Comment by MrMetric
1 day ago
Could you say more on this? I've tried StarCraft a few times over the years, thanks to a lucky thrift store find as a teen. Got a Battle Chest for $10 and the key hadn't even been registered! Never got close to beating it, though. Been a while since last time, but my lingering impression says it was always a confusing sequence of disconnected events taking an agonizingly long time to play out, and the controls were hella clunky and fiddly. I kept trying anyway because something about it feels real appealing, but I don't quite get it. But I feel like I want to get it, y'know?
I'd love to say more but I'm not sure where to start.
Your experience of the game is going to change dramatically depending on when you first played it and how much experience you have with the genre in general. For all my gushing adoration for the game, it is well over a quarter-century old at this point and even then it assumed a fair amount of knowledge and understanding about how the genre works.
When you say "close to beating it" I assume you're talking about the single player campaign, as opposed to the multiplayer death matches?
It's impossible for me to separate my current opinion from the decades of memories I have bound up in the game, but I think the campaign still holds up today, especially in the remastered version. It tells an interesting story with missions that are still fun to play, assuming you enjoy the basic rts build base make units attack enemy.
Like I said, it's hard to tell exactly what part of it you're having problems with, the fundamental gameplay loop is start with a small base, build workers, gather more resources, build bigger base, use bigger base to build army, use army to secure more resource areas to build even bigger base, use biggerer base to build biggest army, win map.
If you're having trouble actually beating the campaigns, 90% of the time the problem is people aren't building enough workers, the exact math gets a little complicated but as a very general rule of thumb you should probably have 25-26 workers for every set of minerals you have a base at, and you should be prioritizing building these workers above basically everything else.
Once you reach something like 8 workers mining minerals you can afford to both constantly build workers and build other units, then once you hit 26 or so you can stop building workers and focus on maxing out your army. Generally speaking the campaign AI is pretty forgiving, concentrating on defense for the first 10 minutes and then pushing out with a maxed out army works on like 90% of the maps.
Beyond that, I don't know what to say about clunky and slow. If the game is too slow, you can actually change what speed it plays at in the options menu, it actually defaults to a medium speed that nobody actually plays the game at, everyone plays at fastest setting, so dunno, maybe that's it. Other than that, units do exactly what you tell them to, no more, no less, that's the nature of this type of game, you're expected to be controlling essentially every unit on the map at all times.
> you're expected to be controlling essentially every unit on the map at all times.
I think that's the core of a big criticism of Starcraft. After a certain point, it almost becomes a rhythm game.
The actual depth of the units was also smaller, compared to the fairly rich dynamics of TA.
This doesn't make it a worse game, but it is distinctly different.
Queuing orders in TA and then in Supreme Commanders was best-in-class. Both single units and structures, and groups of them (selected with an assignable hotkey), could have infinitely long command queues. Patrol mode was useful for both engineers and normal units. SupCom added air- and sea-based transportation corridors. The queues were not broken if you ran out of resources temporarily; they just paused and then resumed when possible. I played TA before StarCraft and after Warcraft 2 - I felt SC to be a huge downgrade in terms of controls, and dropped it almost immediately. SupCom then came close to the absolute peak of RTS for me in terms of controls, physics, and economy management. The problem with all the fan-made successors is that I don't want PvP at all, and they seem to focus on that, while the original TA and SupCom were incredible single-player experiences, too.
Wow, thanks for replying! Thought I was pissing into the wind with that one.
I've never once touched the multiplayer mode. I don't recall seeing the option for it. I mean, I'm sure it's there, but I don't remember it, which means I've never clicked on it. So, yes, single player campaign only. A decent amount of the original, and then about half a level of Brood War when I skipped forward one time.
Wow, that sounds like a hella lotta workers. I vaguely recall trying that in a mission or two where I had severe resource problems, but then I didn't have enough offensive units and ran out of minerals by mining them too fast. Hmm... I remember getting frustration-curiosity a couple times and checking YouTube videos of how people beat missions I was completely stuck on, and being very unsatisfied because what I saw worked when I tried it myself but I didn't understand it (I can tell I didn't understand it because I don't remember it).
I didn't know there's a speed setting. That could make missions less of a long-ass slog, although, uh, controlling every unit at once? That sounds like a massive amount of busywork and I'm not confident I could pull it off (unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean). What I meant by "slow" is the missions can drag on for a reeeaaaally long time, and by "clunky and fiddly", I mean it was hard to make things happen because of all the... not sure how to describe it. I guess I'd want to change the speed lower, but then everything would take too long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And if by "the genre" you mean real-time strategy games, StarCraft is the only one I have any level of familiarity with, so if it assumes you already know that stuff, then that's probably a problem. When I said it's "a confusing sequence of disconnected events", I mean I couldn't correlate most of what I did to any of what happened. It was just random stuff happening most of the time, and when I changed my approach, I couldn't predict what the outcome would be and no significant learning occurred.
Despite all that, I really do like the game (wouldn't be talkin' about it so much if I didn't). I appreciate your advice, too. I'll have to see if I can get the thing running again.
> Other than that, units do exactly what you tell them to, no more, no less,
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The controls are a finely tuned machine in starcraft, as evidenced by the competitive scene with crazy apm.
If you dislike the micro required, thats fine, but just because it doesnt suite your preference doesn't mean its bad or clunky.
Just say “I dont like it”.
Thats fine.
If you want to “get” it, devote a few days to playing online multiplayer.
There is a design choice to be made balancing apm and technical play and I think they went to far towards the apm side. Could compare it to bullet chess. While broodwars was arguably even more neurotic it oddly seemed to have more surprising builds. Like many, I've been wondering what slower speed sc2 tournaments would look like.
Also interesting, they went with a specific kind of maps with things like nearly identical mineral lines, no islands or isolated high/low ground, map symmetry, not to big, not to small, ramps, chokes etc and then they balance the game mechanics around those maps making those choices almost permanent.
I use to download a lot of replays and there is a lot more technical fun to be had that is pretty much irrelevant in apm battles. It is also funny to see the game fall apart on maps that don't follow the standard design. Like, flying buildings should be fun not useless or the end of the world.
I don't love a lot of the design decisions sc2 made but at the end of the day it's pretty small nitpicking.
It's incredibly hard to divorce the map from the unit balance in a game like this and people eventually just settled on some combination of standard map features in order to balance around.
That being said, I think sc2 is considerably worse about map variety (mostly due to having more air units and more responsive/smaller collision box armies), every season bw had at least one "wacky" map pros were expected to play on, whether that involves islands or the nearly infinite number of tricks designers pulled off using minerals and gas geysers and such as ways to force certain play patterns
A couple of times they'd even design maps in such a way that one of your close expansion bases started off covered in creep, meaning zerg players could build there whenever they wantes but the other races had to destroy the creep first, with the idea being to make zerg stronger.
I think flying buildings are an interesting example of a fairly useful ability that ends up being extremely subtle, sort of like zerg healing. In almost any pro game, a terran player will lift off at least one building, frequently more (depending on how long the game lasts), but it's rarely a huge game defining moment, just a little optimization (unless they manage to lift off the barracks just when the speedlings show up...)
As you say, there's a balance between apm and "pure strategy", at one end you have chess and the other, dunno, bw I guess, and where you design for is going to involve a whole bunch of subjective factors.
Huh? I specifically said "my lingering impression". What I described is how the game felt to play, to me. I'm not talking about preferences and I'm not asserting some absolute universal state.