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. I 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 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, so I was out. The organizers thought that was a great tournament rule for some reason… I was also 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 me 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 more! 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).

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 almost daily since then. My own games end up somewhere between Gold and Platinum still, huge lack of control & mechanics there. I guess I'm too old for that, but still trying to catch up at least a bit more… I guess 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!