Evolving StarCraft meta

I don't claim to be a pro gamer or anything (cuz I'm not), but I do like the game of StarCraft.  It seems like only the pros can play super greedy - why, because their micro is fantastic?  That would make sense only if there were an exceedingly high threshold for micro being useful.

Best comment on the internet today

as found on r/starcraft

By the way, I'm not at all surprised that he got constantly supply-blocked. All a zerg has to do to deal with supply-block is go 1svvvv, problem solved. No clicking, no looking back at the base, done. I recently switched from zerg to protoss (nowhere near GM, thanks for asking), and found supply-blocks to be far and away my biggest problem.

A Game of Drones

HotS Plot

So I wanna see if I got this straight.

Amon, the Dark Voice, was revived because Raynor de-infested Kerrigan because Zeratul told him to do it because otherwise Amon would wipe out all life in the Universe.

Wiping out all life in the Universe while you're dead is quite a feat.

What is dead may never die.

HotS campaign II

So I finished the campaign. Please remember in my discussion below that I am not actually very good at the game; I understand the theory, but have a hard time putting it into practice.

Grumbles: no Nydus worm. Seriously, spamming Nydus worms late-game makes things more epic. Also you have to choose between Brood Lords and Vipers; you can't have both. The last level's a bitch and a half, but still a cake walk compared to Wings of Liberty's final level. So many levels force you to get at least one macro Hatch because there just aren't enough expansions.  Final cutscene OH LOOK I CAN FLY NOW followed by most of the lines from the trailer but strung together differently so as to change the entire meaning. Oh and hero units hotkeyed to F3 screws with my camera assignments, because I don't go for that Shift-F4 nonsense.

Cheers: Sarah Kerrigan is far and away my favorite video-game sociopath. Yes that's a hideously narrow category, but come on. Running around with her and wrecking shit is infinitely more fun than the turtle-fest that pretty much every WoL mission turned into. Even the gimmicky missions were generally more fun; spreading Creep as fast as you can > outrunning the world's slowest supernova. The music is f*cking awesome. Especially the fact that some of it shows up in multiplayer and just brings back memories.

Stupid mistakes I made: in the penultimate level you have to control two different groups fighting their way down two different maps, more or less. I hotkeyed the second group to 5 (because all my hatches are hotkeyed to 1, my main army to 2, and my heroes to 3 and 4). Muscle memory screwed me and sent my 2 army into a death zone more than once. Also I took the Deep Burrow evolution for the Swarm Hosts, meaning I could teleport them across the map to anywhere that had creep, which is a great idea for defense... and then neglected to use them at all on the final mission, when my jerk enemies kept harassing the only expansion I could grab in the first 20 minutes.

Most useful Kerrigan ability: Oh God there are so many to choose from. So you know what? I'm not going to name just one. Her dash attack grants a passive bonus to her movement speed, allowing her to stay near the front lines, and Spawn Banelings (when you have Splitter and Regenerative Acid) makes clusters of enemies that much easier. Hell, if you're at a lull, you can spawn Banes and have them go scout for you. No skin off your nose! Apocalypse + Broodlings is also absurdly fun.

And that in a nutshell is why this expansion wins. It was so much fun.

Blizzard, I salute you.

HotS II: trying to use Swarm Hosts

So last time I whined a lot about the Swarm Host and how it was virtually useless. As usual, I just wasn't using it right. 

To be sure, having three micro-intensive units (Swarm Hosts, Infestors and Vipers) is above my relatively useless skill level (check out this Terran wall! Am I gonna build Banelings or Roaches?  Nope!). But I've found two uses for these guys, one of which is less risk-intensive than a similar strategy I tried using in Brood War with Lurkers. 

Basically, you bury them on high ground near (but - and I can't stress this enough - not in) the enemy attack lane, and rally the Locusts to the far side of the attack lane.  The closer they are to the enemy base, the more warning you'll have that the army is on the way and the more easily you'll be able to use them for base harassment once that army is dealt with.  On the other hand, the closer they are to your base (or at least your army), the easier time you'll have saving them in the event that the other player has detection (and he better have detection - you're zerg) and decides to hunt down your Swarm Hosts. 

There was another game on Crossfire where I used them to harass an enemy's third while I went after his natural.  Since his army turned around as soon as I started attacking the natural, the Hosts were able to wipe out his third and then take that upper corridor towards his main, tear down those destructible rocks, and swarm in from the side.

One thing that HotS has definitely done to my Zerg build is force me to tech to a Hive as fast as possible, because my favorite new unit is hands-down the Viper. "Oh, you just blew 400/300 on a nice shiny Battlecruiser that you're keeping on the edge of the battlefield and trying to repair with SCVs on the high ground? Here, lemme just drag that baby over into the middle of my Hydralisk swarm." "Oh, you went through the trouble of properly micro-ing your units so your Siege Tanks were in the back of the line?  Yoink!"  "Hey nice Thor. Let me drag you away from my Ultralisks and into the middle of my Zerglings."  "Oh, I wasn't paying the macro any attention whatsoever, got curbstomped, and now all I've got to defend my base are a bunch of Speedlings and a Viper?  Blinding Cloud."  Go ahead and ask me if I'm even using Infestors any more. 

Starcraft HotS beta

Okay, you might have noticed the lack of a GoldenEye review yesterday. This wasn't a case of me being lazy all day, honest. It was a case of me spending the morning in the emergency room and then being lazy in the afternoon.

Apparently I'm fine, thank you very much.

Anyway I have about half an hour left in the movie to actually review, as well as screencaps to stick in... and I'm abusing my aunt's hospitality while my GoldenEye DVD sits back at my place. So I'm going to talk about HotS now, and maybe have the review up tonight.

First of all, I am by no means a professional player. Hell, the last level of the campaign on Normal gave me conniptions (and I recently re-played the campaign and tried to brute-force my way through the last level with nothing but Banshees... while playing at the "faster" speed. Whoops).  Secondly, I keep flipping back and forth between protoss and zerg, mainly because I only know one way to win as terran (mass Vikings and Banshees) and that gets old fast. 

So let's just jump in and complain about all the new units.

Terran

First off, the Medivac gets a speed boost so as to... give terran an advantage in combat drops, I guess. Now, this kind of makes sense because the zerg can Nydus and the protoss can warp. But both of those strategies involve buildings, and buildings are easy enough to kill if you, you know, pay attention. I always thought that the Nydus Worm and Warp Gate technologies were there to counter the terran ability to move their buildings and thus have less risky proxies.  (Of course, Warp Gate is basically what protoss get now instead of Recall from the first game, which was probably OP if I ever learned how to play the first game... I think the only hotkey I ever used in StarCraft was "A" for attack.)  Anyway, the devs said that it was hard coming up with new stuff for terran because they already have the coolest toys, soooo...

The Reaper is almost an entirely different monster now. They can still go up and down cliffs, but there's no speed boost upgrade and no anti-building grenades. And they regenerate health "outside of combat" which actually means "so long as they haven't been shot in the last five seconds." And they don't require a tech lab.  So basically now they're there for worker harassment as opposed to demolition, which makes the Hellions kind of pointless...

The Hellion can now transform into a Hellbat which does short-range splash damage. Good for blocking ramps, and guarding Siege Tanks and generally forcing your opponent to go air.

F*cking OP Hell God King Emperor Death N00bpwner Widow Mines are another means of forcing your opponent to immediately go air. Which is funny because as you can see, terran gets absolutely nothing to counter Mass Muta.  Except for F*cking OP Hell God King Emperor Death N00bpwner Widow Mines. For the price of a Baneling, terran gets a mine that homes, does splash damage, can target air units, and oh yeah doesn't freaking die once exploded. Oh, and you can unbury then and rebury them at will. Enemy players will need detectors and long-range units by the truckload. Why didn't terran just get the Perdition Flamethrowers from the WoL campaign? Heck, you could let them target air units and they still wouldn't be OP because they can't sodding move around the map. 

Protoss

Protoss now gets a Mothership Core, which functions exactly the same as a Mothership except is moves faster and doesn't cloak friendlies. The Recall ability now sucks (instead of Recalling all the units in a given area to where the Mothership is, it  takes the Mothership and all nearby units back to a Nexus), and instead of Vortex you now have Time Warp. The thing's available as soon as you have a Cyber, so you could take a map like Scrap Station, fly the Core over to the enemy base as soon as possible, and drop a Time Warp in the enemy mineral line. Boom you're ahead. Oh, and then it can stick a Cannon on your Nexus for a bit. So now Toss can Planetary Nexus rush.

The Oracle is basically gets a variation of the Parasite ability from the first game. It can also function as a detector or give itself a weak laser for a while. Haven't really figured out how to make it useful yet. Heck, the mineral disruption is really the only useful trick I've learned for the Mothership Core so far. However...

The Tempest is a flying siege tank.  That can target air units as well as ground units. So now Toss have two of the longest-ranged units in the game. Huzzah.

Zerg

Let's start with the good because there's a lot of ugly. First off, you can research Burrow and the Overlord speed upgrade without a Lair. Second, the Hydralisk speed upgrade from the first game is finally back.

Third, they have an awesome new caster called the Viper, which goes a long way towards countering enemy Siege Tanks and Colossi because it can either blind those units so they can't attack long-range, or drag those units right into the middle of the zergling swarm. Oh, and the Viper flies. So zerg have a flying caster again.

Which is a good thing because the Infestor's Fungal Growth ability got nerfed to hell. I probably shouldn't be complaining that much, because I only just learned how to use it effectively when I switched to HotS, but come on, I had only just learned how to use it effectively and then it got nerfed.

The zerg also have a unit called the Swarm Host which is effing useless because any competent enemy will have detectors in his army. The purpose is to give the zerg a siege unit, but, uh, we already have one. It's called the Brood Lord.

The Citadel

is going to be the subject and setting of the final Mass Effect DLC. Pretty much everybody is going to be in it. Yes, including Zaeed. But probably not Thane. (And thus probably not Mordin either.) It's going to be expensive, but also about as big as Lair of the Shadow Broker.

And it drops basically a year to the day after Mass Effect 3 did, and a year minus one week before everybody started hating on the ending. ...and about a week before StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, so I have to ask, what is it with sci-fi video games and March?

The other thing, of course, is figuring out when the right time is, story-wise, for this DLC, which I won't be able to do until I've played it obviously, but I still like to wonder...

With Mass Effect 1, I only have Bring Down the Sky (and I've heard Pinnacle Station is awful, so...), and really I don't have a set time that I like to play that one, although I do have some criteria...

• Before Virmire. It doesn't make sense for Shepard to go off to save one colony when the entire galaxy is at stake.
• After the Heart of Darkness "Father Kyle" mission. Usually after Feros as well.
• If Shepard is a Colonist, either before or after the encounter with the escaped slave back on the Citadel, depending on whether or not Shepard's going to sacrifice the colonists to kill Balak. (See, once I know the variations on the story, I like to mold it as much as I can.  This is why the series doesn't feel stale yet.)

In Mass Effect 2, I tend to do Zaeed's and Kasumi's missions early on, because my understanding is that TIM sets up the trap on Horizon because you're taking too long dicking around the galaxy.  Alternatively, I'll do Kasumi's mission before Horizon, and then Zaeed's and Garrus's back-to-back because they're thematically similar. Despite the fact that Shadow Broker is kind of written as a post-game mission, I like to do it beforehand, usually around, again, the time of Garrus's loyalty mission. Overlord has to be done before the Derelict Reaper mission for it to make any sense, and if you can time it right and do it right before the Collector Ship mission (so you have even more incentive to distrust Cerberus), more power to you. Arrival is always dead last, after the rest of the game, unless a) I'm rushing through to see how one change I made in 1 affects the story in 3, or b) I want to see the holographic Collector General for some reason. Firewalker and Normandy Grave Site are dead to me.

As for Mass Effect 3, I like doing From Ashes near the beginning, to give Mordin time to work on his genophage cure. Also to get Javik and not miss out on too many of his lines (getting him after the salarian homeworld mission means missing out on the line about a certain Prothean delicacy... oh well. It also preserves the integrity of giving the Atlas its own cutscene on Sur'Kesh but not on Eden Prime).  I really like to spread Leviathan way the hell out over the entire game, because the tone is just a tad schizo. At the beginning of the game you've still got the time to get bogged down in Dr. Bryson's hobby, which doesn't seem to work near the end of the game.  Near the end of the game there's more urgency, and it's more reasonable to accept Anne's willingness to get herself mind-raped to find Leviathan. Don't get me wrong, I love that scene, but she seems a tad too eager to volunteer. Omega is, if nothing else, a great diversion from the tedious Act 2.

Now, knowing nothing else about Citadel, I'm going to go ahead and play it... hrm. My first instinct was to play it during Shepard's trip to the Citadel at the beginning of Act 3, since that's the last time he has to go there... but there have been hints that not doing it right before the point of no return means that a certain character won't show up because their fate hasn't been determined yet.

We'll see.