Power Rank 08/01/2010 - Page 37

There's a lot to marine micro other than dodging spikes, although it's hard for me to formulate all the right words. I see the images in my head of the movements, but that's a little different. However, there's a lot regarding marine movements -- when to spread, when to move them forward (during a battle, not just general 1a2a movements), when to pull back, how much to move them, when to stim, and yes, how to micro vs mutas (which certainly DID appear frequently and in fact were used for harassment even back then)... Obviously Boxer was not the first player to ever stim a marine, but Boxer's army control was what everybody studied.

You really had to be paying attention to progaming to understand exactly what I mean by that. These days progamers might study the timings of each other, but back then people really were studying things like troop movements.



I think Maynarding does not mean what you think it means. Maynarding is when you distribute workers between your main (and other bases) and a newly built expansion. It's called Maynarding because Maynard was the first player to think of doing it.

Maynarding was so significant an innovation because mining didn't work the same way in Warcraft 1 and 2 as it did in SC, which is much more economy based. These days we kind of take for granted that a good distribution of workers is important. You don't want 20 drones on one base and 5 drones on another. That's inefficient and it's obvious you need to redistribute. But back then, coming from a completely different game and learning Starcraft, nobody knew these things.

When I say worker micro, I'm referring to using workers to attack and defend. Boxer was one of the pioneers of this.


Vulture micro didn't begin with NaDa, he just perfected it. I saw Boxer microing vultures (using moving shot + placing mines to glitch unit movements) before I saw NaDa do it (which means something since I started following progaming actively roughly around the time NaDa as an amatuer wiped the floor with progaming legend ChRh), and not to mention that Boxer using mines to glitch his vultures over a forge in a progaming match was an extremely well known event (that caused Garimto, then an announcer, to go into fits of laughter).

Nada perfected all of this and started using vulture harassment as a means to damage opponents and keep them occupied, rather than as part of a serious attack.


When I talk about counters, Boxer essentially made obsolete the "old" way of playing, that paved the way for a more midgame based play (as "invented" by NaDa).

Sigh, okay, right now I really feel like I should write an article on how SC has changed over the years, but there are so many facts I'd like to verify and have no way of verifying, so many things I have to trust my memory on completely, and my memory of these things is more than a decade old.



Let's take a trip back in time. Pre-Boxer, SC was pretty much completely directionless. You have a build order and then everything you do is directly a response to your opponent. As Day would say, there was no "midgame plan." As players learned what all the units were and what they do, they started going into one of two mindsets: hyper aggression or hyper expansionism.

Obviously the fundamental ideas of "aggressive" and "management" styles exist today, but to illustrate how different it was, I'll give an actual (viable) zvT build:

9 pool -> 1 hatch into lair -> fast lurker -> 7 minute guardian rush

This strategy worked for a few reasons:
1. Players didn't have a good idea of how to micro and if they turtle up with bunkers (which will help them hold against the ling and lurker), the guardians will obliterate them with superior range.
2. Pools were only 150 minerals and lurker research was 125/125 instead of 200/200, meaning the Terran does not have much time to prepare an adequate defense and essentially has to turtle.
3. Walls had not been invented afaik until sometime during the 1.07 patch, I think circa middle or late 2000.

On the flipside, an expansionist Zerg might expand 7 or 8 times while still on only lair tech, powering hard lurker/hydra, expecting to lose a few expansions, but playing to keep enough of them that he will ultimately overpower his opponent.

Terran players had no idea how to overcome these kinds of plays. And it wasn't just Zerg where Terran really had no idea. In TvP, you basically had choices between some kind of rush strategy, drop abuse (very favorable on LT, Terrans would turtle up all the cliffs with a bunch of tanks and turrets), or a slow push, which basically amounted to pushing towards your opponent literally one siege tank at a time, building turrets and supply depots along the way to provide them with cover.

And even then, going straight to factory unit play was a relatively new phenomenon. That was invented by St.Eagle. (As I said, I'm pretty sure St.Eagle invented the wall, which was what allowed him to do this. But my memory is rusty. That was 11 years ago maybe.)

Boxer changed all of this. His superior understanding of how to use units, his superior understanding of what to build, how to lay out bases, etc., allowed him to shut down this kind of aggressive play (culminating in 3-0 vs JinNam in Hanbit OSL finals, the #1 hyper aggressive Zerg of the LYH era), while simultaneously giving him the mobility to shutdown the expansionism of Zerg. And in TvP, his drops, his vulture use, and his ability to push without doing this turtle slow push shit gave him a winrate over 70% in the year leading up to shit famous showdown with Garimto in Sky OSL, which was pretty much unheard of back then in any match-up.

The metagame changed. Many players disappeared from the blossoming progaming in large part because they couldn't keep up (although financial reasons were also a huge factor back then -- Boxer changed that too, but that's not what I'm discussing). Between the 1.08 patch and the difficulty in competing with Boxer in a battle of tactics and micro, hyper aggressive Zerg started to die out and expansionist Zerg also. Here is where Yellow stepped in and here's why Yellow is so famous even though he never won a Starleague: Yellow's style involved more economic based openings (12 hatch) that were then used to fuel an aggressive midgame, taking expansions slower than rich Zerg players, but pressuring the Terrans too much for them to do anything about it. And Protoss started changing too, partly from the strategic innovations of Garimto, and partly from the stronger play of the next generation that came into being late in the LYH era/early in the NaDa era that consisted of Reach, Ra and Kingdom. These players learned how to defend against Boxer's aggressive play while expanding, thus developing much stronger midgame economies.

And needless to say, Terrans started copying Boxer en masse. And people who thought Terran sucked donkey balls started switching to Terran en masse.

Go back and look at TLPD and in old tournaments it will list the players and there will be a number of "Terrans" like ChRh or Joyo. These guys were pretty much all playing random. If you look at the games list, you'll see that Terran wasn't used that often. Even TheMarine would often not play Terran (in fact PGR21.com used to maintain a list of top players based on lifetime achievement, and TheMarine's PROTOSS record was actually among the top 10 until sometime around 2003-2004). Many of these guys started playing exclusively Terran during and after the LYH era and Terran was the most popular race of up-and-comers like NaDa and Oov, BOTH of whom played random (actually, I think Oov favored Zerg of all races initially).




Since you brought up Oov and I keep bringing up NaDa, I guess I should go into their roles in all of this.

Boxer, essentially speaking, created the tool set. He turned the weakest race into the strongest race and brought in many ideas into the game that the other races would later pick up on. He killed the older, directionless style of SC, which was unable to defeat him.

But Boxer himself was largely without direction. Middle game was what happened when both players reacted to each other's builds, not a preset plan.

NaDa is the player who changed that. NaDa started using Boxer's tools not to win games directly, but to harass and stall his opponents while he put himself in a superior midgame position. NaDa's dropship build involved getting a command center even as the dropship was en route. And on maps where 1 fac behind wall -> expand was not possible (given the knowledge of the era; this was long before Midas invented the Fake Double), NaDa pioneered a strategy of vultures to harrass/attack into tanks to expand. And ultimately NaDa had the goal of pushing with a maxed out army with upgrades. These are all TvP examples, but it was the same in TvZ and even TvT: the goal was to expand faster.

Oov took what NaDa did to the logical extreme. Late in the NaDa era, these things known as "timings" started to appear. Play was starting to become standardized. Oov started monkeying with those timings, working to cut corners and throw off his opponents. Oov would actively try to get into his opponents head and screw with them, expanding at times when you wouldn't think he could expand, paying closer attention to signs of cheese that would disrupt his plans.

But early Oov had more in common with Gold Grand Slam NaDa than with Flash. Metagame as we know it today was coming into fruition. Because of Boxer's changes and NaDa's changes to how the game is played, standardization was starting to really happen in a big way. But it was nothing like it is today. These were just early explorations. A lot remained undiscovered. Which was how Anytime won a Starleague by gimmicking his way through the strongest opponents of his era in 2005. Even though Anytime was known for strong midgame macro, I'm pretty sure that the only macro games he played in SO1 ended up as losses.

It wasn't until Savior that modern gaming as we know it appeared. This was when standardization really took off, especially in 2006, which led to many retirements. For me personally, the game between Savior and NaDa on Luna caused a major mentality shift. Because before Savior there were many ways to play and there were many "right" answers, but I saw immediately that Savior had "solved" ZvT (with a solution that lasted for years, with slight variations over time). Suddenly rather than there being right ways to play, there was a right way to play.

And the rest you know.