Comment by wredcoll

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.