STARCRAFT: Strategy and Balance

[Catharz]

It's queue, or queued. Yes, it's a terrible word. Blame the french (who pronounce it kuh!).

[PhoneLobster]

1178001862[/unixtime]]It's queue, or queued.

On some deeper level, in the parts of my brain not attrophied by spell checkers, I know that.

But my years of training as a computer scientist have rendered me unable to spell correctly.

Its a secret tradition, if I break it they turn me into a gnome and I spend the rest of my life screwing with your computer's boot sector late at night.

Edit: Edited for wrongness.

[User3]

That sorta stuff just didn't happen in star craft. Whether the rush was early game or late, one big encounter would tip the economic scales forever, and thats even playing on maps with piles of additional resources because no one ever played on maps the designers intended for less than twice as many players as you actually had.

Wait, were you not paying attention before? If you take resources out of the equation, obviously the game comes down to firepower. That's a nonsensical argument, though, because the game is all about resource management and acquisition. That's your only actual incentive to engage in combat that is not the "direct attack on enemy base" that you seem to think the game comes down to.

[erik]

Indeed, single battles sometimes decided my games but certainly not always, or even often really. Unless they were particularily devastating battles, which meant that one player really was just much better than the other, then there was a whole lot more finesse to it.

Frequent sorties against the enemy to know what they're about and to make them overreact either conservatively or aggressively seemed to be key to me when playing against tough human opponents. I should note that most of my games were with a random human partner against 6 computers, because I liked the leisure that that entailed as opposed to fighting people vs. people... so I am definitely less qualified to talk about tactics in heads up games, but I got by alright regardless.

I've never played TA, so I can't say anything as to how superior or not that it is. I will say that I definitely agree that starcraft has lots of areas with room for improvement that were possible even 10 years ago, however, it's shining feature was that it was so well balanced. The simpler a game is, the easier it is to balance. If they had air units that functioned as something other than floating troops, then that would have been a whole nother level of complexity to balance so I don't begrudge their keeping thing simple.

For what it's worth, one can get a force well over 200 troops in starcraft, heh, especially if you are protoss mind control some zerg and make 400 zerglings. But of course this never happens in a serious game.


I definitely did get annoyed with the difficulty of using the special abilities on troops. I almost never used dark archons, ghosts, defilers, or science vessels due to the demand they put on my micromanagement. I simply had too many funky abilties to deal with (and no time to use them!) and chose a play style that was definitely inferior because I didn't like having to stress over having magic troops who I couldn't get to in time to use their abilities optimally. I would have loved if I could have set some stuff for auto-usage, or if they had more auras or passive abilities (like the arbiter's cloaking aura, or medics running to heal). That would have provided interesting abilities without the demand on my already stressed attention.

That said, I still loved starcraft and played many thousands of games, so it couldn't have been so bad.

[Draco_Argentum]

TA really did have the UI over SC. I loved both and spent heaps of hours on them. They're very different games. SC is very much about micro management. If you aren't there for a fight the whole time your guys behave like retards. TA was much more macro scale. Your guys could handle fights better and you could queue orders for when you were somewhere else.

They were both very much about economy though. Either you expanded or the other guy had more guns.

Both games could've taken a lesson from Dark Reign though. In fact so can lots of modern RTSs. Where the hell are my harass, scout and S&D buttons these days?

[PhoneLobster]

A lot of people said that about dark reign once upon a time, admittedly not for long, but for a while there they did.

I must have come into the franchise too late though because dark reign 2 REALLY sucked as far as I could tell.

You do still see scout buttons around, I can't recall exactly where but I saw one one something RTSy recently.

I also saw one on the turn based strategy part of Sword of the Stars, now THERE is a kick ass new game. Not released on store shelves in Australia, of course...

[RandomCasualty]

1178000990[/unixtime]]
Doing a smoke and mirrors run down of random stuff they do is meaningless. They all could have been called "magic wall walkers that just sorta sit there in the sky" and all those traits wouldn't have changed.

Flying around fast, moving in different patterns and ways, and yeah you know GOING ON BOMBING RUNS (and cool strafing runs and dog fights) isn't JUST cool its DIFFERENT to the ways ground units behave, which makes for different reasons to have them over ground units and different ways and reasons to use them.

You're looking at eye candy again and not actual strategic depth. Every unit in starcraft had a different role and was good at different things. It's like saying "Pawns and rooks are the same in chess, they're both peices, they just look slightly different."

Yeah, I'm sure TA and supreme commander look better, there's no doubt about that. Starcraft is an old game and the graphics are very outdated. But then again, some of the best games of strategy of all time are very old.

Supreme uses what, 1 base scout, 1 base fighter, 1 basic bomber, 1 basic carrier, 1 skirmisher, 1 torpedo bomber, 1 advanced fighter, one advanced bomber, one advanced carrier and maybe an advanced skirmisher, AND two factions have giant flying leviathan thingies.

Does it have:

-Air units with special abilities
-Air units with splash damage
-Air units with cloaks
-Air units that have support abilities that improve other units

In an RTS micro control is generally bad, Star Craft is the great grand daddy example of THAT old chestnut.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this. I personally like being able to control my units tactics. Stuff like flanks, burrow ambushes, and so forth make for a good game in my opinion. Much more interesting than just taking two big forces and attacking moving them together and sitting back and see who wins.

I mean, without micro there's no need to even watch the battles, you're better off just sitting back at base worrying about producing more stuff. And what's the fun of that? I always thought strategy games were about the battles.

No, that is not skill, its sucky game design.

Why the heck do I have to be there for my protoss wizard dude to zap an incoming horde of zerglings (who don't so much need their boss to activate their "bite shit" power)?

Well because if it were autocast you'd run out of energy on the first zergling you saw. You only get a set number of psistorms. Each one costs 75 energy, and you can have a max of 250 energy at one time. Having psistorm as an autocast ability wouldn't even make sense. Even if you could do it you wouldnt' want to.

I certainly wouldn't want to come back and see that I burned all my power reserves on three zerglings.

Regardless of that what effect does it have on the game? It means that for some players, and against any simple rush from a player with similar reflexes let me suggest ALL players, may as well not have any powers that require arbitrarily complex and time consuming activation.

It's really not a complex or time consuming activation. Once again: Select templar, press t, click on area you want to storm. That's all. It's the same process as declaring an attack move, only you use t instead of a.

Controlling up to 1000 units of land, sea, and air craft with an easy interface and qued orders to time an effective attack on a similarly complex force while keeping my production rates on track for future attacks and dealing with who knows what multiple fronts of battle is a challenge to my multitasking abilities.

Not if there's no micro involved and it takes 30 minutes to cross the map. Seriously, SC units crossed the map in seconds, not minutes. It was intensely fast.

Like I said, micro management like that is a BAD thing, I may as well not have 5 guys with lightning storm if I need to do that because something that DOESN'T need to do that, like zerglings, will eat them before I can do it. And I'm not exactly alone in that.

Again, this was part of the skill element of the game. Besides templars kind of sucked against zerglings anyway. Psi storm was better against mass packs of hydralisks and other ranged units.

Knowing its there and finding the right spot to move the cursor to are really rather different things when examined closely.

How so? If I want to select the enemy base in Starcraft that happens to be at the 12 o clock position on Lost temple, I just click up there. It's not like the minimap changes or rolls around or anything. That position is always the same place on the screen. It requires no vision whatsoever.

Oh, balance, I could talk about that. And its great, heck I'd swear talking about resource models touches on TA's far superior balance, but, well, it wins out so massively just on INTERFACE alone (which is a massive deal in RTS) that frankly I didn't think I'd need to even go there...

Eh, interface is nothing compared to balance. Half the problem with interface is that it ends up noobifying the game. Everything can't be fire and forget, otherwise there's no tactics or strategy for you to actually do beyond simply tell your men to attack.

You're oddly enough bashing the fact that Starcraft allows you to use tactics, but I can't see that as a drawback by any means. I've played RTS like Homeworld that basically focus entirely on building stuff and remove the tactical element. Because the units fly themselves, you really can't no much beyond tell them what formation to be in and what to attack and hope for the best. It looked cool for sure, but it really had very little strategic or tactical depth.

Personally, I like setting up flanks and ambushes and stuff like that. That stuff adds depth to the game.

Advanced interfaces can be a blessing and a curse, because everything you end up automating ends up taking a part away from the game and making it simpler. It's like saying, "Gee, you know, it's tough having to aim at your foes in Doom, lets just have the mouse auto aim for you... It's kind of a pain controlling your movement too, lets just have it move the character automatically and you just have to choose when to fire and when to reload."

The more you dumb down the game, the less options its players have and the more people have to play the game a certain way.

The good thing about Starcraft was that this didn't happen, there were multiple ways to play. You had players who relied heavily on micro, others who tried to mass expand and macro their foes into the ground the ground and others who did various combinations of the two.

Basically Starcraft was built on the premise that you should always be doing something with your mouse. It wasn't a game where you sat on your hands for a while because nothing was going on. Something was ALWAYS going on. Whether it was producing new workers, or making more structures, or making troops or commanding existing troops. You could always be doing *something*, and you could rarely do everything you needed to do with perfect timing.

This made it very much a speed and skill game. Your mouse had to be darting about doing stuff. In fact, a lot of the pro level of that game was getting super fast at doing things. Now a lot of people felt stressed out by the speed of the game and wanted to slow it down. But that's not really what Starcraft was about. It wasn't armchair strategy, it was fast and brutal real time combat. Like I said before, playing Starcraft at even an intermediate level makes FPS games seem slow and boring by comparison. That's part of the appeal of the game.

Now I realize some people don't like that. But I certainly don't think the answer to fixing RTS games is sitting back and letting the AI do everything for you.

Star craft was fundamentally flawed in BALANCE terms starting from its poor resource and production model, running through unpleasant interractions of its clunky interface with a "some guys gotta click" balance elements and gameplay in general, its combined arms stuff was a shallow joke, and rolling on to the infamous zerg rush issues.

What zerg rush issues? If you lost to a lot of zerg rushes, you just needed more practice. Zerg rushes weren't all that powerful. If you want you can totally log onto Starcraft sometime and I'll show you how to stop a zerg rush. It's not particularly hard, but it does require micromanagement of your troops.

How you make TA and Supreme commander sound, you actually can't rush at all because it takes fucking forever to cross the map. So the game is two sides powering to massive forces that then clash against each other with every little harassment or early pressure. In my opinion, that makes for a very boring game.

Like I said before, Starcraft has you interacting with your opponent all the time. Shortly after you create your first zealot, you're probably going to be defending, or putting pressure on your foe. Every little action he takes is going to be noted and you can react to it in real time.

When you take 30 minutes to cross a map... well that freaking sucks. First, the games are going to be long as hell. Second, in the time it takes you to cross the map your opponent could have easily built a huge force to counter your attack force. I don't even see how you can win an RTS with a 30 minute lag time between attacks. By the time your uber force of Doom arrives, it's grossly out teched and out numbered.

I mean hell, your opponent has 30 minutes to prepare for it. 30 minutes! How the hell do you lose to something you knew was coming for 30 minutes?

TA's resource/production model is just plain beautiful, the recycling tacked on to it was a nice addition as well, the interface has a minimal impact on unit, factional or general gameplay balance, no suckers powers or tactics were based off having to BE there, and/or in three other places at the same, and rushes in TA were cool because they were not only more than the be all and end all of game play they were also a viable strategy that could readily be survived by even BOTH sides to see FURTHER strategies and game play proceed.

Why is not having to command your battles a good thing? Again, arent' these games about battles? I mean... it sounds like you want to just play sim city and ignore your troops in the field.

That's pretty boring to me. The exciting part of RTS is the battles, not sitting back at base constructing workers and barracks. I mean, what's the worth of having all those pretty explosions if you're staring at a barracks the whole time?

That sorta stuff just didn't happen in star craft. Whether the rush was early game or late, one big encounter would tip the economic scales forever, and thats even playing on maps with piles of additional resources because no one ever played on maps the designers intended for less than twice as many players as you actually had.

Are you kidding? Lots of people played on the original maps. Yes, big money maps were popular among newbies, but if you create a lost temple game, I guarantee you people will join it.

As far as early rushes are concerned, they only tipped the scales irrevocably if you were stupid. You see, part of playing Starcraft was also knowing when to retreat (which you probably wouldn't know because you don't pay attention to your battles). If your 6 zealots arrive to find 2 sunken colonies and 12 zerglings, you want to flee. You don't want to stand there and let his defenses tear you up. If you're the zerg and you find the protoss has blocked his ramp with 3 zealots and a photon cannon, you don't charge it like a newbie and lose all your men. You pull back and wait for a better spot.

Yes, if you're stupid and stubborn, the game could get settled in one battle as you throw away all your forces on your enemy's defense, but that's like saying wizards suck in D&D because you can take nothing but magic missile with all your slots. Smart players know when to get the fuck out of there and try something else.

I'm not disputing that Starcraft games could end quickly but with players of close skill they could go on for a long long time as well and the "it's all one rush" fallacy just doesn't apply.

As far as losing big battles and coming back, I've had that happen to me before. Really the problem in SC isn't so much losing troops as it is losing workers. You can very well lose a big force of zealots late game and recover, because you've got 12 gateways pumping. If you lose a bunch of workers at most of your bases, you're probably screwed. Then again, a big strategic premise of the game was protecting your workers...

What WASN'T so great for balance was the at the time utterly fantastical support for MODDING the game and introducing third party units.

But that was still both revolutionary and totally cool, its not like you HAD to play TA with star wars units if you didn't want to...

Like I said, that's a cool feature, but not particularly good for a strategy game. If you want it to be balanced, you can't have all kinds of new units being introduced all the time. It just makes for lots and lots of redundant units, plenty of useless units and probably a bunch of super units.

[Catharz]

1178002236[/unixtime]]

1178001862[/unixtime]]It's queue, or queued.

On some deeper level, in the parts of my brain not attrophied by spell checkers, I know that.

But my years of training as a computer scientist have rendered me unable to spell correctly.

Its a secret tradition, if I break it they turn me into a gnome and I spend the rest of my life screwing with your computer's boot sector late at night.

Edit: Edited for wrongness.

(def foo (make-que)) might a problem...

[Judging__Eagle]

1178031820[/unixtime]]

You're looking at eye candy again and not actual strategic depth. Every unit in starcraft had a different role and was good at different things. It's like saying "Pawns and rooks are the same in chess, they're both peices, they just look slightly different."

Yeah, I'm sure TA and supreme commander look better, there's no doubt about that. Starcraft is an old game and the graphics are very outdated. But then again, some of the best games of strategy of all time are very old.

Nah, the unit designs were pretty simple, boxes on top of boxes or triangle based prism attached to boxes, really low-poly stuff.

Starcraft was all about having really detailed images and spent tons of time animating the images in a method that is both stone age and ultimately ugly.

Blizzard has actually had a long reputation of doing stuff like that, putting on lots of pretty pictures and not really re-vamping gameplay.

Warcraft 2 compared to "Warcraft: Orcs and Humans"; is a good example fo that.

The 'gameplay' of TA is stil as good now as when I first played it; now I can load up really large maps that used to choke my P 133 about 12 years ago.

With the option to play online or go head to head versus custom AIs, the game is still as challenging as ever.

-Air units with special abilities
-Air units with splash damage
-Air units with cloaks
-Air units that have support abilities that improve other units

No, b/c the idea is to use planes in the manner that planes are expected to be used.

So, you have to land your planes to get them refueled (they can go indefinately, but they really drop their speed).

The lack of true 'special' ability units in TA is because TA used a different desin model. Which could summed up to this: "if a unit has a special ability, it will use it on a regualr basis; as all of it's attacks even".

The old 'spider' bot in TA for instance. Its weapon parylized what it hit, but it would have to keep hitting the target to keep it frozen. meaning you needed other troops to help kill the frozen unit.

The terran Science Vessel, Zerg Queen and Protoss Arbiter don't really have abilities that they could use on their own since starcraft was about being able to allow the player to create exploitable arbitrary events.

Instead of different 'air' units you have "Air" units that act in a manner that you expect.

Air is defined as one thing: "fast"

Since there's no ground underneath your air units, they can travel across the map and strike a target and be back before your main ground attack force hits.

That's the "air" special ability.

For "splash" attacks, you have bomber planes; which drop actual bombs in bombing runs. This is usually only good versus buildings, since they don't tend to run away or move.

With a bit of micro you can do "precision bombing" where all of the bombs hit one target. Now, I'm not sure if Supreme Commander has this or not, but I know for a fact that you could make your bombing runs count for as much as 50% more if you had your bombers execute a sharp turn 'just' as they were about to open their bomb doors; since they were 'turning' they would move very slowly and thus all of their bombs would drop in a tiny area.

Fighter Planes attack air (and in TA since they had missiles, they would attack either)

Gunboats are your dedicated air to ground attack units, but they tend to have to stand still and anti-air can make mincemeat out of them.

As for "cloak" units, they exist: stealth fighters and stealth bombers.

Units that you can see only when you have visual recognition, since your radars will not pick them up.

I'm forgetting the infinetly useful air scouts; these tiny little guys with high speed and a built-in radar were amazing to have patrolling your bases perimeter; or heck, I'd tend to have them patrol whole swathes of the map so I could keep an eye on all of my enemies.

That's one thing SC lacked, realistic air units that move the way fighter and bomber planes do, you know 'fast'?

In an RTS micro control is generally bad, Star Craft is the great grand daddy example of THAT old chestnut.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this. I personally like being able to control my units tactics. Stuff like flanks, burrow ambushes, and so forth make for a good game in my opinion. Much more interesting than just taking two big forces and attacking moving them together and sitting back and see who wins.

Well, Micro control in TA was such that, you benefitted from good micro, a lot.

Since you could que up whole attack groups well in advance; or even give standing orders to specfic factories to always produce the same unit you wouldn't have to worry about going back to your base to rebuild*.

It's one thng to hit the hotkey to crank out drones on your carrier battlegroup with protoss, it's an other thing completely to tell your carriers "if you lose a drone, build one to replace it; keep doing this until I tell you otherwise."

Dumb shit like that doesn't need to be micro-managed; moving your arbiter, carriers and zealots in tandem to protect each other and crush an enemy base is important to micro-manage.

*:With several factories cranking out units you could have one making high-end tanks, one making artillery, one making long-range missile carriers and a bunch of low-tier vehicle plants making anti-air trucks)

I mean, without micro there's no need to even watch the battles, you're better off just sitting back at base worrying about producing more stuff. And what's the fun of that? I always thought strategy games were about the battles.

No, TA replaced micro managing with order giving.

You give a unit/building a half-dozen or more orders and it will carry them out.

Heck, you can even put stuff like your 'super long range' artillery buildings on "fire at will" and tell them to shell a specific point and they'll alternate between shelling that point when they can't see anthing else to attack.

The only real time that you had to manage your forces was in the battles themselves, especially if you were attacking an enemy base.

Then again, I'm the sort of player who would send in piles and piles of crappy units into one side of your base to clog your eventual retaliation; while slowly sneaking troops past your plasma batteries and missle turret forests.

Well because if it were autocast you'd run out of energy on the first zergling you saw. You only get a set number of psistorms. Each one costs 75 energy, and you can have a max of 250 energy at one time. Having psistorm as an autocast ability wouldn't even make sense. Even if you could do it you wouldnt' want to.

I think that comparing TA and SC is not really a good way to go about doing things.

Comparing SC to Dawn of War probably is; since Dawn of War is a tactical game that isn't afraid to say that it is so.

Controlling up to 1000 units of land, sea, and air craft with an easy interface and qued orders to time an effective attack on a similarly complex force while keeping my production rates on track for future attacks and dealing with who knows what multiple fronts of battle is a challenge to my multitasking abilities.

Not if there's no micro involved and it takes 30 minutes to cross the map. Seriously, SC units crossed the map in seconds, not minutes. It was intensely fast.

No, not 30 minutes; 1-5 minutes if you're on a big map in TA; and I'm talking a map so big that even a jet-plane would take a while to go across and a nuclear rocket takes appreciable amount of time to cross.

At that point, you've left the "tactical" level of game play and you're at the "strategic" level of gameplay.

At that point your units have to know how to fend for themselves and you don't need to hold their hand every step of the way for their orders. If you do need to command your units at every instance, you're playing a squad-based game, not a strategy game.

Knowing its there and finding the right spot to move the cursor to are really rather different things when examined closely.

How so? If I want to select the enemy base in Starcraft that happens to be at the 12 o clock position on Lost temple, I just click up there. It's not like the minimap changes or rolls around or anything. That position is always the same place
on the screen. It requires no vision whatsoever.

He's talking about targeting specfic structures that an enemy is building or targetting spefic units. In starcraft you could very well tell your guys to 'go' somewhere, but you know that you'll have to micro-manage them when they get into a fight.

Oh, balance, I could talk about that. And its great, heck I'd swear talking about resource models touches on TA's far superior balance, but, well, it wins out so massively just on INTERFACE alone (which is a massive deal in RTS) that frankly I didn't think I'd need to even go there...

Eh, interface is nothing compared to balance. Half the problem with interface is that it ends up noobifying the game. Everything can't be fire and forget, otherwise there's no tactics or strategy for you to actually do beyond simply tell your men to attack.

Actually, TA had, as part of its interface, stuff like giving your units movement modes (stand still, pursue, roam) and attack modes (hold fire, return fire, fire at will).

So, your interface allows you to give long-reaching orders to your units.

I don't see how interface can 'noobify' a game, since a good player benefits as much from good interface as a poor one does.

Also, TA had a little special feature that SC never had; users could you know, make their own interfaces.

You're oddly enough bashing the fact that Starcraft allows you to use tactics, but I can't see that as a drawback by any means. I've played RTS like Homeworld that basically focus entirely on building stuff and remove the tactical element. Because the units fly themselves, you really can't no much beyond tell them what formation to be in and what to attack and hope for the best. It looked cool for sure, but it really had very little strategic or tactical depth.

You're confusing strategy with tactics.

Stragegy is the over-arching goals and methods used to achieve those goals:

Such as: "use long-range frigates in 'wall' formation with claw-formation interceptors to keep them safe"

Tactics is the actual moving and direction of units:

Such as: "Enemies in front of the wall will get pasted by the frigates, leave them alone for the most part. If flanked (i.e. the enemy wants to "cross your T"; rotate your one-to-two closest rows of end arty frigates to face them and send that sides interceptors to keep them delayed; make sure it's not a diversion before you send any more interceptor squadrons. If you have enemy units coming from behind your wall, move your interceptors to keep them tied up while you make your 'wall' raise or lower their vetical position and rotate to face the would-be-rear-attackers"

Homeworld had piles of both; unit movement, unit formation and the like were the key strategic elements to the game.

Being able to time and maneuver units in 3 dimensions over, under and around enemy units were the key tactical elements.

Personally, I like setting up flanks and ambushes and stuff like that. That stuff adds depth to the game.

Yet you said Homeworld lacked tactical depth; when it was a game about starships in three dimensions. Which opens up all sorts of new tactical procedures.

Advanced interfaces can be a blessing and a curse, because everything you end up automating ends up taking a part away from the game and making it simpler. It's like saying, "Gee, you know, it's tough having to aim at your foes in Doom, lets just have the mouse auto aim for you... It's kind of a pain controlling your movement too, lets just have it move the character automatically and you just have to choose when to fire and when to reload."

The more you dumb down the game, the less options its players have and the more people have to play the game a certain way.

Dumb players don't know how to use the orders commands, at all.

Really, the ability to tell your factories in advance to build you 50 vehicles in groups of 20 tanks, 5 anti-air, 10 artillery and 15 fast-attack cars lets you focus on doing more tactical things; like telling your units to ignore the guys who are firing at them, and blow up the fusion plant, which will probably take off-line your enemies nuclear missle factory and cripple his defense structure grid.

The good thing about Starcraft was that this didn't happen, there were multiple ways to play. You had players who relied heavily on micro, others who tried to mass expand and macro their foes into the ground the ground and others who did various combinations of the two.

That's play style, but not army use style.

Each side in TA and now SC has so many unit choices that forgoeing one unit "type" in favour of an other won't cripple your game; heck, you can choose to build only specific units and centre a game winning strategy on just that.

I know that I have. I tend to not build many of the units at my disposal, since I like certain elements that certain units have.

I'm sure that other players of TA have their own favoured units or favoured unit groupings that work for them.

Basically Starcraft was built on the premise that you should always be doing something with your mouse. It wasn't a game where you sat on your hands for a while because nothing was going on. Something was ALWAYS going on. Whether it was producing new workers, or making more structures, or making troops or commanding existing troops. You could always be doing *something*, and you could rarely do everything you needed to do with perfect timing.

This made it very much a speed and skill game. Your mouse had to be darting about doing stuff. In fact, a lot of the pro level of that game was getting super fast at doing things. Now a lot of people felt stressed out by the speed of the game and wanted to slow it down. But that's not really what Starcraft was about. It wasn't armchair strategy, it was fast and brutal real time combat. Like I said before, playing Starcraft at even an intermediate level makes FPS games seem slow and boring by comparison. That's part of the appeal of the game.

Well, 'Eagle' players had to do the exact same thing; their entire army was air-borne.

Which meant tons and tons of micro to make your super-fast army strike what you needed it to.

Ground forces needed a player who was an excellent cartographer and could pick out the most expedient route one what were sometimes torturous maps covered in hills and valleys that would choke up and slow down your troops.

Really... even Proc players in TA were always busy doing something; be it que-ing up an other wall of dragons teeth around their perimeter or building more fusion plants and nuclear plants or tier 2 bombers to win the game.

Now I realize some people don't like that. But I certainly don't think the answer to fixing RTS games is sitting back and letting the AI do everything for you.

The AI did dick for you. You had to tell it what you wanted it to do, before it did anything.

You want that construciton vehicle to build a forest of missle towers?

You have to tell him so, and tell him where to place them.

On the other hand, you didn't have to tell him what to build when he was done building one missle turret.

Star craft was fundamentally flawed in BALANCE terms starting from its poor resource and production model, running through unpleasant interractions of its clunky interface with a "some guys gotta click" balance elements and gameplay in general, its combined arms stuff was a shallow joke, and rolling on to the infamous zerg rush issues.

What zerg rush issues? If you lost to a lot of zerg rushes, you just needed more practice. Zerg rushes weren't all that powerful. If you want you can totally log onto Starcraft sometime and I'll show you how to stop a zerg rush. It's not particularly hard, but it does require micromanagement of your troops.

How you make TA and Supreme commander sound, you actually can't rush at all because it takes fvcking forever to cross the map. So the game is two sides powering to massive forces that then clash against each other with every little harassment or early pressure. In my opinion, that makes for a very boring game.

Like I said before, Starcraft has you interacting with your opponent all the time. Shortly after you create your first zealot, you're probably going to be defending, or putting pressure on your foe. Every little action he takes is going to be noted and you can react to it in real time.

When you take 30 minutes to cross a map... well that freaking sucks. First, the games are going to be long as hell. Second, in the time it takes you to cross the map your opponent could have easily built a huge force to counter your attack force. I don't even see how you can win an RTS with a 30 minute lag time between attacks. By the time your uber force of Doom arrives, it's grossly out teched and out numbered.

I mean hell, your opponent has 30 minutes to prepare for it. 30 minutes! How the hell do you lose to something you knew was coming for 30 minutes?

The 30 minute situation only occurs if land-only games of supreme commander's largest maps.

Now, these are maps that are supposed to be 80 Km across. That's 50 miles across.

So, even the car that travels at 80 KpH or 50 MpH will take an hour to cross.

At which point your really playing a game of "capture the city and surrounding areas"

Most people don't or can't play 80 Km maps in SC, since they're too massive. If they did; you'd probably see tons and tons of air battles really.

Seriously, you have about 5 minutes before someone will attack someone else in TA; the maps aren't that massive and if you used scouting units, they'll get there fast enough to be a nuisance.

What WASN'T so great for balance was the at the time utterly fantastical support for MODDING the game and introducing third party units.

But that was still both revolutionary and totally cool, its not like you HAD to play TA with star wars units if you didn't want to...

Like I said, that's a cool feature, but not particularly good for a strategy game. If you want it to be balanced, you can't have all kinds of new units being introduced all the time. It just makes for lots and lots of redundant units, plenty of useless units and probably a bunch of super units.

Well, it's not a big deal.

Unless everyone in game had the same unit patch, you'd all be forced to play with basic units.

And there were no really redundant units in TA; just units that people ignroed.

[RandomCasualty]

1178049846[/unixtime]]
Starcraft was all about having really detailed images and spent tons of time animating the images in a method that is both stone age and ultimately ugly.

Stone age, ugly? Well maybe. But the units are recognizeable and the game ran fluidly. So the graphics did their job.

No, b/c the idea is to use planes in the manner that planes are expected to be used.

Huh? Who says how a plane is 'expected' to be used? I mean if I remember right TA was sci-fi like starcraft. If it's sci-fi you can let your imagination go wild. Aircraft can hover. I mean hell, they're space ships.

The lack of true 'special' ability units in TA is because TA used a different desin model. Which could summed up to this: "if a unit has a special ability, it will use it on a regualr basis; as all of it's attacks even".

This is a very limiting model and prevents you from having cool abilities like mind control or stasis fields. That's not really a special ability even, that's more just a variant attack. And starcraft had that stuff too. The lurker and firebat both attacked in an area effect. Plenty of units had splash damage.

The terran Science Vessel, Zerg Queen and Protoss Arbiter don't really have abilities that they could use on their own since starcraft was about being able to allow the player to create exploitable arbitrary events.

I don't even understand what you're saying here. If you mean they had no natural attack, then you're right, but I mean, so what? Part of the variety is having special ability only units.

That's one thing SC lacked, realistic air units that move the way fighter and bomber planes do, you know 'fast'?

Being fast doesn't have to be a quality of air units though. That's one thing I liked about Starcraft, they didn't even try to make war simulator. Nobody cared if a hover bike was faster than a wraith space fighter or a battlecruiser. Yeah it made no sense, but Blizzard wasn't going for simulation, it was going for a game.

Half the problem with most RTS in my opinion is they get too involved in acting as simulations and so when you say "Tanks are too powerful and broken!", the designers say, "Well yeah, but tanks really are like that in real life!"

Blizzard just said screw that realism crap. It's cool if a guy with an energy sword can hack through a tank.

It's one thng to hit the hotkey to crank out drones on your carrier battlegroup with protoss, it's an other thing completely to tell your carriers "if you lose a drone, build one to replace it; keep doing this until I tell you otherwise."

Dumb shit like that doesn't need to be micro-managed; moving your arbiter, carriers and zealots in tandem to protect each other and crush an enemy base is important to micro-manage.

Well, to some degree this was also part of the skill factor of Starcraft, and go to the whole issue of dumbing down the game. The problem is that everything you automate brings in another factor that players can't get good at. For instance, if I remember to constantly build probes and you don't, I get a resource advantage. If I choose to build my zealots one at a time, and try to time it such that I don't have to queue up a lot, then I use my resources more efficiently than you do if you go with a straight queue of 3 zealots so you don't have to remember to build that many. What that does is create more mistakes for people to make, and thus more things people have to get good at to do well in the game.

Now, a lot of people didn't like this particular feature of the game, because it made the game feel less like about strategy and more about mouse speed and player skill, so I can understand if you dont' agree with that particular paradigm. Still, I've always believed RTS as a genre is about intense in your face action and if most of your base/unit building is automated, there's very little to do.

You give a unit/building a half-dozen or more orders and it will carry them out.

The problem with this sort of thinking is that it doesn't produce reactive gaming. Basically you do your thing, your opponent does his thing and you see who wins. Assuming the options are balanced, it feels like rock/paper/scissors, but not in a good way, in the way that you don't know what your opponent is going to throw and you just have to guess.

Actual micromanagement has to have some reaction element. I see the enemy falling back, I can choose to pursue or fall back myself, or maybe hold my ground. I can decide to flank or stay as one massed force. My opponent similarly seeing what I'm doing may choose to alter his plans accordingly. The problem with order giving in advance is that you don't get this kind of dynamic change. You pick what you want to do ahead of time and that's that.

I think that comparing TA and SC is not really a good way to go about doing things.

Comparing SC to Dawn of War probably is; since Dawn of War is a tactical game that isn't afraid to say that it is so.

Maybe, I played the Dawn of War demo a bit, it didn't really impress me much. Mostly because I felt the micro control was heavily lacking.

At that point, you've left the "tactical" level of game play and you're at the "strategic" level of gameplay.

At that point your units have to know how to fend for themselves and you don't need to hold their hand every step of the way for their orders. If you do need to command your units at every instance, you're playing a squad-based game, not a strategy game.

Well no, You can definitely have long term strategic plans in Starcraft. It's just you've got to worry about commanding individual battles too. Like I said before, Starcraft is everything. You've got to have strategy and tactics if you want a chance to win.

He's talking about targeting specfic structures that an enemy is building or targetting spefic units. In starcraft you could very well tell your guys to 'go' somewhere, but you know that you'll have to micro-manage them when they get into a fight.

Well, I mean you can just send them on an attack move where they attack anything they run into. It's not particularly effective, but if you've got a big amount of resource and want to focus on macro, you can do that. I've done it sometimes to great effect in late game situations. Effectively, you rely on your opponent to waste his time microing his defense while you focus all your efforts on macro. So while he slaughters your men eventually, there's already another wave on its way. Your opponent hopefully didn't have the chance to replenish his forces in the meantime.

I don't see how interface can 'noobify' a game, since a good player benefits as much from good interface as a poor one does.

Because here's the thing... Anybody can give orders in advance. A total pro or a a total newbie. And everyone gets the same AI, so a pros units are behaving the same as a newbies units do. Much like applying an auto-aim to an FPS, you're taking away a lot of the skill element.

When you have to actually micro your units yourself, that adds a skill element. And allows for units that rely on spells or special abilities that you have to activate yourself.

You're confusing strategy with tactics.

Stragegy is the over-arching goals and methods used to achieve those goals:

Such as: "use long-range frigates in 'wall' formation with claw-formation interceptors to keep them safe"

Honestly, I don't find the distinction all that relevant for RTS games. It's much like asking if chess is a game of strategy or tactics.

The important elements in these games isn't strategy or tactics or any of that semantic crap. It's about moves and counter moves. A good game is about interacting with your opponent.

You see, if all you had to do was enter wall formation and set your interceptors to claw, anybody can do that. Newbie, pro, whatever. And they're all equally good at it.

The problem with homeworld was that even if you see what your opponent was doing, but there wasn't a heck of a lot you could do to counter him. So basically everyone used the same basic strategies and that was boring. Further, you couldn't micro at all.

Strategy and tactics are intertwined in RTS. Lets use an example:

-OK lets say my opponent is playing Terran in Starcraft and my strategy is to build a fast command center and float it over to an island expansion. This leaves an expansion somewhere that's only lightly guarded.

-First, to counter this expansion, I've got to know about it. That means scouting, which is tactics.

-Second, I've got to figure out the best strategy to take it out. Do I want to go fast dropships, do I want to go for air, or maybe I want to take advantage of his fast expansion and rush his main base. Or perhaps I just want to expand myself. All these are valid choices, but I have to choose one based on what my scouting saw.

-Third, I have to execute my plan. If it's an attack, that's another use of tactics.

Homeworld had piles of both; unit movement, unit formation and the like were the key strategic elements to the game.

Homeworld had only strategy, and not much of it, because so many units were unbalanced. Second, tactics were all but alien to the game as your units did their own thing. The extent of your micro was choosing which target to attack. After that, you just prayed it went well.

Being able to time and maneuver units in 3 dimensions over, under and around enemy units were the key tactical elements.

That didn't even matter. The thign with three dimensional movement is that you've got a ton of space, so flanks don't really help at all.

Homeworld basically played like a 2D game where all the units could stack on top of each other. It was technically 3D, but nobody really cared.

Yet you said Homeworld lacked tactical depth; when it was a game about starships in three dimensions. Which opens up all sorts of new tactical procedures.

Um.. like what?

There's no terrain, it's all open space.

Due to all the space of 3 dimensions, you never need to flank to get your full firepower, as you can just go above or below your target.

In homeworld, there was like 3 locations that you cared about:
-Your base
-The other guys base
-The line between the bases.

That's it. It was a two dimensional game that had 3D physics.

That's play style, but not army use style.

Each side in TA and now SC has so many unit choices that forgoeing one unit "type" in favour of an other won't cripple your game; heck, you can choose to build only specific units and centre a game winning strategy on just that.

You can do the same in Starcraft too, assuming your opponent doesn't counter you. If he decides to counter what you're doing, then yeah, you probably have to use different units. But I would hope in any game that you can't win by massing air against a guy who buys tons of AA units, cause that'd be stupid.

Ground forces needed a player who was an excellent cartographer and could pick out the most expedient route one what were sometimes torturous maps covered in hills and valleys that would choke up and slow down your troops.

Now, that stuff is tedious. Seriously, if anything needs to be automated, it should be "Find the shortest path to point X"

And there were no really redundant units in TA; just units that people ignroed.

Well that's exactly what redundancy is. The units play no role in the counter system and really aren't good for anything, so nobody uses them because some other unit does its job better, thus making it redundant.

[NineInchNall]

1178000990[/unixtime]]No, that is not skill, its sucky game design.

You have no idea how many times I've said this to people regarding myriad games over the years. Most recently it was in reference to the control scheme in Resident Evil 4. That tank-style control scheme is dead to me.

And RTS games really haven't changed all that much as a genre since the days of Dune 2?/2000? Meh.

[RandomCasualty]

1178061408[/unixtime]]
And RTS games really haven't changed all that much as a genre since the days of Dune 2?/2000? Meh.

Genres don't change a lot though.

I mean, the new unreal game that's coming out pretty soon is just a graphically enhanced version of doom. (I use doom instead of wolfenstein 3D simply because doom had multiplayer, which was perhaps the last true core FPS innovation)

Also was Dune 2 the game that was Command and Conquer with sandworms? Cause that game sucked so bad. I know there was one game like that, made by the guys who made C&C. It was ridiculous since those guys like have a total hard on for tanks and even on Dune, a world where infantry ruled the day, tanks were the uber unit in the game.

It was just silly.

[NineInchNall]

That whole games not changing much thing is kind of why I've become disenchanted with them of late. Play enough of each genre and games will start to take on a feeling of sameness. It's really quite disheartening.

The games that advanced the FPS genre a little (after Doom) were Half-life and Deus Ex. Half-life was a big step forward for its tight integration with the story, which made it feel like what you did had purpose. Remember the old days of FPSs? Remember the fact that each level was essentially a stand-alone minigame? Blarg! Boredom! Deus Ex was amazing in that it blended two genres (FPS and RPG) and made a whole that has yet to be surpassed in either.

Since then, though, games haven't really done much. Oh, there have been bright spots, but for the most part stagnation has ruled the day.

I think Dune 2 (or Dune 2000, I don't remember the title) was the first RTS to be released, even before it was a genre.

[RandomCasualty]

1178063079[/unixtime]]
The games that advanced the FPS genre a little (after Doom) were Half-life and Deus Ex. Half-life was a big step forward for its tight integration with the story, which made it feel like what you did had purpose. Remember the old days of FPSs? Remember the fact that each level was essentially a stand-alone minigame? Blarg! Boredom! Deus Ex was amazing in that it blended two genres (FPS and RPG) and made a whole that has yet to be surpassed in either.

Honestly, I've never really been able to see the difference in half-life. It seems wholly generic to me and plays exactly like doom does with a slight story element.

Deus Ex was kind of cool, but that's the sort of offshoot genres that develop.

You can see variant FPS, like Splinter cell or Thief which are stealth based FPS, or RPG/FPS like Deus Ex or even Morrowind. Then there's the realistic FPS, like the Rainbow Six and to some extent the battlefield series.

But if you look at the straight core FPS games, there's hardly any innovation at all besides better graphics and occasionally additions of vehicles. But really, there's very little in the way of true innovation. Doom, Halo, Quake, Half-life and Unreal all play the exact same.

I think Dune 2 (or Dune 2000, I don't remember the title) was the first RTS to be released, even before it was a genre.

Well I doubt it was Dune 2000, as Starcraft was out before the year 2000. So it must have been Dune 2. Though I'm not sure if original Warcraft was out before that or not. That's about the only game that might be its predecessor, but I'm not sure.

[NineInchNall]

Well, even Wolfenstein 3D had a slight story element. The difference in Half-life was that ... Actually, let me use a newer example, as there's been little change, and the newer is fresher in my mind.

The difference between Half-life 2 and Doom, when you get past the graphical and aural issues, is that in HL2 there is always something that you the character are trying to accomplish, and you're trying to accomplish that thing for a clear reason that is tied to a logical series of goals.

In Doom, you find the colored keys and open the door to the next level, and this happens ad nauseum until you go through the last door. You could seriously reorder the levels, take some out, put others in, and it seriously wouldn't make a difference. Let's say you took out the sixth level in episode one. You wouldn't even have to bother modifying levels five or seven, because nothing was contingent upon anything else, mechanically or conceptually.

That is the difference. Half-life took the genre away from the Galaga and Galaxian mold.

There hasn't really been an interesting change to the genre since then.

Just about every genre is as stagnant, too, which is depressing. I wonder if it has anything to do with the way games get made nowadays. Back in the Old Time, games could be made by just one guy. That's not quite true anymore.

[the_taken]

Concept behind this problem = If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Need for Speed series? Little changes since customizable parts and decals showed up. "Hey, bitch. Gimme a paint job."

It's like anime and manga. It's all recycled and redone. Just change the colours and the letters and call it a new story. Done. Love Hinna is the same as Negima. It's the same author, so it's bleedingly obvious. Sometimes they even recycle the story as is. Change a few bells and whistles and call it brand new.

Same with movies.
Formula Scream: Start with a spooky scene. Kill someone. Nobody cares. Teen/college angst. Teen/college drama. Teen/college sex (18+ actors). Unleash the butcher. Kill some background characters. The protagonist notices. Run around the halls in any random order to hippie rock. Kill some supporting characters. Trap/kill the bad guy. Teen/college drama. Roll credits.
Addam Saddler Syndrome: Guy meets girl. Guy likes girl. Guy does not impress girl. Shit happens. Shit gets worse. Guy does awesome thing. Guy saves town/city/family/self. Guy gets girl. Roll credits.
Double Oh! Seventy Seven: See James Bond shoot goons. See Bond grab hoochies. Gadgets! Gadgets! GADGETS!!! More Shooting. More Hoochies. Multi-kill! Killing Spree! Rampage! Unstoppable! Godlike! M-m-m-monster kill-kill-kill! Smooch fest! Smooch and roll credits.

[erik]

For what it's worth here's the wikipedia bit on RTS, to settle up the "who came first"s, if nothing else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_strategy

[Draco_Argentum]

1178016361[/unixtime]]I must have come into the franchise too late though because dark reign 2 REALLY sucked as far as I could tell.

I know of zero people who liked DR2. But I found the first one fun.

[RandomCasualty]

1178086208[/unixtime]]Concept behind this problem = If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Yeah, pretty much they take a popular model and just make some minor tweaks to it.

I think you can honestly take the Blizzard RTS interface and apply it to several games that play completely differently, simply having new races and new units and such makes for a game that feels different.

Also, it's notoriously difficult to design good RTS. Most of the time you just end up with some imbalanced crap like Command and Conquer where you've got an uber unit everyone just masses. I actually found C&C to be hilarious because they've got tons of counters for infantry and yet infantry doesn't beat anything else, meanwhile tanks are uber units and there is no good counter to someone who just masses them. But yet the game goes on as though you'd actually want to use infantry, since it has APCs and all kinds of crazy anti-infantry weapons, as though the designers thought infantry was going to dominate the game.

And they go on repeating that same flawed balance paradigm in every game they make.

Most RTS sadly tend to go that way. With homeworld it was just massing capital ships and support frigates to repair them, and fighters were almost useless.

[User3]

One of the things people seem to be confusing is terminology.

Tactics and Strategy refer to particular aspects of planning. Despite being a Real-Time *Strategy* game, Starcraft has very little strategy. Sure, you get to set your tech priorities and choose which units you want. That's a very boring strategic decision. For true strategy you need to be above the battlefield level - multiple battles, multiple victory conditions, and the possibility of choosing to fight some battles for reasons other than winning or losing are what makes strategy interesting. Starcraft is at the battlefield level of conflict. In realworld conflicts, an organization like the Joint Chiefs is responsible for strategy, and high-ranking officers (notably other generals) are aware of strategic decisions but often not allowed to influence them substantially. In historic conflicts pre-dating institutions like the Pentagon, a particular general was often given strategic command of a theatre of war (MacArthur, Eisenhower, etc...). This is war-level command.

At the battlefield level, tactics is about the decisions on troop movements and orders. This is *not* micromanagement. You've taken on the role of a ~1-2 star general or slightly lower. Your strategic goals have already been decided for you (In SC its eliminate the opponent. In the one-player there are often other goals). Tactics is about arranging the use of existing manpower. This is army/battle-level command.

Starcraft additionally has 2 other levels of command.

Micromanagement is squad-level command. You give orders to each of your troops.

Finally, there's also the building game. I won't comment further on that.

The problem with SC is that most of the game is squad-level. People who want Tactical or Strategic games aren't going to be impressed with Starcraft because its mostly a squad-level game with a lot of squads. Strategic people have more reason to be unhappy with it than tactical people - there is very little strategy. Even the counter unit game is ultimately tactical because you can build new units on the battlefield in battlefield time.

I would love a good Strategic or Tactical game that wasn't also a squad game. I love arranging ambushes, but I hate having to tell all my guys to shoot at enemy 1, then 2, then 3, etc..., and then making sure they don't run the guy i'm shooting away so my guys chase after him. Strategy and tactics do not involve commanding individual guys. That's why a general commands (ultimately) lieutenants who command squads, so the lieutenants can get the men in those squads doing the right things when you order them to catch the enemy in an enfilade.

A tactical or strategic game shouldn't let you micromanage. When you put the general hat on, you're giving up control of individual troops.

This isn't to say I don't enjoy starcraft, but i find it lacks any interesting decisions for strategic purposes (since the only strategy is rote rock/paper/scissor decisions), and tactics, while present, are usually less relevant than squad-level micromanaging. And you can't do things like "when his units are between my two units of buried hydrolisks, unbury and attack" without being there to make sure they do it. That's specifically taking away the tactical aspect and making you put on your squad-level cap.

[RandomCasualty]

1178119463[/unixtime]]
This isn't to say I don't enjoy starcraft, but i find it lacks any interesting decisions for strategic purposes (since the only strategy is rote rock/paper/scissor decisions), and tactics, while present, are usually less relevant than squad-level micromanaging. And you can't do things like "when his units are between my two units of buried hydrolisks, unbury and attack" without being there to make sure they do it. That's specifically taking away the tactical aspect and making you put on your squad-level cap.

Well, there's no doubt Starcraft has a lot of tactical elements, but I don't think that the strategy is simple.

Starcraft as I said, is an everything game. It takes a lot of skill to manage all your units at once and yes, most people who start playing aren't fast enough to manage everything at once, however there are strategic elements to consider and they're not simple.

You're constantly piecing together scouting data and trying to guess your opponent's next move.

For instance, consider the following scenario. You're playing zerg against a protoss. The protoss decides to super fast expand, the pylon/nexus/forge build. You are doing a typical zerg build, not specifically designed for a rush, so you aren't immediatley able to overrun him before he can get his photon cannons up to shield his new expansion (and his main base since Lost temple expansions exist in front of the main base).

Now, you're left with several options here:

-Fast Rush!! Get zerglings as fast as you can and try to get there before his cannons go up.
-Assault:Go power zerglings or quick hydras and try to overrun his cannons. If he fails to produce enough, this is certainly viable.
-Harass:Go speed zerglings and run past his cannons to his main base, which is hopefully undefended. At the very least you can kill some workers or take out some structures and slow him down.
-Tech Rush:Go for fast mutalisks or fast overlord drop capability to circumvent his cannons and hit his main base.
-Power:Take advantage of his lack of early army and try to mass expand yourself and match his resource production.

Now, all of those are viable and can work depending on the circumstances. But selecting which one to use requires a lot of strategy. you've got to know the opponent, and know the map as well as be able to read into what sort of things he's planning.

For instance, if you're playing an opponent with good micro, you probably want to opt to use the power game, since he's going to have less micro opportunities in a late game, power scenario. If he's more of a power player himself, you'll definitely want to try to either take him out or harass him and keep the game on a micro scale.

There are even attempts to meta-game various things to lead your opponent to believe you're going to do something you're not. For instance, there's one tactic that involves using your scouting probe to build a pylon to the right of a terran's factory, preventing him from constructing a machine shop (a prerequisite of tanks). This forces the terran to either destroy your pylon or float his factory somewhere else to build the machine shop. either costs him time. Now if you're doing this, the terran usually assumes you plan on goon rushing and will subsequently build defenses against it. Some players will do this pylon tactic and not plan on goon rushing. Still it can waste an opponent's valuable time and get him to waste money on defenses he may not have done so otherwise, possibly leaving it safe for you to expand.

Sometimes you may have your opponent see one of your given tech building under construction, like a spire (produces air units), and subsequently decide to cancel it and do something else, since having seen your plans, it's likely he's going to throw up anti air and the surprise of your attack is lost. Thus you switch your plans and let him make his anti-air anyway (since he's still acting on the intelligence he's gathered) and thus you gain an advantage by having him waste money on anti-air.

Strategy is alot more than just saying "he's making vultures, I'll make more dragoons." There's a great deal of extra behind the scenes planning. The most fundamental is the decision between assault, harass, tech or power. And that isn't necessarily a rock/paper/scissors decision.

Now, don't get me wrong, whatever you choose, you'll have to tactically pull off. But the strategy is certainly there and it takes good judgment and experience to figure out what to do next in any given situation.

[JonSetanta]

Best. Game. Ever.

Second best, Star Wars Battlefront 2.

I was so shocked half a year ago when my Brood Wars disk EXPLODED IN THE DRIVE from.. well... overplay.
And cyclic redundancy error of the CD drive (not DVD tho)...
... of which I guess I am cured of when all the little 1cm shards became lodged in the gears...