quote:You know, I'm not sure which is worse. I mean, 21st Century Skills through Starcraft at least sounds like there's some potential to reach people who won't be reached otherwise, but Origami? As a 3000 level class? Seriously?
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Assuming you acknowledge that art can be taught at that level, period, I do not see why Origami couldn't.
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Okay, followup questions: are there any upgrades you'd consider a must-have before going to Char?
In particular, in any circumstances are Spectres (or Ghosts, for that matter) useful in the final missions? And am I correct that upgrading Vikings is more useful than missle turrets? And are mercenaries other than the Battle Cruiser relevant?
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I barely survived the final battle, so I don't have much good advice. Psi disrupters seemed pretty useful, given lots of Zerg coming through a few choke points.
Posts: 3275 | Registered: May 2007
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Unfortunately I took the Mind Control one. I wasn't sure which was better overal but it seemed cooler at the time. By now I'd have to reply a lot of missions to switch that.
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Make sure to destroy the nidus worms, if you're playing the version where you took out the air! The nidus units are stronger, and your best bet is to use a bunch of banshees to destroy every nidus network every time they appear.
Suddenly my army was adaquete, when it wasn't the previous time I tried it... Also? I was on hard, if that matters.
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I took out air in the second to last mission.
In the final mission, I had 10-14 banshees just for nidus worms, which I made top priority.
Protecting the base was easy, once you take out the worms early. About 10 seige tanks on high ground, 20-30 mixed marines, marauder and helliins to go wherever the heaviest push is, and about 10-20 of the flame turrets at each choke.
The flame turrets were the real key. They do a number on zerglngs, don't use up supply, and are easy to repair between waves.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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Finished it this afternoon. Had to switch down to Normal mode though. I'm not sure I can beat it on Hard without getting the Psi Disruptor, which requires me to play through half of the campaign again.
Spoilers:
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I actually liked the twist with the Overmind. Seems like most people didn't.
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I'm still stuck 2/3 of the way through the last mission on hard. I just can't keep my banshees alive, even with science vessel support.
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(Edit: Basically, the gameplay of the original is pretty similar to the gameplay of StarCraft II. So assuming you like the gameplay and storyline of StarCraft II, you should get something out of the original).
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I haven't played the original. I know that makes the question odd. I guess I meant "in this day and age, is a 12 years old pc game worth playing?"
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I thought my answer was pretty clear. Assuming you've played and enjoyed StarCraft II, you should be able to play and enjoy StarCraft 1.
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It's hard to say. Starcraft is an old game, and I'm not sure if you care about the story, or the game play, etc.
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lol. Okay, well, then I'd say play the original if:
1) you like RTS games in general 2) You've played at least one other really old game that you enjoyed despite the aged graphics, so you know from experience that it's not a dealbreaker for you 3) you care about story (if not, you might as well just get StarCraft II instead since the multiplayer gameplay is mostly the same)
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If you enjoyed Starcraft, you should enjoy Starcraft II, at least I haven't heard anybody who played the original say they dislike the sequel. But I do resent the fact the bumped the price up $10.
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I don't resent it since after all, this game is easily as big as any other comparable RTS game in its SP campaign.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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If Blizzard hadn't broken it up into three games, they would have made something else instead, which I would have bought anyway.
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: I resent them breaking it into 3 games. one for each race.
That doesn't bother me too much as they felt they had too much story to shove into one game. But one does have to wonder how the multiplayer is going to change over the course of three games.
If the next two campaigns are just as awesome and story continues to be interesting that's OK to me.
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quote:That doesn't bother me too much as they felt they had too much story to shove into one game.
I think the overall dilemma here is kinda interesting. I absolutely think the Terrans deserved, mechanically, to take up a whole game. Every mission explored a the potential of a unique unit and introduced an interesting gimmick of gameplay, many of which were unique to the Terrans. From a gameplay standpoint, shortening it to make room for Zerg and Protoss campaigns wouldn't have given us as much room to explore the armory, research or mercenaries.
From a story standpoint, I think things were stretched thin in places. This isn't because there wasn't enough story to support 29 missions. I just think they didn't do as good a job writing all that story. The Matt Horner missions are great. The sequence with Matt's "wife" was funny and interesting, even though it didn't end up meaning anything in the long run. I'd have liked to see more stuff like that in the side campaigns: missions that had interesting characters that we wanted to see, not for some future payoff, but because they were interesting on their own terms at the time.
I also think Char was not long enough. In no way should be able to just roll into Char and take it over in 3 missions, no matter how cool your artifact is. I think Char needed around 5 missions to really feel as dramatic and hopeless as it was supposed to be. Those two extra missions could also have been used to provide some meaning to your choices at the end of the Tosh and Ariel storylines. (Have a mission where it matters whether you are using Ghosts or Spectres, with Tosh as a hero unit to help you out if you chose him, and have a mission where the Zerg are infesting you unless you got Hanson's cure).
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I do agree that there should have been more story for 29 missions. Gameplay and mechanics, the game felt very full. Story not as much. Very well put.
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The thing I noted is that the story seems like it was fleshed out by bookwriters, but the Dramatic Turns ended up having to be rushed through in cinematic form and came off underwhelming.
The Dramatic Turn at the end was so hackneyed in its execution, as a result, that I laughed.
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quote:The thing I noted is that the story seems like it was fleshed out by bookwriters, but the Dramatic Turns ended up having to be rushed through in cinematic form and came off underwhelming.
Definitely. Raynor's inspiring speech just before All In came when this new alliance of Dominion and Rebel troops had been working together for all of 2 hours. Kerrigan's return to human form was rather meaningless because we hadn't actually seen Kerrigan really interact with Raynor in an interesting way. They went out of their way to showcase Kerrigan's original "last stand", which was great for people who hadn't seen it. But it's only half of what the game needed to remind us of.
The more I think about it the more I'm pissed that there wasn't those two extra missions (with the specific gimmicks I described). A ghost-centric mission and an infestation-centric mission would have been great places for Raynor and Kerrigan to interact a bit, developing the tension. As well as make the final battle feel all the more hopeless and Raynor's speech more meaningful.
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quote:Kerrigan's return to human form was rather meaningless because we hadn't actually seen Kerrigan really interact with Raynor in an interesting way.
Kerrigan didn't interact in a meaningful way, period. She would just stress mockingly how much you were not going to win and how it was pointless to try to not lose, ha ha. Followed by: that was cute, but it merely annoyed me and now for sure it is pointless to try to not lose and/or reach the macguffin piece first, ha ha.
Other highlights:
Raynor: Tell me why I shouldn't kill you now!
Prince Anime: Because I'm just so .. so handsome. *tosses rose*
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That is something that bugs me a LOT in Blizzard games - their casual misuse of words. Often number words. Zeratul did not serve Raszagal for countless millennia (he's only 700 years old). Kerrigan didn't kill billions of people (as far as I can tell she is only particularly responsible for the deaths of the UED, who were hardly innocent.) And yeah, I think "treachery" gets thrown around alittle more often than it should.
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I was kinda annoyed that Kerrigan was thrown into our faces at the end so suddenly. But then what exactly the zerg were doing the entire time is completely lacking in explanation. I assume we are going to find out Kerrigan did something *really* bad before Raynor saved her.
----
Raymond: Those are all very valid points. Maybe you should let Blizzard know that.
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: Did you play Brood War? Kerrigan did some pretty bad things....
No I meant since the events of Brood War and SCII. In SCII it sounded like she wasn't really doing anything, just hanging out talking about everybody's inevitable defeat, looking for artifacts, but getting none of them, and then suddenly attacking.
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Ah. Well she WAS laying waste to entire planets while she searched for said artifacts. So it's not like she wasn't doing anything bad at all.
Oooh, know what would have helped cement it though? Have a cinematic where she DOES secure an artifact (totally destroying all kinds of civillians in the process). Then, one of the missions on Char (the ghost-centric one, probably) is to steal it back.
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So today I learned that if you're in a team game, and your partner(s) leave right after the game starts, you have not lost.
In fact, your chances of winning have greatly increased. I think Blizzard will actually have to change how they deal with it, because at this point it would be ridiculously easy to exploit.
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Are you talking about how his workers and buildings default to you, to continue gathering and producing as you see fit? I don't know, that doesn't seem like a very easy win to me if the other team is of any quality.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Are you talking about how his workers and buildings default to you, to continue gathering and producing as you see fit? I don't know, that doesn't seem like a very easy win to me if the other team is of any quality.
In the game it happened to me, I had four barracks, with attachments, all queued with units four minutes into the game. There's a reason they don't let you trade resources early in the game.
The team I played against wasn't all that great, and really could have coordinated better. But on the flipside, I'm not exactly the best myself.
Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Juxtapose: So today I learned that if you're in a team game, and your partner(s) leave right after the game starts, you have not lost.
In fact, your chances of winning have greatly increased. I think Blizzard will actually have to change how they deal with it, because at this point it would be ridiculously easy to exploit.
It doesn't seem to be overwhelmingly game breaking. A friend and I tried to exploit it, but we didn't end up getting the benefit we had hoped. He set his workers to start harvesting, and immediately intentionally quit the game, leaving me, as zerg, his initial 50 resources plus his income from his six workers. I had saved my initial 50 resources as well so that I only needed to mine 100 resources to put down a spawning pool, which I did, and as soon as the pool completed queued a queen and six lings, which went after one of our opponents. Basically allowing me to "12-pool" faster than anyone could possibly 6-pool on their own. However our opponents didn't seem too shabby; the toss player I attacked was attempting, badly, to hold off the attack with his workers when his ally's zerglings came to his rescue. I think his ally had been 7-pooling, perhaps after he saw one of us drop and maybe smartly decided he should eliminate the dropped player as soon as possible.
The critical thing then was that we were both producing zerglings roughly at the same speed, because the limiting factor was the larvae. I had a queen and he probably took longer to get a queen up, but his ally was able to recover and eventually roll over my dropped ally's base, and the two of them together took me out.
I did make several mistakes which I realized both during that game and when watching the replay (for instance, at one point I lost track of 4 zerglings that just sat around for a minute not participating in any of the action ) but I'm convinced that even if I were to work on that, it's no more game-breaking than any other cheese/all-in strat in a 2on2.
(It does seem like it would have been more effective if I was protoss and could have just put up several gateways much more quickly, rather than being limited by my larvae.)
Posts: 142 | Registered: Apr 2005
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I think, as you do, that Zerg are more limited in this strategy than Terran/Protoss, because of the larvae issue. Also, my game was a 3v3, so it was even faster.
If someone genuinely good were to actually practice this kind of play, I'm convinced it would be beastly.
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Honestly... how do you do it? I know I'm not nearly that good. I'm a pretty good silver -pretty high up on my ladder, at least- but it seems like there's a gap I haven't been able to overcome.
Posts: 1577 | Registered: Sep 2005
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As it is, I've been watching myself lose skill. Be defeated even by things I knew shouldn't beat me.
I've played more and more clumsily. It's weird. Ahh, well. I should take more time off of it. No need to focus on this game... the time commitment to really become good will probably be too much anyway.
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Assuming you've already watched the day9 video I hate but which will make you better at starcraft, the ever-elusive goal is being able to manage the scores of cognitive demands that starcraft throws at you. You lose by having your focus broken more than you lose due to mechanics. Like, you have to be able to never have your production interrupted by constant fighting and never have your fighting interrupted by production and resource management. ANY time you look at your resources and see you have more than 600 minerals, you're failing. ANY time you look at your production and see gas dropped off, you're failing. Any time you see yourself supply capped, there better be a reason you like, or you're failing. The best way to start this procedure is to encode specific, pre-programmed routines by drilling yourself.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I've been completely distracted by SC2's newish DoTA map. I play almost exclusively as the stalker, being able to just appear at almost any point in the map when I want to every 30 seconds or so is ridiculously convenient. I also get the 40% faster attack speed upgrade, and combined with multishot I gain exp and crystals at a very good clip. Once I hit about level 10, I start teleporting behind other players right as they are about to consider running back to their pool, and finish them off. They start clustering together, and I go back to creeping until they start going off on their own again.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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twinky: I'm right there with you. If you'd like, we could always play a few games! Team up or "spar" or something.
BlackBlade: What DoTA style map on SC2? Where do I find this?!
Samp: I finally (came close to) finishing the Day9 video. The emphasis on fundamentals was really helpful. And now I finally see just HOW useful hotkeys can be. And how to use them more efficiently.
I'm still not great at them, and sometimes I forget to build when I'm away. But I forget less. I keep things going while away much more often than before. And I make a point of pressing the keys to create units. And not queuing up. I feel silly about how much keeping my credits open helps me speed up my game.
It really helped! Though the guy is kinda annoying...
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