Yes you have a lot of units in SC2, but often they're controlled as a group. You can micro, but it's mostly about the strength of the combined force, not individual units.

An AI would have to be able to play a whole team, i.e control and coordinate five units from a pool of over one hundred unique heroes, some of which can summon and control separate units in turn (e.g Lone Druid) and have abilities that interact in various non-obvious ways (and where it would be interesting to see new combinations and counters evolve).

After all, the AI learns by playing itself or watching games, so it's not about playing a /single/ unit. It's about playing a side.

The only way you get to "play safe" and "have perfect lane equilibrium" is if your opponents aren't doing anything. This is no different from any other game.

Farming is a much larger problem space in DOTA2 than in SC2, where there are already optimal or near-optimal strategies to number of workers, etc. The first few minutes of a SC2 game is just the same old boring mechanical opening shit. IMO YMMV.

My initial reaction when I saw this news was that it was a boring choice. It's a step up from Galaga, so maybe it makes sense as a stepping stone, but as a game something like DOTA2 would be much more interesting.

DOTA2, unlike SC2, heavily depends on both cooperation AND competition between players as an integral part of the standard game. It's got all all the same fog-of-war issues (i.e imperfect knowledge). There's for all intents and purposes one map, so you can focus on the strategy of the game without the changing topology of the map interferring. There's also a huge library of replays to learn from, with more coming online every minute.

It'd be interesting to know if DOTA2 was considered and rejected for some reason. Maybe it's as easy as Valve not being open to providing the hooks they need, but that doesn't sound like Valve.

I guess the positives for SC2 is that it's simpler, and they won't have to contend with too many changes/new units since it's at the end of its life.

Surely this is such a big risky project that it'd make sense to cooperate, or at the very least coordinate together?

Hurry up to die.

To get the other side of the argument I went to Matt Gardner, the director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (the research umbrella for Citizens for Tax Justice). The CTJ is nonpartisan and nonprofit, and it's funded by some of the same foundations that fund NPR. As it turns out, Gardner energetically disagrees with many of the statements in Cook's letter. Here are his responses to Cook's main points.

A Tax Expert Takes Tim Cook's EU Letter Apart Point By Point

This. It's well known by everyone but the OP apparently.

The amazing thing is that they feel they have to use this excuse at all, I don't get why they're all afraid to just say 'Nah, not enough status'. Bunch of losers.