Starcraft 2 discussion thread

[Hawkwings]

Re: Last Stand of the Protoss, use Phoenixes and their graviton beam to levitate the hybrids, and have plenty of anti-air available to kill them while they're helpless. And yes, feedback is awesome.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Ill say this for terran, no one turtles better...

After having my main forces wiped and expansion bases chewed up, I pulled back and did something I havnt done since playing SC2, turtled.

Built nothing but Missile towers and Siege tanks.

I was playing against Zerg and Protoss and defended myself long after totaling running out of minerals. Eventually got over run by 12 Carriers, but only after the game ran after the hour mark

[Hawkwings]

Zerg didn't send brood lords? Wow, that's amazing.

What were the reactions of your opponents?

[Stofsk]

Man I forgot how fun it is to play co-op against the AI

My mate and I played two games with the AI on medium, and rightly crushed them. Then my mate got the bright idea of setting the AI to hard and very hard, and we then got our asses kicked.

So we set the AI to hard and won, and then we played another game with one AI set to hard and the other to very hard, and we won.

My friend is better at managing his economy than I am. I usually wind up with ~40 scvs and he has over 60 drones. He also expands sooner than I do, so he tends to get more resources than me. But I tend to spend the resources I get a lot more than he does. I also make sure I get some upgrades for my units but because of the pace of the game it can be difficult to remember to spend the stockpiled minerals and gas (and gas is always in short supply; minerals stockpile a lot quicker).

Nothing better than a fleet of battlecruisers entering a base and ruining everyone's shit

(I'll probably stick to AI for now, til I get confident enough to start playing against people)

EDIT: btw who plays the lost viking minigame?

[Crossroads Inc.]

Zerg didn't send brood lords? Wow, that's amazing.

What were the reactions of your opponents?

Zerg player i felt was kinda new.. Sent wave after wave of Muti's after me that just melted against the wall of Missile Turrets. Zerg play also learned the hard way that you just can NOT not rush madly up a fortified ramp defended with bunkers and siege tanks no matter how many Ultralisks you have.

Of course they had control of the rest of the map so it wasn't like they needed to worry about resources.

[Thanas]

Nothing better than a fleet of battlecruisers entering a base and ruining everyone's shit

Unless said player has gotten Vikings.....

EDIT: btw who plays the lost viking minigame?

Not me. I find it boring.

[Stofsk]

Nothing better than a fleet of battlecruisers entering a base and ruining everyone's shit

Unless said player has gotten Vikings.....

We played against the AI. I want to practice against the AI long enough to start playing against other people. Plus it's always fun to play co-op with a mate.

EDIT: btw who plays the lost viking minigame?

Not me. I find it boring.

I wanna kill the tetraton

i wanna get the achievement

[Skylon]

Man I forgot how fun it is to play co-op against the AI

My mate and I played two games with the AI on medium, and rightly crushed them. Then my mate got the bright idea of setting the AI to hard and very hard, and we then got our asses kicked.

So we set the AI to hard and won, and then we played another game with one AI set to hard and the other to very hard, and we won.

Well done sir. Very hard my friends and I discovered yesterday is....very hard. We had two 3v3 games. 1 Very hard computer and 2 medium. The first time the very hard was terran and did intelligent crap like scout ahead with an SCV. We did okay, but it was very good and pumping out lots of infantry and stim-packing them.

The next game, the Very Hard ended up being zerg and it nearly wiped me on its first rush. We wiped one normal, but then the Very Hard comp did a Zerg bomb of doom, rushing us with what must have been a maxed out queue of troops.

[Kojiro]

Well if anyone wants to play online (and is on SEA) I'm Kojiro there. I'm up for any style of game.

A few things of note from reading the last few pages though:

Vikings are indeed a void rays worst enemy- that or 8 marines. 8 marines, no upgrades, will drop a void ray in with the loss of only a single marine, if that. Targeted fire is your friend there (hold left Alt to see health bars and pick off the weakest first).

As for rushes, terrans have been given a new toy for this. The supply depot can raise and lower to allow passage. In any mulitplayer game against zerg or protoss it's essential you build one of these at the ramp leading into your base, then the barracks next to it. Done right (and you can enable the grid placement tool if you need it) you'll block off access to your base you can open at your leisure (or just move the barracks away later/replace with bunker). Since SC doesn't use true LOS you can happily repair your side and shoot across the building at any zerglings or zealots trying to rush you while pumping out more marines. Admittedly it's annoying as hell that terran have to do this but it's the only way I know of to counter rushes- you simply can't build a force that will win a stand up fight.

[Minischoles]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDWIgIPCylU

There's a 1v1 Terran vs Zerg, and you see what Kojiro was talking about, using the supply depot and barracks to block off the ramp up into the base. If you want to play Terran, it's essential that you get good at that, since it's pretty much the beginning of every single Terran strategy.

As for playing vs the AI to learn, I really wouldn't do that, or even bother playing the practice maps, since they give a very false impression of the game. If you want to learn, just watch a load of replays online and practice. You'll get your butt handed to you a lot, but if you watch your own replays you can start seeing what you do wrong.

[Crossroads Inc.]

As for rushes, terrans have been given a new toy for this. The supply depot can raise and lower to allow passage. In any mulitplayer game against zerg or protoss it's essential you build one of these at the ramp leading into your base, then the barracks next to it. Done right (and you can enable the grid placement tool if you need it) you'll block off access to your base you can open at your leisure (or just move the barracks away later/replace with bunker). Since SC doesn't use true LOS you can happily repair your side and shoot across the building at any zerglings or zealots trying to rush you while pumping out more marines. Admittedly it's annoying as hell that terran have to do this but it's the only way I know of to counter rushes- you simply can't build a force that will win a stand up fight.

The problem i see in a lot of Terran player,s is they seem to forget the depots can "L"ower into the ground. Ill see a lot of people build partial walls of depots, thinking it would slow down a rush, and then they put their marines in the gap. They never seem to realize how fast Speedlings are till its too late.

And oh yeha, im "Bishotron" if anyone wants to friend and team up,

[adam_grif]

I had someone tell me that Starcraft 2 has "The best story ever put in a videogame" the other day.

Hype force assemble!

[wautd]

Well after a few hours play I got the say that while SC2 doesn't offer the best singleplayer campaign ever in a RTS game (WiC holds that spot), it's a load of fun so no buyers regret on that part. Guessing I need to do 4 or 5 more missions and I got it finished. The mission where the star goes nova was by far the hardest for me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDWIgIPCylU

There's a 1v1 Terran vs Zerg

Man I miss Tales of Heroes. CoH-match replays are so much more fun to watch (no boring recourse gathering the first 5 minutes for one).

EDIT: btw who plays the lost viking minigame?

Not me. I find it boring.

I wanna kill the tetraton

i wanna get the achievement[/quote]

That's the last level right? Damn, I was soooooo close!

I had someone tell me that Starcraft 2 has "The best story ever put in a videogame" the other day.

Hype force assemble!

Dear God! That's just fucked up. Please tell me he got slapped in the face for that.

[adam_grif]

Please tell me he got slapped in the face for that.

No go, our A.I. tutor frowns on brawls during class time.

Man I miss Tales of Heroes. CoH-match replays are so much more fun to watch (no boring recourse gathering the first 5 minutes for one).

What's Tales of Heroes?

And yeah, CoH replays can be great fun to watch, especially the high-level ones.

[Stofsk]

That's the last level right? Damn, I was soooooo close!

I got it, once you kill the terra-tron you get to play on and the next three levels are repeats of the first three, but are slightly more difficult.

I find two drones and two side missiles work wonders, but in level 5 when you do the second zerg level the screen lags something fierce when the whole screen fills with scourges and when they explode all those green bomb acid things spray everywhere. But that's where bombs come in handle, they clean that right up

actually the bombs are really useful against the terra-tron, because that screen fills up with laser bolts and shit which one hit and your toast. But a bomb clears the sky up a bit.

i'm managed to get to level 6 - got the silver achievement (250K points) but keep dying because level 6 busts my balls.

[wautd]

Man I miss Tales of Heroes. CoH-match replays are so much more fun to watch (no boring recourse gathering the first 5 minutes for one).

What's Tales of Heroes?

And yeah, CoH replays can be great fun to watch, especially the high-level ones

Just the name of a weekly show where two guys gave comments on some of the more interesting CoH multiplayer matches. Did a fine job on
that if you ask me. If you enjoy watching them, Check out the King of the 88 one for sure.



Going back to SC2, is there any disadvantage to lower your terran supply depots in the ground? I kinda feel stupid for buying the electronic copy, when I found 2 days later out that a nice physical copy with manual and everything would have been cheaper.

[Stofsk]

yeah, if you use supply depots to block off an entrance to your base then lowering them lets everybody in.

[Companion Cube]

I love that there's a challenge mode where you get achievements for fighting off zerglings with your SCVs

[Kojiro]

I detest those challenges, only because putting them there makes me do them until I get a decent record.

That said, if anyone has any idea how to do the final mission vs Air on brutal please let me know. I've lost at least 4 hours to that single mission and I can't get past 85%.

And that should be Kojiro #442.

[Guardsman Bass]

God, I love reapers. Harassing Zerg players with them is one of my favorite tactics.

[Crossroads Inc.]

In the annuals of playing multiplayer games, ESPECIALLY custom multi player games.... Anytime someone says "Hey! I have this fool proof way of winning!" it is usually a good bet to write them off as a constrictive part of your teams

[Alferd Packer]

In the annuals of playing multiplayer games, ESPECIALLY custom multi player games.... Anytime someone says "Hey! I have this fool proof way of winning!" it is usually a good bet to write them off as a constrictive part of your teams

The only foolproof method I've seen is if all three players on a team are Zerg, and they all do a 6-pool zergling rush. That is, however, ultimately cheesy. Still, a 3v3 is markedly easier to win if one teammate pumps nothing but the basic unit. Last night, I pumped marines while my Terran ally went for MM with a few tanks, and my Zerg teammate pumped speedlings and roaches. In the end, I was pumping marines off of six reactor'd Barracks. There was no way for our opponents to tech switch quickly enough, and we overwhelmed them.

Another fun 2v2 strategy is this: On a TP team, the Terran player grabs both expansions super early. He then pumps nothing but SCVs and mules, and gives all his resources to the Protoss player. The Protoss player then slaps up 10-15 Warp gates and pumps Gateway units like crazy. If the Protoss' player has good macro, he'll pretty much steamroll anyone.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Thats a pretty sneaky way of doing things.

You need a partner you can really trust to pull that off, though I will admit Terran, thanks to MULES have the highest rescouce collection rate out there. I dismissed mules when I first started playing because after all, they are "temporary" what benefit could you get?

Well damn, pop 2 MULES down and watch your resources double and tripple in a matter of seconds.

As far as good ways to win, more and more it seems to come down to who rushes faster. Often if I find myself playing with protoss on my team, I urge a "3 zealot 4 marine" rush. Which works out to 6 zealots and 4 marines in most games. That is usually enough to kill any one player within the first 3 to 5min of the game. Really Protoss are the new kings of "zerg rush" now. With the "time warp" feature needing only 25 energy, they can easily pump out (if your dedicated) 4 zealots when others are just getting thier first few units.

Its especially bad if everyone on your teams is Protoss. Five minuts into a game, you can find yourself being attacked with between 9 to 12 zealots. I know i started off harping about Protoss spamming nothing but void ships to win, but now I see that only happens if you let them live long enough.

Also a note on "basic unit pumping" Playing as Terran, it stops wokring if your opponant lives long enough to tech up. Its the main reason I have become a "zerg rush" player, tryign to kill the other side as fast as possible. If you let the other side tech up, a whole army of marines and maradurs can still be killed by high end units like Thors and Collsi.

[Minischoles]

Terran are the best race atm, far and away in fact. Vs a zerg player, it's practically a free win. They have the easiest early game, since they can wall off and defend their base from scouting very early on, with the two other races basic mineral only units being melee classes, you can sit behind that wall and annihilate them with marines. You also get the easiest scout (even if you don't use SCVs) with the scan from Orbital Command.

Marines+Marauders with medvacs and stim packs are damn near overpowered, those things can take down Ultralisks and Collossi like they don't even exist. Add in some Thors for splash damage, or some spammed out vikings for AA (with the longest range for AA) and with even half decent micro no player can equal you.

Protoss rushing is only effective if you really let it be, and if he's going zealots, you can punish him severely by getting 2-3 reapers and just annihilating his mineral line while his zealots can't even touch you.

[houser2112]

I hear that the SP storyline progress is saved as part of your single (per key) profile rather than as a save slot. I know you can replay missions to get achievements, but is there a way to play missions on the initially unchosen branch? If not, that seems really crappy that there would be missions that are forever unavailable to you.