I feel Starcraft 2 is very passive. - Page 4

sc2 is not remotely like chess.

The difference you noted between bw and sc2 is a combination of simplicity and the superiority of offense over defense. The reason you see so much dancing of armies jockeying for a tiny increase in position in sc2 is because there's so few ways to gain an advantage. Many sc2 games literally come down to the positioning before a fight because nothing else matters remotely as much as winning a battle. In bw engaging correctly was just one of many, many factors in determining victory. Certain players like Jaedong were known for their consistent ability to engage right, while others like iloveoov were particularly bad at it but could win through a variety of other means. In sc2 if you can't engage very well you will never be among the best. When you remove all the nuances of bw that determined skill, you are left with a select very few factors, most notably engaging, but also blind build order luck, that massively determine the outcomes of games because there's so little else to influence the outcome.

The other reason for favoring big battles and massive 1a armies is the ease of movement. Movement in bw is much more subtle and difficult to organize and execute. Position (like high ground) meant much more, all races had various tools which favored defense over offense (reavers/storm in pvz, tanks/mines, scourge/swarm/lurker vs vessels, better static defense, etc). Furthermore, the smooth a.i in sc2 means that it's really easy to attack bases without bothering to micro and do insane damage. Plus there are a number of tools which effectively fight defensive setups (banelings, infested terrans, forcefields, immortals, colossus, marines, marauders) These reasons are exactly why backstabs so good in sc2 compared to bw and why you get many, many more base trades. Ironically, base trades and backstabs happen the most in the matchups most like BW in terms of skill, defense, and positioning: tvz and tvt.

How does this lend itself to big 1a armies? Because if you are devoting say 15-20 supply to a distraction or secondary maneuver, that means your main army will have that much less supply. Therefore it's much easier for you to just get run over by a-move, and that will lose you the game outright in most cases because it's so hard to comeback. You can overcome this advantage to some degree as defense isn't entirely meaningless, particularly in tvz and tvt, but an extra 20ish supply is a lot more meaningful in most cases than a good position. In bw, position is much more important than army size, and you'd routinely see large armies improperly wielded be defeated or warded off by well employed tactics or setups. Someone like Flash couldn't make a fraction of the comebacks he did in bw playing sc2 because it's just too easy to bully your opponent around once you have a lead and you don't have much leverage to 'outplay' someone when behind. Furthermore there are a number of mechanics in place which very effectively dissuade spread out forces in favor of gathering one big army: Terran drops in tvp are absolutely terrifying, but these are more than "balanced" out by feedback, warpins, and blink. Trying to harass past a certain point is often just going to lead to wasted units, which could in turn lower your main army strength for a critical moment and make you vulnerable to getting a moved to death. In TvT the combination of vikings, sensor towers, great mobility of marines and hellions, and powerful turrets has made it very difficult in general to effectively harass behind a certain point.

No this problem isn't going to be fixed with time. It has nothing to do with how young the game is, only a little bit with how bad players are, and everything with how the game is designed. Until that is addressed, the only way things can change is by drastically altering maps to promote more defense and large-scale combat which can help but only to a small degree. Blizzard designed the game to favor offense and ease of use: these are the results of such decisions.