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.