---
title: "Adversarial Hierarchical-Task Network Planning for Complex Real-Time Games"
authors:
  - "Santiago Ontañón"
  - "Michael Buro"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/236"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/0236.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2015
pages: "1652-1657"
track: "Main Track"
keywords:
---

# Adversarial Hierarchical-Task Network Planning for Complex Real-Time Games

Santiago Ontañón, Michael Buro

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1652-1657.

## Abstract

Real-time strategy (RTS) games are hard from an AI point of view because they have enormous state spaces, combinatorial branching factors, allow simultaneous and durative actions, and players have very little time to choose actions. For these reasons, standard game tree search methods such as alpha- beta search or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) are not sufficient by themselves to handle these games. This paper presents an alternative approach called Adversarial Hierarchical Task Network (AHTN) planning that combines ideas from game tree search with HTN planning. We present the basic algorithm, relate it to existing adversarial hierarchical planning methods, and present new extensions for simultaneous and durative actions to handle RTS games. We also present empirical results for the μRTS game, comparing it to other state of the art search algorithms for RTS games.