Playing to win: Starcraft II, part 1

This is part one of a continuing series detailing the casual player’s attempt to traverse the steep barrier to entry of competitive multiplayer real-time strategy in Starcraft II.

So here I am again, back at the whole RTS thing.  I might’ve mentioned before that I’m pretty terrible at competitive real-time strategy.  I’m not a total newbie to the genre, but as far as online play goes, I’m pretty bad.

Last time, I didn’t quite get as proficient at Dawn of War II as I had hoped.  I liked it, but Street Fighter IV came out around that time, and that’s when all of my competitive gaming efforts went into the fighting game scene.  I can honestly say I learned a lot about competitive gaming in the past couple of years – the experience, the mindset, and especially the culture.  Trust me – I really wanted to write some sort of tribute to the fighting game culture, but I didn’t think my words could do it justice.

Anyway, that’s not what I’m here to talk about.  This game called Starcraft II came out.  You might’ve heard of it.  I hear everyone’s playing it.  If there was ever a time to go all-in toward learning competitive RTS, now is that time. And make no mistake, I have a lot of learning to do.  My gaming history, if you’re not familiar with it, has a lot of RTS in it.  I first became aware of the genre with Warcraft II and Red Alert.  I instantly fell in love with it and have played a plethora of titles ever since.  Those early RTS’s were what got me hooked onto PC gaming after the lull that followed the golden age of point-and-click adventures.

But I’ve never had the balls to fight against other humans.  I loved the single-player campaign, and I was content to comp-stomp afterward.  Yeah, I’m that guy.  I’d soon discover much later about how much was involved in becoming competitive at RTS.  Build orders, “macro”, “micro”, APM, etc.  That did not sound like the fun diversion I remembered from my youth.  So I was content to just watch in awe at the Koreans doing their thing while I continued being mostly exclusive to single-player (with a few exceptions, like Age of Empires III for its persistent online upgrade system and Rise of Legends because I loved the mechanics so much).

But after really immersing myself in the fighting game culture as of late, I acquired a newfound appreciation and respect for competitive gaming as a whole.  And while I would like to continue playing fighting games, my conscience nags me about how I’ve persistently avoided the competitive RTS scene out of fear – fear of my inadequacies and utter lack of skill.  Maybe now, I’m just fearful that my best years are lost and I won’t be able to learn and adapt as I once might have been able to do.

15 minutes til midnight...

But I’m putting those fears aside yet again with Starcraft II.  I’m going in knowing I can only get better, because I sure ain’t getting much worse.  I procured my copy at a Best Buy midnight launch (which was, by the way, the first line-waiting event I’ve attended by the end of which I actually had something to show for it).  I wasn’t expecting a lot of people because of the online availability, but I showed up 45 minutes early just in case.  By midnight, the line had actually grown a lot longer than I had expected it to be.

Since then, I played through the campaign, even replaying several missions multiple times to acquire some of the achievements.  I played about a dozen 1v1 custom games against computer, and I played a number of comp-stomp custom games with friends online.  Yeah, not exactly competitive by any means.  But for the past couple of days, I’ve gotten over that wall of fear and just dove into Battle.net’s 1v1 ladder. If you haven’t tried the Starcraft II ladder games yet, they start out something like this: you’re first allowed to play 50 practice league games on easier game settings and less rush-friendly maps.  After that, you play five placement matches to determine which of the five overarching “leagues” you’ll be placed in, after which you just play to reach the top of a 100-man division consisting of random players from your league.

I decided to choose the Zerg because they were my favorite race in the original game.  I later learned that the Zerg are the “hardest” race to play – requiring a ton of macroeconomic maintenance and adaptive, reactive play, both of which I am especially terrible at.  I seem to have a penchant (possibly subconscious) for making my competitive life harder – like when I chose to main Carl Clover in BlazBlue or my somewhat brief stint with C. Viper in Street Fighter IV.  The guys at work are well aware of my competitive masochism.

So I played maybe three practice league games before starting ranked matches.  It’s a little ironic, actually.  The thing that drove me out of the practice league was the fact that the league settings made the game so slow.  Ranked matches are at the fastest game speed setting (I think), which was how I had practiced during custom games.  I couldn’t stand just waiting there for things to happen.

My placement match W-L record was 2-3, which was much better than I thought I’d do.  But as I had expected, I was placed into the Bronze league – the lowest one.  Ultimately, I decided it’s a good thing – I can learn everything from the bottom up.  I’ll probably end up seeing a lot of extreme, all-in strategies.  I’ll learn to counter those degeneracies before having to tackle players that mix strategies together and truly adapt their play over time.

In fact, I’ve already encountered (and lost) to a number of them: Void Ray rush, two-stargate Phoenix rush, proxy pylon inside my base, proxy cannon in front of my ramp, Medivac drop, infantry spam; I even got trounced by my first Zerg opponent because he went for a fast spawning pool and built a Spine Crawler right next to my mineral line without me noticing.  But all of those experiences have been good, because I’ve been learning about the existence of these “cheese” tactics and how they should be countered; hint: most of them are easily beaten with the help of good scouting, which is something I’ve never done well in RTS, but it’s something I’m learning quickly (albeit in humiliating ways).

So I’m well on my way into competitive Starcraft.  My W-L record is currently 7-8 in the Bronze League.  I’m 38th in my division (as of this writing), and I’m continuing to learn.  The majority of my wins have been against turtling Protoss players (I’ve probably encountered three of them?) that rush with Void Rays, and when that fails, turtle up and build cannons all over their one base while they tech up to Carriers and a Mothership that just sit there and do nothing.  I simply wait it out, make sure they don’t expand, pick off their stragglers, and take my sweet time macroing up until I have a force that can attack their base safely (i.e. Brood Lords with supporting Mutalisks/Corruptors) while they run out of resources.  Every turtling Protoss player that did this taunted me through chat, telling me to attack them.  Admittedly, I was extremely slow in teching up to Brood Lords, but in the end, my patience was rewarded (despite one player calling me a pansy while he waited forever for his imminent demise; he really should’ve just surrendered).  Here are some of the other basic Starcraft lessons I’ve learned so far in my limited multiplayer experience:

• Scout, scout, scout!  In addition to thwarting the cheese that a lot of people will try at my (low) level, scouting gives you valuable tactical information.  Most players (at least at my level) will not go for balanced army compositions, so it’s my job to figure out what they’re going for and prepare a counter.  I’m told this is especially important for Zerg players.  This has already saved me a couple of times – once when I thwarted a Terran trying to build a barracks in front of my base, and another time when I countered a Protoss Void Ray rush that could’ve easily ended the game.  The guy immediately resigned after the last of his Void Rays fell to my Hydralisks and Queens.  I also beat a Zerg player tonight when I scouted his base and discovered he had gone for a premature expansion.  He was quickly overwhelmed by my Zergling blob.
• Learn and practice a solid build order!  I’ve messed up several games because I accidentally built an evolution chamber instead of a spawning pool at the beginning.  Or because I forgot to assign workers to my refinery after it was built and realized later that I had absolutely no vespene.  Or because I kept getting supply-locked by my insufficient Overlord numbers, which prevented me from fielding the army I needed to counter an early push.  Yes, I realize that eventually, I’ll need to learn multiple build orders to deal with different races and maps, but for now, I’m just working with a balanced one to start with.  I’ll get to other ones once I’m comfortable with one.  I’m getting the sense that starting build orders are like your fighting game combos.  You have to just memorize them and practice them over and over and over again.  They’re the best way to survive the early game, which is in itself a noble goal for a beginner such as myself.  You can work on the mid- and late- game strategy after you’ve become extremely comfortable with the early game.  This is the same way I started learning Dawn of War 2, by familiarizing myself with the tier 1 strategy, and after that, working on how to incorporate tier 2 units, and so forth.  A lot of beginner RTS games, I’m finding, don’t ever reach levels of play such that the highest tech tier is even needed, so why bother making it a priority to learn how to use those super units?  Chances are you won’t need them when you’re starting out.
• Use up resources!  Unused resources = the army you could have but don’t. Part of this involves always watching your supply limit to ensure you can use those resources on new units.  I still have a lot of trouble with both of those things, but my supply management has been slowly improving.  This is the type of thing that I imagine will take lots of practice to deal with.  For Zerg, it’s especially difficult because you’re generally going to have to remember to spit larvae with your Queens in order to have the larvae to effectively spend all of your resources on new army units.  I haven’t been able to deal with that macro all that well yet.  I still have games where I find myself with thousands of excess minerals, so it’s definitely not an easy thing to remedy.

So there you go.  There’s my first week or so of Starcraft II.  But instead of rambling on about specific strategies, I’d rather discuss the mindset and experience of competitive RTS play and what it’s like being that nub trying to get to a point of enjoyable play in a competitive genre with an extremely high barrier to entry.  With that in mind, it’s easy for me to relate my fighting game experiences to competitive RTS because there are inevitable similarities across all types of competitive activities.

One thing that really infused me with the motivation to learn fighting games was when I immersed myself in the culture.  I started this by visiting community sites like Shoryuken and EventHubs and adding some of their feeds to my aggregator.  Those led me to watch a lot of match and tutorial videos, watch  tournament streams, listen to podcasts, and follow the goings-on of various top players.  The Evo2k streams for the past two years have been fantastic, and community representatives like Gootecks and Capcom’s Seth Killian have been absolutely instrumental in building and sustaining this rich culture of fighting games.  Likewise, for Starcraft, I’ve been following two YouTube channels for commentators Husky and HDGamer, both of whom do excellent commentary and tutorials for the game.  I also peruse the GameReplays website for VODcasts and the occasional strategy article.  I’m in the process of looking for a good Starcraft podcast for my daily commute as well, so I’m open to suggestions.  Aside from the inspiration, the most likely side effect of this immersion is that you can end up incidentally attaining a lot of knowledge about the game.  It certainly happened for me in Street Fighter IV, and I’m already beginning to gain a lot of knowledge about Starcraft strategy just by watching top-level matches.  As I’ve pointed out in the past, competitive play mainly revolves around two elements: strategy and execution.  Knowledge is the basis of strategy.  Without knowledge, you can’t plan effective strategies.  And obviously, knowing more than your opponent can be a huge advantage.

Another thing I got out of my fighting game experience was the importance of practice.  This is related to improving execution – the second part of effective play.  When I was learning Abel, I actually set up a practice regimen, where I would have to perform his f+mk link a number of times a day, and where I’d have to successfully land his change of direction FADC c+hp lk roll into falling sky from both sides until it became natural.  I even practiced contingencies, in case the f+mk link was off by a frame, or if I messed up the c+hp link after the FADC.  After weeks of this regimen, my game improved dramatically.  I haven’t quite set up a regimen for my Starcraft play, but that’s mainly because I’m not confident I actually know what to practice yet.  Again, knowledge plays an important role here as well.  I have casually practiced build orders in custom 1v1 games against AI, but I have a feeling there’s a lot of micromanagement tricks I can practice as well (with the more micro-intensive units like Infestors), and that I haven’t quite learned what they are yet.

Lastly, learning fighting games has taught me to have the right mindset for competitive play in general.  The experience is vastly different from your typical single-player experience.  Most modern single-player games are built around a design foundation that is optimized to make the player feel as good as possible.  When you’re trying to get into a multiplayer scene, you have to toss that notion out the window. You’re going to feel bad.  You’re going to feel stupid.  You’re going to feel pathetic and helpless and scared. To really dive into competitive play (especially in an unfamiliar genre), you have to accept the fact that you’re going to be the high school freshman – in special ed, with acne all over your face, and the clothes your mom bought for you.  Once you’re over that, just play!  Forget your win-loss record and the leaderboards.  Trust me – you won’t want to look at those things anyway.  When you worry about those things, you get into a state where you just end up fearing for every game you play.  You’ll never experiment with bold strategies, and you’ll second-guess everything you do.  And the worst part of being overly concerned with “points”?  Each win will drive you closer and closer to quitting, because with that short-term mindset, you’ll just want to quit while you’re ahead, right?  You have to humble yourself and focus solely on the learning process.  Seeing your game advance to new levels is really where the enjoyment lies, even if you do end up losing a lot.  Just look for those things you did better each time, and you won’t be as stressed out.  Every time you lose, you can learn something.  In fact, you might even have to get a bit masochistic when you start out, because losing is often the only way you’ll be learning anything meaningful.  I know this series is about playing to win, but you can’t win without first losing.  A lot.  Your Terran Marauder spam won the game for you?  That’s great, but you probably didn’t learn anything new.  The guy on the other end of the beating (i.e. me), in the meantime, will be busy scouring for ways to destroy you and the other copycats the next time around, and believe me, my speedlings are out for blood.

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