The problem with this type of planning is that it is not nearly powerful enough to address real problems in Starcraft (except for the given examples) because:

The problem with this type of planning is that it is not nearly powerful enough to address real problems in Starcraft (except for the given examples) because: -discreteness: Well, I think it's safe to assume that every starcraft state is discrete (for sure it's binary representation is) but in general you cannot assume it. - imperfect information: For planning, it's necessary to know or meaningfully guess the state of the enemy and that is not possible due to fog of war. Therefore, everything involving enemy interaction cannot be planned. - dimensionality: There are so many actions available at each state that you shouldn't even be able to reach a depth of 3 of the planning tree in a reasonable amount of time. For instance, if you have 50 units, you can send each subset of them to attack or move to say 128x128 points on the map, you end up having 2^50 x 16k x 2 possible moves. And that doesn't include build units, build buildings + some more exotic stuff like patrol, set rally points, ... You can prune some stuff (e.g., never attack with peons after minute 10, never move to or attack your own buildings) but the order of magnitude should stay the same. So planning is nice but not for continuous problem spaces (real world), problems with imperfect information (every good card game) or problems with a high number of actions (something as "easy and simple" as Go), rendering it IMO not so useful after all.