f13.net

North American Server Access for Southeast Asia/Australia/New Zealand StarCraft® II: Wings of Liberty™ Players FAQ

   1. Who is eligible to play on the North American servers?
      All players, including those in the regions of Hong Kong and Macau, who purchase the English Southeast Asia/Australia/New Zealand Standard or Collector’s Edition of StarCraft® II: Wings of LibertyTM will have the option of playing on the North American Battle.net® servers in addition to the Southeast Asia/Australia/New Zealand servers if they prefer.
   2. How much will this cost?
      The option of playing on North American Battle.net servers will come at no additional cost to all players who have purchased the Southeast Asia/Australia/New Zealand version of StarCraft II.
   3. How will access to the North American servers be granted?
      Our intention is to ensure that within 60 days after the launch of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, all players with a copy of the Southeast Asia/Australia/New Zealand version will automatically gain the ability to also access the North American servers -- this will be handled through Battle.net account management.
   4. How will I know when I can access the North American servers?
      We will have additional information on how and when to access the North American servers on our StarCraft II community site.
   5. What will happen with my Southeast Asia/Australia/New Zealand Battle.net account?
      Once you get access to the North American Battle.net servers, you will have access to both regions for online play. You can choose which one to play on at any given time, and can switch back and forth at will.
   6. How will my friends list and rankings be handled?
      All account-specific data, including friends lists, rankings, achievements, statistics, titles, and unlockable rewards, will be tracked separately for each region's Battle.net servers, and will not carry over between them.
   7. If I have already purchased the North American version, can I also play on the Southeast Asia/Australia/New Zealand servers? No. To have the option to play on both servers, you must purchase the Southeast Asia/Australia/New Zealand version of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. This solution is specifically targeted to address gamers in Southeast Asia/Australia/New Zealand who have social relationships with North American players from previous Blizzard Entertainment titles.
   8. Will I be able to play on any of the other StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty regional servers?
      No. Players who purchase the Southeast Asia/Australia/New Zealand version of StarCraft II will have access to the Southeast Asia/Australia/New Zealand and the North American Battle.net servers. No other multi-region play will be available at this time.


It seems like SEA copies might be the first to try out multi-region SC2...

It won't be starcraft if people don't keep trusting Kerrigan to be secretly good and her randomly killing people. It's the abusive relationship that keeps the game world alive!

http://us.battle.net/en/info/digital-purchase

Pre-download for digial purchase. Wonder if it will work fine with my store copy.

No. They’ll go on sale slightly later, on 07/27/2010 10:00 AM PDT in North America and Latin America.

WHY you obnoxious company :( I was suddenly happy at the idea of not having to bother with physical copies, after cursing them earlier today about not embracing the love that is Steam.

I would just get the digital copy, but I have an unopened game (that I don't think I'll play) I can return at Gamestop. 


Not one that I know of.  His clinching loss to Dimaga was awful.  He basically just didn't make units and kept failing at blocking his back door after walling off in the front.  Kept getting nailed by zergling run-bys. 

His losses to ITR were just sad.  One was failed cheese and the other ITR landed a factory in his main.    Guy just looked like the worst player in the tournament at the end after a 2-0 opening vs the eventual group winner, qxc.

Ah, I'm just looking to use my battle.net account that will have a key on it (boxed copy) but have SC2 pre-installed from this digital download copy. I don't want to fiddle with DVD install. Steam has had weird release timings too in the past compared to brick and mortar.

Edit: No the installer from that file is locked till release date  :uhrr:

I donut get why digital releases are so HARD. It has to be political, because there's nothing stopping this from being easy on a technical side. "Hey, we're doing midnight releases!" "Huh... okay, well, lock the digital copy until 3pm EST!"  :uhrr:

Oh noes you can't take the day off work to play Starcraft!

Also that's 1pm Eastern. Yay math.

Screw you, you're in Hawaii, I have declared it.

And take the day off my ass, work from home! :D

Political?  If political == money then, yes.  I guarantee you the people in charge think (probably know) they make more money if they make the digital unlock happen at a certain amount of time after retail availability.

Time is money, friend!

Certainly it will make the retailers doing a midnight launch happier.

That would be the politics I'm thinking of. Money wise, Activision likely makes a lot more profit off digital distros than brick and mortar. But they want to keep the brick and mortar shops happy and do the silly unlock times and preorder bonuses (not on this title, but others)

It likely helps them later when it's time to go for more "plz to be giving us good pricing on full page ads for our next release all over your site!" deals.

Exploring the Starcraft 2 Collectors Edition… (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/07/exploring-the-starcraft-2-collectors-edition-in-pictures.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss)

god it's 2am and it's installing so horribly slow  :heartbreak:

At least there are pictures! Narrated pictures!

Oh and yeah, collector's is awesome. Even the USB doesn't feel cheap. Also, I think the pictures are over and I'm at 28% :(

I'm seriously debating whether or not to ebay my collector's edition.  I see them going for about $50 more than what I paid for it.  Of course, I could keep it and just sell the code for the mini Thor WoW in game pet.  Those are selling for $50 and more too. :grin:

http://compare.ebay.com/like/260640775123?var=vl&sort=BestMatch (http://compare.ebay.com/like/260640775123?var=vl&sort=BestMatch)

Thor pet is tied to CD Key as per all Blizzard WoW CE's.

I find it fascinating that SEA customers will be granted access to the NA servers, but NA customers will not be granted access to the SEA servers.  That's a strange sort of international support...

fuser 166 if you want to look me up online (generally co-op).

Asking $400 (http://orangecounty.craigslist.org/vgm/1865236273.html).

KMart has a $20 gift card / credit deal with SC2.  I've price matched deals like this to Best Buy and Amazon before.  While the multiplayer beta videos scared me away from the online component, for $40 I am considering it just for the single player campaign.  Any impressions would be appreciated (never played SC1, faintly remember WC2, and I clearly remember my brain exploding when I played WC3 after World of Warcraft and realizing "World of Warcraft" was no joke of a title.). 

Dawn of War 2 / Demigod may have changed what I look for in an RTS now though.

Oh man. At the D9 release party they played a compilation of TLO's placement matches where he was just fucking with people. Dropping two fortresses into the other guy's base. Raven rush where he spells out TLO in the guy's base with autoturrets. Mothership rush with a bonus probe recall.  Just hilarious stuff.

Best part is the lament "Fucking gay lag" after the guy loses to mass ravens.  Hilarious.

Holy shit, day9 needs to turn down his sound.  You can't hear him cast over the game at all.

It works for two reasons. The first being that Blizzard doesn't care about Aus/NZ as part of their "world tournament" separation of the planet. The second being that Australians logging into Asian servers doesn't make even the slightest bit of sense.

Historically speaking SEA players have always been on US servers, now they are getting their servers for the first time.

Also, we are paying $80 USD for our standard editions.... :heartbreak:

battle.net saves my progress and I can continue the campaign here from work. Must resist. Must... aw fuck it.

Impressions on the campaign? (I expect you to be finished by the end of the day...)

Is everybody still trusting Kerrigan?  :awesome_for_real:

nah, I really have some work to do and couldn't play any last night fell asleep. Long gone are the glory days  :oh_i_see:

I'm a couple of missions in - one mission after you get the battleship. There seems to be some sort of non-linearity, as far as you can choose which mission to do next and it tells you how much money for upgrades you get and which unit you unlock. Upgrades are cool, medics are overpowered, firebats are terribad. More or less it's standard affair though - here's your command center, a couple of SCVs and a barracks - go. At least upgrades and mercs give some persistence between missions. There's an insane amount of content between missions - little tidbits you can click on that give you lore, a new newscast after each mission, etc

Oh, there's an arcade machine in the cantina of the battleship - a shmup called "Lost Viking"  :awesome_for_real:

Might I be a leaching beggar and ask someone for a guest key to use while I wait for my amazon parcel?  :heart:

Blizzard Digital Download € 60.0
DVD from Amazon € 38.99

Same with steam. Why do I have to pay 50-ish Euros for a download when I can buy the same game in US$ for 2/3 the price...

I'll hook you up when I get home.

As for the campaign: fun. There's still a lot of "look.. Kerrigan's complicated!" instead of the logical "seriously, someone kill her, okay?" so far.

Mercs are.. odd. Mostly because of the 5 minute cooldown on them that prevents you from using them right off. It makes me totally forget about the weaker mercs because by the time they're available to pop out, I already have a functional army.

Edit: bleh

Oh, thats right, this drops today, and I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye to my friend. *sniff* Guess ill see him in a month when he pokes his head back out.  :ye_gods:

I stopped around the same place last night after looking at the armory upgrades. I really enjoyed the missions as its pretty much a hand holding refreshing of how to play the game. Its a good progression and fits in pretty well with the story. Not to mention all the side quests objectives and collections that can be done. The only thing that ticked me off was the zerg mission where you have to hold out. I had the zerg wiped off of the map then out of no where spawned, yeah I panicked and loaded up the base and floated away.  :why_so_serious:

There's a lot of fun stuff like "Moonwell" vodka or whiskey as a part of the top shelf liquor and the TV station content like GTA "Is your kid on stimpacks?"

Let me know if Kildorn doesn't hook you up.

As for 400 bucks for a collectors edition? Fuck that noise. The Best Buy across the street from me has a fuckton.

Oh, and fuck you Blizzard for making me make a goddamn battlenet account for a game I'm never gonna play online.

If you buy a retail copy of this, you can still register the CD online and also digitally download it (like you can with their other games), right?

Yeah

Addendum:

The song that goes "I've got a Zerg and a shotgun and I'm bringin' 'em home to you" is fucking awesome.

Blizzard makes the slowest installing games.

Not to mention the tiny buttons in the blue window which mutes the audio has zero tooltips to let you know if your going to close the installer by accident.

It installed pretty fast for me, maybe took a minute or two past the end of the PREVIOUSLY ON STARCRAFT narration.

How much personal info do you have to give them to just play the single player game?

A bnet account?

I think it just has to be a valid e-mail, its been a long time since I made mine.

I was at like 22% when it finished.  :oh_i_see:  It's nice though that it patched automatically on its own when it finished.

So yeah, I totally want the units from single player in multi. I know things get cut for balance, but QQ Firebats

Up and running annndd....no support for my resolution it looks like.   :heartbreak: Have to play it like everyone else on one monitor.

This is actually pretty impressive.  The single player campaign that is.  Well, the missions themselves so far are nothing special, but all of the stuff they've built around it is pretty neat.  Sucks that I didn't remember the Terran hotkeys.  :awesome_for_real:

They changed the hotkeys to be more similar to the hotkey layout progamers use. It's less intuitive early on but it helps with hand dexterity.

Full screen mode still seems to be wonky where Alt-Tab to desktop is concerned. The one time I did it SC2 crashed immediately after....

Apparently playing it on anything wider than 1920*1200 is cheating or something according to a blue forum post. I fail to see how that works in single player

Yes, the cutscenes, surrounding elements, conversations, etc. have all built a very VERY nice atmosphere for the single player campaign.

Also, the Terran music and the jukebox are both AWESOME. The whole race speaks loudly to me and my Southern brethren, even if it is making total fun of us.  :heart: :awesome_for_real:

Installed, but unable to play… …stuck on opening cinematic animation of ship going around/past planet, seemingly can't tap any key sequence to get the main menu up…

Grrr, panel must have "slid under" or something… …all well in SC2 land now…

The single player campaign is very good. It's also looking pretty long. Playing on hard is.... reasonably challenging. Normal is a bit too easy. I don't have much breathing room here so I don't know how brutal would be, unless you can carry over your earned upgrades.

Also, get perdition turrets. The second mission in the colonist series offers you a fantastic opportunity to use them really well and they are just brilliant fun.

If the achievements are correct, the single player campaign is 28 missions.

29 missions I think.

The counter says 26.

Only played four missions so far, pretty easy on normal but

There are a few pick a mission situations, so there are ~29 missions, 26 playable per run through.

And the ship interactions++. So well done. Crazy news lady is funny. Armory details on units are nicely done. Absolutely bullshit missions are kept to a minimum and aren't that frustrating.

About my only complaints about the game are that the basic scale of unit sizes makes no sense (drill mission has a keypad that has keys the size of a marine's head. You fly around on a ship with a 250 man crew that apparently holds infinite units including more of said same ships.. why not just make the mothership a GIANT SHIP you never see that builds the shit you use?) and that whoever writes their plots has never heard of the word "subtle"

The whole scale thing is probably part of the 90s concentrate they forced the devs to drink. I like it because it makes things look like a tabletop miniatures game.   

I can see why they do it (scale wise, there's no way to get their concept of a battlecruiser on a map with marines), it just makes me nerdrage a bit at times.

The thing that bothers me the most is the marine suit in all the ship interactions.  You'd have to have six foot wide shoulders!

Having a blast with the single player so far.

For Tychus being in the suit all the time, I was thinking this is typical over-the-top fantasy shit with no thought to actual human function. How does he shit? Where does he sleep? What happens if he gets an itch?

Of course the lore answer will be, "The suit does it all! It's an advanced suit! We give them to convicts!"

In the original trailer, they weld him into that suit.  He steps into the booties, which lock, and then they remove the ankle shackles.  My take is that his suit is a combination weapons platform and mobile prison.  They don't want him getting out of the suit.

That's the opening cinematic when the game first starts, too.

That character bothers me so much. SO MANY GAPING HOLES IN HIS PLOT.

Exactly, I really just can't make the mental leap of "Must be in suit at all times."

That just will not fucking work.  :ye_gods:

It bothered me that Tychus still had his prison pants on when he put the suit on. Even if that thing has poop and piss tubes, it's going to get a bit messy.

lolmetzen

Yeah, that.

That's the LEAST offensive part of his plot holes.

Spoilerish cutscene laugh about the ghosts:

I don't know if constantly being shut in a mech suit could be called the least offensive part of his background. He would have to smell like old shrimp stuffed with bad cheese.

But yes, the second he walks into the door and talks about how Raynor's not a hard man to find, I am immediately going  :oh_i_see:

It works at 2560 x 1440 and I would assume it works at 2560 x 1600 too. It doesn't work at less than 1024 x 720.

Skimmed thread.  I gather the plot sucks but the game is passable.  Buy?

Yeah but it doesnt work at 5760*1200 as that would make me some sort of mustache-twirling uber cheat. I assume it's going to work at most 16:9 and 16:10 resolutions

I got it for free, so my view is skewed. Still, if you like multiplayer at all, cinematics with good flavor, cool music, good options, achievements, shitton of polish, yadda yadda. Buy it. If you are looking for a whole bunch of changes in the gameplay, that ain't there. It's faster and prettier.

It's well done.  Single player RTS is a bit lame, but it's a good diversion before I go crazy on the multiplayer. 

I'll let all of the psychos grind out their placement matches first.  I don't care where I get placed though, really.  Which is good, since this single player part is teaching me all of the wrong hotkeys.

Forgiving the immersion breakers I'm loving the feel of the campaign. About 15 missions in by now and the story has opened up nicely. The extra units and map effects make me excited because the community will create some amazing content (omg dota 2.0)

Rash and hygeine issues. The dude would probably get some kind of infection and be sick all the time.

Maybe the crotch comes off so he can shit, and they just hose his ass down once a week.  :awesome_for_real:

Maybe they attach hose to top of the suit once a week and rinse the insides down or something.

On the other hand, who is to say the other Terrans bathe any more often :grin:

Does anyone know if the game passes are region-locked?


The single player is good fun, and there's more than just the campaign. I'm satisfied with it, and like Rasix I'm just letting BNet settle down a bit before I place and start doing multiplayer.

I expect to not bother with MP.  I will pick it up eventually.

Done, there are some pretty cool missions down the road. Did it all on normal, I'll go back now to get the kerrigan portrait (all on brutal). Took me about, I don't know - 12-13 hours, I was rushing through it anyway. Story was cool to me, but unless you were 14 when the original starcraft came out and you have some serious nostalgia going on don't get it for the story :)

Mission achievements are addicting. Damnit. I just last night thought of a way to get the red lobster one in a really messy manner.

It runs at 2560 x 1600. Even with a GTX-295 I had to drop the settings to medium to get the screen to pan smoothly. But it still ooks good.

god. Brutal is... well... brutal :) Almost failed the third mission  :ye_gods:

Got it last night. Digital download, because F physical media.

I'm finding brutal about the right difficulty. Am maybe 9 missions in. I just finished the floor is lava one. I'm doing it once on brutal and then immediately again on hard to get any achievements I missed. Medic+Marine has seen me through everything so far and I expect it, along with viking+siege tank, to take me through the entire game.

Medics are incredibly awesome and it's a crime that the entire single player game is based around it; people are going to be bitter as hell when they play multiplayer and don't have them. They even automatically move out of fire if they're being attacked!

Mercs seem pretty useless, I forget I have them. I've upgraded medic, marine, and golliath so far but still have 200k banked for things that come next.

Some of the mercs are useful just due to the instant build times. They make for useful "huh, I need 3 vikings like.. Now" counters.

edit: the other hard achievement I was having issues with was The Best Offense, which I think just requires me to be WAY more aggressive than I normally am, combined with a lot of base micro to tell my idiot marines to kill roaches first.

Yegolev, if you're not interested in the MP, do what I'm doing and wait for them to kick the two expansions out first, and get the cheaper battlechest version a few months after that you know will be coming with all 3.

Will be a good 3-4 years wait though. Hope you are moderately patient.

It's taken them just shy of 12 years to get the sequel out.  I think I can wait a few more at this point pretty easily, especially since the multiplayer doesn't really do anything for me anymore.

Weren't you just saying you need more 20 hour games?  :-P

RPGs.  And it's because I'm mired in 40+ hour ones right now.  None of which is Starcraft.  My point here was mostly that if you're (and by you're, I mean Yegolev) only interested in the single player campaign, you might as well wait for all 3 to come out, and get the slightly discounted package that past blizzard history has shown will be coming.

Are there any efficient counters that don't require lots of micro to massed Void Rays?

Even with micro, they're a pain in my ass (campaign at least)

Stalled at mission 7 for trying the hard achievements. Mass void rays sitting behind cannon emplacements and required rushing to make the achievement, woo!

Walked into a Gameshop today and they already had "buy 2 Get 3" stickers on them  :grin:

I'll probably  buy it eventually when I don't have to pay full price 3 times for the 3 campaigns.

Vikings do good in big numbers, just single target the voidrays - press shift and spam right click :)

'specially in the campaign. Vikings are ridiculous - 11 range and splash  :ye_gods:

Is there a way to hide my status from other people on the SC II Battle.net? I.e. somebody has added me as a friend but I don't want them to see if I'm online/away/available, etc.

Based on watching tournament matches mass marines can do well, especially if you can take them out before too many get fully charged. Alternatively just keep sending wave after wave of infantry at them.

EMP?

Like Wolf said, you can upgrade your vikings into ridiculous killing machines.

Does the physical copy come with a cool instruction/story manual, or anything else?  I'm tempted to hold off and buy a physical copy just for nostalgia sakes (I've got my physical CD's of every Blizzard game made so far) since I can just register the key and download it online anyways.  However, if all your getting is a CD and a cheap instruction manual with no cool artwork or anything, guess I shouldn't bother.

The CE comes with lots of cool stuff, the regular edition does not.

Regular edition has a manual in the box (9 pages of back story, 2 on how to play the game and no keyboard reference), cardboard dvd sleeve, box front folds out twice to a four time the size game highlights and a few time limited buddy cards.

The manual stood out as completely shoddy for the lack of any information on how to play the game vs covering the whole game buildup which is redone by the installer and cut-scenes.

Btw, post your character name + numerical code here (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=19586.0) if you'd like to friend up with other f13 people.  This isn't the Read ID nonsense, so don't be timid.

Off the top of my head, here's a run down of list of things in the CE:

2gb Flash drive with SC1 & Brood Wars (the drive itself is awesome, it's in the form of Raynor's dog tags. The only downside is that it's a small capacity. Art Book
Soundtrack
Game DVD
A 'Making of..' DvD
A SC2 Comic
Some bnet exclusives, avatars etc.
Game trial passes for WoW and SC2 (2 each)

Additionally, I found a $20 off coupon and free shipping coupon, that were able to be used together, for gamestop.com (only reason I ordered there, since CE for $80 is okay and was cheaper than Amazon when I ordered) and the package came with a code for 20% off EVGA products. That EVGA part may not sound that great, but I was thinking of picking up a gtx 480 and this drops that price from $500 down to $400 ($370 after mail in rebate). The CE has now paid for itself and then some.

Though, even without that EVGA code, I'd still have only paid $20 more (due to coupon codes) than a regular edition and would still be happy with this purchase

The regular edition, as Trippy states, does not come with cool stuff.

You forgot the major feature when you plug it in, it glows  :awesome_for_real:

I am not patient, really, however I spend all my time working right now.  I'll take Ard's suggestion since I am sure I can buy The StarCraft Chest at any store for the next ten years.  Some people are patient, others have patience thrust upon them.

True, my bad. It is even more awesome than I described.

I'm up to the last mission and there are definitely a couple of missions that were more easily done with mass Air


What research/upgrades did people get? Science vessels are basically medics for vehicles and paired up with a blob of vikings and banshees they seem pretty awesome. I'm really not missing the raven at all. Perdition turrets are fun, and really handy at points, as is the psi disruptor (slows all units). Although I haven't had the chance to try the mind-control one, but if it only controls a single unit that seems pretty useless. Tech Reactor is  :heart: Auto Refineries are  :heart: Spectre perma-cloak is  :heart:


The marauder upgrades are pretty good, and the siege tank ones pay off in later missions. A lot of the rest are pretty blah. The only upgrade panel I have maxed out is the building one, because there isn't really a bad or useless upgrade in there.

As a not for completionists, make sure to go back and redo the alternate missions before the end of the game. There's three missions where you get a choice of two options


Also for 26/26 missions completed you need to do the secret mission


Overall the missions have been really good, all the ones where you don't have a base have been really fun. The only annoying or dull mission was one where the enemy didn't feel like a threat, but completing objectives was just a massive hassle, as anything outside the base died quick.

Mind Control is any number of units, only does what you click (not automated defense)

At one point during a very silly mission, I had about 12 ultralisks defending my bunker lines.

And I pretty much did everything in the latter missions with turtled up base and banshee raids on objectives.

Ah ok, I couldn't really tell that from the little information graphic. Good to know, I may give it a play whenever I replay the campaign. The psi-disruptor is also pretty cool, most stuff dies before it gets in range of the bunkers when used in tandem with bunker range and siege tanks.

Apparently there's a potential video card frying issue with the menu screens:

http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/07/28/blizzard-confirms-starcraft-ii-overheating-bug.aspx

Pretty easy fix in there and I expect they'll patch it.

EDIT: It strikes me as something that most modern cards wouldn't be susceptible to but you never know I guess.

Something interesting poking around the SC2 site. To view friends profiles it redirects to a url:

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/profile/xxxxxx/1/character/

Where xxxxxx is represented by a unique ID. This ID so far has been incremental based upon account creation date and doesn't seem to be padded or hashed.

Mine's in the 200k range (created launch night ~1am ADT there were 69 regional battle.net games running at the time), a friend that setup his character account is around 800k seems possible to track sales.

Can someone explain to me why this game is popping so many e-boners across the internet. People are talking like its the best video game ever created.

I don't understand. Its an RTS game just like all other RTS games before it. Perfect a build, micro everything possible, hope your opponent picked something you can beat.

Does it offer anything new to RTS games besides pretty graphics?

IMO it does what Blizzard does best.

Takes the genre as it stands at the time of the game release, and makes it incredibly slick, well put together, with an easy to use UI.  They don't innovate so much as purify a genre down to what makes it really good.  They didn't have to innovate, and in fact, if they had, they'd have had a failure on their hands.  So from that sense, if you didn't really worship SC1, then you won't worship SC2.

What it DOES do better than most, is be built upon a fairly impressively powerful platform which appears to be really easy to use/mod.  That's what's exciting to me as a programmer...is finding out what comes next on the mod scene.

I feel like I should direct you to your own response to Azazel in the Alien Swarm thread. It's updated Starcraft, why does it need to be anything more?

EDIT: Maybe you tricked me like he tricked you - was this supposed to be green?

He's trying to understand why "updated Starcraft" seems to mean "Second Coming" to a lot of people.

One other thing Starcraft brings is three races that play very differently, and yet are relativley balanced. Most other RTSes have units that are simply reskins of identical units.

random players just don't GET co-op games. Sigh.

The AI will pick a target and throw everything at it. You need to assist friendlies when they do this ><

Been playing a bit of co-op with a friend and this doesn't happen all the time. They will probe your defenses well and try to exploit any holes, if not they move on to your partner and try the same. I had a stronghold defense on a game where they threw the first rush against me and lost 25% of the rush before backing off regrouping and doing the same to my partner.

But yeah in principle you have to help a partner out as the attacks are generally combined. I have had a lot of luck baiting an attacking force with soft targets on lower AI levels too  :awesome_for_real:

I just had one that went about 20 minutes with neither of my allies building more than 2 siege tanks or battlecruisers (no seriously, NOT A SINGLE MARINE WAS MADE), while my roach army skirmished with the AI and chased them off.

Finally, my army got trapped and wiped out, and my allies still hadn't built a damned thing ><

Finished the game. 

It is StarCraft.  The game is polished.  My game only crashed once.  There were no major bugs with finishing missions or upgrades.  Still, it is only StarCraft.  A decent game, but not an exceptional one.  The new aspects are at best a mild improvement.  It being a typical RTS the plot is laughable.  While some of the novelties are entertaining they cannot make up for the very average feel of this game.  Increased micro seems like a penalty, not an exciting new feature.  While the graphics are better they are hardly captivating. 

Twelve years for an expansion pack?  Meh.

I started playing it tonight. After playing DoW, it felt surprisingly dated. Honestly, the in between missions parts are my favorite. I will second the "Blizzard should just make movies" comment.

This explains a LOT.

See, I liked DoW, but not for it's RTS aspects. I'm glad Blizz stuck with the SC/WC formula.

Currently 96 at metacritic. Really that good? (or lolgamingmedia?)

I've been itching to play SC2, but yesterday was the hottest day in Finland's recorded history, and it's been like that for three weeks now. So I have absolutely no energy left after work (no AC in this pos building), but I'm doing my best to complete at least one mission per day.

I really want to get into the multiplayer once the autumn rains start, but the ragequitting will probably cut years from my life expectation.

It's good for what it wants to be. As much as I love the CoH idea of RTS (cover, unit tactics, retreat button and focus on territory control and forced spreading out to hold), SC2 is pretty much the pinnacle of what it's trying to do (the children of dune2), and it's fun for it.

The matchmaking on bnet is also pretty wonderful for whatever you want to do. I can find coop games very easily (I really dislike competitive starcraft. I just don't want to micro that much)

I'd say it rates really high, and most of the complaints (mine included) are basically "it's not a different game I'd like to play" instead of rating it on what it's trying to be.

The writing and especially the voice acting are unfortunately not as good as they could/should be. Dr. Whatshername is especially bad. Game is fun as hell, though.

When can we start spoilers?  I have questions about various things I've heard.

Just throw them in spoiler tags? Dunno, we were chattering a bit about them earlier, but nothing end game destroying.

Spoiler tags please.  I'm on the last mission, but the game's been out only 3 days.

Which is plenty of time to have finished. Heck there's even an achievement for finishing the campaign on Normal in less than 8 hours (Hurry Up: It's Raid Night). :awesome_for_real:

Well yah and it is an RTS of all things.  But I'm trying to be nice here.

Seconded on spoiler tags, I still have like half the game to go (blame actual raid nights).

I don't know what mission I'm on, but if you spoil things for me!  :mob:

But yeah, tags would be nice.

I'm taking it about a mission or two a day, plus skirmish AI and challenge modes.

The challenge modes are interesting. The beginner terran and zerg ones I can do, but the beginner protoss one I cannot get better than bronze.

Figured they would be easier (at least the initial ones) than I expected.

Of course, my click-fu is pathetic these days…

I've scored bronzes and a couple of silvers. I barely squeaked a bronze out of Expert: Opening Gambit. I plan to go back and try for golds once I've finished them all, but I have no clue how to do any better at Opening Gambit.  :uhrr:

Just build aggressively I think. I missed gold by about 40s because I was waiting for a ghost to spawn. Be aggressive with your building and expanding, you'll be gas capped quickly building the siege tanks and the ghosts.

I one-shot the Terran beginner on on Gold, since the unit comps were easy hard counters, the first build a base one was also dead easy, managed that without loosing a single building or unit, just play patiently. The protoss one remains tough though. The Espionage and the kill lots of stuff in 3 minuntes using only hotkeys one are pretty simple too. The one where you only have sentries and high templar though seems like an exercise in frustration.

The challenge modes are a bit wierd. After being touted as "getting you ready for multiplayer" they sort of do and sort of don't. Learning counters is good, and learning to wall off is good, but several of them encourage you to turtle like mad, and in a real game you'd get eaten alive.

I don't think any offline training could properly prepare someone for multiplayer. The challenges are encouraging me to build faster and learn the hotkeys, which I appreciate.

My impressions so far:

a. New Bnet2 is deep fried shit warped in bacon - looks good, but you don't really want to bite in.
b. Ladder/Multiplayer - a step down from SC:BW, it isn't as enjoyable as it should be.
c. Singleplayer - saving grace of the game, extremely well done.

I'm having some serious graphical issues.  Game freezes every few minutes for about 10-20m seconds.  This occurs during gameplay and cut scenes.  Windows 7 is updated, I downloaded latest drivers and followed the advice in the Game Informer article mentioned earlier.  Probably going to shelve this until I can find out how to fix it.

You could try defragging your HD, and putting all the settings on low. Beyond that, no real suggestions :(

It's funny that the expert challenges are the easiest ones by far.

Starcraft 1 brought that, which at the time was pretty amazing. A decade later the same 3 races with the same mechanics is substantially less amazing. Dawn of War has 10 or 12 relatively balanced races with unique units and some unique mechanics.

I honestly believe that Starcraft 2 will be largely forgotten by history and quickly fall off of "best of" lists. It's basically SC1 with a graphical upgrade and some UI improvements. It's going to get high review scores because of the way reviews work - for hyped games the score starts at 100 and then points are subtracted for "objective" flaws. SC2 has very few objective flaws like low production values or technical issues. Reviewers will rarely dock "major" games for being rehashes, though they'll rip into minor releases for the same thing. The fact that the game is samey and uninspired isn't going to hurt its metacritic. But where it will hurt is when people look back and remember how awesome SC1 was and how comparatively tame SC2 was.

Bah humbug I say!

Are you playing it?  Do you like it?  I still haven't bought it and I'm on the fence of whether to buy it soon, or just let it sit for awhile.

I'm playing it, I like it. The campaign (novelty lore aside) is well done and offers a variety of missions with different paces, settings, challenges and difficultes. The challenge modes are fun and add a new type of gameplay, and I hope they add more of these in the future. Multiplayer, despite the doomcrying, is incredibly well balanced and runs well. There's also the whole other world of custom maps, and given the track record with WC3, it is likely that there will be plenty of interesting avenues of novel gameplay that will emerge there over time. Like all Blizzard products, it is incredibly well polished and well done. When you have a fun format that works well there's really no need to reinvent the wheel. The argument that it is just Starcraft with new graphics is fairly poor, you could make the same (flawed) case about plenty of games, such as Doom 2 or the Civilisation series, or pretty much any Nintendo game. The reality is that SC2 is a complete rebuild of the original that preserves a lot of what worked and made Starcraft and interesting and fun game, while adding a lot more. Ultimately it's good fun, it offers content in manageable chunks and it's worth playing. Imho.

I swear the voice of that lab rat guy, Stettman, is the voice of the nerdy kid main character (Kevin) from the Adult Swim cartoon Mission Hill. Everytime I hear him all I can picture is that gawky kid doing his nerd squawk.

Avoiding all the news and discussions during blizzard's long production cycle might have come back to haunt me.  I'm starting to get the feeling that I don't get to play as the zerg or protoss.  I don't, do I?

You do for the low low price of $120 more.  :awesome_for_real:

There is a small Protoss mini-campaign. No zerg.

Multiplayer, vs. AI, challenges, and a brief portion of the campaign (protoss, as mentioned).

I read a post like K9's and I think I want to buy it.  I read a post like Margalis' and I don't want to buy it anymore.  Gah.  How about co-op vs. AI, anyone playing that?  Can the AI put up a good/fun fight?

Why would you take the word of someone that's just trolling the thread over someone that's actually playing and enjoying the game?

You got it. It's Scott Menville.

I've got the game and I'm enjoying it. Jim Raynor must have spent the entire game development time working out though. I don't remember him being a super-mutant in Starcraft 1.

So now giving your opinion of the game is "trolling." Blizzard fanboys are too funny.


If you want a shinier version of SC1 you should buy it. I'm not saying it's a bad game, just that it's super conservative. The AI is pretty decent, the hardest difficulty is probably hard for most players. Also I do agree that the single player is more varied than SC1, so if you're into the single player it's probably a good purchase. (As long as you don't mind buying two more games to complete the story...) Hell the multiplayer is good too, there's certainly nothing wrong with it.

I'm watching some SC2 tournament vids right now, I'm hardly a hater. It's just not the landmark game that SC1 was.

I cant actually recall seeing a body shot of him anywhere in the first game. As a character on the field, he was always either in a Vulture, or in a Battlecruiser i think, and other then that, all you ever saw was his face in the comm screens.

Hmm now that you mention it you're probably right. Still, I found his freakish build a little jarring.

As has been mentioned, unless you're into multiplayer or want the WoW pet it's not worth buying for Single Player.  That's all I'm after because I suck at RTS (mainly because I hate micromanaging what I feel should be guys able to think on their own two feet.)  and use cheats to finish.    As such I'm waiting 2-3 years for the battle chest.   Hell I waited 5 years to buy SC1, why should this be different.  :awesome_for_real:

From the little I played in Beta, it looked like it could be fun for RTS-types, FWIW.

I'm pretty sure EVERYONE in the starcraft universe is juicin'.

Oh God, the story is so BAD.

 :uhrr:

Finally. Let it all out.

I've heard rumors, but I didn't want to stomp all over the euphoria.  Dish!

Yea, pretty much. Plot is really Blizzard's blind spot.

I think there's one chap at Blizzard who writes story.  Sure, he looks great, but the picture in his attic is a fucking MESS.

Finished it on hard just now and I don't think it was worth the money or time, really.

Looks and feels like they're setting it up for a MMO to me. Anyone else get that vibe?


Oh well. I guess I'll go back and do some of the earlier missions for fun if I can be bothered. Maybe I'm just over this type of RTS, but I find the 'epic' ending missions with massive enemy bases and heaps of units really boring and unimaginative and unfun.

I think I'd feel better about myself if the game cost $10 less.

I dished out the big bucks for a CE. I feel a bit stupid, but at least the art book is good. And the USB stick, it's got SC1 and Brood War preinstalled.

I was given it as a leaving gift.  If it was just the Single Player, I'd STILL feel I'd paid too much.

As it is, who cares. 


(So Bad.  SUCH A BAD STORY.)

Yes, I concur since mine was also free. It's been a fun single player, some decent multi-player but I would never have paid $60 for the game. The fact that they are releasing them all for that amount of money is simply ridiculous. I just don't see how they will convince anybody who isn't a raving lunatic to buy the other two parts at full price.

I am absolutely terrible at this game. I mean, like, BAD.

Pretty much

You only feel like that because the Story reminded you of Warcraft III.

In the same way as crabs reminds you of syphillus.

I figure the 'setting up for sequel/ MMO feeling you're getting' is because you haven't seen the entire story yet.  The end of the Human campaign in WC3 didn't feel like the end of a story, either.  You had to play through the Orcs, Undead and then Night Elves to get it all.  Same thing here, only you have to wait until next year to get the Zerg bit, then the ending with the Protoss at some time after that.   

If it STILL feels like "Oh look, set-up for another game" after that I'll concede.  However, I think Blizzard has learned it's better to just come up with new IPs for MMOs so you don't have to cram stuff in that makes no sense.  Then again, Blizz isn't in charge anymore so it could be, "Hay make everything into an MMO, NOW!" time.

Let's be honest;  if it were up to Activision, there would already be an announcement.

I did get a feeling that they were trying to flesh out more of a 'lore' background and a set of 'lore characters' who could serve as future elements in an MMO. But it might just be a hangover from WoW.

What?

WOW is the most successful MMO of all time by a large margin, the lesson they've learned from that is that new IPs are better? Huh?

World of Lost Vikings Craft  :awesome_for_real:

The last patch seems to have slowed down my load times, talking ~60-90 seconds now for a mission which is kinda silly.

Yeah that was my feeling. I thought there were a lot of characters who seemed to be introduced just for the sake of fleshing out a character base for a future game. The single player experience seemed like they wanted to RPG elements into the non-game experience, and all I could feel was like "are they doing this so they can make a spectre class? so they can have a playable Protoss faction? etc?" Maybe it's just bad storytelling, though.

They did say that their new MMO was an all new IP... take that as far as you want.  Frankly, with what Blizzard has learned about games with WoW, a SC MMO just seems natural. 

Why not a Diablo MMO...?

 :?

Anyway, it doesn't matter to Blizzivision what IP they choose for an MMO, it's going to be a cash cow.

I could spend all day speculating, but they pretty much said its a new IP (focusing on RvR elements if I remember correctly) I don't think Blizzard would work on two MMOs while putting WoW out to pasture.

However, I am curious to see what they do with the Warcraft IP once WoW is 'done'.

If anything Blizzard learned that not enough people give a shit about lore to prevent you from doing whatever the hell you want.   Spaaaaaaaaaaace goats.


That's about what I feel.  Pushing the $60 price tag on a rather short single player campaign when you're planning two more seems a bit distasteful.  And it was short.

Still, I figure I'll get my value eventually with the multiplayer and other aspects added in (mission achievements, challenges, custom content).  If I was just here for one trot through the single player campaign, yah, I'd feel a bit ripped off.  But really.. single player RTS isn't ever really a good value unless you get it for cheap. 

Haven't been able to get Supernova on brutal yet, or kill media blitz in 20m. Grr. Supernova is tough, though. I suspect there's some trick to it.

I managed to get a "Feat of Strength" on one of the missions.  Anyone else got one yet?

"The Scenic Route" - Destroy all Zerg Structures in normal Devils Playground mission.

I got that one, there's also one for using the A.R.E.S to kill the brutalisk in the secret mission that I got.

Secret missions ?

Horrible ending. Made the robot baby jesus cry.

So I looked on YouTube for a Terran strategy, and now I feel like I've got the gist. I've won a few games in a row in the beginner league now, and I think I'll give actual play a shot. Then of course I'll get stomped and this game will be no fun again.

Anyone up for some co-op?

I have to say that the standard of play down in bronze is a lot lower than it was in beta. I'm up something like 20-12, compared to barely breaking even in beta. I've been seeing a lot of people doing basic mistakes such as rushing to carriers/battlecruisers or turtling like mad. I also assume every single zerg player is going to 10-pool me and I'm not pretty good at beating the early rush.

There are a bunch of new maps too, some good, some bad. I haven't played most of them enough yet to get a feel for things.

Let's just be clear here though - if you think this is too short, then Starcraft 1 was too short, as was Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3. Both came with an equivalent number of missions, and starcraft 2 has a *lot* more bolted onto it for single player mode than those games did. It's not fair to suddenly start saying SC2 is weirdly short when it's longer than any other Blizzard RTS they have released, and has a lot more single player stuff in it.

Re. adding more characters to setup an MMO - it's an amusing comment because over at FoH folks were complaining they *didn't* add enough characters compared to Brood Wars. IN reality, both games had a lot of minor characters added who we haven't seen again. I didn't get any particular feel of them setting up an MMO, especially as you don't even have to pick up 2 of those characters if you don't do their missions. ((And their fates are determined by what you chose int he missions as well, so hardly conductive to an MMO).

Really?  It may be that right now I'm just better at this game or the individual missions were shorter/easier.

And you know what's really awesome? I'm now getting Starcraft II themed phishing emails.  My Spam folder was getting a bit stale.

I guess it's hard to compare between SC and SC2 on campaign length because frankly it's been ages. Having a single campaign means that you don't have to do three sets of 'baby steps' missions where you can only build a few of the most basic units. I felt the campaign overall was longer than SC1, especially if you discount the learning curve missions. I guess a better comparison is whether this terran campaign is longer than the SC+BW terran campaigns, and again I think it was. Feel free to correct me though.

Most missions took me about 30-40 minutes on average probably, and there are 26, which makes about 15 hours of gameplay. My actual played time was longer since I didn't one-shot everything. When you throw in the challenges, custom vs AI and co-op vs AI, and associated achievements fior each mode the "PvE" game is more substantial than SC I think. YMMV though of course. I'd happily have taken more missions, but I didn't feel that the campaign was under-length.

I'm getting my money's worth out of multiplayer though.

The original wasn't $60 (personally I paid $15 for SC and Broodwars...) and in all those others, you had multple races to play through as.

This one could be worth it because it brings multiplayer into the fold for $60, if you are into that sort of thing. However, if you're a multiplayer fiend, there is no reason for you to bother with the next to games. If you're a single player fiend, you'd want more than just another campaign (because let's face it, the first one on normal difficulty can easily be finished in 7 hours).

I think it's a lose-lose to do what they are doing if they continue with a $60 price point. If they move to $30-40, that would make more sense.

Yeah, it's not THIS one that bothers me much.  I'm getting my moneys worth with the challenges and multiplayer and whatnot.

What I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around is the other two games coming, full price.

I'm not paying that.  I wasn't even gonna pay for THIS one.

The original was the equivalent of $60 at the time in video game pricing though, I don't really buy that as a criticism. New games just cost $60 now. The expansions costing $60 is a better worry I think. (Especially if they also have $100 CEs, that was a bit eyebrow raising.)

As far as the not having multiple races available for play in the single player campaign, it is a little annoying but not really a deal-breaker I don't think. As mentioned they did work in some protoss missions and despite the other missions all being with terrans they avoided the 'sameness' problem they could have had pretty well, both through mission mechanics and because in single player the unit variety is much higher than in the core multiplayer. All the SC1 units that didn't make it into SC2 multiplayer (medics, firebats, reaver bikes, etc.) are available in the single player so you have a lot of choices and options as far as that goes.

Paelos: I originally thought multiplayer people wouldn't need/want the expansions as well but apparently they are going to affect multiplayer as well - new units etc. Much like any other RTS expansion I suppose.

If this thing crashes just as I'm about to complete a gold challenge ONE MORE FUCKING TIME, it's going OUT THE FUCKING WINDOW.

Had no crushes sp far, but the game refuses to quit. I click exit game and it stays there for hours, until I kill it from the task manager.

New PC games do not cost $60.

This is true, 50 dollars is still the standard.  Console games routinely cost 60 now, but I haven't seen that translate into the PC gaming market yet, and you still even see a lot priced at 40.

They do now.  :oh_i_see:

Star Trek Online was $60 I am pretty sure (for like a whole week!), and I think Dragon Age was too. $60 is what the "AAA" stuff is going to cost now. It may take a year or so for everyone to catch up but I think now that the line has been crossed in a big way that's how it will be.

EDIT: Modern Warfare 2 was also $60 on the PC I believe?

I paid £30 for Starcraft when it was launched way back 13 years ago. For SC2, I paid £35 - a £5 increase over 12 years is not a huge amount. (A £10 increase wouldn't be either).

An average PC game costs £30 in the UK, so SC2 is above that - but an average console game costs £40.

In terms of value, that £30 gets you a hell of a lot more than the vast majority of £40 purchases.

DA:O was $65 for the Collector's Edition, $50 for standard, not $100/$60 like SC2. Both MW2 and SC2 were/are $60 on PC.

I don't think the bar is set to $60 yet, nor will it be this year, but it will be very soon. By the time the Protoss and Zerg campaigns are second expansion is out the average will most likely be $60 and I think most of the complaints of "an expansion for $60? pff!" will be gone (not all, but a lot). Though, if Steam (and other digital distributors) keep increasing their popularity, with their convenience and huge sales, the average price will take longer to hit that $60 average. Especially since the only major releases not on Steam (afaik) are Activision Blizzard releases. I know if SC2 was coming to Steam there would have been no way I would have bought it early in its release, I would have waited for a sale with Steam's Holiday sale coming up.


Edit: I thought there was 2 years between each expansion, not 1. So the next expansion will have the complaints, the last not so much.

YES!  Thank you!  I knew I knew that voice from somewhere!

I think you are right on point with the Steam sales thing.  I really think the PC gaming market is loathe to pay full price for games these days because of Steam.  Of course there are some games that you buy on release no matter what, but for anything you aren't champing at the bit for, you'll be waiting.

 :grin:

$100 for SC2 here in Australia. With the exchange rates I'm pretty sure we're the most fucked in the world price wise.

It was bought for him, so he didn't pay anything.

So, those reports some of you might have heard about Starcraft frying video cards... yeah, mine just fried after 3 days of playing SC2. Luckily its still under warranty.

From Blizzard on the Starcraft forums.

I haven't found the story as cheesy as many others here except for everything involving Marine Armor Guy, but I am still only halfway through. Is there a major shark-jumping moment? (no spoilers, just yes/no)
By sheer price, probably... but at least for Eastern Europe the actual value / cost is worse. It costs 60E here just like the rest of Europe, but you're lucky to make E1k/month with an MSC and 5 years of work experience. Most people don't even make E450/mo. :why_so_serious:

I decided yesterday that I wanted to buy Starcraft 2. I try to buy it through battle.net, to have it error on all my credit cards. Nothing wrong with the cards so obviously an issue with the website. I decide ok, screw you battle.net, I'll go buy a box. After one Best Buy and 3 Gamestops I'm still empty handed. All of them just had the empty preorder boxes and no actual real copies. Why does no one sell this game? I come home and get the bright idea of buying a CDKey from one of those sites that just buys retail copies and takes a picture of the CDKey and sells that. I don't give a shit, I just need it in my battle.net account and then I can download it. For whatever reason these sites tend to be kind of shady despite it being a legit, albeit not-normal, way of buying something. I managed to get all three of my cards fraud locked because the site (OffGamers) is apparently not trusted. I didn't know at the time they were being fraud locked, just that the transactions were being denied. I knew 5 minutes later when Bank of America called me to inquire. I finally manage to get it paid using PayPal, get my key, add it to battle.net. Two hours of downloading later and the fucking install was corrupt. At this point I just went and got beer, drank some, and went to bed. I spent like 5 hours of my Sunday trying to get SC2 and ultimately failed, getting three credit cards fraud locked in the process which required phone calls to three banks.

Jesus fuck. Just mail me your wallet next time.

*grumble* Go ruinin' my smiley...

Not sure I understood the Smiley anyway, but I am so glad I didn't pay for this.  I have realised today and yesterday that there's no desire in me whatsoever to replay the campaign.  I did it on Hard and, apart from one FUCKING ANNOYING mission, it wasn't all that hard.  I can't be bothered playing it again for any stuff I missed.  The challenges are fun, apart from Opening Gambit (Seriously, FUCK OPENING GAMBIT.  2 seconds I failed Gold by) but it's more fun to look up Youtube and find out how others did them.

Going to launch myself into the Multiplayer this week.  Oh, and look for another job.

Bleh, only challenge I can't gold right now is the Psionic assault.  My micro isn't up to it.

For psionic assault, create 2-3 immortals per wave, put them in front. Make sure you always have 4. When the enemies close, storm once. Autoattack with your sentries to victory!

The only two issues are making sure the reapers don't hop up the ramp or making sure you don't get blindsided by the mutas.

I did it a different way. Just blocked ramp and sentries with melee, blocked ramp and stormed once with range.

Feedback the banshees.

A couple of hallucinations (I use colossai) to tank reapers and the ones you have more trouble with and then storm the groups that attack.

Once you get towards the end and have templars with low energy make a couple of archons.

So, I finally got this game working.  So far, seems pretty good, but there's two minor nags that are getting under my skin.

1- The manual.  This thing is like five pages long, all of it backstory.  No unit list?  No tech tree?  No map editor documentation?  I could maybe understand it if there was a more comprehensive manual on the disc (still annoying, but understandable) but nope, the PDF is the same five page pamphlet as the paper manual.

2- Kind of sad that the "Player" character doesn't seem to exist anymore.  In Warcraft, Warcraft II, and the original Starcraft, you were playing as a Commander.  A General or Cerebrate or Executor or whatever.  Then in Warcraft III, they got rid of that, and you're not a character in the story anymore, you're just controlling some of them some of the time.  It's not as bad as that in SC2 because it's more like Raynor is the sole main character (at least as far as I've gotten), but I still prefer being the faceless "Governor of Mar Sara" to "Governor Frank McSpacemuscle, whose childhood escapades on the wrong side of the law made him close friends with yadda yadda haunted past blah blah drinks to forget etc. etc."

Seems pretty cool so far, though.  The in between mission bits are interesting, to me, and I'm wondering how they're going to keep that going with the Protoss and especially the Zerg through twenty odd missions.  The Protoss seemed a bit one dimensional to have much character dialogue beyond "honor is good, don't you hate Zerg", and the Zerg don't seem like they'd be chatting with a Hydralisk over by the water cooler or whatever.

There is a full Tech Tree + Unit list available in game under the help menu i believe, before you launch a campaign or multiplayer match.  Not sure about map editor docs though.

Yeah, I have that same wonder about the zerg campaign. The 'best' idea I've come up with so far is that it could be presented as Mengsk or Raynor reacting to reports of what the zerg is doing - you research something for mutalisks, they get a report of "oh no sir their mutalisks have multishot!" or something. You could frame a whole narrative that way but it would be tricky.

In the zerg challenge missions a queen chats to you about what your goals will be, so maybe the Zerg have more banter than you think.

Spoiler tagging this because it gives away the end of the single player campaign:

See, that seems like the exact sort of thing that would give Metzen an erection, therefore it would totally go right in.

I missed the red hair.

 :heartbreak:

Worse part is this a beta bug.

I've got a new favorite stream. Trump is a rank 1 diamond terran player who devotes a ton of time on his stream to helping noobs and explaining builds/game analysis.  He's pretty much awesome, although admittedly if you don't play terran you won't get nearly as much out of it.   Regardless, as I've recently switched to random, I'm finding his stream absolutely invaluable in improving my horrible terran play.  http://www.livestream.com/trumpsc

I'm having the same problem with this as I did with the beta ;  a staggering lack of decent replays to download.

Sure, I have the 3 links that others thoughtfully provided in the beta thread, but they seem to be populated by crap idiots uploading themself owning Downs Syndrome players and then posting 'ahaha, I eat your mother out' at the end.

Anyone ?

Is there a mission that can't be solved with the hammer of marines+medics?

There are some that require you to fly around. Of course, you could just load your marines+medics into a hercules...

There are some that are air only, like the haven missions. But in general, no.

This of course probably demonstrates why medics were cut from multiplayer.

If you mean your main force is mainly barracks troops rather than exclusively then the answer, I believe, is no, at least on Normal.

If you do mean exclusively barracks troops then there are a few missions that I think may be impossible to complete (e.g. "Shatter the Sky" and "The Moebius Factor").

Also most of the missions are designed to take advantage of whatever unit becomes available in that mission. Certain objectives and achievements may be impossible to get without using those units extensively.

The Haven missions should be completable with only barracks troops on Normal assuming you are also allowing yourself to build missile turrets.

It should also be pointed out that thors + science vessels is like a REALLY AWESOME GIANT ROBOT version of marines+medics and will get you through missions pretty much just as easily (once said contraptions are actually available to you of course.)

Also I think you would have a very, very hard time completing the final mission without air units, though perhaps that depends on the choice you make in the mission immediately preceding it.

In PvP it's "kill the healers first". Medics work in the campaign cause the AI doesn't make them the priority targets.

It does. I only had a few air units in the final mission and that's just cause the Yamato Cannon made the "special encounter" easier to deal with.

Science vessel is  :heart:

6 Battlecruisers with 3 Science Vessels pretty much solved all my problems.

Doesn't it? Like, the AI on a attack move will make healing Medivacs priority over other things in multi.

The main difference is really that medivacs can't heal each other; medics can. That makes a big difference balance-wise. Science vessels have the same issue, since they can repair each other.

The AI does on brutal. Honestly it still doesn't really help.

I meant "Maw of the Void" not "Shatter the Sky".

Wow, some of the players in 2v2 are awful. I had two in my placement matches alone that didn't build any SCVs.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=141496

Asian currency exchanges always amuse me. Join this SC2 tournament! Win 1,000,000,000 Dong! $40,000 USD

Hell, 40k USD sure isn't peanuts either.

Looks like they're really pushing this to replace Broodwar.  That's a good thing.  Tournament play is pretty fun to watch with the exception that most mirror matchups are pretty retarded at times still.

I had some fun ladder games last night, beating some folks ranked far above me. Plus, some dude thought I was a girl because I had the news caster profile picture. He got grossed out when I told him I was 31.   I found that rather amusing.

Good thing overall was that I could have won both games I lost last night with very slight changes and a bit more conservative play in parts. 

Nope, $40k is a yearly salary for a lot of folks, but you have to step over a lot of Koreans to get at it.

Well, it's better than having to step over the Dutch....those tall bastards. :why_so_serious:


I avoided getting Thors and Battlecruisers for this reason. Once I got them, I went with 6-10 BC and 2-3 Science Vessals as my air force in one group, and about 6 Thors and 2 science vessals as my second group to run the ground. The game got really easy at that point.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/08/starcraft-2-the-latest-game-to-control-user-created-content.ars

I'm really enjoying the single player campaign, esp. the story.  I don't know how much I'll be playing multiplayer as I'm still having problems with the game freezing and locking up.  I've updated my drivers and tweeked the graphic settings a bit.  Its better than it was, but its still frustrating.  

I did get into one training multiplayer match and won easily.  I chose Protoss by accident (wanted terrans) so I had no idea what did what at first.  I was convinced I was going to get bum rushed before I even managed to figure out what to do.  My base was fairly compact so I built some defenses and some ground units and positioned them so they'd have interlocking archs of fire so nothing could slip through without being attacked.  Turns out that my opponent was more concerned with base building than fighting.  He was spread out to where he had essentially 2 bases, neither of which were well defended.  I built up my air force and systematically destroyed one of his bases and all the units there and part of the other one before losing my units.  I rebuilt my air units, added some ground units, and rolled into his remaining base enmasse and crushed him.  I know I would have been destroyed in a matter of minutes by better players, but it was still nice to get a win.

The number of people who don't build units is quite astonishing really.

Yah, I feel a little worse about one of my wins yesterday when I watched the replay just now.  Guy was sitting on 1k+ minerals for a long time with idle production facilities.  Didn't help that the guy was always supply blocked.

A lot of people probably always played (in SC1) on infinite resource maps on normal speed where you could just build base defense, sit there, tech up to battlecruisers, or carriers, or whatever you wanted, and THEN start building units.  The ladder meta game is not immediately obvious to people who haven't watched videos or played SC1 competitively.

Now I'm tempted to get in a few multiplayer games while the slowbies are still there.  :grin:

Game crashes haven't concerned me until I got to the last mission, and the game has crashed on 3 seperate occasions. I finally started saving it every 10% just to make sure I had a good starting point. It's awful.

I'm just going to nuke the settings so I can finish the game.  :oh_i_see:

As you know, crashes were happening to me with some frequency.  Putting the graphics from Ultra (which ran fine) to the next setting (high, quite high, very high ?) seems to have reduced the crashes;  I've only had one since and I suspect that was due to, ahem, something else.

Yes, I knocked down mine a setting and had no problems until now. It's going to medium next.

I might have to lower the settings again, too.  Mine will freeze for a minute or so, then go black or some other colour then come back fine.  Tweeking the settings lower has reduced the frequency of this but its still frustrating.  My machine is pretty good (i7 920, Radeon 5870, 6 GB RAM) and all my drivers are up to date so I have no clue why I'm having problems.

Interesting, I have the same processor and memory but a NVIDIA card, and it runs as smooth as anything. Wonder if there's some ATI-specific issue?

Yes.  There is.

What Ginaz just described happens to me and that's a GOOD crash.  Windows 7 will say 'whoops, you're driver stopped, but it's ok now', as opposed to locking up your fucking machine.

It's clearly that.

I haven't locked up yet.   I have a rather modest system (with an Nvidia card) with the game on about medium settings on a high res monitor (1900 x 1080?).  The game does require me to have my vid card fan cranked up and suffers some performance issues (mostly between missions oddly).

 

That is weird. I have an Intel E8400, 4g ram, ATI4870 on Vista64 and have yet to have a crash running on max settings through the campaign or any other challenges/multiplayer I've done. I will say that the multiplayer ran smoother in beta for me with older drivers. The lastest ATI drivers don't seem to play well with SC2 as I noticed a drop in performance (I'm guessing it's the driver, but it could very well be something else but I updated the day I started playing retail SC2).


I say this as one of those "slowbies"...... :oh_i_see:

Its outright crashed on me a few times, too.  I've had to do a few hard restarts as well.  Hopefully, its just an ATI thing and either they or Blizz can sort things out. 

I've had a hard freeze happen several times with a GeForce 285.

My only issue is that SC2 black screens and spins if I alt tab. Which is amusing, since Ingmar and I have nearly identical boxes beyond an ATI versus an nvidia card, and he alt tabs fine.

Wtf... no paypal option if I purchase via Battle.net ?

Yeah, a GTX260. Maybe my computer is just magic!

Guy rushes with pretty much a million +1 zealots...too bad burrow is  :heart: :heart:

http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/52331-1v1-protoss-zerg-blistering-sands

I'm not sure I can play this anymore unless I know I have time to play something else more relaxing afterwards.  Ladder matches stress me right the hell out. 

Actually getting better at applying good micro in spots.  I completely trashed a group of voidrays with my stalkers by constantly blinking them back and retreating so he couldn't charge.  Worked really well.  (Of course, I follow that up with a really hilarius brain cramp in which I lose a lot of units I shouldn't.  OH YAH, I HAVE BLINK.) Yay me.

My copy finally arrived yesterday (thanks for taking 2 weeks play.com, last order you get from me). Had issues installing and updating, all very tedious and annoying, but by the time I had it installed and working I only had time to play the first 2 campaign missions.

That was enough to make me feel old. And slow. And stupid. I hope I get better at it 'cos so far I suck badly! I might end up playing a lot of skirmish vs AI because at least there I can adjust the game speed to a level that my addled brain can cope with  :awesome_for_real:

I'm getting really annoyed with the noobs.  The frigging challenges teach you how to block in your fucking base and fend off rushes and have an economy and good build order.  Failing to do that shit just has NO EXCUSE.

And if I get ONE MORE FUCKING PROTOSS who builds multiple gateways but only one pylon powering them, I'm going to go fucking nuts;  two allies last night lost power due to the lings and one of them was so stupid that even after I said 'yeah, get another pylon there', he didn't bother and got depowered again.  That's just insanely stupid.

Anyway, my point here is that I cannot reccomend running all the challenges till you've golded them.  It really will make you a much better player.  I used to have economy problems but that economy challenge will beat that right out of you.

I welcome noobs, even shitty noobs with open arms. Hands down worst thing in an online game is an inbred gaming environment where alpha nerds bully other nerds.

Wut ?

I had a HoN flashback there for a while.

Feel better.

Yeah, I may not be hitting you up for some co-op any time soon then Ironwood, I'm a totally clueless newb. I jumped into a random co-op earlier and me and my complete stranger partner got roflstomped by 2 medium AI in under 10 minutes  :why_so_serious:

I'll look at challenges and stuff when I finish the campaign.

As much as I bitched about this game during beta, 2 of my real life friends put the screws to me and convinced me to buy it :why_so_serious:

You're weak Malakili. Though I'm going to be buying SC2 as soon as my masters finishes and one of my old friends gets back to the UK  :awesome_for_real:

Eh, I ended up getting against my better judgment.

Good thing it's fun and playable.

The game is crashing even more on me now. Anytime I play a mission that's a defense thing, the goes CTD on me. WTF!  :uhrr:

Only weird crashing problem I have is that I can only play it once without having to reboot. If I play, quit the game, then try to play it again it locks up. If I reboot first, it's fine.

On another note, SC2 is the game that's convinced me to use RealID. Being able to chat with my WoW guildies while I'm in SC and they're in Dalaran is very cool.

Been doing some giant FFA AI things and I finally found something that makes my computer slow to a crawl, even on low graphics. Giant zerg flying attacks against my wall of missile towers. I think the corruptors might be the culprit, but I'm not sure.

Might be broodlords? There's a critical mass of units which makes my FPS go through the floor. Carriers are the main culprit, but brood lords could be the same.

I figured out part of the issue. In the last month Comcast made a switch away from McAfee to Norton as their free AV provider. That thing is a bloated awful POS that gave my computer AIDS. Now, I'm running a trial version of something else to see if I can't get away from the overload it was putting on my PC.

Three words: Microsoft Security Essentials

Just had an epic 40 minute TvZ that was even for most of the game.  I went ling/roach/infestor/muta, he went MMM with tanks and some banshees/vikings thrown in for good measure. Losing this one hurt. I thought I played pretty well tbh, but I just couldn't pull through in the end.  I really should have taken my high ground expo, I don't know why it never crossed my mind.  Damn, I'm fucking exhausted after this one.

http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/53207-1v1-terran-zerg-kulas-ravine

Yes. So nice for home PCs.

As for SC2: I tried to get the 8 player FFA vs insane achievement.

I got lol cloaked banshee rushed 5 minutes in <3

I've started to practice for online play, three silver challenges so far and a few AI skirmishes on medium and faster. The damn computer kicked my ass several times until I decided to start a game by building a bunker in its base. After that it folded nicely. You definitely need to come up with a plan beforehand or you're toast.

As a random question, what can I use as Terran to reliably kill Roaches?

Marauders are the simplest counter to roaches, with their double damaged against armored units and superior range.   They'll rip them up quite nicely.  Otherwise, tanks and air units.

You played really well.  There were only a couple of mistakes that I could spot and the Macro could be polished up but the real reason you lost is he had you economically almost the entire game.  On a level playing field of production and cost, you'd have curb stomped him.

Alas, not having the cash or the larvae seemed to hurt you at times.

There is a good strategy for that at the end of the multiplayer faq on gamefaqs (http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/939643-starcraft-ii-wings-of-liberty/faqs/60593).  It let me get it and I suck.  Took me a long time because one of my islands got destroyed, I thought I built plenty of cannons but was very wrong.

That mission caused some slowdown on my machine, I would recommend doing it on low settings.  As mentioned it seemed like the ai using massive air crushes the cpu.  I knew when it was loading overlords up with troops because my machine would begin crawling.

Thanks for the response!  I really need to make more drones...by far my biggest problem and it constantly screws me over.  I just get too into micro and survival and forget to keep a steadily rising drone count sometimes which gets me behind.

RL Creep. (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/the-disturbing-mushroom-of-lincoln-place)

Marauders and Tanks. Don't underestimate how good tanks are unsieged either. Siege is good, but don't feel that it's the only way tanks are viable.

On an unrelated note, income wars is hilariously dumb, and rather addictive. It's in the custom maps (just hit Join Game on the custom game tab on the multiplayer window). PS, it may melt your PC due to there being about 1000 units on screen.

You don't need to make more drones. The problem is a little more complicated than that.

Each mineral patch maxes out rate of collection with 3 workers. On top of that, the third worker is really inefficient. The optimal number of workers per patch is something like 2.25. You had something like 30 workers on 8 patches :( That's something like 12 more than you needed.

Beat all missions on brutal, gold in all the challenges, breezed through 8hr on normal, and what has me unable to perfect the campaign?

The fucking gold lost viking achivement. I can't get 500k. I hate that game so much.

My point was less about the drones and more about the lack of a third hatchery.  It kept your resource and production count lower than the terran, who was pumping it large style.

But seriously, don't worry about it.  Very good play indeed.  If your second Baneling ambush had come off you'd have really FUCKED with his head.

Does anyone know a good source that has actual strategies for SC2? As a complete noob I really need some specific build orders as well as instructions on what to actually do with my units. Until I remembered the bunker rush thingy, I was completely lost with oodles of random units but no idea how or when to use them.

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Main_Page

Although I think practicing and watching vids are usually better than reading about build orders.

Yah, I just wanted something to randomly browse at work. Starcraft is stuck in my head now.

Edit: also how rude of me to forget to say thank you, so thank you!

This game is great fun.  I haven't played an RTS since AOE:2 and I think Blizzard really nailed it. 

Is promotion not working? I'm beating platinum players now and I'm still in silver.

Its working.  Unfortunately the matchmaking system is so cryptic that its really impossible to know when you'll get bumped up.  When it happened to me, it just randomly happened after one game.

Well, that's good to hear at least.  In the past I've usually been bumped up rather early, but my first handful of games were rather mediocre.   30 games though and still in silver although my last 2 games have been against platinum players (1-1) and I'm beating high gold regularly.

I'm still bad, but I'd rather be in a division with bads of my calibre.

I got promoted on friday or saturday from bronze to gold. I was 23-15 in bronze or something. It didn't come after a win streak either.

FUFUFUFUFFU Plat.  Oh, how I missed losing streaks.

I really do feel sorry for the protoss guy (http://sc2.replayers.com/replays/view/1469)

Comedy replay of the week.

The Nexus placement had me in tears.

I read the description and that was enough.  People should at least have good etiquette enough to leave when they've lost.   Now, there is a fine line in some cases, and most of the time I don't mind if someone tries to stick it out as long as they can, but there is a difference between that and just being a jerk.

Is there a way to watch replays without SC2?

I don't think there is.  There might be a hack to do so offline if you can get the client. 

You're likely at the mercy of youtube and bliptv if you can't do that.

Everytime I watch his stream he's getting his ass kicked. I must have bad timing or something.  He seems very intelligent with good APM, he just gets beat a lot.  He's not a pro, so I guess it's to be expected.

Finally started playing this again; hadn't touched it since beta. Went 3-0 on my practice matches, then some bad I won with decided we should do 2v2 together.  :uhrr: Bad call agreeing to that on my part; we both ling rush, utterly fuck the toss opponent, kill his pylon, many of his probes, etc. All in all a good harass; I mass lings for another round to seal the deal, but my retard friend decides to tech to hydras. I think he had about 3 out when their counterattack finally killed us.

Is SC2 like WC3 in that Random 2v2 (or whatever) is relatively easy, but Arranged Team 2v2 results in burly men (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/7/26/)?

Random and arranged go in the same pool afaik, so a good teammate should be better for you than a random. Just go into with your random 2v2 with the assumption that your teammate is an abject moron and just play as best you would.

Also, from lings you should probably tech to mutas. Spend gas on your mutas and burn all your spare minerals on more lings. Muta-ling is incredibly annoying to fight off as zerg or protoss, you're just so mobile.

Zerg v. Zerg feels really awful right now.  Does anyone have any suggestions besides getting more speedlings and/or banelings than your opponent?

I play random and I'm also finally getting to the point where I feel like its hurting me, as I don't have quite the sense of the timings of all the matchups as the people who play only one race and have a really good feel for all 3 of their matchups.  Meanwhile, I'm trying to learn 9.  Still, I'm convinced it will make me a better player in the long run, so I'm just going with it.

Well, my very first multiplayer game! Can mommy put it on the fridge for me?

http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/SC2/Xel_Naga_Caverns.SC2Replay

I've got a tourney and figured I'd actually better start playing some multiplayer instead of kicking the AI around all the time.  :grin:

Which one were you?  :awesome_for_real:  Looks like typical beginning bronzish play.  Nothing wrong with that.

Konig, sorry.  :oops:

My next 3 matches I got stomped good, putting me in my proper place in bronze level. And one guy just quit after a few seconds. I guess his porn finished downloading.

http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/SC2/Metalopolis.SC2Replay
http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/SC2/Delta_Quadrant__3_.SC2Replay
http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/SC2/Blistering_Sands__3_.SC2Replay

Just some general tips:

Make a gateway after your pylon (at like 10 or 12 supply for cheese protection).  Get a zealot or two out early against protoss and zerg and a stalker for terran (reapers/hellions). You don't want to fight a person like you fight the AI unless you're going to totally wall off and warp in past your wall off later.  A cannon is one less gateway.

Try to keep your money low (units, tech, pylons, gateways, whatever) and avoid getting supply blocked.  Don't worry about making your pylons so spread out, you'll just make it easier for someone to snipe one and power down a bunch of stuff.

edit:

Watched another replay:
-Definitely let your cash get too high.   
-Chronoboost your probes.  It's easy to just hit c and target your Nexus.
-Try a build order like (the numbers are your supply count (always make probes)):

9 - Pylon (send probe to scout)
10 - Gateway
12 - Gateway
14 - Gas
16 - Pylon

That's a simple two gate which can help you defend a lot of lower level cheese and help you be agressive when you want to.  You'll want a cybernetics core pretty soon after your gateway finishes.   Flesh out the rest with whatever you need, but try to always be building up your army and producing probes.  You can go 4 gates (considered to be all in cheese by most), 3 gates and a robo, 2 gate and a starport or whatever.

Excellent. TY. Any advice for playing Zerg? I've got the 6 lling start down, but that's crap against a decent wall off.

I do like the 14 Pool, 15 Hatch opening for zerg. If you're not being rushed it gives you a very solid platform to just pump out a lot of units. Just don't forget to build some units (spine crawlers are really good in the early game) to cover your mineral lines from harass.

If the opponent walls off then make some extra lings for map control, and expand and simply out macro him.  Terran mech is pretty brutal against Zerg right now though, I'd suggest going ling/hydra/infestor and using neural parasite on his thors.  Send a bunch of lings into the draw the fire of his mech army, then pop the parasites, then burn stuff down with your hydras.  If he is turtling on one base, you can win a battle of attrition, he'll get to a point where he has to expand or he is in big trouble, meanwhile you are free to take a few bases and spread creep all over the map.

Just in general:  You don't need to play to win NOW, you can play to win in 5 or 10 minutes.  You don't need to smash into an opponents wall all game just because he walled off.  Wait until he moves his army out and try to fight it on creep where you have an advantage.  Then if you win that fight he'll be low on units to defend and you can overwhelm his wall in.  Bring overlords with your army (overseers or get overlord speed so you aren't waiting all day) so you can shoot at the high ground helps to break walls as well.

Do many people actually play Terrans in multiplayer? I've yet to run into one. It's been 60/40 zerg/toss in all my games.

Too many.

It seems like a lot of people get their feet wet on Terran because its in the campaign, but probably switch out later on.  I think I've seen less Terran since getting promoted to Platinum though.  Just looking back and my recent games my last 10 games have been v 6 zerg, 2 terran, 2 protoss.

Odd actually, since zerg feels a little squishy in the current metagame.

After I finish the campaign (and do the placement matches to take my well-deserved last spot in the bronze league :awesome_for_real:) I'll probably be playing terran to start because that's all I have experience with from the campaign (except for the protoss sidetrack thing, but eh). This might be true for others as well...


edit: bah, beaten

I've been playing terran in the Bronze league.  10 wins and 18 losses!

I basically fall apart completely once the game passes the 15 minute mark.  I've no idea how to do the advanced tech, and I don't know many of the units.

Dumb question ahead:

What does 'Get 3 probes/SCVs per mineral patch.' exactly mean?
a) That this is the right amount so every mineral is mined all the time, while the other drones are en-route.
b) Or that that one mineral patch can be mined by 3 probes at the same time?

Bonus Question:
c) What's your rule of thumb numbers of workers?

Also, is no one bothered by the zoom level?
I realize its done to achieve a level playing field, but playing this on a 26'' screen is painful. If it just showed a biiit more of the map.  :heartbreak:
One might say criticizing the graphics and shiny effects on a game like this is missing the point, but I disagree. SC 1 selling point weren't the graphics either, but it never felt outdated back then in 1998. SC 2 does, to an extend its diminshing the enjoyment of the game. (imho of course). A shame.

Cala

Slog - a couple of tips i gave my colleague that she's been using and tearing copper up with. Always build scvs, you will never have enough. Every time you remember just queue a couple up. As soon as you think the game is getting longer (10-15min) get two starports and start getting some battlecruisers. As soon as you have 4 move out with all your stuff and you'll likely kill them :)

Re workers - that's total. On a normal map you have 8 mineral patches - that means you should have a full control group (24) of workers for full saturation. Keep in mind there are diminishing returns so it's much better to have 16 in your base and 16 in your expo than 24 and 8. I try to consciously stop myself at 60 drones so i have some supply left for army. I often fail at that and end up with 75-80 drones :)

As wolf says, if you haven't expanded, ignore the maximums. Always build more than you can use and then transfer (roughly) half to your new expansion as soon as it completes.

While looking at your mineral patch, Hold CTRL and click on one of your SCVs. If the box is full, you've got a full saturation. If, next to it, you have a (1) and (2), and you can hit tab and it flips to the 2nd control page, that's how many extra you've got.

If you've been constantly building SCVS, having more than 1 page indicates you need to expand and is a good indicator that you're being too passive.

This will probably win you games in bronze, but the teching up to BCs is a huge resource and time investment and you are going to have a small to moderate army in the meantime.  If you are terran anyway, I'd burn a scan or 2 on his base to make sure he isn't going to over run you with some huge army in the meantime.

Which custom maps are good?

If you have somewhere been 16-24 gatherers, take a bunch of them to an exp, do the remaining ones automatically reorganise so that they're efficient (i.e. 2 or less per crystal)?

I feel you on the zoom level, it is just sliiiiightly too close in for my tastes as well. Doesn't really bug me in the campaign but doing FFAs against AI I start to feel it a little. (I am too weak to play against people.)

I believe so. I let the workers organize themselves, and they seem to do alright.

Does the supply number in those build orders mean that you should fill the gaps with resource collectors?

Usually.  You'll  only have enough supply/time to get out one zealot after the first gateway completes and before you start your second pylon.  I didn't extend out the 2 gate build very far.   People with a build orders into the 50+ supply count are nutjobs. Based on your scouting, you'll know if you're about to be cheesed and should react appropriately (ie cut probes and start getting out some defense).

I'm never very exact either.  Take in mind that with any build order you're going to run into stuff like aggressive scouting, proxy bunkers/pylons/gateways, and various cheese rushes.  Makes it difficult, but it's good to keep in mind that while dealing with any early aggression, you need to keep your economy going.  That way when you hold it off, you'll be ahead.

How many SCVs do I put on each Gas?
How many per mining shard thingy?

3 on each I think. If your placement is weird you might need an extra guy on the gas (if you're far from it or something). I think in both cases the 3rd guy isn't adding as much as the 2nd.

3 on gas, 2 on mining, but keep building extras so you can move them to your new base as soon as it goes up rather than having to build more AFTER your new base is up, in which case you've wasted tons of time.  This act of building extras and then moving them is known as "maynarding" (i guess the guy who did it in original SC  first was named Maynard), so if you see anyone talking about that, this is what they mean.

It's still 3 on mining too, I believe, it's just not the optimal number. I think over 2 you're still getting some benefit.

At first, since it's hard to see, once you get your gas up, transfer 3 workers to it right away.  With toss, don't just hang your probe around the assimilator while it builds.  b -> a  (place it) shift-click a mineral patch (always shift click a mineral patch after building something so you don't have a lot of idle probes sitting around).  Terran will already have one there.  I'm not sure what the hell zerg does  :awesome_for_real:

You can continue to do damage with a solid Terran core throughout the game.  Marine - marauder - medivac (MMM or the bioball) can last you for quite a while and is pretty easy to manage at lower levels.  Easy to add ghosts into that mix, especially if you're playing against Protoss, where EMP will really make a huge difference.   Just make sure you're adding on barracks as you progress to continue to pump out units.  

Another nice core I see is marine, tank, raven (or viking). That one is just brutal and can do some nice early pushes. You're safe from a lot of different techs.

edit: Keep in mind, I don't play Terran currently and when I did in beta I was a lot worse than I am now.  

The number in teamliquid's site is 2.25.  :drill: Their advice for making workers is that if you have to ask when to stop, you need to make more workers.  :grin:

God I love being in a terrible division.  Diamond Rank 1 baby!

http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/9273/screenshot2010081014272.jpg

You know that's got your real name plastered all over it right?

Just FYI if you care.

Nah it's not a big deal, but thanks for looking out.

I played my first three games in the practice league tonight. Went 1-2, pretty good I'd say. The multitude of rock piles confused me at first. The first game was a long slugfest that ended up on me forgetting to build base defences because I was having too much fun nuking 200 enemy units. In the second I was Reaper rushed, and in the third I tried it myself and microed a Protoss to death with 5 of em.

http://screplays.com/replays/lafaceduslog/4295

That's a replay of a Terran build I got off the internet.  Won three games in a row with it tonight.

It basically goes like this

10 supply in wall-off position
12 rax on wall
13 gas
15 rax
16 supply to finish wall
scout with SCV
have 5 marines
tech lab
supply
factory
supply
rax
supply to 50 over time
gas
starport at 100 gas
stim
medivacs
build what you can without impacting medivacs
push when 2-3 medivacs stim and lots of marines

Thoughts?

If you can pull it off you will run over most people in the lower leagues with that build.  Be wary of banelings and tanks though, as they will ruin your day something fierce.

You should start a CC somewhere in there, and sadly that build will lose to terran mech and well microed blink stalkers. One thing to remember is that medivacs don't do much for midsize armies during combat, they allow you to be more mobile and heal after harass than you would have been able to without them.

Also, I don't see a +1 in there which might help. I can't watch the replay since I'm not going to register to do it.

oh ya, I do the CC right when I attack.

Edit: is there a better place to upload them?

And this is fun to people?

of course!   :heart:

I use http://www.sc2replayed.com/ for my replays slog

1.e4 e5 Double King's Pawn Opening or Open Game
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Ruy Lopez
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 Scotch Game
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Italian Game
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nc3 Nf6 Four Knights Game
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6 Petrov's Defense
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6 Philidor Defense
1.e4 e5 2.Nc3 Vienna Game
1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 Bishop's Opening
1.e4 e5 2.f4 King's Gambit
1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.Qxd4 Center Game
1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.c3 Danish Gambit


.... I just don't understand. How could people find this fun?!?!

ok try this

http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/54302-1v1-terran-delta-quadrant

I tried to hotdrop in this one and he recovered, but I still won the match.

People play goddamn Sudoku for fun.

I love mapping out strategies, trying them out, then analyze, then modify, and so on.   It's not for everyone that's for sure.

To be honest, it's not a very good build.

Basically, you need to do less rote memorization and more focusing on your basics - pumping units out of your structures at all times, not getting supply blocked, scouting, and not having a stockpile of unused minerals. Get those down, THEN worry about tightening build orders.

Work for something like this. This isn't a strict build order, everything after the orbital command is just winging it. Just kept to the basics - spent my money, never stopped building SCVs, got my upgades, and did a timing push once they were complete. Note that I am so horribly out of practice, this is literally the third 1v1 I have played since before the beta broke for a week.

http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/54334-1v1-terran-protoss-lost-temple

Yes, I stomped him because he was terrible and I am still in placements, but that push would have beaten a decent player as well.

For extra credit, find all my mistakes! I made several.

Concerns I'd have are that I would probably respond to this in a way you'd find unpleasant.  I'd be able to scout 2 rax, because on any map I'd get in with my probe before you wall off (unless I get really unlucky).  So, I'd be expecting some sort of bioball push and would probably 4 gate with chargelots, stalkers and a token sentry or two.  Without marauders to slow down some of the zealots, it'd get bloody.  Of course, if you macro up faster than I do or do a pretty effect drop sniping something critical, there's every chance you'd still come out on top (HATES TERRANS).

I'll look at your replays later when I have some time. I like watching replays.

When's your orbital coming out with that?  What supply count are you pushing out at?  And like bhodi said, you might want to just start with a standard 1/1/1 and adjust based on what you scout and how you want to respond.  If someone sees two rax really early they're going to be on the alert for something coming.

Any of rules of thumb for drone production on zerg?

I find it very easy to manage workers with protoss/terran as they get a dedicated structure and unit queue and you can't really overproduce.

Right now I'm trying to learn zerg orders and hotkeying and all that shit in AI and Co-Op matches before I embarrass myself in 1v1. I usually focus on major econ push and then forget about drones entirely once I realize I haven't spent enough money.  Can't seem to find a happy medium.  Doesn't hurt me doing what I'm doing now but I'm sure once I start matches I'll get punished hard for this.

Quite prophetic. I'm getting tuned by plat players. I played some lousy ones to get in.

I've gotten my 10 pool ling rush practiced pretty well, but if it doesn't finish the deal (particularly in 2v2), what should I go for? I always used to do lings into ultras but it seems to take much longer to tech to in SC2. I've tried using roaches a bit but they don't seem durable enough, and while the move-while-burrowed thing is interesting, they always seem to get detected very easily.

When I was playing Protoss I didn't play a rusher (Sorry hate cheese  :awesome_for_real:). I found it simple not to have a set build, but rather have a small set of paths I would take that depended on what I saw my opponents doing from my scouting. I think esp. with Protoss, the special abilities (chronal boost) give you a bit more flexibility in your build order and the ways in which you can respond.

I love rushing because it keeps the game to a more manageable size. The more units I manufacture, the larger my chance of losing becomes. It's all probably because my mp RTS experience is LoL and DoW2.

btw, the Madfrog vs TLO showmatch from some blizzard thing in cologne last weekend was pretty awesome:

day1, bo3 - http://tv.esl.eu/de/vod/view/22299
day2, bo5 - http://tv.esl.eu/de/vod/view/22308/high

Day 2 is especially awesome. Commentary by demuslim btw  :awesome_for_real:

And the big tournament coming up at gamescom will be amazing: Invited players (http://www.esl-world.net/masters/season5/gamescom/news/131100/). $15k prize pool, Day9 commentary. Wonder if I'll be able to catch some of them live.

A friend of mine does the local distribution of Razer and he's promised to get me a picture with Nada, who will be there for the "Hax Life" thing. I'll fanboi him pretty good :D

Mutas imho, and keep pumping out lings. Expand up and tech to brood lords. It depends a lot on the map and what your opponent does. Generally the only way to make a 6-pool or 10-pool work is to keep dumping all your minerals and larvae into zerglings once you start rushing and just try to supress your opponent until they die. A steady stream of zerglings should finish the deal. If your opponent breaks your rush without losing much of anything you need to change directions generally. The longer the rush distance the harder it is to make this work though, on maps like twilight fortress your opponent will probably have a zealot or two, or several marines up before your zerglings can reach them, and there you are just throwing resources away.

Banelings are another good choice.

ling muta and ling hydra are both popular builds.  10 pool isn't especially early though, so you aren't going to straight up beat a lot of people with it (which is fine, early pressure is good even when you don't win outright). My point being that you probably don't want to invest tons of minerals into lings unless it looks like you legitimately have a chance of winning.  Instead take the advantage of having map control to expand, out macro him with whatever mid game build you decide.

Played three more games, went 2-1 this time. First was against a Zerg who killed me with a Nydus worms, I took down two until he realized he should maybe not do it right next to my marines. Then he proceeded to overwhelm my ten marines plus Banshee spam with Hydralisks coming in the third worm. After that I had two terrans and decided to try some f13 wisdom. That medevac marine blob thing totally works in the practice league. So many ideas are dead in the water though, because of the damn rock piles. You can't even scout unless you're Zerg or build the Terran base upgrade (which is mandatory anyway for the MULE alone).

The rock piles are a blessing and a curse aye. They give you a cushion to learn the tech trees which is good, but they don't prepare you for facing down rushes which is one of the harder elements of transitioning to the real leagues. They also promote turtling, and in a real game turtling will get you dead.

Also this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45-59VYDyjc&feature=player_embedded

If you are going for a standard build you are probably getting your first worker out of your IMMEDIATE area around 9-10 food, so you can just let him leave a little early to scout the edges of your base for proxy cheese.  If its a proxy pylon outside of your base, you first scout should always just check the normal places.  Occasionally cheese will beat you, but you can keep it to a minimum without too much trouble).

<3 <3

man diamond is such a joke. I just played a terran, 20:10 in diamond, 20th in his division. He build his barracks and first supply in his base, not at his ramp. I just walked in at 30 supply with speedlings and killed him. WTH?

*shrugs* you don't NEED to wall in as terran.  I don't know what his plan was or anything and clearly he made mistakes if he lost to that, but at the same time, it doesn't make "diamond a joke."

My impression is that as higher-level play is somewhat less rush-dominant, and people are generally better at scouting, a lot of high-level terrans don't wall off; at least with supply depots. Using Barracks+Factory is a lot stronger against banelings since depots are rather flimsy.

That said, I'm not sure what benefit there is to not walling off beside being able to get tanks and thors in and out of your base easier.

Sometimes your depots can be extremely vulnerable and getting put under supply can really fuck with your build, especially early in the game.

All pros wall in against zerg and toss. That's because they know that if they're playing someone that thinks they will die. It's not a matter of what you wall in with, you just don't leave your ramp open. 

And either diamomd is as much a joke as old platinum was or i've been getting all the scrubs. 5:0 since placement and i had one game that wasn't a walk over. Zvz of all things, got 7 pooled at close lt positions but recovered and won the ensuing baneling madness. 

Yeah, gotta wall against Zerg I think, otherwise you are forced to have defensive bunker placement covering your mineral line which is usually too much of a waste of resources.  Not really against Toss however, I've certainly seen pros not wall against them.   

Low diamond is a huge difference in skill level from mid diamond which is a huge level in skill difference from high diamond.  I just hit an absolute brick wall at about 550 points in Diamond.  All of the sudden people got really good, and I've been Idra-raging ever since.   :heartbreak:

Yeah, I saw a fun TvT with TLO where he constantly nuked the guys supply depots to keep him blocked.

So, i'm starting to get to that point that I always hit in an RTS where my mechanics are a total barrier to further progression.  Where the fuck can I learn to play right?  Simple stuff like learning hand positioning on the keyboard would be great, because my muscle memory is so tuned from shooters that I'm finding it very difficult to get past an average level in RTS.  No matter how many replays I watch or tutorials I do, there really isn't much that helps you during a game when you ham handedly hit the wrong keys ALL THE TIME.

Perhaps I just expect myself to progress too quickly, it took me years to get good at shooters, and I'm expecting similar results in weeks in this game :-/.  I just hate hitting walls where I feel like I'm making no progress at all, even slow progress would be ok, but I feel like I'm actually getting worse lately.

Actually, I'm going to blame Minecraft, since that has taken up all my SC2 practice time. :why_so_serious:

Looks legit. See you guys online!

:awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real:

If you're literally hitting the wrong hotkeys, then watching replays and tutorials isn't going to help with mechanics. You can only really improve that by playing.

Yeah, replays are definitely not going to help this particular issue.  What I wish, though, is that I had video of someones HANDS.  I feel like i'm holding my hand as if I was playing a shooter and they just groping for keys when I need them, there MUST be a far more efficient way to do it, I just literally have no idea what it is.

Eh, I like my hands to be resting in a shooterish position. Protoss uses the E key a lot and I like to hit keys with my index finger.  Makes blink micro hard at times.  Sometimes I accidentally scoot over and then I'll find myself spamming the R key when I want to make a pylon.  :awesome_for_real:

It's just muscle memory and that will be a little slow to develop since I haven't been playing RTS competitively since 12 years ago.  Plus I have to break bad habits (I click mostly in WoW  :uhrr:).

You know what, I think just fuck it.  I tried, I really did, I even bought the game when I said I wouldn't, but after getting 6 pooled two times in a row in games that I had just decided before hand "I'm just going to focus solely on mechanics" and then not even being able to do that...I just can't do it anymore.  

Meanwhile, Minecraft is fun as all hell, 0 stress level, and I actually ENJOY my time spent playing it instead of feeling like I'm taking years off my life.  The contrast between the two really couldn't be more drastic.  I think SC2 is probably the best RTS on the market, at the moment, but I just do have what it takes.  I'm certainly no totally shitty, I'm platinum, nearish the top of my division, and I could probably improve if I really gutted it out, but thats what I'd have to do..gut it out..and I just can't do it anymore.  I think I may have seen the end of my competitive gaming days.

I'm really feeling your pain right about now as well.  I've had a good 3 weeks where I have nothing to do, so I decided to attempt to get really good at SC2 and have been playing fairly obsessively.  But hitting that brick wall where you just seem to get worse every game you play is so disheartening.  I'm not sure whether it's best to play through it or just take a good break.  One thing that has seriously helped me is immediately watching the replay of every game I lose and making notes on things to improve.  It allows me to settle down going into the next game.  Getting into a negative emotional state before playing is an easy way to play worse than your capabilities, that I know for sure.

Teams is a lot less stressful than single-player. I find it a good change of pace and you can still practice stuff while being a bit more laid back.

Might be a better place to work on mechanics. Thanks. I'll try that.

Yeah I'm staying away from the competetive side of SC2 for now. I'm really enjoying the campaign and I'm trying to at least get the Normal difficulty achievs, but not busting a gut over the Hard ones.

I've done a few co-op games which have been fun and they've been enough to show me that I'm just not good enough of a player to be anything other than shitty in a competetive game, which I'm fine with.

Been reading this thread and it's pretty obvious that you all are mostly playing a different game from me, but that's cool - it's nice that it's got fun for highly skilled microers and the old duffers with slow brains  :awesome_for_real:

Day[9] had a good webcast about when that happens and how to analyze your replays and be really critical of yourself.

In the meantime, I've won 9 matches in a row in the Bronze league using the standard 1/1/1 Terran build.

Why do I keep winning with the marine-medivac blob (or is it ball, what do the cool kids call such groups of units)? I'm firmly a bronze league player, but even so it can't be that everything folds to it while usually defeating me if I attack on the ground. 

I also found that it's a winner 90% of the time.  I think it's because Bronze level players don't know how to defend their SCV/Drones/whateverProtoss ones very well.  Combine that with bad scouting and within 15 seconds their economy is crushed for the next 10 minutes of the game.

I've had some good players just shred my drops, but they seem to  be few and far between.  I've been going Armor lately just so I can learn the 1/1/1 strategy.

I don't think he even means drop harass, but rather just marine medivac -> 1a -> win.

Marines are really good against a lot of things and are really only extremely weak to things like collossi and siege tanks when they are supported by medivacs.  Chargelots will also make short work of them, but that requires a specific upgrade and scouting to know you probably want it.

Yeah, I just send two medivacs full of marines and they almost always carry the day. Sometimes I need to help with a second wave of Vikings, but usually not. A couple of times I won because the opponent had sent his army away, but still...

And I must emphasize the fact that I almost always lose if I try a macro based slugfest.

Are you sending them around the back and dropping them on his SCVs?  (that's what I was referring to)

If you are in the Bronze league, then the simple act of attacking after the initial "omg 6pool 1 gate reaper rush" window but before the "yase 200 supply worth of Battlecrusiers achieved!" window means you are doing something that will make most of your opponents very uncomfortable.


Marines are also the most cost effective and versatile unit in the game, that are constantly underestimated. One marine is no big thing, but two dropships worth is 16, that's a lot of firepower. Marines actually out DPS Marauders, even on armored targets. It's almost never a bad idea to have some marines around, no matter what build you are aiming for.


Just in general though, MMM is just a solid strat, its mobile and versatile. As the game goes on longer, you can just add on some Ghosts and/or Ravens to keep the army composition relevant to the very end.

That's what I try generally. Here's my last two game replays if you want to watch 'em. But only if you promise not to laugh.
 
http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/56017-1v1-terran-metalopolis
http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/56018-1v1-terran-protoss-xelnaga-caverns

Yeah, Bio is a very viable strat for Terran (though I do prefer mech at the moment).  Remmeber to get your barracks tech lab upgrades if you go bio though, and don't be afraid to add on extra barracks as the game continues, one of the thing lower level players do too often is not build enough unit producing structures, so thats why after the early game that have trouble keeping up a big army, as well as have 3000 minerals in the bank.  You can support a lot more than you think even on one base, and with 2 base you can really ramp up the production.  

I say this because you mentioned you(jakonovski) were having trouble winning if you didn't win early.  Like Fordel says, don't let your army become stagnant either, mix in some ghosts, get a raven or two, and remember for goodness sakes to buy upgrades at the engineer bay.   A strategy needs to mature into the mid and late game or else it'll get over run, which I suspect may be your problem.   MMM can still be the core/majority of your army, but don't JUST build MMM.

Yeah, I've been having trouble keeping a coherent plan for longer than 15 mins. Going bronze has weirdly enough made it easier because there's less waiting and thus fewer chances to forget what I was supposed to do.

Ok, breaking down the game v. protoss (Druckwelle)

Just listing things as I see/watch.

1) build your first supply depot as soon as soon as your 10th scv is queued and you have 100 minerals.  you'll have 50 minerals again to build your eleventh scv on time and won't have to wait to begin your depot until its basically too late and your bound to be supply blocked.  Seems like a small thing, but you'll get off to a much better start if you don't have waste time sitting around.

2) good scout early

3) keep building SCVs all the time, looks like you forgot for a bit after the orbital command finished.

4) you misclicked with a mule, make sure you click on a mineral patch.

5) You have a LOT of gas at this point (6minutes in), and you don't really have anything building that requires gas.  The factory and starport are up, but you aren't producing anything out of them (especially the factory).   If you are going to get it that early build things out of it, and don't feel like you need your second gas right away if you aren't planning on building many gas heavy units.

6) always shift click back to your mineral line after telloing an SCV to build something so it doesn't just sit around afterwards

7) tech lab going down on the factory but you don't have enough minerals to produce out of it right now, I'd say if you are going for this build stay on one geyers  alittle longer to keep those 3 extra scvs mining.  Good on getting the weapon upgrade for your  marines.


8) good drop and win


Some other thoughts:

 keep an eye on your supply, you get supply blocked often.

control group buildings!  Something as simple as: command center 1, all barracks 2, starport 3, then you can just hit 1s2aa3d to build up a full production cycle with that build order.  Your macro stopped as soon as you attacked for the most part (which is common at your league), but if you can have everything hotkeyed you can build units without ever having to actually look away from the fight if you need/want to.

going to do this for the other game too.

Awesome, thanks! I didn't even know you could shift click workers so they resume their duties automatically. Grouping buildings I learned yesterday, and I keep forgetting to do it.

It all comes down to being methodical, and it's really hard as I'm soooo used to playing online games by a seat of the pants feeling. But I guess that's why I like this game so much, it's got tons of depth and it's all new to me.

You can actually Queue up a large number of actions at once. You can have an SCV build several buildings in a row, do a little scout route then return to mine all in one set of clicks.

It's about being smooth.  The smoother you are with your Macro the better.

game 2 Terran v Terran.

1) same thing with your early build order, get that supply depot going earlier, you queued up 2 scvs deep (1 building 2 queued) for your 9th 10th and 11th supply, which left you feeling like "damn I don't have enough minerals for this depot yet"  But if you watch you'll notice that if you hadn't queued up that last scv you'd have enough minerals to start a supply depot right as your 9th scv comes out and your 10th is building.  You'll still have enough minerals to buyild your 11th scv "on time" and you won't get supply blocked either.

2) Looks lik eyour scouting was a little odd, but mostly due to not knowing the map I assume no big deal.

3) again the 2nd gas an no real reason to have it yet.  Since you are waiting for the factory as your next building you end up with a lot of resources just sort of sitting around because you don't have much to build from.    Get that second barracks up earlier isn't a bad idea, maybe even before your factory, and stay on one gas.  

4) remember to use mules, lots of energy in that command center.  Will come with repertition

5) Again you are ending up with a ton of gas and not enough minerals.  Stay on one gas longer and remember to mule.

6) Control group your buildings to aid ease of building units.

7) ok, looks like you built a tech lab on the factory and then started building a second star port.  Not sure what your plan was here.  I think you were maybe thinking "I have a lot of gas and those buildings produce gas heavy units", but if your plan is Medivac/Marine, try to stay with that build concept.

8) ok, look like at some point a bad rally point or a misclick got like 5 scvs standing around in the mineral line without mining, that helps explain some of the mineral problems.  Just try to keep that stuff to a minimum, but it happens sometimes.  Also, remember to queue up your scvs to go back to mining after they build, you workers tend to stand around a long time after they are done because its hard to remember/keep track. If you get in the habit of shift clicking back to the minerals after you tell it to build, it saves you the trouble of having to remember.



One more general thing: DO NOT QUEUE UNITS. My guess is you've heard "keep your money low" and that you queue up units and think "there i'm keeping my money low" but its really just shifting it to a queue slot so you can't see it, when in reality its still sitting there in your coffers.  I saw a few times you'd queue up stuff at the star port, and then not be producing anything out of your other buildings.  Produce something out of every building.  If you aren't producing out of a building ask yourself "do I really need to build this next game".  Obviously a factory is necessary for a star port, and sometimes you don't want to build from it. Thats ok, but then you can do something like fly it over your enemy's base to scout (and it'll probably scare the shit out of them in bronze).  Just try to keep it alive and fly it back home after so you don't need to build another later if you want a second starport.


For the next step in your plan, I'd say work on getting an expansion up around the time you attack.  If you are murdering his workers, he is going to be freaking out and won't be attacking you most likely, so this is a nice window to take your expansion, build a bunker at the bottom of your ramp, and you should be pretty safe.

Yep, you can queue up any orders in the game by holding shift and issuing another order.  Very useful with workers and scouts, or telling your units to move in a certain path to get to their destination, etc.

Make a sticky note and put it on your monitor:

1) SCVs (build scvs forever and always, but don't queue them up, you want to go build a new one right after the old one finishes)
2) supply (glance at your supply and no how much supply you are building per production cycle and keep yourself from getting supply blocked)
3) macro (build from your unit producing structures)
4) check mini map (get in the habit of checking the mini map and keeping as much sight around the map as you can, leaving one scv at the xel naga watch tower after he scouts early int he game isn't a bad idea, especially if there is one located in a good position to see when the enemy is moving out.

Just worry about those things at first. And keep going down that list the entire game over and over and over, just get into the rhythm of it.

Here is that video from Day[9] that you should watch

http://day9tv.blip.tv/file/3991475/

That was the first time I played on that map and when his base wasn't in the opposite corner I was all like what the shit is this fuck.

Also, print this out

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1yaK73J9GwM4CzyIF5A-qCtaamoinqWf7rGH-S8N2JJk&pli=1

Anyone else always get stuck with a billion minerals and no gas as Zerg?  I must be doing something really wrong.  In any event, I realized a few things about this game and myself as a player tonight

1) Random is hurting me a lot more than I thought.  I figured I could play random and be fine, but the higher I get up the more people are very aware of all the timings for their race and the build orders and so forth, and with 9 possible matchups and multiplayer build orders I could do per matchup, my mastery over anyone is just so mediocre that a well executed play beats me most of the time.

 I'm seriously considering picking a race at this point, but I feel like its taking the easy way out and I've gotten it into my head that random is the only "pure" way to play as it gives yourself the least advantage...of course that does me no good playing against 1000s of people who only care about winning no matter what.  I have a bad habit of doing this in most games though, picking the underpowered class in an RPG, or whatever.  Like I need the extra challenge...righhhht. 

2) I have about 1 good hour of SC2 in me per day, and it has to come near the middle of the day when I'm at my most alert. Any more than that, or playing when I'm tired/after a long day and I just don't have the attention or reflexes to match up.   It makes me feel like I'm getting old to say that, but its just the truth.

Look at it this way - there are achievements for all 4 ways of doing it - picking 1 of the 3 races, or just queueing as random. So if you're an achievement doer you're going to want to do everything anyway, and once you 'master' each race in turn then playing random will be more approachable.

Seems kind of strange thing to say.  Either you play to win or you play to have fun.  If you're playing to have fun, you're generally not going to be competitive at the high levels.  If you're playing to win, there is no "taking the easy way out."  Personally, I'd say you might be doing it backwards: focus on your favorite race until you've really mastered them (or get bored with them), then switch to a new one, and once you're expert at all three, then start running random, if that's your goal.

But if you're feeling like going random is getting in the way of having fun, then stop playing random.  You don't get bonus points for choosing random or anything, just do whatever is most fun for you.  And if you're feeling frustrated at going random, why do it?

This last page of posts has been incredibly useful, thanks guys. I may even try an actual competetive game against a human soon  :drill:


 :heart:

First full system lock in 2v2 (sorry Margalis).  YAY.  :oh_i_see:

We won.  :awesome_for_real:

Good call, they had all marines and my banelings obliterated them. After that I just flooded in lings and zealots.

I know thats how most people approach it, win and all costs, use anything and everything at your ability to do so, but I just don't think that way.  I'm that way in real life too though, not just in video games.   So, I can still be "playing to win" but put artificial restrictions on myself because I feel like that if I can do it that way, then I REALLY feel like I  deserve to succeed.  Its the same reason I hate to cheese, it doesn't feel like a deserved win to me.  Not precisely the same, but it arises from the same mentality.  I know its stupid and I know I have no right to complain about losing when I'm not doing everything possible to give myself the best chance to win, but I have trouble approaching it any other way.

One advantage to Random is that for a short while, your opponent doesn't know what race you are. He's got to scout. Of course, a decent player is going to scout anyway, but until he gets a peek at you, he may fall a little behind in his plans. But then if you're both Random it equalizes again.

Not that I play a ton of multiplayer, I'm just in an informal league. But it seems to me that playing Random will give you a broad approach to the game, but it takes 3X as long to get as good as a one-race player.

No idea why, but I seem to do worse when I try any of these strats....sigh.

Removed - I don't want to shit up this thread with my bitching.

Na, it means you don't have OCD which is good.

Removed - See above.

Sorry Marg, missed you message. Was in a pretty tight game. If you're interested I'll go for some 2v2, though I'll probably be no where near most people's skill level yet

The problem is that the openings are presented as gospel, when really they are core frameworks that you need to adapt around. If you're thinking too much about adhering to a set route, you often forget or neglect to pay attention and adapt to what your opponent is doing. Take them as guides, not gospel I'd say. Use the logic behind them and find your own build orders which suit you.

The main things to learn from them are to minimise downtime on production facilities/units (especially your harvesters) and to out produce your enemy. Then the other half of the game is figuring out how to apply your army against the enemy.

So for example, things to avoid would be building multiple barracks say, before you have the mineral income to support steady production at all of them. Or building multiple gas extractors before you really need gas and hurting your mineral income.

God, I won like four games in a row with the medevac drop, didn't play on Saturday, and now I'm getting gold players whose macro kills me dead before I can even get off the ground. Hey Blizz, I'm not THAT good. I'm still in the lowest tier of bronze for christ's sake.

Edit: but holy poop it's an effective way to learn, I'm getting way better at setting early defenses, esp. against Protoss.

I generally suck at this game in multiplayer, but a saw a video that shows a banshee rush tactic.  You basically build as fast as you can to get 2 starports then you churn out banshees and research cloak and rush their base.  I've tried this 4 times so far and its worked each time.  You might be screwed if they go for an early, hard rush at your base since your defenses are minimal but that hasn't happened yet.

It's easily countered.

Banshees are fairly pish.

Banshee rush works well against zerg, ok against protoss and is pretty dire against Terran. The main issue is that the time to get to 3-4 cloaked Banshees is quite long, and requires a hefty chunk of resouces. Banshees are fragile as hell, and comsat+marines will eat them before you even come close to recouping your expenditure. You're also left without a solid defense.


Yeah, getting stomped on really exposes you to your errors.

WTF, are all the bronze players dead or something, I get maybe half not-quite-bottom-of-the-barrel bronze opponents, and I now win about half of those as is supposed to be. Then there's the other half of my games, that are against silver or better, which I promptly lose all. My standing goes down veeeeeery slowly as the system counts my losses to good players as only -1 or -2 points.

edit: scratch that, I'm actually climbing by having a w/l ratio significantly less than one. I just beat a lower ranked player than me and got like +40 points. Battle.net must think I'm destined for greatness or something.

I've actually won against a couple of silvers now. I think it's all down to practice, as I'm really not good at doing the transition to other stuff if the medevac drop fails. One game literally went to both sides destroying each others' bases, and the only reason why I lost was because the dude had minerals left to build a new one, roughly the margin by which his macro had been better than mine.

Congratulations, practise really helps a lot.

Two awesome korean replays, PvT. This level of play is just crazy.

Game 1 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=222a87X9t5c&feature=channel)
Game 2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm7jA4yaPCg&feature=channel)

That level of play is just insane. The best part is that it just looks so effortless.

The ranking system doesn't use the league ratings for matchmaking.  There is a completely separate ranking algorithm for that which of course you can't see.

:heart: the void ray micro at the beginning.

I think this is a good spot to use the word byzantine.

They're trying to see if you need to be promoted.  Toward the end of my silver play, I was getting nothing but top rank gold or mid plat in matchups.

You were right, I got promoted to silver.

What kills me is just how calm it seems. That early kind of Void harass with the stalker support under the ledge would send me into panic mode, but the Terran here was like "no big thing, I can just repair my barracks till stim pack finishes researching and I can snipe the ray!"

I finally did my placement matches today and got placed in Bronze. :ye_gods:  Yeah, I kind of suck.  I'm about 50/50 so far.

To be fair, he is a professional, and is playing in a friendly match against one of his team mates.  Hes been in a lot more pressure filled situations in starcraft than that.   I mean sure, I would've lost right there I'm sure too, but I was just impressed in general by the really amazing micro by other sides.    Watch how fast the terran hotkeys each of his individual scvs at the beginning.   My god. :ye_gods:

As long as you are having fun and feel like you are actually competing, then I wouldn't worry about which league you get sent too. A Bronze vs. Bronze can be just as intense for the players as any of these super pro diamond matches are.


It's only really bad if you just get rolled all the time.

I'm scared to play in leagues, not sure why. Been doing a lot of coop with friends...4v4 vs Hard AIs can be pretty frustrating, especially that first rush...it sure hits hard.

Anyone have a resource giving a rundown of the different difficulties? Normal to Hard seems like a huge jump, and the amount of units that get popped out seems unreal.

EDIT: Though I felt like screwing around with Protoss today...first ever match with them, I ran up to Immortals and eventually just overpowered, choked off expansions, etc. Pretty snazzy, I thought.

I played my first few non-coop matches yesterday. Did a couple of 2v2's in the practice tournament, totally came top of both of them in every metric so I hit the "Skip" button and plunged into placement games.

1st one on of our opponents left the game after 1 minute and then the other one left too after about 5 mins, counted as an easy win. 2nd game my partner left after 2 mins and then I got rapidly roflstomped.

I shall do a few more today and see if I can get a real game  :awesome_for_real:

I just eclipsed the 50% win mark in Bronze last night.  :)

I'm trying to concentrate more on the micro and scouting.  Makes a big difference, but I still don't use my scouting to full effect.  I think this is mostly because I'm still learning what stuff like "Two gate proto rush" means.

To the person who is reluctant to play in leagues:  It can be a little hard on one's ego to be in the Bronze league and to lose a lot.   Once you get over the "I am not special at SC2" roadblock, you might find that it's a lot of fun.

That seems like the wrong focus there in bronze, but whatever works for you.  Personally, I'd focus on your macro to about the 50-60 food count and then do something with it.  If you're keeping your money low, not getting supply blocked, and building up a non-retarded army comp; 1-a will beat just about anyone in bronze.

For scouting, just build your depot, and send the scv.  Once you're inside their base, just cue up a bunch of moves and pop in every once in a while.  Also, if you don't get much out of your scouting just assume everyone in bronze/silver cheeses.  This means finish your wall-in early against toss and zerg.

edit:
Ohh, and don't rely on drops (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/sc2replays/badterrandrop.SC2Replay).  :why_so_serious:

My Macro is much better than it was. I have the build to 50 down really well though.

Maybe I need to work on identifying cheese.....

If you can comfortably handle 6/10-poolers, cannon rushers and reapers you'll be able to cope with the majority of the common "cheese" strategies.

I lost to a two gate zealot rush.  He had built right outside my base.  My macro was way to slow and my scouting poor.

Yeah, those are an arse.

Haha, that's totally true. I botched one drop because I forgot to unload the droppees. Looking at that dude's game, I don't think he should create more dropships like that when his base is temporarily lacking combat troops. Go Vikings! He also has production buildings sitting empty. And finally, he totally feeds his guys into your Stalker concave. Not that it mattered at that point.  :drill:

My greatest micro achievement to date was defeating that with two Hellions. I'd just learned to do the whole building grouping thing, and spammed marines & marauders in my base while ten zealots chased my buggies across the wasteland. Now, when they build a turret in my base, that I haaaaaaate.

Yeah, cannon rushing is retarded, and although it is beatable, it's rarely straightforward.

The best thing they could do would be to make Engineering Bays, Evolution Chambers and Forges require Barracks, Spawning Pool and Gateway respectively. This would have very little impact on gameplay, but it would delay your first cannon by 60s or so, meaning you should have your first units out and can kill the probe.

I've been chasing the probe around when I see him scouting.  Once I have my first Marine out, he's dead meat.

Drops are really powerful in bronze/silver because most players don't scout.  Scout doesn't mean just suiciding units into the enemy base to see whats happening, ti means putting an emphasis on keeping lots of sight around the map in general to catch troops movements and such.  

Usually what happens is that surprise tactics are SO effective that I think a lot of lower level players spend most of their time thinking of ways they can surprise their enemy to win, rather than thinking of stable builds.    If you are new to the game you'll probably get a single cloaked banshee in your base that beats you, and you think "haha, if I can do that to another guy I'LL win instead."

Its easy to get a couple things into your head:

1) The way to win is to do something your opponent wasn't expecting and win by surprise.

2) The way not to lose is to have a list of things in your head that could beat you and just try to build defense to stop each of those eventualities.


One will win you some games from time to time, but as soon as you face someone that has better map vision and scouting information, your surprise turns into you getting destroyed and having little left.  Two is actually just as destructive though, because you end up wasting tons of resources on defense you don't need.  

As an example, the VERY first match I played in beta, I think I played Zerg, and the opponent was Terran and it was on Scrap Station.  I had only played one match v. Very Easy AI just to sort of get the most basic feel for what I needed to do as Zerg just to play the race.    I built like 8 roaches (roaches were one supply then, so it was easy to get a lot early game) and attacked his base.  He had like 3 units and about 20 missile turrets, I just walked in and won.  Clearly this guy had gotten beaten by an air rush or something on Scrap Station and was operating under the "things I need to prevent from killing me" method of defense.  Thats obviously an extreme example, but the idea stands.

Its easy to fall into bad habits that win you a fair amount of games, and if you just want to stay in bronze or silver and win, thats actually fine, but if long term you'd like to move up in league, then you're better off losing a bit more in the short term.

Zealot rushes are almost worse as toss because the only real way you're going to beat it is to defend with a 2 gate until you can break it.  I almost welcome the other guy going voidrays.  Sure beats a contest of who can 4 gate harder.

At least with a terran you can wall in.  In fact, the second you scout his base and you see something goofy, complete that wall-in no matter what.

Well, Evolution Chambers are only for Spore Crawlers not Spine Crawlers, which require just a spawning pool, and Missile Turrents only defend air, which you aren't going to see in the first 3 minutes anyway.  Unfortunately having a forge require a gateway would make the forge fast expand build quite a bit less possible.  And frankly on the 2 player maps where this stuff is possible, you're best off just sending out your worker that is going to build your first pylon/supply depot around your base to make sure nothing is being built there.  For Zerg, overlords can give you plenty of sight in your own base early in the game

The real reason this is so effective in some games is because newer players are concentrating so hard on "ok, 9 supply, build my first pylon, send the probe out at 75 minerals" and their focus isn't on stuff like scouting their base because they have to spend so much effort on build order earlier in the game.  Once players get this opening stuff down, the scouting becomes much easier and this sort of in base cannon rush/gateway rush becomes a lot less of a problem.

someone should write (in a printable format) a "When you  scout X, it means Y".

I think that for me, right now, the holy grail of SC2 is pincer attacks. Like the one in that Korean video. It's so beautiful it brings a tear to my eye. Whenever I try that I just fuck up and lose.

I'd add ", and to counter it, build Z."

Well, the point of putting the change across the board would be to dampen the complaints about this being a direct nerf to protoss. As for the Forge FE, on the few maps where that's viable you can do double gateway to much the same effect. It's not a common build anyway from what I have seen.

The problem with cannon rushing is that it is easy to miss it, especially since pylons can spread energy up cliffs. You don't even need to drop the first pylon in the base, you just need to hide your probe, which against even reasonable opponents is not all that hard.


Yeah, the only problem with Zealots is that they are slow. When you close the rush distance they're pretty fucking powerful. Being turtled inside your own base is rarely fun though.


On an unrelated note, 200/200 for zealot legs is still stupid. Especially since conc shells, stim, zerling speed and blink are all a lot cheaper.

Unfortunately its rarely that simple.  The list would quickly grow to the point of being almost useless.  Instead of thinking in terms of counters and builds, think in terms of broader concepts.   If the opponent is building lots of infantry as Terran, you know he has a pretty mobile army, so things like keeping your army in good position to defend is a high priority.  If the opponent is going mech as Terran, you now he will be pretty immobile, so you can exploit that by harassing a lot and keeping him with either a split army, or able to catch him out of position.

I mean, sure there are some things that are pretty clear cut: If you scout protoss and he has only a pylon in his base, hes building gateways  in your base or near your base, get units FAST.   If you scout and he only has a forge in his base, hes going to cannon rush or cannon contain you.  

If you start to try and think of having plans for EVERY individual unit or build the enemy is going for, you'll be overwhelmed.  Instead, think in broader strokes, and then you can refine it later once you have a handle on most situations.

Actually learning what does not work as a counter is often vastly more useful than learning the things that do.

For example I learned the lard way that an army of Hydralisks is useless against banshee or mutaling harass strategies as Hydras are just so damn slow.

How many Marines does it take to kill a cannon anyway? I've only faced the cannon rush twice and both times they got it shooting me before I could figure out what was going on.

Probably four, but that assumes you're only dealing with a single cannon. You ideally want to suicide units onto the probe, then start taking out pylons, as they are a softer target than the cannons. This isn't very cost effective though.

Bring a few scvs off the line to take some shots and use marines to burn the pylon down

The key is (like the korean guy in video 1 I posted up yesterday) to sit back and actually take some beating while you build up 4-5 marines. If you send your marines in 1-by-1 the shields will recharge between each atatck and you'll never get it down. It takes a bit of cool and restraint to accept that though.

Oh definitely, you can sustain a lot more damage than you think most of the time.  And remember if they are going for this they are basically all in.  If you defend this, you're in great shape even if you lost some things.

Funny, I JUST played a game where they other guy tried to cheese me, so I saved the replay to post here. 

http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=details&id=139548


Here is my thought process (spoiler in case you want to read after you watch)

If you're not spreading the creep as a Zerg player, play another race.  You're crap.

Get those creep tumours and spare overseers working for you.  You'll be amazed at how quickly even Ultralisks can shit their arse over the map.  If your base is still being harrassed at that point, you've either not spread the creep or you haven't researched burrow.

I watched one of the better players lay some overseer jizz down and then put 3 spine crawlers on it.  Instant choke point.  It was awesome.

I've been looking at my average APM during a game, it's about 20, ie. half that of my opponents. I guess I'm a big picture kind of guy. In other news, how fucking awesome is Planetary Fortress. I made an early gold ore expansion with PF and it took out an enemy medevac drop just like that. We ended up attacking at the same time and taking out each others' mains, he might well have beat me if it weren't for two very large guns on top of a house.

 

PF are everywhere at the moment; they're way strong.  I suspect we might see them get nerfed just a little.  If you have your SCVs repairing, it's golden.

APM isn't really really about hand speed, despite  popular belief.  Anyone that types well performs way more actions per minute than Starcraft players.  Its about remembering to do stuff and training muscle memory to hit the right keys at the right time.  Now, that is far from trivial, but my point is, if you are only doing 20 things per minute its a memory problem and not a hand speed problem.  

Also, yeah, Planetary Fortresses are really good for stuff like a gold expansion, and in fact, I've seen terran players set them up at choke points as stationary defense late in the game when they have lots of income but not much room under the supply cap.

Yah, my low APM is probably because I still have to stop to think every once in a while. I also think a lot of player pad their number by microing units by frenzied clicking, the point of which I never saw.

Oh yeah, I'm sure they do.   I like to think of it this way:  High APM doesn't make you a good player, but good players have high APM.  Now, there are varying definitions of "good" and "high" and it isn't really my point to debate that.  I just think that there are a lot of misconceptions about APM out there and its one of my pet peeves in the RTS scene.

I really do suck at this game.  I got all the way up to #2 in my Bronze then I lost like 10 in a row and ended up #14.  I was pretty much curb stomped in all of them, too.  Most of the time I lost to an early rush of lower level units, like marines or zerglings.  I'd put a defence up at the entrance to my base, usually 2 or 3 bunkers full of marines, but they'd still overrun me.  

A good rule of thumb that works for me is, if you play only defensively, you've already lost.

Haha, that brings back some memories.   :drill:

I remember people in swg kept calling turrets turrents, even pronoucing them as "turrents" in vent.

3 bunkers is 6 marines/scvs or 2 barracks you could have.  Building too many defensive structures tends to put you in a massive hole.

I wasn't really playing defensively.  I normally just put a few basic defenses down (like chocking off the entrance to my base with bunker and marines) in the beginning.  At the start, I get all my scv's mining then I crank out more of them until I get to 8 or 9.  I then send one of them off to scout, another to make a depot or 2, then another to put down a barracks.  All the while I'm making more scv's to mine.  Once the bunker is done, I make a bunker and start on marines to fill it and another one at the entrance to my base.  The problem is that by the time I get the bunkers full, the other guy has already rushed me and gets inside my base.  I'm not very fast, but all of this takes place in the first few minutes.  I usually don't even have time to put down a factory before I get rushed.

And whats up with almost everyone playing Terran?  The only reason I play as Terran is because I'm more familiar with them having played the single player.

Hmmm.  Maybe I'll try it without the bunkers to start with.  I'm just used to having them I guess.

That and they're the perceived OP race at the moment.

You should be using your structures to wall-in your choke (ie supply depot(s) and a barracks).  Remember, your depots go up and down.

You really don't need more than two comsats in the mid-late game. Once you have two all your subsequent command centres should be planetary fortresses. Obviously it's not a hard rule, but past three comsats you hit serious diminishing returns on mule efficiency vs the number of patches you are actually mining, and you rarely need that much scanning.

Planetary fortresses as static defenses is something I have seen pro players do. For 650 minerals and 150 gas it's a pretty awesome unit in it's own right. Surrounded by bio and tanks it's a fucking monster.


My only caveat to this in ZvZ. I agree that not spreading creep in ZvT or ZvP is a massive mistake, basically hamstringing the effectiveness of hydralisks and ultralisks. In ZvZ however too much creep can be a boon for your opponent as well as you, so I'm not always in such a rush.

I'm getting much better at using overlord vomit to build paths to expansions. There's really no reason not to have them spewing creep, and I think it is making the most of little abilities like that which separates me from better players, and ditto all the way on down too. I really want to get better at using the Overseer's contaminate, it seems like it could be a really annoying ability when used right.

Changelings are also fucking love.  LOVE.

The only reason not to spread the creep from overseers is that pissing noise it makes that, after five minutes, makes you wanna go yourself.

Yeah, I'm slowly getting a grip on my Changeling-fu. They are brilliant.

My problem playing random is that I forget about cool shit like Overseers.

I'm also terrible with Banelings, I'm still a little stuck in that Bronze League mentality in that regard.

Yeah, when I was playing random I was all over the place, forgetting about units, abilities, and so forth.  Since switching to full time protoss, like 3-4 days ago, I've gotten SUCH a better understanding of their units and abilities just after maybe 10 games straight with the same race.  It really helps a lot to not have to focus on a ton of different possibilities all the time.  Changed my entire outlook on the game.

You start to use PForts as 'super bunkers' once you reach 200 army, since at that point you're still rollin in cash and have nothing to spend it on and normal bunkers just crumble against your opponents own 200 army.



I'm still often torn between Orbitals and PForts, since you can start to do really silly things with extra mules. Drop them on your mechanical army to repair anywhere in the field, or drop them on your opponents tank ball so they blow themselves up. No one expects the offensive mule!  :grin:

Then on the other hand, a PFort with a couple Missile Turrets is going to stop almost all 'cutesy' harass at an expansion. Especially if you have the range upgrade for your turrets and fort.

On the other, other hand, you can never have to many scans either! Once you reach a surplus, you can start scanning to just nullify high-ground during pushses, or being able to always check if that big blob of red on your sensor tower is really a doom drop, or just a bunch of probes.

True all those points. Also echoing how awesome the +1 range for missile turrets and fortresses is. The building armour upgrade isn't bad either, later in the game. It gives your expansions quite a chunk more longevity

6 bunkers can also surprise.  I just wish they didn't look different.

Another benefit of the bunker capacity upgrade, is it also doubles the capacity of Command Centers and Pforts. Setting up that island expansion is a lot easier if you have 10 slots in your command center for SCVs.

They do? I rarely use bunkers, so never researched it. Will have to check that out

Or you can just get a drop ship and then also have a unit to use for harass or healing :).

I can't rightfully say I know much about Terran, but I almost never got bunkers when I played them before unless I was very specifically building one as an attack was coming and I needed a little extra oomph to hold it off.  It seems like investing the upgrade in them is a little iffy.  Especially since you can salvage them now, there is no reason to really make them more cost effective. 

Had a very weird game today.  The guy made his own little mega fortress by walling in a few command centers that were turned into fortresses.  I think he might have been a young kid or something.

(http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-139699.jpg) (http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=download&id=139699)

http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=details&id=139699 (http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=details&id=139699)

You also have to factor in placement and build time. You can also get the space upgrade long before you could even think of getting medivacs. Though I would agree that it is currently a very rare and neglected upgrade.

I've taken to 2-bunkering my natural. Seems to work alright, especially with sieged tanks overlooking. I heart siege tanks.

Seems BNet is having some problems.  Kind of sucks since I had 3 games almost won when I lost connection. :ye_gods:

No issues here.

I 'm ranked #1 in my Bronze league, and I just beat a Silver and a Gold in my last 2 matches. 

For a few hours this evening, bnet was giving out odd SC2MASTER_UNKNOWN_MMQ something errors and signing you out of bnet if you tried to join a multiplayer game.

Yeah thats what happened to me.  Cost me 3 wins.  My record for today should have been 8 wins 4 loses.  Oh well, at least I'm getting better.

God, my macro fell apart after not playing 1v1s for a few days.  Lost like 4 matches in a row in no time flat.  2 were kind of lame with one being a bunker rush cheese and the other being a massive marine all in (could have probably won, but I was being stupid). At least I got to beat up on some Terran who was bitching about how OP protoss was the entire time.

"How do you blink up with no sight.  I killed that fucking observer"
"ORLY"  2 observers sitting on his ledge.
"Huh"
...
"Best macro mechanic and best units. WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH"
/ragequit

Made a crappy run worth it in the end.

Finally had time to play one quick game last night. Lost a 30 min ZvZ, really annoying. I'm still trying to figure out why I decided going for Ultras would work. It probably would have in any case, but I would have destroyed the guy if I had played standard. I was ahead all game, in every aspect, and he decided to attack 1 minute before my ultralisk cavern was going to pop, and i was forced to spent the money I had saved up on roaches :(

A 550 diamond dude that got his 1/0, when I was 2/1 and 2nd carapace was just finishing up. Lost 1 point, should've won that game easily to be honest. Watching the replay was painful.

btw, on the changeling thing - I'm super surprised on how people can't see them? It always pops out at me. The second I see a zergling or marine just wandering or lagging behind. Hmmm, if you have speed on lings, does the changling have speed too? Maybe that's it.

I think they are pretty easy to spot.   Especially if they are moving, because I'm like hey....I didn't give that order.  That being said, I don't think their point is to walk around inside the enemy base for 5 minutes, I see it more an expendable scout that costs energy instead of minerals so you don't need to sack and overlord to fly over.

I normally set the changeling to follow a unit, I think detectors pick them up too?

So I went to a LAN cafe. They claimed they had Starcraft II installed. I was planning to play 2 v 2 compstomps with my friend. Just a test-drive of sorts - we're about to get our seats when the clerk asked us, 'You need to have your own B.Net accounts to play team skirmishes. or else you're stuck with single player. Sorry, that's just the way it is.'

So instead, we went to watch Salt that night.

That's just how bnet 2.0 rolls

GLORPGLORPGLORPGLORP

If your pissing sounds like that, I think you've got some serious issues.

Is there a hotkey for "select all of this kind of unit" (not just "select all of this kind of unit on screen"). It'd be nice to start all my overlords pooping creep without tracking each one down individually. Or if they'd just start doing that automatically when you get the ability.  There's sooooo much busy work in this game. I understand that the ability to keep going through your busywork routines and never missing a beat while getting punched in the face is a big part of the skill in this game. But still, there's a lot of busywork in this game.

I'm a shitty bronze player who never played RTS games before. I kinda wish I'd gone Terran. They don't seem to lose very much by turtling, which would probably let me focus more on scouting and not having buildings idle (and once that's solidly in my brain, go more aggressive). As zerg, the need to expand-expand-expand, have 5 queens vomit on 5 hatcheries every 30 seconds, constantly spread tumors, fend off little raids on undefended bases and keep an eye out to see if the other guy has unturtled and is about to roflstomp one of my bases takes up about 150% of my thought-per-minute capacity. That leaves nothing for scouting the bad guy's base, harassing/raiding, herding overlords, or thoughtfully managing larva. I've developed a hotkey system for queen vomit, which makes that part easier (when I don't forget, that is) and I'm sure the rest will become semi-automatic as I keep playing. This is probably just grass-is-greener thinking, but it seems like Terrans turtle up to 200/200, beat my 200/200, and then whether they win or not depends on whether I can whip my larva into another big army to take out his army before he gets to my main.

Anyway, end whine. I have two actual questions.

1. As a shitty Zerg, is there any way I can take out a shitty T/P's defended base before ultras/broodlords?  I have 4 bases and the other guy has 2; I'm making a lot more money and am doing at least as well on tech.  I feel like there should be a way to press that advantage then. But no matter what I bring near that ramp, it gets instantly evaporated. I know that good players don't mind this since they'll always win in the end.  I usually will too. But it's long and boring.

2. How do I harass his workers midgame? mutas seem to get blown up pretty easily because their range is pretty short. Also, they take up 100 gas. I have a hard time justifying not spending that gas on 2 hydras. I'm very dependent on hydras to protect my army (and bases) from air attacks.

Nydus worms?

NYDUS WORMS.

I can tell you that control clicking any unit (or double clicking a unit) will select all units of the same type on the screen.
Also

If you have multiple unit types, the TAB key will move through each of the unit types in that group.

Yah, he knows bout that, he's asking if there's a way to select all units of a given type you've created, regardless of whether or not they're on the screen.  I too would love something like that...easier to select all my SCVs for example, in the case of an attack to move them all even if I'm not fully on the screen with all of 'em...otherwise, some dumbly continue to stand there while they get eaten.

That'd be real silly.  If it selects all the SCVs even off screen, then all your wee expansion ones would also run and hide.

 :uhrr:

Hotkey your groups of probes per base, or if you don't want to or can't afford the control groups, just do it with the one which you think is most likely to need emergency movement.

Right, right, I knew that. :D

Okay, so the first time I tried it, I'd have been really surprised. :D

Oh man, I hit a total slump tonight, only won one out of five games, and even that was against a really weird gimmick (Terran opponent moved his base to a gold expansion right at the beginning, then started proxying shit all over the place).  My macro still has a looong way to go.

I think I'll try triple barracks next for early aggression.

Early aggression is a great way to get out of a slump.  You can sort of let yourself get stagnant and lazy with some builds if you do them over and over again  (I know I do), but early aggression gets you "into" the game immediately and helps you to "snap out of it."

In any event, I've been making a lot of mistakes myself today, but at least I'm to the point where I'm noticing what they are.  I'm not losing and thinking "well fuck, I don't know what I could've done."

Depends on the defense. A terran playing very conservatively and very defensively isn't likely to win, but they won't loose easily either. If they don't wall off well you can just run huge clumps of zerglings into the base to harass stuff. If you end up pulling half his army off his ramp or whatever to kill zerglings hitting his workers/pylons/supply depots/tech buildings, then you can use mutas or roaches to smash against the remainder of his wall. As zerg your main aim isn't necessarily to keep your losses 1:1 with the enemy, if anything you should not just expect but almost plan to loose a lot more units than them. Where your strength lies is in your ability (through larva vomit) to bring a new army back up in the fraction of the time it takes your opponent.

Against an aggressively walled in opponent, particularly terran, brood lords are ultimately your only option. Nydus worms are awesome, but they aren't infallable. Spawning multiple worms can help though. Harrassment and erosion are your best weapons. Nibble at him to draw him out then crush him. If your opponent prefers to sit on one base, simply take all te others and suicide waves of your expendable units against his that he cannot afford to replace.

Also, learn to love baneleings. Accept that they are suicide weapons and just send waves of them at his wall. Once the wall is broken, just run your zerglings in and hit stuff.



The trick with Mutas is not to over commit, it's the same with Banshees. You have to resist the "just one more kill temptation". Run in, kill one or two workers then bail. Run around hit one of his tech labs or pylons, then bail. Always keep moving and hit in an unpredictable fashion (i.e. don't just circle his base in one direction hitting every 20 seconds). Mutas are fragile, and depending on what he brings to bear you need to be careful. The absolute best way to piss off terrans is to kill workers that are constructing a building, a lot of Terran players will not even notice for ages, and it's a free kill you can steal then run. If he has expansions hit his main, then his expansion then back again. Mutas are fast, it's their biggest strength, use that to be all over the map. Having to chase mutas around with a ground army is very irritating. Don't use mutas to take out production buildings, they're awful against armoured targets (generally). Go for tech labs, reactors, pylons, workers, refineries, overlords and if you can get your opponent out of position, unprotected siege tanks, immortals, colossi, zealots and zerglings are muta fodder. Just remember to pull out after a kill or two, don't sit there until the defense comes, be gone before it can get there. Keep your opponent all over the map.

Mutas also need a critical mass. Three mutas is pretty useless, four mutas is fairly weak. Once you hit six or seven though you are good to go. Seven or more mutas can start holding their own against reactionary vikings or corruptors. Learn what reflex reactions your opponents will have and meet them. If you are against a terran without any air, expect him to start popping vikings. If you can catch them as they spawn 7 or so mutas will kill two vikings without a loss (I think), and it will really frustrate your opponent.

A cheaper alternative is the good old zergling run-by. With about 20 zerglings you can maul mineral lines, and with the speed upgrade you are highly mobile. Like with the mutas, run in and hit the workers. The nice thing about zerglings is that since they are so cheap, you can afford to just run them past enemy armies, even siege tanks and cannons, and just hit the mineral lines. Sure you may loose half your zerglings, but you'll still damage him more than he damages you if you can take out even as few as 3-4 workers. In particular go for workers on gas, as people forget to keep those topped up.

On another note, mass infestors spamming infested terran is my new favourite way to beat someone. 10 infestors = 70-80 infested terrans, and they really don't do bad damage tbh.

(http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20071008150935/flashgordon/images/7/7d/Nottheboreworms.jpg)

I'm sort of drifting in and out of this thread, but didn't you say about a page back that you'd uninstalled and were done with this game forever?

Yeah and then 2 posts later was like "Yeah.. I'll be back and I'm just raging right now" and deleted my other post because I didn't what to shit up the thread.   I've switched away from playing random since then and the game has been SO much better since.

I'm seeing nothing but cheese now, especially against Protoss.  Cannon Rush,  2 Gate Stalkers, etc. 

On the plus side, I'm getting better at IDing and beating cheese, but I feel like Blizz kinda screwed up on this one.  The game shouldn't be about cheese as much as it is.

I get the cannon rush part, but how is 2-gate stalkers cheese? Seems like a legit rush. That would be like raging against 2-rax marauders, right?

Because it's a guaranteed loss if the initial rush doesn't work.

...

 :uhrr:

Maybe it's a one gate.  I don't know.

All I know is that Zealots start showing up when I have 1 supply and 1 Barracks out and I usually die. 

I'm doing

10 Supply
12 Barrracks
13 gas.

And I'm already under Zealot attack and I'm losing more than I'm fighting it off.  When I do fight it off, I win.

So you tell me, what am I doing wrong?

Post a replay.

Well 2 gate zealots is a lot different than 2 gate stalkers.  One is an all in, the other is a moderately early pressure into robo or stargate build.  


Also, cheese is a LOT more viable at lower levels than it is at higher levels (though its still somewhat viable later).  Newer players are much more susceptible to surprise, you aren't as familiar with the timings, and most often pure army size wins.    If I see some sort of 8 or 9 gate zealot rush coming I plop down a gateway immediately and depending on the map might throw down an extra pylon or even another building to totally wall off.  If they are going this, its ALL IN, all you need to do is tough it out to win, and you can lose a bit and still tough it out.  Time is their enemy, so just delay them.  You can often actually get away with getting a super early stalker out about the time 3-4 zealots are coming into your base, and start chronoboosting out a second one immediately.  With no charge upgrade your 2 stalkers sill kill pretty much any number of zealots if you micro them, and meanwhile you can keep pumping out more of them and eventually over whelm them, push out, kill the proxy, and win.  

As Terran if you see it coming FINISH YOUR WALL RIGHT AWAY, and bring over 3-4 scvs to repair your wall while marines build.  Then, shoot the zealots in the face.  The key of course is seeing it coming, and since these kind of all in rushes are really only viable on the small 1v1 maps, you can send out a very early scout if you are worried about it just wen playing those maps.

Of course, knowing its coming is the key to all of this, if the first time you suspect all in cheese is when its in your base, you actually lost the game 2 minutes ago.


EDIT: One last thing about why its more popular at lower levels generally:  Its takes less APM, less awareness, and less skill in general to pull off early cheese than it does to defend early cheese.  Most anyone has the APM to build 2 proxy gateways and spam out zealots, however it takes more to defend it.  However, a bronze level player who practices 2gating every game is going isn't going to be appreciably worse at it than a diamond player in terms of the timing.   Meanwhile, a diamond player defending it is going to be signficantly more likely to be able to deal with it than the bronze defender.   In other words: The meta game really isn't the same across all leagues.

I didn't save it.  I'll save the next one.

You're replays wil be saved by Battle.net (maybe indefinitely, maybe for a little while? I'm not sure), but as long as you played the game somewhat recently, it'll be there, and you can stil save it to your local drive.

(http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-140080.jpg) (http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=download&id=140080)

First thing I noticed is that I did double Barracks in order to pump out more Marines and still lost.

The first thing I noticed is that you didn't scout and messed up your wall in.  One bunker or a non-botched wall-in shuts that down with at most 2 marines.  Your double barracks came after your ass was already toast.  

Your timing on everything just looked off (a lot of money doing nothing that early isn't good and a mistake I tend to make also)and your first marine was a little delayed.   The probe nearly sniping your SCV seemed to throw you off a lot.  

It was a cheeseyrush two gate that you didn't handle well.  It happens.

zerg harassment: BANELING BOMBERS  :ye_gods:

load up 4 banelings in an overlord - drop 2 on the left side and 2 on the right side of the worker line. POW. no workers.

IEM Starting today (http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=145111)

More info in linky, there's plenty of streaming starting at ~15CET

 :awesome_for_real:


Nothing boring about the Nydus.

This is getting so meta. Apparently everyone's now wised up to the medevac drop and builds defences against it. So what to do instead? Why, go 3 rax and go knocking on their front door. Goddamn Zerg and their Infestors though. I had no idea how to counter them.

I remember seeing some really sweet zerg saturation bombing in...I think it wast the HDH but I can't remember who did it.  It was brilliant and I think more zerg players should try it.  You can even do it mid battle if your micro is up to it, and bomb the crap out of those pesky terran.

What ability are you trying to counter?

The one where they shoot a gazillion infested marines at me.

Infestors are made of paper, kill them.   If they do the infested marines spam and you can't dela with it, run away, they only last a little while and then the infestors are out of energy.

Ohh, I thought they were permanent units. Not so scary anymore.

Infested terrans are effectively immobile.

everyone should watch WhiteRa vs TLO Game 2 from Group A of the IEM. Awesomest release game yet.

Is there VOD of it out there?  Yes, I'm being lazy.   

Better question: has WhiteRa managed to pull his head out of his ass yet?

When do replays go up? Livestream feed kinda sucks.

Any link?

Goes to two feeds.

there will be vods after, I think.

Madfrog vs TLO now, there will prolly be spoilers in commentary though. dApollo is doing a very decent job complementing Day9.

Rasix - Kinda, but no :)

Ah cheers, could we spoiler win/loss discussion too please?

Gotta watch till the very end (don't skip ahead on the last video).

HD Starcraft 2 TT1 v MasterAsia

1/4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9niTmeOU

2/4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aLBqeKd_lk

3/4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww_w7sh6NWY

4/4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOY2ve7zHb4

That is goddamned hilarious, especially the last minute.

I think the most interesting thing is the prospect of draw scenarios.  That was basically a draw, but they just decided to make it not a draw because it was a ladder game that didn't really matter in the long run.  I wonder how something like that plays out if a few thousand bucks is on the line.

Blerg. Got posted to Gold and was running wild. Got bumped up to Platinum after just 10 games and am now getting curb stomped.  Can't seem to get units out fast enough so I definitely know where my game is falling down. I think I am going for multiple upgrades too early instead of getting units pumped out.

Better than getting bumped from Silver to Plat. The ass kicking I've been receiving is just humbling.  Of course, that's resulted in less practicing, which has resulted in more ass kicking. 

/looks at his PS2 backlog.

That was awesome! And slightly scary. The bit when both of them were attacking the other bases in multiple places and microing at the same time.... not human O_o

I've been playing like shit lately, and consequently got bumped back into bronze. I think that in silver I need to use PF instead of OC. I can't beat the good silver players in macro yet, so I'm better off leveraging the maneuver game.

I'm getting a bit better.  I was 12-6 today and 27-34 overall.  I'm surprised at how many people fail to check the back and sides of their base in case the other guy has dropped something there.

That replay was golden, one of the best I've seen  :awesome_for_real:

Fun replay.

I'm really struggling to enjoy Day9's casts, I think the way he excessively over analyses and keeps pausing and jumping around rather kills it for me. Watching HD or Husky is more cinematic and enjoyable, as the game just plays through.

Well, Day9 isn't shoutcasting in his dailies, its supposed to be a learning show.  Its like watching film to an NFL team vs. watching Monday Night Football.  Of course MNF is more entertaining, but that isn't the point.

Played against a zerg who six pooled and then expanded to the gold immediately when I over reacted by chronoboosting out like 4 zealots.  Its my own fault for not being able to scout, but I was CERTAIN there must he a legion of zerglings just waiting for my zealots to leave my front so they could run in and wipe out my economy.  Turns out, if I had pushed out with those zealots I probably would've won the game outright.

I watch SO many replays of my games where I could have won if only I would've made the right decision at a certain point and I make the wrong decision SO OFTEN.  It is singularly the source of my rage in this game, I can deal with losing streaks, I hate cheese but I can deal with being cheesed, but these mistakes I make game after game occasionally throw me into a frenzy.

The ranking system is so blasted weird.  I got placed into bronze after my matches.

Last night I handily beat a gold player.

I don't even really have a good grasp of what I'm doing.  All I did was barracks, marines, then add the engineering bay for marauders, then factory for tanks, starport for one medivac and one viking.  Added two more barracks when I saw I had way too many minerals.  Grabbed two tanks in the medivac with the idea of doing a harass on his economy, did a glorious drop on his expansion, thrashed that, then dropped them on his workers in the back.  I then pressed the front with a decent force, including too many marauders, blew up his thors, and he quit out because all he had left were a couple tanks.

I then watched the replay and realized he could have destroyed me at about any time from the 5 minute mark to about the 15 minute mark, when my forces started to overtake his, because he decided to build lots of thors.  I got supply blocked a couple times, my forces were ridiculously puny until my second push, I never bothered with upgrades other than stim and siege, and I still managed to win.

 :headscratch:

 :awesome_for_real:

Tech lab.  See?  I can't even remember building names!

edit: I never even built an engineering bay, now that I think about it.

I wish I was more consistent at this game :(.   The good moments are SO good, and the bad moments are soo bad.  It makes the game addicting because it gets so much adrenaline pumping through your veins, but sometimes I wonder if its worth it. 

Yeah, the game's intense enough at bronze/silver level, can't imagine gold & beyond.

Compulsory horn autotooting: I feel soooo good when things go like the last two games, where the opponent outmacroed me by 20-50%, but had absolutely no chance because of my strategery expertise. He scouted my medevacs and started building air defenses like crazy, but instead I just landed upgraded siege tanks and infantry on an expansion site overlooking his base, where the path to his base was blocked by rubble. I could leave most of my army defending the base against his push and just destroyed his base right when his dudes arrived at mine.  

I'm kind of thinking the intensity is about equal. When you're ready to move to diamond, I think the bronze/silver would feel a lot less intense where as moving up a league creates a new high. The closest analogy I can think of would be alcohol tolerance, or adrenaline junkies. That's how I look at it anyways.

As a side note, I found out that when you're in 2v2 and your partner drops you get control of his troops (that is if he wasn't killed and left voluntarily). That was a fun 2v1 I overcame, and don't think they expected me, as protoss, to be bringing in reapers and siege tanks to compliment my own army :awesome_for_real: Next time, I have to test a medivac and see if it will heal my bio units. Medivacs + rechargeable shields...yes please.

My suggestion is to stop worry about rank so much, and get yourself good and drunk before a nights play session.  I never have a "bad moment" when play in SC2 multi player drunk!

I have discovered a strategy that works against me 100%: stalemate. I just can't bear to play more than half an hour, and the second shit starts looking grim I GG away.

Boring your opponent to death is a popular Terran strategy.

In my continuing quest to discover awesome units I never used before, how about some Ravens. They kill stealth strats dead dead dead, and the turret spam they can unleash is just sick.

I just managed to lost 2 games to complete idiocy.

Game 1) I accidentally rallied my nexus to a gas node at some point and ended up with like 12 probes in one gas, and I was wondering why I was so mineral starved.  he just out macroed me and won.  Durrrrrrrrrrrr

Game 2) I was going to collosi against a protoss who was going for a bunch of gates, and I was just getting my first one out when he apparently scouted it and started pumping out immortals.  I saw them coming as they headed out across the map and was like "its no thang, I'lk just use my warp gates and warp in a bunch of zealots to get up in their face"  But...I was supply blocked...and by the time my pylons warped in it was just too little too late.


Its these kind of errors that I make really frequently and I hate losing to that stuff.  On the plus side, if I can clean that up I might actually make it to Diamond, at least I have things I know I can work on  :oh_i_see:

I see supply as similar to workers, it's something you just have to be producing non-stop, not when you need it. Zerg are the worst for getting supply blocked in my experience, so I have to force myself to keep churning out overlords whenever I can.

Yeah, it really is, I'm just really REALLY bad at remembering it still.  I get supply blocked at least once and usually more per game, and it has really cost me a lot of games when I should be able to warp in a bunch of units right at that critical moment, and then can't, and other times when it has just slowed down my macro enough that by the time the decisive battle comes I am 15-20 food behind.  I think if I could consistently keep myself un-supply blocked (under supply, over supply? Whatever the good one to be is), I would win probably 10-20% of the games that I lose, at least.

Make a pylon farm then!

Unfortunately making huge numbers of pylons all at once is just as bad as forgetting to make them you really need to build them one at a time, ideally having the current one finish just as you would become supply blocked, this allows you to have maximum resources for supply/upgrades without "wasting" resources on something that you'll need 30 seconds from now.  Its that kind of management that I need the most work on.  I've spent the last 3 games REALLY paying attention to my supply and my mini map and it helps some, but in the mid game when stuff starts happening all over the map, it becomes really difficult for me to keep up with everything that needs doing, both mentally and physically.

I've heard Day9 say something along the lines of you should never be thinking about what you're doing, always what you are going to do next, but of course, doing that requires that you get good enough at doing things that you can do them from muscle memory once you've decided, so you can move on mentally while still doing the task physically. 

That's true, but that's also why I agree with the wisdom of work on improving 1-2 things at a time until it becomes something you don't have to think about. Right now, you're at a point where preventing supply blocks while doing other things is important. For me, I'm becoming much better about it since I've made sure to make a mental note of anytime I cycle through my unit making buildings that I check my supply with no exceptions, even at 200 just to really drive home that habit. I have my unit producing buildings hot keyed to my macro buttons on my keyboard and when I cycle through I just include that mental check at the end.

It's been working pretty well and has improved me in that I don't supply block myself as much as I was before. Granted, I have a thousand other things to improve on, but supply blocking is becoming less and less of one of those items with each game lately.

I'd probably just have them replay the game if I was the tourney organizer.

Match loss for both players clearly!

It only matters in single-elimination time anyway, if you've got say swiss pairings going before a cut to a top 8 or whatever then the system can handle draws.

I've seen contingency stuff for that in place for tournament announcements.  They'll replay the game.

Madfrog v. WhiteRa in IEM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7fcwUiYCpc
 :ye_gods: :grin: :drill:

As Malakili already mentioned Day9 has two ways he does stuff.
Educator mode and Shoutcaster mode.

You may have already seen this but the first two games between Tester and IntoTheRainbow during that King of the Beta thing were really really neat to see because you could actually "feel" the back and forth pushing between the two players in places.
It's also a somewhat decent example of the Day9 casting style. Sort of a comedy take on it. Lots of dumb jokes. Makes it fun though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lPhvPZ9Lkc
The crowd in this one helps alot. Follow the "video responses" to see part 2 and at LEAST the second match if you haven't already.
I think he just did some casting for a German (iirc) tournament too if you want to see even more "normal" style shoutcast stuff from him.



You probably already have this.. and may have even done this already, but I'll suggest it anyway just in case.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=127833.
QXC himself made a build order tester.
He had to stop supporting it but passed it off to this other guy who has maintained it pretty well.
That link has a download of the release version in spoiler tags..... and I'll put the link HERE (http://www.sectorfive.net/(2)%20Desert%20Oasis%20-%20BT%20-%201%20-%20With%20hotkeys%20-%20Localized.SC2Map) as well.

This might be way too boring for some of you, but I really enjoy just feeling my ability to macro and execute a build "tightening up".
The cool thing about the build tester is you can just use the hotkeys to reset the map instantly.
So lets say you can only get up to about 30 supply before you start to get confused and "block" yourself or loose track of when to put workers on gas.
All you have to do is hit that Ctrl+X or C or Z (race dependent) and just start over at base supply.

This allows you to go quickly through the equivalent of a dozen or so matches in the time it takes to do one.
True you aren't flexing your micro or strategy muscles, but you are getting your mechanics down really fast and solid.
You can even start to move your eyes around faster watching the minimap and money/supply counts and learn to absorb that info really quickly while you constantly tap those hotkeys to check your macro progress. It also helps to pretend things are happening and force yourself to try and move units in a box shape or something while keeping up with the macro and supply numbers.
If you go into it just looking to make it to a higher supply number faster and more "smoothly" each time it almost becomes a game in it's own right.
Also it fulfills day9s suggestion to focus on one aspect at a time like you mentioned earlier.

If you do end up downloading it note that you need to launch the Starcraft2 Map Editor and then use File>Open to open the map and then the File>Test Document to load it correctly. If you just double click on the map file it won't work.


Hope this info isn't painfully redundant, it really has helped me commit to muscle memory the handful of builds I'm working to become competent with right now so I'm trying to just pass that along.

Turn it into a little game and do it once a day for a half hour or so for a week and you will feel so much more confident when you actually play. You get to start focusing on the "fun" things in matches.. .like drops and harassment and intel.

:ye_gods:

So, I finished the 1p campaign, and am going to whine about it:


Anyways, trying to get my act together in practice games before I tackle multiplayer.  I thought I'd give the Zerg a try, since it seems to be what all the cool kids are going, but is it just me, or are they like ten times harder to macro than every other race?  As the Protoss or Terrans I can just hit the hotkey for my base and tap "E" or "S" a couple times every time I hear the "worker finished" bloop, and my economy is fine without me doing anything (minus some chronoboosting for the Protoss).  As the Zerg, though, you gotta know when larvae are spawning and then you gotta morph all the ones you need to Drones and then you have to assign each individual drone to a task, plus you have to move your Overlords around to spread creep and keep your Queens spawning larvae and creep colonies.  I don't know if I'm overcomplicating the Zerg or missing some major aspect of Terran/Protoss play, but it's getting crazy.  I can completely stomp the AI as Terrans or Protoss, but as Zerg they routinely roll right into my base when I'm trying to sort out my army of Drones and Queens and Overlords and only have a half dozen Zerglings.  Ugh.

You don't have to actually assign each drone to task individually.

Just highlight the Hatchery and press the "G" key to set a worker rally point.
Then you just right click as usual where you want the normal troop spawn to rally.

If you watch an IdrA replay from his PoV you can actually see that often once one mineral field is saturated he'll rally all workers from all hatches to the next expo using a group hotkey and re-rally all units to wherever they are needed.

edit:
Also, as far as keeping track of larvae.
It's hard to remember at first when the queen spawns are dropping, but if you need to check up on how many you have as you go along you can just hit your hotkey for the hatches and hit "S" which selects all the larva you have in that hotkey grouping.... So you'll know when you have larva sitting there when you hit [basehotkey] + S and then look in your unit window. If there aren't any there yet go do something else for a few ticks... then check again... Got some larva? Spawn some drones/units.

Hardest thing to learn by far with Zerg is tempo.

edit2:
@Kail
One thing I forgot to mention about Queens.
Easiest way to keep track of them as far as spawning larva?
Hotkey them all as a group onto a key... like 4 or something.
When you need to spawn larva just hit 4 to select all your Queens.
Hit V to activate the cursor for "Spawn Larva".
Hit backspace to center the screen on your starting Hatch.
Hold shift and click the hatch to cast Spawn Larva on it.
Hit backspace while still holding shift and it will center you on your next Hatch.
Click that one while still holding shift.
The game will automatically make your nearest Queens do the hatch spitting even if they are all selected in the group when you cast the spell.

That looks dense but the full sequence is actually pretty simple.
Two Hatch example.
4 > V > Shift[hold] > Backspace > Leftclick > Backspace > Leftclick > Shift[release] Then go back to what you were doing.

One final thing.
Spacebar is your friend as far as helping your memory.
Hit that thing all the time and you'll be kept up to date with stuff finishing.

Here's me getting rolled over in the first round of a 2+2 forum tournament.

http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/60096-1v1-protoss-zerg-metalopolis
http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/60097-1v1-protoss-zerg-scrap-station

And here's a  52 minute TvZ featuring ultras and battlecruisers.  It really shouldn't have lasted that long tbh, but I still think its fairly epic.

http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/60086-1v1-terran-zerg-kulas-ravine

So I lost the internet for 24 hours yesterday.

No problem, I thought, I'll play offline.

Clicked that and it said I had to Connect to Battle.net to verify that I wanted to play offline.

This is the future of gaming.

Infestors would have cut half an hour outta that game.  What's funny is you clearly KNOW that, since you used your infestors to take his BC a lot in that game.  Then you wasted all that time, gas and minerals making corrupters when 4 infestors would have done the job.

I loved the creep though.  You spread that shit AROUND.

It's not just you.

The Zerg macro mechanic is basically broken. It requires constant attention and has zero margin for error but also zero decision making. In theory there are at least minor decisions you could make like "maybe I should save this energy for a creep tumor" but building another queen is the right answer 99% of the time. It's really a terrible mechanic, it's completely rote and unforgiving. Whereas something like Chrono Boost is both forgiving and interesting.

As Zerg you have to stay super busy spreading creep, positioning lings and overlords all over the map, constantly spawning larva, etc. Compared to the other races there is a ton of busy work. One of the reasons Zerg are considered weak right now is that the relative concentration and energy investment is so high and the return isn't there.

I play Zerg almost exclusively and I like Zerg but I do often feel that I have to maintain twice the APM of an opponent to play even.

I'm seeing a TON of early all in stuff lately in Platinum, anyone else seeing similar things in other leagues?   I've heard that churning out tons of games where you just do all ins every game and have a ~8 minute turn around is a really addicting way to play, and gets you a decent score on the ladder, so many thats my answer, but it seems like these people are just going to have their 5 minutes of fame atop their division before getting outpaced by the people who are working on their long term skills.

The story stuff is basically "lolmetzen" in full effect. They TELL you one thing, but show you something else entirely. Almost nothing is internally consistent in any Blizzard game and people/places/technology do exactly what the next mission requires for justification, not what they 'should' do as characters or anything.

That, or they do whatever Metzen thinks is awesome that particular week of writing.



Mechanics wise, the Zerg is just that different from the other two, which is sorta the point. I don't really 'get' the zerg either, I'm always floundering all over myself whenever I try to play them. "I have no workers, now I have 500 workers, where is all my money, why do I have so much money in the bank?". I'm never smooth with the Zerg.

*snickers* yeah, reminds me of teaching my friends how to play them the first time after a phone call.

'Hey man, why aren't these spawning pool building units? Wtf?'

'Gee, since hatchery can build all units in one building, Zerg's so much efficient than other race. IMBALANCED!'

Yeah, it just isn't very intuitive compared to the other other two. Oh hey, a barracks, soldiers come from it, cool.  Oh hey a spawning pool, zerg spawns from i...oh wait.

The queen SPAWN LARVA is what messes with my head.

Okay, so I sort of get the timing of when I make new units. Now let's add in having to run back and clicky a thing to make this better, and if you screw up the timing a bit you wind up with a larva here, and larva there, 3 in that mini spa.. god damnit zerg!

I think probably one of the better ways to just learn the basics of Zerg, is to only one base for awhile. Once you get a handle on the droneing/unit balance of one hatch, THEN you can try running an expansion.

Which is itself counter intuitive, since the Zerg are all about swarming across every base on the map.


Damn zerg, just so weird!

The gameplay which makes Zerg so different is what makes them so fun though.

Oh no doubt! It's also why I really enjoy the Warpgate mechanic on Protoss as well, really gives them their own feel that is distinct from Terran too. (to? too? I never get those right)

too ~= also

Jings.  That's new.

http://sc2.replayers.com/replays/view/2401 (http://sc2.replayers.com/replays/view/2401)

And a Tube for the SC2 impaired :  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fIFL-D-2fY  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fIFL-D-2fY)

Cannot watch. Commentator too annoying.

Yeah, he's really irritating

Wouldn't know, watched the replay.  Common sense suggests to me that the Mute button should be employed and you can make the zergy noises yourself.  It's what I do.

AskJoshy has cast all of the group stage games from the IEM tournament (http://www.youtube.com/user/AskJoshy#g/u)

He's a pretty decent commentator, very similar to HD, not at all annoying.

Thanks for the channel K9, about to lose the rest of my evening.

From Idra vs. Silver Game 2:

Idra: 4 terrans top 8
Idra: you beat me
Idra: drewbie beat huk
Idra: makes perfect sense
Silver: what you want me to say ??
Idra: apologize for playing that race
Silver: man i'm just playing the game
Idra: and taking wins you dont deserve
Silver: right, and you do
Idra: yes
Idra: i do
Silver: did your mom tell you your special?
Idra: no but im actually good
Idra: you just abuse idiocy

... Silver wins the game ...

Idra: you're a joke

Never seen a T start like that, enjoyable.

Idra really is a lot better than Silver though, and he is known for being ragey, so its not all that surprising.  Also, hes been using the new Mutalisk control technique in the IEM and kicking ass with it.  It was impressive to seem him knock thors down like nothing where before they were getting beaten pretty badly.  Learn how below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68H8FeZHkWg