EPTMy first step into an RTS was Dune II: Battle for Arrakis and it hooked me harder than morphine. It wasn’t that the concept was new to me—I actually tried playing games like Age of Empires and Red Alert before I started playing Dune II. It wasn’t the competition (non-existent), the difficulty (Snoozefest AI), or even the narrative (Not Dune at all actually) that hooked me. What hooked me was the game mechanics.
To truly allow this to make sense, I’ll need to pull back to when I first fell in love with Chess.
Chess is not a strategy game. Before we can continue with this line of thought, you need to make the same epiphany that I made when I was just a tiny infant dragging plastic pieces across a checkered board.
Chess is not a strategy game.
A true strategy game is one reliant on rules. The existence of rules allows for there to be a predictable order. I move piece A, piece A moves. I move piece B, piece B moves. When piece A or piece B is in situation C—D happens. Predictable, perceivable. With predictability, stratagem evolves. If piece B is in location E creating situation C then I have to make sure that piece A should be in location F in order to allow situation G to occur! Predictions is what stratagem is all about. I will wall off with 2 supply depots and a barracks in case zerglings run into my main. I will forcefield the ramp with the one sentry and defend with the two stalkers I left behind to allow me to feel safe pushing out. I will scout with my overlord so that I can see what stratagem he will concoct and then swiftly counter it. A strategy game is about predictability of factors.
Chess is not a strategy game.
“That’s crazy” you say.
And you’d be right. I was just a little under ten years of age when I had this epiphany. I still believed wrestling was real. I was absolutely crazy.
The problem with Chess, I realized, was that the board was already set. Who was stupid enough to think that having pawns block all your good pieces was a good idea? That ruins my ability to—as day9 once famously said—go out and fucking kill him. The game of Chess, it turns out, is merely a violent game of opening presents. You see, your gift is wrapped in pawns, and your opponent’s gift is wrapped in pawns, you both race to unwrap your gifts and all of a sudden—4 move checkmate.
“Wait a minute!” my feeble tiny mind said in protest. “What the fuck is that shit!” Of course, this is a modern translation of the event. It was most likely just me crying. I prefer the modern interpretation.
It turned out, chess was not predictable. I not only could see what pieces my opponent moved, but he even just sat there and watched me stare at the bishop not wanting to explain to me what had just happened. A normal kid would think “Oh cool! I could do that!” but I wasn’t a normal kid. It turned out I was an Sc2 fanboy to the core—so I began to whine about how white was too powerful of a color. So my dad switched colors with me. We played again. 4 move checkmate. Now at the time I didn’t realize this. It took my dad about 10-15 moves to get the checkmate—but it was still the same damn bishop standing innocuously in the middle of the board pretending to not have the sniper rifle that just ended the possibility of future bloodshed.
I was furious! How in the hell did things manage to come at me like that from out of nowhere! Yes, my age was in the single digits, yes, my dad wasn’t being nice. But I wasn’t normal. I played again.
I was not to be tricked by that devious bishop once again, I hounded it, chased after it, checked every angle I could, I would not die to some stupid silly overpowered imbalanced—2piece Knight capture.
As I sat there on the table staring at the Knight who had both my King and my Queen in check I thought that life was unfair. How the fuck can this stupid piece of shit of a game be called a strategy game if things come out of fucking left field like the fucking plague with no warning, no countermeasures, nothing! This wasn’t strategy this was gimmickry! This wasn’t strategy this was bullshit!
Chess is not a strategy game!
I ran off from Chess. I eventually went back. When I was in high school I won several chess tournaments in the East Bay area of California before laying down my pieces after realizing that my dad wouldn’t love me more just because I won chess tournaments. I eventually learned that I was wrong to think that Chess was all about gimmicks and surprise. Chess actually was a strategy game. But that’s not for many years and I still haven’t gotten to Dune II yet.
After giving up on Chess I set my sights on computer games. This was true strategy. Predictability allowed me to see what was coming, and then prepare for it. Red Alert infantry charging at my base? Build a pillbox. Raiders attacking my Age of Empires workers? Run to the center of town. It was a give and take. I see what was coming; I would prepare, and then respond. Then I’d prepare something, attack, pull back if they were ready for it, and then change my plans. This was strategy.
Then Dune II smacked me in the face. In Dune II, all units were useful at some point despite the design of the game. Let me state this clearly. Dune II: Battle for Arrakis is a bad game. The AI cheats, bugs, and the UI was god awful. And the Unit design was atrocious.
Infantry could be run over by tanks.
Unit effectiveness was determined by health. A unit at half health moved half as fast and took twice as long to fire the next round.
Unit design was a linear progression. Trikes, into Quads, into Combat Tanks, into Siege Tanks.
You had no control over air units—none.
Why did it interest me so much? Mechanics.
A Carry-All was essentially an automated Dropship. 99% of the time its only job was to move harvesters back and forth. Then one day I accidentally blocked off my refineries and repair facilities. Don’t worry if you don’t know what they are—it’s irrelevant. It turned out that if you prevent a unit from popping out, and you had a Carry-All, it would pick it up and drop it off somewhere on the map. I was like “interesting,” but then ultimately I found it dumb. Why would I want my rally to go from being adjacent to the building in question (There was no rally point) to some random part of the map? Then I noticed that when the Carry-All picked up a wounded vehicle and brought it back to the repair facility, the Carry-All would then pick it back up and return it back where the damaged unit started from. So long as the repair facility was fully blocked of course.
This is confusing to those who never played the game. So let me spell it out. It turned out that they had an automated dropship system in the design of the game. This automated dropship system was very helpful if you completely blocked off/surrounded every inch of some buildings, but was awful and got in the way if you surrounded other buildings.
“What did this mean?” Those of you who haven’t figured it out yet ask.
It meant that there was a way to optimally design your base. You wanted buildings that the AI valued to attack in the rear, and the buildings that were normally ignored to act as walls. You also wanted fragile buildings to be away from the fight while robust buildings should be closer to the front line. All this was easy to figure out and was what you did because the AI kept attacking the same spot every single time. However, since there was an optimal way to set up your base in order for it to run more efficiently—suddenly it wasn’t so obvious. You see, the Dune series limited *where* you could build your buildings to just rocky ground—which sucks when fighting on a desert planet that is mostly made of sand.
The whole game transformed before my eyes. With limited space, I needed the heavy factory (a prime target) to both be in the back of my base as well as for it to have enough “open room” around it to allow units to get out of the building without needing a carryall. At the same time the repair facility (also a prime target) wanted to be as close to the battle as possible to reduce travel time between repairs in order to allow your carryalls to pick up and redeploy your troops as fast as possible. However, it had to be scrunched up with as many things as possible in order to “bug” the carryall to pick up and redeploy troops constantly. This then lead to bunching up your Wind Vanes (think powerplants in Command and Conquer) allowing Nukes to wipe out your power in one landing. Oh right—there are Nukes you can’t stop.
I haven’t talked about the game yet have I? It seems I’ve spent forever talking simply about building placement and Carry-Alls. I talk about those things because they are the fun parts of playing Dune II: Battle for Arrakis.
Another Example is the one combat air unit in the game—the Ornithoptor. It was an air to ground flying unit that attacked the closest target. It was also fragile as can be and lasted about less than a second in an enemy base as turrets shoot it down from the sky. Why was it so good? Because “closest target” meant that it attacked whatever was closest to the building you build Ornithoptors from. So I would regularly begin building them when the AI started to leave their base to attack, time it so that the Ornithoptor popped out right as the army engaged my banks of turrets and rocket tanks and BAM the enemy forces are overwhelmed. It was a completely automated unit—and it was completely under my control. The game was riddled with these ridiculous inconsistencies that I kept “figuring out” as if they were this secret gem that I could raise high and decree.
“Yes! I am this awesome of a human being!”
The more I played the game the more I kept finding these gems. It turns out that you can hide infantry in mountain terrain to prevent tanks from running over them. This allows you to defend yourself with cheaper troops (long enough for your main force to return home) and cheat out an extra production facility here, an extra refinery (for harvesting spice) there. You could make Sand worms chase your cheap and useless (but fast moving!) trikes towards the enemy base and all of a sudden the AI has lost 5-6 tanks and all you’ve lost is a Trike.
During combat, units can’t shoot past buildings. This means you can hide your tanks in some angles that caused the AI’s tanks to shoot at their own building. Combat inside the enemy base was a brawl where you kept inching forward and backwards to cause the AI to shoot at its own buildings and to hide your units from enemy fire. The Trooper was an infantry unit who had rockets so it could shoot over buildings—so you brought them along to gain extra DPS during urban combat despite them being useless out in the open. Siege Tanks were the king of direct combat but Combat Tanks were the king of being actually fast enough to reinforce a weakening line. Every unit in the game had a job it could do better than any other unit. It was beautiful despite being so terribly designed.
The best part of the game, and the only reason that I was able to learn all these weird stuff in the mechanics of the game (Because you have to know, the game is as easy as sin and I only learned all the tricks after replaying it over and over and over again) the only reason I found myself wanting to relearn everything despite already beating the game—is because of the way they differentiated the races.
Three races, all of them sharing the same “overall” unit base—but each one is missing something that the others have.
The Ordos don’t have either a Siege Tank or a Rocket Tank. So unlike the other two races, you can’t simply fight straight up with them. This was okay since the AI’s macro was awful.
The Harkonnen don’t have Trikes, Infantry or Ornithoptors. They do not have a cheap option for scouting, sacrifices, early defense and they don’t have the efficient and powerful defense of Ornithoptors. This was okay since the AI’s strategy was predictable.
The Artreides don’t have a Palace weapon. Harkonnen’s have a nuke, Ordos have a sabatoer (instantly kills a building suicide bomber style) and the Arteides gets Fremen which are essentially troopers that spawn randomly around the map and you can’t control them. This means that the Artreides eventually have access to all tech—but are boringly without an ultimate weapon.
To play each race efficiently meant that you had to keep using the same units differently with each race. What defined the game as amazing was not the units, it was not the graphics, it was not the UI (single unit selection bleh!) What made the game awesome was you could automate things if you were good enough to work on it. The more you were able to automate, the more of the game you gained access to. The more of the game you were able to access, the more you could actually feel like you were playing the game and not fighting the UI.
What made the game amazing was mechanics. It is easy to confuse my experience with Chess with my experience with Dune II. One could argue that the only reason I got upset with Chess was because I was not the one who “discovered” the 4move Checkmate or the 2piece Knight Capture. However, the tricks I found playing Dune II did not negatively affect the opponent. Never did I think that the En Passant or Castling were overpowered out of nowhere moves because it didn’t hurt me. Not in the same way a 4move Checkmate hurts me. Not in the same way watching my Queen being raped by horses hurts me. I found tricks and moves that allowed me to do what I was already doing—only a little better. Part of it was by forcing the game to automate things for me, other parts of it were simply being more precise in my control of already available options.
When I switched to Broodwar—my brain exploded.
Yes, the first time you get to the final Zerg Mission in Broodwar you’re like “That’s awesome! It’s a reversal of the final mission in Starcraft!” Yes, the first time you figure out how to leap frog tanks you feel like a champ. But I had a lot of doubts at first.
You can select more than one unit at a time?
You can que units?
You can chain commands on units with the shift key?
You don’t have to resend the harvester back to the spice fields every time it finished its drop off unless you glitch the AI into thinking the harvester is always a “new” harvester upon exiting the refinery thereby glitching the carryall to get stuck and automating mining for you?
What do you mean the UI is smart enough not to shoot its own buildings and even smart enough to not shoot its own units unless it is splash or you ordering your unit to do it?
You can build anywhere you damn please?
You only need to power your units and not your base? (Farms vs Powerplants)
You have actual control of air units?
There was a lot of things I was very cautious of when I first was introduced to Broodwar. Like, did you know that in Broodwar you can just bring your medics and SCVs with you to repair your units and you don’t have to design your base in such a way as to glitch an air unit into doing things it wasn’t designed to do and by doing so you were able to ferry units to and fro from the battlefield simulating helicopters transporting the wounded to and fro in Vietnam? Did you know that in Broodwar if you activated the attack button and clicked on the ground, the unit would just move towards where you clicked, automatically target hostile targets, and just stand where you clicked by the time it gets there instead of what units did in Dune II where the attack command was also the force attack command and so would cause a unit to just attack the ground instead of attacking targets of opportunity?
Interface wise, Broodwar was damn dream to me.
“But Lorkac! But Lorkac!” You all say to me. “Didn’t C&C, and Red Alert and Age of Empires have a great UI as well?” (Relatively speaking of course)
And they did have a clean and wonderful UI. But they weren’t as fun. For example, in the Command and Conquer series, Infantry units are produced as individual units. So when they die they pop like grapes. In Dune II, you got them as squads. As they lost hitpoints the squad would shrink until it eventually would just be a single infantry unit by its lonesome. Yes, I know that you could have bought the infantry as an individual unit just like in the C&C series. But since you could also buy it as a squad you had a better idea of how the infantry died *because* you couldn’t see them die. Seeing the last guy die was sad because you imagined that he was friends and buddies with the others that came with him when you first bought the squad. You saw them go from being a full company to a ragged troop to a lone survivor. There was narrative, there was drama. Yes—in the end the math was all the same for both games. But you cared about the infantry in Dune II a lot more than you did in C&C despite both units being just as useless as the other in both games.
What did Starcraft offer? Honestly all that Starcraft 1 offered was an amazing campaign and a rich storyline that I miss from the Starcraft universe. Even Broodwar’s story was very lacking compared to vanilla Starcraft’s opus of a narrative. What impressed me the most about Starcraft? One word.
Defilers.
I was going through the campaign until I reached mission 7 of the Zerg campaign. Keep in mind that I was (and still am) a terrible RTS player who still thought without a shadow of doubt that Bishops and Knights were overpowered in Chess. I hit mission 7 and I botch it completely.
To those who don’t remember/never experienced this mission, this is what it was http://strategywiki.org/wiki/StarCraft/Zerg_mission_7:_The_Culling
Now you might think to yourself, what does me having a bad time with a mission have to do with falling in love with Starcraft? I botched the mission completely, at some point I forgot what I was going for, what the mission was about, etc…
And then I ran out of mining bases. You see, I played the game with a mouse and no keyboard. I had bad unit control. I was able to take a second base, but that’s it. I did not know a damn thing about unit compositions and I had thought to myself “I like Zerg” and just skipped right past the Terran campaign with its lovely introduction to basic mechanics such as minerals are the stuff you want to harvest. Yes, my first 7 missions of Starcraft was on the Zerg missions. I had reached what I first thought was an unwinnable situation. Truth be told, I probably had more than 10k minerals in the bank and vespene never runs out. But in my head all the “possible” resources I had was gone. I had to squeeze every inch of worth from my banked up minerals. I had beaten the previous missions with mass swarms. Enough Hydralisks and Zerglings beats the computer eventually. However, I now feel crunched for resources. What do I do?
If you guessed “learned how to dark swarm and consume zerglings like a fucking champ”—then you’ve got way too much faith in me. Consume? That kills a unit I could have used! That Zergling had so much potential to be awesome! Why must I snuff him out so soon while he is so young!
Dark Swarm and patience was what won me the day. I literally would engage a sunken colony with my entire hydra force hiding beneath a dark swarm while zerglings are in hold position in case the AI sent melee units. I would kill 1-2 sunken colonies and then retreat to regenerate energy.
Was I maxed out on Hydralisks at this point? Yes. But I needed most of them to defend every single valley, cliff, ramp, and hatchery I had! At least 5-10 on each spot! With so many troops defending the motherland, I had to make sure each of my attacks counted!
It took me an hour to beat the mission after I realized that I ran out of minerals—one dark swarm/plague at a time. Now you might be asking me why in the hell would I love Starcraft after taking possibly 2-3 hours to beat that mission. It’s because until I played that mission I was not really in the proper mindset tactics wise to imagine that it is possible to win without having to use a death ball of troops. You see, what made C&C, Age of Empires, etc… so boring for me was that I amassed the biggest thing I could make, and then I go try to kill the opponent with it.
At the time, to me at least, bishops and knights were just diet queens. What you wanted was the queen, what you needed was the queen, to win the game without the queen is just bonkers, crazy, stupid. Of course the 2piece Knight Capture is unfair. Of course the 4move Checkmate is unfair. It forced the game to play out differently than what I had intended to play. But after spending a year of my life wasted playing Dune II, micromanaging dark swarms was easy! But more importantly, I was winning the game without having to move my deathball around with me. It felt almost as good as playing Dune II!
In Dune II, the slow chipping process of the enemy base was a dance with the AI. You flanked his base so as to sneak a few tanks between his buildings, get him to commit a large number of tanks to get stuck between the architecture of the base, get his tanks and your tanks to hit each other/the AI’s buildings, and then run in with a large flock of Rocket Tanks/Combat Tanks to snipe the Construction Yard. It was slow, tedious, and everything had to work since the AI didn’t actually need resources—you *had* to destroy his construction yard or else his buildings would just be replaced instantly. Oh by the way, the tanks you sent it to distract didn’t actually want the buildings they hid behind to die. So you actually had to (sometimes) use the attack command to hit the ground instead of the enemy buildings in order to both threaten a zone of control while reducing the damage being done on the enemy building to allow your units to live longer. All the while trying to get as many angles as possible where the enemy tanks would hit the building with their attack, but your tanks could hit the enemy tanks with their return fire.
Compared to that, casting dark swarm once every 2-5 minutes was a piece of cake. It also helped that I was against dumb AI that let me kill one sunken colony at a time and didn’t instantly rebuild them the moment you killed it.
Then it started to click. It turned out every unit in Broodwar was as cool and interesting as the Defiler. I scan my opponent going Templar Archives on Lost Temple (also known as the Battlenet Ladder lol) I start spider mining both my front and my rear because who needs silly turrets for detection! Siege tanks are too slow in my eyes, I start winning games through marine medic science vessel because I absolutely loved how awesome mass Defensive Matrix is. Yes, BW was so bad outside of iCCup that when you went SK Terran, you brought a science vessel for every marine. Like a boss! It’s also the land where Nukes actually destroyed expansion and muta flocks were 3-5 mutalisks in size—yeah!
You know what countered fully upgraded archons in BW outside of iCCup? Zerglings, since Protoss could only really macro out 1-2 archons at a time and would normally have zero support with the archons save the 15ish probes that constitutes the protoss economy at that time. It was a really bad time to look back on. But man did you feel like a fucking king when things turned out right.
Ever see 24 marines each one with a defensive matrix and each one with a medic healing him attack move into a zerg base?
Ever play a team game where the zerg player shares his overlords with everyone only to end up being the only player to die to DTs because his overlords are protecting his allies? Yup—awesome times.
Do you remember the first time you lost to 200 supply of Carriers/Arbiters/Corsairs in a moneymap? I do.
Broodwar blew my mind. I remember the first time I started using hold position on my Vultures to prevent them from wiggling around everywhere when I was trying to hold the middle of Lost Temple with tanks. Then realizing I could do that every chance I could get to stop them from bumping into each other, just hold position so that they don’t all converge into one point while harassing. I felt like a god then too.
I remember the first time I floated a barracks over my 2medic/1marine wall off in Lost Temple to prevent my friend’s zealot rush from killing me. You see, the marines would taunt the zealots with their gunfire and the zealots would prioritize killing the marines over the medics. However, medics are blocking the marines. The protoss player *could* target fire the medics to kill them and then kill the juicy marines inside—but the barracks was in the way preventing my friend from right-clicking those sexy medics. Those were amazing times playing Broodwar.
I still love Broodwar. I would not be the same player I am now if it wasn’t for Broodwar.
So let me make this perfectly clear when I say this.
I prefer playing Starcraft 2 over playing Broodwar. The reason this is the case is because I am a bad player.
I currently use 4 hotkeys.
1-Command Centers/Orbitals Commands/Planetary Fortesses
2-All Production facilities that don’t produce SCV’s
3-Main Army
4-Drops/Banshee/Tanks/Vikings/Raven/Marauders (trick plays)
I build supply depots by using the backspace (which I have remapped to spacebar) to bounce between my command centers. If one is too full I jump to the next one and start building supplies there.
I can’t split marines to save my life.
I can’t micro more than 3 drops at once.
I can’t properly judge when to retreat.
I’m even worse at judging how many workers to pull for repair.
If I was in iCCup then I would be H ranked because neither E nor G is low enough below D- to properly rank me.
However, I also had the same early qualms with SC2 as I did with Broodwar.
You can select more than a dozen units at a time?
You can select multiple buildings at once?
You can chain a fuck tonne of commands on units with the shift key?
You don’t have to right click mineral patches all day? (Oh those who’ve banned me knew that I was going to sneak this in somewhere)
What do you mean the UI is smart enough to do as they are told?
There was a lot of things I was very cautious of when I first was introduced to Starcraft2. Like did you know in Starcraft2 you can just put nothing but combat units in a medivac because you don’t need to waste space carrying a medic (Broodwar) or an SCV to build a bunker (Starcraft)? It turns out that the medivac is protection enough. Did you know that in Starcraft2 you can send out your worker to scout and just cue a whole bunch of movement commands through the minimap and then be able to forget it for a bit as you do other stuff and then get back to it and cue some more move commands unlike in Broodwar where units will remember just a few commands before glitching and suddenly getting stuck trying to harvest a tree doodad.
Interface wise, Starcraft 2 is damn dream to me.
I no longer had to worry about things I simply let slide before. The reasonI had about as many marines as I had Science Vessels in Broodwar was because it was hard to remember to keep the Baracks glowing when also teching and attacking. By the time it got to the point where I could make Science Vessel I would go to my base, cue 10 Science Vessels and 10 marines, then micro my army. By the time I remembered that I built anything, I have 10 marines and 10 science vessels and cue 10 more of each.
Build orders and timings were never anything I cared for since to care about them would require me to learn how to play the game at a level that I wasn’t competing against.
Everything changed with Starcraft 2.
I hopped into Battlenet 2.0 and laddered it up. I was late into hopping into the SC2 train. I knew I was going to play it. But by the time I did 2 of my closest nerd palls had already been playing for a month or so. One friend was in Diamond (he and I used to play Broodwar together religiously) and the other friend was in Bronze after playing WoW religiously.
(Don’t hate on WoW, it’s an amazing game that requires a lot out of the top players before the nerf bat hits)
I tried to convince my self that I was a zerg player and landed in Gold. If you recall, most of my BW experience is in playing Terran. I played Terran the most in Broodwar which obviously meant that I should play Zerg. Idra did it, why couldn’t I? I eventually switched and immediately turned platinum. But until I did....
I was terrible.
If it wasn’t for my extensive experience in army positioning and dropship harass in Broodwar—I would have been a Bronzie for life. Mass mutalisks was a lot easier than dropping 3 marines, an SCV and a siege tank in a zerg base and using the scv to glitch the a-moved zerglings to allow the siege tank to kill them while the marines shot at drones that didn’t all run away because moving 12 drones at a time takes a long time to do in low apm land.
I learned quickly that my macro was non-existent. (Need I remind you of building Science Vessels 10 at a time)
It turned out that even if I was to play Starcraft 2 casually—I would need to actually know what I was doing. Because macro mechanics got easier, macro mechanics suddenly became essential. Their army will be big, it will move as one blob and it will have all the units shooting at the same time. I eventually switched to Terran because I needed something familiar. And so my brain had to be rewired.
*Build SCVs
*Build Supply Depots
*Expand often
*Keep money low
I started to care about playing an RTS and not just lazily move pieces across a digital board. I started to realize what I had always known, but never understood about the term “macro” and “fundamentals.” The game stopped being me and my friend fiddling with whatever unit composition we wanted and started about becoming efficient at doing the fundamentals of the game. We started caring about being better at the stuff we were already doing anyway.
I could still watch my army move around the map without having to go back to my base and left click buildings and right click mineral patches. I could have a similar visual experience watching GSL and playing on the ladder. The game was suddenly fun on a zeitgeist level.
I remember seeing Boxer lockdown a dozen battlecruisers on lost temple and thinking to myself “that’s inhuman!” I remember seeing him cast a scanner sweep during a carrier assault, and during the window of time cast optic flare on all the observers and none of the interceptors, and then proceeding to destroy the carrier fleet with cloaked wraiths. Then I remembered that I barely remember to cast a scanner sweep at all let alone during tactical situations. It felt overwhelming, crazy. I knew how hard it was to do what I saw. And because of that I treated RTS gaming the same way the American public treats all sports. They stop playing it and just watch it instead, having more fun talking about it than actually doing it. The physical limitations were simply too much for me. There is a reason that when I watch a hockey game (live or otherwise) the last thing I want to do is put on skates and play hockey. It looks painful, and hard, and cold, and sweaty, and need I remind you painful?
But Starcraft2, oh, the joy of playing Starcraft2. Everything the pros do always seem within reach. I mean everything they do always almost seem so close to being easy. Except it’s not. Except there is a reason why Koreans are dominating, there’s a reason why so few foreigners make a dent in Code A, there’s a reason why it’s always the same people winning tournaments.
There is a reason why despite being made fun of for being terrible at MLG pool play LiquidTyler massacred the American public and got back to the final day with relative ease. There is a reason that the top GSL players hold a 60%-90% winrate in their matchups. There is a reason why foreigners can’t consistently break into Korea no matter how long they’ve been staying there. Because Starcraft2 is a deceptive bitch that teases you into thinking that she’s an easy lay until you end up like Destiny and have to make your money beating American players all day cause he can’t even handle MLG.
Because here’s the truth. Starcraft 2 is a very very very hard game to play. Much like baseball, it seems very effortless and easy. But the facts are that the top players have been the top players for a year now, and there isn’t any sign of them letting go of their grasp in 2012. Why? Because Starcraft 2 is a tease that can hold its liquor and no amount of cosmos is going to get you laid tonight. No matter how easy it seems to be—there is still a massive skill gap between the top players and everyone else. The only difference is that, unlike Broodwar, “everyone else” is now a much larger and all inclusive modifier. As in, I am as much in the “everyone else” category as players like Destiny, Incontrol, LiquidTyler, SlayersGolden, Mondragon, etc….
I’m no one. I have absolutely no shot at a GSL trophy. I am not a top player. And neither are a lot of foreigners and Koreans in Starcraft 2.
However, the reason why Starcraft 2 is so much fun and so amazing is because it seems so easy. Because it seems like you could just “do it” and suddenly you’re as good as MVP. Suddenly players like Nestea are draped across your mantle as you just “harassed with dropships” like MMA does. Because all of a sudden you watch MC lay down forcefields and you’re like “that looks easy enough, anyone can do that!” And suddenly you’re just like every other foreigner who can’t even beat the Koreans who can’t get past the Code A qualifiers. You always feel so close to getting it right, you feel like if you’re just a little bit faster, a little bit quicker, maybe, just maybe you’ll get to day 2 of MLG. Maybe, just Maybe you’ll get to day 3. Maybe, just maybe, if the stars align, then you’re in day 3 of Dreamhack holding a trophy over your head!
It feels so feasible, feels so easy. Then suddenly you lose 10 games in a row in the ladder and you remember why you’re still in Platinum. It’s such a beautiful way to play video games. To always feel like you’re almost there. That if you just worked a little bit harder, you’ll finally make it.
I love Broodwar. I really really love Broodwar. I also love Wings of Liberty. I really really really love Wings of Liberty. I also love Dune II. I really really love Dune II: Battle for Arrakis. Saying all that, I honestly believe that Wings of Liberty is more fun to play than Broodwar—for much the same reasons that Broodwar is more fun to play than Dune II.
Of those three games I honestly believe that a Dune II: Battle for Arrakis game engine and UI with some balance tweaks would be the best competitive RTS game ever. Harvesting has to be done manually for both returning and harvesting resources. No hotkeys, single unit selection, units get slower and deal less damage the more hurt they get. Artillery is inaccurate and you can’t control what units get repaired and which carry-alls pick up the harvester. Imagine playing broodwar, but with 10 times less ease of play and being able to hide units behind buildings so even fighting inside a base is different from fighting outside a base (mechanically) You’d need to be on the ball 150% of the time otherwise you’ll end up with your army target firing the ground as a nuke lands on your wind vanes. You push out and suddenly 10 packs of Fremen are in the middle of your base focus firing the Construction Yard. Only the best possible player could win. And it’d be great—if it wasn’t so boring watching Rocket Tanks fire missiles that sometimes 180 mid-air and lands back on the original Rocket Tank killing it. (And you thought Scarabs were finicky!)
In Truth, Broodwar is more loved than Dune II not because Broodwar is easier, but because Broodwar is its own separate game that has fans that enjoy it. Starcraft 2 also has its own fans who love playing it, who enjoy watching it. They don’t do it *because* Starcraft 2 is easier, they do it because they enjoy Starcraft 2 in and of itself. To simply think of it in terms of difficulty demeans Broodwar. There are many more games that are more difficult than Broodwar. And there are many more games that are easier than Broodwar. If it was purely because of ease of play, Red Alert would have taken over MLG. If it was just about graphics CS 1.6 would have died out years ago.
To attempt to quantify something qualitative is silly. People like certain games simply because they do. That’s it. The reasons are always arbitrary and they will change over time. At one point in my life, I thought Chess was an imbalanced game of tricks and all-ins. After time passed I was playing it in tournaments and enjoying myself.
Was it because of patches to Chess? No.
Was it because Chess wasn’t figured out yet? No.
Was it because the moves were no longer showing up/being used? No.
Over time I simply began being better at Chess. Enough to win amateur tournaments. Because I got better at playing Chess I no longer thought that the overpowered moves of my childhood were overpowered. As time passed, my opinions changed. Because opinions on why something is good, bad, fair, unfair, balanced, unbalanced will always be in flux will always adapt and change over time—it has to be understood that “logical reasons” for being certain why something is qualitatively good or bad is always arbitrary and it is always personal.
