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Brood War Bench

2026-09-19 | original

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Why This Matters

This piece offers a rare, concrete look at how an AI system performs in the complex real-time strategy game Brood War, revealing both surprising tactical creativity and fundamental strategic weaknesses. It matters to the tech industry because it illustrates the current gap between AI's ability to exploit narrow tricks versus executing coordinated, long-term planning—an important benchmark for evaluating progress toward more general AI reasoning.

Key Takeaways

Codex excelled at low-effort disruption tactics, like harassing enemy workers, which distracted opponents disproportionately to the resources invested.
The AI struggled with core strategic fundamentals like sustained production and coordinated attacks, often behaving like a beginner by sending units in piecemeal.
Codex used multiple subagents for economy, production, and combat that didn't communicate well, but human-guided coordination significantly improved its performance.

Worth a Look

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01

Codex found cheese before it found macro

Codex's strongest recurring idea was disruption. In Protoss games it often sent a Probe across the map to attack workers or buildings. This worked shockingly well as the opposing agents often spent dozens of seconds thinking about what to do about a probe instead of doing anything else.

The same systems were much weaker at sustained production. They delayed tech, trickled one or two basic units into defended bases, and threw workers into last stands.

I also noticed Codex often created separate subagents to manage the economy, army production, and army control. They didn't communicate much with one another, so the army agent often sent each new unit straight into an attack, unaware of the larger army the other agents were planning to build.

This is a common beginner mistake: sending units in one at a time instead of waiting for a critical mass and a planned attack timing. In games where I helped direct Codex, it was much better at planning those moments and getting its subagents to work together.

The persistence was real. In G009, after losing its army and main base, Codex 5.6 Terra / medium lifted its last Command Center and moved it toward the opposite corner. It survived for another six minutes.

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