Starcraft II: whose turn is it?

I have I confession. I’m a turn based strategy gamer. Going back to The Ancient Art of War (1984) I’ve obsessively played most of the non-grognard computer turn based strategy and tactical games. Warlords, Sword of Aragorn, Master of Magic, Civilization, Master of Orion, you name it. Even more perverse, I spent an inordinate amount of time playing clunky multiplayer turn based strategy games. I used to run an online competitive ladder for Warlords 3 — not the Battlecry RTS nonsense, the real one from back in the late nineties.

Sure, I also played all the big RTS games, but the multiplayer never clicked for me. It all felt too arbitrary and chaotic, I felt hampered by not being able to carefully consider my actions. I knew I was missing something, but it wasn’t until I forced myself to play Starcraft II for a few weeks that it all fell into pace.

After the jump, what I was missing all these years.

Starcraft II is a game of balancing resources — minerals, gas, army, scouting information, and technology. But the most important resource is not in game at all, it’s the player’s own attention. You simply can’t pay attention to everything in the game at once, and knowing where to focus at any given time is pivotal to winning. Some scoff at Starcraft II as a game about APM (actions per minute), but that’s missing the point. You don’t need to spam your keyboard, you need to quickly decide what can be ignored and what needs to be closely managed.

This was a forehead slapping moment for me when I realized everyone else playing the game was just as overwhelmed as I was. I had this little epiphany watching pro players and noticing even as a newbie I could see obvious mistakes and flaws in their execution. Far fewer than me of course, but this realization is what changed my play of the game. I suddenly understood the real value of scouting, misdirection, and multipronged attacks — key ways of wasting my opponent’s most valuable resource: their attention. In a turn based strategy game, there may be a game mechanic simulated fog of war, but the pacing of Starcraft II also gives you something much more like the real thing.

After a week of playing, I’m beginning to feel a little under control again. Also, let’s be honest, I’ve lost enough that the ladder is giving me easier opponents.

The Terran player in today’s screenshot made the first move in the game by attempted to wall me up in my own base with bunkers full of marines. I pulled nearly all of my workers and destroyed the bunkers before they were completed.

He then staged an attack with the fast moving blue flame hellions, a unit that can roast half a dozen workers in a single attack. But I had seen the attack coming by scouting his base with an overlord. I had defenses up and surrounded and destroyed every last hellion.

I’ll admit that I could probably have won this game easily at this point, but experience has taught me to be extra cautious against attacking an entrenched terran player. Instead, I used my mutalisks to deny his attempts to expand, while taking more bases myself. I spread my creep around the map — that’s the purple stuff on the mini map which gives me both vision and speeds up my units.

I’ll also admit to maybe, um, savoring my win a little bit. The screenshot up top shows a group of his marines having the worst day of their lives.

Next time: Manner up! Why Starcraft II is surprisingly polite.
Click here for the previous Starcraft II entry.

Peter Ginsberg lives in Maplewood, NJ. He is an independent game developer who makes games for kids and the occasional manchild.