Starcraft II: Lessons Learned

Yes, it’s me again (and if I’m spamming blogs, well, you people should blog!). Got my Starcraft II: Starter Edition running (downloaded from the official site, so no PS or BS, mind you). So, let’s go over some basics first.

The Starter Edition only allows me to play four/five campaign missions, two challenges (which I should get to), a few selected maps (max are 2v2 maps, no higher than that), and a custom map named StarJeweled (which is a surprisingly nice, albeit hectic, game of Bejeweled, Starcraft style. Try it out!). Furthermore, I can only play as Terran. Which might be a good thing; I can hone in my basic Terran strategy before I humiliate myself with the other two races.

So, the campaign I played (like a wuss) on casual. It was fun, introducing me to basics such as movement, some gunning and running, and one of the only place for me to play against Zerg or Protoss. It didn’t really help me in the sense of multiplayer strategizing, but hey, it’s campaign.

I inspected the multiplayer games. Turned out I could only make games against AIs of easy or very easy levels (which get surprisingly testy if you let them go late-game, as I learned while poring over techs and builds in one game). Meh, easy prey. Got my Terran custom achievements pretty quickly playing that. Experimented on walling off my base, as well as getting the “golden hour” build perfected. As I learn later, I was building my supply depot one SCV too late.

The Protossibilities

My first real challenge was against a lad who played Protoss (and obviously had the full game) on Xel’Naga Caverns. I thought, “oh crap, he’s going to wipe the floor with me.” And with good reason; I have no true experience with a Protoss player in SC2, given that I could only play against Terran AIs. I was still playing with an offish build, and my wall was incorrectly constructed. I decided to scan early with my orbital command, and only saw a stalker or two, plus a zealot. The dumb moron I am, I thought, “hey, let’s send four marines to their base! It’ll be great!” Of course, I neglected to identify the number of gateways and warp gates he had going. By the time my tiny army reached his end of the map, a formidable force of four or five stalkers easily ripped them to shreds. I began to panic (though fortunately didn’t send my main forces).

And what did I do? Pump out a few marauders and marines. But by then my opponent had sent his stalkers, with zealot and sentry escorts, up my ramp. My marines stationed there (and that’s all of them) were gone in a flash, as were my futile attempts at making marauders and marines, and his units casually walked by my failed wall in. GG, my friend, GG.

Tag Team No!

Another memorably horrible game occurred on some space map (don’t remember which one). It was two medium-leveled AIs, set at random, a Zerg player, and I (the randoms turned out to be Zerg and Terran as well). I didn’t think medium was going to be a huge step above easy. But before I could get some adequate defenses up (see: marines, a bunker and marauders), the enemies suddenly waltzed up the main ramp with roaches, hydralisks and marauders. I was toast. My Zerg buddy didn’t seem to care or respond–all he had were zerglings and a queen.

While I desperately moved my SCVs to a new location, the rest of my base, as well as his, were annihilated. I tried to reestablish a base on another expansion, hoping the enemy wouldn’t find me. It didn’t work; no sooner did I churn out my first marine did that same squad walk up the ramp again. Well @#%@.

Wait… Did He Just Win?

My final interesting match happened today. In a free-for-all match, I was up against a very easy Terran AI, a player who didn’t seem to talk much, and a rather boisterous player who tried to play mind games.

From the replay, the match went like this: I began with a much smoother build, learning to build the supply depot at 9/11. I walled myself in, and built two more barracks to work with. The AI was doing whatever the AI did (which, as a very easy AI, usually advanced buildings sooner than they built units). The timid friend (let’s call him Blue, for his color of the match) had only a barracks up, with some supply depots in a square. The loud person (Yellow) went straight for the factory, and churned out a tank and a few marauders.

At about five minutes, Yellow decided to move toward my location with two marauders and a siege tank. Needless to say, they were ripped to shreds by a dozen marines backed by marauders. We didn’t cross paths until much later after that.

Soon enough, I gathered enough marines (and balls) to storm Blue base. He had a few bunkers up, plus about seven marines. I had a platoon of about twenty. I dispatched his (non-existent) outer defenses, and destroyed his barracks. Oddly enough, his marines were located on the other end of the base, as were his bunkers; what was more, was that he ejected his marines to fight me. Poor choice on his part; I scrambled his marines like eggs before eliminating everything else.

Yellow, on the other hand, was building thors, massive ground units that decimated nearly anything in its way. Instead of approaching my base with them (with small escorts), he decided to run the AI to the ground. That began quite well on his part, until I decided to send my marines to his base (with prior scanning, of course). I managed to destroy his factory, his barracks, and his armory, all of which was required to build additional thors. Unfortunately for me, marines don’t fare well against a thor, much less three; they shambled back to base soon enough, and scraped the marines aside like old lead paint.

So I continued building marauders to counter his threat (marauders have a bonus against armored enemies); I already had a small group that I’d been slowly building up. I bided my time, for fear that he was hiding his units somewhere from his base, so he could strike when I least expected it. Eventually, though, an announcement heralded the defeat of the AI; it appeared that Yellow decided to ransack that base again, to finish the job. Sensing my opportunity, I sent my mass of MMM–marines, marauders and medivacs–to scrub his base. He “g2g” (which I, sympathetic to such circumstances, would understand), which ended in my victory.

So what went wrong with Blue and Yellow? Well, Blue didn’t get his base up and running fast enough–an understandable error by any newbie, because the competitive sphere in RTS is extremely unrelenting. Yellow built three thors, and from what I could see, got tunnel vision–he focused too much on combat, which allowed me to sneak into his defenseless base (to be fair, I tunnel-visioned too, forgetting to pump out more units at that last battle). He also failed to replace his ruined base; had he done so, my press into his base the second time could have been much more difficult. But when I got there, there was only a barracks that was rebuilt.

So what did we learn? I still suck, but now I fail less. If you want to go mano-a-mano against me, or help me get a few co-op achievements, feel free to give me a call. Because I’m a paranoid prick, I’ll ask for buddy info privately.

Adios.