A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play
Details
- External ID
- 47149586
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play
- Website domain
- llmskirmish.com
- Launched
- Feb. 25, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 220
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9555256064690026
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I've liked all the projects that put LLMs into game environments. It's been a weird juxtaposition, though: frontier LLMs can one-shot full coding projects, and those same models struggle to get out of Pokémon Red's Mt. Moon.Because of this, I wanted to create a game environment that put this generation of frontier LLMs' top skill, coding, on full display.Ten years ago, a team released a game called Screeps. It was described as an "MMO RTS sandbox for programmers." The Screeps paradigm of writing code and having it executed in a real-time game environment is well suited to LLMs. Drawing on a version of the Screeps open source API, LLM Skirmish pits LLMs head-to-head in a series of 1v1 real-time strategy games.In my testing I found that Claude Opus 4.5 was the most dominant model, but it showed weakness in round 1 as it was overly focused on its in-game economy. Meanwhile, I probably spent a third of all code on sandbox hardening because GPT 5.2 kept trying to cheat by pre-reading its opponent's strategies.If there's interest, I'm planning on doing a round of testing with the latest generation of LLMs (Claude 4.6 Opus, GPT 5.3 Codex, etc.).You can run local matches via CLI. I'm running a hosted match runner with Google Cloud Run that uses isolated-vm. The match playback visualizer is statically served from Cloudflare.I've created a community ladder that you can submit strategies to via CLI, no auth required. I've found that the CLI plus the skill.md that's available has been enough for AI agents to immediately get started.Website: https://llmskirmish.comAPI docs: https://llmskirmish.com/docsGitHub: https://github.com/llmskirmish/skirmishA video of a match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnBPaZ1qamM
Enrichment
- Theme
- AI agent frameworks and developer tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- real-time strategy game for ai agents
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The system adapts the open-source Screeps engine or a custom 2D grid simulator to run Sandboxed JavaScript bots generated via standard LLM API calls and calculate ELO ratings.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: StarCraft AI competitions, OpenAI Five (Dota 2), Beyond All Reasons, Core War, C++Robots
Concerns raised: Turn-based autobattler misrepresented as RTS, Unclear if LLMs actually learn across rounds or improve win rates, Game state may be too token-intensive for LLMs to perceive effectively, LLMs attempting to cheat by accessing opponent strategies
Feature requests: Light mode, Support for hierarchical agents and communication protocols between teammates, Human-playable game mode, Multi-agent team-based matches (not just 1v1)
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 116 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #5 of 117 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 112 days after the earliest competitor.
- LLM Skirmish · hn · 2026-02-04 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.83
- Can you beat frontier LLMs at social strategy games? | Multi-Agent Arena by Olam Labs, evaluating through multi-agent simulations · yc · 2026-08-05 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Multi-Agent Arena · ph · 2026-09-27 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- LLMPvP · ph · 2026-09-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Yuanzai World · hn · 2026-01-10 · 31 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Speed Miners · hn · 2026-01-17 · 49 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- I taught LLMs to play Magic: The Gathering against each other · hn · 2026-02-17 · 117 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- A game/benchmark where AI bots hunt each other · hn · 2026-01-08 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.