Metagame integration: YABOT

As you might have noticed by my earlier post, I'm all for anything that helps players get better at a game. The YABOT (Yet another build order tester) is one of the best tools I've seen in a game yet. And it's a fan-made custom map.

Since the Starcraft 2 beta is currently closed and I've had a big interest in both Starcraft games at a high level, I wanted to be able to practice while I can't play on Battle.net. What YABOT does is allow you to choose a build order (or make one yourself) and practice it against an AI opponent that does a specific build order (or a random one). Essentially, it allows you to test a strategy to find it's weaknesses as well as try to get better at building timing to make your resources match better.

What it doesn't do is react to what happens in the game. It will still spawn the exact same army even if you killed all his workers or didn't even scout. It is probably the only bad side but it should be mentioned.



Since it is a small fan-made project it doesn't need all the bells and whistles of a release product but what it does is show potential. If one (or a few) custom mappers can create this in just a couple of weeks, there shouldn't really be anything stopping the game developers themselves. If you want to create a game for competitive play, making good practice tools should probably be high on your list of priorities. Good spectator tools like those in SC2 are a huge improvement but they don't matter that much if the players don't get good enough for anyone to want to watch them.

Even though I've never been top level in the SC2 beta and I don't expect to play enough to ever get there, I still like to be good at a game. Unlike a lot of designers I know, instead of playing a lot of games for a couple of hours I'm more interested in metagaming and strategy development over time. There's a good feeling that comes from just having perfect timing when you have the exact amount of minerals and gas for the building you want to build. Practice makes perfect and when you can practice enough playing single-player to not get killed within a few minutes in a multiplayer game it's a good thing. This is where I'd like to see more development instead of having more bloom on your shoulderpads.

The YABOT site with downloads can be found here, the TeamLiquid.net thread here.