Macro action selection with deep reinforcement learning in StarCraft
  StarCraft (SC) is one of the most popular and successful Real Time Strategy
(RTS) games. In recent years, SC is also widely accepted as a challenging
testbed for AI research because of its enormous state space, partially observed
information, multi-agent collaboration, and so on. With the help of annual
AIIDE and CIG competitions, a growing number of SC bots are proposed and
continuously improved. However, a large gap remains between the top-level bot
and the professional human player. One vital reason is that current SC bots
mainly rely on predefined rules to select macro actions during their games.
These rules are not scalable and efficient enough to cope with the enormous yet
partially observed state space in the game. In this paper, we propose a deep
reinforcement learning (DRL) framework to improve the selection of macro
actions. Our framework is based on the combination of the Ape-X DQN and the
Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM). We use this framework to build our bot, named as
LastOrder. Our evaluation, based on training against all bots from the AIIDE
2017 StarCraft AI competition set, shows that LastOrder achieves an 83% winning
rate, outperforming 26 bots in total 28 entrants.
