Sure, but even then it's difficult. Micro'ing three fronts at once would be difficult for a human but could easily fit within the AI's budget.

You could solve this by coming up with some sort of context-switch effort function but it starts to feel forced.

Or at least, once you start calibrating the parameters of the problem around human limitations, it sort of feels weird to talk about the computer being better or worse than the human.

I think you just need to require the computer to do the same thing a human does and only look at a specific part of the map at a time. Then switching between fronts will require clicking on the minimap to move the view to a different front, so frequent context switching is naturally penalized by the APM limit.

>You could solve this by coming up with some sort of context-switch effort function but it starts to feel forced.

Doesn't seem too forced to me IMO. Humans have to expend more effort to context switch, so if the goal is to put humans and computers on a level playing field that's something you have to take into account.

no one is even mentioning the role of vision in the game. for a human it's pretty tough to keep track of the minimap and play at the same time. you end up missing a lot of things. imagine something that could monitor both simulataneously.

APM limiting would be an interesting way to scale the game's difficulty level.

Maybe at high levels of play it would, but limiting the APM to even very low levels (e.g. 60 APM, i.e. 1 action per second) would still allow the computer to macro very efficiently, so I don't think it would be a balanced difficulty adjustment. It would be simulating highly skilled player with limited mobility rather than a player that is overall less skilled.

Depends on how you limit as well, what if it does 100 actions at once for example.

Perhaps we can have the AI move the mouse/keyboard at "human" limits?

I'm guessing that a limit of X actions per minute would be implemented by imposing a delay of 1/X minutes after each action during which the computer cannot execute another action.