Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Protoss vs Terran

I play Protoss in the Beta. I did about 100 games as random before switching to Protoss. I realized that I just sucked too much to do the random thing. And I win a lot at the moment. Part of the reason is that the beta is full of people who basically don’t know how to play RTS games, but that is only part of the reason.

If you, as Protoss, can get that mix of about 3 immortals and some support units you feel pretty invincible. AiurAdun, who for now play Terran, and I set out to test this yesterday in a series of three games.

His idea was that with early ghosts you could counter the Protoss army. In the end I think he was fairly optimistic about this approach. I’m not so sure. I think the secret to dealing with this lays more in using the marauders to slow down the Protoss army, retreat and get a around of fire in and then repeat. This level of micromanagement is completely absent from gold league and down.

The game that I lost, I did a pretty aggressive zealot opening. That I thought had a good chance of Steppes of War, but apparently not. This has led my to believe that the only feasible opening for Protoss is fast immortals, attack and win.

He Suck at Starcraft II too!

I feel related to this guy here. I don’t think I suck quite as badly, but still I share his pain. Check out his videos. He has 7 up so far.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Promotion

I started out trying to experiment with the new league promotion features. I lost – on purpose – so much that I got placed in a Copper league initially and hope to abuse that in a series of n00b-bashing games. Unfortunately this is not how the system plays out.promotion

I got to play maybe 4 games before the match-making system started pairing me up against people in silver league. At first you think: Ah, I guess this is a side effect of not having a ton of people online to match me up against, but after a while it dawns on you, that maybe the system suspects you cheated in your initial placement matches!

After about 8 games I was exclusively being paired up against Gold and Platinum league players. At this point the race for the top spot in my Copper league started to get interesting. A couple of players in my league had obviously done the same as me expecting to get easy wins and others in the top really struggled with win rates around 50%. At this point I started to see some of my competitors being promoted and I knew it was just a matter of time before my number one position in Copper would be yanked away from me in favor of a lower position in a better league. But what league would it be?

 

This morning I was 13-2 after having joined my league, and I set out to play another game. I had lost only two games and won a few over people placed in platinum, so I guess I thought I was heading for gold league at least. The final game that led to my promotion was a very typical Protoss vs Terran game on Scrap Station. My opponent was in the top tier of his Gold league and rated “favored” before the game began. When the game was done, I got promoted into Bronze league and was deducted 273 points. I guess they think I got all those points too easy, when I was posing as a Copper player? The punishment seems kinda harsh, but maybe that is just me.

The game itself was rather uneventful. He went marines and marauders and tried to spice it up with a little harassment with banshees. I had my defenses up and was already on the fast track to immortals which counters marauders pretty badly. Game over and the promotion was a done deal.

Replay Pack added.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Danish Starcraft II Tournament

I hosted a Starcraft II Beta tournament for the Danish Starcraft II community last Wednesday. I’ve done that a lot back in the days and I also held two tournaments about a year and a half ago on iccup. Usually we would have about 20 sign-ups and when it came to actual participation the number would be closer to 15. Not so here… We had 38 people signing up and in the end 36 of them did participate. That is really great!

teamladder_chartIn the end PhoboS.cruel won after about 5½ hours of play. I casted some of it too on livestream. Apparently I suck at it, but part of the problem with my casting is most certainly all the administrative work I had to do while playing, observing and keeping track of scores.

The tournament was held on the patch 5 version of the game, but replays can still be viewed.

Friday, March 26, 2010

Lame Strats are Lame!

Blizzard finally pushed out a new patch and reset the ladder. Great, upgradeit is time to test out the game anew.

I wanted easy opponents and to get a feel for what it took to be moved from one league to another, so I started out on the (now only 5) placement matches with the intention of not trying too hard.

So I made up rules for myself:lame_strats_are_lame

  1. No units before a Mothership
  2. Only one production building of each type
  3. Don’t win anyway.

I almost won my first game and had to stop making more units. So I fell back on just canons for defense. Even that was almost too much for my opponent who spend about 50 minutes destroying my canons with Brood Lords. In the end I ended up 1-4 in my placement matches. The win due to some guy who quit like 2 seconds into the game.

no1_copper

Now I started playing in earnest, and quickly secured the number one position in my copper league. This is fun and actually not quite as much newbie-bashing as I thought it would be. After my 2nd win, I started getting matched up against silver league players, so the system might already consider me placed in the wrong league. It is exiting to see what will happen now!

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

A couple of Replays

I haven’t played that much the last couple of days, primarily because I have been busy organizing the first Danish 1v1 tournament. It is tonight and is going to be great!

But I have collected a few games, for others to see. They are probably not anything particularly exciting, but here they are anyways.

aiurpvzI really like the TvT where we both end up losing our bases. That seems to happen a lot for me in TvT and can potentially lead to deadlocked games. Not something that the system can handle as of now.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

So I Suck at Starcraft II too!

I’m quickly approaching 100 games of Starcraft II and I suck at this game too! I’m stuck in Silver League, with no firm understanding of the game. I play random and have promised myself that I will do this for a while. Just to get a feel of the different races.

On request I tried to do an FPVOD. Here it is. I apologize for the lousy video quality, but this is my first Starcraft II VOD and I probably haven’t figured out the best approach to making them yet.

(Part 1 of 2 and Part 2 of 2)

Take a look, and remember that there is a lot of basic stuff that I still don’t quite understand about the game yet.

Friday, March 19, 2010

I’m in the beta!

So I got in the beta thanks to a friend who got an extra key from Blizzard. Thank you, AiurAdun!
I’ve only been back a day and I am extremely jetlagged. Yet I have so far managed to play 54 games (40 1v1 and 14 2v2). My first impression is that the game is fun, but still have a long way to go before it will get close to Brood War in terms of quality. I’ll probably post more on that later.
The features of battle.net are still a little rough in terms of usability, but I have really been looking forward to automated matchmaking and now it is here.2v2_platinum
And I love the placement match system even if it by some weird mistake sent me to the Platinum League in 2v2. Pretty strange!
My Silver League placement for 1v1 seems much more sensible to me. Stay tuned for more SC2 Beta updates here.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Urge to Game when you can't

So we are about one week into our south-east asia travels and I am following the Starcraft 2 Beta on the sideline thanks to the free wifi (and my trusty HTC Hero phone) from Chiang Mai. Admittedly that this is probably a mistake as the news from the beta is just making me want to play and reducing the enjoyment of our vacation (which I still enjoy btw.).

 
The day before yesterday, while sitting in a restaurant in Chiang Mai, I observed an enthusiastic RTS gamer. The closest I have gotten to fulfill my own urge to play. The screen on his computer is rather dark, but he is playing Red Alert in single player. With one arm constantly behind his back and with a huge cup of ice and soda in front of him.

And no, he was not 1337 as to not need the keyboard. He was just a very, very n00bish player. Still fun for him though.