Abstract

We consider the problem of high-level strategy selection in the adversarial setting of real-time strategy games from a reinforcement learning perspective, where taking an action corresponds to switching to the respective strategy. Here, a good strategy successfully counters the opponent’s current and possible future strategies which can only be estimated using partial observations. We investigate whether we can utilize the full game state information during training time (in the form of an auxiliary prediction task) to increase performance. Experiments carried out within a StarCraft®: Brood War®11 1 StarCraft is a trademark or registered trademark of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., in the U.S. and/or other countries. Nothing in this paper should be construed as approval, endorsement, or sponsorship by Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. bot against strong community bots show substantial win rate improvements over a fixed-strategy baseline and encouraging results when learning with the auxiliary task.