StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void

[Paelos]

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.

[Margalis]

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?

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.

[Sir T]

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?

[Malakili]

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.

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.

[Ingmar]

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

[Sir T]

 

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.

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.

[Lantyssa]

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.

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

[Phildo]

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.

[Malakili]

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.

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.

[Malakili]

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.

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

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.

[Sir T]

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.

[Malakili]

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.

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

[Fordel]

It's a little bit of both probably.

[Sir T]

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.

[Malakili]

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.

[Fordel]

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.

[glennshin]

And you are still spending 200 minerals every 24 seconds regardless.

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.