Starcraft 2

Wow...

What an awesome single player campaign!

The story, just as much if not more than the setting, is what always drew me to the original Starcraft game. The deception, the betrayals, the grasping for life and happiness, were always so great! I'll probably get in to some speculation later on what might be coming in the Heart of the Swarm, but maybe not, since updating time has been scarce.

So anyways, what I'd really like to talk about is the multiplayer game I ran last night in the "newb ladder" with 3 other obvious new SC2 players.

It was a quick match up, with a Zerg and Terran player on each side, on some massive map that had about 18 different base locations including the starting four spots. I was running Zerg and my Terran ally didn't really know much of how to play. (Said he didn't even do the campaign yet and just wanted to jump in to a multiplayer map.) Myself, I had very limited experience with Zerg, but them being my favourite race in SC I wanted to give them a shake, so after only one match as Zerg against a computer opponent I jumped in to this match.

Now a lot of this commentary will come after looking through the replay, with sight at what everyone was doing, rather than just what I could see while playing.

So I started out, hatching drones and getting mineral production up as fast as possible, and ignoring gas until I had my first secondary base collecting minerals. This was fairly quick and simple since the expansion base was right next to the starting base, and there was an obstruction on the ramp into the whole starting zone for each team. My teammate was puttering around on his side and the opposition was fortifying their ramp with Bunkers/Seige Tanks/Missile Turrets as well as sending out a squad of Zerglings to try to rush us. Unfortunately for them my larger squad of Zerglings were ready when they broke through the ramp block. ^_^

So I continued mass-producing Zerglings and continuing expansion and climbing the tech tree, fending off small skirmish attacks while having roaming Zerglings take out a few enemy expansions while my partner managed to destroy one of the enemies larger expansions, followed by losing said area back to them, and almost getting killed by them before I could get some support to him in the form of some 'lings and Hydralisks.

That assault was a close thing, just managed to hold off a force of Thors/Marines/Banshees/Zerglings/Hydralisks at the ramp (that my partner wasn't defending at...) and so thought that there was a follow up force moments behind it to finish us off.

In the end my aggressive expansion into other areas allowed me the resources to build a big enough force of Brood Lords to break their defences. All in all a hard-fought battle that I thought I was going to lose at any moment, a very satisfying match!

What I didn't really see until the end was that the enemy didn't really branch out and exhausted their resources. They didn't have enough to pump out the unit numbers I had available, and probably couldn't have raided me successfully thanks to the Nydus Worms I had in my expansion bases.

Some good tactics from this fight:
-Roaming Zergling patrols to take out undefended new expansion nodes
-Fast Expansion for more minerals/gas
-Massed Brood Lords backed up with Mutalisks for air support
-Converting old drones to base defences after the minerals are all done

Some things I could have done better:
-Better coordination with my teammate on offence/defence
-Faster switch from ground forces to air forces when I saw which way the enemy were heading with tech
-Faster "going down" the tech tree to get Brood Lords
-Better grouping of units for "Fast Reaction" forces to attacks on satellite bases
-Better places of Nydus Worms so they don't get killed easily in bases, and secondary Worms
-More aggressive use of small groups of Brood Lords on different attack vectors

Overall tons of fun, especially when I managed to get a Nydus Worm behind their defences and take out about three quarters of the Zerg base. That was just a cool thing to do!

-LaFollet