When thinking about getting ready for Starcraft 2, it seems natural to think of playing Starcraft 1 or Warcraft 3. However Starcraft 2 is only just related to these games and playing them can teach you good things, but when you get hands on with Starcraft 2 you’ll find it quite different.
Starcraft to Stacraft 2
This is generally going to get you most acquainted with and prepared for SC2 except for the vast vast improvements in building grouping, resource gathering, and smartcasting.
War3 added in multiple building selection and allowing them to be hotkeyed, whereas in SC1 you can’t do this. Reading over Sirlin’s sit in at the SC class this semester I read that one of the pro gamers tip was that you hotkey one gateway and you double click it and quickly select each gateway nearby with hotkeys for unit creation for a rapid fire mass build. In SC2 you can just group all your gateways into one control group, press the hotkey, then for as many of the unit you want you press the unit creation key. So if you want 3 zealots you press z 3 times.
In SC1 you want to constantly produce your probe/drone/scv units. Since you can’t group buildings together, you have to manually check each town hall spot to create the unit. Additionally you can’t rally them to minerals/gas and have them start harvesting on production. So you must babysit them once created to get max use out of them. Again, in War3 you can rally straight to resources and have units begin gathering automatically. To me, the SC1 setup is very tedious, but it does force you to remember to keep producing your economy.
Starcraft 1 had no setup for smartcasting. If you had 3 templar and pressed the psi storm and fired it off, 3 would go off at once. You’d think this is great except the game didn’t allow stacking of psi storm, so 2 are wasted. In War3 they implemented a feature where the casters would cast one at a time in this situation. Tab subgrouping also really helps to quickly select your casting units, again something added into War3.
Other than that, SC1 should teach you the basics of SC2 very well. Many units are removed/replaced in SC2, but the fundamentals of economy, building, and unit counters are all there.
Wacraft 3 to Starcraft 2
So in all those points you’ll notice that War3 made great UI improvements which makes SC1 frustrating to play. I’m taking the War3 to SC2 route, but I’m also aware of the problems and differences in War3 style play to SC2 style play. War3 is a very hero-centric game with many RPG elements. Hard counters are not as hard as they are in SC2 and the economic model is far more simplistic.
The hero-centric nature of War3 means that for the most part, armies always move as one with the hero. Through the course of patching and such, they made it so that you don’t have to move with the hero (hero still gains exp if your hero isn’t around) but in the world of min/maxing I think it’s somewhat foolish to split your army away from your hero. Because of this, one of the main tactics I employed in my days of SC1 isn’t as easily done (coupled with the fact that you require a neutral building to do it anyway) which was always having a drop ready when my main army was in battle. Heroes are so powerful that you want them in the army to help turn the tides. An army fighting without a hero vs an army with one is most probably doomed.
The RPG element of leveling your heroes made games over long before the actual ending. You will find very few if any games where the victor had lower level heroes than the loser. How you play your hero and how early battles play out can many times plot the course of victory long before you see the summary screen. You can easily lose the game in the first 5 minutes and not even know it NOR make a large comeback in time before the more powerful hero presses his advantage.
Starcraft is a game of hard counters and low health. Battles can be over in the blink of an eye because of the unit matchups. In War3 you try to preserve anything and everything so that the enemy doesn’t get an exp advantage, but in SC tactics and map control are far more important than making sure the first zergling you ever made lives to the end of the game. War3 has a lot less of this and stresses the continued importance of micro during battle.
One thing about the economy in Starcraft that pro players do is they always have an scv/probe/drone queued up. You must have continued economic growth in Starcraft whereas in War3 you can only have so many people on the gold mine. That’s not to say you shouldn’t keep making peons in War3, but expanding is much more natural in SC than it is in War3, or at least, how I play War3, which can still be very incorrect. War3 has a sort of set it and forget it style about the single town economy. You only need so many guys on gold/lumber. In Starcraft you cannot have enough guys getting minerals ever, and if you do, you should be expanding to move excess onto the new hall.
Starcraft 2 gains the best parts of Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 and leaves the junk behind. And by junk I mean heroes. RTS games are all about economics, who has more resources on the battlefield, who is getting the most return on that investment, and how you are planning to incapacitate the enemy’s economy. You do this by evaluating what the opponent is showing you on the battlefield, responding appropriately, and combat while still keeping tabs on the basics like your probe production/teching. When you watch the best players play, their screen is just flashes of locations as they squeeze in just as much time as they need to on economy, combat, and reconnaissance.
So what should you do to prepare yourself for SC2? It probably doesn’t matter if you’re choosing between SC1 and War3. SC1 is probably better for you since looking at the Protoss the transition to SC2 should be pretty seamless, although Terran are nearly 100% different. War3 will be more familiar control wise but fairly unfamiliar when you’re making units and deciding what to do.
Then again fundamentals are important. When teamed up with a new guy, you want to be able to say things that make sense to them and not totally confuse them. If you say “Go fiends/statues” you don’t want their response to be “Ok what do I do to make those?” This is probably a different topic altogether though. Maybe what I’m really saying is SC2 multiplayer prep.
So originally this was going to be a rant about how I would go about dissecting the game to teach a total noob how to play. I still think about this since there will be so many new people playing soon who don’t keep up as much as I obsess over it. So maybe this is something to look forward to.
