APM is not everything in StarCraft

One of the requirements of expert-level StarCraft: Brood War gameplay is the ability to execute commands rapidly. It is common for professional players to execute over 300 APM (actions per minute) during peak gameplay. Increasing APM is important for RTS players, because it can increase the effectiveness of units in battle. However, players that place too much emphasis on micromanagement may fall behind in other aspects of gameplay, such as economy.

Bots have the potential for a much higher APM than human players, because they can simultaneously send orders to units all over the map. But does the potential for unlimited APM give bots too much of an advantage over human players? This is a question that consistently came up in discussions surrounding the StarCraft AI Competition. The winner of the competition was UC Berkeley’s Overmind. The Overmind was able to defeat the other bots by exploiting mutalisks, which are flying units capable of simultaneously moving and attacking. During battles, it often performs over 10,000 APM.

One of the possible conclusions that can be made from the competition is that execution is more important than strategic decision making in StarCraft. Essentially, exploiting the nearly unlimited APM available to bots breaks the game and nullifies the need for strategy. I disagree with this conclusion, because I have been working on a bot (EISBot) that is able to frequently defeat the Overmind using approximately 200 APM. A match between EISBot and the Overmind is shown below (video).

EISBot (green) versus Overmind (green)

APM of Overmind versus EISBot