EPT
[edit] added date and cite.
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Starcraft: The "Old School"
Tzu's ways are the ways of the best Starcraft players in what Zileas calls the "old school." These players strive to build a strong economy to finance overwhelming hordes of units. When they outnumber the enemy 10 to 1, they attack; 5 to 1, they surround you get the idea. Individual battles matter little to these players, since it's more important to build a large mobile force capable of attacking the opponent's weak spots.
Most of these players come from the days of Warcraft 2, Starcraft's predecessor. Warcraft's interface and units didn't allow players to gain much benefit from micromanaging individual battles. Warcraft's units were more homogeneous meaning you didn't see kill ratios of 50:1 like Templars and Reavers are capable of in Starcraft. In short, macromanagement was the only way to go. Build a large army. Divide the enemy's army. Concentrate the firepower of your army.
Starcraft: The "New School"
And then there was Zileas. He came along and pointed out the amazing effects micromanagement of individual battles can have in Starcraft, and he preached the revolutionary ideas of divide and conquer and concentration of firepower on the small scale, that is.
Lesson 1: Shift queue to concentrate firepower. When enemy forces engage, say 10 marines versus 10 marines, they will fire at each other in a mostly random distribution, so units will only start dying towards the end of the battle. The better player will select all his marines and concentrate their firepower on a single enemy marine, then (hold shift to) queue the next command to concentrate firepower on the second enemy marine, and so forth. All 10 of the first players marines will kill one of the enemy's units right way, reducing his firepower. The 10 marines will then automatically (through shift queuing) concentrate their fire on the next enemy unit, then the next one, and so on. The enemy is dividing his own fire but the better player concentrates it.
Lesson 2: Use formation to concentrate firepower. When two enemy forces engage, say 10 marines versus 10 marines, formation can be everything. If one player marches his single file line of marines into a horizontal line of enemy marines, the horizontal line formation will be able to concentrate its fire on the first marine in the single file line, then the second, and so on. The last marines in the single file line won't even be close enough to fire until all their friends are dead. Even better than a horizontal line is "shallow encirclement," a crescent shaped formation that maximizes the firepower one can apply to a point.
Lesson 3: Use choke points (narrow passes) to divide the enemy's units. When a large enemy force must pass through a narrow choke point (either naturally created by terrain or artificially by your buildings) he is dividing his own force for you. You can concentrate your firepower on each unit as it passes by.
There are more lessons, but his point is the concentration of firepower on the small scale of an individual battle. I cannot leave out Zileas's most extreme and signature use of concentration of firepower: his "Doom Drop."
Zileas is known for playing the Protoss race, the race smallest in numbers and most powerful in punch. Notice that they are already concentrated before he even got a hold of them. A so-called Doom Drop is when you fill 4 or 5 shuttles (flying transports that carry other units) full of amazingly powerful Protoss attack units such as Reavers, Templars, and Archons. (These shuttles are accompanied by Scouts, heavily armored air units.) This superabundance of force his concentration of firepower is enough to overwhelm nearly anything, so long as it is applied instantly at a single point. When 1 Archon, 3 Reavers, 4 Zealots, and 3 Templars suddenly appear in the middle of your base, the sheer force of it all applied to your surely badly positioned units is usually too much.
![[image loading]](http://img463.imageshack.us/img463/6922/doomdrop2fa.gif)
A Doom Drop in Starcraft, Zileas style.
Even more devastating is what Zileas calls his Extra Crispy with Slaw version of the Doom Drop, where he uses hallucinated (illusionary) units to draw fire. Flying 4 shuttles into an enemy base is not an easy task, since they'll probably be shot down easily whatever anti-air happens to be scattered about. 4 Shuttles accompanied by, say, 5 scouts is another matter. Now the anti-air fire has been divided among more targets. Better still if all these targets are accompanied by, say, 10 illusionary Scouts. The illusions can't attack, but they draw fire enemy fire giving the real units more time to act. In effect, the illusions divide and conquer the enemy's anti-air fire.
![[image loading]](http://img348.imageshack.us/img348/1130/doomdropextracrispy5fk.gif)
Preparations for a Doom Drop, Extra Crispy with Slaw.
Micro and Macro
Why not apply Tzu's teachings of divide and conquer and concentration of firepower on the large scale as well as the small? Must one choose one over the other? The answer in Starcraft, realistically, is yes. One only has so much attention which must be divided between micro Extra Crispy with Slaw Doom Drops and macro economy and horde-building. Zileas explains:
The Third Resource: Concentration
Minerals and Gas are the resources that most players think in terms of. Although these are central to the game, you also need to think in terms of concentration. I define concentration as time that a player has to spend focusing on a task during the game. Expanding is a high concentration task, especially if you are Protoss. Attacking certainly has a high concentration level, and the more concentration you put into an attack, the higher the effect. Even scouting carries a high associated cost. One big difference between “Someone who is really good” and someone who is #1 is knowing when you need to watch a battle, and when you don't, and recognizing that your opponent also has a finite amount of concentration to draw from. There are a number of techniques for minimizing concentration costs (i.e. hot-keying buildings, using magic spell hot keys, queuing attacks, etc.), but everything you do has some intangible concentration cost. I would argue that as you get better at Starcraft, you go into a match with a larger innate concentration income/second.
It is very possible when doing multiple coordinated attacks at different locations to use your superior concentration reserve (if you have it) to decimate an enemy who is tied with you in terms of unit control and tangible resources. Although I’m sorry to say this, concentration is basically talent. Playing a lot of games slowly raises it, but its something some people have a lot of and some people don't. It's kinda like fast sprint ability in running: you can train up and become a great long distance runner, but for sprinting, there's always that talent based barrier you can slowly improve it, but everyone has a limit. I'm sure that someone will push me off #1 who has more innate talent, along with the same skills…The best way to train concentration, as Visage has reminded me just now over MIT chat, is to play 2 on 1s and 3 on 1s (multiple opponents vs. you). I can often pull 3 on 1s, and certainly 2 on 1s, and really the only reason I can do this is my ability to multitask. Also, team melee is an interesting game as it involves doubled concentration reserves on both sides… well almost doubled since its not one mind thinking at once and they have to communicate…?
Whether you, as a player, spend your concentration resources on the large scale or the small depends on which game is at hand and your personal style. In either case, the same principles are at work. On one level or another, thou shalt concentrate thy fire and divide and conquer thine enemy!
![[image loading]](http://img348.imageshack.us/img348/4396/zileas0ai.jpg)
Postscript
In an odd footnote of history, I was a senior at MIT when Zileas, who apparently has a real name (Tom Cadwell), was a freshman. I never actually met him, though. Zileas leveraged his success as a Starcraft player to help form an independent game development company called Ethermoon. The release of his first title, an rts called Strifeshadow: Tournament Edition, is due for release shortly.
date:
Sunday, November 5th, 2000
cite:
http://www.sirlin.net/archive/art-of-war-part-4-divide-and-conquer/
