Walling in strategy games via constraint optimization

Abstract

This paper presents a constraint optimization approach to walling in real-time strategy (RTS) games. Walling is a specific type of spatial reasoning, typically employed by human expert players and not currently fully exploited in RTS game AI, consisting on finding configurations of buildings to completely or partially block paths. Our approach is based on local search, and is specifically designed for the real-time nature of RTS games. We present experiments in the context of the RTS game StarCraft showing promising results.