take the replays for instance. i see that, when i lose a game, there’s always something that i could have / should have done to turn things around. this isn’t like warcraft where the micro game is so important. when i look at the mistakes i made, speed and multi-tasking haven’t been an issue, it’s more about macro, and the ability to react to changing circumstances in real time. it is an RTS game after all.
Sheer action speed doesn’t get you much in SC2 and the focus on it is a holdover from its ancestor. Speed was much more important in SC1. SC1’s user interface was stone-age even when it was released, and resulted in having to mouse-select each of 7 barracks and tell them to individually queue marines, select each new worker and tell them to go mine, and all sorts of other mindless tedium like that. It was 6 actions just to tell 30 zerglings to all go to the same location, and you’d be lucky if they actually made it there in one group.
Most of that is gone now. SC2 brought the UI up to the standard of 1998 and automates or streamlines a great deal of the rote busywork, allowing you to do much more with fewer actions. The minimum production speed requirement is giving a few hotkeys every 20 or 40 seconds, and armies of any size or unit composition can be slung around with single orders, and they’ll actually manage to navigate to their destination without falling all over themselves. This leaves the player much more time to actually play the game. Any heavy gamer will have the mechanical speed to play the game, provided they’re using the hotkeys.
The speed difference is really emphasized if you play one of the home-brew AIs. They can be set to do utterly inhuman things like instantaneously sniping the 5 banelings out of a wave of creep-accelerated zerg, dancing and burrow-juggling wounded units out of a force of 100, things that even the pro players manage to pull off maybe once a year…and it winds up making almost no difference at all in the long run, as the AI is still weak on the actual meat of the game.
SCII definitely requires both reflexes and strategic thinking in order for one to excel at it.
I’ve got the latter a little bit, and the former none at all, hence I sit in Silver league waiting for an inevitable re-demotion back to Bronze pretty soon.
And yet I still have a lot of fun playing the game because the matchmaker does a really good job of matching me with people around my own skill level.
I’d say the best comparison isn’t with chess, but with martial sports like fencing or wrestling. If you’re good, you’re constantly pushing and poking at your opponent, making subtle threats not with the intention of winning with that blow necessarily, but rather in order to suss out signs of what the opponent is up to. You try to force him into a mis-step, etc etc until you have an advantage and can make the winning strike.
You could describe a chess match this way as well but it’s most directly applicable to martial sports, especially given the fact that reflexes and speed are important for excellence (but I repeat, not necessary in order to have fun playing with others at your own skill level).
Something I just haven’t been able to accomplish even after over a thousand games is remembering to make goddamn probes all the time. For some reason I always find myself stopping at around 24 when i watch the replay. I only go past 24 if I expand. But this is all wrong–I should be continuously making the things all the time til I’ve got 30 at each base.
I have no idea how to get over this. It’s just a matter of hitting 5-Q every twenty seconds or so, but once the fighting starts I just can’t ever seem to remember to keep hitting 5-Q.
Gah it’s so frustrating. Every game I lose, almost, is because I just wasn’t making as much money as the other guy because he made a lot more probes than me.
Here’s how you get over that: For your next dozen or so games, you’re going to do nothing but 13gate into mass stalkers. No scouting after the first scouting probe to find your opponent. Doesn’t matter what you’re against. Just mass stalkers. You’re not going to micro them. You’re just going to 1a2a3a them over to your opponent’s base every so often. Your view will never leave your base. You’re going to spend the whole time every game just making sure that you never drop a probe. Expand. Maynard. More probes and 1a2a3a stalkers. Once you have it down, expand into scouting and countering. Just gotta pick one thing to learn at a time.
meh, protoss is easy. since it is a separate production building, churning out probes can be easily added to the mental army queue. if you have no problems making troops, drones is just another unit to make.
zergs, on the other hand, has the lair of a bottleneck. since everything is from one building, it requires a different mindset to keep your unit count up. it’s tempting to go drone crazy and forget to make troops, or vice versa.
I’ve done this very exercise recently and found it very helpful. (also, despite the absurdity of only building stalkers, I won almost all those games). ETA: if you do go only mass stalkers, don’t forget to throw an observer in there.
The thing that helped me get over missing workers is just constantly being in the rhythm of tapping 4,5,6 (my nexuses stay on 4, my gateways on 5, my robo bay on 6. If I have a starport, add 7 to the mix). Then I’m just always hitting 4,5,6,4,5,6 etc to watch the progress bars. As soon as one of them finishes building what they’re building, start something new then right back to 4,5,6. Combine that with watching your food and watching the minimap and you’re about 80% of the way there.
I barely micro anyway in battle, so I gave up on pretending to. I would watch my replays and when I was in battle, all activity just stopped. I wasn’t microing effectively and I certainly wasn’t macroing. So now I just remind myself, especially during battles, to mostly ignore it and just keep checking 4,5,6. If you want to attack, just 1a toward his base and then go back to 4,5,6.
Okay, would you even do this against a walled-in Terran? With siege tanks?
Would you at least have the stalkers focus fire a particular building and then stream in and focus the tanks? (Though I guess if you get blink and have an observer for vision…)
Or would you still have a decent chance of winning (once you are good at making enough probes) if you simply threw a whole bunch of stalkers directly at the wall in and then ignored them?
I find it hard to believe–but if you say it’s so, I can find it easier to believe.
Yes, it’s super super easy. And I am not good at it. Therefore…
(I’ve never understood what people think they are accomplishing when they respond to others’ statement of difficulty with the response ‘but it’s easy’.)
Here’s the original thread where I learned about this “strategy” (really, more of a practice exercise): Reddit - Dive into anything
One of the games I lost was indeed to a terran with a ton of siege tanks, but I decided to stick to the plan. The graph is telling…I had a significantly larger army, but lost the battle and ultimately the game. However, there were other games where I lost the initial battle due to unit composition but ultimately won a few minutes later because my economy was so good I was able to remax much faster than he was.
Also, it isn’t supposed to win you games. It’s supposed to make you better.
you are right, i was just thinking of it relative to my own similar problems with zerg drones. it wasn’t meant as a dig.
It’s a ZERG SWARM!
scuttles back off to WoW thread
What I find myself doing in SC2 is to put all of my base buildings on the same hotkey. That frees up more hotkeys for mixed forces, and hardly causes myself any added effort: When I select the whole group of buildings, I can see from the little dots on the icons which ones are still producing, and if one is idle or close to idle, it’s only one or two more keystrokes to tab over to it and queue up more. It would probably even work to add a building to the group of units it produces: It won’t do anything until you tab over to it (I think that buildings always show up after units, in a selection), but it’d still let you see the dots while you’re managing your army in the field.
It’s not a strategy game. Not at all. Strategy plays almost no role in the game.
It’s a tactical game. Very different. There are almost no strategic elements - only the very simplified economic aspect. There are and were no strategic aspects to the game.
As with a certain other thread, people, stop pretending that the name of the thing is the thing.
And yeah, I don’t want to bloody do 50 actions per minute. I want to do one good action. Look at what those “actions” boil down to. Push button to make soldier. Move soldier over there. Make those soldiers not act stupid.
The game is a tactical game about keeping idiots from killing themselves, and that ain’t strategic. It’s fun. I enjoyed the single-player mode. But if I fight other players, I want to do so strategically. I want to be a general, not a lieutenant. Lietenants can manage jsut responding fast. Generals have to act right.
Aside from which, you’re crazy if you think 50 apm is “ordinary”. Holy crap is that fast!
But the selling point on the linked reddit thread and from some posts here is that if you do it, and you’re in bronze silver or gold, it will win you the majority of your games.
You can say that all you like but it’s simply not true. You have to have an overall strategy to manage your economy, unit count, build order and react to what the other guy is doing. If you don’t have a plan you will lose. You may not feel that the Macro (strategy) isn’t robust enough for you but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
And you shouldn’t pretend your narrow view is the prevailing one.
Going for the old reduce a game to its most basic level and dismiss it? I could reduce Civilization down to the same level.
Well in Starcraft II you have to be a General and a Lieutenant. So the online gameplay isn’t for you. That’s fine but you’re trying to dismiss something because of your perception of it that isn’t really supported by how high level play works.
That’s because grasp of the basics is the key thing at the lower levels of play. It doesn’t get you out of the bronze league by artificially inflating you, it gets you out of bronze league by making you stop being a bronze player. For someone starting out, it’s good advice to not worry about what you’re making or what you’re doing with it and focus on simply making lots of anything. Once that becomes second nature, the real gameplay begins.
That’s just one button press every 1.2 seconds.
Darkhold, I don’t want to argue with you, but trying to pretend the game is about strategy is the weakest line I can imagine. Most of the basics are pre-set, and while they may vary by player’s personal preferences, they’re merely there to set up a certain tactical outcome. A real strategic battle would involve far different concerns.
Likewise, trying to pretend I’m reductio ad absurdum-ing is pretty weak, too. The bulk of the critical gameplay is all about moving your soldiers into the right position so they can hurt the other guy - a purely tactical problem. Resources are few and generic. The sole goal of the game is not to win against an enemy in depth, but to kill all the enemy. That’s how you win and only how you win. You can choose to either beat the army first and then the base, or vice versa, and that’s it.
Sure, how you can chose all kinds of ways to go about doing that, but only within the tactical model. Do you use these units or those? And strategic choices are minimized because there’re few long-term consequences. Unless you are decisely beaten, you can always change your unit mix and try again.
But manuever is essential meaningless, you can’t attack the enemy’s supply except at his base (because it’s all abstracted afterward). You can set up fully ueful buildings anywhere on the map, can’t arrange for reinforcements, have to actively build your bloody transports. You can’t bring more troops to the battlefield, and no consequence lasts beyond the end of the battle. You can’t teach your soldiers new tactics, and they can never be trusted to handle anything on their own. Nobody cares how many soldiers you lose as long as you win.
It’s a tactics game about herding idiots to the right spot to make them.
Yeah, only about an action a second. Not fast at all. What was I thinking.
Evidently, we have a huge difference. Furthermore it’s sustained over time. More than I can handle. I’m fully in favor of people having fun. But let’s not pretend that everyone competes in that way. I doubt very much that most can, and most definitely don’t.
No, it isn’t. Positioning and micromanagement of units is a small part of the game. Unless you are also trying to dismiss the importance of map control with this statement, in which case, :rolleyes:
See also such horrible, flash-in-the-pan strategy games as, say, chess. And just about every other strategy game in the world. OK, Civ was pretty cool in this regard in that there were multiple paths to victory. I love Civ. Doesn’t make it the only strategy game.
In other words, there’s no strategy at all, as long as you ignore all the strategic elements.
What?
Good luck tech switching if your first one didn’t work. Typically, you tech switch for strategic reasons. You can try to force your opponent into responding to one tech while you switch to another. It’s part of the back and forth, cat and mouse game you play with your opponent during a lengthy game. But you have to do that when even, if not with the lead. If you’re trying to tech switch while losing, it’s usually just a desperation move to try to hold off defeat. And it’s never what you’re saying…“well, that didn’t work, I guess I’ll tech switch…no damage done.” Never. It’s much too big an investment to go down one tech tree to just switch without consequences.
You must know much of this is paragraph is just incorrect. Have you played Starcraft 2?
I totally get why the game might not be for you, that’s fine. But your argument that it isn’t a strategy game is absurd and unsupported by anything you wrote. I get the feeling that you prefer one narrow sub-genre of strategy game and dismiss everything else as “not strategic”. You should stop doing that, it’s ridiculous.