Brood War - GoKawiil

StarSkirmish Bench ranks LLMs on coding StarCraft bots in one hour

A new benchmark called StarSkirmish Bench v0.2 tests flagship LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta by giving each one hour to write a Protoss bot in C++ for StarCraft: Brood War, then scoring win rates against human-written and demo bots. GPT-6 Astra topped the leaderboard, with GPT-6.1 Sol second, while Gemini 4 Argon, Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 scored closely behind between 37 and 39. Even the top model, GPT-6 Astra, won only 7% of games against the strongest human-written bots like Stardust, PurpleWave and BananaBrain.

starskirmish.com · 2026-10-16

AI agents in Brood War benchmark rely on worker harassment, struggle with macro

An analysis of Codex-based AI agents playing Brood War found their most effective tactic wasn't standard economic play but disruptive harassment, like sending a single worker to attack enemy bases and buildings, which distracted opponents for long stretches. However, these agents were far weaker at sustained production, often delaying technology and dribbling units into defended positions rather than building up forces before attacking.

bw.swerdlow.dev · 2026-09-19