StarCraft Winner Prediction

Abstract

In game-playing, a challenging topic is to investigate an evaluation function that accurately predicts which player will be the winner of a two-player match. Our work investigates to what extent it is possible to predict the winner of a StarCraft match, regardless of the races that are involved. We developed models for individual match types, and also general models for predicting the winner of non-symmetric matches, symmetric matches, and general matches. The contribution of this paper is (1) a generic and relatively accurate model for winner prediction in StarCraft, and (2) a detailed analysis of which features are the principal component in accurately predicting the winner in this complex game. Specially, our results show that we can predict the winner of a match with an accuracy of more than 63% in average over all time slices, regardless of the time slice and the combination of the match types. A study of which features are most important for the prediction of the match results, shows that the economic aspects of StarCraft matches are the strongest predictors for winning, followed by the use micro commands.