and honestly, i fail to see all the hype it gets. I admit although i played lot of RTSes in my gaming "career" and love the genre, i am not very good player, i tend to do probably better on Call of Duty, which i played a lot for the majority of the last year, or sports games (football, ice hockey) which i always played a lot.
Anyway after playing Sins or SupCom SC2 feels like the relevation from the past... you cant zoom and your average armies consist of 10 units at best... hardly a trait of strategy, more like RPG. Simply i have no feeling i am commanding an army, this is quite an important aspect to me when it comes to RTSes. BTW i would say on average you can have 5x more buildings in your base than units in your "army"- thats pretty weird ratio, if you ask me.
Other thing, game speed, i played at Fast level, and the game is both superfast and slow at the same time. I mean the building and teching take ages, while battles are incredibly fast. I lost my army literally in a time period, i was scrolling to the place of the battle. This leads to interesting and IMHO quite stupid consequences: you lose you army in 5 second long battle and although you have money to burn and base spreading through the quarter of map, you wont be able to rebuild your units, before enemy turns majority of your base to dust...
Finally those 5 second long battles, i wonder where is the strategy part in that? Seriously unless you have 200 APM, youhave no chance to issue any commands in such a battle. All i see then is a game promoting the reflexes and faster hands, there is no strategic thinking involved.
To be fair, i never played old SC that much, so maybe my expectations were bit out of place, i expected something like Command and Conquer Generals, which i liked pretty much. SC2 however is nothing like that and i am really disappointed. Here is the hoping, that next CnC wont be trying hard to be EA´s Starcraft and will rather continue the CnC tradition with maybe few improvements taken from recent RTS hits like CoH or Supreme Commander.
I really loved Warcraft 3 but have the same complaint - it's largely about reflexes. Units, other than the heroes, are mostly ephemera that die quickly.
Starcraft 2 is a great game but is essentially the same iteration of the past 15 years. No unit advancement, no change in appearance of units upgraded, etc. And the game suffers from cheese and some unscrupulous players. I love the game but it is mostly a reverberation of 12 years ago. I am really hoping that after the 2 planned expansions Blizzard comes out with another expansion that adds a new race or 2 or some new maps with interesting challenges.
Starcraft isn't primarily about unit control. Unit control can win or lose you the game, but it's not the most important aspect.
If you don't like that, then you won't like the game.
So isnt Sins, and i like Sins pretty much.
Starcraft 2 was made primarily for competition. They knew what people liked about the original, and they just refined it in Starcraft 2. They always wanted it to be an "e-sport", and that just means they had to refine Brood War instead of doing something brand new. Blizzard should never be looked to for innovations in a genre. They should be looked to for refinements and polish.
For sure. I meant that the 'strategy' of Starcraft is not primarily in how you maneuver your army during any particular battle, but how you arrived at that battle in the first place.
Well both Sins and SupCom are slow games compared to SC2. And you are used to those slow games.
Unlike them SC2 rewards you once you become faster and better because you do feel faster and better. You can see the improvement in your game.
And Strategy is there, it is just not as simple as build troops and move them towards the enemy (when you really start to learn the game it is extremely complex where one small mistake can cost you a game at top level). If you want to see how it should look once you are good enough go to justin.tv and go to their gaming streams and check out any starcraft 2 stream at the top (with most viewers). Some of them will even be people casting different tournaments.
That is also a good way to learn (in addition to just practicing), you can find streamers of your race and learn from them. Some of them also comment their play and it is even more entertaining.
Also from your post I didn't get an impression if you tried the campaign or playing against the AI/players in MP or skirmish.
Campaign is pretty relaxed and casual so it should be fun for you. Also there are plenty of custom maps in MP that allow you to play in many fun ways and give you a totally different experience then ladder 1v1.
SC2 is a fast game, but there is plenty of strategy involved. For a noob, the fast play is basically learning the hard way how to play the game. If you don't understand the possible strategies that can be used within the first few minutes of the game with each race you will be susceptible to early rushes (the few than 10 units complaint the writer has) or cheeses the game has. But lets be realistic here, although even pros get cheesed from time to time it's not that easy to cheese someone who understands the timings involved in the game. Timing and scouting, these are the keys to surviving the first few minutes of the game and possibly even winning in the mid to long game.
Like TorinReborn, I watch many SC2 replays on youtube; I watch some of the best players in the world duke it out and let me tell you that in rare occasions do their winning strategies involve anything less than 30 units when going in for the kill and the average game last at least 20 minutes. Most COD games last 30 on average. Their strategies involve everything from scouting their opponent trying to guess what their strategy may be and then attempt to counter while at the same time trying to implement your own strategy and adjust it as you gain more scouting information. The point of the game is to win and if you have the advantage of taking the opponent out in the first few minutes because he made a tactical error then you need to exploit it because that's the point of the game.
But I have to admit that there is nothing better than a macroed up game. Watching 2 opponents get as many units (of what ever combination of units they choose) as they can and see who has the better army and better microing skills when pitting them against each other is what makes these casting videos worth subscribing to.
I can only hope to be good enough to move at least 2 levels higher than Bronze some day.
Fast play isn't necessarily a major problem.
It's when the single player campaign plays like an online rush-fest. That killed it for me.
You're always rushed to do this, run from that, relocate all your buildings before they get roasted...That's twitch gaming. It has nothing to do with tactics and definitely not with strategy.
Maybe the online players like that but so what? They don't care about the campaign anyway.
Interesting take. I normally play games on the normal setting the first time then go to the hardest. yea, the hardest level usually does seem almost impossible to beat but I don't necessarily see it like a rush fest. more like trying to figure out in what order to do things in order to beat the mission.
I played only with my buddy (who convinced me to buy the game. so we´ll play it together) against 2 AIs so far. I am not the one for playing campaigns in RTS, unless the game is called Homeworld But i might give it a chance cause of those CGI sequences.
Still i am disappointed and i do not think this feeling will change, when ill have more matches under my belt...the ingame mechanics are simply all wrong in my opinion. We just talked about it with him about yesterdays match we got beaten by Hard AIs, he claims i made a mistake by building only 3 Warp Gates (which was obvious as wasnt able to pump units fast enough)...but i could not help myself, i felt and still feel its stupid thing to do... so i need 8 barracks to build 8 zealots in time? He was defending it, thats it normal thing to do, but i am yet to play an RTS, where you need to play it this way. With CnCs you build airfields this way, but it made sense, as the planes had to return to reload, but you were allways fine with 1 or 2 barracks,factories, shipyards.
Unfortunately, I don't have SC2 because it would be a waste of money until I get a computer that can handle it, but I do have SC and play it a lot in skirmish verse AI since human players on battle.net in both US West and East seem to rarely play the official maps. I don't build so many barracks, factories, starports, and the equivalent production facilities for the other factions, and do pretty well against the AI. I never did understand the necessity of building so many production facilities, when in most other strategy games known to man, that isn't generally necessary.
It's really pretty straightforward. You need to always be spending your money. Any money that's "saved up" is (usually) wasted because it's not a unit/building in the field doing stuff. As you expand and mine more, you make more money and can thus support constant unit production from more buildings at the same time. This is why players add more and more production buildings as the game goes on. If you don't, you'll end up with 2000/1000 banked and half the army of the other guy, and he'll just walk over you because he had enough production to spend his money and you did not.
Starcraft 2 is awesome for it's own kind !
Warcraft 3 really failed to my opinion because it was too much of a copy of SC.
SC 2 fail for me because of the units they did not include and especially for the zergs
The main scenario is awesomely made and entertaining, the multi is especially great for the custom maps...
It's fast paced, sometimes too fast though ! It's a rush towards ressource points and having a lot of units !
Though there's some nice strategies if you look deeper that will allow you to avoid using tons of powerful costy units to win and that's the awesome part.
Don't play in league though because poeple are just crazy ! SC is all about competition ! That ruins it a bit if you're not really into it !
But I think the next addon might be really interesting ! We'll see !
I think your expectations were off. Starcraft 2 is very much like Starcraft 1. It's meant to be a competitive, fast paced game. It's far and away the best RTS for competitive gaming. If you were looking for a slower more expansive style of game (like Sins), then you got burned by bad expectations.
I also don't agree about the campaign. I loved the SC2 campaign and found it to be one of the best I've seen in a long time. Every mission had some unique mechanic going on, there was very little "just build a bunch of stuff and mindlessly zerg" (especially on hard), and it didn't suffer from the pathetically awful writing that plagues the Dawn of War series.
I was about to create a very similar thread yesterday or today but you beat me to it.
To understand that I was a bit more fanatical about StarCraft II than your average joe, check my posting history and you'll see me defending Blizzard and creating threads about one of the Battlereports that Blizzard created.
In 1997, I joined this club of gamers, boardgamers, magicplayers and such. There I played WarCraft II. Thought it was awesome.
One day, a guy I got to know wanted me to play a game called 'StarCraft'. I was like: "Ooooh no I don't want to play some boring turnbased game!" since I had no idea what StarCraft were.
Fate must have been involved that day, since WarCraft II didn't start....so I started StarCraft instead. I noticed that both were made by Blizzard but didn't think about it.
I started the tutorial and realized it was the same type of game (RTS) as WarCraft II but this game was sci-fi instead of fantasy. "Ok, cool I thought". I explored with a marine and noticed how the black shroud moved away FLUIDLY as opposed to immedietly in WarCraft II. I realized that this game was the next generation over WarCraft II and I now had a hard time going back to WarCraft II.
Getting my own computer
When I got my own computer the next year, StarCraft was the first game I installed. Battle.Net, here I COME!!
Had some fun years at Battle.Net. Found Tower Defense, RPG maps and lots of others (some which I never completed....)
BroodWar arrives
When BroodWar arrived I played the campaign and was blown away by it. BEST EVER! In StarCraft it's the stereotype "humans get attacked by unknown alien bugs with ancient superrace laying the hurt on the bugs" though that is WAY too simple an explanation of the storyline.
In BroodWar however, it started out with evacuating the Protoss and eradicating the Zerg from their new homeplanet of Shakuras. The Terrans were 2nd and here it is when it became REALLY interesting.
You were a captain in a fleet from earth called the United Earth Directorate (UED) under command by Admiral DuGalle, sent to enslave the new Overmind and ultimately take control of the Koprulu sector (which is where everybodys fighting).
You begin with fighting "Emperor" Mengsk and obliterating his empire. In the very beginning, you get aided by a Lietenant Duran who proves to be very useful. He knows alot about the Zerg and has some disturbingly exact knowledge. It's not questioned though since it's likely he has been fighting for a long time and thus has been able to gather that intelligence. Aaaand then you enslave the Overmind. Now Duran appears again, showing his true colors of being Kerrigans servant. DuGalle becomes angry at Durans treachery and Kerrigan and Duran leave.
Lastly, You play as Kerrigans cerebrate to get her back to power in the sector. Duran is at her side from the beginning. Here she goes into an alliance with Mengsh, Raynor and Fenix to be able to destroy the UED AND their puppet Overmind since it's formed by renegade Zerg which has no alligiance to Kerrigan. First objective is to destroy the Psi Disrupter which negates Kerrigan control of the Zerg.
Halfway through her campaign, she backstabs her allies, killing Fenix and Admiral Duke (that was very good mission!) and thereby ending the alliance.
Now she goes to Shakuras to kidnap the Matriarch (leader of the Protoss) to force Zeratul to kill the new Overmind so ALL Zerg obeys Kerrigan and no one else.
After the Overmind is dead and Kerrigan has full control of the Zerg, Zeratul and some Protoss survivors try to escape. Kerrigan sends all of ther brood to hunt them and they are stopped. Zeratul kills the Matriarch since she was mindcontrolled by Kerrigan from the start! She become free and with her dying breath tells Zeratul to watch over her people. Kerrigan lets Zeratul go since living with heavy guilt is worse for him than dying.
If you completed the mission in under 25min you got to play a secret mission called 'Dark Origin'. That mission is VERY IMPORTANT to fully understand Samir Duran and his goals. I got two saves of that mission.
The last mission is about pure revenge. Mengsk, DuGalle, and Artanis arrives with one army each to kill Kerrigan. This mission briefing has to be the best in the game. I especially like DuGalles last words 'Then SO be it' after he offer Kerrigan to surrender to the sovereign might of the UED.
This mission is HAAAAARRRDDD!!! Took me several tries to win and I did it without a guide! A few months ago I played through the campaigns again and read a guide on how to do it (who to attack first and so on)
I never liked competetive BroodWar as I never could properly deal with Dark Templars. They were too exploitable. I considered and still consider the Protoss to be overpowered to very overpowered. In StarCraft II it's the same.
In 2002 when I started to play StarCraft again I felt it to be old. Wasn't exciting anymore. In 2004 when Dawn of War arrived I only played StarCraft for its campaigns. Dawn of War heralded a new ERA and I played it alot in SP.
I only tried out Company of Heroes in the tutorial....I thought all WWII games were hypegames and sucked....MAN was I wrong!
Time went on and strangely, all I wanted was StarCraft II. In 2007 it was announced and I was happy. Fastforward to january this year and I feel....
The campaign is the best ever. No competition. The skirmish however....no......nooooooooo!! I can't have waited 7 years for THIS?!?!
Talk about epic disappointment! A whole match is nonstop producing and activating abilities and keeping track of your troops ALL the time! Then you add these RIDICOULOUS "macro" features and it's too stressful and tedious. It's not fun....It was fun 12 years ago (I N-E-V-E-R thought I'd say this....It's like I some day would say that computergaming isn't fun anymore!!!) but today it feels outdated with it's goddamn peonmanagement and "macro" features.
I bought Company of Heroes on Steams christmas sale and I want to play that much more.
So there you have it. A hopeless StarCraft diehard has been converted to Dawn of War & Company of Heroes.
This game is much about how fast you make your decisions and reacts or adapt with the situation. I have played this game for awhile in multiplayer (1v1) mostly and I found it pretty enjoyable and satisfying. The game itself can get very intensive and exciting when you first engage your opponent but how you manage to control your units is the key to keep them alive - "micro-management".
/ Have a good one!
Sounds like you need to spend some time learning about how the game is played in the multiplayer setting. There is a TON of strategy in this game there's just a learning curve to executing it. You need to learn to use hotkeys, scout, execute build orders properly as well as transition out of opening builds, micro and macro manage at the same time and counter various unit compositions and strategies. It might sound like a lot but once you learn some of the basics and start having fun with it you'll get much better quickly.
Read up on the teamliquid.net forums as well as "liquipedia" for build orders and strategies and watch "Day[9] Daily" #252 #257 #261 <-- These dailys and a handful of build orders are what has gotten me to Gold League.
I hope you take the time to give it more of a chance, it sounds a bit like you're giving up kind of early. Here is my character name and number, add me to your friends if you want to practice a bit im more than willing to help you get started or just play some games for practice and fun. Hope this helps, Craig.
ID: Lucid
Character Code: 725
No offense, but you were a SC diehard who played the campaign and "skirmish" mode but didn't care for multiplayer and couldn't counter DT's? It sounds like you're disliking elements of SCII that were also very present in SCBW as far as "peon management" and "macro features" go. Perhaps you're just not a fan of multiplayer Starcraft?
Spoiler tags only work with one paragraph at a time. If you highlight multiple paragraphs, it does nothing.
No, I played the campaigns, skirmish and ALOT of multiplayer. If accounts don't disappear after 90 days in StarCraft then check up my StarCraft account with the same name I use here.
Back in 1998 - 2004 I played soo many 3v3 Hunters with my old internetfriends that it became standard for me.
Unfortunately, my internetfriends were not interested in 1v1 (one in particular) so didn't get to test my skill that much in MP.
We also played an insane amount of custom maps.
The above was about StarCraft.
There were also no good maps out by then so Protoss was the obvious choice (Terran need small chokes and Zerg usually got completely annihilated when up against Protoss).
Me and my internetfriends didn't like BroodWar. I don't remember why THEY didn't like it but I consider the Protoss overpowered and I dislike mirrormatchups.
Also joined the Swedish PC Gamers forumclan of StarCraft and we played the original. We tried BroodWar one time. It was an internal 3v3 (all they ever wanted to play. At one point one of the clanleaders BANNED 1v1 because the players in a 1v1 started flaming eachother) where I got contained by Lurkers as Terran on The Hunters and we quitted. I know how to counter it today but I wasn't that good back then.
But most importantly it's just god damn frustrating fighting invisible units that takes more effort to counter than to use. And I don't have 300APM like Stork. It also just doesn't look fun to play when you're as fast as he is.
I must mention though that in PC Gamers forumclan I WANTED to play 1v1 but the clanfounder who banned 1v1 said that a clan should stand united (perhaps he believed that himself....?) so it was just a bunch of lame 3v3s all the time.
To add insult to injury, today in Company of Heroes the people I usually play with (reallifefriends this time ) only want to play 2v2 or 3v3 or perhaps a 4v4.... I got ONE guy on my list who say he prefers 1v1s but we haven't played yet eventhough he installed the game like a month ago....looks bad....
I felt I should post this as your impression of SC2 is no doubt brought about by your naivete and lack of experience with the game and I don't want this to put off new players. Your view and opinions are more than understandable though as SC2 is probably the hardest online game I've ever played.
To be honest, SC2 is the finest example of a competitive RTS in existence. That is no understatement.
You should know that you're probably not used to the fast pace and are probably playing the game completely contrary to how it's been built to be played. It isn't a slow game. The only reason you think that armies are "small" is because you probably lack the macro required to play into the mid-late game where army size really starts to take off.
The strategy of battles is in multi-tasking and positioning. Without the correct position your 100 supply army will die to a 50 supply army. Also in use of key abilities mid battle and unit composition, which will depend on what your scouting has revealed. Also you need to have built up your base enough and expanded your economy enough so that you can replenish your army as fast/faster than your opponent. Lol, I could go on and on, it's such a DEEP game, but understandably offputting and seemingly simplistic to the new player.
When your force is under attack, you can't scroll to the battle, lol. In a game like SC2 that's your army dead. Like I say, it's a LOT more fast paced than what you're probably used to. Expecially if you're coming from the C&C Series or Sins.
Go to www.youtube.com and search for HDStarcraft. Watch some games, educate yourself. You'll enjoy the game a lot more.
EDIT:- After reading through the thread some more I saw your post about building numbers. Yes, it's different to other games. In a 1v1 game that goes into the mid to late game, it isn't unusual for a player to have 8-10 (or more depending on the map!) unit producing structures. This goes back to the point I made before, SC2 is heavily a MACRO game, which basically means managing your base and having efficient mechanics to produce an army faster and better than your opponents.
Like I say, give the game a chance, watch some VOD's (http://day9tv.blip.tv - great for new players!) and bang out some 1v1. You will lose a lot, and lose hard, but eventually, you will WIN!
I understand the part about the need spending money, it works this way in other games too, you dont need money on the account, you need units on the battlefield. However in every other normal RTS you would do exactly that - i mean build those units, but not in SC2.
In StarCraft you have to spend those money on more and more production facilities, so you can pump those few units in time if needed. This leads to situation, where you have 10 gateways, but only 7 troop units, cause you cant build more anyway, as the unit cap is incredibly small (obviously you can build more troops, but you want to build few air units and those walkers as well, so there goes the unit cap). I simply cant comprehend reasoning behind this design choice, it would make sense with unlimited unit cap (i mean more barracks = more units produced overall -> steamroll the enemy with superior numbers), or SupCommanderesque unit cap, but here?
Well i knew its going to be nothing like Sins and i played shitload of different RTSes, some of them were far more paced than Sins. I just expected it be exactly like Generals Zero Hour or Red Alert 3, only more polished and balanced.
The level of that polish i cant evaluate yet, the game is freezing/unfreezing for me, so perhaps it would require more dedication from devs to fix these little setbacks, but i already see that gameplay-wise its lot different to those CnC games and unfortunately i do not like that much. I explained why in my previous posts.
What do you mean there goes the unit cap? You realize the max supply is 200/200 right? If you find yourself with more unit producing structures than you're able to constantly produce from it means you adding them too fast. Its typically only good to have a lot of gateways or barracks if you're on two bases. Most standard expands or one base timing pushes involve 3-4 barracks/gateways but its not uncommon to have like 6-10 when on two or three bases. Build PYLONS and PROBES or SCVS and SUPPLY DEPOTS the entire match so that your income and supply cap are constantly rising along with your number of structures and size of your army.
Not sure, if this was addressed to me, but if yes, thanks for the friendly advices and the ID.
Despite my negative opinion I am not giving up early, i will keep playing it, as my buddy surely would want me to, and the game cost 50EUR, so it would be waste. I will try to exercise bit more against AI and perhaps than we could try a match via Bnet.
You said you were not one for playing campaigns earlier in this thread. Play the campaign. Now. All of it. Learn little grasshopper.
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