Starcraft 2 is no more strategic than Pokemon.

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When I play Pokemon, I have to have an idea of what I’m going to do in order to win. Type coverage can work for you and against you, as attack types frequently coincide with Pokemon types. I have had strategies in Pokemon that were godly and some that were crap and didn’t work. With the exception of Legendary Pokemon, you can’t just grab 6 random Pokemon and roflstomp everything. You need to think, you need to employ tactics and you have to have an overall strategy to win.

Let’s compare this to a game of Starcraft 2, where a battle is often decided in about 10 minutes and a good 3 minutes of that is executing a build order that 99% of the time will not result anything too amazing, but if you have a crap build order and get behind on your macro you automatically lose unless the enemies run their entire army into a wall of Seiged tanks.

Where Starcraft 2 is won and lost is in how fast you click on stuff and how quickly you can produce units.
Where Pokemon is won and lost is in choices that you make, depending on continually changing sets of circumstances and trying to predict a step or two ahead what your opponent is likely to do. A good strategy can result in a super-buffed Pokemon that sweeps an entire team, but that same strategy can be defeated often in one single correct Pokemon move by your opponent.

Pokemon requires strategy, Starcraft 2 requires time-management skills and multi-tasking.

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Is that the difference between strategy and tactics (I’m not sure what the correct terms are)? I never knew where to draw the line but I felt like there are 2 different skillsets, one that I’m ok at (tactics in FPS games, micro management in Men of War style RTS games) and one that I utterly suck at (everything remotely grand strategy or stuff that requires planing far ahead).

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A strategy is something like “beat my enemies by having balanced type coverage” or “pound everything with Alakazam but have Pokemon to switch into in case you hit a hard-counter”. Tactics are the individual things you do while trying to achieve your strategic goal, such as leading off with a bulky Pokemon (like Onyx) with Bind and Roar, so you can switch out enemy Pokemon until you get one that you can one-shot with another Pokemon, then switching out and trying to continue on that way, heavy hitting until you hit a counter. Strategy is almost like a goal, tactic is something you do to work toward that goal.

Strategies are very high-minded and involve thinking ahead, they come from a place of understanding of the enemy and of yourself. Tactics are ways of exploiting the enemies weakness, and depend upon timing and placement. While employing certain tactics can be supremely aggravating to an enemy and they can devastate in a given battle, having an overall strategy that you don’t stray from will win the war.

I saw one battle in Starcraft where strategy was used, but it was on a high-level match between a couple of very highly ranked players. One player looked like he was losing the entire game, because he kept losing big expensive units in the middle. And it was like… he just kept putting them out there. He was done for. Then, at the end, the other player has no more money and no more bases. Why? Because while he was throwing units away in the middle, he was secretly flying squads of attack units around the back side of the enemy bases. His strategy was “divert the enemy attention away from the real attack by putting a honey pot in the middle”. That battle was more exception rather than rule, most Starcraft 2 battles are nothing more than a frantic death race to produce as many units as possible, fraught with errors and a failure to micro-manage every soldier that takes a piss for the entire match.

And even in that match, he could have lost. His enemy didn’t make a couple of very high-power units that could have obliterated his base, which is more luck than anything. Go figure.

That’s funny, I feel the reverse is true for me… I don’t care for the micro-management aspects of game play. It doesn’t interest me in the slightest. For one thing, the ultimate Starcraft 2 player is going to be a piece of Artifical Intelligence that can control each unit individually. As a rule, I try to avoid investing in learning to master things that a computer can already do better. I’m not a computer nor do I desire to be one. Chess is a big sore spot for me, as well… supposedly chess players are strategic masters. Oddly, chess is probably more strategic when played by the average person than by someone who has studied the game for any length of time, as people who play often begin to memorize opening moves, patterns and it is from this they gain their advantage. It’s literally the same battle over and over again for all of time.

I don’t like grunt work in general and that’s all micro is to me, grunt work. No thank you, ma’am.

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That’s my understanding of it. “Strategy” is about what to do long term, “tactics” is about how to execute it short term. StarCraft definitely has a strategic element, but I agree that winning a game often comes down to tactics and implementation rather than strategy.

For instance, things like “stutter-stepping” marines so that they get more shots off. That’s one of many deliberate design decisions in StarCraft that focuses on short-term “how” and clicking ability rather than long-term “what”. I’m nowhere experienced enough to know for sure, but I get the impression from what I have played that there’s far more tactical depth than strategic depth to the game. (Note: I played only the base game of SC2, and the best I did was get into silver league.)

Just to be clear, that doesn’t make it a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t think it should be more strategic, because that wouldn’t necessarily make it a better game. But I do think that “RTS” is often a misnomer (much as I think that “RPG” is often a misnomer, used to mean “upgradable skills” rather than “role playing a character”).

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I logged in, just so I could nominate this as stupidest thread of all time.

there’s no f****** strategy to pokemon go… walk around/swipe screen.

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There definitely is strategy, if you play a gentleman’s game.

Now if you want to win…

Why do Terrans put structures in their doorways?
Have you ever seen a proxy barracks → bunker rush?

Let’s be frank, there are game-ending tactics that can finish everything in under 5 minutes and one of the things that defines higher level players is that they can hang on by a thread and repel these b.s. tactics, some of or most of the time and retaliate. But properly executed cheese is simply effective.

It almost always comes down to one of three things:

  1. Bigger ball of death than your opponent.
  2. Below the belt tactics.
  3. Better multi-tasking.

Sun Tzu you do not need to be.

I can even tell you why Starcraft 2 was designed this way.

Chess is slow… real war is slow… political campaigns are slow… Pokemon battles even, are not super fun to watch, but they are very interesting to wage. Strategy takes place over time, it’s big picture. There’s no big picture to a 10 minute match.

If two high-level pro players play a 27 minute match, one has to wonder how much of that is an homage to Errol Flynn.

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…there’s always something there to remind me… why I’ve been staying away from here.

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On that note, I’m not convinced that there’s any less of it than there is in Pokemon. Sure, there’s more of other things, but is there in fact less strategy?

I do recall finding some tactics frustrating, not so much because they were hard to defeat but because they were so un-fun when used against you. Like the one where a Protoss gets an invisible guy into your base and slowly kills your builders. You know what’s coming, but you can neither do much about it nor hurry it up. You know you’ve lost, the other player knows they’ve won, but you still have to wait out the inevitable before you can start the next game.

That said, the answer to those tactics was in fact execution of a better strategy. Most newbie players blindly pick something and go with it, where really you need to be scouting, identifying your opponent’s strategy early, and countering it. I sucked at that, which is why silver was my best. To my knowledge the so-called “cheese” tactics relied on the person they were being used against not actually looking to see them coming. If you saw and recognised them then they were quite manageable. If you didn’t then you were toast.

As for building structures in your doorway I can’t see how it’s un-gentlemanly. Are you suggesting that it would be more “gentlemanly” to choose not to offer your own troops the best available protection? A commander who willfully lets an enemy massacre their troops when they could have mitigated it isn’t a “gentleman”, they’re a “fool”.

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I guess “beat them before they can muster a response” is a strategy. As valid as any. So, I will say it’s probably just as strategic as Pokemon. I was thinking about this… you don’t know what your opponents Pokemon are until they pull them out, which is sort of like fog of war. You can scan your opponents bases, and you can use Roar to poke at your enemy’s ranks. I don’t know what it is about SC2 that frustrates me so… I think it’s because, the game is so demanding and fast-paced that even though in principle I know how to win… it just feels like so much work. We’re talking about dedicated practice, like if you were trying to learn a musical instrument. Daily, deliberate. Sometimes I get so frustrated with SC2 after I get stomped, even though I know why I lost, I just feel exhausted and it makes me think… a strategy game shouldn’t feel like this. It shouldn’t feel like I just disarmed a nuclear bomb.

So I invariably arrive at this thought… if only it were slower-paced and more focused on strategy, it might be even more fun for me to play. But then you would be able to get good at it… and master it… it’s a conundrum. It’s a love hate thing with me and SC2.

Sun Tzu would do whatever would make him win. I’m a fool.

I just figured that if people would just allow one another even 5 minutes to prepare before sending the first attack party… then maybe you wouldn’t have to build structures in a walkway just to prevent an all-in.

I didn’t know you played SC penguin.

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That’s the thing, I’ve never viewed it as “a strategy game”. It has some strategic elements, but as I mentioned there are loads of design decisions that deliberately move focus away from that.

The deciding factor for me on whether or not it’s a strategy game is where the effort should primarily be put to get good at it. Someone who is good at the actiony bits and sucks at strategy is going to wallop someone who’s good at the strategic bits but sucks at the actiony bits. Though, y’know, as a mostly bronze player I could be way off, there.

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I never knew how to view it, I just stumbled upon Warcraft 3 one day and I was addicted, then I found Starcraft 2 and it was even more addictive. I love the characters and the music and the artwork, the voice recordings, etc. It’s fun to play until it gets so hard that you have to be serious… and I think that’s my real gripe, is that I shouldn’t have to be ‘serious’ about a game, yet SC2 and its makers have decided that the only players that matter are the ‘serious’ ones. You can see it reflected in their number of active users, a lot of people have all gone on to other more “it” games like LoL and DotA.

Personally I have never taken any game 100% seriously, and I feel that to move ahead in SC2 it requires you to stop treating it like fun.

Which I guess means it’s time for me to move on.

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What’s wrong with that? Every product should have a target market, and they addressed that one pretty well. Not taking it seriously never stopped me having fun, and all the infrastructure they had in place made it really easy to find a game when I wanted it.

To be honest, I don’t know of any large online multiplayer game that isn’t predominantly represented by it’s “serious” players anyway. They’re the only ones who care enough to consistently show up and make noise.

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First of all, we usually call the serious players “hardcore” player and the less serious ones “casual” players but it should be noted that these words have many different meanings depending on context. It has become the way of describing extreme players or the polar opposite types of players in game design.

Now, Starcraft 2 is neither a hardcore or casual game. It sits there, somewhere in the middle. That is one of the reasons why it is so appealing. You primarily got the campaign and custom, multiplayer matches for the more casual players. That way, people that doesn’t want intensive matches / games can adjust their experience.

The Starcraft 2 ladder is on the other hand a hardcore feature. Dedicated players that invest a lot of time and practice can show off / test their skill in online matches against other players around the world in a competitive fashion. You are basically entering an arena match when you access the ladder features. Two enters, one leaves :wink:

Now, from a different perspective. Both types of players can approach the game in a serious (hardcore) or unserious (casual) way. A serious player might be involved in the eSport community, have sponsors and he got to win because it affects his real life income. An unserious ladder player like me might start up a match against a skilled for a short moment of fun but… a true, casual player that isn’t serious might start up a ladder match and find the worst experience in his life as he encounters a skilled player that utterly crush him in just a minute or two.

I can continue to spin this explenation forever but yeah. There is:

  • hardcore and casual players

  • hardcore and casual games

  • hardcore and casual game modes

  • hardcore and casual game mechanics

  • hardcore and casual strategies / tactics

  • …

Meaning players looking for a soft or hard, calm or intensive, difficult or easy experience etc…

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Check out “supreme commander forged alliance”, that has a x-minutes no-rush timer that can be set before the match. it traps all players in a bubble around their starting position. Imho it’s a good feature.

Isn’t that the case for all high-skill-ceiling strategy/tactics games? I find shooters to be a lot easier to keep treating as fun, because your core skillset is clicking on other people, and that doesn’t need much planning. Of course there are exceptions. If you play CS:GO competitive and you block a doorway for one second, that you were supposed to rush through, you’ll get screamed and cursed at by your teammates and blamed for your loss ^^.

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Look, I’ll be frank… I like winning. I like some things about Starcraft 2 but others I don’t. I don’t think it’s a right/wrong argument. I’m super disappointed that Starcraft 2 gets into this hardcore vitriolic metagame as soon as you enter the competitive arena but I know some people live for that. I’ll admit I kind of upturn my nose at the idea of sitting around on a computer, practicing a video game. But I’m in the “life is too short” mentality, and I have been ever since I had a near death experience back in 2006. I’m in love with the idea of being highly skilled and being able to outmaneuver and outsmart your opponents in this high-tech space battle, but in reality… that’s not what SC2 really is. It’s a time-management, micro-management game with a really cool aesthetic.

My whole point was that I actually get the same depth of enjoyment from Pokemon, but not the same level of frustration I get from Starcraft 2 when I face an opponent of a sufficient skill level that if I slip up 2-3 times, I die.

At any rate, I digress.

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I feel like every competitive ranked multiplayer game feels a bit pointless, because if the playerbase is big enough you always get matched with people so that you lose roughly half the games you play. I really hate that, because I never feel like I get better at such a game. I much prefer the experience of unranked multiplayer communities on public servers, where I might get rekt when I first start playing the game, but after a while I get to a point where I’m considerably better than when I started out, and I know that because my average place on the scorebord shifts and not just because some rank or number tells me I’ve gotten better, even though I still lose as many matches as before.

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I think I have to agree with the Frog, even though I couldn’t endure SC2 for long enough to really be entitled to an opinion… here goes anyway:

SC2 is all about execution skills. Who clicks fastest shall win. If somebody does it in the better order, he will win even harder. But the game is all about speed it seems.

While true strategy games are less about speed, and more about the COMBINATION of a good strategy, and the right timing. Remember, timing does not mean “bum rush as soon as possible”… because in real life that “tactic” will most probably fail without the right preparation.

I found it puzzling as to why some to my eyes stupid design decision made it to the final game in SC2… like having to activate skills/special attacks per unit, instead of having the option to bundle units and activate the special for the whole formation.
Seems like this was a decision to make the game more “skill based” and less strategic. To make sure the game looks like insane action during intense e-sport matches instead of a strategic snoozefest (like chess sometimes is, if there is not a tight timer involved).

I cannot say I liked the game besides those points (the single player campaign had an appllingly stupid story. Really, I have to this day never seen a Blizzard game which had a story for grownups and not 12 year olds, but the SC2 story takes the cake for cheesiness for all the Blizzard games I have played to date)…
But they certainly were the final nail in the coffin. If I want twitch gameplay I fire up CoD, or let the mad-skillorz teabag me in battlefield. If I fire up a game with the “RTS” label on the box, I expect something different.

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Playing COD makes me feel like twitch skills are worth less there than in other shooters, because the p2p setup makes for crazy desync between players. When I run down a straight corridor and at the end of it someone comes around the corner, I’m dead before he even was on my screen, if it’s a reasonably competent player. In CS:GO, Insurgency, Day of Infamy, there is much less desync and there’s a good chance I’d have gotten that kill instead. I got the COD BO3 multiplayer starter pack in the humble monthly bundle a while ago and deinstalled it after a few days because it’s a night and day difference to all the shooters using dedicated servers, and I can’t deal with that. I played MW3 1vs1 with a friend for a while, and we found out that the one who hosted the session would win almost all close range knife-fights. In that sense it’s more of a ping based shooter than a skill based shooter.

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^^^^^^^^^^^

This is why infinite runners and match-3 games are popular. They are fun, fair, challenging without you feeling the need to seek group therapy after playing them.

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@Martin_H in cs:go being twitchy won’t get you anything either, it’s about knowing the maps, routes, cross hair placement, and clearing all your angles. Also peakers advantage exists in all online shooters.

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