EPTI'm a lowly Gold level player trying to get better with limited time on my hands. SC2 is hard. SC2 is really hard. (PAX, all the BW vets out there already typing out an indignant response at 400 words per minute. A steel bar isn't as hard as a diamond. It's still really hard.)
I've put in a few hundred games into SC2. That averages out to about 100 hours sunk into the multiplayer of the game, maybe 125 hours counting training maps etc. That's nothing, NOTHING compared to most people who seriously play the game. Maybe 160 hours if you include reading and watching guides, reading help me threads etc.
But its enough to finish any other game, or become pretty darn good at it. Even Street Fighter 4, which had a pretty high skill cap as far as these things go, you could become pretty good with 125 hours sunk into it, if you were training properly. You could be pulling off Focus Attack Dash Cancels like a BOSS.
I've gotten pissed off and frustrated at the cruelly unforgiving mechanics at this game so many times, i've given long speeches to my friends about how Team Fortress 2 and SF4 (both of which I love) are so much better because games, after all, are meant to be fun AND rewarding to skill.
Why do I keep coming back to it, then? Why do I feel compelled to ladder though my heart is pounding and I know I'd do so much better in other multiplayer games?
SC has that special something that the French call Je ne sais quoi, literally "I don't know what". It transcends fun, which I always thought was a core requirement of good games. But in some ways SC2, especially when you're trying to get better, isn't fun. What it is, is satisfying in a way that no other game I can think of has ever been. Seeing those low minerals at the 15 min mark. Macroing up a third while pushing your army into his base. Seeing your rallied units arrive in greater bulk than his and knowing, knowing deep down that you're about to tip the balance you worked so hard to tip.
Which brings me to strategy vs mechanics. I used to be one of those people who wanted to do away with supply depots because, honestly, why the hell were they in the game? It's like playing an FPS except you need to type out "reload" every 30 seconds on the dot otherwise your gun will jam for upto 30 seconds. I want to be killing dudes, why are you crippling me because I didn't complete a mindless task? How is this a First Person Shooter? For that matter, how is SC2 Real Time Strategy?
And then I realized, slowly, so slowly, that if these mechanics make SC2 less of an RTS, it makes it more starcraft. I've played Supreme Commander and WC3 and CoH and all those games that are focused on tactics and micro and none of them, none of them had that compulsive attraction that Starcraft does. Those damnably annoying, seemingly inane mechanics MAKE SC2. And its better that way because here comes the big secrect that I, at least, didn't figure out for a long time:
PURE STRATEGY IN A GAME LIKE THIS ISN'T HARD.
Woah. My mind was blown when I figured it out so don't judge if you got it first time. I would always think I was roleplaying the brilliant historical generals we all know and admire (well, you do if you have intellectual/competitive aspirations) and being all like "maaan Genghis Khan didn't have to click B S to make supply depots why do I?"
But the thing is, what brilliant strategies do I and other noobies come up with, that we're so angry are thwarted by mundane things like supply mechanics?
1. Imma make him think im going ground and then go air MUHAHAHAHAH.
2. Imma hide invisible units around the border of his base, send in a strike team to take out his sensors and then autowin BWHAHAHAHAH
3. Imma hold the high ground with siege tanks outside his base, outrange everything, and build bunkers around it! INVINCIBLE!
4. I will lead a special ops team to disable their key installations. STEALTHY!
Any "imaginative" strategy we noobies come out with is usually obvious and stupid, and makes us think we're super smart and feel betrayed that our smarts are hampered by our slow ass hands. Protip, fellow noobies: we're not that smart. We're kids playing at being generals, whereas really we should be playing SC2. The strategy EMERGES from the mechanics of the game. It's the same reason you don't, in chess, go "well this is stupid if it were up to ME the horses would cavalry charge the pawns and open a path to the king". Wow, some Machievelli type calculation there.
If you want to roleplay, there are plenty of LARP fairs out there. If you want to play Starcraft, this is Starcraft. You build supply depots for the same reason that Knights in chess move in an L shape: its not a simulation of real war, its a game unto itself, and its limitations and demands define what a "good" strategy is.
I finally understand, though I don't always agree with, ex BW vets who lose their minds because autosplitting is now a thing (or whatever). It's because Starcraft, a game that transcends even fun, is a phenomenon that we have never seen the likes of. It has a certain something, a je na se qua. And when you start removing bits of it, there is always the fear, rational or irrational, that you are cutting into the flesh of that certain something, unwittingly and slowly crippling that mysterious X factor that makes a phenomenon what it is.
Anyway, sorry for the long post. I was just musing on it on a slow work day. Cheers!
