A Communicating and Controllable Teammate Bot for RTS Games

Abstract: Communication in team games between human player is important, but has been disregarded in teammate bots for Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games. Control over the team-mate bots have existed for a while in other genres than RTS and if implemented correctly it adds another dimension to the game. In this study we investigate whether players think it is more fun to play with an RTS bot that communicates its intentions and reasons and is controllable by the human player. But also what features are liked, disliked, missed to provide guidelines to future researchers and companies. For this we create a StarCraft RTS bot with communication and control abilities. The experiment consists of four scenarios, turning on/o communication and control, to conclude what players think is fun. All testers agreed on communication being important and more fun to play with. Beginners did, however, not like the control feature as they already had enough on their mind whereas experienced players preferred having some control over the bot We conclude that communication is an important role in team games, including RTS games. More work needs to be done how to integrate control so that beginners do not feel overwhelmed and at the same time experienced players do not feel restrained by too simple control commands.