On wednesday night I saw the mix of joy and despair as TL members received their beta keys while others found their email box empty. I myself was expecting one after winning one of TL's own Ironman tournaments. I went to bed around 3am disappointed after 5 hours of refreshing my inbox.
Thursday morning and it turns out my beta email arrived 10 minutes after I gave up, good job I guess or I wouldn't have slept.
After the tedious wait whilst it downloaded I started my first 1v1 - deciding to play random and get a feel for the game (In SC1 I was a B ranked Protoss). I quickly realised my laptop was not up to the task and turned all my settings to the lowest they would go However, 9 of the 10 the opponents I faced in the "test" phase obviously had no Starcraft background, so that was 10 quick games that all lasted no longer than 10 minutes.
My first game after being put into Platinum league #6 I randomed Protoss and was against a Zerg, I believe he said he was Russian and played Starcraft, I forget his name. We were cross positions on a 4 player map, again the name eludes me and I had unfortunately decided to 2 gate zealot rush. Forgetting about the nexus boost ability which I've only remembered to use a few times so far, my rush did no real damage vs the zergs hatch first. I opted to expand with my ~10 zealots and began aimlessly teching in my first game not to end with an initial attack. From here on out my computer started to struggle and the game became less enjoyable to play. A muta flock entered my main and took out my main nexus - 2 cannons arent enough to hold off 7-8 muta, as in broodwar and my opponent settled into mass hydra against my zealot/stalker/ht combo. I moved out looking for the zergs third but with my now heavily jerky pc, my ability to storm accurately and quickly was non existant. His hydra's rolled my army and after that he elevatored them to my main, bypassing my 6 cannons at my nat. GG
After this game I was pissed that my laptop wasn't holding up. So I did what any dedicated Starcraft player would do - I ordered myself a new PC -
I chose the ATI Radeon HD 5770 Gfx card and Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit operating system. It should arrive on monday :D
Since getting my 10-0 in the warm up games and my first loss and heavily laggy game thereafter, I played a few more games going for aggressive builds trying to end the game quickly and have gone 2-2. Both the game I lost were TvP where I was straight up owned by DT drops. One of these opponents was the german, zerg, sc player MTW.MF-Gan. One of my two wins was a PvZ where I went for a 1 base mothership/speed zealot timing attack, lol, it worked a charm but the opponent was probably the weakest post first 10 games.
So far in my SC2 experience the most annoying things, disregarding my obvious computer problems, is the different hotkeys from starcraft broodward. Such as probe and pylons now being "e", marines "a", seige mode "e", etc. the list goes on. Also the visibility/clarity issue that I have seen many people discuss is annoying, but I feel a large part of this is due to the game being "new", and after a week or two, I believe I will be able to distinguish between things much better.
So far I haven't been able to fully explore the tech trees due to having generally short games. Of the new units I have used, the mothership seems cool, although I got the one I build killed pretty quickly and didn't get to see any of its abilities in action. Hellion's seem just like vultures without the mines, however the ability to build 2 out of a factory simultaneously is a nice touch - devestated a noob with a proxy fact thanks to this.
Oh also I played a few 2v2 with a friend and found out the hard way that overlords don't detect
Anyone wishing to see the specs of my current Laptop that struggles here they are - + Show Spoiler +
Acer Aspire 8930G laptop Inter Core 2 Duo CPU P8400 @ 2.26GHz 3GB RAM Windows Vista Home Premium NVIDIA GeForce 9700M GT
Would be happy to answer any questions that I can on the beta and if you are lucky like me to be in, feel free to add me to your friends list id "rANDY" identifier "pro".
Your laptop specs don't look that bad at all...I"m surprised that you struggle to run it. Are you trying to run it on high res? You should be able to run the game comfortably on lower resolution.
Also, is your laptop power mode on High Performance? You'll have to keep it plugged in, but running the power to max capacity will also do wonders for speeding up your games.
On February 20 2010 02:40 danl9rm wrote: lol at the laptop specs, u should be running it fine
reformat immediately.
edit: u beat me to it.
Yeah, it really surprised me that he's struggling to run it.
Just try running it on high performance and run http://www.ccleaner.com/ along with doing a disk cleanup and clearing your shadow copies from hibernating your laptop so much (search disk cleanup in your vista start menu)
On February 20 2010 02:56 Nytefish wrote: Have you played any 2v2 with kish yet O.o
yea but lag problems were greater there
On February 20 2010 02:47 KwarK wrote: Mind if I come over to your house this weekend and check it out?
nah I wont have my new machine until monday anyway
On February 20 2010 02:40 danl9rm wrote: lol at the laptop specs, u should be running it fine
reformat immediately.
edit: u beat me to it.
I would but I'm pretty clueless on how. My old laptop had a separate HD and when I formatted it installed everything back to when it was new itself. I don't think my current laptop has that option and I don't have any CD's to install stuff from.
Anyone wishing to see the specs of my current Laptop that struggles here they are - + Show Spoiler +
Acer Aspire 8930G laptop Inter Core 2 Duo CPU P8400 @ 2.26GHz 3GB RAM Windows Vista Home Premium NVIDIA GeForce 9700M GT
Hey randy, seriously its not your bad laptop which cant deal with SC2. Its prolly the massive load on crap on it or even some viruses.
My specs:
E6700 dualcore @ 2.66 GhZ 4GB RAM Vista Home Premium Geforce 8800GTS.
So basically my specs are just about the same(slightly better cpu/ram, slightly worse gfx card), but i can play SC2 on BEST settings. "Ultra" on EVERYTHING. Not the slightest lag/delay/whatever
I'm not sure how much better the 8800 is than the 9700, but the 9600 sucks huge ones, so it could be possible that the 9700 is just bad. That said, it seems weird that you have to play on absolute lowest settings, but again, given the performance of my 9600, I wouldn't be too surprised.
Anyone wishing to see the specs of my current Laptop that struggles here they are - + Show Spoiler +
Acer Aspire 8930G laptop Inter Core 2 Duo CPU P8400 @ 2.26GHz 3GB RAM Windows Vista Home Premium NVIDIA GeForce 9700M GT
Hey randy, seriously its not your bad laptop which cant deal with SC2. Its prolly the massive load on crap on it or even some viruses.
My specs:
E6700 dualcore @ 2.66 GhZ 4GB RAM Vista Home Premium Geforce 8800GTS.
So basically my specs are just about the same(slightly better cpu/ram, slightly worse gfx card), but i can play SC2 on BEST settings. "Ultra" on EVERYTHING. Not the slightest lag/delay/whatever
Thats the best part of SC2 they want everyone to be able to play it.
On February 20 2010 04:23 ramen247 wrote: its probably because you are running it on a laptop.
huh? why does that matter? assuming there are no underlying heating issues, specs are specs.
@op: you should be able to run the game on ultra ez mode. either there's something wrong with your computer, or you have a very poor internet connection.
parts are modified and usually capped so that they dont overheat in the limited ventilation that a laptop offers. Also, laptops are designed to use very little power and will probably prioritize battery life over short term performance.
op should try playing with adapter plugged in and put the laptop on "turbo" mode or some high performance setting.
EPT
and my opponent settled into mass hydra against my zealot/stalker/ht combo. I moved out looking for the zergs third but with my now heavily jerky pc, my ability to storm accurately and quickly was non existant. His hydra's rolled my army and after that he elevatored them to my main, bypassing my 6 cannons at my nat. GG
