

Used more often by several bots because they have the APM and multitasking capabilities to continuously do it for every worker for the entire game.Įxample of bots that use it: LetaBot. Used sometimes by humans in the early stages of the game to gain a mineral lead on their opponent. This technique/algorithm assigns a worker unit to a mineral field and assures that it stays there by continuously giving the worker unit a gather command to the mineral field every time that it tries to go to another mineral field.

This is the technique used by most humans. The technique/algorithm simply assigns each worker unit to the closest (unoccupied) mineral field and leaves the default technique to manage the worker unit. Once the worker unit has delivered the resources, it will go back to the last mineral field it tried to mine from. If the worker unit has minerals, it will deliver them back to the nearest resource depot. It will go to the nearest unoccupied mineral field (it will only check mineral fields nearby). If a worker units arrives at a mineral field from which it wants to mine, but the mineral field is occupied. In essence each worker unit gathering minerals works as follows: This algorithm/technique describes the default behaviour of worker units. Co-operative Pathfinding + Queue System But if you are developing a bot (with the BWAPI), you can turn some of these techniques into an algorithm such that your bot can gather more minerals per second.įor my master thesis I considered the following techniques: Techniques to overcome these problems require some APM and multi tasking, so they are only feasible for a human in the early game. The most common example is a worker unit that goes to a mineral field far away because the one it originally wanted to go to was occupied (even if it had only 1 millisecond remaining). #1 Improving mineral gathering rate in Brood War (using BWAPI)Īs some of you may know, the default behaviour of worker units is not optimal.
