EPTPart 1: My history of RTS games
I'm a total beginner at RTS games, though I've been aware of them for years.
In the olden days, we played Warcraft II, Tides of Darkness. That seemed to be a matter of "beating the computer." I played against a friend one time, and I had no concept of winning or losing, just creatures on screen fighting each other.
I used to watch a friend play an RTS game based on the Dune franchise. As Atreides or Harkkonen, he would build a base and purchase military with the money he earned harvesting the Spice. Sometimes, the Fremen would attack, guerilla raids on his settlement. I still had no clue what I was seeing. I was watching a battle in miniature, but I was not seeing strategy.
Fortunately, my best friend in high school was from South Korea. If not for him, I would probably have gone totally unaware of this scene. Right as we graduated around the turn of the century, he made me aware of the fact that Starcraft Broodwar had become a huge deal in Korea. He showed me lurkers, demonstrating how transformative the expansion pack had been on the game, and then he showed me the ridiculous footage of Boxer in his space suit standing in front of a cheering crowd. I filed this away in the back of my mind. Starcraft was cool, but I didn't think about it after that for many years.
In 2008 I was going back through a list of games that I had "skipped" over the years that I wanted to play. I finally sat down and played through all 6 Starcraft campaigns. When I was finished, I knew the story of the game, and I had "beaten the computer" in my slow, plodding, meticulous way, never attacking until I felt invincible.
But along the way... I found that the computer's attacks were fierce! I didn't realize how slow and stupid the computer really was. I didn't realize that my passivity, cowering behind the walls of my base, is what had allowed the computer the opportunity to create such fearsome battalions.
Having conquered the single-player game, I wanted to get a feel for Starcraft's professional history in Korea. At the time my friend was watching Tasteless on GomTV, and he pointed me there. Tasteless' broadcasts plugged TeamLiquid, which is how I ended up here. Viewer's delight! I found a smorgasbord of information, more information than anyone could ever want about Starcraft progaming. I devoured Starcraft VODs from 2008 to 2010, and I still devour them to this day.
But until recently, I was only an observer. I have never played a single game of Broodwar online anywhere, not battlenet nor ICCup. Starcraft has an intense learning curve, and I was just coming down off a gaming addiction... so I felt that I did not want to invest the time to learn to play the game well. Instead, I was happy watching very talented people play the game very, very well, better than I could ever hope to play it. It is marvelous viewing, a true modern sport.
Still, though, purely through quantity, my viewing-without-playing helped my mind to mature with respect to RTS games. I learned game flow through osmosis. Thanks to the Day9 Daily, I have also learned to conceive of the game in terms of goals. I finally sat down and read Sun Tzu's Art of War, further cementing strategic ebb and flow concepts in my mind. When my good buddy Pholon gave me a SC2beta key, I said to myself, hey, I bet I can do pretty well in the newbie league just by "spending my money".
Part 2: Starcraft 2 techniques
And that's what I've been doing. I play Random, spend my money as fast as possible, and just try to win. The goal I'm most comfortable with is the goal of expanding, because it dovetails with spending money; when you expand, you get "bigger": you get more and more money coming in, which you must spend faster and faster, and you become huge, a war machine with powerful momentum. If you deliver a staggering blow to a weak opponent, you can, backed by your powerful economy, simply rally your spawning units to his base, and your opponent will never recover.
The goal that I feel I'm weakest at is remembering to tech. The first two ranking matches I played were against silent killers, who took me apart without trying with minimal effort, saying nothing and leaving afterward. I remember specifically in one of the games that he brought a small airforce to my base after I had expanded, and my antiair defense was not sufficient or in place. I had succeeded in my goal to expand, but I hadn't teched correctly (or a better word might be "stably").
On the other hand, I won the next two placement matches that followed these defeats, leaving me at 2-2, exactly where the matchmaking system wants me. As I've explained, the underlying method I used to win these games was to press buttons really fast. However, because I have goals, like expanding, the fast spending of my money accomplishes purposes that harm my opponent's chances to win (rather than simply being newbie button-mashing like in a fighting game).
Obviously, what I am doing is extremely basic. I made this blog because I anticipate very soon needing to smooth out my gameplay into a very sharp and tempered edge. Improvising every game will only get my so far. Having these gameflow goals isn't enough. I need to know how I can accomplish those goals.
If anyone a step above me in SC2 learning growth wants to pass some knowledge down the chain to me and others like me at this stage of development... if you're reading this blog, what are some stable openings that you like for each race? What do you think they allow you to do? What are some timings you think people need to be familiar with? What is the "next step" after learning the importance of mechanics?
p.s. is it just me, or is the included Broodwar AI MUCH harder on fastest setting than the SC2 AI? the SC2 AI never seems to do anything, but the Broodwar AI stomped me the one time I tried to play against it last year or so.
p.p.s. I take it back. After the bnet reset for patch 13 today, I got stomped even in newbietown (practice league). My mechanics are nowhere near what they need to be to start doing build orders.
p.p.p.s. The responses to this thread essentially make the blog post you just read obsolete. Ah well. Well... not entirely. Known openings are a bit better in some ways than just practicing endlessly until you figure out what the opening should be.
