Dota is a pretty local game. 70% tactics, 20% strategy. Maybe 10% information. Yes you have warding game but for an AI with no cost of looking at heroes inventories (humans need to waste attention and move their map) AI already has huge advantage over humans in the imperfect information part. Usually fighting into the imperfect information is the bad choice.
Stratego is 40% information, 40% strategy, maybe 10% tactics. If you know where is the flag it's trivial to win in almost all situations. Fighting into imperfect information is literally all the game.
Dota at the mid-casual and high-casual brackets (which is where you find most players) is also a social game. Establishing efficient leadership, communication and cooperation in a game gives you a huge advantage. And the low-casual and the pro levels you find it becomes more a game of skill and strategy funnily enough.
(The old joke is that Dota is a 1 v 9 game, not a 5 v 5)
I periodically still drop in to Subspace/Continuum Trench Wars and in a multi hour play session will generally spend the first hour dogfighting and then get annoyed with the performance of my assigned team and switch to a command ship and spend a lot more time typing encouraging other pilots to do the sensible thing than I do actually fighting.
Both modes of play are fun, mind, but the parallels struck me as worth noting.
It's from things like properly last hitting creeps, good reaction timing, good reaction decisions, coordinating real time actions with teammates in milliseconds resolution.
It's obviously not about clicking fast, but it is about timing, sometimes 100 milliseconds reaction time make huge difference in outcome. It is usually making decisions on very small time scales. Do you retreat or continue? Use ability or hold it? Can you overextend?
The only meaningful strategic decisions in dota (which you have long time frame of deciding and effect the game for a long duration) are draft (which AI doesn't really master, they reduced the heroes pool to simplify) and item purchases, and there are only a handful of them (~6) in an entire game. Other decisions don't really have a long "memory" time, a minute or two at the most. After two minutes every other decision is just reduced to the relative advantage between the teams.
There used to be one hero in Dota which made it a strategy game instead (techies). But it was like playing a different game and everyone hated it and it was effectively removed. Techies was like playing stratego against chess players, they obviously get pissed off by not playing what they wanted.
There are larger strategic decisions that are significant in dota. Which area of the map to play, which objectives are important and when, what type of fights will we win (fast and bursty) and when will we take them. Often times these are thought of at the beginning of the game and effect gameplay throughout.
That's pretty tactical decisions, usually made in a time window of like 20-30 seconds top. Takes like 40 second to reach more than half the map from the base. Fighting decisions usually also get tactical. I would say that 90% of the game deciding decisions have a time window of less than 30 seconds to make. 70% are in a time window of seconds. You don't make a strategic decision to fight ever, you make tactical decision when the map looks fitting. If you take strategic fights because of long term strategy (instead of deciding tactically) in Dota you will lose.
I feel that I generally know where I will play well in advance. Like before the game starts. At this point it just seems like semantics of what we think of strategy vs tactics if that's the case. As I think many of the things you see opportunistically while I decide I know when I'm going to fight in advance and I put myself in opportunistic positions at those times.
in dota the tactics is to do with the execution of abilities, often times in coordination with other agents in execution of their abilities to get combo effects while adapting to the situation as it unravels.
As an avid dota player I wouldn't agree with your characterization that 70% of dota 2 is your definition of tactics. What I've noticed differentiates player MMR the most is the strategy applied to each context. It's rarely the execution that's the problem as you can gain such overwhelming advantages through strategy.
There's barely any long term strategy in Dota, only meaningful strategic decisions are items and heroes. Even ultimate usage has like 2 minute window of importance. Wards too. And maybe the decision to push high ground because of how many times games are lost because of it, but it's the tactical errors usually making most of the difference there.
I'm immortal (6k MMR) and agree with the parent. I used to think similarly as you, because my mechanics were very good, but as I started to play with friends who are much lower ranked, I noticed that they can often execute things (e.g. ability usage) pretty well, but their overall play and strategy is desperately lacking. Things like playing the wrong areas of the map, spending their time inefficiently, never capitalizing on their strategic opportunities (e.g. not playing where they have vision, not playing in areas of the map that are near their objectives, not taking calculated risks based on available information).
I do think OpenAI five derived some of their advantage from seamless ability usage, and inhuman coordination in lane, but it also did some novel things strategically, that challenged some of the established tenets of high level play (e.g. they had a lot of mobility on the map, back when that was considered very inefficient).
I don’t think it is more challenging than StarCraft or Dota. Does the blog post claim that anywhere?
Stratego is way more challenging than Poker, though. StarCraft/Dota/Stratego have the property that you can’t represent their imperfect information as a vector in memory, whereas you can easily do that in Texas hold’em poker (there’s only 52C2 = 1024 possible hands). So for those games, you have to use an approximate distribution rather than the exact one.
I’m an author on this paper (although my contributions were relatively minimal) and on the Player of Games paper (which did Poker, Chess, and Go).
> I don’t think it is more challenging than StarCraft or Dota. Does the blog post claim that anywhere?
My very naive question question being: Why tackle this after SC and Dota have already been done? What is the scientific interest? Stratego seems strictly simpler than both of these games. In what way is this an advancement over how SC/Dota AI were solved?
Great question! I would say the main reason why this work is significant is that StarCraft agent was bootstrapped from human replays, and Dota agent did not have game-theoretic guarantees on minimizing exploitability (i.e. how far the strategy is from Nash equilibrium). The R-NaD algorithm with neural nets (behind Stratego) starts from scratch, and has game-theoretic guarantees.
In principle, the AlphaStar's league approach (from StarCraft) could be done also in Stratego, and it would be very interesting to compare the two approaches. Note that AlphaStar is more expensive: it required to train N competing agents with pair-wise evaluation costing N^2, while Stratego's NeuRD trains a single agent.
Starcraft and Dota benefit a lot from having good micro. Stratego seems to be only macro. Micro is easyish for AI and requires less long-term thinking to get benefits from.
Starcraft especially only resembles a strategy game in GM (and maybe high masters). Below that, the strategy is mostly macro better so you have more units.
