Impressions

Starcraft 2 still plays great. I had a few matches where the games started lagging like crazy but I later found out that this was caused by the laptops overheating. The section we were playing at had all these Alienware laptops as opposed to the big bad Intel machines in the regular area (we were in the more or less unlimited play community tournament area where you could play DotA/WSG/Starcraft 2). Other than that, the game is actually faster than I remember it last year. Last year I think games played on Fast and now you had the options of Normal, Fast, Faster and I think you could even go to slow and slower, but normal was agonizingly slow.

I played each race this year, terran by accident, zerg intentionally, and a lot of protoss. Terran and zerg were miserable failures. Zerg I feel like have viewing issues. I set my rallies (seperate for workers/units) but when I needed to select units I really couldn’t get a good feel for where they were on the creep. There’s a little too much ambient motion on the creep, zerglings themselves looked a lot smaller, and the color of the zerg units blends a bit too well with the creep.

My play this year was very poor. Often when playing people I knew, I’d forgo an aggressive playstyle to allow them to get their bearings, especially when I hear them say “I don’t know what any of the new stuff is” but the problem was they just defaulted to tier 1 rush style units and I wasn’t turtling exactly, but sort of blending tech/expand/defense. Probably a very Warcraft 3 thing to do. As such, I got stomped a few games just from tier 1 rushes. I also accidentally set the game speed on normal a few times which you would think would be easier to play on, but I found it massively distracting compared to the max speed.

Protoss have 2 units that I feel like are shown off now and then and are more or less obliterated in play and show no signs of usefulness. Colossus and void rays you see now and then but it seems like you don’t get a lot of bang for the buck. In one game specifically I was able to create 6 colossi and I crushed an outrageous sized army effortlessly. They just decimated this army and I was amazed. Void rays as well, I had created a pocket of about 6 of them and when frontal attacks came, I sent them into bases. They tear through buildings like butter. They’re amazing.

Unit formations aren’t in like they were the previous years. When you’d hotkey units they used to form up nicely into blocks. In a way it was annoying, especially in older games, but the pathing is so much better now that when they used to do this, if anyone needed out or anything they would part to let the unit through. This didn’t happen anymore which caught me by surprise when I was trying to build some buildings or expand and I’d look over and nothing was made.

The macro economic elements are crazy. A few games I didn’t have sound, but I don’t think that mattered because I don’t think there’s an audio cue for what’s happening, but for Protoss you have an obelisk (200 minerals, created after you have a gateway and requires pylon power) that has a targetable spell which makes your probes get +1 more of what they’re gathering. The spell cost and mana regen rate of this ability are matched so basically you can chain cast this forever, however it’s very hard to keep it up 100% of the time. Ok actually it’s really easy to keep up 100% of the time, but I was just not good at it. Early game it’s simple, but later on you just happen to notice “Oh no I forgot to charge my probes!”

The zerg version is the queen. You can make her after your spawning pool at the hatchery and it doesn’t require a larva. What she does is allows more than 3 larvae to be out at once on a hatchery you pick. So you have her cast the spell on a hatchery, wait a bit, then boom you’ve got tons of larva instead of however you’d typically have. Early game it’s easy to do, mid to late I don’t know how useful it is except when you want to mass an army up, but even then you have to wait for the extra larva to be made. I mean I guess it’s always useful, but when you’re zerg and you already have like 7 hatcheries I dunno if you care at that point.

The multi-building select now has a pretty cool interface for letting you know when your buildings are making things. I had forgotten off and on that if you have two gateways selected and you try to make a zealot, only one gateway will actually make the zealot. You have to press it each time per gateway you want making things. What I had done was grouped all my nexus buildings to keep the probes coming out. What happens is in the unit selection window you’ll see a white box below the building letting you know something is being made. So with MBS it’s easy to see if you have units coming out quickly. However, I’m still in War3 mode where pressing a unit makes every building make it.

Game creation this year was pretty cool. It was LAN mode setup where you’d name your player, choose a game speed, pick a map, and hit go. You had other options as well in that menu which didn’t make sense. You could choose to be an observer instead of a player (this option should be inside of a game lobby you join, not outside of it) and probably a few other things I’m forgetting. The game lobby was nice this year, you pick your race, color, handicap, team, and get a little overview of the map on the right side. I wish I had checked out the observer mode stuff and watched some people play in retrospect.

The battle.net panel was very informative. I’m hoping with the release of this information that no press event will be necessary and we’re now one step closer to beta. I’m concerned with how chat will work with all those menu overlays but I suppose it’ll work out by the time beta launches (hopefully). Other than that they hammered some great new features like multi tier ladders, battle.net unification of friend’s list, game creation improvements, and map filtering options. Shack has all the great high res screenshots: here. The only thing I wish they had shown was the score screen since I hear that is specifically tied into battle.net now.

Game Highlight

Alright so I played one random 1v1 against a stranger at Blizzcon, mirror match double Protoss. He scouted me with one of his first 6 probes which made me fairly worried since early scouters are usually very aggressive players. I tried running him off but he’d only go so far away before he’d come back. This lasted quite a while until I got my first zealot out and he finally ran. I followed him back to his base with a probe and robbed him of some minerals, looked around and left. His base was similar to mine but he was going for an early expansion. He already had 2 cannons down and a few zealots and I only had about 3 zealots so I just had to match him and take my expansion and hope for the best.

One thing I don’t understand about some Protoss players are the ones who never make observers, or who make very few. As I’m teching, I shoot for 3 observers and send them out. Luckily one chances upon his second expansion as it is being made, so I send out the entire army and crush it. The other observer notices that his army never sized up as well as mine at his first expansion so he just lets the 2nd expansion fall. My third observer comes into his town from the backdoor and notices he’s making 6 stargates. I take my army back to my town and a few of his dark templar have followed me. I let him think I didn’t have detection the entire way until he reaches my hill where my army stops and obliterates his stealth army due to a cannon I placed above.

At this point I realize he’s just going for carriers or whatever, so I take my army back in hoping he doesn’t have anything else hidden and crush his town. The most hilarious part of this assault is the amount of cannons he has made. He has like 6-8 cannons up with his army which is intimidating except for the fact that he has only one pylon powering them. I wipe up his army then destroy the pylon. Before he can respond I just push up into his base where I see millions of things being warped in, only like 2 of which are pylons, I again assault only pylons and leave only devastation and orphans in my wake. I realize the game up to this point has been a huge letdown. His early scouting tricked me into thinking he was a much better player than he was! It was GG after that but he wanted to play one more. Fortunately for him, the doors were closing so there was no time, no replay sucka.

Final Thoughts

Overall I went something like 5-6 where I was like 5-4 in 1v1 play and 0-2 in 2v2 play. The 2v2 matches I played were terrible and should have been coined 2v1 against me. I could have pulled out a better game in one of those matches but overall it didn’t go so well. I did notice something about the 2v2 maps we played on and that’s the starting locations are literally back to back now. When you play these maps in 1v1 it’s really strange to have this expansion just on the other side of your mineral patch and when you have overflow workers you’ll know because they start mining from those patches. There weren’t any score screens still, it’s really killing me waiting to see them. I know it’ll have the usual stuff that Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 had, but I also know it’ll have APM counters and possibly graphs of interest.

In the end, just like last year and even the year before I left thinking, “Man why isn’t this beta yet?” The game didn’t crash on me at all, the only issue I had were a few games got reaaaaally laggy, but as I overheard from one of the guys working it wasn’t the game so much as the laptops overheating. It feels and plays great. I still get the impression that zealots are crazy powerful, but I likewise get the feeling that the colossus and void ray are crazy powerful. The void ray on the other hand is really slow, but the colossus in mass is truly frightening.  This year the pace of the game felt really fast. I spent a lot of time examining the maps themselves. They didn’t have Lost Temple which was a bummer since I actually knew that map. Like I said in my preview to Blizzcon, the game probably won’t go into beta until they show off Battle.net and they did. I’m cautiously excited about beta starting soon now as opposed to waiting for that information to come out first. There’s another battle report coming out as well and I hope it’s the last one. I don’t see them making any more after the beta starts which is all well and good since I’ve heard they’ve implemented video recording from the replay viewer so people can just make their own. It’s just a matter of time and patience.