More Starcraft2 Beta!

I’ve been enjoying some Starcraft2 beta with several friends and I’m very excited for the game to come out this Summer. The beta takes a break on May 31st, so I’ll be sure to post up a lot of information on it for those interested in reading about it. But as far as balance goes, I feel like that game is fairly well balanced with a few little abuses – but that’s the nature of all Blizzard strategy games.

Right now I have 200 achievements points, have won 50 games solo as random, 50 games 2v2 as random and working on getting more achievements with the other races. I’m really on the fence on my favorite race, I play a lot of Terran but recently went back to Protoss mostly due to the strength of a proxy gateway rush. So long as I can manage building/teching while harassing with Gateways at their door it works.

Every race has its strength and weaknesses. Zerg, as always, has the versatility to mass produce at a rapid pace and being able to switch techs on the fly; but expanding is key in surviving as a Zerg player. Mass production and outproducing your opponent is really important. Right now my weakness playing as Zerg is a mid-to-late transition. Early game with Zerg is pretty straightforward; either speedlings or mass roaches. Then you either choose hydras or mutas. That’s about all you see. Sooner or later brood lords is ideal as their siege, but it’s so late game that most games end in that point.

Protoss is seeing a lot of proxy gateways with a zealot rush, transitioning to stalkers and immortals. The key to a good proxy gateway rush is to make sure you manage your economy and tech quickly to stalkers. Zealots hit a wall without range backup – especially if you’re trying it against a Terran that has managed to wall off, or come close to walling off. Adding a degree of difficulty to the entire rush is harassing with your probe once your two gateways are building. It’s amazing how far back an opponent can be set with just some good harassment with a probe.

I played a lot of my games as Terran, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to win now that I’m Rank 2 in Gold League in a packed division. I’ve played several Platinum players as Terran and it’s all about the early game rush. Terran marines are obviously weak against 6 zerglings or 1 zealot. Your benefit is being able to wall off, but medivac drops, warp ins and even Nydus is the quick way around it. But still to me Terran is very versatile since almost every game you end up building at least one barracks, one factory and one starport. You can switch techs fairly quickly, but to maintain any reasonable Terran production you always end up quadrupling up on a building, if not more. There are games where I’ve sported three tech barracks and two reactor barracks (allows you to produce two marines at a time) just to maintain usage of my economy.

The opening 5-6 minutes is key to every Starcraft2 game. There are just so many opening strategies people can use – I like comparing it to a Chess game. Either you’re on the defensive or the offensive in the first few minutes. You may not always win with a rush and sometimes it’s better to counter the rush and attack. Such a fine balance between micro’ing and macro’ing, the game is quite different than Warcraft III which I spent several years playing.

I did play the original Starcraft but not very competitively and not as intense as I have even these last couple of months in the beta of SC2. I’ll probably start keeping a log of my favorite games every few days from now until the beta break and then post my feedback and feelings on the game.

Sorry that the post is sort of all over the place, just found some time in between work and play to drop some words on the game.

I did have a great game tonight where I did a proxy gateway rush on a zerg player that countered it nearly to perfection. The early game went back and forth and he was able to keep an overlord in my base to monitor what I was doing. Once I realized my initial rush was failing I switched over to a cybernetics core to get stalkers and threw down a robotics for immortals. He continued to harrass me with speedlings straight to my mineral line, so some delicate micro’ing with my probes, zealots and stalkers allowed me to survive. He teched to mass hydras (which was expected at that point of the game) so I got out one colossus to counter. We had a couple more fights before I managed to break into his base. He switched to mutas, but it was a little too late. It’s a great 30+ minute game of going back and forth against a great player.

I’ll see about recording the replay and tossing it up on Vimeo. It’s a great watch!

Anyways, more updates with just random thoughts on SC2, strategy talk, unit talk, counters, etc.