The dawn of a gaming era rises on the horizon. It is a bright star, shining as brightly as the last day it rose more than ten years ago – as StarCraft 2 rises in the distance. No doubt you’ve heard by now about the beta premiering (and naturally hitting the downloader’s underground less than 24 hours later… pirated servers to come) and the absolutely enormous hype surrounding it (putting both WarCraft 3 and Diablo 2’s hype to shame, but not quite overpowering the Modern Warfare 2 hype of last year). It’s true, it could be a great game, but the strongest argument for why it might fail stands as proudly as Mr. Burn’s contraption that blocked out the sun, over Springfield:
“How the hell do you top StarCraft”?
Few people believe that, despite Blizzard’s phenomenal reputation, they can. “Why?”, is the question, however. We all know that StarCraft is awesome but very few people seem to grasp the true reasoning for it and even fewer so, grasp the basic intricacies that make it, without a doubt, “perfect”. There is nothing wrong with StarCraft at all. Now, you get a lot of new kids saying “eh, it’s okay, but the graphics are old and it’s old, we’ve been playing it too long”, etc. There’s another strategy game which is perfect that we’ve been playing for hundreds of years: chess. How often do you hear somebody tell you that they don’t play chess any longer because they’re bored of it? So..
Let’s step back and look at what makes StarCraft, “perfect”.
OH WAIT, it’s simple: balance. However, that’s a long and complicated story, so let’s take it from a personal side, first..
When I was young, I loved StarCraft. I’d download Fastest Map Possible, amass an army of Battlecruisers or Carriers and wreak havoc on my enemies (usually friends). This is what every kid does with strategy games. Just as the Queen is your Battlecruiser in chess and all other pieces are mere pawns to the novice player, but that didn’t matter, it was fun. Yamato cannon, fire!
While still amassing Battlecruisers against my Protoss-playing friend, I decided to take another route. Those Carriers still did a fair amount of damage to my fleet, there had to be a way to give them even more of a disadvantage – and then I discovered the Science Vessel, paired up with a beautiful little skill called “EMP Shockwave”. This skill completely eradicated his unit’s shields in a small radius area, I had discovered an “AOE spell”, huzzah! I had no idea what it was, but of course that didn’t matter to me. What was important was that I had a new weapon against my friend. He saw a little blast, thought it was nothing, and assumed the damage negligible. He had no clue how wrong he was. I wiped him out while only losing 1 battlecruiser. I had a similar experience discovering “Irradiate” not too long later.
Needless to say, when you’re young or you don’t understand an RTS, the only thing that seems important is firepower. StarCraft does this very well, showcasing the Terran and Protoss as seeming very powerful in terms of their units, and the Zerg being weaker, but inexpensive. Everyone understood that much, Command & Conquer had a similar division between the two factions (one being weak and inexpensive while the other is strong but costs), however this was the first time that an RTS had taken 3 very distinct races, that did everything differently, and balanced them out perfectly BEYOND the units!
I told you about the strategic advantages that I found in abilities. Now, some units have an equivalence in tier, but very few of them have a counterpart that has anything in common. An example are the first two military units that you can build for each race.
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The Terran are introduced with the basic Terran marine, a ranged unit (with a range-upgrade) and a very short-range “melee” unit that does extra damage to organic units. This makes the two of them in combination work very well together. The marine is made useful for defense by his range-upgrade in the first tier, and bunker, also in the first tier.
The Protoss Zealot has 4 times the amount of hit points, but is melee and attacks slower.. also costing twice as much and taking longer to build. However, a Protoss Zealot can handle its own against 2 Marines (depending on how often the marines are sent to do hit-and-run attacks, an attack, move back, an attack, move back), but the Zealot’s shields recharge, making this a long, time-wasting tactic, just for killing one Zealot and saving your cheap units. The Zealot is joined by the long-range and slow to begin attacking “Dragoon”, a long-ranged large unit with a range upgrade, at the same tier as the Marine’s upgrade. Zealots are made useful again late game with their high defense, as tanks, when their overall speed is given an upgrade in the third tier.
The Zerg come in with Zerglings, which cost half as much per-Zergling as a Marine, and build nearly twice as fast.. however, two Zerglings will lose against a marine, until upgraded, but four can probably beat two marines if they’re played right. They are melee, very fast, get an attack speed AND movement upgrade at various tiers, and are again, useful until the end of the game, from attacking to cannon fodder. It’s hard to fight off 100 units coming at you, nomatter how easy they are to kill. The Hydralisk can be made the backbone of the entire Zerg army with all of its upgrades, especially the range and burrow upgrades. Their low price makes them ideal for taking out fliers without having to spend too much.
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Wow, and that’s just talking about six units. Each of these units attacks very differently, has no real “special” abilities that give it an advantage that isn’t veto’d by an advantage on one of the others. Once you start including the abilities you get into a completely different level of balance, altogether! The Terran Science Vessel for instance, has no attack, but two of its’ three abilities are devastating to your foes’ armies, while the third can turn any unit into the perfect scout.
The strategies you can form with just those six units above is immense, but with the large tech-tree and endgame usefulness of every unit, a factor that very few strategies take into account and immense balancing out put into its development. So, if you’re a battlecruiser/carrier whore, let’s play StarCraft, I’ll show you just how useful some of the seemingly useless units in this game are, and I’m not talking about a Reaver drop, because that’s the oldest trick in the book now.
Think: Army of ghosts and goliaths…
–Jeff “DanyLektro”
Note: Yes, the single-player campaign is also a phenomenally told story. En Taro Tassadar.
StarCraft was almost this!