We have been braving the toils of battle.net against real people with both success and failure, but mostly success! The actual outcome of our gaming evenings have been based off of a series of d20 rolls: 1 through 9 for real people and 10 through 20 for custom AI games. Our first few wins were overwhelming victories against people who were obviously new. Game #4 was the first “real” opponent who made an effort to attack. I don’t know how the practice league works, but it seems like were are being paired with more skilled people the more we play. Just for the heck of it I have been jotting down short notes about some of the matches that we have played throughout the week. Here are a couple of highlights:
3rd game: We got complacent after the first two wins and having little to no defense, pretty much got rolled over very early in the game. We also got rolled over during our 5th game but I am pretty sure that was just due to the other person being better :P. I like how you can kind of sort of gauge your opponents skill level based off of their SC2 portrait on the game load screen. If they have one of the portraits that is not unlocked by a normal campaign play-through odds are that the game is going to be fairly short lol.
4th game: This match was a lot of fun because our opponents were decent. They got a good mid-game stalker/viking rush off. Mothership and banshee spam still prevailed though I feel as if we should be exploring other build options at this point. First decent win \o/
8 through 10: We went double Terran and “experimented” with viking rushing. Basically, just going 111 build with a reactor on the starport to shit out vikings as much as possible. It worked well twice; The first game being an 11 minute win, the second game being an 18 minute win. The third game was a massive failure because something uuuuh bad happened lol.
11th game: Even match, they had half of the map and we had half of the map. They surrendered almost exactly at the one hour mark, ending a huge no resources left on the map standoff. That was a very fun match. I spent a not so insignificant portion of my time faffing about turtling my base because I wasn’t sure what else to do. I should have realized that the southern zerg base was a lost cause and sent units up to help my partner overtake and hold the top part of the map earlier on. And yay, I also learned a couple of nuking and siege tricks over voice chat courtesy of my lovely 2v2 partner <3.
I really like the replays, we have been examining and commenting on each interesting vs match. I have gotten reasonably okay at turtling and eliminating expansions, ultimately leading to wins by resource attrition. Still not good at keeping constant, early pressure on other players. You see this micromanagement thing is uuuh tricky. This is what I have learned so far in my two+ weeks of playing. I still intend on learning to play a race that is not Terran at some point.
- Terrans should wall off their ramp as early as possible to prevent scouting and to help defend against early rushes. Apparently more cleaver people are able to craft ramp funnels around units and bunkers, redirecting an invading force around armed units.
- Supply depot walls make reasonable fodder. They will also retract into the ground with you select them and press “r”. In practical terms, it means that they make great gates.
- Ultimately, StarCraft is a resource strategy game. No minerals = no units.
- Expand early and try to prevent your opponent from expanding.
- The general strategy, afaik, seems to be: Attack and retreat attack and retreat. Harass early and as often as possible. Pull out to avoid excessive unit loss; The goal of an early rush is to do more economic damage to your opponent. Reapers can kite all level 1 units but can be countered by like, placing a bunker or a marauder at your mineral line.
- You can queue unit actions by holding shift and right clicking. Awesome for siege tanks: Hold shift, right click, siege mode, go do something else. Also awesome for scouting: Right click all over the map, let the unit scout, do something else. I NEVER KNEW THIS.
- You can mix and match Terran building addons. Need a tech lab on your factory right away? Lift off and swap it out with something else that has a tech lab…as long as your base isn’t retardedly layed out like mine usually is. Also good for pre-building expansions so that say, you will be able to start pushing out Banshees immediately without having to wait for a tech lab to build. An idle building is a useless building.
A couple of replays are included below for posterity. I still need to hop on and do some 1v1 matches. In fact, I was planning on doing that earlier today but I uuh had to be productive this weekend and step away from my computer for a good portion of the day.