Improving Terrain Analysis and Applications to RTS Game AI

This paper presents a new terrain analysis algorithm for RTS games. The proposed algorithms significantly improves the analysis time of the state of the art via contour tracing, and also offers better chokepoint detection. We demonstrate that our approach (BWTA2) is at least 10 times faster than the commonly used BWTA in a collection of StarCraft maps. Additionally, we show the usefulness of terrain analysis in tasks such as pathfinding and discuss potential applications to strategic decision making tasks.