Well to be fair, Zerg wasn’t a rush race in SC1 either, except on initial release. Once people realized how potent workers were in combat and how badly Zerg was wrecking their economy to do any early pokes, the “omg zergrush!” phase died out pretty fast. It wasn’t long before the consensus emerged that Zerg needed one more expansion than the opponent, at all times, to be considered on equal footing. The threat didn’t really begin until mutalisks or lurkers came out, which cemented them solidly into tier 2.
SC2 has strengthened the potential of early zerg offense, since banelings give you a pre-Lair option against a wall-off and the ability to really devastate worker count if you can get in, but the larvae restrictions still punish you hard for early game military. The race as a whole is still heavily focused on victory via production advantage.
At low levels, race balance is basically irrelevant because whichever player has better macro/execution will win regardless of race.
At the high levels, the races are fairly balanced. Protoss have the highest win percentage on the ladder at high level (at least they did 2 months ago, I haven’t checked since then) but that isn’t totally relevant. Terran have by and large had the most success at the highest level tournaments, but that was mostly because of map imbalances. Those imbalanced maps have been mostly replaced with new maps, which haven’t been out long enough to reach a consensus.
So, at high levels the answer is most likely “it depends on the map”.
This is why I despise Starcraft multiplayer. Any game where success is determined by who can click through a predesignated set of actions is nowhere near a “strategy” game. It is which monkey can click buttons more efficiently/accurately.
That’s not a fair description of Starcraft multiplayer at all. Yes, if your economy management sucks, it doesn’t matter how brilliant your strategy is, because you’ll get rolled by a player who simply has more stuff. But that’s not at all the same thing as saying it’s a contest for who can click through a predesignated set of actions better.
Put it this way: would Starcraft be a better game if building workers, supply, and production facilities could be autocast so that all the player had to worry about was army composition and micro? No, it would be much worse.
The set of actions is only predetermined at the very start of the game, before first contact (and sometimes, not even that long). Once you start getting information, you need to respond to it, or you’ll get your butt kicked.
And Mekhazzio, even if the early zergling rush isn’t very common any more, it’s still common enough that you have to take steps to defend against it, even if you don’t actually face it (since you won’t know whether you’re facing it until too late). I know when I played, I could get lurkers out in time to stop anything but the 6 lings ASAP attack, but the threat of that ling attack meant that I had to slow down the lurkers (and subsequent mutalisks) enough to defend against that, too (though I did find ways to make it not completely wasted effort).
Which is wrong. There are players that are better at the micro game and players that are better at the macro but people who just do the same thing over and over are destroyed.
Seriously watch some videos of high level play. You usually can’t tell who is ahead until three or four serious clashes (unless someone tries a high risk/high reward strat very early).
When a game has a set of “build orders” that any player hoping to compete effectively needs to know is not a strategy game.
There is no strategy to a build order.
As for strategy once contact is made by all accounts I read it is a matter of knowing what build order your opponent chose and adjusting yours to the build order that most effectively defeats it.
The monkey who can do that micromanagement better wins. I have watched high level matches in the past and they look like zero fun to me. Being jacked-up on Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs and a liter of Jolt Cola is what it looks like you need to compete. Twitch-fest gaming is not fun to me.
For that matter, compare it to chess (which I think is universally agreed to be a strategy game). There are a relatively small number of standard openings, and at the high levels of play, almost everyone sticks to one of those standard openings for the first few moves of the game. Does that make chess not a game of strategy? No, because once you get past the opening, you still have to make decisions based on what the other guy is doing, and deviate from the standard moves.
The difference is in chess a given set of openings are not “hard counters” to other openings. How the game plays out is not a foregone conclusion based on the opening each player chooses. Strategy gaming ensues.
In Starcraft you can get hard counters to what the other guy is doing. In the 6-pool if your opponent doesn’t counter it he loses. If he does you lose.
Basically it’s fancy rock-paper-scissors which I think most would agree is not much of a strategy game.
At the risk of being fallacious, if you think that Starcraft is just a giant rock-paper-scissors game then you are sorely mistaken.
Any build that can be blindly countered by another build before you’re able to scout it is a poor build, plain and simple, unless you’re specifically going for a risky all-in strategy. The vast, vast majority of high-level games are intense affairs that require scouting and reactionary play if something is out of the ordinary. They’re very back and forth until either one player makes a brilliant, opportunistic decision or the other makes a crippling mistake. This is no different from chess, really.
As for the 6-pool strategy, there is no build to “counter” that because the attack happens before any infrastructure beyond the basics is complete. That particular case comes down to micromanagement and scouting.
That’s not the case at all there are rarely hard counters. What you do about a 6 pool depends on so many factors. The only option that could conceivably be considered a hard counter is a wall off which may not be possible depending on your race and original building position. But you can survive a 6pool anyway. And the 6 pooler may still win if you wall, though probably not as 6 pool isn’t exactly a smart opening. How depends on too many factors to try to enumerate with out a specific example game.
Not really. Sure there are lists out there that say X counters Y. But those are just gross oversimplifications. Yeah Vikings counter Colossus. But what fool wanders around with a swarm of unsupported Colossuses? You’ve also got Stalkers, Sentries, and maybe Voidrays to help defend the Colossuses. And the Terran likely has a ground army to support their Vikings. At that point it mostly comes down to positioning and economy. IE whether your overall strategy was better than theirs.
I’m not quite sure how you took away “you must do this series of steps to defeat it” when the page you linked to, itself, says outright:
As in, unless you’re doing something equally risky such as a super-fast expand, you don’t necessarily have to do anything different to handle the 6-pool except not panic and control the small-scale skirmish decently well.
The analogy comparing RTS build orders to chess openings is spot-on. In both games, the initial starting setup is fixed every time, you have relatively few options as to what you can do in the first few moves, and your opponent is unable to directly affect you for a short period of time. This automatically means there’s going to be some repetition in the beginning of each game. The obviously bad openings get weeded out quickly, leaving a large collection of roughly equivalent choices with their own strengths and weaknesses, with a ridiculous amount of debate over the different flavors. Most serious players teach that a strong grounding in the openings is an important foundation to the game but that all games go “off the book” quickly and success is determined by how you adapt to the opponent.
That American StarLeague announcement is sick. Sucks that inControl and Gretorp are casting, but at least they’re committed to putting on a good show. I remember seeing this WC3 tournament with ToD and Rotterdamn casting, which was terrible at first because they didn’t know how to do it, but after a few games they settled into it and were decent. Hopefully this arrangement works out too.
The problem with SC isn’t that it’s mindless, but that it’s about speed. Sure, you need to know what you’re doing. But you don’t really win because of the superior strategy. You win because you’re fast and efficient enough to do what you do perfectly. Strategy might apply at the very highest levels, but it’s 75% speed, 24% perfect execution of a pre-planned generic build, and only 1% strategy.
Yeah, the people who are super-fast and have a flawless general build order are differentiated based on strategy. But the nature of the game cuts out any real strategic competition. You’re cutting out 99% of your real strategists in favor of speed-monkeys.
It’s a game I’d like to play multiplayer… but it’s not gonna happen. I like to think in a slower and more considered manner. But let’s face it - there’s a lot more relying on you having ludicrously fast mastery of hotkeys than any strategic component.
First of all, I’ll defer to Day9 (professional SC player) on this issue: he says you need about 50 apm to do everything you need to do in SC. That’s not that much. That’s one click or key press every second to second and a half. Frankly, when I see players spam-clicking to get up to 200 apm, I just laugh at them. 90% of the time they’re terrible and just want to have a great APM.
Second, since the matchmaking system in multiplayer matches you up against people of your own skill, there’s no reason to avoid the multiplayer just because you’ve seen the top pros play ridiculously fast. I don’t need to be able to keep up with fruitdealer, because my mighty 40 apm is equal to or better than almost everyone I get matched up with.
No, it’s not turn based strategy, so you don’t get to sit and ponder for five minutes over what your next move will be. But there’s plenty of time to do everything you need to do and think strategically. It’s ridiculous to say that one of the best strategy games in existence cuts out 99% of real strategists. Ridiculous.
It’s really the exact opposite of that. Unless you are incredibly slow. Yeah the pros are shockingly fast but the vast, vast majority of players are about the same speed and being faster than that is only a small boost in your effectiveness. It’s really all strategy most of the time. Preplanned builds are only relevant for the first few minutes and microing at superhuman speeds only saves you a few units here or there. Far more important than either is being able to interpret the game state to know when, where, why, and how to attack, scout, and expand.
To be fair, if you focus only on having absolutely rock solid mechanics, you can probably get to gold by just building a lot of random shit with no thought to strategy or counters. But it’s like any other game, if you’re good enough at mechanically playing the game, you’re going to win because of that instead of depth. Like in shooters, some people are just so much faster than others that they can win that way. It isn’t really a fair scenario to judge the game. It’s like saying boxing is stupid after watching Tyson pummel a five-year-old. Eventually, you find someone who can play as well as you and that’s what you should look at.
I’m largely in agreement with you…but rock solid mechanics is not the same thing as speed. Rock solid mechanics means always building workers, keeping production buildings busy, keeping money low, never missing chronoboosts/injections/mules. You can do all that with a pretty low apm. It’s not the speed that messes people up, it’s the tunnel vision they get in battle, or the inability to multitask (due to forgetting, not due to speed).
Yes, if you have solid mechanics, you can probably get to gold as long as your strategy is even halfway reasonable, but so what? Being in gold just means you’re a somewhat above average amateur and will be matched up against other somewhat above average amateurs. And then once again strategy rules the day.
(I am a silver level player; I am half a step above awful. A friend of mine who I play with all the time is a diamond level player. My apm is consistently faster than his, and I never spam apm as a matter of principal. He plays slowly, but never gets supply blocked, never misses a worker, scouts well, and plays with solid strategy. That stuff is way more important than speed.)
