My RTS journey

whatthefat

United States918 Posts

May 06 2012 06:29 GMT

My RTS Journey

As a lover of almost all strategy games, RTS games tap into something deep inside of me. Starcraft 2 is a game I love, but it is just the most recent step on a long RTS journey. Those reading this certainly don’t need convincing as to the charms of RTS games, but the paths we have each taken to end up here on TL are very different. I’d like to share the path I have taken, which starts back in 1994. Hopefully some of you will find it entertaining.

Part 1: Warcraft
A new kind of game

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Growing up, most of my gaming was done on a Sega Megdrive (a.k.a. Genesis). My favorite game back then was probably Rock 'n' Roll Racing. It was a quirky racing game, with weaponized vehicles, amusing (if slightly repetitive) commentary, and a great soundtrack.

Rock 'n' Roll Racing was published by Silicon & Synapse, who shortly thereafter became Chaos Studios, and then became a company you may have heard of: Blizzard. Prophetic indeed.

A couple of my closest friends, who were brothers, would often come around and game with me. Their family didn't have much in the way of consoles, but they had something arguably much better: computers. Through them, I was introduced to many of the early PC games. The three of us would sit around the computer, two watching excitedly while the other played.

It was in this environment that I encountered my first ever RTS game. Warcraft was its name, and it was strikingly different from other games I had played. Now I was controlling not a single protagonist, but a whole town and army.

Looking back, it was a rather quaint interface, and the game felt incredibly slow compared to the RTS games to come. But there was something fantastic about placing down a city in perfect configuration, with all the buildings linked by roads - as they had to be. It appealed to the same part of me that Simcity 2000 would, and my friends and I coined a word for this geometrical joy: The game was "squishified". All future games would be judged not only on the attributes we already knew about (graphics, sound, gameplay, in-game music), but also on their level of squishification.

Warcraft made quite an impression, but I wasn't yet blown away.

Part 2: Warcraft II
I have to have this game

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Somehow, I never encountered Dune II. If I had, maybe I'd be a progamer by now. Instead, the RTS epiphany came for me with Warcraft II. Already familiar with Warcraft, I was interested to hear one of my close friends tell me he had acquired the sequel.

I don't remember exactly what happened next, but I do remember becoming utterly engrossed within minutes of playing the game. I think my friend had to go out briefly, leaving me with the game. I could not get enough. To this point in my life, I had casually enjoyed games. But this game was amazing. As soon as I got home, I told my parents that I had to buy this game with my saved pocket money. Unfortunately, the stores had already closed for the day, leaving me to stew in my obsession. So, first thing the next morning, we visited the local video game store and suddenly I had the precious game in my hand!

Without a doubt, this was the best game I had ever played. The campaign was fantastic, the graphics were incredible, and the gameplay was so smooth. It was such a tremendous advance that it felt almost nothing like its predecessor.

The two races - Humans and Orcs - were essentially identical, but felt and looked different enough to be interesting. The inclusion of naval units also made for some interesting gameplay.

But the music. My God, the music. To this day, I think Warcraft II has the best soundtrack of any game I've played.

Listen to that while you read the rest, and then tell me you don't feel the urge to pledge allegiance to Khadgar for the sake of Azeroth.

As though it couldn't get any better, the game had a Map Editor! Together with the friends who had first introduced me to Warcraft, I would spend hours editing maps. We would base whole days around playing each other's maps. Two of us would go bike riding while one would toil away on a map for one of us to play. Then we would rotate.

Some maps told a tale. Prisoners would have to be rescued from a dungeon, deep in the bowels of an Orc castle. A small party of explorers had landed in an unfamiliar land and needed to set up camp in the forest, which seemed safe for the moment, but who knew what lurked behind the fog? We made every type of map we could think of. Maps of the world. Maps of Heaven and Hell. Maps with realistic damage, where a single arrow shot could kill an orc. Even a map with day and night, which we effected by manually changing the monitor brightness every 10 minutes!

My personal favorite was a map I made that looked something like this:

The green areas are forests. The blue circle was the starting locating for my friend, with progressively harder red enemy bases placed around the corners of the map. The map was quite scenic, but seemed relatively straightforward as a scenario. It was just a matter of fending off the occasional attacks, and building an army strong enough to defeat each enemy base. There was just one catch...

For those of you who have never played Warcraft II, the game has two resources. Gold, which is taken from a mine, much like a vespene geyser, and Wood, which is collected by chopping down trees. Eventually, large areas of forest are cleared, but it takes some time.

Figuring about how long the game would take, and knowing that my friend wasn't one to always use blimps to scout, I had placed a monstrously overpowered enemy force in the middle of that huge forest near the center. Just around the time my friend was overcoming the apparently final enemy in the top right corner, he received audio alerts saying he was under attack. Surprised, he quickly went back to his base, to see that his workers had just chopped through the forest into what appeared to be a clearing. A group of death knights and dragons, aroused from their slumber, were now descending upon his base. He had spent around an hour getting to this point. In a matter of minutes, his army was completely crushed as he looked on in horror.

I nearly gave myself an aneurysm laughing.

Part 3: Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Blowing shit up

The next step on my RTS journey came with the release of Red Alert in 1996. Having briefly played Command & Conquer, and now fully infatuated with the RTS genre, I was excited to get my hands on Red Alert.

In terms of gameplay, it didn't have the same fluidity as Warcraft II and the Blizzard games to come, but it was damn fun. The single player campaign was brilliantly designed, replete with hilariously over-acted cut scenes.

Like Warcraft II, the game was quite easily edited if you knew what you were doing, and I had a lot of fun messing around with it. Units could be given arbitrary attack types, and I remember creating maps where dogs biting enemies would set off nuclear explosions.

Fun times.

Part 4: Dark Reign
People play this stuff seriously, huh?

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Around this time, my friends and I were starting to hold semi-regular LANs. Those were halcyon days. We gamed through the night, powered by youth and caffeine. Of course, we also usually spent several hours fixing network and hardware problems. But it didn't matter.

Along with the beauty of deathmatch Quake, RTS games featured heavily on the menu. Warcraft II and Red Alert both got some playtime, but one of our favorites was Dark Reign.

Looking back, Dark Reign was astonishingly far ahead of its time. The gameplay was fast and fluid. The terrain was three dimensional and line of sight was realistically blocked by hills. Following the accepted formula, the game had two main races, which felt qualitatively different (unlike most races from contemporary games), and two basic resources: water and taleon.

The units were well balanced and extremely innovative. They included espionage units, such as a spy that could morph into doodads, and a unit that would self-destruct to create a shockwave through the ground that would damage any units or buildings caught in its path.

One of my friends got involved in the online scene and spent a lot of his time associating with high level players. I used to love watching him play, amazed by the level of detail involved in perfecting build orders and unit micro. As a lover of RTS games, I was still far from an expert player. The fundamentals of macro and micro were unknown to me. Dark Reign was the first game to make me aware of how high the skill ceiling was, though I had no clue how to reach it. For now, I was happy in my ignorance, just enjoying the strategy and the battles that could be had.

Wondering whether people still play it, I just went to the official site, and this is what I saw:

1 player online, and 11 games in the last 24 hours. Wow. I actually would have found 0 players and 0 games less depressing.

Looking through the comments, the last one is from 2009:

hank Says:
April 24th, 2009 at 11:12 am

hell yea!!! this game is still alive and as fun as the day i got it around 10+ years ago =D

Geez.

I need a drink.

Part 5: Starcraft
This is the best game. Ever.

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What can I say about Starcraft? As a Warcraft II fanboy, I had very high expectations. They were comfortably exceeded. Three totally different races, all somehow balanced against each other. The single player campaign was outstanding, and multiplayer was even better.

I never really got into playing on battle.net. But with my LAN days at their heady height, Starcraft could not have come at a better time. At an annual 4-day LAN, we would churn through as many team and FFA games as we could. We were all pretty terrible, but it was such fun. One of my friends was noticeably better than the rest of us (making him an inevitable target). I remember us all being amazed at just how many workers he would build. He was never successful in convincing us that this was a good thing.

I still remember the first proper build I ever learned. It was a Muta rush I learned from a PC magazine. In the tiny gaming pool consisting of me and my friends, using an actual build had monumental effects.

As befitting a Blizzard game, Starcraft came with an amazing Map Editor. I spent countless hours building multiplayer maps and custom campaigns. I made a custom version of Big Game Hunters with more reasonable resource counts and more perfect symmetry between spawns, called Not So Big Game Hunters, which became the go-to map at our LANs.

I could not get enough of Brood War, and nor could my friends. I remember a night, playing against computers on Not So Big Game Hunters. Having reduced them to nothing after about an hour, and now getting quite drowsy, we hatched a plan to construct a 'tentacle', consisting of Missile Turrets and Pylons. By the time we had covered the whole map, it was 5am and we were slurring our speech.

Part 6: What next?
More Brood War, I guess?

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Over the following years, I had progressively less time available to devote to games. After Starcraft and the incredible Brood War expansion, it was difficult for other RTS games to measure up. Krush Kill 'n' Destroy was good for a laugh, but felt years too late. Total Annihilation was ambitious, but felt like junk alongside Brood War. Homeworld was fun, but didn't hold my attention.

The Age of Empires series was highly entertaining, bringing the charm of history to the RTS genre. As a big fan of the Civilization series, it hit a sweet spot. While I never played the games seriously, I remember many exhilarating 1v1 games of Age of Empires II with a friend over 56K modems.

It was a beautifully crafted game that was happy to fill its own special niche. I know some members of the TL community played the game competitively, and I'm sure have very fond memories.

Over the next few years, I occasionally dabbled in the RTS scene, fooling around briefly with Sins of a Solar Empire and Company of Heroes. These were fun games, for sure. But I had become an RTS snob.

With the release of Warcraft III, I was ready to be wowed. Yet, somehow, I wasn't. The game didn't have that Blizzard RTS feel. The single player campaign failed to elicit that same joy I had felt playing Warcraft II and Starcraft. And heroes in multiplayer? I loved Diablo, but no thanks.

Part 7: The Brood War pro scene
What's my APM?

After a long hibernation, my RTS journey was reinvigorated by the 2007 announcement of Starcraft 2's coming development. Feeling inspired, I bought a copy of Brood War again - my fourth, I believe, having lost the CD three times previously. The game felt as good as always. Just as I'd left it.

This time around, I was a little older and wiser, and the internet had made the world a much smaller place. I became familiar with GosuGamers and TeamLiquid for the first time. I started to download pro-replays and popular maps, and became particularly enamored with the play of one sAviOr. I came to realize just how far the game had gone in Korea, and was introduced to the Foreigner/Korean divide.

I started to learn some basic builds, and downloaded bwchart. What an incredible program! In the same way that sc2gears has revolutionized game analysis in Starcraft 2, bwchart offered the same functions for Brood War. Now I could track my own progress. My APM, which started off a measly 30, was soon over 100.

Around this time, I reintroduced my friends to Brood War; the same ones who I had played Warcraft with all those years ago. Unfortunately, the skill gap had grown a little too large now that I had become acquainted with the pro-scene, so we could not recreate our former glory.

Part 8: Starcraft 2
About time, indeed

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When Starcraft 2 publication was imminent, I warned my girlfriend. There was no way I was missing this, so I bought a new laptop and decided to give up Chess to free up some time for gaming again.

As excited as I was about the game, I chose to forgo the beta. While I appreciate the value of having the community playtest games, unwrapping the present early just doesn't sit right with me. When I look on youtube and see that there are already videos of the Cow Level for Diablo III, before the game is even released, it just weirds me out. Call me an old fuddy-duddy. Actually, no, that's insulting. Call me a traditionalist.

Naturally, I had some reservations about whether Blizzard had done the game justice. On release, I was pleasantly surprised. The gameplay felt pretty good and the single player was a lot of fun. The multiplayer balance was relatively good and is continually improving. Starcraft was far from perfect on first release, and Starcraft 2 is going through a similar development process; the difference being that the goal is pre-defined and it has big shoes to fill.

Feeling a little rusty, I started my multiplayer experience with the practice league. The game felt good, although it took me some time to get over my Brood War inclinations. It took about 3 DT rushes for me to come to terms with the fact that Overlords could no longer detect. And I still remember the sad moment in a ZvT on Metalopolis where my massive Hydralisk army melted in seconds to an arrogant blob of MMM. Things had certainly changed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJai8JPsNX4

Ultimately, I was placed in Platinum, which seemed pretty okay (although sc2ranks now claims I started in Silver, strangely). Having a history of RTS gaming certainly helped, even if I hadn't really played competitively. It didn't take long to get to Diamond, and after some serious practice I was comfortably playing at a high Diamond level.

Around this time, I became aware of youtube casters, including Husky, Psy, and Day[9]. They were immensely helpful in terms of growing my interest in the scene, making me aware of new builds and strategies, and introducing me to many top players. On top of that, they were damn funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zi4vaAC3I8

My play was also very much helped by my voracious appetite for pro-tournaments, especially the GSL, which I watch religiously. Even today, I feel my game knowledge is a few steps ahead of my other skills. This makes it easy to critique my own replays, but applying my hands and mind to the task in the frenetic in-game environment is another story.

Part 9: Climbing the ladder

Long frustrated by my inability to reach Masters, I decided it was time to really tighten up my play. First, I looked at my macro, which I had long suspected was suspect, despite being a 'macro-oriented player'. My attempts to analyze my own play led to a much larger analysis: Do you macro like a pro?

This was a lot of fun and it was received very well by the TL community. However, the hours invested in performing the analysis proved detrimental to my play! On the plus side, I now had a metric to see just how detrimental.

In all seriousness, I spent the next months focusing closely on my macro. Specifically, I worked hard on avoiding supply blocks (learning the exact timings for Overlords rather than going by gut feel), making injects a priority over watching battles or microing, and keeping unspent resources low.

This brought noticeable improvements to my play, but I still felt as though I was some distance from Masters. So, next I focused on improving my worst match-up. ZvZ and ZvT have always felt quite comfortable and logical to me. ZvP on the other hand has never clicked for me. The inability to ever safely hatch-first railroads Zerg to a particular set of openings. Reading Protoss' intentions is then a game of successfully making a collection of many subtle reads. After reviewing my replays, I realized my ZvP was all at sea. I didn't know any of the critical timings, I wasn't scouting efficiently, and I wasn't making the right decisions. Everything came down to intuition, and my intuition was horrible.

Seeing such a disgusting mess before me, I realized I needed a new template. Around this time, Zenio was popularizing a Roach-less style that appealed to me very much. Roaches, while undoubtedly effective, have always felt like a questionable decision to me in ZvP. Their short-term viability can be reduced to almost zero by good forcefields, immortals, and blink micro. And if they don't do damage in the short term, they become wasted supply in the long-term. So, Zenio seemed to have just the build I was looking for.

I picked a few of his games and watched them over and over again, taking meticulous notes. Then I picked a representative replay and recorded every single action he made up to 100 supply, followed by his general game plan thereafter.

Next, I memorized all the actions, and tried to mimic them on an empty map. After a few tries, I had the build up to about 50 supply. And then something happened: I hit a wall. Even with no opponent and therefore no possible distractions, I was struggling to keep up with Zenio's actions with 60+ supply. For anybody unconvinced of the sheer speed of Korean pros, I recommend trying this exercise. I am not a slow player, but it is simply incredible how much is going on, even in a routine build.

I repeated this exercise about 20 times, until I felt reasonably confident maxing out with the build. Since then, my ZvP has been significantly better, although I still have a way to go.

With some newfound confidence, I forced myself to regularly hit the ladder. Again and again, I forced myself to just hit the 'Find Match' button, and then watch that curious volume control that blinks when an opponent is found.

No matter what, every game I started with "glhf!" and every game I finished with "gg", even if I was raging over losing to some insipid and predictable all-in. And if I was raging, I took a moment to compose myself, remind myself that it is just a game, and reflect on what positive I could learn from the game I had just "stupidly" lost.

Following this regimen, this season I finally achieved my long-term goal of making it to Masters!

I was overjoyed. I was beginning to doubt whether I had it in me to make it to the top 2%. But I did it! Sure, I'm probably one of the worst Master level players in the world, but ∀ϵ>0, #Fucks<ϵ

It has been a long and tumultuous journey. I spent a long time near the top of Diamond. As you can see from sc2ranks, I was damn close to promotion around the end of Season 1, but just couldn't quite get over the threshold. Every time my promotion seemed inevitable, I would go on tilt. My play and my mindset were just too inconsistent.

Again and again I see people told that achieving Masters is a trivial achievement that anyone with half a brain can achieve. Putting aside the logical inconsistency (Masters being the top 2% by definition), let me assure you that unless you have a history of competitive RTS play, making Masters is a hard slog. Even for somebody who grew up playing RTS games.

Without a doubt, the level of play on the ladder is now much higher than it was back in Season 1. Staying high Diamond and ultimately making Masters has required me to work many times harder and play many times better than I used to. This is partly due to the loss of casual players, and partly due to the ever increasing standard of play.

Here's hoping I still have it in me when Starcraft 3 hits the shelves.

Thanks for reading!

Steveling

Greece10806 Posts

May 06 2012 06:43 GMT

Enjoyed it.

polyphonyEX

United States2539 Posts

May 06 2012 07:02 GMT

loved the blog

Synwave

United States2803 Posts

May 06 2012 07:37 GMT

This needs a highlight!
Right there with you on every step of the journey with the mild exception of dark reign, but hey I did play dune! I even remember rocknroll racing which a friend and I played a healthy amount of at his house as he owned a sega and I owned a nintendo. How could we be friends right? (ahhh the great sega nintendo debates I miss thee)
It wasn't rts but did you play lost vikings?
I recall finding out waaaaay after the fact that those two games came from roughly the same initial source and being surprised as how I had apparently been a fanboy without realizing it prior to warcraft.

Congratulations on Masters, I tend to quirk an eyebrow when people say its so super easy to get. I don't argue with them because perhaps, for them, it was super easy to get. I do however mentally go, "well if its so easy to get...why aren't you grand masters, because that would only be like, slightly more effort right?"

6/5

surfinbird1

Germany999 Posts

May 06 2012 07:45 GMT

Nice blog. Whenever I read one of these I get super nostalgic. And I have a feeling that many people in our generation went through pretty much the same games with Blizzard being one of the defining game companies for many.

Hoodlum

United States350 Posts

May 06 2012 09:25 GMT

Well done I really enjoyed this blog xD!!

On May 06 2012 16:37 Synwave wrote:
This needs a highlight!
Right there with you on every step of the journey with the mild exception of dark reign, but hey I did play dune! I even remember rocknroll racing which a friend and I played a healthy amount of at his house as he owned a sega and I owned a nintendo. How could we be friends right? (ahhh the great sega nintendo debates I miss thee)
It wasn't rts but did you play lost vikings?
I recall finding out waaaaay after the fact that those two games came from roughly the same initial source and being surprised as how I had apparently been a fanboy without realizing it prior to warcraft.

Congratulations on Masters, I tend to quirk an eyebrow when people say its so super easy to get. I don't argue with them because perhaps, for them, it was super easy to get. I do however mentally go, "well if its so easy to get...why aren't you grand masters, because that would only be like, slightly more effort right?"

6/5

I'm not gonna argue about how easy masters is but the difference between low masters and grandmasters is equal to if not greater than the difference between gold and diamond... As the league increases it gets exponentially harder and since gm is only the top 200 on the ladder thats an extremely big mountain to climb....

Synwave

United States2803 Posts

May 06 2012 09:47 GMT

On May 06 2012 18:25 Hoodlum wrote:
Well done I really enjoyed this blog xD!!

Show nested quote +

I am aware, my point in the comment was not to say it was easy or hard, merely to point out that people who say masters is easy are being a bit silly so I used sarcasm to emphasize that.

lloydp

United States82 Posts

May 06 2012 10:10 GMT

6/5, i'm sorry, but I am not sure anything else need be said, not unless I(you) want to write a paragraph.

Fishgle

United States2174 Posts

May 06 2012 10:39 GMT

The death of Dark Reign saddens me. That game is incredible. Better than CnC or AoE, easily.

firehand101

Australia3152 Posts

May 06 2012 11:18 GMT

#10

Very nice

. Mine was more along the lines of battle for middle earth and C&C generals (Dustin Browder was involved in the production of both strangely enough haha)

s.a.y

Croatia3840 Posts

May 06 2012 11:23 GMT

#11

Great blog, congrats on achieving masters level!

nofAcedAgent

United States951 Posts

May 06 2012 17:11 GMT

#12

You're journey is not far from my own..............except the masters bit. Lol

Cheers

whatthefat

United States918 Posts

May 06 2012 18:47 GMT

#13

I did play The Lost Vikings, and I was equally amazed to later learn that it was from the same developer. It was actually one of the very few games that the three of us could all play at once on the same computer, since there were three characters. I didn't know about Blizzard's secret past until well into my Brood War days!

Aalo

United States33 Posts

May 06 2012 19:11 GMT

#14

Congrats on your promotion! Love hearing the success stories especially from the ones who had to put a bit of extra effort in to get into it. Don't let the haters tell you it's a trivial feat to pull off, most of the people who say that are either extremely arrogant or have the inability themselves to do what you did. Hard work pays off, and well, you got to witness the results.

whatthefat

United States918 Posts

May 07 2012 21:25 GMT

#15

Thanks for the congratulations! It was a lot of hard work and extremely satisfying.

Synwave

United States2803 Posts

May 08 2012 01:49 GMT

#16

On May 07 2012 03:47 whatthefat wrote:

Show nested quote +

Same here, a friend I got into playing broodwar with me mentioned it while we were discussing games we had loved earlier in our lives. I was quite surprised to find out the connection.

I still want a warcraft movie though, blizzard make it happen!

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