Hello everyone! My name is Alon, more commonly known as Caerwyn, and I will be joining the admining team for ProBots!
With that out of the way, welcome to the second season of the 2021 ProBots competition!
Let’s kick things off with another author preview, where I discuss some of the key changes, important dates and things to note regarding the new ProBots season before the formal announcement. Giving eager authors time to contemplate strategies and features they may want to code in. In this post you’ll get generalized info as well as some reasoning to consider.
Tournament Format
First things first, the format. The format will be quite similar to the previous season of ProBots, with the double-elimination bracket. The bracket will include the top 4 bot authors from the first season of 2021, as well as the top 12 Authors invited through the SC2 AI Arena Season 1 ladder. The major change this season compared to the previous one is regarding the grand final. Last season’s grand finals, if the bot in the winner’s finals lost the first best of 5 then there would be another best of 5 played. This season the grand finals of the tournament will just be a best of 7, with a 1 map advantage to the winner of the upper bracket.
Qualified
Top 4 Season 1 2021:
Tyr
MicroMachine
Ketroc
JensiiiBot
Top 12 SC2 AI Arena Season 1:
TBD
Rules
Rules will have some clarification around Draws, Bot in-game chat and changes to bot updates. Feedback about ‘Sniping’ of bots has been heard and though there are no intentions to remove it as an option from ProBots we are playing around with ways to make it more difficult and increase the risk factors of using your update to target a single opponent.
Map Previews
These will be the maps that are included in this season of ProBots:
- Romanticide
- Blackburn
- Jagannatha
- 2000 Atmospheres
- Lightshade
- Oxide
Important note: Beckett Industries will not be part of Season 2’s mappool.
Version
Probots will continue to run on the StarCraft 4.10 version.
However, the maps themselves carry the information for the patch 5.0.6 changes.
Dates
Qualification: SC2 AI Arena Season 1 will end on June 1st, 2021.
First Submission Date: June 20th - 23:00 UTC
2021 Season 2 - Broadcast: July 8th 2021