Is SC2 too fast? - Page 7

On April 16 2016 07:40 nanaoei wrote:


my articulation is pretty bad and i'm sorry, but i think the idea is that games are more fun with people who are willing to roll with you. i'm not trying to say much with this, but: maybe you or anyone else could consider it a $60 lesson. i mean it brought you here, talking to us, or you learned a little more about what you want in a game.

of course there's that whole deal with expectations. WoL had huge expectations, and didn't meet a larger fraction of all of it. that is however a wake-up point about games being produced and played these days. i don't remember when i hit this rut of enjoying games less.

personally speaking (and this is very different for each person) i didn't have a great upbringing surrounding my hobby for games. i instantly fell in love with playing counterstrike competitive, and then as a really young guy, i went to the top competitions. i could not convince my parents or brother that it was going to be a thing and eventually they threw out my computer. that wonderment for gaming just did not go away. and here i am in my older years trying to regain that time i felt i lost by not playing to my heart's content all those years ago. i've heard similar stories before from other people i've met from the same sort of generation, and i'm sure it still happens today.
and after all that gaming, all these years later, i've reached a point where i can finally say i'm satisfied, or filled.
there are still regrets, but i've received so much out of gaming already, including all the knowledge and having new learning habits stemming from solving problems in games. even just the fact that you could put so much into a game is a level of reassurance that you can hope to put your all into something else.

in my opinion, where there's money to support all the things you ever want to do in life (whether for yourself or others), that's a viable main pathway in life. gaming was not like that before. i actually think our little microcosm of gaming could have easily happened in the reverse order compared to how it is now, where money existed, then disappeared. right now it's simply in a spotlight.

what i mean to say though is i hope each rts player has a great story to share even if it seems as small as one average ingame victory. as long as it stays with you--memories unaltered--it's a valuable kind of lesson for what you want in other games or perhaps what you want to achieve as long as you keep playing.
unfortunately as it is, especially for a 1v1 game like starcraft 2, our fate and most of our enjoyment is entirely up to us.

On April 16 2016 07:58 mauwee wrote:
I always found SC2 to be way to slow but perhaps that because I also still play SC1.

On April 16 2016 07:41 Laul wrote:


I find it's just a shame that no matter how creative or involved you are in your strategy/personal playstyle, you'll never actually "be good" unless you play in the holy meta everyone worships. "If you don't build x unit at x supply you insta lose " is what a lot of players, and myself, find to be true in practice, and overall the greatest deterrent to really enjoying this game, a lack of variation I suppose.

Just my take on it though. What do you think? How would you like to play the game vs how you should play the game?

On April 16 2016 08:10 nanaoei wrote:


i'll actually answer this question even though it's not addressed to me, and since i have a different view overall.
i know it's not as simple as you type out as the, "if you don't build x, you lose" deal.
i've been respected for ultra creative stuff which in respects to professional sc:bw and sc2 players i adore, is child's play at least half the time. it's the fact that you can still win while doing something ridiculous that's fun about it.
on the contrary to not following the norms to best of your ability, you can do something stupid and have quite a few windows to abuse and make something out of it. usually the brick wall is multitasking and general ingame experience.
you throw something wild out there, you need to continue to not follow the norms.
a small example: you're all-inning, usually you cut workers for this because you don't need them anymore. what about adding workers as you are wining and dining them in cheese and are succeeding? i mean you no longer have to continue the all-in, you can just reset to even or advantaged and take it from there.

for everything to succeed--at least often--you need the basics down pat. that is fact. a lot of people view it as build order dependancy and strict rules. it's true and not or in other words a matter of personal perspective. again, it's just another fact about playing games that have been explored a lot already. creativity can be expressed in other ways. your entire game-plan doesn't need to revolve around one gimmick turned into a strategy. it can be based on something as little as one little maneuver that you think is awesome. this is shit that you think before sleep, waking up, while dreaming, or daydreaming in the shower about. unfortunately or not, these things require good play. sometimes fast, sometimes above average, and mostly fleshed out.

you can't get creative with an art brush and canvas if you haven't even done any artwork or prep before. at the very least, you can't ask for anything close to a masterpiece. that is just disrespecting all the work and study that other artists pour into things to get to the point that they're at.
but once you know you can do something respectable or something close to what you envision, absolutely.. absolutely, there's so much you can do. that's how i see starcraft 2, with a little emphasis on the multitasking aspect.
i think being creative in this game and in a lot of competitive games is putting in a lot of extra (thinking, executiong, etc.) to gain just a moment of flair in your play. i really respect it because it really is difficult and isn't necessary to winning.

watch some SC2HL on youtube!
there's some hilarious stuff on there from the best of the best who are trained to perfect their play in the meta.

On April 16 2016 08:15 InfCereal wrote:
Y'know, I've been rolling this over in my mind since I read it this morning.

There's something to be said about seeing lings leave a base (if you see them at all), and having maybe 6 seconds to react. I haven't been a low league player since the first year of playing, but I remember I wouldn't even play 1v1 because it felt hopeless.

That was back in WoL, and the games were dramatically slower back then. With LotV, you have that 6 seconds to react still, but now your mains running out of resources by the time you finish defending. It's definitely a shock.

At my level, I don't really feel the difference too much. It's just the game it always was. Trying to put myself into a slower player's shoes, I can definitely see how the game would be perceived as way too fast.

On April 16 2016 08:37 Ball656 wrote:
I think most of the reason fights seem to play out quickly is the tendency for players to put all their stuff in one place, often clustered together like a phalanx or shield-wall. If there were more punishing ways to destroy close together units, players wouldn't do that as much and fights would tend to be slower. Perhaps paradoxically, I think the way to slow down fights is to actually increase the damage output of certain things in certain ways. There are of course other things that can be done to discourage clustering, for example something like CoH2's suppression mechanic or any other kind of widely spread harmful debuff.

I'm going to consider something that would probably break the game for a moment, so don't be alarmed because it's not something I'm saying should be done: what if, for example, the colossus did line damage like a hellion or lurker? And it could friendly fire for full damage. Clearly you couldn't use it like it was usually used in HotS or WoL in that case, hovering over the army-- you'd have to put it on the flanks or out in front. It would be yet better against masses of marines or hydralisks even without support, but worse in the case of supporting a bunch of units in front of it attacking from a safe position behind a blob of friendly units. I think the presence of such a unit would tend to slow fights down between people using it correctly and reacting to it correctly even though if it was used in a simplistic group everything and A-move fashion it would make the fight speed up even more by just killing everything in front of it indiscriminately. But because the correct response seems to be to keep most units out of its line of fire-- for both players-- then less units are actively participating in the battle and dealing damage. So that means less units are dying at the same time. And there might be more thought being put into exactly how each player wants to engage, though there would of course still be standard practiced procedures and responses.

So that's my view on the speed of fights in the game, for what it's worth (probably very little).

On April 16 2016 10:00 washikie wrote:
I disagree with all the people saying that Starcraft lacks stratagy. I think people who say this don't understand all the decision making that goes into playing the game at a decent level. I don't claim to be great at the game. I am only a mid tier masters player but even at my level I percive the substantial swing in advantage that strategic thinking can provide you in a game. Consider the scouting phase of the early game. Since I play Terran I'm going to talk from a Terran's perspective. As Terran you usually want to set up you economy and infistucture at this stage of the game while keeping tabs on your opponent. To do this scouting is critical. Say that I send out a reaper to see what my opponent is up to in tvp if I see 2 gas and a cyber core I know it's some kind of pressure opening. If I see a faster nexus then my opponent is planing to play more economically. From this information I need to make a wide variety of strategic decisions. If my opponent went for pressure I need to try to Scout it but I might not know what it is. Do I build a bunker at my front? Do I invest in missle turrets to deny oracles and Dts? Do I delay my star port to get extra barracks. Do I make cyclones or tanks? These are all strategic dicisions that will help me survive the early game. If instead my opponent opened defensive I need to figure out how I'm going to keep up with there economy. Do I try to get aggressive with some drop harass? Do I try to take a faster third base since they probably won't attack me? After this early phase of the game there are even more important decisions you have to make. The biggest 3 are generally what unit comp to go. When should I try to take my next base. And when should I try to do damage to my opponent as a Terran once agian these decisions are driven by information on what your opponent is doing . Based on thier unit comp you can determine what supprt units your army needs. Based on the time they plop down thier new bases and also the timing of thier Tech and your own economic state you decide weather to attake or not. There are countless examples I can give where you need to make decisions In a game of Starcraft and those dessions and the reasoning behind them vary based on matchup and game state. Now to adress the question of speed. Speed is important in sc2 there is no doubting that but it's not the only thing that matters. How fast you play often dictates how much stuff you can make. How much harass you can do and how well you manage fights. But speed can be counterbalanced by stratagy because like speed good corner cutting and decision making provide you an advantage. Further at the highest level I have herd pros describe how choosing which actions to do becomes part of the stratagy of the game because both you and your opponent are near the limit of amp that most people can achieve. Mechanics matter but that does not mean strategy does not. And for the game being to fast well, that's part of the fun and challenge its one of the things that makes sc2 an awesome game but it's not for everyone if it's not for you why not try playing a tbs like civ or chess.

On April 16 2016 09:04 coolman123123 wrote:
I'm going to go against the grain here and say I agree with OP. for 90% of the playerbase or more, it makes more sense to macro up a huge ball while scouting and defending and then a moving to victory. there is a reason more people watch this game than play it, its designed for the pros exclusively.

On April 16 2016 10:19 seemsgood wrote:

I think people confuse and can't have same agreement between "strategy" and "reacting"

On April 16 2016 10:00 washikie wrote:
I disagree with all the people saying that Starcraft lacks stratagy. I think people who say this don't understand all the decision making that goes into playing the game at a decent level. I don't claim to be great at the game. I am only a mid tier masters player but even at my level I percive the substantial swing in advantage that strategic thinking can provide you in a game. Consider the scouting phase of the early game. Since I play Terran I'm going to talk from a Terran's perspective. As Terran you usually want to set up you economy and infistucture at this stage of the game while keeping tabs on your opponent. To do this scouting is critical. Say that I send out a reaper to see what my opponent is up to in tvp if I see 2 gas and a cyber core I know it's some kind of pressure opening. If I see a faster nexus then my opponent is planing to play more economically. From this information I need to make a wide variety of strategic decisions. If my opponent went for pressure I need to try to Scout it but I might not know what it is. Do I build a bunker at my front? Do I invest in missle turrets to deny oracles and Dts? Do I delay my star port to get extra barracks. Do I make cyclones or tanks? These are all strategic dicisions that will help me survive the early game. If instead my opponent opened defensive I need to figure out how I'm going to keep up with there economy. Do I try to get aggressive with some drop harass? Do I try to take a faster third base since they probably won't attack me? After this early phase of the game there are even more important decisions you have to make. The biggest 3 are generally what unit comp to go. When should I try to take my next base. And when should I try to do damage to my opponent as a Terran once agian these decisions are driven by information on what your opponent is doing . Based on thier unit comp you can determine what supprt units your army needs. Based on the time they plop down thier new bases and also the timing of thier Tech and your own economic state you decide weather to attake or not. There are countless examples I can give where you need to make decisions In a game of Starcraft and those dessions and the reasoning behind them vary based on matchup and game state. Now to adress the question of speed. Speed is important in sc2 there is no doubting that but it's not the only thing that matters. How fast you play often dictates how much stuff you can make. How much harass you can do and how well you manage fights. But speed can be counterbalanced by stratagy because like speed good corner cutting and decision making provide you an advantage. Further at the highest level I have herd pros describe how choosing which actions to do becomes part of the stratagy of the game because both you and your opponent are near the limit of amp that most people can achieve. Mechanics matter but that does not mean strategy does not. And for the game being to fast well, that's part of the fun and challenge its one of the things that makes sc2 an awesome game but it's not for everyone if it's not for you why not try playing a tbs like civ or chess.

I think people confuse and can't have same agreement between "strategy" and "reacting"

On April 16 2016 10:52 washikie wrote:

I don't think there needs to be much confusion. The majority of stratagy in any stratagy game is making the best possible decisions based on the game state. Admitidly there is the opening game where your choices are not affected as much by your opponent. You can also have a general game plan like I want to take three bases then do a big attack. But honestly these kind of overarching stratagies are just a small portion of the strategic thinking that goes on in a game. Few people consider chess a deep and interesting game because The decision to open queens gambit vs something like indian or English is so interesting. A far more important skill is deciding what to do based on the board state. I guess if you want to argue semantics you could say I'm discussing tactics and not grand stratagy . Mabey you would be right but grande stratagy Is usually a vague outline of what you want to achive and how you plan to get there. and in the case of most stratagy games this means any one can look up a stratagy on the web that they can open with. What realy differentiates players and shows off intellect though is the decsions you make for yourself based on the variance of the game to get the most out of your initial plan. So yeah mabey in sc2 tactics are more meaningful then stratagy if you go the semantic route but if you do then in almost any situation. Where decision making matters tactics will be the more important and interesting skill than stratagey. But most rts gamers don't think about semantic stratagey because frankly it's not that helpful to And lump tactics into strategy.

On April 16 2016 10:52 washikie wrote:
I don't think there needs to be much confusion. The majority of stratagy in any stratagy game is making the best possible decisions based on the game state.