I always ask people: how would you feel like playing Need for Speed, but on 16x speed?
Yeah, SC2 I think is simply too fast. But I don’t think the game speed is the problem as much as the economy, which is so intense that players can get maxed in just 7 minutes. Units have research to make them stronger, but barely any unit is ever used without it’s research because it’s available so early on.
RTS is doing great. Look at League and Dota. SC2 isn’t doing so hot. What’s the difference? They actually fit into the RTS genre. I don’t think SC2 can be classified as an RTS anymore because it has such an extreme emphasis on endurance and multitasking. It’s like a tower defense game but with the multitasking dialed up to 11. It doesn’t really matter what you do, because any management of your units is better than the default outcome. The same is true for macro – it doesn’t matter what units you make, because keeping your spending low is a thousand times better than floating money. The game is all about spamming low quality but high volume actions. Strategy is the opposite of that – you want high quality actions. In chess, if you make one sub optimal move with a pawn you can lose the game. In SC2 you can lose an entire base and drown it out through a macro game. Strategy is maybe 5% of the game. I think SC2 is doing poorly because it isn’t RTS. It’s an Endurance & Multitasking game, aka “EAM”.
Do you remember the game where SelecT killed 8 zealots with 3 marines using superb micro? Back then SC2 was a strategy game. I just watched a game where Cure took a fight against Dark and didn’t even bother to siege his tanks. He lost all the tanks and the game went on. SC2 is not a strategy game. If SC2 were a strategy game, mistakes like that would cause the game to immediately end. That would be like losing your rooks and bishops and castles for free in chess. The idea that you could play that out & have a chance at winning is insane, but that’s the reality of SC2.
I fully agree. I wouldn’t call SC2 a strategy game anymore, but a micro battle. Why would a game require a bazillion actions anyway to be allowed to be titled an RTS?
When LotV released, I actually stopped playing SC2 altogether, switched to Dota2 and later (due to Dotas toxic community) to Hunt Showdown, an extraction shooter, first shooter in my life.
And I consider both games having a way more important aspect of strategy than SC2. Even the shooter. It’s simply more important how and where I move than in SC2 and can have a big impact on the fight, while in SC2, no matter where I am, I just react to Medivac drops, baneling roll-bys and Disruptor shots, which just isn’t what I call strategy. It’s just a micro battle.
I’m playing the shooter only because I can satisfy my desire to strategise, which I can’t in SC2. I actually shoot like a pirate with 2 eye patches, but I can catch up with smart gameplay.
I definitely disagree with that. Micro doesn’t matter specifically because it’s overshadowed by multitasking. You don’t need good positioning & micro, you just need to be able to do mediocre positioning & micro across multiple locations.
Dota and League have a much higher emphasis on micro than SC2. In SC2 you can micro badly and lose units but it doesn’t matter because you have a 7 base economy that will crank out a thousand replacements over the course of the game. I would not classify micro as a large aspect of SC2, and I definitely don’t agree with characterizing SC2 as a micro game.
I don’t think that’s accurate. The positioning of your units and how that changes with time absolutely is strategical, but in SC2 it isn’t strategical in the sense that multitasking is much more important than high quality strategical moves. SC2 is all about low quality but high volume actions.
An analogous scenario in chess would be if you had to play 15 blitz chess games simultaneously. Obviously this is going to require making only the most basic, obvious moves, in order to keep up with the pacing. That means strategy is irrelevant. That’s where SC2 is at. You have to make extremely basic strategic moves in order to keep up with the sheer volume of moves that have to be made.
You both are delusional. War3 was a micro game and MOBA exists only because of war3. im not going to feed any trolling that tries to tell me how they are actually MOBA.
MOBA is not an RTS (even though strategy is involved any game even in RPG) and is control 1 hero. There is nothing APM demanding about controlling 1 hero to claim that doing so with entire army is a MOBA.
Thanks to War3 and SC2 any strategy game I touch I would use it. I would micro in any game. So how is this wrong in RTS? AOE4 has micro and macro. Stormgate also will have the aspect of being fast. Just not as fast as SC2 where units are made die much faster. This is the only difference compared to any other RTS
it is like the existence of this parameter “APM” scares the heck out of lazy heads.
As part of working for a game company I had to test CoH. And my reactions are the same
How fast you do actions and respond to attacks this is ALL APM and it matters for how well you attack and defend, anything worse than that will make your gameplay worse compare to those that can do better.
NA doesnt like that? no wonder.
But I can agree SC2 made it too extreme of game to be liked by many. Which is why I think pace like war3 best pace, cant get any slower
I haven’t played for quite a while, so don’t know much about the current state. But at LotV release micro mattered a lot. If you just a-move an army, it’s basically suicide. There are so many units to micro, blink, split, spells, siege, stutterstep, sometimes even targetfire. This is so much. Multitasking plays a big role, too, and ofc you can just substitute a lack of micro with lots of multitasking. And the amount of multitasking I saw up to masters level was just “drop here with cheap units and let the drop do it’s job while I micro main army”.
I have the feeling you disagree because you like disagreeing. Even if we actually more or less agree. Multitasking and micro overshadow the strategy aspect really hard. I even call multitasking part of micro, because move-commands are micro, too.
Disagree. You have only one unit and that limits the amount of micro you can do at all. I’ve played Dota quite a bit. Everything works slower than in SC2, if you cast, you have lots of delays before and afterwards, there is turnspeed, you have whole phases where you can give your hero a bunch of commands to walk from creep to creep and level, and you just watch for a minute.
What’s instead important is positioning, how to make your spells hit and not the enemies. There is no pre-splitting your army in case the enemy attacks, or sending the right amount of workes into the geysers after a harass, instead you’re required to run for 15s so you can participate in a team fight.
Instead in Dota there’s all this dynamic with your team, when to attack, what to do when, coordinate with the team, and how to respond to the enemy team’s coordination. SC2 compared to that seems to me like run around in search for undefended places, and that’s about all the strategy that game has.
I haven’t read 2000 posts of this before. So to me these are just buzzwords. What does this exactly mean? What exactly are low/high quality/volume actions?
I think the position doesn’t matter much. A bit, to have units in the spots you get attacked at. But other than that… you poke as much as you can and retreat the moment the enemy arrives, no matter where that spot is. Cliffs are never used to position anything of value, except tanks when you’re 1.5base. Cliffs don’t give any advantage anyway, you just need one single flying unit and it doesn’t matter anymore that there’s a cliff. In a fight it’s more important to siege tanks at the correct time than the correct spot. And instead of figuring out how to reach them without taking much damage, you simply abduct them. The strategic aspect was dumbed down this way, to make room for reactionary actions, which are micro and multitasking.
Maybe another analogous scenario would be that you have to play 2 simultanous games of Need for Speed, each running at 4x speed.
Every competitive game is played at the same speed - max speed that human player can squeeze out of himself.
Sounds like real life street racing.
Except in real life you get even bigger adrenaline rush because its not some silly points but your life that you put on the table.
Wow. Reading your comment is such a chore. I’m not gonna do it. Moba is not an RTS, way to state the obvious. Yet it has (IN MY OPINION) a way stronger aspect of strategy than SC2. If you can’t understand that certain APM actions require you to think on the fly and others don’t, then this conversation is really pointless and you can believe whatever you want to believe, even in a flat earth. The strategy aspect requires planning, so an RTS where you spend most if not all of your time responding instead of planning (and also the responses are kind of “just activate everything”) lacks in the strategic aspect. The amount of clicks you can or have to do is irrelevant.
Another example is how many builds you can go in Dota. Not only which hero you choose, but also the items and how you respond to the enemies, is 100x bigger than in SC2, where it’s considered a gigantic deviation from the norm to build 2 oracles instead of 1 (for example).
Protoss has all these gimmicks, and it’s rock paper scissors. But in the last 5 years I haven’t seen a game where Terran or Zerg did anything different in their tech paths.
I can point you to top level games where players use amove micro, lose the fight, and the game goes on for another 20 minutes.
that was his micro the entire game more or less. He doesn’t even bother to siege his tanks for crying out loud.
Yeah it’s physically impossible to micro this many units which is why top players like Cure just amove.
Multitasking is the primary mode of winning. The strongest way to play SC2 is to simply out-multitask your opponent.
Everything you listed supports my argument. Micro is more strategic in league and dota because it’s slower paced. It’s focused on fewer but higher quality micro moves, while SC2 is focused on spamming large volumes of very basic micro. League and Dota absolutely has a higher emphasis on micro than SC2, while SC2 has a higher emphasis on multitasking.
High volume actions just means actions you can do really fast and can do lots of them. Only the simplest and most basic actions can be done fast which reduces the quality of the micro, positioning, strategy, etc. SC2’s emphasis on multitasking requires high volume actions and this basically deletes the strategical element of the game. It doesn’t matter what you do, it matters that you do it fast.
I worked in the game industry for about 15 years and was the lead developer on two games.
MOBA is a sub-genre of RTS and that’s an indisputable fact. SC2 is also a sub-genre of RTS called “EAM” aka “Endurance and Multitasking”. MOBA is truer to the RTS category than EAM because the multitasking in EAM overshadows the strategical element. “Real-time strategy” requires that strategy be the primary mode of winning, and that’s not the primary mode of winning in SC2. If games do not require strategy to be the primary mode of winning, in order to be RTS, then games like Call of Duty and Minecraft are “RTS” games. RTS requires strategy to be the dominant element of the game, and for SC2 that isn’t the case. Multitasking is the dominant element of SC2. SC2 really isn’t an RTS game anymore. It’s an Endurance and Multitasking game. This is why SC2 is declining while League and Dota are excelling. League and Dota stayed true to the RTS genre while Starcraft diverged from it.
RTS is very popular, so if SC2 were an RTS it would be doing well. The fact that RTS games are excelling but SC2 is failing is proof that SC2 isn’t an RTS game.
I don’t think it would be smart for SC2 to try to compete against League and Dota, but I also don’t think it’s smart for SC2 to take a polar-opposite approach to the RTS genre. If they reduced the multitasking by even 5%, and reworked the defenders advantage to favor 1-3 base plays, it would probably double the number of people wanting to play the game. It would still have a heavy emphasis on multitasking, which keeps it distinct from other RTS games, but the multitasking requirements wouldn’t be quite so oppressive.
You don’t have to be sweaty to play decently at sc2. That’s a fact. Most sieges aren’t particularly fast paced either.
Damage also scales way faster than hp or repairing.
There are methods for zerg to punish an overly turtle terran
The facts disagree.
https://i.imgur.com/VQIKkXA.png
You know what’s for “crying out loud”? That people think unsieged tanks don’t do any damage. This example is idiotic. He moved back and forth to evade biles, as did Zerg. He was 20 supply behind before the fight and 10 after the fight. Your point is idiotic.
Once in a lifetime a Terran thinks he doesn’t want unmovable tanks against a bunch of ravagers, and the community goes “he doesn’t micro, HE DOESN’T MICRO”, like… seriously? The f is this dumb. Sorry, but this is undoubtedly dumb.
Even if there were no micro, you would be arguing with the exception against the rule. The rule isn’t mech vs Zerg, but bio, and bio has to split or explodes to banes, while banes have to split to not explode to WMs.
This is absurdly dumb.
Never said anything different. You are deaf I think. I agreed with you and then you proceeded to disagree with me. Like a moron. Really! Disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing. The SC2 community hasn’t changed a bit. Always angry. Always on the attack. And it reminds me of flerfs, too.
I see multitasking as part of micro. Doesn’t matter if you agree on that or not. Maybe multitasking is truly the primary factor and micro the secondary, I thought it’s the other way around, but I don’t even care about that because it’s completely beside the point. My point from the beginning was that the strategic part is the least important one to win a game, as you said yourself. Nice job wasting time shifting the topic into wherever.
So I said in Dota you can just queue a bunch of commands and then watch for a minute without doing anything, and you say Dota has more micro than SC2?
You have brain damage or something?
You can literally queue commands and then watch the items in the shop, for periods of 10 seconds, sometimes even longer, without doing anything with your hero. And when you die, you have one whole minute where you can’t do anything at all. Except maybe blame your allies.
Also did you invent these words “large volumes of micro” or something? And expect people to understand? Do they understand, I wonder…?
And even then, large volumes of very basic micro is still micro, and still way more than you have to do in Dota (and still way beside the point). Why do you think people keep saying it’s easy to control just one unit??? There’s never a time in Dota where you have to split to not get AoEd down. Not even pros do it. In SC2 probably anyone above diamond has to split, against banelings, against Disruptors, against WMs. Dota isn’t micro driven either, there are decisions what to do with your hero, because you can’t put him into a medivac when he’s low health, and boost away. Some heroes require to run into the enemies to be played properly. Others to hide around the map, just wait for an ambush and maybe put up wards. You need like one click in 20s to do that.
Have you even played Dota or League at all? You’re spouting absolute nonsense.
I think you’re making up buzzwords. That’s all. You don’t really understand what’s killing the strategy in SC2. The fact that you can outweight strategic choices with basic units and lots of micro is just one aspect, not “the killer of strategy”. It’s way more complicated than that, the strategy aspect gets a lot more punches to the gut, which at this point I doubt you even understand. I’ll give you an example:
Multitasking has actually a strategic aspect to it. When a player decides to attack several places at once, this is a strategy. If you mean that, you’re contradicting yourself without noticing. You’d be saying “strategy is a killer to strategy”.
What I’m arguing btw is that it doesn’t matter where the player attacks, as long as there are several simultaneous attacks, which dumbs down the strategic aspect really hard. Although I haven’t read the whole thread, I haven’t seen you mention things like these to me (only once you said something in that direction, but overgeneralized, too, when you said “It doesn’t matter what you do, it matters that you do it fast.”), you constantly disagreeing with me for the sake of disagreeing doesn’t make you look like you thought anything in that direction, at this point it’s understandable to question your understanding of the topic, and your buzzwords won’t make up for that. Even if you are (at least partially) correct, when you have to resort to these buzzwords to make your point, nobody will listen.
The way to not contradict yourself is when you mean macro. But then you could just be saying “macro”, instead of letting it float in an overgeneralized manner of buzzwords. And get to the point quicker.
Macro does require too much attention by bombarding the player with redundant actions, doesn’t it? And then it’s more impactful than a good strategy. That’s because of how explosive the economy is.
Btw I think it matters what you do in SC2, you have to follow the meta or you’ll be behind. Exotic unit compositions will make you lose, SC2 simply doesn’t have the room for creativity. So that’d be another example how you don’t understand how it works.
I think I’m done with you anyway. Careful when responding to me, because I’m gonna go look for an ignore button now, I won’t be reading any of your comments anytime soon. Even when agreeing with people on the state of the game, talking here in the forums is never ever a good experience. I doubt you understood half the points I made anyway.
I stopped reading there. Bye.
LOL OL OL OLOLOL AHAHAHAHA lolol o,llllllllL!@!!!
Mate, you are talking to Batz. He is either a very fat troll or an idiot.
Just ignore whatever he says, 95% of time its complete nonsense.
This guy seems to be off his meds for a long time
Blizz designers after receiving scalding criticism from bAtZ:
The facts show that people dont use swarmhosts and or infestors/broods as much as they should. staying baneling against a terran who slowly starts to add heavier mech as well and isnt stuck at mmm+tanks is the surefire way of losing or drawing our games I agree
Excuse me… what RTS game (RTS real time, on the fly, not a Chess, not turn based, not wait hours to press the ‘Your turn’ button) gives you enough time to think? I mention multiple times War3… the game is only slightly slower. How is it any different?
I’ve worked in AAA as QA, I have studied Game design, made games and participated in results that made it live. Nice try with ethos but I am also not speaking from the 'S". On top of being with strategy all the way back to Dune 2, War2. heroes 3, I like Empire Earth and newer strategies. For all of them the more you can do, the more efficient your gameplay.
Sub-Genre I could agree because it comes from RTS game. War3. But still, an RTS is imagined one where you control a bunch of armies even if technically many things could be called strategy games.
The problem with you two, is that (yes I agree APM could foreshadow strategy aspect) but the problem is you think that APM or the speed of SC2 overshadows it. Same question to you, War3 was a bit slower game, how much more time you had to think, it is RTS darn it not a CHESS with 2 hours waiting.
Don’t be such an embarrassment, I will even complement someone from NA. I have participated in tourneys where an NA Zerg knew how he would attack me, how he thinks to counter my units, to know where I am to surround me from directions, is this not decision making. What more do you expect in a game that happens on the go?
if you want you can go play some other type of strategy game that is all about choosing the army and the numbers and let them AUTO fight like warhammer.
Because even AOE 4 and Stormgate what do you think, if slightly slower what more do you think they will allow you to plan?
The definition is literally in the name. “Real” “time” “strategy”. It’s a strategy game that doesn’t have turns – it progresses in real time. There isn’t anything else to the definition.
My man, you can’t even understand the definition to game genres. How am I supposed to take your posts? Are you trolling? I literally can’t tell. You’re kinda in the grey zone where you are saying really dumb stuff but not so dumb that’s it’s definitely trolling, if you know what I mean. I can’t tell if you are “for real.”
Dota and League both spawned as a sub-genre of a map from Warcraft 3, so you could say they are War3 derivatives. They improved on the concept which is why people play them and not War3, so I am not seeing how your example supports your conclusion. It clearly supports mine. The style of RTS which has more emphasis on strategy and less emphasis on speed is a much more popular game genre.
Warcraft 3 is a slower paced RTS but that doesn’t mean it will necessarily be played more. War3 has to compete against other games in that genre, and by comparison it isn’t as good, even though it has an attribute that is good (slower paced). That’s why I specifically said SC2 should not try to be the same as League and Dota. My point is that SC2 should be different and should fill a niche, but not quite to the extreme that it is currently. SC2 has gone way too far in the opposite direction, and because of this it limits what players are interested in the game, because only a small fraction of RTS players are interested in multitasking. That’s why I said if you reduced the game pacing by 5% you’d probably double the number of players. It still wouldn’t be as big as League which has 17x as many players, but 2x more would be a big improvement while keeping SC2 niche so that it doesn’t have to compete.
Why on Earth I am giving game design consulting services for free on an internet forum is a beyond me. I guess in the back of my mind I know nobody reads the nonsense on these boards, so when real advice happens to be posted here nobody will even see it.