Reactive planning idioms for multi-scale game AI

Many modern games provide environments in which agents perform decision making at several levels of granularity. In the domain of real-time strategy games, an effective agent must make high-level strategic decisions while simultaneously controlling individual units in battle. We advocate reactive planning as a powerful technique for building multi-scale game AI and demonstrate that it enables the specification of complex, real-time agents in a unified agent architecture. We present several idioms used to enable authoring of an agent that concurrently pursues strategic and tactical goals, and an agent for playing the real-time strategy game StarCraft that uses these design patterns.