Games have to be fun which means that the goal of the AI is to gracefully lose to the human player after making him exert some effort.
The problem is that most RTS games stand no chance against me or any other half-descent player, unless they are cheating. And when they cheat, the game is very much brute force vs strategy.
I've been playing "Ultimate general: Gettysburg", which was touted as having put a lot off effort into AI, and which paid off - when I play it on the highest difficulty settings, I can still win convincingly, but it does feel like I am playing an incompitant human, rather than an artificial stupidity. Its far more enjoyable to play.
The problem is that most RTS games stand no chance against me or any other half-descent player
Sure. Consider that the game has to run on your sucky home computer (or, forbid, a console), most likely without a GPU. The strategy/tactics/behaviour code has to share the CPU cycles with a large variety of things including the uninteresting but vital functions like pathfinding and it has to make its decisions within the tick time which is a fraction of second. AND many players prefer the AI to be a pushover, anyway.
So chess and Go are both games of perfect information. How important is it for the next game that DeepMind is trained on to be a game of perfect information?
How would the AI perform on generalized versions of both chess and Go? What about games like poker and Magic the Gathering?
How realistic do you think it's possible to train DeepMind on games of perfect information (full-map-reveal) against top-ranked players on games like Starcraft, AOE2, Civ, Sins of a Solar Empire, Command and Conquer, and Total War, for example? (in all possible map settings, including ones people don't frequently play at - e.g. start at "high resource" levels). How important is it for the AI to have a diverse set/library of user-created replays to test itself against, for example?
I'm also thinking... Shitty AI has always held back both RTS and TBS games.. Is it possible that we're only a few years away from non-shitty AI in all RTS and TBS games? Or is the AI in many of these games too hard-coded in to actually matter? (e.g. I know some people who develop AI for AOE2, and there are issues with AI behavior in the game being hard-coded in - e.g. villagers deleting the building they're building if you simply attack them).