Hundred Hand

I started writing an article about Starcraft II a while ago where I tried to give a big introduction so that people who didn’t know what it was would be able to follow along. It turned out really boring, so I scratched all that, and this is take 2 instead. If you’ve never heard of the game, that doesn’t really bother me, but I’m not going to catch you up. OK?

So, I have a beta account for Starcraft II due to the generosity and lack of gamer friends of a coworker of mine. Before this, I had never played any of the original Starcraft, and had probably only seen about 1 min of some Starcraft tournament video. I had however played Age of Empires II, and Warcraft III a good deal, and had the understanding that Starcraft fell somewhere between these two games.

You could say that it is Warcraft III without the heroes and the creeps and the items. That’s a pretty fair thing to say, but that makes it sound like it’s worse than Warcraft, which, in my opinion, it is not. Like Warcraft, there are a set number of bases around the map where you can create expansions, there are just a few races which play massively differently, and you can do some amazing things by micromanaging your troops well. However, like more macro oriented strategy games, there is no economic disadvantage to holding a large army, and the max population allowed is quite high. In fact I’ve never had that many troops, only ever getting up to about 150/200 “food” before I sent in my guys to get slaughtered.

It seemed pretty simple to me at first. You send out gatherers to gain resources, you build buildings, you make troops, you try to expand, and you have nasty encounters with the other people trying to do the same thing, whom also want to wipe your seed from the earth (or whichever planet you happen to be on). However, it didn’t take too many episodes of people having vast armies in my base about the time my very first marine was coming out, or me sending in huge groups that get obliteratied while being totally ineffective towards my oponent, before I realized there was a lot more going on in this game.

Like all the best games, it has an easy to play, hard to master quality. To truely play the game, you have to know every unit’s strengths and weaknesses, what abilities it has, how fast it is, what its attack range is, where it comes from, and what works well or poorly when attempting to fight it. You have to be able to keep your resource income up, even while you are fighting, while the limited resources are running out, and while your workers are getting shanghai’ed while your troops are out taking a stroll. You have to have the presence of mind to use the abilities of your troops at the right time, while there might be hundreds of things fighting each other, and a combined 10 different abilities between your troops.

Much like the original Starcraft, even during the beta, it’s superbly balanced. While individual units are getting nerfs and buffs here and there, the individual player’s ability separates them from one another far more than the underlying numbers. I will get slaughtered by a better opponent every time, and destroy a worse one every time. The matches where I am matched up well can become quite epic, and mental fatigue often comes into play.

Since this is a pvp game, the fun of it is largely reliant upon you being matched up with equally skilled opponents. It’ll be interesting to see how this shapes up one the full game is released. Right now in the beta, the database is reset every few weeks, at which point you have to go through 5 qualifying matches again before you are assigned to a given league, which is supposed to contain others like you. This is one thing that seems off right now, but a larger playerbase, and the omission of database resets should even this all out; at least that’s my hope.

So I’ll be playing until the beta cutoff date of June 21, and I plan to get a copy of the game once it comes out for real. In the mean time, I’m trying to find as many other people I know in real life with which to play. As we all know, competitive stuff is so much more fun when you know the person you are trashtalking.

Terran 4 Lyfe!