StarCraft II Brood War - Page 23

how can you be any more wrong about the situation, not only do you not provide any points other than the common stereotypes of "scbw has terrible ui", you also seem to blindfolded that starcraft 2 can get fixed by a few patches for units when it's fundamentally broken as a game in whole.

The reason scbw is more interesting to not only watch, but to play is because of the amount of limited control you have when you are playing the game. SC2 gives you infinitely more control over your army, your production, your worker management, to the point where almost everyone does the same thing, and everyone has the same management. I cannot see an average joe sc2 zerg controlling 200/200 army of ultralisks, defilers, zerglings and lurkers like they can do with one
control key in starcraft2. I cannot see them control 10 defilers to constantly cast swarm without having their macro suffer. Is that not the entire point? The more supply your army is, the harder it should get for you and the more actions required for you to control it while still managing your economy and production. The more production you have, the more time it should take you to go through all of the buildings. The more bases you have, the better you have to control your mineral and gas count because you'll have more and more income per base. The more bases you have, the harder it gets for you to control your own army due to the actions required for defense. These are just one of the few characteristics that BW has which starcraft2 does not. There are abilities in starcraft broodwar that are imbalanced and would, with starcraft2's design, completely break the game. However, most of the ability lies within the player AND his opponent to deal with the spells, making it two sided and leaves a lot more room for error. To me, this type of design seems to have a very metodical, logical approach, yet still maintains the fun spirit of the game.

As lalush has pointed out, in starcraft2 you almost never need to go above 3 base (except zerg because of the gases). Not only does that narrow down the amount of options that you have to break your enemy's defense, but because of macro simplicity (automining, having many production buildings in same unit group, controling your entire army with just few keystrokes) AND because of the fact that you don't feel pressured to take more bases there is little space for you to excel at something in which your opponent doesn't, leaving them only with a few routes. Two of them are micro and unit control. But now to add some hypocrisy, blizzard has introduced two abilities that have been broken since the beginning of starcraft2, forcefields and fungal growth. When one plays against such spells, he can only hope that his opponent makes mistakes as he will be UNABLE to micro against them due to their mechanics. And then one can ask himself "why is the game so passive?". Talking about strategy of choice, from pure observation almost every zerg on world goes for 3 hatch with queens play as anything else is pointless. This build clearly gives you a big advantage over your opponent, therefore doing any all ins is pointless as it is a risk that can put you behind (ironically, not always the case as in TvZ it can put zerg ahead if terran goes for banshee hellion play). So what does this leave you with? A swarm of faceless players. Not only do all zergs play the same, since terrans cannot all in zerg anymore, it leaves them with less options than fingers on hand. So much for the strategy variation. There are only a few players that are exciting to watch and even that is because of their PAST innovations (marineking's marine split, stephano's crazy macro and engagements, MVP's tactical brilliance). One year later, many more players are mechanically on par with them. Are players truly improving that rapidly or is there something else involved here?

So what does this mean for the future professionals? Breakthroughs in skill are definitely much less probable than in bw because of the softcap that starcraft2 has right now, and it won't change in HoTS either. Units come and go, fundamental problems and design issues will stay here until blizzard redesigns their philosophy.

only when a post like this appears do I realize the sheer brilliance that old blizzard put into this game along with some happy accidents

edit: talking about the 3 base play, worst of it all is that almost every map is the same and centered around you getting 3 bases without any reprecussions