Building Placement Optimization in Real-Time Strategy Games

In this paper we propose using a Genetic Algorithm to optimize the placement of buildings in Real-Time Strategy games. Candidate solutions are evaluated by running base assault simulations. We present experimental results in SparCraft — a StarCraft combat simulator --- using battle setups extracted from human and bot StarCraft games. We show that our system is able to turn base assaults that are losses for the defenders into wins, as well as reduce the number of surviving attackers. Performance is heavily dependent on the quality of the prediction of the attacker army composition used for training, and its similarity to the army used for evaluation. These results apply to both human and bot games.