StarCraft II 5.0.13 PTR Patch Notes

When it’s possible to win at a GM level with half HP, strategy is not a significant factor to the outcome. It’s like saying you can fly an airplane that’s made of lead. The only way a lead airplane can fly is if gravity is fake. If strategical decisions matter, it would be impossible to win while making bad strategical decisions. Half hp on your units is one of the worst possible strategic decisions, and it can win at a gm level.

Micro rarely matters. In the gsl, ryung lost 5 full medivacs for free with bad micro, and won anyway. What matters in modern sc is having the apm to macro 5-7 bases and do 3-5 attacks simultaneously. If you can do that, the micro and strategy is literally irrelevant because the opponent just can’t keep up with the pacing.

You’re confusing addition and subtraction with string theory. Yes, technically, both are math. What modern SC2 pros do is they optimize worker counts, optimize unit production for that worker count, and then they start to trade with the intention of using multi pronged attacks to wear down a player with weaker multitasking. Their entire “strategy” is “lets get to a point in the game where strategy doesn’t matter.”

If you want to see a strategical play, watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5mvPiv2jBs&t=558s

This is a strategical play. Every action is careful, thoughtful, and planed out with precision. sOs navigates a soup of possible actions to find the 1 in 100 that will win the game, and he chains together a series of these to produce a win. This level of care and planning simply cannot exist in macro games, because it’s literally impossible to put this much care into each move when you have to make 400 moves every minute. It is physically impossible for strategical thinking to exist on the time-scales of 60/400=0.15 seconds. Chess grandmasters will spend an hour making a single move but SC2 players have to make 5-10 a second. This is not a strategy game. We’re talking about the ABC’s of game design here – we’re dealing with the definitions to words like 1st graders learning to read. The definition of the word “strategy” does not apply to this game. It’s all about mechanics, aka split second reactions and multitasking, and that is literally the polar opposite definition of strategical plays. Strategical plays emphasize the quality of actions, mechanics emphasizes the speed and quantity. If SC2 is a strategy game, then basketball and football are a “strategy” games.

This is a strategical game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UP9bHPDaf4&t=542s

  • Quantity of actions is irrelevant because each player gets the same number of moves.
  • No mechanical skills whatsoever.
  • Quality of actions is all that matters.
  • Critical thinking in the moment is absolutely required to successfully pull off complex strategical maneuvers.
  • Plans are made that affect future moves 10 or 20 minutes in the future.

Contrasted to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0_qo0KCX0M&t=2129s

  • Actions happening so fast you probably won’t even see them happen.
  • Decisions are made on the 40 millisecond time scale.
  • Many units die unnecessarily and/or take unnecessary damage; positioning mistakes are made frequently; the quality of actions is clearly much less important than the speed and quantity.
  • Extreme emphasis on using many hotkeys for unit abilities, defending multiple locations at once aka multitasking, and the control complexity of have many control groups for various tasks including multiple army and production and upgrade hotkeys.
  • No time to think / every action is pre-memorized, the quality of actions is very low and there is nothing resembling a complex strategic maneuver.
  • No long term planning involved, the only goal is to survive the current moment.

Yes but Asmongold being an RPG gamer may not know the difference between micro and macro. SC2 is heavily macro oriented and I find it stupid as a a concept to require 90 workers of 200. But then again what is microing workers ? Just send them to work lol.

If the quote means that RTS should find a way to be competitive without giving players the tough time to multitask whether to defend multiprong attacks and so on, im sorry that has to be there and it is what determines who is better. But I agree with you that the game should also be more strategical not just mechanical. Maybe what Asmongold means however is not what you and I say, so probably not the best example to give.

Funny that Stormgate is actually as a map and look and camps very war3 lookalike but the mechanics are solely SC2 like.

You really make a lot of workers. Maybe because I come from war3, in WoL I found it fun to test my opponent exactly by mechanics and if they survive an expand punish - then good job, else why should I not take my win? But even such games are strategy too no? To decide to cancel expanders rather than wait for late games and to go all in.

But LotV and SG in that regard is all about expanding. ZeroSpace though - the complaints there are that there is barely any macro, a lot of the games are 1 base 5/workers 7 on another etc. So ZS is a lot more like war3 as there are heroes too. SG is a lot like SC2, ZS a lot like War3.

I will give you an example from SG : because I have had this problem in War3 (elf expanding over and over) and SC2 too (Z or protoss expanding the whole map).

A player who is mechanically bad but makes expands all over, makes 10 towers a base (we call them tower noob) and you just go with 1 army and destroy all.

But because he banks a lot, he keeps expanding and expanding. What is the solution here - stop the expander, multitask to punish it (if I made 3 attacks a base maybe he wouldn’t have won and because he may not be able to watch 3 actions, he deserves to lose). Expands shouldn’t be the only way to play the game, this also means the game has more diversity in builds right? Yet LOtV is exacly EXPANDcraft and SG is too.But at least in SG it is def toned down on mechanics requirement.

I found it weird that macro in these games is so strong that you can go with 1 army destroy him everywhere he will still come back again and again. I do not remember this in war3 when I punish expanders. WoL also had that. In LotV and SG though this happens - more expands wins it all each time. And to me this is not strategy it is not about mechanics call it as you want. this is the lack of diversity Im talking when I say Expandcraft and yes that is in LotV and SG. As some also complaint in the other thread what 12 workers have deleted as builds.

He said he had about 3,000 games played which is a ~750 hours. So he’s a fairly veteran player. The reason he brought up SC2 is likely because he was thinking about playing it for his stream, but he decided against it for the reasons he listed. Basically it’s too hardcore, with an extreme emphasis on multitasking, and most twitch viewers aren’t going to be interested in it, so it would be a bad idea to stream it.

The issue is that the multitasking is so fierce that it has become the only element in the game. Even extremely talented players still can’t get past the multitasking. The skill floor is absurdly high, in other words. You could still have a high skill ceiling, the problem is that the skill floor is just as high as the ceiling itself, and the skill floor needs to be reduced.

To enjoy the strategical and tactical elements of the game, you have to play at 1,000 mmr lower than your true skill level. That’s why I can beat Ukko and SortOf and Eggz in zvz’s all the time because it’s the one match where tactical zerg styles are actually a valid way to play. ZvT and ZvP punish tactical play to such an extreme that if I went 2 base muta, an SCV-spammer could get out a third, a BC, and turrets before my spire is even done. It’s flipping crazy how far behind a zerg is if he does anything except spam drones. Spamming drones means longer games with higher emphasis on multitasking. So in order to play tactically and strategically in those matchups, you have to be willing to lose 1,000 mmr because you are just so far behind. Zerg is supposed to have an eco lead, meaning if equal in economy the zerg is behind. If you go 2 base muta, you aren’t going to be even, you are going to be behind in economy.

I think expansion-focused RTS games is a mistake. Unit-retainment is a much better focus for the genre. Unit retainment requires good strategical and tactical moves, because each unit is incredibly valuable. The reason tactics and strategy is irrelevant in SC2 is because if you make a bad move, lose 5 medivacs of marines, it doesn’t matter because you have a huge eco and that represents like 1% of eco so it’s basically irrelevant to make mistakes.

Yep, the over-emphasis on macro is the exact issue that I am getting at. Macro is simply way too strong compared to tech and upgrade styles. Being ahead in tech is absolutely useless when the opponent has infinity money.

The new map pool is a step in the right direction. I was pointing out a year or so ago that the maps were way too basic. They basically copied and pasted all my ideas off the forum into the new map pool. It’s going to solve the issue because tactical plays might be possible depending on the map layout. If bases are too easy to defend, it’s impossible to do anything except just spam workers. So they need to make the maps weirder and with more vulnerabilities so that turtling + spamming workers isn’t quite as powerful. For example, they added the ability to kill mineral patches. What this means is that, if a player gives up map control, they will be punished by loses 1,000’s of minerals. This rewards aggressive players and punishes turtlers / worker-spammers.

2 Likes

I don’t load 5.0.12 replays after update.

New hatch creep radius extends far enough that on team maps, teammates can’t even build on their nats.

I know the game’s not tuned for team matches, but this is just stupid.