I’m in the Beta and there’s a post on the forums saying we’re not barred from saying anything. So… ask away!
Is there a single player campaign worth playing? or is it more a testing of Battle.net capabilities.
How is the gameplay like? Something similar to twitch reflexes like SC1? I thought I read somewhere that SC2 is supposed to be more strategic and less Actions per minute (apm) reflexes that pro-gamers from Korea have. That’ll be awesome for the aging gamer with slower reaction times.
Are the graphics as good as the replays show? I saw some terran units dancing with a /dance command. Do toss and zerg dance too?
Damn you’re so lucky.
What’s your Battle.net username and password?
Serious: what’s your rank/league?
How’s the balance seem so far? I’m also curious about the tempo. Are the games still fast-paced?
It’s Battle.net only. There’s a sort of beta ladder right now, ranks go from Practice (which you can opt out of) to bronze, copper… etc, to Platinum rank. You can play against computer players, but right now there only seems to be very easy level available, though that may be because I’m in the practice bracket, I’ll check again when I “graduate.”
Very Easy is, indeed, very freaking easy. Like, the enemy doesn’t seem to tech past tier 2, sometimes tier 1.5. I’ve never seen them build an air unit.
Well, obviously there’s still that bit of twitch that’s inherent in any RTS, simply because the faster you can place a building the faster you can get units. It actually seems sped up a tad. That’s not to say it’s not strategic, but for a given game speed setting units seem to both build faster and die faster. Build orders are very important.
Unit management-wise it seems to have balanced Starcraft (almost all macro) with Warcraft (almost all micro), almost every unit has an ability, but not to an insane degree. Most of the abilities are either autocast or toggle (think Siege Tank Deploy), except the usual “tech” units like the Ghost.
The graphics are quite good. I did not know there were slash commands, I’ll have to check that. Thanks for the heads up.
Some other miscellaneous things:
I’m not sure what’s been balanced out and what’s simply not finished. For instance, the Protoss mothership, as of now, is an Arbiter for all intents and purposes. Literally, it has every ability that an arbiter has, the same slow weak attack and none of the cool reality-bending stuff we saw in the preview.
Terran seem… squishy for some reason, things die faster in this game in general but Terran are very, very hit and run. Almost any unit that’s not a Thor will not stand up to any extended damage. I’m not very good so I can’t really comment on balance right now, but Terran seem like a race you’ll need to micro a lot more than the others. That’s not to say they’re poor, I just got my ass handed to me by the Terran, they just don’t seem to play too easily for me.
Terran in general seem weaker somehow. Nukes are still in, but they’re quite downplayed. They still incinerate units to an absurd degree, but buildings shrug off nukes pretty well, usually only taking around 1/4th HP damage. Of course, remember this is all still being balanced, I’m just commenting on now. On the other hand, Terran shine at splash even more now, a tight group of units will not get past a moderate sized Terran force.
One cool thing is that there’s a “build order” tab after a battle now, so you can see exactly what your enemy built and when, compared to you. It seems a little buggy unless there are already hacks somehow. For instance, I just played my first multi match after dicking around to see units vs computer and when I attacked the enemy’s base with my army of zealots, stalkers, and immortals he already had 3 Thors out, I didn’t even really see any Tier 3 buildings on the build order, nor did I see any unit past marine on it. It was presumably done in the gap where it doesn’t report him doing anything for 6 minutes.
I just found it today, logging into Bnet. It showed the SCII Beta under “My Games” and I just kind of said “oh… that’s kinda awesome.” I’m still in the practice league. I never was very good at Starcraft, so if you’re looking for in-depth analysis of the evolving metagame I’d be happy to tell you the scuttlebutt on the forums, but I’m not the person for up-to-the-minute strategy info.
Tempo answered a few quotes above. Balance is fine from what I can tell on the forums. It seems that right now most people play Protoss/Zerg but Terran aren’t “down and out,” sort of a rotation of the SC1 concept of “Zerg and Terran, then Protoss.”
Edit: Oh, and rushing, while effective, isn’t QUITE so much anymore. It’s mostly agreed that until you have one or two T1.5 units (Roaches for Zerg for instance) that a rush will most likely get trampled by any player who knows what he’s doing. Protoss are the exception, not that in a Zealot rush is effective, but rather that Protoss tech slightly faster and can get Immortals (T2) faster, whereas Stalkers are considered nice, but not good enough auxiliary support for a full raid.
If you guys are trying to find a site to scratch the SC2 itch, Youtube HuskyStarcraft uploads and commentates SC2 matches.
Oh man, I just watched my first replay. I was close. If I hadn’t waited for my second immortal I would have won, he got his Thors the second I got to his base.
I think I might have mentioned him on the forums before, but one of my best friends from college is a competitive Starcraft player. It actually wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say he’s one of the best players in North America–he represented the US at the World Cyber Games multiple times, and I believe he won the WGC Pan-American championships at least one of the years that we were in college. Anyway, his knowledge of the game’s mechanics and strategy are beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Although I’ve played it a bunch, my knowledge of Starcraft doesn’t go much beyond attack/move, but I spent hours discussing the game and watching replays with him, and it’s entertaining as hell.
Anyway he’s been doing a live cast of professional Starcraft games with his commentary for the past several months, and recently he’s been doing commentary on SC2 replays, along the lines of what BMada posted (I’m not sure how much Day9 and HuskyStarcraft differ in style or in what they focus on, not having watched the latter at all). It might be cool to check out if you want to see some opinions from a very competitive, strategy-focused viewpoint. Here’s the index where you can watch saved casts: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=104154 (Starcraft 2 stuff is mostly since mid-February)
Your friend. Is Day9.
envy
Okay, I’m 1 for 8 today. Did I mention I’m not very good? From what I can tell both from my own experience and that on the forums is that Zerg are a tad bit overpowered through their versatility right now. Specifically a hydralisk army (which requires 2 buildings, 3 if you add in an unrelated one most Zerg players would probably build) embarrasses almost anything. The Protoss counter seems to be Zealots with charge (Zealots are T1, but charge is T2 at least, and most Protoss will opt for immortals thereby wasting resources before then), and if you don’t want to get ripped apart, Colossi as well. Colossi are T3. Terran apparently means you need a crap load of marines, preferable with the healing transport and possibly a Raven.
I can’t comment too well on Terran, but for Protoss this is difficult. You’re essentially teching to T3 to counter a T1 (1.5?). It also doesn’t help that if the Zerg are allowed to establish their economy at all, it will probably be near impossible to win, since their universal unit system allows them to build a good 18 or so of them at once (and yes, many Zerg do indeed build that many lairs). Of course, the counter if you’re really, really dilligant with your colossi is to simply build a spire and build mutalisks when they’ve beaten your army. By that point the Protoss player have probably teched so specifically and poured so many resources in the aforementioned units to counter the hydras it would be incredibly prohibitive to switch to anti-air, while the Zerg can do it with a single building.
That’s not to say PvZ or TvZ is impossible by any means, but hydralisks are a wee bit strong right now it seems.
It’s only got very easy throughout. I vaguely recall Blizzard saying something about not wanting to rewrite the AI after every change so they’re waiting till it’s more stable.
The only unit with that much health is a Hive. Any non main building will fall in 2 nukes, the main buildings other than Lair will be so low the ghosts can finish them off after 2, a Lair will fall in 3, and a Hive can be finished in a few seconds of ghost fire after 3 nukes.
I love ghosts. 
The ability to get nukes without needing a special add on for your CC is great and them not taking a load of food and resources is even better. The ghosts are more pricey than the nukes now.
Hydras are Tier 2 now. Hydra Den requires a Lair. And they take 2 food now. They also no longer have a move speed upgrade. Terran can destroy them utterly with Hellions with preigniter upgrade. Siege tanks are also very useful on them and Thors deal enough damage to one shot a Hydra that is not significantly more upgraded than itself.
I usually go DTs against Hydras as Protoss. Overlords aren’t detectors anymore, they have to be individually upgraded to Overseers, and most Zerg players just don’t expect DTs. Plus Archons do bonus damage to organic so if they do get a detector you can quickly switch to Archons. Though Archons splash radius has been decreased greatly. And, of course, Psi Storm from the High Templars is also very effective. Especially if you have some Sentries, and you should, to use Force Field to funnel/block the Hydras. Other than that Zealots and Sentries(with the damage reduction spell, cant remember what it’s called) can do fairly well and is cheap on gas so you can make some Void Rays to harass their base from behind.
Hydras are indeed a nicely versatile unit now that they’ve been bumped up to tier 2, but there’s nothing they particularly excel at, either. Marines and zealots just by themselves can more than hold their own against hydras until, like every other long-ranged unit, the hydras reach their critical mass where every incoming attacker is instantly killed by the focused fire. The catch to that is that without their SC1 speed, hydras have barely any ability to cope with the AOE from tanks, storm, colossi or even fungal growth. They mainly appeal because every race has an early, potent air to ground flier now, not just zerg.
So far it seems a decent enough game, but I have to admit some surprise at how much of a retread it is. I realize that Starcraft is a sacred cow that they don’t dare to alter much, but this is practically the same game with an only slightly less crude UI. It’s more like a Gold update than a real sequel. Aside from the extremely solid technical backend (the engine, pathfinding & networking are all excellent) this game would not have been out of place in 1999. The RTS genre has branched out in a lot of ways since then and all of that has been ignored. Blizzard isn’t usually this iterative.
I did not know that.
MWAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The problem I have with the HT counter is that you have to get the archives and then still research Psi Storm (which takes more than a few seconds, even with boost). And the problem is that you can never be sure the Zerg is going mass Hydra, if they have a lot of roaches that strategy doesn’t necessarily work as well.
Let me rephrase that, I thought of the DT counter, but I did not know that only overseers had detection.
You “can never be sure”? The templar archive is so far down the tech tree that you’ll have had ample opportunity to check out what your opponent is doing by then, and probably rather a lot of combat with them to boot. You will know what they’ve invested in before you’ve built HT capability, and it doesn’t much matter what they switch to afterward, because the templar is useful against almost everything Zerg, including roaches – not that anybody in their right mind would even touch roaches in tier 3 against Protoss in the first place. The problem with the templar vs zerg is not that they’re not effective, it’s that you’re already going down the robotics route for observers and the threat of immortals & colossi, leaving templar with not much of a niche left to fill.
This is brushing against one of the weaknesses, as I see it, of Starcraft. There’s so much to the game that’s unintuitive to beginning players, from the huge worker counts needed to reach full efficiency to the potency of any and every unchecked attack that most players never actually get to the level of play where the details actually affect the game, like what roles are served by which units and how that changes with the way they’re controlled by the player. These details wind up being red herrings, generating questions about, say, “how to deal with mass hydra” when the actual hurdle is scouting and matching economy and army placement. The entire bottom three brackets of the ladder are sorted out based mostly by who makes more workers, spends the the largest percentage of their income, and attacks first. The bits that make the game Starcraft don’t even come into play.
And this is why I never play multiplayer in games that’s not co-op. Ever. Not FPSs or RTSs or anything else, because I can never grok these things. I hear what people are saying in these threads but I have no idea how to execute them. I’ve literally never played a ladder or random match in Starcraft of WCIII (well, I did a couple times in WCIII, but by that time every “new” player was a pro who made a new account to dick around with the level 1s). I don’t even know basic build orders, nor do I know how to scout with Protoss (whenever I build an observer I never have enough for more combat units and get stomped from being crippled JUST by not having that one extra unit or so). I didn’t know until last night that you could even have more than one probe on a single mineral node. In SCI I never even beat an easy computer player without cheats.
and they give you a Beta key? lol, j/k
I used to be ranked in the earlier days of SC1 ladder when the games were forced to be at “fast” speed and not “fastest”. Hearing how this game is nothing revolutionary in terms of new gameplay kinda makes me a bit sad. There’s nothing wrong with a better version of SC1, but I had higher hopes of greater things.
I’d give it to use if it wasn’t against the TOS, I only play Blizzard RTS games for the custom maps and campaigns, and even then, if custom maps get too meta (DOTA) I won’t play them because I simply cannot play anything that has a metagame.
Okay, here’s a link to my latest replay: http://www.mediafire.com/file/2t2tynumwm1/PvZ%20Jsor.SC2Replay
(Sorry, I’m not a good enough RTS cameraman to make a video for you non-having people)
I think I’m getting better, maybe. At least I won this time. I’m Protoss, of course.