StarCraft 2 announcement on the 19th of May

[Samwise]

There is nothing more satisfying after hearing an hour's diatribe from a friend about how awesome he is at the game and how his battlecruiser army rolls over everything (including you if you were to take him on), than to finally play a game and lock down every single one of his "incinvible battlecruiser army" and kill them to a man. With marines.

Replace "with marines" with "with one nuke".   :-D

[Megrim]

Actually, ugh, Battlecruisers are the one unit in the game that survives a nuke.

[Samwise]

Hm.  They must have been slightly dented already the one time I saw someone pull that off.  A squad of ghosts vs a fleet of cruisers... locked em all down in one spot and called in a nuke to clean them up.  Le brilliant.

[Morat20]

Hm.  They must have been slightly dented already the one time I saw someone pull that off.  A squad of ghosts vs a fleet of cruisers... locked em all down in one spot and called in a nuke to clean them up.  Le brilliant.

I remember using an Arbiter to cloak a strike force once -- I had a forward tower and defensive positions, and it was obvious he was massing for a major assault and expected to be dealing with carriers and my turrets. I had two carriers and a pair of scouts there, to be sure. But mostly I had Zealots.

He didn't expect the Zerg I had burrowed in right where a smart man would place his seige tanks. I destroyed about 2/3ds of his forces with cheap zerg units and a pair of lurkers. I cleaned up the rest with my carriers and Zealots, then razed two of his bases just for giggles.

I love being Protoss.

[Samwise]

Did you mind control a drone, or was this some freaky custom game?

[Morat20]

Did you mind control a drone, or was this some freaky custom game?

Controlled a drone. Managed to keep the little sucker a secret, too. Had a  zerg creep and hatchery and a few other buildings in the far back of my original base, where his spies, scouts, comsats and whatnot never bothered going.

I had a zerg base rather close to my original spawn point, and basically contained them until I could get mind control and snag a drone. It was worth the effort -- wouldn't have tried it on a serious game, but we were playing on a LAN and I got to hear the "WHAT THE FUCK?" when they popped up.

I try to grab drones if possible -- if nothing else, the units you make using a MC drone take from your opponent's unit cap -- not yours. I always make the effort against NPCs (generally if I'm facing NPCs, it's or 2 or 3 per human player in the game -- mininum), but against other people the oppurtunity rarely arises, and is even more rarely worth doing.

[Samwise]

Speaking of unit caps, another once-in-a-blue-moon trick I saw once (in a 2v2 game where one side severely outclassed the other) was to have one guy pump carriers and the other guy make a big DA army.  The supply limit doesn't get checked when you mind-control something, so the carrier guy kept cranking them out and sending them over to the DA squad so his teammate could take them off his hands.  By the end of it the mind-controller had something like 200 carriers (about 8x over the max supply limit).  Suffice to say that when they finally attacked, the interceptors blotted out the sun.

[ahoythematey]

That's what I loved about starcraft at LAN's: no other game seems to produce so many shouts of "WHAT THE FUCK" and "Oh My God".

[Ironwood]

Supreme Commander did that, tho.

"What the fuck am I playing ?"
"Oh My God, This is Fucking Lame."

[Morat20]

Speaking of unit caps, another once-in-a-blue-moon trick I saw once (in a 2v2 game where one side severely outclassed the other) was to have one guy pump carriers and the other guy make a big DA army.  The supply limit doesn't get checked when you mind-control something, so the carrier guy kept cranking them out and sending them over to the DA squad so his teammate could take them off his hands.  By the end of it the mind-controller had something like 200 carriers (about 8x over the max supply limit).  Suffice to say that when they finally attacked, the interceptors blotted out the sun.

I remember my first Brood War game -- didn't play the campaign, didn't even really scan the new unit types. My friend and I just booted up a multiplayer map and went head-to-head with the usual number of opponents.

First, the upgraded AI was a shock -- kicked our asses. Second, neither of us play Zerg -- so the new Zerg units did a number on us until we worked it out. Brood War was a good expansion. I became pretty fond of Valkeries when playing humans.

[Megrim]

Hm.  They must have been slightly dented already the one time I saw someone pull that off.  A squad of ghosts vs a fleet of cruisers... locked em all down in one spot and called in a nuke to clean them up.  Le brilliant.

Ya, sorry, i didn't mean to sound snarky - just that it's always amused me how BCs can actually survive a direct hit. A nuke will do either 400 damage or 2/3's the life of a unit/building (whichever is greater), so the BC will survive with hp equal to it's armour (iirc default is 4); so one shot from pretty much anything will finish it off.

[Miasma]

EB has already pulled a fictitious release date out of their asses.  October first...  2008.

 

[Strazos]

EBstop tends to love to assign arbitrary release dates in Q4. November is also pretty popular.

[Simond]

Anyone seen this interview with Mike Morhaime of Blizzard?
Point to ponder: Towards the end, where he's asked which Blizzard universe he prefers...look carefully at the 'Diablo' box.

[Merusk]

Anyone seen this interview with Mike Morhaime of Blizzard?
Point to ponder: Towards the end, where he's asked which Blizzard universe he prefers...look carefully at the 'Diablo' box.

I think I just heard Schild's joygasm from all the way in Kentucky.

[schild]

What.

[Calantus]

Anyone seen this interview with Mike Morhaime of Blizzard?
Point to ponder: Towards the end, where he's asked which Blizzard universe he prefers...look carefully at the 'Diablo' box.

You are a beautiful person.

[Yegolev]

Foe? Toe?



Shop?

[Sky]

Any minute now Sky is going to show up with amusing pictures of WH40k characters in comic situations.

THEN YOU'LL BE SORRY.

I don't like Starcraft. RTS yucky. And I was too lazy to find WH40k marines in funny situations, it's not like they're Vader or anything. So have a guy in a Tron suit.

[Merusk]

Foe? Toe?

Shop?

Doing so to a video interview hosted on gametrailers would be impressive.

Unless you're saying that gametrailers itself did the job.  That I could buy.

[Yegolev]

I am just trying very hard to not get optimistic.  I did mean someone may have "touched up" the pic before it was put in, but I'm really just lying to myself.  Sssshhh!

[Ragnoros]

Damn forums need some sort of auto save feature. Another post to the abyss.

Anyway I have seen that Pic before of the D3 boxart last year either as a Hoax or just cause someone made and posted it somewhere. As to why it's there my guess is either A. Gametrailers is fucking with schild, or B. Someone at gametrailers wants it as bad as him.

I'm sure they are working on D3 in some form tho. I remember hearing in a "leak" last year (GamingSteve maybe?) that it was a good way in but they scraped it due to it not being fun.
Even if thats not ture I'm sure they have someone on it. I mean really how many people can it take to reskin Warcraft 3? make SC2

[Megrim]

Update:

New gameplay movie apparently posted up on the official SC forums.

Features new Protoss units such as:

 - the Dark Carrier. Tempestuous by nature, it has been rumoured to possess a powerful anti-ground shield, but no innate anti-air defences.

 - the Necron Destroyer   Silver Surfer   Soul Reaper! Apparently specialising in hunting souls (would you believe) and getting stronger with each kill. As was immediately pointed out, this brings up deep philosophical implications; namely as to whether the Zerg have souls, and what this could mean for future development of ethics in human/protoss societies.

 - Phase Cannon. The new and improved version of the regular cannon, now with the ability to teleport around onto any Pylon grid. Totally not imba.

 - Twilight Archon. Not the Dark Archon, and not the regular Archon, this is the new metrosexual archon, sensitive to the needs of the other player and at ease with it's role in the modern world.

Also featured are a new, slimline Reaver (still as stupid apparently), some Assault Marines armed with flamers and a High Templar somewhere in the background, casting Stasis on a Bunker.


* edit:

Added the high definition version.

[Samwise]

What?  No homicide crabs?

[Teleku]

Dang, they are adding in alot of new shit.  Going to be interesting to see how they balance this.

[Morat20]

What?  No homicide crabs?

Are you talking about those pretty much defensless Zerg flyers that can obliderate ground targets from roughly halfway across the map? Jesus, I've had more than one game fucked over because three of those showed up when my air defenses were occupied elsewhere.

[Akkori]

I like crabs.

BTW, has anyone here read the Starcraft novels? I saw them yesterday and was tempted. I recognized a couple of the authors as having done quality stuff before.

[rk47]

Against AI, it's simply turtle and go for mass air -- guardians/battlecruisers/carriers -- boring.

no you don't. you send one worker. shoot on their workers. then run back to your base where the marines are waiting.
they never fixed this till i quit IIRC. the computer will chase it round and round and round.

[Kail]

BTW, has anyone here read the Starcraft novels? I saw them yesterday and was tempted. I recognized a couple of the authors as having done quality stuff before.

I read some StarCraft novels, but that was like, five, six years ago?  There were only two, and I read them both (Liberty's Crusade and Shadow of the Xel'Naga, I believe).  And they were both completely fogettable.  I guess there have been more of them published since, but really, I can count the number of excellent novels that I've read based on video games with one finger, and that's mostly just to give myself a margin of error.

[Typhon]

...on one finger!  oh man, that was a perfect setup for a nose picking joke and you just let it pass.  Where the hell is your commitment to comedy!?  You dont' even care about comedy, do you?!

[Wolf]

BTW, has anyone here read the Starcraft novels? I saw them yesterday and was tempted. I recognized a couple of the authors as having done quality stuff before.

I read some StarCraft novels, but that was like, five, six years ago?  There were only two, and I read them both (Liberty's Crusade and Shadow of the Xel'Naga, I believe).  And they were both completely fogettable.  I guess there have been more of them published since, but really, I can count the number of excellent novels that I've read based on video games with one finger, and that's mostly just to give myself a margin of error.

Liberty's Crusade was actually pretty decent.

[Megrim]

Thread update, yesh yesh!

Blizzcon has predictably yielded some new information on everyone's favourite RTS. The main page at www.starcraft2.com has been updated with unit information for the Terran race. Gameplay video can be found here. Understandably, teamliquid.net is going berserk, so I've taken the liberty of shamelessly ripping the following link (which contains a whole slew of stuff, including current 'toss and Terran tech-trees). There are a couple of live blogs running on their forums, they may be worth checking out for those who are interested.

[Teleku]

I was quite happy to see that Blizzard decided to give the Terrans Valkyrie fighters aparently:








 

[Simond]

They're even called 'Vikings'. ;)

[Teleku]

Yeah, I noticed that as well, heh.  To bad the Terrans already had a Valkyrie space ship, which these ones are replacing apparently (if I read the lore right).

I'm really hoping the Terran super ship will be the Macross