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The thing about being an RTS noob is that there’s a conflation of factors that lead to a loss which makes things hard to analyze post game. Did you lose because the unit composition your picked is bad, or just because you didn’t micro them properly? Was your build order trash or did you just execute it poorly? For instance, I used to think that a heavy scout opening for Space Marines in Dawn of War 2 was not viable until I saw a replay of Pega pulling it off with god-like micro and dominating people. There’s no way I would be able to do it however.

SC2 is much more demanding than DoW2, so the problem of working out whether a loss was due to mechanical problems, i.e. failure to control stuff properly, vs. strategic problems is compounded because there’s so much more that could go wrong. You could place buildings incorrectly, forget to summon a MULE as Terran, rally units to the wrong place, miss building workers, build too many workers when you should have built something else, fail to scout correctly, and many other macro mistakes before you even get into any micro mistakes. I’m making all of these mistakes and sucking as a result. From my experience with DoW2 it means I just need to play a lot more games and become comfortable with the game before I can really judge how good or bad a given strategy is. I am, however, developing a sense of what army compositions beat one another and when attacks are likely to happen timing-wise. Watching streams of people in the platinum league is helping with this too.

I lost a good two thirds of the games I played over the weekend, mostly due to macro errors and my house’s flakey internet connection wigging out mid-game, causing me to be demoted to the copper league. It’s interesting how much macro errors can make a huge difference. Yesterday I spectated a platinum league ZvT game in which the Zerg completely contained the Terran, then went on to float over 4k minerals whilst the Terran built up a massive marine, marauder, and medivac army supported by battle cruisers, then proceeded to break out and destroy the Zerg who had squandered his advantage, and this was despite several clever plays involving attacking via Nydus worms.

From my wins I can draw a few lessons: roaches smash a food-equivalent army of zealots or zerglings, the thermal lance upgrade on colossi makes them viable against siege tanks, broodlords are just amazing vs a mass terran ground army, you can get immortals about the same time that a roach rusher tries to attack in PvZ and they dominate roaches, mutas are an excellent answer to roaches due to roach inability to attack air, and marine blobs are great against banshees assuming you have detection.

I find that losses tell you more than wins though, and I sure had a lot to learn from the beatings I took. My first painful lesson was to always scout your opponents main army and know when they are attacking. In a PvP match I was rushing for a void ray cheese and had the clever idea to position my army near a proxy pylon i’d built near the center of the map. My opponent had gone for a large ground army, which totally bypassed my forces and entered my base just as my void rays were making their way to his base. Without my army at home to defend I lost when I could have held out and perhaps won. Moral: defend your base when you’re teching and know when your opponent is attacking! Also, abusing choke points and static defenses is a must when teching or rushes will crush you, as I learned in at least 2 games, where I tried to hold off big armies with small ones in open ground and predictably died. I lost another 2 games at least in part due to forgetting to build detectors. You need to have them before cloaked units arrive or the damage will already have been done. My most eye-opening loss was due to a 9-pool zergling rush in ZvZ, when my opponent scouted me early with his overlord. I hadn’t even realized that you could mass so many zerglings that fast.

The number one thing that’s still killing me though is poor macro and unit control, which only comes with more play. I’ve decide that it’s finally time to pick a race, and I’m going Zerg, because I seem to do best at macroing with them due to everything being made out of the same building, which makes things a whole lot simpler. In general though, I think I just need to get a hundred or so games under my belt.

I played 5 games of SC2 beta last night, finishing off my free practice matches and playing 2 ladder placement games. Correct macro is without a doubt the hardest thing for me in this game at the moment. I float massively in just about every game from not building enough buildings or units fast enough. I get distracted controlling my army and then realize that I have 3000 minerals sitting around doing nothing. Sometimes this doesn’t matter because of the skill level of my opponents, but I had at least one game this time around in which it did.

Game 1 TvP:  I went fast reapers and got into his base way before he had an army. I think he was trying to fast tech, although he had a small group of zealots and stalkers. I was able to use cliffs to dance around them and harass both his main and his expansion. He conceded after losing most of his probes.

Game 2 ZvZ: I’d heard that massing roaches is imba in the ZvZ matchup, so I gave it a shot. My macro was horrible though, and by the time I managed to mass a small ling and roach army he’d already got basically and equivalent number of hydralisks, which were a tech tier above my crappy army. He then proceeded to completely dominate me with them. Watching the replay, I saw he was on top of his economy the whole time and built maybe 1/3 again the number of drones that I did. I need to learn to use my queen properly and build gas earlier.

Game 3 ZvP: Having just been smashed by hydras I decided to try it out myself. My opponent went zealot / stalker and was crushed horribly in our first engagement. From there I contained him with my army, harasses his ramp, and expanded, whilst pumping hydras. Eventually I got a critical mass (despite floating huge number of minerals), pushed up his ramp, and destroyed his main.

Game 4 TvP: This one was interesting. I felt it could have gone either way for a while, but micro and macro mistakes from me, along with a lack of scouting, cost me the game. I went marines and marauders, which was a decent match for his early zealot / stalker / sentry army. He expanded and I pushed against it, but he repelled and went to my expansion, which I also successfully defended. I teched to siege tanks and medivacs then tried to push against his expansion again, but my tank micro was terrible and I lost a chunk of them to flanking zealots. He pushed and managed to get into my main, but I repelled him with marauders and tanks. I was just about to set up another push on his expansion, when he hit me with a force of void rays and I had no air counter.

Game 5 PvT: This game was on good old Lost Temple and was over very quickly when I scouted him with my first zealot and discovered he hadn’t blocked his ramp. I walked straight into his base and started killing SCVs. He tried defend with a small force of marines, but my zealot reinforcements arrived and killed them off. Unable to get my zealots out of his worker line he conceded.

After the stress of SC2 I needed to unwind with a bit of DoW2. I played two random team 3v3s.

The first was SM/SM/Ork vs SM/SM/Eldar on Angel Gate with me as Warp Spider Exarch. I did a variant of my usual build, which is fast rangers, in which I experimented with only building 2 guardians rather than the regular 3 and it worked well. My rangers came out substantially sooner than normal. Rangers are completely imba in this map and managed to snipe an awful lot of units out of their buildings. After winning the early attrition war we got to vehicles first and I walked a wraithlord into the enemy base, which died eventually to a missile tac, but tied them up enough for my team to capture the field. From there they were screwed and we ticked down their points quickly.

I played SM apothecary in the second game, in which I ended up fighting two Eldar players in the north that used banshees to push my tacs around. I was forced to retreat twice before pushing them back from the center of the map with the help of an SM team mate. Once ASMs hit the field things were looking up. I spent the rest of the game pouncing a lot of platforms. I had an annoying loss of my dreadnought to a wraithlord and falcon combo that I couldn’t hold off with my army and then later lost a plasma devastator to a singularity charge. Seriously: I saw the indicator on the ground, hit retreat on the dev immediately, and they still got gibbed - singularity is totally imba. Other than that though, I preserved my units well did some sneaky stealth capping with scouts. My team manage to hold the center and bottom, whilst ninjaing the top occasionally and we came out on top.

Yesterday I played Power Grid for the first time and was not massively impressed by it.  Mistress S, myself, and some other MIT grad students played a 5 player game on the map of Germany, which added a bit of spice to the game for me since it meant I got to flex my geography muscles and practice my German pronunciation. I found the game itself to be a bit too dry for my tastes however, despite our particular session having a very close ending in which I was pipped at the post by a mere 4 Electros.

I think that ultimately what it comes down to is that I didn’t dig the theme that much, and the fine game mechanics couldn’t make up for this fact.  Another turn off was the constant mental arithmetic.  I don’t mind the odd spot of mental computation, but when I’m adding up slews of numbers written on the board, rather than simply tallying up the number of abstract pieces or resources that I’m going to get, the math becomes a bit too intrusive for my tastes.  That said however, the game really is quite elegantly designed and has interesting mechanics that advantage players whose board position is relatively weak, with the result that to play optimally you’re sometimes better off making worse plays than you otherwise might in order to make sure you avoid the “shaft the winner” mechanics.

I’ve been avoiding playing this game with the more experienced folks at Pandemonium and MIT’s Strategic Gamers because my suspicion was that it is not newbie friendly, and from reading BGG on the topic that sounds about right.  The game is all about making optimally efficient decisions, which strongly punishes players who can’t anticipate things like what a certain power plant will really be worth to them in the long run.  As such I’d happily play again with people who’ve only had one or two games like myself, but wont be playing it with more experienced players any time soon, and didn’t enjoy it enough to want to get my skill level up to the point where I’d be competitive with experienced people.

DA, Em, and Biodecay have all been trying out Eve Online recently.  As big fans of classic space games like Elite I could see how it would appeal to them.  They all were concerned with quickly raking in as much cash as possible to be able to fly battleships and blow apart NPCs.  I was more interested in experiencing some of the PvP that the game is legendary for, but ultimately I didn’t even get up to the end of the first run of storyline missions.  Why?

These days when I approach an MMO I’m doing it with several games under my belt and a game really has to grab me to make me willing to commit to it.  I have relatively little time and a commitment to my weekly WoW game, so something would have to have a very strong pull on me right of the bat to convince me to give it more than a cursory glance.  Eve is not that game.

Eve is notorious for having a very steep learning curve.  The interface is absolutely jam packed full of menus and subscreens that let you access different functionality and customize your display.  There is a load of information available on every piece of equipment in the game accessible through inspection panes.  There is also a whole slew of tutorials to teach you how to read and use all of this stuff.  The thing is though, that I want to be able to sit down and play the game to see how I like it without having to commit to hours of dicking around trying to work out how to get stargates to appear on my overview.

It’s not that I am unable to work it out, it’s more that it’s hard to work out what even needs to be worked out!  The utility of the interface is entirely obfuscated to the beginner.  You get the feeling that there’s something chunky under the hood, but you can for the life of you begin to work out what’s important to look at.  Indeed, even once you start doing things like inspecting the statistics on items you still remain relatively unenlightened as to whether one type of autocannon or another is better, particularly given that I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to view the details of two items side by side.  My friends and I managed to get the fleet controls set up, but in 4 hours we never did manage to work out how to form a gang with other people.  The whole experience made me reel from infodump.

I know that this level of up front complexity appeals to people who consider themselves hardcore and in the past I myself may have embraced such a learning curve as a deterrent for unworthy n00bs, keeping the gaming environment pure and full of hardcore gamers.  These days though I find it a turn off.  I want to be led gently into the experience.  I want to quickly get a taste of what the game is all about, preferably within the first half hour.  The tutorial was helpful in this respect, but in all honesty my feeling is that WoW just does it better, with its quest series that organically lead the player through the game experience and advancement that layers complexity relatively slowly.

I don’t doubt that Eve is a good game once you get into it, but for the time-strapped ex-powergamer it combines the evils of MMO time-suckage with the need to wade through an encyclopedia of game information just to get started.  I guess that since I’m not willing to commit the time to grinding NPCs or asteroids for cash and am reluctant to grind my eyeballs through the documentation that I’m not the target market.  More’s the pity for my dreams for interstellar piracy.