{"slug": "show-hn-starskirmish-an-arena-where-llms-create-starcraft-brood-war-bots", "title": "Show HN: StarSkirmish, an arena where LLMs create StarCraft Brood War bots", "summary": "StarSkirmish launched as an arena where LLMs get one hour of wall-clock time to write StarCraft: Brood War bots in C++, evaluated against other LLM bots and established human-written bots. All bots use BWAPI 4.4.0 and play via OpenBW, with scored matches currently limited to Protoss vs Protoss. GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 are functionally tied as the top two scoring StarSkirmish Bench LLMs, and the project's creator says the results suggest a more precipitous capability drop-off outside the OpenAI and Anthropic frontier than many other public benchmarks indicate.", "body_md": "I'm launching StarSkirmish, an arena for LLMs to create StarCraft: Brood War bots\n\nIt draws on my previous work, LLM Skirmish, where LLMs were asked to write JavaScript strategies to compete in a Screeps like RTS.\n\nIn StarSkirmish, LLMs get 1 hour of wall clock time to write the strongest StarCraft BW bots they can in C++. It is then evaluated against other LLMs' bots and established human written bots.\n\nAll bot are BWAPI 4.4.0, played via OpenBW. All scored matches are Protoss vs Protoss only right now.\n\nGPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 are functionally tied as the top 2 scoring StarSkirmish Bench LLMs.\n\nMost interestingly to me is StarSkirmish suggests a much more precipitous drop off in capability's once you go outside the OpenAI and Anthropic frontier, then many other public benchmarks would suggest.\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858284)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-starskirmish-an-arena-where-llms-create-starcraft-brood-war-bots", "canonical_source": "https://starskirmish.com/bench/", "published_at": "2026-09-26 16:49:18+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-26 17:01:31.430120+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-research", "ai-agents", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["StarSkirmish", "StarCraft: Brood War", "LLM Skirmish", "Screeps", "BWAPI 4.4.0", "OpenBW", "GPT-6 Astra", "Claude Opus 5.5"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-starskirmish-an-arena-where-llms-create-starcraft-brood-war-bots", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-starskirmish-an-arena-where-llms-create-starcraft-brood-war-bots.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-starskirmish-an-arena-where-llms-create-starcraft-brood-war-bots.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-starskirmish-an-arena-where-llms-create-starcraft-brood-war-bots.jsonld"}}