It never scouted properly. It didn’t adjust when the unexpected happened. And when it was forced to use normal human camera controls? It lost. That match left me with a burning question—was AlphaStar actually intelligent, or just a machine executing...
4 months ago • 2 min read