  There have been numerous breakthroughs with reinforcement learning in the
recent years, perhaps most notably on Deep Reinforcement Learning successfully
playing and winning relatively advanced computer games. There is undoubtedly an
anticipation that Deep Reinforcement Learning will play a major role when the
first AI masters the complicated game plays needed to beat a professional
Real-Time Strategy game player. For this to be possible, there needs to be a
game environment that targets and fosters AI research, and specifically Deep
Reinforcement Learning. Some game environments already exist, however, these
are either overly simplistic such as Atari 2600 or complex such as Starcraft II
from Blizzard Entertainment. We propose a game environment in between Atari
2600 and Starcraft II, particularly targeting Deep Reinforcement Learning
algorithm research. The environment is a variant of Tower Line Wars from
Warcraft III, Blizzard Entertainment. Further, as a proof of concept that the
environment can harbor Deep Reinforcement algorithms, we propose and apply a
Deep Q-Reinforcement architecture. The architecture simplifies the state space
so that it is applicable to Q-learning, and in turn improves performance
compared to current state-of-the-art methods. Our experiments show that the
proposed architecture can learn to play the environment well, and score 33%
better than standard Deep Q-learning which in turn proves the usefulness of the
game environment.
