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So I downloaded a copy and messed around with it for an hour or so this evening. First impression: stating the obvious here, but overall, very strong sense that this is the same game I played a decade ago. I actually only had vague memories of the Starcraft by this point, but this brought them all back to me. In campaign mode, the first mission is a tactical walkaround with a fixed number of units, and the second is destroying a large/established but strangely unaggressive enemy base sending small waves at you when it feels like. Then, I tried fake-multiplayer against an AI to start learning the ropes, and it's the same micromanagy experience with the two little resource counters increasing in the corner and most things are idle until you click on them. Well, since I usually prefer to revisit genres containing a game I'd already mastered (in this case, Warcraft II) only when some fundamentally fresh element has been added to the experience, probably this wasn't the best purchase for me. (Anyone have any suggestions for very different-feeling RTSes, by the way?)

It mostly reminds me of the reason why I stopped playing RTSes way back when. I tend to be acutely aware of every moment I waste thinking about my next move as opposed to clicking on things -- precious seconds that the unseen foe is using to get ahead of me. And I go through all these little self-recriminations as I notice that I left that barracks idle, that I left resources accumulate without spending them, that I forgot to send that unit scouting, etc. So most of the game is covered by a miasma of low-grade stress and guilt. It's really this that saps my enjoyment of the game, personally, not the sandcastle-destroying stuff haze was talking about (I'm fine with that -- I'm a born rusher). And it seems like I'd have to improve to a very high level of micromanagement smoothness before I stopped feeling like this.

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Tycho's comments on Starcraft II are unusually apt:

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I found this post has a lot of youtube videos covering useful multiplayer tricks: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=142512

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This is similar to the kind of issues Wing Commander IV ran into way back in 1995 (and SCII's campaign mode may well be directly inspired by WCIII/IV by the way: the resemblance is uncanny). The most memorable part of WCIV's plot is that in the early game, it lets you choose to ally with either the Earth starfleet or defect to a ragtag band of rebels. Starfleet is gradually revealed to be corrupt and the game expects you to eventually decide to defect. But there are 3-4 extra missions you can do by choosing to remain with Starfleet for longer, each of which gives stronger and stronger evidence that your side is evil (and each giving you a chance to defect in the middle). In the final Starfleet mission, the game forces the issue by telling you to destroy the rebel mothership, which is designed to be impossibly hard. But if you insist on being evil, play skilfully and destroy it anyway, then the game makes the Starfleet mothership explode at the same time for absolutely no reason, so there's no way to complete the mission on the Starfleet side.

Sounds like SCII finds a different solution to this problem (I haven't reached that point yet). Though I can say that ultimately, in all the cases I've seen so far, this kind of choose-your-own-adventure storyline ends up feeling cheap one way or another. Agency is shared clumsily between designer and player such that the former can't build an organic storyline and the latter feels that the choices offered are meaningless.

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I played my first Practice League match yesterday and won handily in 15 minutes, so that was fun. I busted through the two side-entrance rocks as fast as I could and waltzed into his base with 4 marines, and by the time his zerglings came back to the base from wherever he had parked them, all his drones were dead. After that it didn't take long until GG. I always loved to rush back when I played RTSes, so I'm not too fond of the extra blockages on every Practice League map, but I guess it at least means that any semi-rush like this will catch the enemy even more by surprise.

After that I spent a couple of hours reading up on basic strategy on liquipedia. A good starting point is http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Definitions , otherwise some of the other guides' terminology can be confusing. ("6-rax"??) Also http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Build_Order since the notation is about as obtuse as chess moves.

Anyway, while I knew that in theory this was a deep game, I'm really starting to appreciate why. While the basic game is the same as Warcraft II (the last RTS I played a lot of multiplayer of) -- efficiently multitasking between fighting, scouting and economy expansion -- each one of those three areas has been deepened by an order of magnitude. Fighting now involves careful rock-paper-scissor unit building as well as micromanagement of unit skills, and your micro skills also feed into what will be an effective macro strategy. In scouting, I was astonished to see the variety of scouting-oriented units and tricks Starcraft II has. For economic development, the race-specific economic boosts are welcome. And of course these aren't distinct minigames or anything, they all interact organically and deepen each other in turn.

The upshot is an experience of play that's extremely intense and dynamic game-by-game, but even more importantly with a sense of weight and purpose because each game is a learning experience. It's another step on a ladder of increasing mastery and power, sort of like what WoW provides with levels and equipment but without any of the fakery. It seems like a profoundly satisfying experience, but it demands that you invest yourself and be serious about winning not only the current game but also all the potential games in the future. It's harsh and alienating to the casual player who only wants a short-term romp and doesn't care about moving up in the Starcraft world, but it's enthralling to the novice initiate whose very losses symbolize the awesome landscape of skills to be mastered.

You can see that I'm tempted to go on this path -- I've done it for a couple other demanding games -- but I've got so many other things to do in real life that I really shouldn't. In which case though, I'm not sure it's worth playing just a small amount of games, so despite my increasing admiration for the multiplayer design, I may end up not playing at all.

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I like the MULE/etc management but I'm not too fond of the old-fashioned supply mechanic, which is another kind of regular check-up mechanic but annoyingly punitive instead of boost-based. Now of course I'm saying this because I suck and keep finding myself supply-blocked in the midgame, but I feel it's pretty stupid to have to look at a tiny number in the corner and if I don't I can't build anything for a whole minute, nor do I see how it deepens the game much. I would've liked it if they got rid of that whole Warcraft I relic (yeah some pros would whine, but that's going to be because their mastery of it gives them an edge), or at the very least give some clear audio/visual warnings when your supply is running low.

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I'm really having trouble with turtling Terrans. I don't have a good feel for what it takes to bust through their defenses, and my invasion forces typically get demolished even when I'm trying to be clever about it (e.g. banelings, two-pronged attacks etc). Then with some of these practice league players, they don't even counterattack so it just makes for interminable games. I've been giving up on games after an hour of stalemate despite having better macro and map control.

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I guess my problem with turtlers isn't so much that I couldn't beat them if I really wanted to take a patient starvation/expansion/mass-huge-army approach, but that I'm not willing to play for an hour or more in a totally boring game. Whereas games against fun, aggressive players tend to be over in less than half an hour, games against crap turtlers last forever: the upshot is that although only about a third of my games so far have been against them, they've consumed 2/3ds of my playtime. It seems to me it's a flaw in Starcraft that losing players can extend the game interminably by turtling or hiding. I feel like there should be a win condition other than "destroy all buildings".

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Anyway, after the general praise of the story of schlock like Bioshock, I'm pleased with the fact that practically everybody seems to hate the writing in the SCII campaign (even IGN!). It's strangely heartening to realize that the level of taste among reviewers and "gamers" hasn't actually hit rock bottom. And hopefully the blowback will lead Blizzard to demote some folks, redraw the storyboards and get their act together for the next installments (slim hope, I know).

Though, even if the individual sentences in the script were fixed to no longer be cringe-inducing, just the basic concept of new adventures for old Starcraft heroes limits the level of quality the story can reach. Somebody like Kerrigan has already gone through a complete (and pretty cool I might add) character arc in the previous games, and there's really nowhere else to take the character that won't feel either like a travesty or rehash. And personally, I didn't even remember any of the characters' names, so I don't see why they insisted on reusing them -- especially given a game universe with so many different factions and minor characters. Modern Warfare had a better idea with its narrow, constantly shifting perspectives of grunt-level soldiers -- given Starcraft's focus on small tactical battles without overarching metagame strategy, this would've been a great fit for its story too.

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Well, we're only talking about the cutscenes and whatnot here. The actual campaign levels are well-paced, challenging and varied.

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I had two of my funnest games so far tonight. The first was a satisfying 25min TvT Blistering Sands matchup where I basically dominated on all fronts, even though my opponent was relatively strong by practice league standards. Early on I wiped out half his workers with a reaper rush -- even though he already had 4 marauders, they were at the choke point and very slow to respond. I think he had a lot of trouble recovering from that, I noticed he was very late to expand to his natural later. Then I gradually encroached on his base with marauder/tank/viking mix, basically taking my time advancing a couple of tanks at a time and waiting for reinforcements when weakened, first cutting off his expansion and gradually wiping out his army.

The second was a 50min metalopolis TvP. My opponent was weak, all he did was mass Stalkers, he played very defensively and I had much better macro and map control, but I still lost because I had no idea what the counter to Stalkers was. Reading up on them now, I now see I should've cranked out marauders instead of sending all those 50-marine/8 tank armies to be butchered (my simplistic understanding was that marines were good against protoss :) and I most likely would've won. I destroyed two of his expansions out of 4 before they were very developed but he let me take 5. I was overaggressive, kept getting wiped out and there were multiple times when he could've taken his massed stalkers and walked right over my base, but he didn't due to cowardliness and lack of scouting. Near the end, I launched about 8 nukes at his massed army -- again one would have been enough to win, I think he was out of resources while I had 10000/5000 with 200 units -- but I was too predictable with my aim and he kept dodging them. I think the nukes spooked him into eventually actually coming over and destroying my base. I tried to insta-rebuild a whole new base with all my accumulated resources, but before I had an army he came over and destroyed that one too :(. I don't agree with you guys's claims that knowing the counters doesn't matter that much.

EDIT: Also duh should've used EMP with all those ghosts.

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So I finally ran out of Practice League and did my placement matches tonight. So I finally found out where I stand in the pecking order: low Silver. I won 3 out of 5 but I the ones I lost were against Silver-level players (I asked after gg). Guess I should start following the advice in this guide: http://www.gamesradar.com/pc/starcraft-ii/preview/a-gentlemans-guide-to-losing-at-starcraft-ii/a-20100226104617602007/g-20070518211627437097

I had stayed in Practice a long time because I wanted to familiarize myself with all three races before going into ranked, so I wouldn't feel afraid of switching race later on. Anyway, now that I'm playing for real I can see what difference those destructible rocks made. I know in principle to expect rushes, but it's still surprising just how fast and in quantity the early armies come in. Practice league gave me lots of experience with massive macro and late-game armies that I gather is hard to pick up normally -- I did finally figure out how to crack turtles -- but my early-game habits are all wrong. There I am running my economy efficiently and building what I perceive is a reasonably sized army, when one 50% larger waltzes up my ramp. But I like it, games are much faster now, I just need to rehabituate my play for the new tempo.

BTW, about that replay, I waited too long to find out where it was and it seems to have been overwritten... I wish they were cloud-synced.

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Random bump to mention I've started playing this again lately, since I finally have a bit of a lull at work.

I've been rotating evenly between races and dicking around a lot trying to improve my feel for what works -- combined with long intervals between games, I haven't been playing very well-planned or efficient games and it hasn't done my ranking any favors. My theorycraft is now pretty solid but my execution isn't there.

Overall, my comfort zone is still definitely with Terran. My favorite thing about them is that their Orbital Command macro mechanic always feels like a nice bonus smoothing over whatever pain point you have at the moment. Plopped down a new expansion? Put all the workers there on gas to begin with and MULE the shit out of its minerals. Worried about what your enemy is hiding, or getting attacked by invisible guys? Scan away. Supply blocked? Not for long. It's the total opposite of the other races, especially Zerg. With Zerg, creating larva is just a tedious obligation that you're harshly punished for not doing. With Protoss, the punishment for forgetting Chronoboost is less visible but it's essentially the same story, and the benefit is nullified if you're sloppy with keeping your buildings active anyway.

Zerg play in general feels like a hazard course of obligations and pitfalls. The larva thing is only the start of it. If you're ever supply blocked, you're totally hosed because overlords take forever to build. If you build too many expansions you're hosed early game, not enough you're hosed mid-game. If you don't make creep all over the map, you can't send your blob quickly to defend your expansions. If your opponent goes air and you haven't teched a counter, you're hosed. Of course the only way to scout the air inside the enemy wallin is to send an overlord, which gets back to the supply block issue. If you navigate all this successfully you end up in a pleasant position of taking over the whole map, replenishing giant armies instantly and putting up some duplicate tech buildings so you don't even care if your main base is destroyed, but man is it a slog to get there.

Protoss look like fun to play. They have fantastic army mobility, with warpgates, blink, colossus cliff climbing, all-purpose air (void ray) and generally fast movement speed. As Terran, I've repeatedly gotten massacred by Protoss back attacks while my army was elsewhere. The Sentries and High Templars also have very generally useful spells. But I haven't really mastered these Protoss tricks myself yet and basically have been just playing them like Terrans, so I mainly notice their weaker points like the poorer macro mechanic, difficulty in walling in etc.

So I think from now on I'll settle on playing 90% Terran and learn some proper build orders so I can start putting my knowledge to use. I'm planning to focus on 1/1/1 and the general counters to enemy strategies:

* In TvT, slowly pushing forward with tanks and vikings, denying expansions and attacking from advantageous terrain seems the way to go.

* In TvZ, get up in the Zerg player's face and attack his bases constantly with my pound-for-pound tougher units before he gains map control. At your main base and each expansion, couple of tanks, towers combined with the currently building reinforcements should be enough to hold off Zerg counterattacks provided he hasn't run creep up to your side of the map yet. Also, constantly mess with him with Banshee and Viking (v.s. overlord).

* TvP seems like the most complicated. It's hard to attack Protoss with your main army when you don't have a decisive advantage because 'toss is tough and also has the option of striking back wherever your army isn't. So you have to turtle a bit and focus on M&M-drop/banshee harassment while the bulk of your army stays home. Ideally, you want to build a huge army of the counter of whatever unit the Protoss is focusing on, supplement that army with ghosts and then lure the Toss main force into a confrontation on the open field where you EMP the crap out of him and mow him down, then walk to his main base to cement your win. And you really have to scout the Protoss main base properly and think carefully about what kind of unit you're focusing on, because Toss has a variety of great options and you're dead if he attacks with a thing you didn't expect. Generally, your backbone is MMM and Ghost, but if he's doing a lot of X you need to counter with a lot of Y:
- Zealots/Photon cannons -> go Siege tank
- Stalker/Immortal -> Marauder
- Void Ray -> Marine/Viking/Thor
- Colossus -> Viking/Banshee and go lighter on the bio


I'm also going to try to get into a more regular rhythm with my game. I need to remember every 30 seconds or so to go 4 (control group, orbital command macro mechanic/worker building), 5 (army buildings), 6 (research), then check supply, check my money and see if I can build more buildings, then move around some units on the map to start harassment. Then 15 seconds or so of "free play" for whatever most needs doing at the moment, then go back to the beginning of the routine. As it is, I spend too much time flailing and thinking about what I need to do next instead of just doing it.

So that's my overall game plan. Let's see how it works out in practice.

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Yeah, roach rushes are a serious threat to Terran, particularly on small maps. I've gotten dominated by them even though I was teching to marauders and walled in reasonably quickly. The thing is that even a single roach is a threat very early on, so it can be used to turn a slight early development speed advantage into an immediate victory -- attack with one roach and kill the first few marines, gradually reinforce with more roaches and kill the units as they come out of the barracks one at a time (if the marauders start coming out too late, they won't be a powerful enough counter). It's pretty sad to see this slow-motion rush gradually roll over you and not be able to do anything to stop it. The only defense is good scouting and just plain fast/efficient macro before it arrives.

But, most bronze/silver-league players don't know about this rush, so I'm not saying it's a huge deal. It's just one of the many, many things that you need to know how to deal with before you can win consistently. Zergling rush is much more common and that's easy to counter with the usual ramp wallin.

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Dunno, most of my experience with battlecruisers (mainly in Practice League, where they come up more often because rushes don't work there) is that they were pretty good, but that was before a patch that nerfed them. They don't have any particular strengths or weaknesses, they are just generally powerful (but that doesn't mean you're getting your money's worth). If you don't put enough pressure on a player and let him accumulate a crapload of them (>20), they'll destroy just about anything. Same with Protoss Carriers.

They are relevant particularly in turtle scenarios: either the turtle himself is collecting those cruisers for a long time, or the player with the map control can build a ton of them quickly to bust into his base. I don't think that happens in high-level games, no, but they're still a relevant part of the game.

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I wouldn't call that "easily". I mean look at what you just explained, you need to have good scouting and macro to build a big clump of the counter before the cruisers attack, then also maintain tight micro to consistently kite/blink the cruisers. Against an opponent who fails to do all that, the cruiser pile wins by default. I'm just saying, I came in assuming as well that battlecruisers were a joke because every good player says so, then I lost to them a couple of times and stopped mocking them quite so much. In a match between two less expert players they are quite effective.

I would say Brood Lords are a different kind of unit entirely despite superficially being on the same place on the tech tree. They are much weaker individually and they have no defense against air. Because Zerg is all about accumulating massive clumps of overpriced units thanks to greater production/resource accumulation anyway, a unit like Battlecruiser or Carrier would be too much up their alley and be unbalanced.

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Well, you didn't really say anything inaccurate, I just brought it up because I got burned by analogizing Brood Lords to the other capital ships before. According to Liquipedia, Battlecruisers have 550 HP and 35 DPS, Carriers have 450 HP and 26 DPS, while Brood Lords have 225 HP and 8 DPS. They were a lot weaker than I expected when I first used them, and it's easy to not send enough of them if you're used to the other races' capital ships.

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For line-of-sight, it's more typical to build Vikings. These will also help defend against all kinds of air threats. Orbital scans should be used sparingly since you do need that energy for muling.

Using both siege tank and thor at once is a bit heavy on the mech. You'll be weak against anti-armor. I usually prefer to accompany my mechs with marauders. It's a good way of continuing to exploit your early-game barracks and infantry techs.

Also, keep in mind MMM is weak against mech, so in TvT it's only useful in the early game. Medivacs are hard to handle too yeah: in a sense their mobility is nerfed by how awkward they are to control. Common mistakes: don't move them at all while they're unloading or they'll stop the unload, and watch your clicking to make sure your troops don't reenter them by mistake.

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Anyway, I should note that I still suck hard at this game, but I act like a knowledgeable player on SB! I haven't even played in a while because it's too intense and was giving me insomnia if I played it too late. Funny, I have no problem at all playing Left 4 Dead, Vanquish, Puzzle League, and all manner of other fast-paced games, but I find this game of clicking on little space toys to be in a whole different league of pressure. It's just so relentless in how fast and efficient you need to be in every second of play, and on multiple factors at once.

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Well. It's usually 8 or 9 minutes. And 10 seconds.

I don't see this as a flaw, but I guess you could say Starcraft is a bit of a bait-and-switch if you come in expecting a strategy game. It's about military logistics.

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I used 'strategy' to mean the combination of strategy and tactics. A lot of SCII is neither. To some degree, it doesn't matter what you build, as long as you have more of it than your opponent. That comes from all that crazy clicking. In those first 8 minutes of the game, what is really going on is that the players are shaving a second here and a second there through careful planning and quick reactions to different events (enough food, minerals or gas for the next development step), and thus end up with more units earlier than the opponent.

Strategic matters like army composition and attack timing gain most of their depth in the way they interact with the logistics. Players plan in advance for a target army size/mix, but this plan is always subject to change based on enemy actions, so that you can't simply memorize one build order. Surprise attacks can divert resources and attention from development, and scouted enemy unit types may require a change of building direction to counter them. SCII always keeps you constantly juggling balls at your home base even as the ground shifts under you. Or, rather, it's two jugglers each trying to push the other guy out of balance. Sumo juggling.

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Same reason people play a fast-paced puzzle game like Tetris Attack or Digidrive, or one of those restaurant sims where you have a queue of customers and dishes that you run around carefully timing. It's pretty satisfying when all the elements fall into place exactly when they should.

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I like the first 40 seconds. It's a chance to breathe, get emotionally ready and think about your intention for the game (a battle plan, or an area you'd like to focus on improving your skills at).

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