Starcraft 2

[The Damned]

OK, so I noticed this little thing called "practice league", and thought I would give it a try.

0 for 2, but at least it's not as brutal as getting put in with serious (and downright psychotic) players like Starcraft 1 would do. That went so badly, I stopped playing online for a few years It was just that bad.

But the nice thing I've noticed about SC2 is that it seems much more designed towards getting you to play better, whether off-line or on-line. They have challenges in single-player to practice common tactics and get a feel for units and their specialties.

Multiplayer practice (and I assume the ladders and leagues) pits you against players of the same skill-level, which really cuts down on the "I just can't compete against these guys, so why bother playing anymore" shit that happens to a lot of newer players. Remember all those games you felt like shit after playing, simply because you got your ass kicked? This makes up for it.

In fact, even though I lost both games so far, I got some really good attacks in, and in the 2vs2 game, we actually did a lot of damage to one guy, so much that we forced him to abandon that base and hole up with his buddy near his base. We still lost, because the Terran guy had fuckloads of Vikings, but damn, it was still a damn good game.

Thanks Blizzard, for making up for twelve years ago.

speaking of counters....

That's just awesome.

[Scrobble]

unfortunately, the practice league ultimately will not give you any sort of applicable skills for the real game, as the maps are changed to have more destructible objects, and i also believe the game speed is lowered.

Everyone loses a ton when they start out. If you can accept that (or at the very least just take a break after some dork cannon rushes you), then sc2 will be a lot of fun.

but skip the practice league.

[Souliarc]

If you can accept that (or at the very least just take a break after some dork cannon rushes you), then sc2 will be a lot of fun.

I love fending off the cannon rush :D It has happened so much. It was mainly on 2v2 and my partner usually had a rough time spotting it, but I just hoped they'd try that shit on me. Easy win.

[BardicKnowledge]

unfortunately, the practice league ultimately will not give you any sort of applicable skills for the real game, as the maps are changed to have more destructible objects, and i also believe the game speed is lowered.

Everyone loses a ton when they start out. If you can accept that (or at the very least just take a break after some dork cannon rushes you), then sc2 will be a lot of fun.

but skip the practice league.

If you're _completely_ new practice league can be helpful, but be aware that the only acceptable "strategy" there is to rush air units and rock house. This is because in order to get ground units to the other guy's base (without dropships or nydus, which are also decent) is to plow through an extra 10,000 HP worth of rocks. By the time you get a ground army punched through, the other player's void rays / muta army / banshees will have eaten half of your base.

Once you get away from the "novice" maps you need actual play because the rocks are no longer there. I'd advise that everyone learn how to do the following strategies at least once so that you understand their weaknesses -- bronze league seems to be dominated by these types of cheese:

1) 6pool zerg rush. To beat it as terran, make a wall at your choke point with your first supply depot and barracks -- pump marines to come out safely behind asap. For protoss you'll have to attack with probes while you chronoboost a zealot out -- don't burn CB on your nexus more than once until you know you're not being rushed. Counterattack once you fend off the second set of zerglings. Zerg get two spine crawlers up while you attack the first wave with your drones.

2) Reaper rush -- terran rush marauder, protoss CB a stalker out (don't even get any zealots to start if you scout this), zerg either spine crawler or queen (roaches probably won't be ready in time).

3) Cannon / proxy gateway rush -- Those empty corners of your base? Scout them early...which I will cover in a moment.

The single most important thing I can recommend for a new player is to scout early. Terrans should use the SCV that builds the 9/10 Supply Depot, toss the probe that calls the first pylon, zerg once your spawning pool goes up just send a drone. Sweep it around your base to check for proxy pylon, then head over to the other guy's base.

The important things to check for: How much gas does he have at this point? Does his barracks have an attachment -- which one? Did the zerg player try a rush (check for low # of drones)? If they have no attachment to their barracks but are pumping gas, they are trying to tech up quickly at the expense of an army -- attack now! Once you feel that you have enough data to give yourself an idea of what to build, either take your drone to his natural expansion (so you know when he uses it), or to the watchtower nearest his base. Either will make good use of your scout for some time.

[Schwaltzvald]

Probably old to you guys but...

First

then go see the following.

:lol:

[Souliarc]

Probably old to you guys but...

First

then go see the following.

:lol:

I was laughing so hard I was crying. My boss probably thought I was crazy.

-- bronze league seems to be dominated by these types of cheese:

Seems to be a testament to the skill level of players using that cheese. No doubt, if you work on your metagame and you know who you're facing, it's skillful in deciding to implement it based on their game play style. Otherwise... yeah.

Good info though Bard. Spot on to how I counter those cheeses.

[Schwaltzvald]

I was laughing so hard I was crying. My boss probably thought I was crazy.

Hope you took the time to see the full version; also here's his

.

[Souliarc]

Oh... oh yes indeed, I did lmao

[Koriantor]

Ok, I just played a 2v2 match and I was playing like this

They turtle at the beginning, making it easy to control the rest of the map, and we mass armies, and my team memeber got disconnected. I had to micro 2 races, but I gained a metric crapton of resources. In ended up because they turtled, I controlled the entire map, and just bled them dry. Except, they just would not give up. I killed anyway for them to rebuild, but they just built vikings and would not give up, even though they knew they had lost.

I'm all for giving a last ditch effort, but seriously, have the common decency to give up and let people go play another match rather than spend all of your time on this one match.

[Souliarc]

I hear ya. I was playing the other day and the other team would not give up until the last building, and even then, they kept pausing the game (to where I would unpause).

Of course they are just raging ragers and mad cause they lost, but don't BM... just learn from it.

And what is up with almost everybody that beats me gg'ing before I do? I usually am about to gg them and then they gotta go be fags. I'd imagine most of these people are Americans.

[The Damned]

FACT: Everyone on-line is an asshole. Totally insufferable, and totally dickish.

[Souliarc]

While noting the hyperbolic context of your statement, I do agree. I've agreed with this for many, many years. Sometimes I forget (like in this past SC2 match instance), but thanks for reminding me. As simple of a statement as it is, it's real.

[BardicKnowledge]

Ok, I just played a 2v2 match and I was playing like this

They turtle at the beginning, making it easy to control the rest of the map, and we mass armies, and my team memeber got disconnected. I had to micro 2 races, but I gained a metric crapton of resources. In ended up because they turtled, I controlled the entire map, and just bled them dry. Except, they just would not give up. I killed anyway for them to rebuild, but they just built vikings and would not give up, even though they knew they had lost.

I'm all for giving a last ditch effort, but seriously, have the common decency to give up and let people go play another match rather than spend all of your time on this one match.

This brings me to a complaint I hope is eventually addressed in a future balance patch:

Terran turtles a little too well now. And it's not the kind of turtling that allows you to build up an army and counter-attack, it's pissy turtling that just drags losing games on for too long. I think reducing Viking air range by 1 and/or increasing Siege Tank transition time by 2 seconds would help this without having a negative effect on the rest of the metagame. Thoughts on this?

[The Damned]

Well, I like to turtle in general. I love making bases and setting them up to withstand attack. Sadly, no one else likes doing this, so all my games end up with giant rushes or are over far too quickly.

Maybe it's all those 3 to 6 hour games we used to have in Starcraft 1 and Homeworld... but I just love long, drawn out, battles that take hours to finish.

So yeah, I'm finding SC2 isn't the game for me in that respect.

[Necrotic]

This brings me to a complaint I hope is eventually addressed in a future balance patch:

Terran turtles a little too well now. And it's not the kind of turtling that allows you to build up an army and counter-attack, it's pissy turtling that just drags losing games on for too long. I think reducing Viking air range by 1 and/or increasing Siege Tank transition time by 2 seconds would help this without having a negative effect on the rest of the metagame. Thoughts on this?

Siege tanks are getting pretty nerfed in the next patch, that'll probably help a lot; Instead of doing 50 damage straight up, they're gonna do 35 + 15 vs armored. So lighter units won't get swallowed up by tank shells as much anymore and heavier units are gonna take the same amount of damage they always did. They did a similar thing with the damage upgrades too.

I don't mind turtling really. A Terran will spend resources on defenses, but it's kind of balanced out by the fact that an opposing player can get ahead in tech and unit production. It makes timing your pushes and scouting really critical though.

[tweex]

http://gammasquad.uproxx.com/2010/08/university-of-florida-gives-up-gives-credit-for-playing-starcraft

HAHAHAHA. Thank God I'm not a Gator...

[Brandon Strader]

Cause if you were, you'd be scaly and green.

[friendlyHunter]

http://gammasquad.uproxx.com/2010/08/university-of-florida-gives-up-gives-credit-for-playing-starcraft

Interview with the prof behind this course here:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25626/

I like how the articles show only screenshots and artwork from games that are clearly not StarCraft. Even the thread title is wrong!

[Bahamut]

I thought this thread was spam at first

[Ramaniscence]

Ya'know I've been looking for a way to get my loans deferred....I wonder if it's an online class

Strike that, it IS online.

[friendlyHunter]

Man, this is the most confusing mod edit EVAR!!! =D Someone makes a thread relating to StarCraft 1, but puts StarCraft 2 in the title, and then the thread is merged here... making 2 of the 3 first replies no longer make sense due to lack of context!

But seriously, unmerge please; this has nothing to do with StarCraft 2, and if there was a SC1 thread, it would hardly belong in there either, as it isn't something that only SC players would want to read. If the thread was about a university course for a game I've never heard of, why the heck should I have to go to the [game I've never heard of] thread to find out about it?

At LEAST put a mod edit note on tweek's OP saying that a thread called "Get a Degree by playing Starcraft 2" has been merged into this thread.

[Arcana]

I am finding that there were a couple of things that improved my Starcraft 2 game immensely. I read this from an article inspired by Day[9] who is a pretty well-known video blogger for Starcraft and Starcraft 2.

These are applicable for bronze league (and probably silver/gold as well).

Number 1: Concentrate on macro.

Don't worry about how good you are with manipulating those units. Simply concentrate on getting the larger army up, faster. Be sure to expand out to new bases and to keep building units. A lot of games that don't end in 10 minutes due to rushes in Bronze simply come down to "who has the bigger army?"

Number 2: Watch the minimap.

If you can develop a skill to keep one eye on the minimap and the other eye on the main screen, do that. Because you will realise just how much you can see. People in bronze/silver often don't watch the map and you can fly guys by for harassing their expansions, or, interestingly enough, when the enemy launches an attack they'll walk right by your units at a Xel'naga watch tower because they simply did an attack-move to the base and didn't decide to clear the towers first. So you get to see exactly what type of army they're bringing to you.

This is why it's important to scout, though admittedly most new players will scout and not really know what to look for.

In this case though I recommend keeping units at each tower simply to watch for the enemy's movement, and if you see them move it'll allow you to get up the right type of defenses for the army they have.

[The Pezman]

I just remembered I had a program to fix Actizzard's annoying missing LAN features, now I think I can make LAN games on SC2

Do tell. I'm quite interested...

http://gammasquad.uproxx.com/2010/08/university-of-florida-gives-up-gives-credit-for-playing-starcraft

HAHAHAHA. Thank God I'm not a Gator...

Well, I actually know some people from the University of Florida. Smart guys. Pioneering a new semantic-web network for researchers. So I wouldn't bash the whole of U of F over this thing.

On top of that, they weren't the first to do this.

[Conan The Politician]

I know that scrobble has already declared it first, but I'm going to see if we can't try again at getting a small tournament together. Due to the fact that this issue may or may not be drowned out by other posts on this thread, I will provide a link on this post to the social group topic for the tournament. Supposedly there's already some ideas out there for what format it should be, but I'm having trouble finding it.

And here's the link:

http://ocremix.org/forums/group.php?&do=discuss&groupid=8&discussionid=&gmid=1647#gmessage1647

I'll probably paste this to my signature, just to see if that can't eke out a few more people that may be interested. Everything, as far as my knowledge goes, should be addressed, while that which isn't can be discussed on further in the thread link. If anyone else feels like advertising it, go right ahead and paste the link wherever .

[noTuX]

I wish they had a league for people that are new to the Starcraft series. I've played 4 matches in the practice league, but I only won 1 (by luck).

The other guys I've played have been playing Starcraft for years, so they already have the advantage. Kinda frustrating...