Alright... as we all know, starcraft is a unique RTS in many ways. One of the ways starcraft has always seemed the most unique to me was in it's use of the keyboard. Have you ever watched other RTS games played live by top players? They don't use the keyboard a tenth as much as a Starcraft player does. We play an incredibly difficult mind game while our left hand glides over the keyboard with precision and and style. This makes Starcraft possibly the most difficult game ever created. We're hitting combos on our keyboard like it's street fighter, meanwhile out positioning our opponents like chess. But there's even more than this going on.
Have you ever noticed the patterns on your keyboard? Most of the starcraft players i talk to who aren't koreans don't... Here are a few of my favorite keyboard combinations 4d5d6d7d8d9d0d (i've just made seven dragoons in half a second), 0p9p8o (two probes from my nexus and then an observer), 4z5z6z7t8t9t0t (three zeals, four temps... i'll prob morph one group into an archon ; ). I know exactly which fingers to use on which keys and it allows me to get big tasks out of the way more quickly so i can focus the rest of my energy on strategy. As most koreans do, and foreigners don't, you can practice these keyboard combinations even if your not playing starcraft... Just practice them in wordpad or something.
In my own mind... Starcraft has always reminded me of a game that Day[9] and me grew up playing together as children. Beatmania. We love this game btw.
This game has always struck me as remarkably similar to starcraft. Obviously he's not out thinking someone... but his hands are tapping the keys rapidly in a pattern. In starcraft we have a bigger controller and we play the entire thing with our left hand (because we're SO GOD DAMN SEXY! ; ). Mastering patterns with your left hand can greatly help increase your skill... I'll play another song i like to play when I'm doing some PvT fast nexus on Gaia. I named it 'Eschobars Nightmare' becuase i actually name all my builds after i write them out (nerd pride folks)... Here, i'll play it for you now:
0p0p0pbp0p0p0p0p0pbn 0pbg0pba0p0pbybg4z0p 9p9pbp4d5d6s0p9pbp4d <-- 6s is me making dragoon range. 5d0p9pbp0p9p4d5dbn0p 9p4d5dbp0p9pvrbgbg
there may be a few mistakes... that was just from memory, when i play it's easier to do because seeing my food/money/army helps me stay on top of the next few notes i have to play. There's also another branch i can easily transition into if i want to get my two gateways and robo before my second nexus. My music can take me to many places ;D
Originally i was opposed to MBS... you can see me ranting like a lunatic about it in this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?currentpage=All&topic_id=53602&show_part= After thinking it over i think MBS will allow for more difficult patterns to master while playing the game. I want to see for myself first, but i think it will be good...
But i want more... i want more sexy things i can do with my keyboard. I want it to be a step up from starcraft! Here's my ideas.
Upgrades:
Why do we need one hotkey for an upgrade? That's too simple... i already know a basic combo i can do to upgrade out of three forges fast... everyone knows it. w [click] a [click] s [click]. Now i've upgraded out of three forges in a second. But wouldn't it be cooler if i had a special combination i had to do for just one upgrade? What if for my level one attack upgrade i had to do this combination on the keyboard:
wga <--- this combination would take three fingers, obviously you can do it quickly, but this would follow the basic keyboard pattern logic starcraft was based off of...
what about a level two weapons upgrade?
wgart <--- now it's four fingers instead of three. Better upgrades = harder combos.
What about level three?
wgart[space] <--- now i've used five fingers (thumb on space) to get a level three upgrade.
If a player does this combination wrong he is punished and has to start over again. We could do different cool patterns depending on the race and the upgrade.
But i want more still... What about that mother ship? It seems like it could kick some ass. But if i find out the mother ship is easy to make (hotkeywise) i'm going to be pissed... What if i just have to hit 'm' on the keyboard... wtf? NO WAY! lets step it up. Okay this might be a little too crazy... but what if the mothership requires a big keyboard combination to produce? Here are some of my ideas.
If the mothership is SO powerful and can only be produced once... maybe we could make it a two hand keyboard combination to produce. you would have to hit these combinations at the same time, otherwise start over. This would mean you can't use your mouse at all while making the mother ship.
Left hand. | Right hand. vdsa | nkl; asdv | ;lkn qq | pp
The final move will involve your entire left hand making a chopping motion on the left hand side of the keyboard:
[esc] ~ [tab] [caps lock] [shift] [ctrl]
You would have to hit all these keys at once... like your making a karatie chop on your keyboard.
What do you guys think? This would be a totally new way to use the keyboard and pick up the intensity of the game on all fronts. This would also make SC2 revolutionary for stepping up the use of the keyboard for the sake of game play.
What do you guys think? Do you have any sexy keyboard combinations you think should be implemented?
sorry, but no typing game could be seriously implemented to be part of an RTS
you could however, very easily make a UMS out of that idea ^^
starcraft is already typing game. no joke. did you not see that song i played for you? This is the most basic and fundamental element that the game is built off of. most people are too busy clicking on buildings and not hotkeying things to notice this... It's obviously more than just a typing game too... it's the most difficult game ever created. Keyboard combos, strategy, mouse micro, psychology and more. The perfect game.
sorry, but no typing game could be seriously implemented to be part of an RTS
you could however, very easily make a UMS out of that idea ^^
starcraft is already typing game. no joke. did you not see that song i played for you? This is the most basic and fundamental element that the game is built off of. most people are too busy clicking on buildings and not hotkeying things to notice this... It's obviously more than just a typing game too... it's the most difficult game ever created. Keyboard combos, strategy, mouse micro, psychology and more. The perfect game.
Let us build upon perfection.
players use the keyboard becouse it is faster than clicking but i have to make those combos i would rater just click on the upgrade.
Remove keyboard, make controls a combination of voice-activated and Wii-controls. "Gogogo" builds Marines. Use Wii-controller to highlight group, yell "attack" to target location, and so on. Also, use tongue-twisters to build Mothership.
Instead of that ridiculous combination of hotkeys to build a mothership, I'd rather just use the mouse, hover over the "build mothership" icon, and click it. Would take less than a second.
But... if we had hotkey combinations like this... it would be really awesome watching someone play Starcraft basically dominating the entire keyboard with their left hand.
that would actually be really awesome (i love learning/mastering these sorts of things) but i'd be totally surprsied if they did something like this, because it'd be too hard to have other people learn and be too obviously an artificial difficulty restriction.
but i do think the game needs some mechanical skill to keep it interesting, so i hope they come up with reasonable ways in which these sorts of mechanics still come into play without being TOO contrived... maybe if you need to assemble different pieces of the mothership together from different buildings or something, dunno.
I think that's not quite an RTS game. The point of using the keyboard is to get stuff out faster, but the keyboard is not an integral part of the game. You are proposing that Starcraft should become a fusion of keyboardness (yes, I make up words) and normal RTS. Personally, I wouldn't like that, and I would be pretty pissed if Blizzard did that to Starcraft, but it could be fun for other people.
The part with the mothership is exaggerated imo. I see no point in using such a hard combination to produce basically ONE unit. However, the upgrade idea is pretty nice. You wouldn't have to hotkey your forge, pressing "qart" very quickly will automatically select an available forge and start tier one weapons upgrade for example, if you have resources. This idea is rather revolutionary, and I like it very much. The nicest part is that you'd have to be pretty gosu to know (not to mention to master) all the combinations.
In my own opinion, i think koreans are probably better at starcraft overall because they seem to be more keyboard oriented. Koreans play in PC bangs where they get to see other koreans who are good playing... they also get to see how good players use their hands. I think seeing someone play live, first person, is a way better learning experience than watching a replay. I'm not saying foreigners are dumb; just by reading tl.net you can easily see that foreigners have a very strong strategic grasp of this game. I just think we don't focus anywhere near as much on simple game play mechanics such as hand positioning... probably because most foreigners practice at home... where they don't get to see other players play. Think of how many foreigners could be 10x better if someone showed them how to correctly hot key everything. What fingers should be used on each key. Think of how many people have probably spent countless hours playing the game via clicks while their keyboards sat right in front of them.
Why not get rid of the option to upgrade clicking all together? Starcraft has two possible methods of action. You can click do do almost anything or you can use the keyboard to do almost anything. On the surface it's much more appealing to click than to find a key on the keyboard. So many people who start the game focus on clicking to do things like build units and upgrade. Unfortunately (once mastered) the keyboard is 10x more efficient than unnecessary clicks. But you would have to play this game for quite a while to figure that out.
If we got rid of the option to click we would avoid the risk off people learning the game the wrong way. If we HAD to use the keyboard people could learn how to play from the get go rather than years later. Some people don't even know to break off their windows keys before they start to play.
I once remember seeing this player at a lan four years ago. He was egar to get better at Starcraft so i offered to break off some keys on his keyboard so that it would be easier to play. He immediately clutched his keyboard to his chest, like a child with a teddybear. He refused to break off his keys. I tried to explain to him that you basically HAVE to break off your windows keys to play the game because otherwise you'll probably end up tabbing yourself out of the game every other time you try to use your pinky or thumb to bind a hotkey. But he didn't want to damage his keyboard. After the lan i felt very bad because i knew even if he went home and practiced all the time, he would probably focus so much on clicking that he would never find this more efficient manner of playing.
Did you know protoss has five basic hand positions? You constantly shift between them while your playing. I'll write them up for the tl.net strat section sometime later this week. I don't want to steer this thread off topic. ; )
Starcraft can only be played efficiently if the players left hand is constantly moving. It starts out slow, but once the game picks up... it never stops. That's what makes starcraft starcraft. Becuase it's the only RTS game where the player looks like he's playing a musical instrument with over fifty buttons only using his left hand... meanwhile he is rhythmically clicking his mouse, moving it with surgical precision... in his head he is out thinking his opponent through pure strategy. Starcraft involves psychology too of course. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to trick someone by faking a build early, like making a second gateway and then canceling and expanding after you kill his scouting scv. But you can only focus on something like that if your using the hotkeys enough to keep up with the game.
This is just the way i always saw starcraft.
But i do think it would be wise for blizzard to remove the 'clicking' option for commands which COULD be used for the keyboard.
In fact i wouldn't even mind seeing some other features like special patterns and formations you could do with your mouse to cast a spell. Like making circles with your mouse to cast a spell in a specific area. I think they had something like that in this other computer game called Black and White. Although that game wasn't a fast paced RTS...
These are the roots of starcraft and i really hope blizzard keeps this in mind when making the game. I want more stuff like this. I think if Starcraft can build on these 'beatmania' like motions on the keyboard, they could make a fucking incredible game. They just need to incorporate hotkey patterns into the single player mode or something... or have a training mode where players can practice using all their fingers.^^
Why doesn't blizzard just make a real time strategy high level gaming language. Kind of like java or c but oriented to gaming. The idea is that you wouldn't even use the mouse the entire game. The beginning of a game would look like this.
*game starts*
move all min1 //moves all units to min1 move p2 min2 //moves 2nd probe to second mineral patch move p3 min3 //moves 3rd probe to third mineral patch move p4 min4 //moves 4th probe to 4th mineral patch mb = main1 //sets variable mb as the first nexus/hatchery/cc
mb p //makes a probe pn min5 //tells the newest probe to mine from mineral patch 5
mb p pn min6
mb p pn mov (21, 77) //tells to move the newest probe to the map coordinates (21,77)
this wraps up the early game commands along with scouting. Next I'm going to describe the art of a zergling rush..
EPT
