Starcraft II: Friends Indeed

Hello, it’s me again! And it’s Christmas! Huzzah to all those who celebrate it, and I thank ye for making it an actual holiday so I can relax a bit.

So, where to begin…

30 Minutes or Less

For this trio of experiences, I share my dismal skills with the much more affable and powerful David!

Unfortunately, I’d say that we didn’t get a great start. In a 2v2 on Discord IV, it appeared that our opponents were actually VERY high ranked (well, higher than me, at least, wherever I stand as is). So, it came to a rude surprise when they were easily able to amass siege tanks, marines, marauders, carriers, stalkers and a mothership to top it all off.

Our toast was burnt, and no amount of scanning would scrape off the black part.

And David, in his good wisdom, advised that we should bail while we still had some dignity. (Okay, I had none.)

…Yea.

Hard On

For our next trick, we decided to go with something a little more tame: co-op vs. AI, 2v2 on Discord IV, on hard difficulties. I was Terran, David randomly selected Zerg, and our random AIs were chosen to be Protoss and Zerg.

Here, I’m getting a little better at a beginning build and an actual strategy before running blindfolded into the fray. David introduced me to the 3rax and 1-1-1 strategies. 3rax, which actually took a minute to sink in what it meant, meant building three barracks in rapid succession for a stable infantry army. 1-1-1 stood for barracks, factory and starport, quickly providing military options from all branches. Give or take, I’ll probably be refining those techniques to my (dis)advantage.

So it started off pretty standard; after the usual humdrum, I plunked a pair of bunkers down at the height of the ramp, stashing a few marines and marauders in them, while the rest of the army stood in wait. David was going roaches, and being completely unable to understand SC2 Zerg strategies (damn you, Starter!), I let him do what he did best–which was good, since he did whatever he did better than what I could do.

Well, what did you know, a mass of stalkers, zealots, roaches and hydralisks appeared on the minimap. Taking a few losses, we weathered their assault–they actually retreated after losing quite a few. So, expanding, refining, and sparring ensued, which somehow escalated to the enemies having infestors, colossi and brood lords. It was chaos, man! Absolute madness. There was a large stand at our side of the rich mineral expansion, where we just threw everything into repulsing the AIs from David’s Zerg hatchery.

But we pushed, some would say slightly ineffectively, but well enough, to overwhelm the AIs’ military forces. And while David went about scrapping the multiple Zerg structures (although in one raid, I take credit for removing that greater spire), I went about killing expansions and destroying pylons. If I had a day job, I wouldn’t quit it.

Short story long, we won. And it was a nice morale boost to me.

Which meant…

Cluster@!$#

Here we went again. A full Terran matchup, Discord IV.

David went 1-1-1 with his build, while I went 3rax for mine. Now, here’s the part where I should tell you that I have absolutely no idea when to place additional supply depots, since my economy is usually out of whack between resource floating and having too little mineral while too much gas. The result of that? Constantly supply-blocking myself.

The enemy pair decided to go in for a frontal assault fairly early on, which was easily repelled. A bit of sparring here and there, we again pushed to the rich mineral field in the center (obviously held by David’s command center). The enemy had a few things going for them, including ravens and I believe a few banshees. Of course, David’s harassment of their bases with a squadron of banshees first was probably more annoying. At about this point, David pointed out how do 1-1-1 with all the perks: have the barracks build the tech labs, while your other buildings come up, which would take the barracks’ place for instant extra options.

Then one of the players quit. I was slightly elated, yet also slightly suspicious (see previous SC2 blog for details).

Their expansions were fairly light. Yes, a few annoying siege tanks abandoned by the player, plus a bit of this-and-that, but nothing too bad.

Then we see over the horizon a good dozen medivacs, which flanked what appeared to be a SEA of marines. And holy hell, that was the second most annoying wall of units I had to push through in this past week.

We threw everything at this guy. I stupidly sent all of my marines and marauders, which were gone in short order. We sent hellions, thors, battlecruisers, all of which seemed to melt under the combined power of the marines and medivacs. Finally, I decided to build some vikings to remove the medivacs from play; apparently at this time, David had already done good business taking down a good number of the marines, as well as leveling the base (supply depots are an important part of a healthy army). The player decided to send the medivacs on a trip, which I followed with my vikings (which was probably a ridiculous waste of time, but David had base razing down).

Throughout this entire match, David was building an absurd amount of orbital commands, which turned out to be quite hilarious when you see fifty MULEs drop onto a single mineral field. That’s two clusterfucks in one game!

Here was where I learned a sad truth: my laptop didn’t have the capacity to watch epic battles, which meant I couldn’t ever micro anything bigger than a raid. Well, what are you gonna do; I suck at micro anyway, so I’m likely sticking to massing troops and sending them to their untimely deaths. Much easier that way.

Have a happy holidazzling day!