IndyDDR.com

This is a thread for me and Michael Blanford.

Starcraft is a decade old now and is considered the definitive RTS in terms of balance, strategy, and competitiveness. The country of South Korea has even gone so far as to seemingly deify the game and its top players. Starcraft 2 has been in production for about five years now and is supposedly going to be released within the year if Blizzard can get the beta out soon.

The Starcraft scene in America is full of your typical internet aspies who treat it as a lifestyle, not unlike the rhythm game scene, particularly the ITG scene AMIRITE?

Anyway, I guess the point of this thread is to discuss Starcraft, why Chad hates (and sucks at) it, and to share replays.

Mike, review my replay, I know I am terrible and know nothing of micro. I would like to see some of yours too so I can stop losing games in <5 minutes. I played it on iccup so obviously the map was Python.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=dada ... f6e8ebb871

What about Daniel?

Does he play? He's Korean so he obviously is familiar with it and is probably naturally very good at the game. But I do know that Mike takes the game somewhat seriously and plays at a competitive, as opposed to casual, level.

I know Daniel Renner plays Starcraft or is at least interested even if he hasn't played recently. He's asked me to play him repeatedly, which I would do if I had played it within the past 6 years. I recall at one point being on the top 100 of the US ladder, but that was when the game was very new and nobody was overly serious about it yet (I bought it within like 2-3 days of release).

It's a pretty good game. 1.04 Brood War unbalanced things some, but I think they restored the balance near the end of the patch sequence (whatever they're up to now). The problem I had was that none of my friends wanted to play anything other than Big Game Hunters (which we had been off and on playing since before Brood War as "The Hunters with mucho money"), which definitely changes the game.

Yes, I would say that for the most part the game is balanced which is a rarity in pretty much any sort of game these days. From what I've read the few imbalances in the game come from the maps themselves instead of the races. I suppose the fact that it's still played competitively, after 10 years, can be attributed to its balance.

And yes, playing on BGH or any other sort of money map pretty much takes all the fun out of the game. Sadly that's all you'll find now if you go onto battle.net and try to play. Fortunately there are the iCCup servers where you can find regular games with people who probably take the game a little bit too seriously. It is interesting though to see how the game has evolved into the clickclickclickclick APM-fest that it is today.

But anyway, if anyone ever wants to play I am unemployed, so I have plenty of time on my hands.

I get it. I suck at Starcraft.

>=[

What's Starcraft?

WhiteDragon wrote:What's Starcraft?

Some crappy RTS that is inferior to Age of Empires 2 in every way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1pLV5KyvQM&fmt=22

Pretty cool, shows how seriously they take it in Korea. They have houses for Counter-Strike and Starcraft players. There are similar things in Europe and maybe one or two in USA for CS:S I know, but it'd be pretty cool to stay in a place like this.

When I started playing SC forever ago the official ladder was already full of hackers: the top 10 all "magically" had a 9999 rating and everyone else on it maphacked. So I just played a lot with friends and eventually got into gamei which was the 1v1 korean ladder at the time. Ratings start at 1000 and used something very similar to the USCF system. I think the high rating was 2200 or so - I got to 1600 with protoss and 1200 with zerg. But that was 5 years ago or so and now the only ladder I know of is iccup, which is also dominated by koreans in 1v1, but I don't think it's as serious a ladder as gamei was. I heard koreans just play iccup to get experience playing vs random cheese. Cheese is the technical term for doing something very unexpected that will give you a huge advantage IF your opponent doesn't notice that you're doing it, but will give you a huge disadvantage if they DO find out. So for example, in protoss vs zerg my favorite cheese is to build one gateway in your base so that they scout it and think you're going to fast expand, but you actually built 2 more gateways in a random location on the map. Then you show up in their base with like 12 zealots. So that's why there's a little bit of chance to the game instead of just APM. If you pick a really risky opening and your opponent doesn't find out in time it's tough luck.

Yeah I pretty much only play 2v2 nowadays, because if I play 1v1 I'll have to take the game MUCH more seriously. Not entirely sure why, but 1v1 is just a lot more personal and intense than 2v2.

K here's one I played today on USEast. http://www.mediafire.com/?uzoyyng2zuu

Oh - and on the subject of BGH - it actually turns out that that map didn't have enough minerals for some people. The invented a new map after someone hacked the map editor to allow you to place mineral patches on top of each other. So they stacked about 100 mineral patches on top of each other right next to your nexus where you start. The probes don't even have to move, they just mine, turn left, deposit.

And it that's not fast enough for you, you can play "255 Fast and Free", which is a ums where you start with infinite minerals and gas, you can upgrade to 255 instead of just 3, and everything builds in 1 second.

and hey merk find me on US East, my name's BigBadOrc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpuv7VPb2rA

PRAYGUU

IIRC, I beat Daniel at SC sometime last semester. That means I beat a Korean. That means the world exploded.

Srsly though, I'm pumped as hell for SCII, pissed about the lack of LAN support, and antsy to dive into the new terran tech tree.

Also, hello IndyDDR

Just played a really good 2v2 - I had a decent ally and we actually managed to beat some good ass people. One of them had 305 APM

http://www.mediafire.com/?1zjifhtwntu

Edit: Rofl and then my ally had to go and I got BITCHED OUT cuz they wanted a rematch. Lovez me some starcraft drama +_+

Um, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Starcraft 2 just got pushed back to "The first half of 2010."