Starcraft II

[Aphelion]

In SC1 it was super normal to build a hatch a little bit off due to terrain reasons and placing a 3rd hatch at the 'proper' location later. I don't see anything about SC2 that would make that different.

[CSamurai]

So, I came across this last week, and I figured that even though it is in regards to an SC1 tournament, it might appeal to those of you who are interested in AI programming.

Why the Zerg will rule the universe.

[Abydos1]

Terran will sometimes build a CC next to the rocks and mine one of the geysers + some close mineral patches until they can get around to destroying the rocks. You can do this if your expo at the nat gets delayed by pressure too.

For zerg in bw it was a lot more common since the extra hatch is used for larva but with queens now you don't often see a hatchery that isn't placed at an expo.

[Aphelion]

Of course Protoss, the race that needed the expos (in BW) the most gets screwed.

[Solomon]

GSL finals in 7 hours 47 minutes! I wish it'd be a PvX, but TvT is definitely the more dynamic mirror matchup so it's all good...+ these are the best of the best when it comes to Terran. I think IMMVP is gonna take it 4-2 , MKP forever silver.

Also, right after the GSL is the OSL finals (good night). I haven't been keeping track of the BW scene so much these days but it's definitely interesting to see Stork still doing very well these days, reminds me a bit of Lee Changho. Anyways I'll be rooting for Stork, my life for Aiur .

[Chew Terr]

To terran players: I've heard of gas steal helping to hinder double-gas banshee rushes, and the logic makes sense. Banshees are currently the bane of my existence (the cause of my last two 1v1 losses). Obviously I need to work on getting more queens/spreading creep between bases, and so on. However, can any terran players speak to the effectiveness of gas steal on hindering the banshee builds? Of course, it's only a delay, but every bit I can get will help. Any other zerg suggestions for how to predict the banshees?

As an aside, I once managed a double-gas steal, intending to force my opponent into early marines, which I hoped to counter with banelings, but then I noobishly failed to get banelings fast enough to counter the inevitable marine rush...

[Numsgil]

I play random, but when I'm zerg in ZvT:

With your early drone check his base. If he goes double refinery early on, banshees are a distinct possibility. Otherwise, check back periodically to see what he's going. If your drone gets to Terran's front too late (it's already walled off), you probably need to send a drone a bit earlier. Later in the game, You can always shove a few zerglings up his ramp and see what he defends with, then pull back, and only lose a zergling or two.

If you see lots of marines or helions (far less common), and double especially if you see bunkers defending Terran's base, you have to ask yourself where that gas is going, because it's certainly not into units or structures you see. If you don't see what he might be spending his gas on, assume the worst. And the worst for Zerg is usually banshees.

He might not be going to banshees (maybe he's going for a Thor drop), but for your given build, assume the worst case scenario for your opponent's build unless you can prove otherwise. In the case where there's two worst case scenarios or more (your build is fragile to a few different things), you have to figure out what's going on as soon as you can, or you'll lose. You want to try and force your opponent to reveal his hand, by either attacking his front with fast units then pulling back once you see what he defends with, or sacrificing an overlord into his base (your first overlord should have made it to his base by now). You don't want to play blind if your opponent could be going a build you don't handle very well.

Once you know its banshees, or once you strongly suspect its banshees, start spamming queens. You probably will still be on hatchery tech, so build queens, and one spore colony at each base, and connect your bases with creep (they detect cloaked units much further the spore colony's range, so your queens can be your mobile battery).

The other strategy is to actually stay on one base for a bit longer and tech up.

Also keep in mind: banshees aren't base stomping units. They tear through drones pretty fast, but they aren't going to be taking your buildings down very fast (unless he's massing banshees, in which case it's well into the mid game and that's something else entirely). You can often just move all the drones away to another base, start building queens and spore crawlers, and wait the 45 seconds or whatever for them to get up. Terran has to do a lot of damage with his banshees to even break even, since he invested so much to it. Even if you lose half your drones, he probably won't have an army to come kill you, so the game is probably even. Macro up some more drones and you should stand a good change of winning.

[ketchup]

GSL finals in 7 hours 47 minutes! I wish it'd be a PvX, but TvT is definitely the more dynamic mirror matchup so it's all good...+ these are the best of the best when it comes to Terran. I think IMMVP is gonna take it 4-2 , MKP forever silver.

Also, right after the GSL is the OSL finals (good night). I haven't been keeping track of the BW scene so much these days but it's definitely interesting to see Stork still doing very well these days, reminds me a bit of Lee Changho. Anyways I'll be rooting for Stork, my life for Aiur .

Wow GSL Finals, huge disappointment. MKP seems to have had the pressure/nerves get to him. There's no way MVP should have shut him out. I'm sure he has a lot more talent and skill than what was seen there. Plus, it's really odd he didn't really play his own style in any one of those games. I had really high hopes for TvT as well, since it's actually one of the more common match ups for SC2 in GSL.

I was thinking of staying awake for OSL, but I couldn't do it!

[CSamurai]

Losing streak. Demoted to silver.
Should just quit, learned that at the L19 diamond tourney.
Too stubborn.
I hate failing.

[Numsgil]

Keep in mind that everyone else has been improving, too. It's a bit of a red queen's race.

[Chew Terr]

Keep in mind that everyone else has been improving, too. It's a bit of a red queen's race.

This is a good point, and one that's not always intuitive to me. I feel like I should always be improving (a trap I fall into with go), but it's even harder in SC, since there are effectively mobile anchors, depending on whether people improve or new players join.

[Numsgil]

Go at least has some somewhat stable anchors in high dan pros, that we can sort of trickle down ranks from. Starcraft is too new (10+ years, maybe 20+ years if we include other RTS games vs. maybe 500-1000 years of really serious study for Go) for even those that play Starcraft professionally to really be stable anchors.

[CSamurai]

Unless the entire population of a rank is improving at a similar rank, which I find to be unlikely, then improvements of individuals in a well structured rank system (which I'm not suggesting Blizzard's is.) should be mobile, rather than the anchor points themselves being mobile.

That is to say, unless everyone is simultaneously getting better, and I'm standing still, the 'improvement' of other players should result in demotion only after I have been surpassed by a large portion of the gold population. I went directly from #1 gold, back to silver, proving that either I suck, which is by far the more likely event than the whole of gold and part of silver suddenly getting better.

I haven't put in any 12 hour Sc2 days lately. I've worked on my Yabot a little, but I haven't been playing 10 games a day like I used to, in part because I can't beat terrans or protoss, and in part because playing with the field of diamond at the last tournament made me realize, I'm never ever ever going to be any good a this game. Not even a little bit. Even if I were to completely focus on this game for the next six months, I would never reach high platinum, much less diamond.

And do you know why? No? Neither do I. I don't know what it is I do wrong. My build order, though not perfect, isn't horrid. My food count is often equal to or close to even platinum level players. And when it comes down to it, I couldn't win a fight if a gold terran left half his troops at home.

My APM maxes out at a blistering 100APM. My builds crumble under any sort of pressure. Want to win when you play me? Build some air force, and harass me. You win. Of course, it's even easier with terrans, just build stim pack and some marines.

I'm so demoralized lately that I don't even expect to win any game that isn't a zerg, even if I'm favoured.

I'm going to go home in a few hours. And I'm going to try to play. I'll probably win, since they'll match me against bronzies and new silvers who haven't even heard the words 'build order' before.

But once I've won a few, they'll match me against people actually at or around my rank again, and I'll lose.

There's no middle ground any more for me. I'm either steam rolling a poor nub who doesn't know they're playing a 1000 game failure, (I'm rounding up. I've got 50 or so games before I get to 1000.) or getting my butt handed to me by a 200 game veteran who must think I'm pathetic with my 1000 games to silver.

I don't know why I bother to play any more. Wins aren't fun, they usually make me feel bad for steamrolling my opponent, leaving a taste in my mouth as if I were sandbagging. Losses are humiliating and demoralizing.

But I keep coming back over and over, like somehow, if I just remember when to chrobo boost, and when to build a pylon, something will actually take more than 5 minutes, and be halfway fun.

It never is.

[topazg]

Sounds like the story of my life

I'll never get diamond league in anything I suspect, it's just something to come to peace with. I have no idea if I even _could_ get to diamond league in anything, even if it wasn't for this great huge timesink that is a busy family life. If I don't enjoy something just for the sake of doing it, I stop doing it and do something else.

Divide your time into "stuff that's really fun", "stuff that's helpful", and "stuff that's necessary" (in no particular order), and get rid of the "stuff I feel I have to do or get good at because, I dunno, I don't want to be bad at them", and get rid of the desire to be really really good at anything that fits into the "fun" category.

Just my relatively unhelpful philosophical diatribes I'm afraid, but I felt your pain a bit with that last post and wanted to say something.

[CSamurai]

I like playing games. I'm a gamer, and a geek, and rather proud of both. One of my earliest memories is of holding a paper chess/checkers board up to a wall when I was still too young to stand up well, and trying to convince my elder sister that it could be used to play some sort of abstract game, like a map for battle.

Told my mother this memory, turns out I was between 2 and 3 years old, which is why I had a few problems explaining my new chess variant, I'm sure.

Games are a major portion of my life.

I've never been particularly good at games. My hand eye coordination is, at best, mediocre. My reflexes are a bit slow. My brain reacts very quickly. My fingers less so.

I took to playing first person shooters rather late in life, when I was 18. I started hanging out with a lan house that lived near me (One of the guys there worked for a computer store, and just built up a stockpile of about 15-20 working to semi working computers). We played everything, but mostly we played Counterstrike. I sucked. I couldn't move five steps without getting my head blown off.

So I started playing 5 hours a day, every day, 10-12 on days off. I spent almost every waking moment playing. When I could win on the newbie servers, I went to the hacker's servers, and played against hackers without any hacks myself. When i got bored with that, I started playing with only the desert eagle on the hacker servers. At the end of a year, I was one of the best players in my clan.

Now, granted, my life revolved around the lan house, my clan, and counterstrike. I didn't read, I didn't socialize, I just shot people in the head, a lot. I know that such dedication isn't healthy (see the fact that I ended up joining the military shortly afterwards to pull myself out of debt) but I know what it takes to get good at games.

And I know I have to try harder than most to get better at reflex based games. I have to basically build up my reflexes from the ground up. I have to hard code them myself.

I'm just not sure why I should bother with SC2 any more.

When I started, it was fun. It was completely new to me. I had never played any multiplayer of any RTS before, not with any sort of study, so I cracked open liquidpedia, I sat down with my favourite race, and I learned myself some build orders.

And I sucked. So I learned some better ones. I experimented with 4 gate, 3 gate expand, 3 gate robo/star, I experimented with 1 gate FE, 2 gate FE, I spent 400 games experimenting, and sometimes what I did worked, and sometimes it borked, but I learned a lot.

Then I settled down, and I got serious. I started to focus on a couple builds, which I knew should work. I mean, I've seen other people do them, and they work. 3 gate robo should allow me to stand a chance vs terran or protoss, but I don't stand a chance. I could be playing blind fast expand with more success than my 3 gate robo. 2 gate stargate allows me to steamroll most zerg around my level.

I started building my tactics based on maps, scouting, my opponent's race, etc etc.

And I suck. I haven't improved in ages. I even feel like I'm worse at my builds now, than I was a few months ago. I seem to come out with fewer units than I used to, anyway.


At some point, the new wore off. The fun of learning something interesting became the grind of trying to tweak everything, to get 'a little better'. But I'm doing all this work on my game, and I'm not getting any better, and I'm not having any fun.

I don't know. Maybe I should quit playing, and quit whining. I just have invested a terrible lot of time into this. And when I sit around at work, all I can think of is my malkovich game, and what I can try to do better next time I play starcraft. Every time I close my eyes I see a snapshot of my last game, and think to myself 'What's next in the build order?' just like I used to when I was studying joseki, close my eyes, picture a corner, and ask, 'What's next in this joseki?'.

I'm not a good gamer. I'm just a very very determined one, one willing to play a thousand games, just to learn how to execute a build order. But what good is playing more games, when I'm not going to get any better?