Meaningful choice in strategic unit selection: a case study of unit rankings in Starcraft II

Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Trading card games challenge players to select a card from their personal deck to compete against cards from an opponent’s deck with the outcome determined by rules specific to the game. Players desire that the cards in their decks offer meaningful choice relative to those held by the opponent since one player dominating removes all challenge from the competition. The issue of determining the existence and extent of meaningful strategies during competitive selection processes is common to range of other contexts, including picking units for combat in real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II. The approach described models game outcomes as a skew-symmetric matrix and presents an algorithm for excluding dominated and dominating units, and then further ranks the remaining meaningful choice options. A metric: band size quantifies the degree to which subsets of units can still contribute to meaningful game play. This process is applied to a single unit combat scenario using the StarCraft II rules to identify and rank a core set of 39 combat units that only offer meaningful choice within a limited neighbourhood of 12 units around each unit.