Real time strategy games are among the most challenging for artificial intelligence development and research. The need to manage resources and agent co-ordination in this genre still presents real challenges to even the most state of the art techniques in AI. My recent series on the AI of Total War highlights the continued efforts by series developers Creative Assembly to improve and expand the suite of AI systems required to craft the epic battles and nuanced diplomacy players comes to expect from that franchise. Today I want to look at this same issue from a research perspective, with a particular focus on the franchise that is arguably most synonymous with the genre: Blizzard's StarCraft. I want to take a look at the challenges this series presents to AI research and the significant efforts made in developing new AI techniques that adopts StarCraft as a test-bed. It's important that this be re-iterated at time when mass media rhetoric suggests the recent interest by the likes of Google DeepMind is the first real exploration of the problem.