f13.net

It's technically not an expansion, so it deserves it's own thread....I guess?

The new Trailer is out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUMSMDX5iQc) - and it feels surprisingly low effort.


Exciting new features / lame gimmicks include:

- Archon mode - in which two players share control over one race.
- Daily Automated Tournaments
- Some sort of new co-op mode

Edit: Oh, yes...I forgot to tell you, the spice exists only on one planet in the entire universe you don't need to own the main game to play it.

If it's a stand-alone game, meaning that it'll have stand-alone pricing around $50-$60, then it should have stand-alone levels of content. Aside from Archon mode (which really would open it up to some interesting combos..have one person focus on the macro while another does the micro), I could give a rat's arse about multiplayer features; if the single-player content isn't as full+more as Wings of Liberty, I'll wait for holiday pricing a year or two after it comes out.

I still have yet to pick up Heart of the Swarm for that reason. $40 was just too much for me when I was only going to play half of the game, and even at $20 right now I couldn't be bothered to pick it up with WoD coming next week.

I wonder if anyone at Bliz has thought about just selling the single-player stuff by itself, and I could DLC multiplayer if I wanted to?

Knowing Blizzard most of the units they showed in the multiplayer changes videos are going to be changed a ton by release after the pros get in and show them how terrible a few of the designs are (I'm looking at you Cyclone).

Anyway, I don't really ladder Starcraft anymore, but I might go back for a ladder season when this comes out if it looks good enough.  Single Player will be worth playing through but not amazing, I assume.  The Starcraft 2 story is so terrible it is kind of embarrassing.

I realize I'm one of the few people around here who actually loves classic RTS games, so yeah.

You're not.  You're just one of the few that will pay for shit.

StarCraft II was mostly shit and it was shit divided into expensive chunks of shit.

Wings of Liberty single player was shit, or at least pretty bad.  Heart of the Swarm single player was substantially more fun, but had an even worse story.

For multiplayer it has been the best RTS in a decade and it isn't close.

Legacy of the Void is just going to be more of the same either way though.  I can't see any reason for people to buy this if they don't already like the previous ones.  And besides, you can play the arcade (aka Custom Games) for total free now, which is one of the draws for owning it in the first place.

EDIT: Starting the game with 12 workers is going to totally change everything about the multiplayer meta game. That is probably the most interesting thing I've heard so far about this.

The sharing one race thing is actually probably a bigger deal then it seems, in terms of bringing new people into the game. Having a more experienced friend being able to cover your mistakes, or being able to show your noobish friend the best way to do things directly.

Plus the simple fact you aren't alone while you play the actual balanced version of the game.

I agree in principle, but I can't imagine a scenario where I actually play the game that way.  You might be right in general, but I wonder how many people really want to get into Starcraft 2 from scratch at this point regardless.  I certainly can't think of a single person I know who would make a good candidate for getting them into the game via this method.

They seem to be trying to solve the problem of the SCII multiplayer skill curve by... adding masses more micro.

Also lurkers... They're really running out of imagination now. I thought the reason they left them out of HoTS was because they had cooler ideas or some such?

Bar the changes to the carrier (which seem wholly logical) everything else seems uninspired.

Eh, Lurkers are way better designed than Swarm Hosts anyway.  They were a total lynchpin of the Brood War meta and I think a really good unit.  I don't know if they have "cooler" ideas or not, but the unit is going to make the meta substantially better in my opinion.  One of the things that SC2 has suffered from in comparison to Brood War is the propensity for "death balls" because of the lack of units that can defend choke points really efficiently (and the different high ground mechanics).  Heart of the Swarm has definitely improved that some already, but units that force more spread out battles and more stuff on the map rather than huge armies roaming around is a good thing.

I also don't think they are trying to solve the problem of SC2 skill curve.  They just pretty obviously don't see it as a problem at this point.  The solution to that problem is just not playing ladder.

The biggest cause of the deathball is the one thing they can't/won't fix. The fact SC2 pathing is actually decent instead of pants on head dragoon retarded.  :why_so_serious:

So the big new feature is a "shared control" checkbox?

True, but there are plenty of other things that encourage it beyond just the fact that your units don't dance instead of fight these days.  Actually another one of the notable changes is that mineral patches have only 1000 minerals each, which means you have to expand much more frequently if you want to sustain a 3 base economy.  That should also encourage a meta with less turtley death ball play. Taking, holding, and attacking expansions has always been important - obviously - but it's going to be all the more important now.

Which is something the original Starcraft had. At least I remember playing in a "everyone playing with shared resources and able to control everyone's units" mode.

I might pick this one up since I was always a Protoss fan in the original game and I have avoided the other ones.

After going through the "new" features, I give up. I mean, I mostly gave up on Blizzard before. but this.... this is just...

Yeah, I am worried by all the micro they keep talking about. Starcraft is already insanely intimidating to play multiplayer, adding in a new set of units all of whom are "MORE MICRO" doesn't exactly make me rush to play it...

The difference is that it is 2 people controlling a single "players" worth of stuff.  Shared Control is already in Starcraft 2 for 2v2 and such.  This is a "1v1" mode with shared control.  I'm not saying its a huge deal, I'm just trying to be clear on what it is.


I don't really understand this line of thought if I'm being honest.  It's like being worried because a shooter makes you aim - it's an inherent part of the genre.  Besides, ladder is going to always be a bit tough because it's competitive -why not just queue up for unranked.  The competition is a bit easier and there is no pressure because who cares if you lose? 

Who cares if you lose anywhere? Micro intensive games are just less fun for me. I like good play to be more than just furious click execution.

Having to micro your base is what killed SC2 for me, with the stupid queen larva spit thing.

Good play in Starcraft is a lot more than just furious click execution. 

But I'm not having this conversation.

I don't even know why most of you people are posting about this. It sounds to me like you just want to play turn based strat games. RT implies a level of physical capability in the gameplay. This is no different from fps.

Not to the extent they seem to be pushing. Classically in RTS you had your meat rock-paper-scissors type units, and then casters. They added a lot of interesting passive abilities to some of the former units with SC2, but now every other unit has an active ability. You're adding an extra level of requirement, it's not enough to position your units, assign targets, and handle the special abilities of casters, you've got to handle unfun bullshit like non-passive immortals shields. Pretty much every re-work they mentioned in their multiplayer videos entailed adding an active ability to a unit that previously had none, or turning a passive ability into an active one. It just pushes the skill cap higher, which is fine for the pro-level play, but shit for everyone else.

Dealing with one or two special abilities in your army was always part of the RTS, but now you're looking at juggling as many or more as you have unit types. That's not fun, it's just a headache, and frankly it only pushes the game further towards simple deathball type play. People don't play MMM because it's elegant or interesting, it's because it's simple and effective. I promise you that if Blizzard 'enhanced the fun' of these units my making concussive shells and marine shields active abilities you'd see those units get less play across the board.

Handling another active ability is more fun than units that are so hard counter-y. I don't know about you, but a unit that requires me to control it to be at its most effecitve makes for a lot more interesting games than a unit that just wins because math in circumstances and loses because math in others.  There will always be some of that, but something like the immortal was a bit too pushed. 

I'm not some Starcraft 2 whiz.  But the challenge is what makes it an awesome game. It's still considerably more newbie friendly than Brood War was.

As a dirty casual I friggin' hate active abilities.

We get what you like. But the fact some of us like different things doesn't mean those different things have to be turn based. I'd rather win a battle because my army compisition and attack timing is better than yours, with the micromanagement of individual units to be almost negligible.

+1 for not wanting to micromanage every unit in your army during a fight.  I like to set up my army guys and watch them wail on each other.

I'm a toddler, but I know what I like.

I'm not sure how SC2 is more noob friendly than BW was. Nearly every unit has an active now, as opposed to mostly just casters before.

removing the immortal's shield and replacing it with a short lived damage absorb ability just basically means that i am as much as is possible not going to bother with them, since i won't be able to justify the risk versus what i have to invest to get a couple out on the field. The tempest being ground only is also a huge, huge hit to my playstyle. The carrier change is welcomed but overshadowed by teleporting battlecruisers so

In Brood War macro took WAY more APM than Starcraft 2 does, and the active abilities of units in SC2  (that are only going to spike APM requirements in fights) pale in comparison to the constant high APM needed to just fucking build units in Brood War.

man going over these things again makes me think that unless there are some readily noticeable bread and butter upgrades to attack damage, armor, etc to a handful of protoss units, i'm not going to really have the mental overhead to protoss well anymore.

maybe it's my fault, i became a creature of habit and was super into using tempests to give me the AA oomph necessary to push with immortals and collosi, but now immortals will get pasted if i don't become an ability micro god and now for anti air I suppose I have to just do ?????? i hope i like stalkers (i dont)

wait no maybe my orbs can eviscerate their swarms with their deadly death laser rays and

.. no, no i'm boned this expansion i think

I am taking full credit for the Battlecruiser warp drive, I suggested that years ago! 

Clearly my doing. :why_so_serious:

RTSes like this do exist (Planetary Annihilation for example.)

For Zerg that feels absolutely false. Building units seems to take way more work in SC2, since each hatchery now requires a queen injecting nonstop.

It's not that it's high APM to inject all the time, it's that you can't miss a beat.

Right. I'm not up on RTS lingo to know what that shit is called, I just know it ruined the game for me.

Not many good recent ones, unfortunately. The company behind Planetary Annihilation seems to be run pretty poorly?

This was (unintentionally) in Age of Empires back in 1997.

If a game is requiring me to micro 8 special abilities to do shit then count me out. I'm in my 40s, I don't have the micromanaging skills of an octopus anymore and even in my 20s I'd have said sod that as it was a pain in the behind.

I imagine there are underground micromanaging programs to manage all this crap being written as we speak to "give pros an edge!" If I buy this I'd stick to single player because who wants to deal with "Pros"

The problem I have is that part of the point of SC2 was to remove micro.

When SC2 was announced a lot of people were like "but you're removing so much micro and that is critical to the game!" The response was along the lines of "STFU randomly clicking a lot isn't a valid skill, automated abilities 4 life!"

The second expansion is a strange point to decide that those original complainers were right all along. Didn't that ship sail?

That said I assume they are trying to add micro because they realize that SC2 is super boring to watch and don't know how to fix that. By adding micro and more player skill maybe there will be more stuff to be excited about?

I don't know if it "feels" false to you or not, but go back to Brood War and actually Macro well.  You can't select more than one hatchery (or any building) at a time.  That means you have to individually click on each hatchery to build your units and because there was no inject you had to had a lot of hatcheries to actually spend your money. You got 1 larvae per 20 seconds per hatchery and they maxed at three.  

Injecting larvae can be done by putting all your queens in a group, hitting backspace to cycle through them, and injecting with each. When I was playing zerg I re-bound the inject hotkey to "\" because it is next to back space and you can inject all your hatcheries in literally 1-2 seconds using a really simple keystroke pattern.  Sure remembering to do it is "hard" but remembering to macro well in general is hard so I don't see how that makes a big difference.

Last couple of days I'm finding what you find to be fun fascinating.  It seems like you require some amount of of tedium/work/"earning it" in your games.  Almost like, if you haven't suffered, how can you have fun?

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't express it like that, so apologies.  How would you express it?  Are you left cold by games without ... I don't even know how to lead the question.  What is it in addition to "fun" that you are looking for?

The thing that is fun to me is learning to master something difficult.  I don't care if it's video games or some other "real life" hobby. 

Try marriage.

No, wait, Don't.

I've already been married for a few years, it's going quite well thanks.

Thanks for the answer. 

So we're at least similar on the, "enjoy mastering something".  I think the divide is on the amount of tolerance we have for the systems involved.  The difficulty has to make sense to me or I just reject it.  Starcraft micro seems to be a pointless level of difficulty.  Why would I have minions that require that much handholding?  To me it makes no sense and I get turned off.

A musical instrument, on the other hand, is only as complex as it absolutely needs to be to make music.  It's not arbitrary at all.

I'm also guessing you have a larger amount of tolerance for delayed gratification.  Especially with games, if I'm not getting some amount of positive feedback pretty quickly I turn off.  Life is too short.

To me mastery of a game is pointless because it has no impact on the real potential of my life. It's much more important to me to master my writing, or master my job, or master my public speaking/teaching, etc.

That's not to say I don't enjoy wasting my time on games because I do. This isn't about that at all. But a game like Starcraft requires a level of input to be good at it that I'm simply not willing to spend. I eventually got the same way with WoW. At some point I pick my head up from a game, realize I'm wasting my life on something, and move on to more important pursuits.

This is certainly not something I said to myself in my 20s.

I don't disagree with that.  I haven't played much Starcraft lately because it's, like you said, kind of all or nothing and lately it has been nothing. But it's still a very good game, even if in practice I'm more likely to play Diablo 3 lately.  But Diablo 3 isn't really "fun" to me, it's just relaxing.

That changes.  Usually after a few years.  Or the introduction of Spawn.   :why_so_serious:

Seriously.  Our daughter hasn't slept through the night yet at 11 months old.  330 days without a full night sleep can be....trying.

The entire "amount of micro" and "APM needed" issue is why, despite enjoying SC when young, I really got stuck (+500 hours *blush*) on Wargame.

Units do not have "special abilities" at all and the speed of units and combat in general is slower, so everything depends more on when and where to attack, how your unit make up is, how well you are co-ordinating with team mates, etc... There still is some micro of course, but slower and (with few exceptions, such as radar-based AA and SEAD planes) not of the "busy-work" kind.

Yeah, I still play Supreme Commander when I need my RTS fix for the same reason.

Tried rice bottles? When ours wouldn't sleep it was due to hunger. A small spoonfull of baby rice into the overnight bottle (you have to widen the nipple by cutting 2 of the holes into a larger slit) and they were sleeping fully.

Things can be difficult without that difficulty being repetitive tedium.

Here's the panel from Blizzcon about the Legacy of the Void single player campaign.  I just started the video myself so I don't know just how clown shoes this is going to be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsvHY7YaxUg

I don't know that selecting a bunch of units and pressing backspace to cycle through and inject is what I'd consider an interesting example of mastery. That sounds like mastery of busy work.

SC2 is largely about periodic chores. Injecting, spreading creep, using mules and the Protoss speed boost. These chores aren't particular hard or interesting and being good at them just means doing them on a tight as schedule as possible.

It's doing them while also doing everything else. But it wasn't meant as an example of mastery, it was just meant to show that that kind of thing is fairly trivial in terms of actual keystrokes.  People like to pretend their fingers just aren't fast enough for a game like SC2 - but its their brains that have trouble keeping up. And that is fine.  It's fucking difficult to remember to do everything, and move your army intelligently and be in good position, and so on.  But those are mental hurdles, not physical ones. Build orders, timing, and basic good decision making - the things people claim to care about - will get you into the 10% of players easily with only basic mechanical proficiency.

It's a pet peeve of mine because it dismisses the genre as for ADD addled children, when the real problem is that they just don't know how to play properly.  You can play Starcraft 2 at a reasonable high level (like say, Masters league the top 2%) with only about 80 APM.   Most of you complaining can probably type more words than that per minute.

My complaint has never been about APM; it's the quantity of things you need to keep track of constantly which seems higher than it was in BW. Maybe I'm just remembering BW poorly; I just know that I played BW nonstop while I was done with SC2 1.0 within weeks of it's launch.

I think the big problem is that Custom games were just impossible to find in SC2 when it was new and take away chat rooms (which only came later) and suddenly it was hard to find games except for ladder.  So now you're on the ladder against people who are trying to play well and are playing the base game.

It was easy to have fun with playing Brood War while being absolutely garbage at it (believe me, I'd know) because almost no one knew how to play properly.  Hell, most people didn't even know there WAS a way to play properly. 

It's not that people don't know how to 'play properly'. It is that 'playing properly' is boring.

If I want to do tedious things for the sake of it I could just stay at work.

K.

Is that what we are doing now? K.

I can't believe you don't recognise how great SC2 is. It has really hurt my feelings that you guys have all said (in my imagination, where I am easily offended and delusional) it is just a game for ADD children.

You know what would be cool? If you had to go back to your command centre every 3mins and 33 seconds as Terran and hit a 'megaphone' active ability, otherwise a (hidden) screensaver would kick in and cause someone inside the command centre to panic and mash their keyboard and cause the command centre to lift off and then explode.

Requiring players to remember to do this at least once every 3mins and 33 seconds wouldn't be tedious and boring at all, it would be an innovative mental hurdle that most players just aren't good enough to master. It's like, fuck-all AMP, even a sloth could do it. If they were smart enough. Which of course they're not, because only the top 10% have such capabilities, and they're a sloth.

I'd say the challenge in SC2 (they kind of mastery that will get you into the top 10%) isn't about APM or about being mentally agile enough to deal with the task loading. It's about developing habits that allow all that base micro to be taken out of the mental task loading. No injecting with your queens to keep unit production up isn't a huge number of clicks, nor is it a particularly complex task. New players are never going to manage to keep doing it while controlling everything else though, even if they're capable of 120 APM pretty easily, because they're thinking about the strategy they're trying to employ.

Starcraft is difficult to engage as a strategic game because it has half a dozen little distracting mini-games in there to keep unit performance optimal, those mini-games aren't mentally or physically challenging but they are distracting if you're thinking about them and very easy to forget if you're not. So the only way to get the best out of your performance is to get to the point where you don't need to think about them. Pro gamers aren't thinking to themselves that they need to switch back to their queen to inject in 24 seconds because they play so much they just reflexively do it. When you say that simpler keyboard shortcuts will help you get into the top 10% all I'm really hearing is that it makes the task easier to do habitually without thinking.

Edit to contribute an opinion: I can see why you might find the game itself rewarding once you've gotten to that point, there is strategy in SC2 but the model of all those little mini-game abilities doesn't add anything much beyond artificially inflating the difficulty curve in competitive play in a manner that rewards intensive play and will weed out players not capable of a very high level of APM. I think that works well for professional gamer type stuff but it simultaneously makes it very time consuming for players to reach the point where they can fully engage the strategy part of the game in a competitive match. If your opponent is able to micro much more efficiently than you there's a very good chance he can beat you even if he's just rushing marines without any particular strategy.

It's easy to dismiss the genre because despite your defense of the game, it still comes down to the "mental hurdle" of being able to perform mundane tasks quickly while focusing on larger goals. That's not really strategy in the real sense.

If we look at chess as the ultimate in mental strategy, at no point are the players supposed to prime their pieces with certain mini-games in order for them to make moves. In war games like TW or EU strategy isn't about unit ability so much as it is about politics, positioning, economic shortages, and timing. At no point in those games are you required to master a series of busy work just to make strategic decisions.

It's not about clicks. It's about your brain putting up with that kind of minutia focus. Some would call that a skill. Some would call it a disability.

lol

I guess I don't see building units in an RTS as "busywork." But then, if you're really dismissing the genre than there is nothing I can say that matters to you anyway.

Chess and other Turn Based games are also awesome.  But Turn Based Strategy isn't real time strategy and I don't have the same expectations for it.  But playing pretty much any real time game is going to have that kind of thing.  If I'm playing Quake - or even something more casual like TF2 - you're at a big advantage if you can keep track of the spawn timers on health, ammo kits, power ups, and so forth. That's a really hard mundane task/mental hurdle too.  And you'll get crushed by someone who can do it well.

Anyway, I don't really care if people like starcraft or not.  I just think you're slamming the genre in general is stupid because you're blaming the genre for just being the genre.  Maybe the degree is "worse" in starcraft, but you've got to deal with the same things in any RTS.  Most of them just don't have the competitive community that pushes it to the limits so much.

We're not slamming the genre. We're slamming the clikedy. And if it is so much fun how come there are so many Starcraft II Bots that will do this shit for people so they can go out and actually do the fun stuff like command the armies. I mean if it was fun to do clickedy there there would be no demand for them.

Clickedy is NOT an integral part of the RTS genre.

I don't think that's an accurate representation of the conversation here.

Anyhow, SC2 has just gone down a path and focus that is incompatible with how many of us want to play games. 

For me, it's just a stressful experience in multiplayer, and I don't want to be stressed out while playing games.  I also hit a hard APM ceiling.  My progress was severely capped once I hit a certain tier and my opponent's APM was anywhere from 25-50% better.  Even with a micro-lite strategy and army composition, I just couldn't keep up mechanically and that was incredibly disheartening.

It's specifically the 'do X every Y' segment stuff that bugs me. It's basically a rhythm game element and I don't feel like that adds anything to my enjoyment of the game. Setting up an economy, building units, setting up base defenses, standing my guys in the right place - I want the game to be about those things. I just don't want the way it is about those things being about hitting a bunch of cooldowns on an exact rotation, that's not engaging. It's a big part of why I always preferred TA to SC/Brood War.

This stuff feels arbitrary and tacked on because it is.

When they made SC2 they increased unit selection count, improved pathing, got rid of scoot and shoot and other control quirks, made it easier to cast abilities with groups selected, etc - then discovered that the resulting game was too simple and not clicky enough.

The race-specific abilities (mules, queens, protoss speed-up) were intentionally added to give players more busywork to do.

That's the problem with this stuff in SC2 - it's busy work. It's designed to be busy work, the design goal was literally "we need to give players more clicky stuff because we removed too much. Now the game is boring, so let's make the player press a button every 30 seconds!"

SC1 has a lot of clicky stuff but it's organic - you click to build units, to move them around, etc. All the clicky stuff stems from how the game works. Whereas in SC2 it was added on top to fix a problem in a very inelegant manner.

I don't mind having to click a lot. I'm never going to be super-pro at RTS but I don't care. What I do mind is having to click a lot knowing that the only reason I have to click a lot is someone on the design team said "the game doesn't require enough clicking, let's arbitrarily add more!" Remembering to call mules is not interesting or fun, it requires very little decision-making. It's just something you have to do, a barrier to entry that serves no purpose except as a barrier to entry.

People like to say that RTS games are all about managing resources, one of them being your time and attention as a player. But in most RTS games that comes naturally - there's a lot of stuff going on that you have to manage just due to the base gameplay - whereas in SC2 that comes from minigames they added on top of the game.
---

Another thing I would point out is that watching someone micro units in SC1 is fun. A guy who can micro units really well is impressive. A guy who can call mules down on a regular schedule is not impressive. That sort of skill doesn't lend itself to exciting viewing, which is probably part of the reason SC2 is so dull to watch.

Yeah that's it at it's heart. The micro in SC2 feels artificial and doesn't really add to the excitement. Plenty of people here aren't saying they want Turn based strategy games or that they don't want any kind of micro but that 1) Crazy fast micro isn't a necessary part of an RTS and/or 2) The micro in SC2 feels like a tacked on requirement, a gameplay element in and of itself rather than a requirement of other game mechanics. SC1 doesn't get that kind of criticism for 2) because, as others noted, micro could be used to take advantage of the game mechanics and would let a properly managed army overcome a Random Number Generator type stronger army. It had the drawback though that it meant neglecting things like base management because you'd be dancing hydralisks or whatever people did.

SC2 changed the mechanics to make it more automated and newb friendly, which they discovered made higher level play uninteresting and far less challenging because it no longer required frantic APM. So it seems like they introduced a whole load of micro by task loading the players with a bunch of extra shit to do on top of the actual core gameplay. That's the aspect people don't enjoy because it seems to be difficulty either for difficulty's sake or to make competitive play more exciting to watch. The problem at lower skill levels is that it makes the micro and habitual actions one of the biggest factors in success until you reach a high enough level where everyone is pretty maximal on that front, which is the point where good strategy starts to be the deciding factor. People don't dislike SC2 because they dislike RTSes but because you need to be on par with your opponent in the rhythm game mechanics in order for the strategy portion of the game to matter all that much.

I don't understand how you think this is special to SC2.  SC1 Macro was had much more APM intensive macro AND required the a similar rhythm thing of going back to your base to do it every cycle. The idea that calling in mules, chronoboosting and injecting larvae somehow make SC2 macro way more repetitive, taxing and boring than SC1 is insane.  Did you really like going back to your base to individually click on each barracks and start building another marine every 24 seconds so much more than SC2's macro mechanics?

Now, I agree that unit micro in SC1 was better than in SC2.  But things like the 12 unit selection limit made it aa lot more micro intensive than Starcraft 2 even with lots more activated abilities in the latter.  Talk about tedious - managing a maxed out army 12 units at a time while having to individually micro each individual caster (instead of being able to select them as a group and let smart cast make decisions about which unit will cast the spell).  Something like the new immortal shields where you literally add 2 keystrokes to the entire fight seems pretty manageable by comparison.

If you just want to say to hell with the whole bag, then fine. But then I don't really understand how people are rationalizing this as differences between SC1 and SC2 when on pretty much every beat SC1 required more APM and still more of that APM was being spent on tedious, repetitive things like macroing from individual structures or dealing with the 12 unit selection limit.

I don't really like the genre as a whole, but I do understand that advances in the genre are supposed to make things easier/more automated. However, if you make things easier or more automated in an RTS game like SC2, you suddenly realize your game is very shallow. Which is really an indictment on the genre more than the game.

When improving past the small line tedium of your game makes your game less of a game, your game isn't good. That's my main complaint with SC2 and the genre as a whole. I find the same thing to be true when you get to top level commands of Total War games. There comes a point in a game where strategy gets tossed out the window because you are simply trying to micromanage too many units, and that's usually because the AI is stupid and won't path where you want, or won't operate how a normal player would, or simply isn't automated enough.

But I do believe that if you could improve the TW AI (insert laugh track) then it would be a better game. I'm not sure that improving SC makes it a better game or that it can be improved the way they want.

The difference is that building marines is core to SC1. They didn't make the game, realize it was dull, then say "hmm...what if we add the ability to build units? That will give the players more stuff to click on!" You have to click to build units because the game is fundamentally about building units and that was the interface they came up with at the time.

SC2 is not about injecting larva and calling mules. That is not the core of the game and we know it was added to give players more busywork because Blizzard essentially said as much.

The amount of clicking you have to do in SC1 doesn't feel like it exists to punish the player or make them do a list of chores, it feels like it exists based on the design of the game and the interface, which for its time was pretty reasonable. The clicking you do in SC2 very much does feel like a a list of chores someone arbitrarily decided you should have to do.

The other problem is that, from what I can see SC2 drags your focus away from where it should be. In SC1 you didnt actually have to bring your veiw back to your base from the font lines. You could assign a hotkey to your production facilities and then simply cycle through them filling queues on the hotbar. EG "7*clickclickclickclickclick* 8clickclickclickclickclick 9clickclickclickclickclick 0 clickclickclickclickclick" and then focus back on what was happening. You didn't have to go back to your base at all, and it made no difference if you filled your queue by 1 marine every 24 seconds or by 5 every 120 seconds. That made it pretty easy to work with and was pretty intuitive.

Plus, and this is the important bit, it did not interrupt the fun.

Forcing someone to hop on one leg every 30 to 50 seconds for no real reason just interrupts the fun and that's the real crime when it comes to a game. Yes it separates those who are really good at hopping on one leg, and those dedicated to learning the best hopping on one leg techniques away from the unwashed masses, but lets be honest; Who the hell cares if you are good at hopping on one leg?

This is exactly the opposite of the way it actually is in practice.  In Starcraft 1 you could assign a hotkey to ONE building because you couldn't select more than one building at a time.  And since you needed quite a few of your hotkeys for army control groups (12 units at a time), you often couldn't reliably macro entirely off screen.  In Starcraft 2 ALL your barracks can be on one hotkey making off screen macro WAY more manageable.  You should spend WAY fewer actions looking at your base now in SC2 than you had to in Brood War even including your new SC2 macro mechanics like inject.

Also, are you seriously suggesting it made no difference if you queued up 5 marines at once?  That money gets spent right away, if you have enough money to be queueing up 5 marines per barracks your macro is TERRIBLE.  You should have enough barracks that you can produce 1 at a time out of each and keep your money low.

This is what I meant when I said earlier that I suspect a lot of this comes from people being bad at Brood War but not having had any metric by which to realize it.

My complaints come from it not being like TA, though.  :why_so_serious:

 
If you were spending the amount it took to make 5 marines every 120 seconds then no it made no difference at all. The money was being spent and utilized at the exact same rate. Hell there was probably more efficiency if you were doing it that way as there was less time wastage between every marine popping out. The next marine would start production instantly rather than be at the time it took you to come back and do it again. So you had 5 cases of forgetting to come back or not be at total efficiency rather than 1 instance of it for 4 or 5 marines.

Having "money low" made no difference out there except in your own head.

I never played star-craft "competitively" but I was pretty feared in my LAN group and I know how to do maths.

From a competative standpoint I wasn't just bad at Brood War, I was horrible.  But I could be horrible while having fun.

I played Star Craft online once.  I got randomly matched against some Korean prodigy and lost in five minutes.  I still see "kekeke" when I close my eyes.

What?

Ok, this is like basic RTS macro 101.

If you have 1 barracks, and you queue up 5 marines, you are spending 250 minerals.  50 of those minerals are making a marine RIGHT NOW, and 200 of those minerals are sitting in the queue doing nothing for you.  If you instead had 4 more barracks and are building 1 marine from each all of that money is getting spent on a marine that you are going to have on the field and ready to go 24 seconds from now.  Obviously those 4 extra barracks cost money and build time too, but that's why "builds" are a thing, to efficiently spend your money on time and set yourself up to actually be able to spend your income efficiently.

This is a fair point but I think has a lot more to do with the cultures surrounding the game than the game mechanics differences between the two.  Starcraft 1 didn't have a built in ladder, and it was easy to find lots of games with lots of similarly bad people.  Again, I was one of them.  I was not good at Brood War until MUCH later when I realized competitive play was even a thing.  Starcraft 2's community is much more competitive all around, and because information is so widely available people know what build orders are and how to play at an at least basic level.  You could have just as much fun being horrible with a group of friends as you used to in Brood War, but it is a lot more difficult to find a game of randoms that are all just screwing around.

That is coupled with the fact that Starcraft 2 had (and still has to some extent despite improvements) an inferior interface for finding that kind of casual game.  Although the SC2 Arcade helps quite a bit, it came out so long after release that I think a lot of the people who would get the most enjoyment out of it had already quit.  The good news is that it is free.  Like, not microtransactions, not you need to own the WoL or HotS.  Just literally free to download and play.

And you are still spending 200 minerals every 24 seconds regardless. And you are spending more time on the front line managing troops. And I never said sont build multipe factories.

But hey, I never cared about the non fun of hopping on one leg for glory either.

*Edit* and I'm sorry, but spending 2 seconds cycling through your factories every 120 seconds is just much more time efficient than spending 2 seconds every 24 seconds. Sure you lose a little time at the start for cash build up but you gain it back in spades through the game. I don't know why you feel that this is the Starcraft equivalent of the black mass in terms of blasphemy, but that's what I did because IT WAS FUN and it was effective in my LAN games. It minimized the boring shit to concentrate on the fun shit.

And I had fun so whatever. Yeah you probably could have kicked my ass but Fun is the point of the game.

I'm not sure if you are trolling or don't understand the basics of building units in an RTS game.

It's a little bit of both probably.

I'm sorry that you love the thrill of losing 2 seconds every 24 seconds as opposed to the horror of losing 2 seconds every 120 seconds. But hey, who cares at the end of the day.

It's not about losing seconds. You're losing marines that could be on the field.

Also, another one for people saying SC2 macro mechanics are so much more of a burden than SC1.  I just remembered that in SC1 your workers don't automatically start mining when you rally them to a mineral patch.  I assume you loved the "rhythm" of going back to your mineral lines every time an SCV production round finished to manually order them to start mining.

Like I said last page, if you don't like Starcraft then whatever.  But all this talking about SC2 being somehow way more tedious and boring than SC1 seems to be a result of people just not knowing that playing Brood War they were supposed to be doing all sorts of stuff that were way more of a pain than they are to do in SC2.

When you queue the marines up, you lock the resources into the queue. When you don't, the resources are free to be spent on something else, like another barracks.

SC has lots and lots of stupid fiddly bits that don't need to exist. This isn't one of them. The only way it works the way you think it does Sir T, is if you only had one building forever.

Your previous post said "5 marines every 120 seconds" - that's a huge difference in being able to defend things coming at you.

Either way SC2 wol/hots & D3 showed us what Blizz gives a fuck about these days. Remember how Broodwar could be installed any number of times on any starcraft install?

The most disappointing thing about SC2 wol/hots was all the gimmicky moba levels & not enough fucking epic RTS battles like the old days. Hell they even stole the arcade game "starbattle" for a level. I remember them saying they took out the fuckin lurker because they have units to fill that role. Psych! We'll put him back in on the Protoss expansion...

Fuckin bastards...

They got all these interesting evolution op units but I never got to use them in big epic battles. (hopping zerglings, corpser roaches & the seige lurker!)

On the upside - been playing SC2 in 3d & it is fucking glorious.