Nuances of Gaming
Posted by TimothyJul 28
I had this whole long thing written up about the fundamentals of RTS (specifically Starcraft/Warcraft) games thinking about how to better elaborate on a starting point for new people. I’ve since decided it’s not learning how to harvest with probes and when you should start making buildings that’s really important to getting into games, but really the nuances of each element of the game that are really the defining characteristics between the gaps in player skill.
For instance, you can have too many people on a mineral patch. If this happens then your remaining probes will find another patch nearby, however the delay in this action will cost you some early minerals. In Starcraft 2 the AI for this is much much much better, but still something that you might not know or realize until later in your playtime. Even though the basic rule of thumb is always to be making your probes/drones/scvs you will hit a limit on effective resourcing. Long before you hit this limit you should have expanded.
Units are designed to counter other units generally speaking. From what I’ve been reading it seems like counters don’t intend to be as hard as they were in Starcraft 1, but I’m hoping that’s just a random statement from the developers. What this means is, if unit A is designed to counter unit B, and you’re making unit B and your opponent is making unit A, you should probably stop making unit B. There’s no amount of brute force (again generally speaking) of throwing the unit inferior to the opponent that will make you come out on top. There are a lot of units in Starcraft so this is something you’ll have to research on your own.
Cliffs and hills are much more advantageous in Starcraft 2. In Starcraft 1 if a ranged unit was attacking from the top of a hill it is possible (if the attacked unit is ranged) that the player at the bottom can attack up the hill with a chance to miss the target. In SC2 this is gone, unless you have a unit that can see up the cliff, you cannot fight back.
Right clicking is context sensitive and generally does what you want it to. Be aware however that if you’re under attack right clicking to move your units can doom you. When any unit is selected, right clicking on the map tells them to move unconditionally to the spot you tell them to go to. If you instead press “A” or issue the attack command and then right click, they will move but stop if they run into combat and fight. It’s really easy to spot and punish noobs for right clicking and issuing the wrong orders.
Holding position to help create chokepoints in Starcraft is also a very important skill. If you’ve seen battle report 3 you’d know just by seeing the force fields go up how important this can be when faced with an overwhelming army and you aren’t quite ready for it. If you combine the hill advantage on your incoming base ramp with a blockade you create a situation where the ability for mass melee units becomes less effective since they’re unable to surround you. With range you create line of sight problems which plays out to your advantage. There’s also the new tall grass map mechanic that might be useful for escapes as long as you hold your battle line right at the perimeter of the grass.
Space bar is a special hotkey that takes you back to the last unit transmission. If a unit comes under attack and they shout that out and you’re looking somewhere else, if you press spacebar your screen will center on that last transmission. In SC1 it only did the last immediate transmission, but Warcraft 3 had a transmission queue that you could cycle through. Don’t waste your time scrolling around the map/minimap when you can just press space bar.
Speaking of queues, buildings can queue up many units for creation, however it’s in better practice that you shouldn’t probably use more than the 2nd spot for the queue if you can avoid it. The reason for this is that you’re spending money for the long long term when you can spend that money on more immediate things. If you have only one barracks and you are constantly trying to make 7 marines or something, you’d be better off making at least 1-2 more barracks and limiting the line. In the end you’ll be able to make 3+ marines at once as opposed to waiting for 7 to come out in order.
Those are the really basic nuances of Starcraft. Some advanced ones from old old Starcraft 1 were the reaver drop. In Starcraft 1 the reaver is the siege weapon of the Protoss. It attacks very slowly (time between attacks) but hits very hard with aoe damage. Someone noticed one day that when you drop units out of a shuttle they attack immediately. They then thought about what would happen if you were to pick up the unit and drop it out again faster than it’s attack speed? Well it turned out at the time it would fire regardless of cooldown. What ended up happening is that pairing the reaver with the shuttle made it a rapid fire death machine. It was eventually patched so that it wasn’t as potent. Stuff like this learned in the game is what’s going to be really important compared to the really fundamental things you learn as you cruise through single player. You may never even notice or learn of things like this and once you face off with someone that knows the trick you’d be at a crippling disadvantage.I really can’t wait to see what all kinds of things will be discovered in Starcraft 2.
