Thanks to the generosity of a friend of ours, we were able to gain access to the Beta. This has been invaluable as a resource for this site, and has also greatly increased the level of awesomeness present in our everyday life.
So, last night, when our friend asked us to fire up StarCraft II for a 1v1 match with him, we readily agreed.
Let’s be clear. We’re not particularly good at this game. We’re not really trying to be, but even if that was the goal, we’d never be that competitive. Still, we enjoy playing, and this seemed a great way to try out StarCraft against an actual human who we knew.
We were well aware we were going to get owned, but that was no issue to us. Still true, though.
The match began and we both picked Terran, owing to their clearly awesome Battlecruisers and the sweet over-poweredness of the Terran Siege tank. Honestly – although we did lose, and hard, we took five of these bad boys in to an anti-air encampment that our friend had built, sieged them, and let them just go to town. They did a lot of damage before he wiped them out.
We learned several important things during the match from our friend, so it was worth the drudging just for that.
First of all, upgrading the Terran Command Center to a Com-Sat is a must. Not only does this give the ability to drop extra supplies instantly onto a Supply Depot, permanently increasing your unit limit by eight, but it also allows you to spy on enemy territory. Your opponent will be aware of this intrusion, but it’s still fun, and can be quite useful.
But the biggest thing that the Com-Sat upgrade gives you is the ability to call down the Mule. This is basically a robot in a box that drops out of the sky and mines minerals twice as fast as an SCV. It only has a limited time of operation, but the number you can call down is governed only by the energy level in your Com-Sat station. It takes 50 energy to call down a Mule, and the robot can be placed on any mineral node that the player can see. This means that if you had five or six Com-Sats, you could potentially call down 10 or 12 mules at the same time.
Doing this, we were able to build up a significant stockpile of resources, despite our best efforts to spend them.
Two other important bits of information that we took away from our beating involved missile turrets and the final attack.
Missile turrets are a great aerial defense placement, but they’re not as powerful as they were in the original StarCraft. They don’t require a great deal of resources to create so rather than ignore them entirely, it’s better to just build a hell of a lot. On one of our first forays into our friend’s base, our two Battlecruisers and three Banshees were handily blown out of the sky without being able to take down a single turret. That will happen when facing lines of turrets six or seven long and three deep.
The other thing we learned just before everything went black was about the giant final attack. We had just gotten a decent amount of Siege Tanks rolling out to our friend’s base when the warning siren went off. Looking back at our own property, we saw what could best be described as a host, or perhaps legion of units bearing down on us. There were so many overlapping it was hard to tell them apart, but from what we could see; it was mostly Banshees and Siege Tanks. We panicked, and lost. Frankly, even had we kept a cool head, we would have lost. This was just faster.
What we learned after the match was that approximately 40% of our friend’s units in that final push were SCVs.
Say what?
That’s right. He intended for this to be the end battle, so he brought everything he owned with him. SCVs can attack, but their damage done is so minor as to be inconsequential. No, what he was trying was form of psychological warfare. By adding sheer numbers to his army, its potential appeared huge. Its actual damage output was lower than it looked, but we didn’t know that.
He made us panic. It worked.
Well done, sir.
For us, it’s important to be broad-minded. We’ll get owned by anyone, friend, stranger, or the computer itself. We’re just generous that way. At least we’re learning.
