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Meaningful choice in strategic unit selection: a case study of unit rankings in Starcraft II

conference contribution
posted on 2018-01-01, 00:00 authored by Shaun BangayShaun Bangay, Owen MakinOwen Makin
Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Trading card games challenge players to select a card from their personal deck to compete against cards from an opponent’s deck with the outcome determined by rules specific to the game. Players desire that the cards in their decks offer meaningful choice relative to those held by the opponent since one player dominating removes all challenge from the competition. The issue of determining the existence and extent of meaningful strategies during competitive selection processes is common to range of other contexts, including picking units for combat in real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II. The approach described models game outcomes as a skew-symmetric matrix and presents an algorithm for excluding dominated and dominating units, and then further ranks the remaining meaningful choice options. A metric: band size quantifies the degree to which subsets of units can still contribute to meaningful game play. This process is applied to a single unit combat scenario using the StarCraft II rules to identify and rank a core set of 39 combat units that only offer meaningful choice within a limited neighbourhood of 12 units around each unit.

History

Event

Computer-Human Interaction in Play. Annual Symposium (2018 : Melbourne, Vic.)

Pagination

33 - 44

Publisher

ACM

Location

Melbourne, Vic.

Place of publication

New York, N.Y.

Start date

2018-10-28

End date

2018-10-31

ISBN-13

9781450356244

Language

eng

Publication classification

E1 Full written paper - refereed

Copyright notice

2018, ACM

Title of proceedings

CHI PLAY 2018: Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play