Honestly, I think that the two big aspects of Starcraft have now merged into one.
End of 2nd dimension
Starcraft II moving to 3d it’s no surprise certain elements of Micro will disappear forever, as the move basically means improved path finding and more accurate attacks by units, without a chance to miss, except for distance calls.
The changes were expected, players already got used to 3d strategy environment by the means of Warcraft 3 and a number of Command and Conquer games, but, as always Blizzard does everything just that little bit different, enough to illuminate new features without losing the great heritage if Brood War.
Analyzing the game, several micro tricks are still in, and, in fact are still very effective. First of all in the very beginning we have Terran SCV not letting Zerg build a Spawning pool, the second one we see a few moments later after the rush bunker has been built, an SCV comes down the Zerg ramp with four Zerglings attacking it but being slowed down by slow SCV movement. It doesn’t really matter if they were attacking or not, which they were, the fact of the matter is, building can still be blocked and unit movement can still be disrupted given good micro is applied.
Rationally, with the absence of a number of micro features you have to introduce new ones in order to keep players with high apm getting an advantage, and Starcraft II does that perfectly, only this time the APM will be more strategically and economically oriented, rather than being applied to either Micro or Macro aspects of the game.
Counting our micro losses i.e. new game features, we have: Auto Mining, Multiple Building Selection (MBS), and Multiple Unit Selection (MUS > 12). All of that makes up for a pretty relaxing gameplay in the first minutes of the game, but there’s a catch, of course. The first part of the balance is down to abilities. Zerg has the Queen that can spawn additional larva(e), which obviously you want to do. Terran now has add-ons for barracks which he needs if he wants to further utilize the barracks.
Roughly these new options don’t require a large number of extra clicks by the player, but greatly add to the strategic aspect, as strategies have to be adapted to spending extra resources on both the Queen Unit and add-ons for Terran.
At the very beginning we are introduced to double gas geysers on each base, leading to even further strategic mayhem, meaning a player can now move up the tech even quicker than before. As an example in Brood War, 2nd geyser would be a favorite in Fast Lurker build, Lurker drop, Fast Muta and pretty much all conventional ZvZ games. And for the Terran, you don’t need me to tell you how much Terran depends on gas.
For the Zerg there’s a new ability attached to Overlords, to dispense Zerg creep on any place of the map, that, combined with walking “Sunken” or “Spine Crawler” can make for some very nasty tricks. In the Battle Report the Zerg player actually attempted to prevent Terran from Landing the Command Center at the expansion by putting some creep on the ground, but missed and it splashed out over some minerals instead, but that’s still a possibility.
The early game is also spiced up with transformer units, - Terran with the Viking, a Goliath to Plane transformer, and Zerg with a number of mutations for the Zerglings. In Original Starcraft transformers have not been available till mid game, basically with only Lurkers, Mutalisks and Archons. Terran of course still has the Siege tanks as a “Unit to be dealt with” type of transformer.
For micro enthusiasts a larger number of combat abilities have been added, rather than strategic ones. Terran still has mines, and a new feature - Auto-turrets, and (although it’s been temporarily removed from the game) Marine drop pods. Also, as we mentioned in previous parts of the review, Terran has been added a great deal of mobility with Reapers, increased marine running speed, efficient flying units and so on, making him pretty busy.
On the note of neutral stuff on the map, there are the three types of strategic objects, the Xel’Naga watch towers, Yellow mineral patches and Rocks blocking entrances. In opposition to CnC neutral buildings are used differently in Starcraft II, as the player doesn’t need to produce a specific unit to acquire neutral building or make if functional, here it’s just enough to place any unit near it and the detector tower will activate. These towers can be very practically used throughout the game, in the beginning as a scouting element, to prevent a tech rush versus Defilers, Dark Templars or Banshees in the mid to late game, and overall for better map control. Not exactly a new feature for Starcraft but fallen rocks, blocking a back door entrance to the base is a nice feature, as previously it was only introduced in a form of stacked Temples, zero-worth minerals placed on ramps and so on, - always nice to have dedicated features for strategic use, rather than to go around finding how to imitate or replace them.
Rarely any new Starcraft feature faces strong opposition, but with the Yellow Minerals people really spoke up. Yellow mineral patches are basically a distant more profitable expansion which will require specific strategy to stretch player's forcec somewhere in-between to defend both the expansion and the main base. In my opinion this will simply do wonders for strategic thinking, opening up an enormous amount of possibilities for any race. Although the issue was not demonstrated at hand in the battle report, except for acknowledging the existence of Yellow minerals on the map, it begs the question how every race could squeeze maximum profit out of this feature, well Zerg with its mobile and early expanding style is one thing, Terran can now summon Mules, which is a temporary resourcer of sorts to speed up the mineral extraction even though he may not be able to properly defend the location in early to mid game, and Protoss with all the abilities to morph units on any Pylon and even transfer canons via Pylon’s field can set up a decent protected expo in minutes.
Entourage aside several “tricks” have been added, first of which is the alike look of all Zerg mutating buildings, making it almost impossible for opponent to guess which building it is without clicking on it, the same is probably true for Protoss and partially even for Terran, as we only have the size of the construction box to judge by.
Virtually every good old common micro feature is still in, you still have to scout, move around large groups of units and do early attacks, counter attacks, pushes, drops, control medium groups of units in different locations. Although now it’s all been spiced up with unit variety and abilities, it’s still there for us to operate with keyboard and mouse. What Blizzard did is, they took small part of control off our hands, made gathering minerals and producing units a little bit easier, so we can focus our attention on expanding strategic aspect of the game, because after all it’s a Strategy first, and everything else second.
Eventually we were not demonstrated all the features, partially of course because the players are new’bish, nothing to hide here, they put their enthusiasm in making games rather than playing them, so let’s not judge them on why they did not demonstrate Mutalisks and Siege Tanks, why resources piled up and why they did not show the fast control of massive army, rather than just groups of counter units. They listen to us, the customers, we have to listen and respect them, the developers, judging aside it was a great game report and we picked up a lot from it.
Rather than ending up with a popular conclusion being, - the game is still in development, therefore everything is subject to change we have a new one for you – the game has changed, drastically. It looks familiar, sounds familiar and even game mechanics are still the same, - counter units. Overall it’s a brand new game that smells like a mix of Starcraft, Warcraft III and CnC features, wrapped up in Starcraft Universe with addition of e-sports pedigree. That’s a recipe hard to cook, but if anybody can do it, it’s Blizzard, so let’s hope for the best and wait for the next Battle report to come out, for us to take apart, or “Wink” perhaps even beta.
Gee, it’s been four long days writing about starcraft II. Our coverage of battle reports will obviously continue. Sorry for any mistakes that might’ve slipped in the analysis, we are all people here. Unlike many websites we actually tried something different and looked into the single 20-minute video. Going inside the game is what we like to do and by the looks of it, you, the community, enjoyed that too. Advice for all the anti-starcraft II folk would be to just wait and try the game before splashing out. Merely a year ago we knew almost nothing about terran and zerg but here they are dark, creepy and almost ready for testing. Eventually it’s the players who will figure out the builds, strategies, counters and secure the evolution of the game. Roughly, I think the game should be released by end of the year holidays, to match the shopping spree. Strictly speaking we haven’t even seen the most important stuff – new features of battle.net, whatever they may be. Our favorite game developer has quite a few tricks up its sleeve left for sure. Ultimately there could even be a mmorpg based on the world of starcraft. Thanks for reading.
P.S. There’s a simple word riddle hidden in the article, just for kicks.
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