Muta rush remains strong in SC2!

With trepidation I logged in to the Starcraft 2 beta using the account that I’d borrowed from a friend of mine last night. I’d prepared a bit for playing my first game ever by reading a bit around on how to get started with the original Starcraft, but that doesn’t alter the fact that 1v1 RTS games are among the most stressful and unforgiving gaming experiences out there, so much so in fact that I stopped playing 1v1 DoW2 because it was too stressful for me.

SC2 blows DoW2 out of the water in terms of complexity and attentional demands. In DoW2 I feel like it would be possible to micro every unit on the field basically optimally at the top tier of play, but in SC2 the armies are so large that doing that would be impossible. From my reading on the original game I took away that as a newbie I should not worry too much about trying to micro my army and instead focus on macro, building my economy, expanding, and producing units without floating resources. This is an aspect of SC2 which doesn’t really exist at all in DoW2 in which the only thing you can build is power generators, so it was a bit of a radical shift in focus for me, but I set my sights upon that being what I’d try to focus on in my first game.

I chose random race, clicked the automatch button and within a few seconds was paired up with a zerg opponent. Once the map loaded I saw the familiar Zerg hatchery greeting me; I’d rolled a mirror match with me playing probably the least intuitive race in the game. It took a few seconds for me to realize that building drones is actually a 2 step process for Zerg, you have to select larvae and then morph them, which confused me for slightly. After that some of my memory of SC1 kicked in an I started pumping drones continuously. “Heya this is my first game, go easy on me” I said. My opponent responded “Don’t worry I’m using a trackball.” Poor guy! I chilled out a bit since him having no mouse probably meant I’d have a control advantage.

I queued up waypoints for a scout drone to check all the mineral points on the map and then went back to spamming drones. A little later I noticed a drone running around inside my base and thought “Damn he’s scouted me already!” before realizing that it was actually my own drone, which had been unable to actually get out of my base because of the new destructible rocks feature in SC2 blocking my base’s choke point. Having discovered this I figured: Okay, so that means I can probably boom safely and then rush to Mutalisks. I sent out my overlords to scout, and found him before losing my scout overlord to a small army of queens.

From here I executed a really bad boom and Muta tech strategy, which saw me floating thousands of minerals despite me trying my hardest to spend it all as soon as I got it. In retrospect I should have blasted my way through my rocks much earlier and expanded with the extra money, or at least built some turrets to defend against any Mutas he may have been building. To eat up my minerals I eventually ended up pumping roaches, which I had read were imba, and smashing my way out to expand a few times, but by that time my Muta army was just about online. They hit his natural expansion just as he was starting to mass a much smaller army of Mutas, which I quickly blasted before his queens could move to support them. I then knocked out the queens and destroyed his expansion, forcing a GG with a fat army of Mutas in the air, a blob of Roaches bashing his destructible rocks, and 3 expansions building at various points around the map. I was still floating thousands of minerals like a total noob, but managed to at least spend all my gas by spamming Mutas.

Looking at the post game stats I saw that my economy score was at least twice his. He’d built a reasonably large ground army, but hadn’t spammed drones as hard as I had, and the army never made it out of his base because of the destructible rocks. I may actually have been in trouble if he’d come out of his base earlier in the game, but focusing on macro really did win me the game in this case.

The whole game I felt like a total klutz. I had a basic idea of what I wanted to do, but my control over the game was mediocre and I was floating horribly. I dread to think what the experience must be like for someone who has never played SC before or even never played an RTS game before, looking at the bewildering array of options and trying to figure out what the heck they’re supposed to do. SC2 is also massively aulde skewle. It’s very focused on building up your economy with workers, research, and production buildings, in contrast to extremely micro focused games like DoW2 or CoH. I’m not entirely sure whether I like that, though it may just have to do with my skill level.  Nevertheless I was pumped enough from playing my first game to make me want to try the game some more and get more of a feel for how it plays. It remains to be seen though whether the gameplay is appealing enough for it to replace DoW2 as my RTS of choice.