I'm rather surprised no one has created a thread about the release of SC 2. Anyone have it? Your thoughts on it?

I like the short cinematics before each mission, the armory, and the simple UI(much like the first one). The game starts off slow with a tutorial feel, but I'm hoping it picks up speed.

Meh. I might pick it up after the craze dies down a bit.

Yeah, I love the new LAN features and how we can play toge...

Oh wait, nevermind.

It's a bit expensive, 59€ here (games are usually 45-49€ at most). And just for 1/3 of the game, meh When it gets cheaper I may get it.

It's awesome, no doubt about it. I'm mainly interested in multiplayer, but the campaign feels very well done. The new research system and general feel of the in between missions part is cool, and the brutal difficulty is just that. Blizzard did this well!

I hardly think they will charge full price for the next campaigns. And that's interesting, because the game is actually fairly cheap here in Norway (although prices vary as much as $30 between the various retailers).

I preordered the collector's edition online. According to Canada Post I should be receiving it today.

Saw it today in game but didn't want to buy.

Only recently bought Witcher, haven't even put the CD in the computer yet.

It's just Command and Conquer

My little brother just bought it yesterday.

It's immediately noticable to me that it suffers from Blizzard's "I live up my own ass so I don't see faults anymore" syndrome. The dialog cinematic voice acting is sub-par for what they're advertising. The animation (the movement of the characters) is very robotic and almost lifeless. Mass Effect 1 was levels above Starcraft 2.

The game run on a semi-recent computer runs like piss except on lowest detail. In which case it looks like Warcraft 3: Starcraft, and everything looks like 3-D models walking on top of a terran map with a completely different art style.

All that aside, so far, the gameplay looks and feels fun. So once you peel away all of Blizzard's ego BS, it's not so bad. The few movie cinematics I've seen pretty cool looking.

Also, the game tries to make it more like you play Reynar and you have to go to "the bar" screen, click on a mercenary guy to hire mercenaries, and click on the television to watch announcements, etc. It's like I'm watching someone play Wing Commander--except the interface is less responsive.

I haven't tried multiplayer yet. I do have significant faith in Blizzard's ability to create a balanced game. I just hope it's more like Starcraft than Warcraft 3 (which I never really liked.)

Don't know if the dubbing is the same as this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10773395

But my initial thought was it's trying too hard to sound dramatic but they've hired the wrong person.

I bought it, i knew I'd buy it eventually so why not juts get it now. (okay so i got home late, after drinking a few, and totally made an impulse buy) I hate how its only 1/3rd of the missions but i think online play is entirely complete anyways. Starcraft 1 had that bloody brood war expansion pack anyways which you needed to buy if you wanted to play online with others anyways.

While I love most of the game, it's the cliches that really get to me, for some reason. "You can't lose as long as you keep trying." "Some things are worth fighting for." Hmmm.

I do like how the missions aren't strictly linear any more. I'm only a few in so I can't call if the storyline/progression is good but I've heard others say it only gets better as you get further into it.

i'm a total n00b. Played the computer on medium. It was a ZvP and i tried to do a standard and got squashed by stalker rush with 3 zealots. When I'm good enough I'd like to play some a.cc'ers like back in brood war days.

Blizzard is the only company that makes balanced PC games.

[edit]

Ok, I've just installed the game and I'm seriously pissed off. The game has no option for multisampling. Seriously, wtf? This is 2010, not 2000. I can't stand jagged edges - fuck it, I'm going to go rant on their forums instead of playing the game.

[edit2]

Ok, after downloading the latest graphics card drivers (apparently NVidia patched especially for SC2!) and selecting "override application multisampling settings", I now have multisampling and the game suddenly looks great. How the hell did they overlook this?

gamecreator 625
Feel free to add me. I haven't ranked outside of beta yet but I'll probably end up being silver.

You need to play more games.

Ranked gold. Anyone else finish their placement matches? What'd you place?

Platinum!

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I think it is an amazing sequel, but haven't bought it yet in fear that I'll never set it down. That screenshot is from a trial key, my sister's boyfriend bought it. Best 7 hours of my life.

I played the beta for a week or so, so I had a bit of practice. I find it to be very similar to the original... void rays are insane, though. Blizzard sure can make addictive games.

It's $59 CAD here, too.. and that's more than I've spent on a game in a very long time. Most of the games in my collection are greatest hits PS1/2 games, heh.

Well, 59$ CAD are only 43€ according to google. That would be ok for me. But 59€ = 79.5$ CAD, that's its price here And they wonder why so many people pirate games here

Speaking of pirating... I gotta get on that, and seed this unholy precipitate.

I have to admit, just watching the single player campiegn is fun. My little brother is on a world where the sun just rapidly turned into a red giant and is growing fast. It will consume the world where the artifact that he needs is located. They drop in anyway, and the map is being consumed by fire from the left of the map and slowly propogating to the right. Seeing the trees and world slowly burned as it turns is a really fun an original way to make a ticking clock plot drive.

The game is quite expensive here too. Normal console games are about £35-£40 and pc games about £20-25, but starcraft 2 is £35. That's about CAN$56 when it should really be about $40.

I'm pretty far into the single-player campaign now. Blizzard made a serious effort to make the missions as varied and creative as possible, which I'm enjoying a ton. It's inspiring me to try to one-up them and make something even better in the editor.

I also like how they try to challenge you by introducing related bonus goals, which are also usually pretty fun themselves. A good mix of guidance and freedom and even the Hyperion interactions are growing on me. Just played the first Protoss mission last night.

Agreed that the price is high for a game but I expected that and saved my pennies accordingly. I don't buy games often and I knew I wouldn't regret it.

Oh, and congrats on the Platinum rank, Derezo! If you don't mind playing a lowly Gold player, I'd love a round or two.

You all seem to forget that unfortunatelly the prices of the electronics, games and possibly other software go along the line: 1USD = 1GBP = 1EUR. Can't tell much about how CAD blends into it, but this all makes games insanely expensive in most of the Europe.

And even more expensive here, since they are usually imported from Europe and then resold for even more $$$. Starcraft 2 costs ~80USD :X (most new games cost ~60USD though)

I'm going under the name goaler in the north american servers. I'm a total n00b.. i'm winning about 50% of the time but i have no idea how to do a proper build order. I'm basically lucking out on a bit of n00by micro and fast void rays.

The campaign has been crap so far. I originally selected "normal" difficulty, and everything was so ridiculously easy that it wasn't even fun. I then changed to "hard" and it was way beyond my ability to the point of being frustrating and tedious. I also can't stand the fact that you can select the difficulty of each mission (and have always been against this in all games): it totally devalues your progress through the campaign.

The characters are so corny its cringe-worthing, and the game runs extremely poorly on the final missions, no matter how powerful your PC is.

Worst of all, the game brings nothing new to the genre apart from a guarantee for extremely well balanced multiplayer. But considering that they've abandoned all the huge strides they made in gameplay with Wc3 (I don't care what you say, having to spend most of your time managing macro is mind-numbingly boring and tedious) I don't think I'm going to bother getting into the multiplayer.

The only reason why my expectations for Diablo 3 are still high is the fact that they it has been developed by totally independent Blizzard teams.

I recommend this game if you have the computer to run it, although finding a copy might be rare now. I have one.

That's very much a personal opinion. Some of us find the micro-managing click-fest to be mind-numbingly boring and tedious.

But a good RTS should balance macro- and micro- management. This has always been my biggest problem with the original SC, it doesn't matter how well you can macro-manage^[1], if you can't micro very well, you get your ass handed to you.

I think that works for some games. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark are two examples of it, where the harder difficulties had additional objectives for each level. I don't remember, though, if the AI was any better or not for the harder difficulties (they prolly were), but I'm guessing that's how Starcraft 2 does the different difficulties, which I agree is a bad way of doing it. Basically, if each level has a choice of difficulties, then the harder ones should require the player to actually do more (or do something in a different, harder to figure out way), not just put the player at an even worse disadvantage.

My roommate got it; the dialogue is terrible and the cinema animations made him go into the Options menu and make sure his graphics settings weren't all at Low (they were all at Ultra ... wtf). Actual gameplay is nice though. When do the Zerg and Protoss campaigns come out?

According to this:

http://kotaku.com/5599005/everything-we-know-about-the-next-starcraft-game

Sometime in 2012 for Zerg. Protoss will probably be a bit later.

Ouch. That's a lot longer than I imagined.

Don't much care for that either ...

Is anyone planning on creating custom maps with the map editor?

Oh great God, are the players actually buying this bullshit? I wonder how much will those "datadisks" or "episodes", as they like to call it these days, cost. If I'm not mistaken HL2 episodes didn't cost a full price of the HL2 game. Way to make money Blizzard...^[1]

I've been playing my brother's copy. The writing seems fine to me. It's no Mass Effect, but it works. It also seems like a pretty fun game. I'm liking single player much more than playing on Battle.net, but it was the same thing with SC1 for me.

I like playing 2 and 3 player verses AI so far. Strategies that worked with Starcraft:BW still pan out here. I survive the first rush and by then I'm already working on siege and by then, one of us is working on battle cruisers.

I like that everyone has something more resembling a "main battle unit", whereas in the original, it felt like every race was intentionally crippled and overly dependent on having a mixed fleet.

Also, they have a lot of interface improvements over the original. Shift clicking does exactly what you feel it should do, and queing up construction sites leave placeholders so you can stack them better. Grouping units doesn't have size limits (ABOUT TIME.).

They simplified the tech tree and made it more straight-forward. I never had problems with it, but it's still much less hassle (no more "build a science building just to get level 2 armor" junk). And you can query technology upgrades. You can group select flying buildings. You can easily set rally points for produced units to any task (namely mining, but also repairing bunkers). SCV's AUTO REPAIR (about freaking time!). Siege Tanks have two different keys to deploy and un-deploy so you don't accidentally do the wrong one. The keys are always available even when other non-siege units are in your group. You can deploy (by accident) and hit un-deploy while they're still changing, they'll start to un-deploy as soon as they finish. There is resource trading, however chatting is an extremely slow, unresponsive, and delayed process that becomes impossible if there are tons of units on the screen--which is exactly when you'd need to warn your friends. But voice communication is essential these days, anyway.

It runs like complete piss on my computer, however. My processor is more than enough, however, I'm left with an onboard GeForce. So once the polygons fly, the framerate crawls. They also did a poor job of offering low polygon models for budget computers because even with completely washed-out textures it still barely runs 10 frames per second. So I would imagine it's a polygon count issue.

I am. Last night I threw together a quick test map that was a 2-player co-op. Worked super well. I also made a campaign map I liked in phase 1 of the beta but phase 2 kind of broke it.

Chris, you pointed out some of the positives I like about the second game over the first one. Another fun one that I learned from a YouTube tutorial is that you can select a tank in siege mode (or several), hold down shift, [unsiege, right-click to move elsewhere and resiege] in under a second and the tanks will execute all three commands while you're already off doing something else. Very micro friendly.

I'm going to post some interesting comments from today's Penny Arcade, which may constitute flamebait but let's see who agrees and disagrees. Safe to say I basically agree, at least now that I've seen the whole game. I won't be buying Wings of Liberty; still hoping Heart of the Swarm is worth my money.

In related news, my WoW account ends this week. All those epics, gone.

I totally agree with you. You have succinctly expressed and substantiated my feelings on the matter.

Oh, they aren't gone. After your account ends it goes into 'stasis' where your characters and epics are still there, just inaccessible. That way you can pick up a gamecard (or plunk down your credit card) six months down the road, log in and your toon and all your epics will be there...

SC2 has much better pathing, grouping, and micro-ing abilities. For instance, when i spawn workers I dont need to manually send them to the mineral field. This gives me a lot of hope for not sucking But if you want to win you still have to micro very well.

I don't have to micro well. I'm only in gold. People in our division don't focus as much on that. And of course, thanks to the wonderful matching system, I still win half my games, which is perfect.

When I want to rank higher, I think I'll learn a little bit more about micro-ing, like blinking out weak Stalkers, which is actually kind of fun for me. I just don't research Blink often enough.

It would be nice if you didn't have to micro at all (blink out weak stalkers for instance), but configure them and give them actions (like dragon age).

For instance just set it something like:
unit: stalker
condition: shields < 10%
action: retreat from combat to nearest base, use blink if possible.

or:

unit: stalker
condition: being attacked by melee
action: blink away from attacker

I think the UI and the amount of micro management from SC1 have definitely improved, but not enough. Every time I play I find great areas of improvement for usability. It's very annoying.

If they did that it wouldn't be the same game. A person could play competently by just copy-pasting some macros from www.starcraftbotsftw.com or something. If you want a game like that, find one with robots that you can fully customize their physical and mental construction and pit against other robots (or armies of robots) with custom bodies, attacks, and behavior.

I have to say this, though perhaps I'm repeating myself:

I'm appalled that I'm going to have to pay THREE TIMES for Starcraft (that's assuming I do pay). Though, optimistically, they'll be adding a huge amount of content and not just systematically unlocking single player units.

I'm offended by the lack of LAN support, though it's a aesthetic issue because playing two or three computers over broadband isn't affected at all. Perhaps 8 player will be strain broadband connections and become a logistical issue. They may patch it in the future to allow LAN, but this is Blizzard and not Id Software, so I'm doubtful in that optimism.

However, as a balanced game, I love it. I never got into WC3 because it felt so weird, and I hated the idea of heroes in multiplayer--it completely took away any sense of tactical realism for me. Armies do not have heroes! But Starcraft 2 is balanced, and every team has new and exciting units, but at the same time feels true to the original. It's what a twelve-year sequel should be: I feel at home, and excited by the newness at the same time.

Look only a few months back, and I was one of the most outspoken opponents of both Blizzard and the new Starcraft--and I still hold on to my points as valid. But I didn't expect to love the gameplay so much. I've played 4 2v2 games so far against human opponents. The first we died miserably. The second two we won amazingly close and fun games. The fourth, the protoss built towers in our base ( ), and we lost. But being terran and somewhat annoyed, so we made them work for their meal. The game went on, and even in losing, I had a good time with the friendly players.

And that reminds me, while 4 games is hardly a valid sample of the population, I immediately noticed that the userbase acting more adult, civilized, and professional than Call of Duty or Halo.

If PennyArcade doesn't like it, they're welcome to it, but Starcraft 2 is not at all a dreamcrusher like Indiana Jones 4 or some other far off sequel.

YES! I love that you can set rally points on mineral fields. It makes everything so much more elegant. I don't play modern RTS games (because I don't care about them?) but this one has so many straight-forward features I never even thought of.

I personally don't get why people get up in arms about the zerg and protoss campaigns being released as expansions. The SC1 had 30 single player missions and SC2 has 29. It's not as if they divided the game in three; they made it three times bigger.

Age of Empires II had it, and that's from 11 years ago

It would be if one of those players was me.

My gf and I sometimes play SC against each other over our network. Doing do via bnet would be impossible.

Hey some people enjoy getting up in arms! We don't judge you for your extra curricular activities.

Granted, but not as elegant as Starcraft 2. I played AoE2 this summer and it was playable but somewhat annoying compared to modern standards of RTS.

Again, I'm no Blizzard fanboy.

Ha ha! I remember. I was in the beta then and I was trying to sell the game so much because I was convinced that if you loved the first Starcraft, you'll love the sequel as well, despite some of its shortcomings.

I've noticed the same. I'm not sure if it's relative to what division you're ranked in but I've had no problems with players in Gold and higher. However, a few of the people in 4v4 and 3v3 are a bit crude (though it's rare).

Also, today's Penny Arcade:
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Why'd you play it then I for one just deleted it for good after seeding it for around a day, to satisfy my purpose.

Why only a day? I thought you didn't like the game.

What's the point of seeding it? It hasn't been cracked yet, to the best of my knowledge.

(I'd happily be corrected on that though, since that would be hilarious).

Afaik, there are 3 cracks out there and at least two of them are reported to work. Only for the single player game, obviously.

I wonder if it's like the cracked beta where it was just a single player skirmish against AI with randomized races.

If it is the full campaign and basically everything aside from Battle.Net matches, how does it save your progress & achievements? I thought those were battle.net only.

Assassin's Creed 2 was saved games on the server only but that was cracked. It took them quite some time but they did it.

In other news, from Blizzard:
"We're pleased to announce that within one day of being on sale, StarCraft® II sold more than 1 million copies worldwide, making it the bestselling PC game of 2010 in under 24 hours of availability. By the end of the 2nd day, it had sold a total of 1.5 million copies worldwide, setting the record for fastest-selling strategy game of all time."

Assassin's Creed 2 had the option if you wanted to save on the server or locally. And AFAIK Starcraft 2 saves locally and uploads the saves to battle.net when you're connected.

Well I played and I guess it's good for people that liked the first one since it's almost the same. I'd say is more like a remake with a different campaign. I don't like that everything is still tile based (It's ok for buildings, but I hate it for unit movements). I find the UI still falls behind most moddern RTS games, I find it limited (I don't play many RTS's any more, but DoW 2, Battleforge and Sins of a Solar Empire, all these have some nice features that make micromanagement much nicer (specially better group management), which Starcraft 2 lacks). Oh, and shift+number still doesn't do what it should

The campaign is much better than the original, with varied missions and objectives. I didn't play that much, but I liked it so far.

Special mention I must put into the Spanish localization. Everything is translated, even things painted into the map, in signs, in the cinematics. It's not the first game that does it, but it's very unusual.

I'm not sure if getting it. The single player campaign looks very good, despite what I said about the AI. I haven't played it online, but I don't usually enjoy very much playing RTS's online. So I'd buy it mostly for the single player. I may wait for its price to drop, though, since 60€ seems too much.

The downloader is working horribly for me. I have about a 5 mbit connection here in Vietnam but the downloader averages about 20KB/s. At this rate its going to take me days of download time and practically it will take weeks because my computer isn't always setup!

What really bugs me though, is they make you login and redownload the downloader every time you restart it. I'm almost up to doing this 30 times.

I don't think unit movements are tile based. You can stop a unit anywhere. I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean.

Dustin, have you tried closing the downloader and then also ending the downloader process? Oddly, I found that if I do that and restart the downloader about twice, the patch then starts downloading faster.

From what I've heard there are at least two cracks. One works for campaign only. The other one allows playing skirmish as well.

Aww, 60€? No way I'm gonna buy that even if I'd be decided to play it. 1/3 of the full game, possible multiplayer incompatibility between releases (though I'd not probably play online) and high chance of getting it only in the localized version - thank you very much, after playing Czech version of Homeworld 2 I'd rather have it in English next time.

Stealing it for single player is a dick move. If you want content, pay for it. If you really hated Blizzard and Starcraft 2 that much, you wouldn't even be playing it. You just want it for free because it's not worth the $60 to you.

That's how I'm rolling.

First, I'm not decided to play it. Second, if I'd be, I wouldn't buy it for that price. I'd wait till it goes down. I've never said I would pirate that (though I must say I should have been clearer in the above post).

This never fails to bug me.

First, they have three times the missions the Terran campaign had in the original so yes, the campaign is just as long if not longer than the original game. And like the original Starcraft, you can play multiplayer as all of the races.

Second, there are more cinematics and cutscenes and interactions then ever before. It's not just a few actors reading lines to you in a communication room any more.

Third, they didn't announce the prices for the expansions yet. The only thing I've seen out there is that they planned to price them as expansions, not as full games (link), so they expect to be priced lower than this game (I'm happy to be corrected). So anyone saying "I'm not gonna pay $180 for a game" is either ignorant or chooses to ignore facts.

Still downloading it! I bought it a week ago.

Well, I caved and bought it. Pretty much everyone at work is playing the multiplayer on lunch break, might as well join in. :p

It sounds like a good game, but I'm not in a hurry to buy it.

I figure I'll wait for the other campaigns to come out. I don't want to be forced to pay for all three (which would be the case if each campaign added new multiplayer features), and at the same time I'd be interested in getting a good price for all three in a bundle. Anyway, I'm undecided on if / when I'll buy it. For now I'll wait.

You can preorder the expansions, and they still cost more than a regular game does. (at least over here)

Nice, how about releasing all three campaigns in one game? Don't get me wrong, longer games are hardly to see these days. But releasing just one campaign is ridiculous. Not to mention the rumors that second Starcraft II (whether full game or just the expansion) will have incompatible multiplayer with this release.

In the end it's just getting more money for the same product with slightly different content. If I'm ever going to play this game, I'm gonna wait some time till the price goes down.

Kind of a compulsive buy,but I got it Installing right now.

I'm very dissapointed about the box. For a 60€ game, I expect more than a black & white 25 pages manual :/ Where are the unit and technology tree sheet that all RTS used to come with? (I haven't bough a boxed version of a RTS in a loooong time).

It didn't even have an instruction manual, oddly.

Where is this? I tried looking at Gamestop and Amazon and neither even mentions it.

This is nothing new. The original Starcraft multiplayer wasn't compatible with the Brood War expansion. Same for Warcraft III and its expansion.

I recall months ago they said the online multiplayer would be the fully functioning version and that you wouldnt need expansions to unlock anything more. I now hear rumours of the opposite. I would be really pissed off it they were true.

Over here, not that that means much to you :X

Used a public torrent to download the game (still took me 1.5 weeks after I bought the damn thing). It wouldn't install so I started deleting files and having the official torrent replace them. Finally got the installer to run.

It gives you a prompt to activate the thing. Link leads to battle.net login page. Login page just redirects back to itself. Had to do workaround by logging in on main page, and then going to url directly. Got a 404 error.

The offical downloader has a little view that shows stuff from the webpage. They added a splash page meant for the browser that you see when you click to any page on battle.net. The page is too big for the window, making it make no sense.

If you click through that page, you get a 404.

There is no menu option on battle.net to activate my SC2 download.

Did they do any QA at all?

At least the game is good, helping me put up with all of this.

Running patch updates now. Let's see if it will let me activate after that...

Edit: All done! Woo...

Well, the 3v3 ranking is bullcrap. I'm stuck in bronze league because during the qualifiers i was either paired with quitters or complete n00bs. I just played my first bronze league game against some "favoured players". Damn, the quality was low. All three of us didn't lose any forces practically. They had no scouting, no scanning, no defences, just mass economy and a few tier three units.

Woo! I'm forming a liberation rebellion against the tyrannical government! I love the pre-scene movies in Starcraft II. They really know how to make low-polygon movies look good. It's humble yet awesome at the same time.

@Goalie
That's okay, now you'll just be paired against easy people and win all the time. Winning is fun .

VOID RAY SPAM IS TOO EFFECTIVE. God damn. I've won with it about as many times as I've lost to it. Is there any Protoss strategy that is at all as viable as Void Ray spam?

Yeah I'm mad about void rays too. Give zerg some love dude...

I kind of laughed when I heard "rush to Void Rays" was viable until a few of us played with it over the weekend. I can deal with it, but it's really annoying.

Maybe someone has figured out a good counter to it on the internets? We should check the battle.net forums.

My biggest complaint is how fast they are. You can't even attack the damn things.

Ghosts have this special ability called emp. That works amazingly well against protoss. It cuts out the shields. Marines and vikings can take care of the rest. I've also won a few times using blink stalkers against void rays. Not sure what zergs could use but i'm sure that infested terrans and corruptors will work fine. maybe even mutalisks because they do splash damage.

The biggest difference between noobs and good players are the scouting. You absolutely need to find out what your opponent is getting so that you can counter it.

edit: Games like evolves and tug are good for figuring out which units counter which. There is also a challenge which requires some good micro to do well with as well.

If you have it. When I say people rush to Void Rays I mean it; you'll have two behind your mineral pile before you can even train Ghosts. Anti-air structures are (part of) your best bet, but if you're Terran and don't have a few missile turrets guarding your economy you're a noob anyway.

marines are really good against void rays when the vrs are small numbers. generally it takes them a while to get an economy going before they can mass it.

I just got out of a 3v3 where the other team massed void rays. I did a massive ammount of damage to the armies with my ghosts and vikings but the rest of my team were idiots. I couldn't even mine because they built structures near the bloody patches. what a bunch of arseholes. bronze league sucks and i don't have fait that i'll be able to win my way out like this.

There's your problem. You're playing 3v3 with a random team and expecting a fair fight.

Void Rays are easy to handle; as Goalie said, you just have to scout your opponent and you'll see them coming. Lucky for Terran players, Marines are easy and dirt cheap compared to VRs. Protoss have Stalkers fairly early on. It's Zerg who are the toughest with Hydralisks being tier 2 so you either rush to them to counter or build some Spore Crawlers. In emergencies, I've even seen some pros build an extra Queen or two.

How many void rays can 3 queens take on?

Don't worry, if your skills are beyond your league you'll win more than 50% of the time. That means <50% you'll experience this.

Edit: I did pretty awful, landing myself in silver. I was platinum during the beta.

For the curious, here are the rankings:

Pro League  This league would only be accessible through invitation[4] using the same techniques as promotion into other leagues. There will be a set number of participants, and they will not be divided into divisions.[6]
Diamond  Not available through placement matches; players must earn enough points to enter this league.[1]
Platinum  Standard league.[1]
Gold  Standard league.[1]
Silver  Standard league.[1]
Bronze  Standard league.[1]
Practice  Features slower-speed games with novice anti-rush maps for newer players. Players can play 50 practice matches, and only upon creating an account. Once a player leaves (voluntarily or otherwise), they may not return.[1] Blizzard Entertainment is trying to prevent "smurfing" of this area.[7][8]

I don't know if I just suck or I have bad luck, but I'm getting my butt handed to me in bronze league.

In the beginning, me and my brother did some awesome marine rushing. We completely overpowered them early on by ignoring their bases and going for their harvesters. It was all about destroying their morale--and it worked. We lost our first, but then won three games in a row.

And now we've only won one game since.

I thought I had a pretty good early game. But I have no idea what to do mid-game. Once siege are up we either win or lose. It's not a clear victory until it happens. Perhaps I take too much risks.

I have to say, that as far as Terran is concerned, the units to choose from kind of suck. There's no firebats, no medics, and no goliaths.

Maybe I should try Protoss for rushing. They have a much better main battle unit that can also take down siege tanks. It's not like anyone has air in the beginning.

As far as the basics are concerned, for terrans the main strategy is MMM -- marines, marauders, and medivacs. Just make sure your marines have stimpacks, of course.
To counter tanks, just use banshees. If your opponent is heavily turtled in their base, then just expand so you have enough economy to send wave after wave of units to eventually break through.

With or without Transfusion?

Here's my current favorite Starcraft II video. It doesn't really prove anything, just funny to watch.

Serious question: How are you supposed to scout effectively on novice maps (which is all I play right now)? Void Rays will appear long before you have the tech up to make any air units whatsoever, aside from Overlords, and only if you're Zerg.

Two options:

1. You tech hard and get air fast as well. Void Rays need a Pylon, Gateway, Cybernetics Core and a Stargate. As Protoss, you can simply match this and send a Phoenix to scout (Phoenixes hard counter Void Rays, are cheaper and build faster). As Terran, you need a Barracks, Factory and Starport. From the Starport get a Viking and send it to scout (again: hard counter, cheaper, faster to make). Zerg is the easiest. Tech to Mutalisks. I say they're the easiest because unlike the Viking and the Phoenix, Mutas attack fairly well against ground too.

2. You don't scout and build to defend air. Not turrets and the like necessarily (though those can't hurt for detection). But having a group of Stim-researched Marines, Hydralisks or Stalkers doesn't generally hurt. Like the Mutalisks, they can serve as defense or offense so if your enemy doesn't end up going Void Rays, you'll still be ok as long as you have other units to counter whatever he's sending.

Edit:
3 (the less standard options). With Protoss, you can also research and use Hallucination with a Sentry to create an air unit or two to fly around. With Terran, you can fly a Barracks - I kid you not. I've seen this done in pro games and someone used this very efficiently against me to scout my cliff and take out the buildings at the edge of my base (using the Barrack's air vision).

As Zerg, I can't even build a single hydralisk or mutalisk by the time two void rays show up and destroy my shit; and furthermore, two void rays can easily fuck up two mutalisks before they have a chance to retaliate. Seems like you need a lot more than that to have a chance. And it seems whenever I spend drones on building anti-air turrets, they just show up with a bunch of colossi or something instead. What do you suggest?

(Also Legend of Kyrandia was boss.)

I stopped playing novice maps because they prevented any scouting or early/mid-game. It basically was all about massing a units in a single wave. I think we'll see blizzard try and nerf them but in a way that doesn't affect the perfectly balanced high-level pro-games that make them the money in korea.

Also, zerg is hard to play. You really need good scouting and map control. Not something you can do at all in novice. Notice how majority of players are protoss. Those are easy to micro and manage while terran takes a little more unit mixing and micro. Zerg requires a lot of precise control and I almost see no one using them.

edit:
what i'm finding now is that every protoss play basically walls themselves off with a million cannons. Terrans almost have no base defences/detection and zerg players have a queen which is usually easy to take out. Protoss base defence is easy since the cannons can do ground defence and air defence and detection.

I think this simply comes down to scouting with your Overlord and better timing. If you add up the time to make a Pylon, Gateway, Cybernetics Core, Stargate and a Void Ray it's just over the time it takes to make a Spawning Pool, Lair, Hydralisk Den and several Hydralisks (from 3 ready larvae). If you include a Queen before you tech to Lair (which you really should) then the time is about equal if you also take into consideration the time it takes the Void Rays to get to your base. If you stay in step with your enemy, you will greet his 2 or 3 Void Rays with a small group of Hydralisks and a Queen.

That said, it really doesn't hurt to put down an Evolution Chamber and a few strategically placed Spore Crawlers if you see a Stargate being made (and certainly for two of them).

I'm happy to help you practice if you want, playing either side.

Edit: just realized that you're probably on a different server than I am. I play in the North American region.

Yeah I'd love practice too. What's your name and character code?

gamecreator 625

If you've got a few Infestors, feel free to vomit a small army of Infested Terrans to deal with Void Rays. They hit slightly harder and have more life than normal Marines IIRC, and the Infestors can also control the Void Rays if you've researched Neural Parasite.

I usually don't have anything aside from 6-12 zerglings and maybe a half-constructed Hydralisk Den. A friend recommended building a couple Queens to counter these kinds of rushes since they can pretty much keep each other alive with Transfusion.

I don't know if battle.net regions are incompatible. But you can add Yamaxanadu/816 if you like. But beware, I'm really crap at this game. So far.

Ah, a matter of practice then. Only thing I can think of is to make sure you don't make too many Drones before your Spawning Pool and to know when to make your Extractor and put your Drones on it for the 100 gas you need so that you can start your Lair right as your Spawning Pool finishes.

And Queens would certainly work, as the video I linked to above demonstrated. Despite what the YouTube caption said, it was 7 Queens against 6 Void Rays (1 Queen is lost a few seconds in due to mis-micro), which is still a great economical exchange.

Edit: X-G, I tried to add you but no luck. It said it couldn't find you (I guess on the North American servers).

I couldn't add you either.

I'm winning a few games in the practice league, but I feel it may be as much due to opponent incompetence as my own competence. I won one game by distracting an opponent's mutalisks with my own corruptors long enough for my wave of zerglings to make it over to and completely obliterate his entire harvesting operation... you just don't recover from that. The second time was a lot of hit-and-run with void rays while some stalkers harassed the other side of his camp to keep him having to split his forces, which pretty much won me that one despite facing heavy anti-air resistance.

Thanks for the games by the way X.G.

Void Rays feel like chimeras from Warcraft 3 except that it takes a fraction of the time to start rolling them out, and they can attack other air units.

I'm struggling to see the point of this game; it's Warcraft 3 with all the fun bits removed and the tedious bits emphasised.

I said pretty much the exact same thing to a friend of mine when I was saying why I don't really like Blizzard any more. We were talking about the video game market and how Microsoft jumped into consoles because the PC market was no longer the main source of 3D gaming. Going through the history of Blizzard, they didn't start with games. They started with spreadsheet apps and crap. It was just more profitable to move into gaming. Thus, their games are designed to create the highest profit, which means they will work with the human brain's reward system as fluidly as possible.

I think they've done a great job, it just sort of creeps me out that they actually did it.
It's another one of those things I have to try and keep away from myself even though it's what everyone talks about. Over 4,000 matches on the original SC is enough gaming addiction for this lifetime. I even have people asking me to build them computers specifically for SC2. It's so hard to be paranoid of commercially designed entertainment.

Now I'm a little scared...

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Ah at least you aren't in Diamond.

Picked it up, pm me for my user ID (as soon as I find it), I'm up for some A.cc games like the old days, and I'm also happy to play SC1 as well.

I'm still in bronze in 3v3. turns out my record is shit. I keep losing all the matches. Like the one i just played... i warded off 3 teams with blink stalkers, chargelots, and collosus. But in the end my macro slipped and after the two toss players were out the terran nailed my only minning expansion and i was toast. But like always, i lost 2 players to a really early rush when they had no units.

Don't. Play. The practice league. Ever. It's slowed down and the maps are not worth the bytes they occupy. Go play on the ladder and learn the correct timings and play styles.

I wonder how they managed to make those practice maps anti-rush.

They put rocks with stupid amounts of health everywhere.

EDIT: By the way, I wish Zerg had a better counter for Mauraders (an armored target that does bonus damage to heavy armor). Roaches are armored and so they get cut down fast, and Protoss has Immortals and (to a lesser extent) Stalkers which both have bonuses to armored targets, plus the Immortal shields cut the damage they take from them so there's no contest. Zerg get no bonus to damage, only bonus to damage taken. Zerglings and Hydralisks still work decently, but it's kind of an unnecessarily uphill battle. I worry less about Protoss, since Zerglings don't trigger Immortal shields.

I have the same record for 2vs2. Out of the games I lost, only once did I have a decent teammate. One win for example happened when my teammate left in the first 20 seconds. I ended up using his base to fund a quick zealot rush which I went all in and held nothing back (if he had just one air unit, I would have lost the game), and it managed to win me the game somehow.

Other then that every game I've played had the other team "slightly favoured", and by slightly favoured, they mean my teammate will only mine half the resources of any player and have one barracks for the entire game.

The StarCraft II site suggests Zerglings, which make sense. For the cost of a Marauder, you can make 5 Zerglings (not including the supply cost) and they'll clean up a Marauder no problem.

The 2v2/3v3/4v4 games I don't really understand. I play them from time to time but I don't expect to do anything but play my ass off and hope my partners do the same. That done, the win or lose doesn't mean too much to me. Those games are just so wildly unpredictable.

Plus you can cheat, if you have someone on your team with decent micro.

Thats kind of crazy. All my opponents have been surprisingly good and I'm in the second worse division. I'm not at my full strength but I always have at least 3 barracks and such. I just lost a game to some void rays -- man those things are annoying. I had a fleet of valks, about 2 to 1 against void rays. The void rays cleaned them out. What the hell are you supposed to send against them?

Any swarm of pretty much any unit will clean out the Voids. Are you focusing fire on each Void Ray in turn, or are you hitting 'A' and clicking your minimap?

They usually do pretty well in that situation, but it's usually Marines/Marauders vs Zerglings. And maybe a few Roaches/Hydras. Just seems weird that there's no explicit counter like Protoss get. Even Dark Stalkers get a bonus to damage vs. armored units; IMO Hydras should really have some bonus too. Especially since they're the only Zerg ground unit that can hit flying. Not a huge deal, but still odd IMHO.

I just got into Platinum League making only 3 unit types.

The more I play the game and watch replays of the top players, the more realise what a pile of shit it is compared to Warcraft 3. The only thing keeping me from reinstalling Wc3 is that it's so much more fun that I tend to waste too much of my time playing it.

That should have worked, as Vikings are the strong counter to Void Rays. The one thing you may not have done is micro your Vikings. They are faster than Void Rays so you need to fly out the weak ones or, if you're fighting in the open or in the enemy's base, focus fire one or two Void Rays, take them down then fly your entire fleet away for a few seconds to reset the Void Ray's beam to the weak phase. Return to focus down two or three more. Repeat as needed. Do not fight Void Rays with full beams if you can avoid it.

Though I prefer to greet Void Rays with Marines. I use 2 or 3 Vikings just to harass/distract.

Hm, I have not been microing. I guess that is the problem.

How the hell did I place in the GOLD league? They're going to eat me for BREAKFAST.

You'll do fine. I also got placed in Gold League for 1v1 too, and I just completed the 5-game hotstreak achievement.

Another thing that really annoys be is the "favored" bull-shit. I've now got ~100 games played across 1v1 / 2v2 / 3v3 and not once has my team even been "slightly favored". I've come to the conclusion that Blizzard always tells each team that their opposition is better than them so that they feel better about losing.

Has anyone else noticed this?

No, after losing nearly every game in a row, today I played a couple games where I was "slightly favoured", and the difference was exactly as slight as mentioned earlier. We dominated.

I finally started playing online matches, and entered into the expected bronze league. Most players seem nice, but there are those that tell you how much you suck after you wipe the floor with them

@Arthur Kalliokowski

0_o That was ... interesting.

Hahaha.

I think that whole video was staged, but it was still funny.

In other news, six of us in the office tried to have a 3v3 and boy was it laggy. Just to beat the old dead horse, WTB LAN support. >_<

Ever since I got into the Gold league, I've lost every single match. So yeah, "I'll do fine" my ass.

Heh, I just beat the top ranked guy in bronze league(he was zerg, i utterly suck against them). I suppose I should go back and read what you guys have planned for allegro games

I caved in and bought the game... Downloading as we speak. I'm on the EU region (hopefully they will merge the regions in the future...).

I've heard rumors of people purposely losing games to keep their rankings low and win more. I wonder how bad it is -- maybe bronze is actually hardest.

Funny contrast. I've heard some people are already hacking the game to get ahead. (One thread here.)

Once everyone gets the hang of the game, we should organize a fun tournament or two.

...Except blizzard ruined that by dividing the MP into regions

Yeah, it's related to smurfing. Sam idea behind it.

EDIT: Also, Blizzard are apparently working on cross-region multiplayer at the moment. It seems to be mainly technical reasons that made them want to divide people.

EDIT2: Okay, someone just tell me what the fuck I'm doing wrong. My economy is great, and the post-game graphs reflect that. I'm not falling behind the curve at all. And yet, about 10-20 minutes in, the enemy shows up with 10 carriers and I have no way to stop him. Promptly destroys me. I even build the appropriate counters (vikings), but it doesn't help. [i]AT ALL.[/i]

I do hope you're focus-firing. Also, do Ghosts get EMP in this game?

Anyway, harass. If you let the other player do as he pleases, he will eventually roll you. Figure out an early build that gets a pack of Marines and Marauders in his base ASAP. Later, throw Medivacs into the mix. If the fight isn't starting until the 20 minute mark, you already lost.

OH GOD PHOTON CANNONS

(Ghosts have EMP. I built Ghosts. It didn't help. I'm not even sure if they hit air or if they just suck.)

If you're attacking before the 20 minute mark you're rushing and a douche bag

If you swarmed a bunch of EMP'ed Carriers and lost, you were either vastly outnumbered, drunk, not focusing fire, or getting hit by something else (like Psionic Storm or Archons). Do you have a replay?

20 minutes is a long-ass time. I have Zerglings in 3 minutes, and they're partying in your mineral field in 4. And that's not intentionally rushing; that's just my normal build order. It's fairly routine for a 2v2 round to end in 15 minutes in my experience. In 20 minutes the heavy air is out, so you and I clearly have different definitions of "rushing". The worst thing you can do in a fight against Protoss is leave them to their own devices.

Vastly outnumbered is the correct answer. The question is WHY THE FUCK AM I OUTNUMBERED.

This game, I lost against cloaked banshees because I can't both attack and defend at the same time. And rushing is useless, since the enemy can just wall off his ramp and become invulnerable to a frontal attack, especially if he's playing terran.

I swear, air superiority is the ONLY way to win in this game, short of rushing. So far I've never lost with Void Ray spam, but I feel cheap playing that way.

Anyway, I agree air is important in this game. I was surprised when I realized that Zerg only have one ground unit (Hydralisk) that can even hit air. Since I realized that, I've been making my Spire before my Hydra Den. Other races get more anti-air options, but even then it's only like 3 units. I never ever neglect my Spore Crawlers for base defense anymore; between that and a small group of Mutalisks for backup I stuff Void Ray rushes pretty easily now. And then my Mutas go check your Cannon layouts.

PS: The replay files are tiny as hell; feel free to attach some of this fail so we can all laug^H^H^H^Hcritique it.

so you always rush then? God I hate rushers.

When I start the fighting, I get fucked by ramp walls. A pack of marines cannot get past a walled-off ramp, when it's flanked by either enemy marines or photon cannons. Air becomes your only alternative. Besides, I get outnumbered about 10 minutes in as it is.

Also, I just won. Guess what strategy I used?

No; actual rushing screws your economy. In the first Starcraft those Zerglings would be there in 2:30. That's a rush. A competent player will have Marines or Zealots to kill those Zerglings of mine at the 4 minute mark. Someone who's rushing to Void Ray will lose a lot of Probes.

There's a big difference between rushing and harassing. If you don't harass, why would they need base defense? Pour resources into Void Rays and spam ftw! EDIT: Like X-G probably just did.

Air, or a drop ship, or Reavers, or something very long range (like Siege Tanks), etc.

If you haven't already, I recommend checking out Day9's daily. It's probably the best source of SC2-education available, and it's entertaining to boot. Here's a link to his Blip account. It should be fairly easy to get into lower diamond if you watch and learn from those videos.

Edit:
Also, those complaining about rushing obviously don't have the experience to scout and shut down an all-in. But you need to know what your opponent is doing. Always.

I find zerg are the worst rushers, they always come at me when I only have 2 marines(who knew SCVs were such a good defense line). Personally, I go for a double missile turret line for air defense, 2-3 siege tanks with bunkers for ground defense, then 100 marines with 21 vikings for offense/spot defense.

Hasn't failed me yet

Yeah I just can't build up an army, pay attention to scouts, memorize where all the other players are, what they are doing, and build a defense while resource hunting, in 2-5 minutes. just can't do it.

If I get attacked before say 5-10 minutes its a bloody rush

Yup, that's pretty much it. Do that and you'll be a pro in no time!

If I have air or drop ships or siege tanks, it's not harassing early anymore. Then it's at the 20 minute mark.

Besides, even siege tanks cannot see up hills.

No, but you'll be amazed how far a well placed scan gets you (I personally tend to refuse the mass viking/tank hype that's going on at the moment in TvT). Reaper harass + early banshee harass will most of the time set your opponent back enough to greatly reduce his ability to mass those fairly costly units, and you can just walk over him with your mm + 1 tank-push.

Won two matches with void rays, then I get hit by 6 roaches after 5 minutes. How the fuck am I supposed to deal with that? I can't build zealots any faster, not without crippling my strategy.

Your strategy needs room for flexibility. Otherwise, yes, getting hit by something you weren't expecting will pooch you. Scout early and have some base defense.

I did have some base defense. I had two zealots, a sentry and was about to add a photon cannon to it. Other than that I was fully focused on getting the heavy economy up required for Void Ray harassment to work.

Remember your own comment earlier; you need to wall in if you're relying on building up your economy.

I had a Protoss/Zerg team do this yesterday; 5 Cannons on one ramp and 6 Spine Crawlers on the other. Focus on making your cannon wall, then focus on pumping out Void Rays. Focusing on building money while half-assing your defense is a great way to die on the first assault.

I was going to wall up, but I can't wall up without money, and I can't get money if I don't invest in money, and if I invest in money I get destroyed by roaches. Any other ideas? Spending money on a defense that you never end up using is even worse.

Any half decent player that sees canons on your ramp will immediately know what's up and fend of your rays, or possibly just push through before you get them out, depending on their build. The only way to know how to respond to these things is to play and watch a lot of games, to a point where you have encountered any feasible build and/or cheese, and figure out how to act accordingly.

The key really is scouting. I usually send my first probe/scv/drone to their base to see what their doing and leave it there (in one of the corners) or close so it can keep scouting at least once more before being destroyed.

Of course, seeing what your opponent is doing is useless if you can't use that information to counter their build. For instance, if your terran and you see two warp gates going up, you know to go reapers. If you see multiple extractors early game, their probably teching up/going air.

You need to balance investing in economy and investing in base defense (even if it's "slower") early game.

The units are prices accordingly; Cannons, Turrets, and Crawlers are relatively cheap because they may never fire a shot. Sure, there's a chance they may be a waste of money, but so is everything you build. And you'll be sorry the next time Dark Templars are merrily carving up your Drones.

This time I had a great defense, but I still lost. I can't build enough stalkers to take down his vikings, even with a far superior economy.

I think at this point we really need to see some replays. If you have a superior economy then either you have too much money (ie: you aren't converting it into troops quick enough) or something else is going on here.

EDIT: For the hell of it I'm going to post that 1 hour 3v3 from work I mentioned earlier. Only decent players were me (as hot-pink Zerg) and my production manager (McAwesome). tooled is normally good as he's an old hand at Starcraft, but he was lagging so bad he couldn't do much. The other three were largely noobs. Nothing special, just entertaining to do 3v3s with friends.

I'm the kind of player that goes for a fast expand and macros up really fast. I try and build up a forward army somewhere around where the other players are supposed to expand. I seee a lot of players only expanding when they start running low on minerals in their main. That is not the right thing. You need to be able to replace your entire army in a minute in order to win.

Lego Starcraft:

I've a coworker who is about to get Stacraft 2, so I may buy it in the future (although I'd prefer to wait until it's a bit cheaper, still I don't know if my laptop can handle it though - HP Pavillion dv6000).

See? Air wins again! wtf

What the hell, was that Dragoons? There are no Dragoons in Starcraft II. ;_;

There was a request for cheesy replays somewhere in this thread, here is one particular game that made me rage pretty bad. It's not like you're ever going to scout that in time.

That replay is what I'm going to point to now when people tell me they don't need to make turrets/crawlers/cannons for perimeter defense, especially when everyone should know Protoss go Void Ray spam 50% of the time. You had money for 5 missile turrets minimum before the Voids arrived; grouped around your command center that would have been your win.

EDIT: I also shudder that Thomas probably thinks that was a rush ... on both sides.

It's usually more about execution than strategy. A highly ranked player could easily make a well-rounded army and stomp anything that less skilled player throws at him, though it wouldn't be the easiest way for him to win.

If your opponent builds cannons, then you should have a larger army and should be able to win by stopping him expanding while expanding yourself.

Likewise, if your opponent expands before you, try to hit him just after the expo goes up when you should have a far superior army provided you scout and don't let him get towers up first, and you haven't wasted your own resources on towers.

On that topic, how are you supposed to scout effectively, i.e. without getting your scout immediately killed and learning nothing of value? Seeing a barracks going up at 2:00 hardly helps. You knew he was going to do that anyway. And any later, you tend to die before getting close enough to see any structures.

I don't know - I've never had much success scouting between him getting a wall up and me getting an observer out. What I meant was scouting for expansions, which is quite easy to do.

A few other things I've noticed: your workers are very good at defending early rushes. Also, high ground makes a ridiculously large difference (and seems to work for air too!). If you get a void ray out early along with some zealots and defend at your slope, it's amazing how an opponents ranged ground units disintegrate.

Nah, I've seen it once or twice in diamond. It's not really effective at all unless it's an all in such as this that doesn't get scouted.

My wife is awesome, she bought me SCII for my birthday... I have no idea how she even knew that was a game I wanted, but she managed to get the right one and completely surprised me. Now I just got to find the time to actually play the game, maybe we can all have another B.NET tournament

And if it turns out badly, well, there are drugs for that...

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/08/22/021243/Anti-Depressants-Used-Against-StarCraft-Addiction

Sometimes you can't scout their base; just don't let him scout yours either. Changelings and Observers help. Nothing can stop a Sensor Sweep, of course. And yes, patrol the expansions. Always, always, always.

Keep your scout around for more info. Don't be afraid of losing it. What he attacks your scout with is valuable information. More than that, if he's going for a reaper rush, for example, him cranking out a marine first to kill your scout delays his reaper that much longer for you to counter it. Scan, use an Observer or sacrifice an Overlord some time in to get further info.

To complicate matters, what your opponent doesn't have in his base also helps. That he seemingly only had a gateway and a cybernetics core at that point in the game should definitely raise some alarms.

Also, use turrets, cannons and the like sparingly. The more you use, the more on the defensive you are. 10 turrets in your main won't help defend your expansion. But your enemy's 20 marine army, for the same price, will happily attack it.

That said, if your opponent is slow and you think you can out-tech him, by all means wall off and try.

Edit: Hmm. I can't attach files. Dropping a file onto the area makes Firefox want to open it. Clicking the "Drop Attachments Here" as a button and trying to attach it does nothing.

And this is why I like Spore Crawlers. Offensive crawls is lawls.

Yeah, that's why I pushed out when I did (right before the rays). I was expecting some proxy gateway action, since I hadn't seen the second gas.

Observers are expensive and too late to subvert early attacks (and force me to delay my void rays by spending resources on an otherwise useless-to-me robotics facility), sensor sweeps are good but I don't play terran that much, and anything else just tends to get blocked off by ramp walls.

And say that he kills my scout with a marine, or two zerglings. What am I supposed to glean from that? (Aside from the fact that I can't pay attention to what is killing the scout all the time -- I have to build my base, too.)

For Protoss, if you'd rather avoid the 200/100 cost of the robotics facility and the 50/100 of the observer, research hallucination for 100/100. Hopefully you're using at least one sentry a few minutes in anyway, so you'll get free scouts (for 100 energy) whenever you want.

That he didn't attack you with a reaper. And if he does, that scout more than paid for itself. Ideally, you'd like to see if he makes a second barracks or goes for a factory. You don't party with zerglings though. You run. If you see just 2, then be suspicious. If you see 6, then be ready shortly for 10. Also, if you don't see an extractor once a spawning pool is finished, you should anticipate a heavy rush. More than that, there's also a chance that he'll mix the zerglings with banelings so make sure you get another peek at his base two minutes later (for zerg it's easier since they can't really wall off). Perhaps needless to say, for Protoss, the most valuable scouting information is what building he builds right after his cybernetics core.

If you're playing against terran who's walling off, consider hiding your scv in a far corner of his base for a minute or two. Then scout his base again to see what's going on.

Edit: Ah. I was able to attach a replay file with IE8.

I hear a lot of "the chance is" or "he might" or "be suspicious". It still sounds like a crapshoot to me. And if all I do is respond to what he does, I can't win anyway. So what do I do in the meantime, other than roll the dice and hope that what I produced counters what he has produced?

Also, I've faced zerg that wall off quite well -- they just place two or three queens on top of the ramp with a few zerglings in front. Not quite as fast as a terran or protoss can do it, but still hard to get through.

Exactly. How the hell am I supposed to build my base while fending off basic units pouring into my base (just two Zealots in the original SC were able to take down my Terran base) all the while scouting my opponent. Not to mention targetting specific units during a battle (i.e. focusing fire), using special abilities and building my base and new units. This way I can play Diablo and have a same clickfest.

Maybe she crawled up to this forum and found out about your Starcraft addiction or maybe she found out Starcraft and Brood war boxes in your home?

Serious scouting is only of real use when you've played all races and you have at least a vague understanding of each. At least this is what I found in Wc3 - scouting allows you confirm common courses of action.

At the moment a Terran or Zerg base looks like a generic mash of buildings to me - with my current understanding of other races, the only real use of scouting is to find out where their army is or whether or not they are expanding.

The other thing that really bothers me is this: what counters what also depends on the size of the army. For example, zealots might counter marines early on, but mass marines will massacre mass zealots before they even get close.

They can.

It's scary to see how their hands move through the keyboard, and not doing random nonsense.

I think this is my response to most of the comments here, and by "they" I mean your opponents, not the Koreans. You can't build your base while fending off basic units? Well where are your basic units? Defending is cheaper than attacking; you should have the easy job ffs.

Actually, most of my problems with RTS' aren't my APM, but rather that I just can't keep like 5 alternate strategic logics working at the same time(gathering, expanding, teching, scouting, attacking) like OICW pointed out. If the RTS keeps simplifying stuff like Gathering(in SC2, you can just rally point the command center to the minerals), then maybe I can keep up better. Adding unit queues and tech queues helped me as well. But still, it ain't a good strategy to queue up a lot since you're eating lots of minerals earlier.

Dario ff: thank you, I have a life. I want to play for recreation. Not grind my clicking skills 8 hours a day.

Queuing in general is a bad idea. If you have enough minerals to fill a queue you should build more production buildings instead. In low level games, I'd say keeping average unspent minerals low is more important than keeping APM high.

You asked how you were supposed to do it.

EDIT: Just wondering, how are the leagues named for these insanely skilled people on B.NET?

Pretty much. Some people want a hard game. APM doesn't really matter that much in our league; just learn to multitask.

EDIT: I would also like to point out that I am by no means good at this game. But when I lose, I know why, and it usually boils down to "I'm bad".

And when I loose I also know I'm bad, but I don't know the details

I really can't focus on more than a couple complex tasks at a time or my head starts spinning. Just get frustrated, my attention span shortens, and ability to think straight goes out the window.

I pretty much am incapable of playing some of these games

So concentrate on the things in life that you do well, and don't worry about the rest. Concentrate on that fact awhile.

There is a reason I don't play games very often. Probably the last video game I played was a year ago, at a big lan party. Haven't touched one since.

I went and bought StarCraft 2 the other day after seeing a thing on the news about it. Later I realised that I probably only bought it because since there was so much enthusiasm for it I thought I'd be missing out if I didn't. Haven't taken the cellaphane off the box yet.

AHHHHHHHHHH!!!! PPPSSHHH!!!!

Heh, in 3v3 I'm in the bronze league still struggling to get out and win games, but in 4v4 i'm in the platinum league and seem to not be having a problem.

I won three straight games as terran.

I can't help but think it came down to the other guy not being all that good though. And as usual, I'm sitting on way too much money unspent. I can't both focus on basebuilding and micromanagement.

League is pretty meaningless outside of 1v1, particularly just after your placement games.

Yeah, it's really a flaw in the gameplay in my opinion. Warcraft 3 is infinitely more fun because you can focus on micro for prolonged periods of time. Any argument that this requires less skill is nonsense because there is still an unlimited depth of micro one can go into.

The other thing that really makes me what to delete the game altogether is watching replays of top players in the Diamond league who do little else other than camp in their base / expo in an unassailable position (usually due to the ludicrous bonus one gets from high ground) and then, when their army peeks, come out and wtf pwn. Or even worse, when both players do this!

I was really expecting the game to grow on my as I played it more. I'm now in Platinum League for both 1v1 and 2v2, and still struggling to see why anyone would want to play something so inferior to Wc3.

Macro is easy with buildings hotkeyed.

Noone said it wasn't easy, the point is that it spoils the continuity of battles, it is not particularly fun and just generally detracts from gameplay. What's worse is that is that there is often the other extreme where the most tactically favourable thing for you to be doing is sitting in your base doing bugger all other than scouting the opponent and massing units. In Wc3 this "downtime" is filled by creeping which is fun and cool.

I say that queuing is broken in this game In other games resources are used when units start to build, not when you queue them. I find this very annoying.

The servers seem to be very unstable. I see a lot of people complaining about servers going down in multiplayer. Also, achievements don't work since 2 or 3 days ago.

There seems to be a funny bug in the Mac version, too: with a Spanish keyboard, pressing the º key (they key next to 1) makes the game crash Now I wonder what kind crappy code they have for that kind of bug

BTW, the achievements have just started to work again, while I was posting this.

Obviously this is the intended behavior. It's a way to (artificially) increase the high-end learning curve. It's not "broken", but I agree that it's annoying.

That sure sounds like an interesting bug ^^

Who would be interested in a North American region funament?

I think this weekend is too last minute (though I could do it), next weekend is Labor Day so the earliest would probably be September 11th.

I'm thinking best of 3 matches for as many people as we can get to sign on.

I'm in and wouldn't mind arranging/spectating/sharing replays. Can anyone else set aside several hours on that weekend and want to compete for fun? We should probably try to arrange people by current rank fist and then by times available.

"Tournament" seems like a strong word for the level of player we have around here (myself included). "Organized chaos" might be more appropriate.

Fun story: one of the girls at work won't play StarCraft because she only plays casual stuff like FarmVille, so for kicks I created a game on a 8-player field as Terran, and gathered all resources as the game ran in the background during work. Then I built all over the map, leaving room for "roads". I put my vehicles and infantry on patrol and bam; Social City rip-off. Then I showed her how to clear room by attacking buildings. Then I showed her how to make a parking lot with 8+ Nukes.

StarCraftVille. It's gonna be huge I tell you.

Edited for accuracy per your suggestion.

Edit: I found this nice thread where people who want to practice and play against others have provided their information. It's organized by server and then by current 1v1 league skill.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=139384