User:OmaMorkie

About me:

My in-game character is an evil (read aggressive) – chaotic (read wild build orders and tech-switches) Zerg. I love to burry 6 banes in your third mineral line before you build the expansion and slow-walk (or fly) queens around with creep-poop overlords in the middle of the map to catch up on my miserable early game creep spread. My favorite pro-gamers are Crank and Has.

Out of game, well, my history with strategy computer games goes back to 1988, with the good old Battle Isle on the Amiga 500. It had fog of war, and surrounding an enemy unit (on the hex-grid) gave you a bonus, the steeper the angle, the higher the bonus. Works like that with Hydra-Bane, too, doesn't it? I then got hooked on RTS since the release date of Dune 2 – or rather, shortly thereafter, when I got my hands on an illegal copy. What can I say? I was young and needed the money.

Been with RTS ever since until about the year 2000. I believe I played on what was the first LAN tournament in the German Broodwar Scene (not quite pro back then). Got killed in the first round by a Terran, and after that revenge slaughtered him 2-0 on lost temple. The tournament first round was a best-of-1 on a map none of the players had ever seen before. The organizers thought that was a great tournament rule for some reason: Well, I admit the new map thing would be kind of cool, but only if we had a lot more time to analyze the layout first… I was further in the same Team as BenniTheCow (shout out to Benedict from Türkenfeld), actually I was one of the founders of that Team and coached him a bit when he got started. He quickly shot way above my skill level and was amount the first Germans to ever get invited to Korea for Tournament.

Well, and thereafter I dropped RTS completely, tried to learn Go for a while and even harder tried to find something meaningful to do with my life. I guess I didn't predict that RTS would play a key role in the future of AI research at that time, or I would have certainly stuck with it! So now I'm married, my dayjob is as a climate change consultant, and I still suck at Go on Kyu 12 (approx. middle Gold League). And maybe I should mention that I used a custom-made “Farm-Ville” App game in an economic experiment on deforestation in Brazil (https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/101610), so I do have a history of bringing computer games in science together.

Well and finally, here I'm back in the game. Big shout out to Per, a wonderful colleague, who asked me out for night of Starcraft with him and his friend about a year ago. How could I have said no, and hooked I am again. Wow, you guys have made some amazing progress in my absence. Been watching pro-games, coaching sessions and strategy guides almost daily since then. My own games end up somewhere between Gold and Platinum still, huge lack of control, mechanics and time to play there. I guess I'm too old for that, but still trying to catch up at least a bit more… But my future role shall be the mad scientist, optimizing the AI training for a player. And I really want to get started with my new job the same day that Blizzard and Google open up the Archon-Mode to us!