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The first thing you have to learn is to get your peons to work and that is torture.
Countering your opponent I´d say is satisfying, even moreso If you manage to counter his counter
Honestly, do you even like Starcraft? Some of the most satisfying feelings of accomplishment I've had in my gaming life involve those rare occasions where your game is on and your hitting every SCV the instant it pops out and grabbing +shift hotkeying every unit that comes out perfectly. It just feels SO GOOD when you look back and think about each individual thing you just did all in under like 2-3 seconds as your friends watch and be like "I could never do that no matter how hard I tried." Frankly, just countering strategies is extremely boring to me if I'm not actually improving every time I play the game.
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[quote=NatsuTerran]It just feels SO GOOD when you look back and think about each individual thing you just did all in under like 2-3 seconds [/quote]
I think you should play stepmania (keyboard is fine too, they have files of that) or other response-mechanics games.
The genre is "Strategy" and you can do the game justice if there weren't any. There is nothing wrong with liking the comfortable feeling of controlling a ton of things fast and precise, and I like that myself. However Starcraft is more than that.
Frankly, just countering strategies is extremely boring to me if I'm not actually improving every time I play the game.
You are improving if you are countering strategies properly. With every game you are suppose to learn the effectiveness of each counter. So do you build 5 turrets or 3? Just how much drone whoring can you when you stop a fast gas on katrina....and so on. The devil is in the details as a unspotted dropship or a well placed mine can reverse the game flow and that is what makes Starcraft fun to watch.
If you are training your muscles, your coordination improves. If you are training your mind, your counters improve to ever improved efficiency and precision. A newbie can move SCV to mine too, but a skilled player do it better. Same with strategy like setting up flanks, timings or pulling boxer tricks, any newbie can do it, but a good player do it better.
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On January 26 2009 07:55 Unentschieden wrote:
The first thing you have to learn is to get your peons to work and that is torture.
Countering your opponent I´d say is satisfying, even moreso If you manage to counter his counter.
I won't continue this conversation because it would result in some flamefest with "I hate SC, but SC2 OWNNNZZZZ just because it won't be like SC (even if I don't play it very frequently)" vs "Keep the good things of SC in SC2 and don't make it another boring luckgame which will be dead after few years".
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Bill307
Canada9103 Posts
Funny how all the examples seem to revolve around StarCraft and Chess, as if RTS and TBS are the only genres that involve strategy.
Two reasons why strategy can be planned almost completely in-advance outside of the game in the cases of Chess and StarCraft:
1. The # of plausible strategies is small.
2. There is little-to-no need to adapt to an opponent's unique strengths, weaknesses, quirks, etc. during a game. If this aspect were more important, then you could e.g. have a strategy to learn what their personal weaknesses are and then put together a strategy that exploits their weaknesses in the midst of the game.
This can be done in between games of StarCraft, e.g. you may notice your opponent is bad at dealing with muta harass, or has a tendency to leave expos undefended against drops, etc., and then use those weaknesses against him in the subsequent games. But the ability to discover and prey on a person's weaknesses in the middle of a single game is all but useless in StarCraft.
Edit: I changed my mind about how to express point #2: see below.
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Well.. You could call Scouting --> No drop defense exploiting the weakness due to ingame information?
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If you are trying to say that fun is important in competitive play that you are sort of right, but you missed the whole thing.
Most players who became pro gamers did so becaose they liked the game in the first place, not the other way around.
Is starcraft fun? - yes
is macro in SC unnecessary baby sitting? - No, its an important part of the game that makes the game what it is today. If it didn't have macro it may have not turned out as it has.
There is one way to look at it and here it goes:
Micro - good, adds some depth, skill and fun
Macro - good, adds some depth, skill and fun
Macro&Micro - WIN situation, mixes best of both world and increases depth, skill, fun, strategy and longetivity!
About skill its very simple: everything that helps a player beat the opponent is called skill.
Weather this be strategy, tactics, positioning, APM, micro, macro, game sense, mental strenghts, etc... is all skill.
In some cases more APM makes you an advantage, but it others not.
If we look say at Savior in his prime, he won 75% of his games and was one of the slowest APM in the whole pro gaming scene. This means if he had better game sense, better tactics and mental state than his opponent who had less of those skills but more APM he would still loose anyways!
So every single thing in SC is important, the game is better than the sum of its parts and thats a fact. There have been and will be games that have more micro or more macro or more strategy than SC, but ultimately they can't find the right balance between all those elements and the game end up being boring after some time spend with it.
So ultimately to speak for one thing as good and other thing as bad is as ignorant or unknowledgable as it can be.
Thats like figuring out the meaning of life itself, its just not possible at lest yet... :D
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On January 29 2009 08:38 Bill307 wrote:That's a good point and I didn't really consider it when I was writing my post. I think I should have written my 2nd point differently. In my opinion, StarCraft doesn't really expose unique individual differences as much as other genres of games can. But maybe I'm making this statement due to my own limited point of view, since whenever I play 1v1 against someone I don't know, I always play "the same". Maybe my build or overall gameplan will be different, but the differences will not depend on who my opponent is or what their personality is like. (Except pre-game things like "I think this guy is inexperienced so I'll do something stupid and unexpected in the hopes that he won't be able to adapt to it." Or, "I hate this guy so I'll do a proxy rush."  ) And rarely does a situation arise in-game where I actually need to stop and think to myself, "This guy has shut down all my usual strategies / attacks. How do I overcome this guy and his unique strategy / style of play?" (And when that does happen, I'm usually already dead anyway. =/ ) This is what I am referring to when I say that you do not need to adapt to your opponent's personality.
I partly agree but also disagree. It's true that the beginning of the game, most of the time you will do the same bo (even if you alter your builds, this is not relevant to your opponent). However, after a few exchanges like watching his scout and his behavior in base, your game sense should be tingling to tell you how this opponent behaves. For example, suppose it's a new season and you are playing at d+ level, if your opponent has an active scout + no idling at base it instantly tells you this guy has good multitask or is better than a regular D+ player. This may subconsciously affect you to do less/more risky plays than how you usually play. (eg. you may play get more defence than usual or do proxy because you believe your skill can't match your opponent's)
In regards to personality, it is a skill to take advantage of your opponent's skill-set. Suppose you are playing zeal/temp vs hydras. If your opponent can storm-dodge + snipe ht, you may play more cautiously and alter your unit-mix. Whereas if your opponent focuses more on macro and less micro, you may add more ht because it gives a better return. This in itself of recognizing your opponent's weakness is a skill, and as skill level goes up where your opponent seems perfect in everything, it becomes harder to exploit the weakness.
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Bill307
Canada9103 Posts
On January 29 2009 13:01 PocketX wrote:
Suppose you are playing zeal/temp vs hydras. If your opponent can storm-dodge + snipe ht, you may play more cautiously and alter your unit-mix.
Assuming you haven't already fallen hopelessly behind due to his micro. =/ The fact that RTS games have a slippery slope effect when you start to fall behind (fall behind => fall even farther behind) means that even if you learn from your experience, the fact that you've already lost a battle or whatnot could mean that you'll lose the game regardless of whether or not you adapt (unless your opponent blunders).
But aside from that drawback, I agree with what you wrote.
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What kills strategic play are 3 things (and they're connected):
1. There are build orders which get you into mid or even late game without much trouble - meaning early and mid game strategies are almost always doomed to fail unless you can prevent the opponent from scouting it. There is a "best build" which you can slightly adapt to any situation.
This is bad. Remember Flash not SCV scouting at all in TvP, and winning? That's why this is bad - you should always have to adapt to what your opponent is doing. You should lose if you don't know it. But SC has like one or two openings in each matchup on each map which work against everything (with only very slight modifications you can do on-the-fly without many problems).
Pretty much the only reason why progamers lose to other progamers in early or mid game is a micro or timing mistake (they know and can do better, but things like that can always happen) or a greedy build order (e.g. PvZ with P FE: not adding enough cannons in case of a hydra break)
2. In late game, most (if not all) RTS (including SC1) are mostly about mechanical skill respectively multitasking ability. Other skills are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
That's the physical sport aspect of it - it's like soccer - no one expects great creative play or something. The players just need to be physically skilled, that's all.
When you're good at #2 you'll roll over opponents who are not good at it. It will automatically look like your macro and micro is amazing, simply because you're doing so many tasks at once.
#2 is why SC1 can never really be compared to e.g. chess, even though people always will try to because they try to overglorify the "strategy" aspect of SC1 while not realizing (or not wanting to realize) that the strategy aspect of SC1 is really small.
3. Luck. With the real-time aspect comes luck. And in late game when you're doing a lot of things "at once" you will not be able to react fast enough in some situations, and even though as a progamer you're amazing at deciding when to pay attention to what, you'll inevitably be like 1 second too slow in some situations, and combine this with the fact that most SC units die extremely fast (almost instantly), and you know why this can be a factor of "luck" and why this can be very bad for you sometimes. Another luck factor is of course the path finding - units will sometimes move stupidly and you WILL lose some units because of that.
Ignoring #3, which can't really be changed, this means that:
When you're good at #1, you'll almost always reach late game, and when you're good at #2 as well, then you're gosu - playing as fast and as precise as a robot.
Bad players (let's just say iccup < A) are bad at both. Good *foreign* players are at least good at #1, not very good at #2 - most only have around 200 APM too. Korean progamers are good at both. Plus, Koreans are the only ones who seem to understand that the things that matter the most are great build orders and great multitasking/mechanics. Many foreigners still live in dreamland and try to optimize irrelevant aspects about their gameplay while Koreans train mechanics hardcore and make sure they are able to follow the best build orders to the best of their ability.
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If SC2 isn't fun, I wouldn't play it competitively much less play it.
SC1 is fun at all levels from beginner to competitive level. WC3, I never liked it at any level.
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On January 29 2009 15:49 0xDEADBEEF wrote:
1. There are build orders which get you into mid or even late game without much trouble - meaning early and mid game strategies are almost always doomed to fail unless you can prevent the opponent from scouting it. There is a "best build" which you can slightly adapt to any situation.
This is bad. Remember Flash not SCV scouting at all in TvP, and winning? That's why this is bad - you should always have to adapt to what your opponent is doing. You should lose if you don't know it. But SC has like one or two openings in each matchup on each map which work against everything (with only very slight modifications you can do on-the-fly without many problems).
Pretty much the only reason why progamers lose to other progamers in early or mid game is a micro or timing mistake (they know and can do better, but things like that can always happen) or a greedy build order (e.g. PvZ with P FE: not adding enough cannons in case of a hydra break)
This is like saying Halo 3 is more skillful than Halo 1 because in H1 there is only one dominant weapon (pistol) that outslays everything else. And your argument is that your opponent has doesn't have to adapt his play as much as in H3 because every weapon in H3 is viable under certain situations.
Don't you realize how stupid that is? Why should someone lose because They are holding a certain weapon? Why should someone lose because they chose a certain build? There MUST be a safe build in which the whole game revolves around. Something to be used as a benchmark for skill. Much like in H1 the Pistol is your main battle tool, and everything else is a prized sidearm.
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EPT
