AI Coaching for SC2
What AI coaching actually means here
When people hear “AI coach,” they usually picture some kind of bot watching over their shoulder in real-time. That’s not what this is. An SC2 AI coach works after the game. You upload your .SC2Replay file, the parser rips out every game event, and then a language model reads through that structured data. It looks at your economy numbers, your build order timings, your army trades, when you expanded, when you lost units. Then it writes up specific advice based on what actually happened in your game.
It’s closer to sending your replay to a friend who’s better than you and asking “what should I have done differently?” Except the friend responds in about ten seconds and never gets tired of watching your games.
How it differs from a human coach
A human coach brings something an AI genuinely cannot replicate: feel for the meta, intuition about opponent psychology, and the ability to say “yeah, that was the right call even though it didn’t work out.” A good human coach understands context beyond what the numbers show.
Where the AI wins is speed, availability, and consistency. It will review your replay at 3 AM on a Tuesday. It won’t have an off day. It checks the same things every single time, so you get a reliable baseline. It also doesn’t cost $30 an hour. The tradeoff is that it lacks the subtlety a GM-level coach brings to reading intentions and making judgment calls. If you can afford a human coach, use both. The AI handles the repetitive macro analysis so your sessions with a real coach can focus on higher-level decisions.
What the AI actually sees
The AI doesn’t watch a video of your game. It reads structured data extracted from the replay file. That includes: mineral and gas collection rates over time, worker counts, supply timings, every unit and structure built with timestamps, full build orders for both players, upgrade timings, and a breakdown of every battle that happened. It knows how many units each player lost in each fight, what the army compositions were, and who came out ahead in resources traded.
That’s a lot of data for a single game. For a deeper look at everything the parser pulls out, check the replay analysis guide.
What it’s good at
Macro analysis is where an SC2 AI coach earns its keep. It will catch things like: you floated 1500 minerals at the 6-minute mark, your third base was 30 seconds late compared to the standard timing for your opener, you had 14 idle workers after your natural finished, you stopped making probes for almost a full minute during your push. These are the kinds of mistakes that are hard to spot when you’re in the game but obvious from the data.
It’s also good at identifying build order deviations. If you opened with a standard build but drifted off track by adding an extra gateway before your robo, the AI will flag it and explain the downstream effects on your tech timing. It spots resource waste patterns across games too: if you keep losing the same units to the same kind of engagement, it will call that out.
What it’s honestly not great at
Micro. The AI has no concept of unit positioning, spell targeting, stutter stepping, or any of the physical execution that separates a Diamond player from a Masters player. It knows you lost 8 stalkers in a fight, but it can’t tell you whether better blink micro would have saved them. The replay data simply doesn’t contain that level of spatial detail.
It also can’t read opponent intent. A human coach watching a replay might say “see how they moved their overlord there? They were scouting for a cannon rush.” The AI doesn’t have that kind of game sense. It works with outcomes, not intentions. Creative plays, mind games, and metagame reads are all outside its reach. If your question is “was my bane split good enough?” the honest answer is: the AI has no idea. If your question is “should I have attacked here or kept droning?” it can actually help with that because the economy data tells the story.
Team game analysis
For 2v2s, 3v3s, and 4v4s, the AI reads data from every player in the game. It can see whether your team’s combined economy kept pace with the opponents, which player on your side was pulling their weight and which was falling behind, and how battles played out across different parts of the map at the same time.
One thing it does well in team games is spotting coordination problems. If one teammate is massing carriers while the other is doing an early timing attack, the AI will point out that the army compositions and timing don’t line up. It can also identify when your team lost a fight because one player’s army arrived late. That said, team games are inherently messier than 1v1s. The advice is still useful but expect it to be broader. There are more variables and more chaos, so the coaching reflects that.
Getting the most out of it
One replay gives you one data point. The real value shows up when you upload a batch of games and look for patterns in the feedback. If the AI keeps telling you that your third base is late across five different games, that’s a real habit you need to fix. If it only mentions it once, maybe you just got pressured that game.
A few tips that help. First, don’t just read the AI’s advice and move on. Open the economy and army graphs alongside the coaching tab and verify what it’s saying against the actual data. Second, focus on one or two things per session. The AI might give you six suggestions, but trying to fix everything at once is a recipe for fixing nothing. Third, combine AI coaching with your own replay review. Watch the replay yourself first, form your own opinion about what went wrong, and then see what the AI thinks. The places where your assessment and the AI’s disagree are usually the most interesting.
Try it yourself
Upload a replay and see what the AI coach finds. It takes a few seconds to parse and analyze the whole game.