273 replies to this topic

[Sneaky Snake]

Frost, on 25 April 2012 - 01:45 AM, said:

Discovered Left 2 Die. FUUUUNNNN stuff! I gotta play that with some of you guys. Got overrun four times my first time out on normal, then managed to come up with a good defensive plan. Beat it on normal solo on the 5th try, then teamed up with a random guy online and beat hard.

Gotta say though, a lot of the SC community are asswagons. Higher jerk to normal person ratio than Xbox Live, and that's saying something. For example, played L2D with one jackass who was criticizing my playing nonstop through the entire. frakking. game. Funny, at the end of it, he had no minerals left and was just holding his defenses. My base was an impenetrable block and I had a 60-man army fielded running over the infested areas. I should have started in with the "where are your minerals? Where is your army? Why aren't you attacking? Why aren't you building faster? Oh, you're poor and have nothing? All your guys died? Sucks to be you! Maybe if you'd spent the time you wasted typing barbs on fighting the enemy, you wouldn't be sitting there watching me beat it for you."

Gads.

BTW, SC character name is Frost, code is 1468.

customs are way more bad mannered then ladder games. I find the community on the whole is usually pretty good.

[badger2d]

Fun to read about somebody enjoying SC2 for the first time! The campaign was a blast. I played most of the levels several times over collecting achievements, which I care not a whit about for their own sake, but the levels were varied and just plain fun, and a good many of the achievements do a good job of suggesting a way to play the level in a different-but-also-fun way than you did the first time through.

I am Symphony 364 on b.net. I love the competitive multiplayer, mostly play 1v1. It has a steep learning curve, but once you get your feet solidly on the ground, I couldn't have put how much fun it is and why any better than Snake did on the previous page. But I'm also down to kick it in fun custom games!

[Frost]

Bleh, guess I finally found a game where I suck irredeemably. Tried League play tonight. 2 wins, 8 losses. Can't even beat bronze players. Thought I was off to a good start, completely schooled the first guy I played against, and then got r-a-p-e-d for 3 hours nonstop after that. Building like freaking crazy and it seems like they still have infinite money and units. Finally get enough to overwhelm their ground, and hey, they found the money for 8 mutalisks in the middle of that and there go my workers. And then out pop infinite more units from their barracks and overwhelm my forces faster than I can reinforce them. God.

Probably do a lot better if I could play at a somewhat sane speed, but all games being on Faster is just too freaking fast if you don't know the game like the back of your hand, which I don't.

Guess I should just stick with coop and campaign; don't have the time to dedicate to learning the game to the degree I probably need to to have a chance in League play.

[Eric5h5]

Oooh...you're gettin' old.    Downhill all the way from now on.  I don't wanna be on your team anymore.

--Eric

[Frost]

Bite your tongue! Put the weapon in my hand and we'll see how "old" I am; within 3 points of maximum skill rating for a year and a half on Halo, sucka!

Probably just need more practice and need to learn how sides other than Terrans work well. I could and still can usually rock people's worlds on C&C Generals, but then I also know that game and its three sides inside and out about as well as you possibly can.

[Sneaky Snake]

Ya SC2 takes a lot of practice to master. I'm bouncing between gold and platinum league right now. It's all about macroing (continuously expanding while building a bigger and bigger army, and more and more production buildings behind that army). Whoever macro's best will win 95% of games.

Keep at it though. I lost a popsnizzle ton of games when I first started. I went and read a lot about strategy, and some good build orders, and now I'm decent.

Just a word of advice: terran is the hardest race to play in lower leagues. In professional play all 3 teams are quite balanced, but in lower leagues terran gets wrecked by certain units like high templer with psi storm, A nice zerg ball of muta, ling, baneling, etc.

Protoss and zerg require a lot less army micro to win games. Zerg can just throw units at you, and not really care at all what happens, because as long as he has a good economy, he can makes units faster then you can kill them. And then protoss and the infamous death ball: 5ish sentries, a few colossus, and then a lot of stalkers/zealots. Unless your good with ghosts, or the toss guy sucks, your losing that fight. And then there's my personal favourite: high templer. Protoss can just throw an army at you, and while your distracted, he gets a few high templer in there and psi storms everything to popsnizzle. Unless you retreat, or emp with your ghosts, he wins.

Like I said earlier, all the 3 teams are balanced at the professional level, but certain teams are much better at the lower levels, because players simply do not have the macro/micro skills to beat certain unit combo's.

IMO Protoss is the easiest race to get wins with early on. Terran is a decent all around race, and zerg is probably the hardest to learn, but once you learn it, zerg dominates lower levels.

Everyone has their strengths though. I can beat terran 90% of the time, zerg probably 80% of the time, but against a protoss I probably have a 10% win ratio. My buddy however, whose in the same league, can beat protoss every time, but he loses to terran everytime. You'll find your strengths pretty quick.

[Frost]

Heh, well that's not good news for me. Terran's the only side I can win with.

Tried some Zerg for a bit and that's where I think the majority of my losses came from. Just can't do them. Could probably get good with Protoss if I tried though.

[Wumpus]

I stick to Campaign (on Hard or above) coop and the super fun custom maps. I think I sunk more time into custom games (including Left 2 Die) than I did anything else. There's a number of excellent tower defense games, as well as a really cool squad based survival/horror map. Forget the exact names but I sunk countless hours into both.

[Frost]

LOL

Got my first Zerg win. Rushed a pile of zerglings into his natural expansion and he got psychoed out and did a bum rush, lost some marines, then quit. Guess he figured I had way more forces than I did and he was bottled in, which actually couldn't be further from the truth, as I mucked up my early game and had little else to throw his way at that time.

Maybe that's what I need to do, get some practice in by playing earlier in the evening when the real bronze players are out and not the derankers portrait farming (which I just learned about via the forums; certainly makes more sense for why some of the supposedly bottom of the barrel players were playing so ridiculously well last night).

EDIT: And now just proceeded to get a 3 win streak. Aside from falling prey to a zergling rush and being outplayed by a Protoss with a billion units just prior to that, I've been stomping people, and I'm not playing appreciably better than last night at all. I think the people on the forums are right, the smurfers who are actually platinum+ and deranked for portraits are out late at night, so just play during the day/evening. New rule: 11 PM local time hits, I stop for the night.

BTW, been playing 1v1 so far only. Figure it's the best trial by fire rather than relying on allies, though it's pretty stressful so I dunno how much more I'll subject myself to before teaming up with other people. My win rate is substantially higher with Terrans than anybody else though; I have 8 wins so far. Two Zerg wins, one due to the above, one due to a successful zergling rush on a Protoss just now, every game I'm Protoss I've lost, and I've only lost two games as the Terrans. Unless I'm slow on the build or my opponent is really good, rushing to Marines/Marauders backed up by 3-4 Siege tanks for supporting fire has been crashing through opponents' lines and then defenses like a hot knife through butter even when they've built a lot more units than I have; siege splash damage just melts their masses of units away. Think I'll keep playing around with the races a few more games, but then I'll just go all Terran from then on out and develop my skills with them. My C&C strategies seem to translate somewhat well to Terran play, while Protoss and Zerg are totally alien (pun, I know).

[Sneaky Snake]

Just make sure whatever race you pick, that it's the one you want, cuz your kinda stuck with it. Obviously you can learn a new race later on. But if your plat level terran, your probably gold level at best with the other races. So you'll lose a lot of games if you switch races later on, until they bump you down a league. I'm in the process of switching to toss. Which I am gold level at. However my account is platinum cuz of my terran  

Bronze league is by far the league with the most variance in skill level. You have everyone from the uber noobs to the masters level farmers. Once you hit silver and up it's very balanced. They try to always have your win rate around 50%, so once your win rate starts getting into the 60-70ish range you'll be bumped up a league soon.

1v1 are incredibly stressful. It's like that epic 1v1 battle rifle duel in halo that you have with a guy. But instead of lasting 5 seconds, it lasts 10-20 minutes. You gotta outthink your opponent, while constantly keeping your kb/m hands busy producing units, as well as expanding your economy, scouting, and harassing your opponent. I've played every genre of game, and RTS online is by far the most intense and stressful, but also the most rewarding. Only other genre that comes close is actionRTS/MOBA (DOTA, League of Legends, etc.). That's also the reason why I think SC has taken off as an eSport compared to pretty much every other game. It's incredibly competitive, fun to watch, and very balanced so the best players do in fact win games, rather then luck playing a role.

[Frost]

Heh. Someone else tried that same mindgame tactic by spreading their forces around my base and making me feel surrounded. Figured they were trying the same tactic I had done in the post above, so I just ignored it and killed whatever came up my ramp, then dropped the supply depots and poured Marines/Marauders/Siege Tanks out. Yep, he was bluffing. Crashed through his spread out units with minimal losses and then he immediately quit. WTF? Stayed in the game and went to his base and he had gone all in trying to cow me into turtling. He had nothing in between his drones and the units trying to bottle me into my base.

Good stuff.

I'm definitely gonna stick to the 11 PM rule. I thought I was terrible at this, but I think the late night masters level farmer thing was what was wrecking me up so terribly last night. Played earlier in the day and had 2 losses, 5 wins.

Sneaky Snake, on 23 May 2012 - 09:53 PM, said:

1v1 are incredibly stressful. It's like that epic 1v1 battle rifle duel in halo that you have with a guy. But instead of lasting 5 seconds, it lasts 10-20 minutes.

I wouldn't know about that; 1v1 duels in Halo usually means 80% odds I win. 90% if it's PC Halo and I have a mouse.

I know what you mean though. A couple of the wins I actually felt more or less evenly matched skillwise against my opponent, and trouncing him in the field was pretty great. Again, I doubt I'll ever have the time to get really good at this like I was at Generals, but as long as I'm not losing 5 games for every win like last night I don't mind mucking around in the lower leagues every so often.

[Frost]

Okay, yeah, there are definitely derankers infesting bronze. I got hammered by a guy who was AMAZING with Protoss my first game tonight, then went on to win 3 in a row. I was playing random, and I won with Zerg, then Protoss, then Terran back to back. That was gratifying.

My third win, which I just played, I was against the #4 ranked guy in the entire Bronze league. He was so bad I literally toyed with him to get achievements. There is no way in hell these significantly lower ranked but outright amazing players are worse than him. I need to get up to silver so I can get away from the smurfers.

The best game I have played so far was my second win though. Protoss vs Protoss, and my first ever Protoss win. EXTREMELY close. He almost pulled off a cannon rush, but I caught him and he lost his probe and pylon. After a Zerg game my first night where I had overwhelming force but I barely made a dent because the Protoss Colossi just vaporized my entire army in like 3 seconds, I decided, hmm... I should build a handful of Zealots to be my shock troopers, then a bunch of Stalkers, and then back them up with Colossi behind the lines.

My first attack failed, he built WAY more stuff WAY faster than I did, and killed everything but the Colossi... but my inferior force held them at bay long enough for the Colossi to carve a giant swath in his units. Retreated to lick my wounds, he attacked this time... again, he had overwhelming force, but I put the Colossi on a ledge while sacrificial forces held off his army, and they vaporized everything.

I made a second attack, lost badly this time, including two of the Colossi.

Then, lucky break. He needed to expand beyond his his first two bases, and sent all his probes from his base to an off-the-beaten path base. I happened to see them on the edge of my radar because of the Colossi I had holding the Xel'Naga tower. Shadowed his probes, then as soon as they reached their destination, vaporized them all in about a half second. He sent about 10 Zealots at my base to take out my workers... my army was in the field so I had little to stop him. Let him in, had him chase my probes while I sent my army back, then used the probes to pull him to the SE corner of my base where the Colossi had walked up the wall. ZWEEOOOEEEEOEOEWOEWEOO. Zealot for dinner, well done. 100% casualties for him, 0% for me. By this time I had my destroyed expansion back up and was producing troops again. He thought because all I had were the Colossi in the base, that that was my army... stalkers charged my apparently defenseless expansion, to meet freshly created zealots and stalkers, backed up by... a group of Colossi now FIVE strong. Vaporized everybody, then made another push at his base. Met a pile of stalkers and zealots, used my tiny handful of stalkers to anchor them in one spot, then Colossused the whole group away. Lost everything but three Colossi, one of them badly damaged, but he had nothing left to fight with, and ragequit.

Then I sat happily for about 3 minutes cleaning up his enormous base with the Colossi.

The Protoss Colossus is just godly... it's like a Siege Tank that doesn't need to deploy. If I have time to tech up to those things when I play Protoss, I'm gonna do that from now on! The Zealot/Stalker/Colossus army was about as effective in the field as my Terran Marine/Marauder/Siege Tank armies.

Snake, gotta say, that game completely validated your description of what makes SC2's competitive enjoyable. Even if I'd lost that one it would've been worth it.

EDIT: Watched the replay just to see everything from the opponent's POV... I am actually shocked I won now. His macro just destroyed mine on every level. What I took away from it was I won only because I blocked him from expanding beyond two bases (and cost him a full base worth of probes in the process), and because I built Colossi. He was way outplaying me (I don't believe he was a legit bronze player), but there wasn't much he could do when every time our armies clashed, huge swaths of his would get vaporized even when he had me well outnumbered. He built robotics and I think he was going to attempt to match me Colossus for Colossus at one point, but all those minerals he dumped into stalkers just cost him too much and building even one at that point would have cost him the game as there wouldn't be enough of anything else on the field to hold me back, so he never followed up on it. Looking at the minerals used, near the end of the game I had a sizeable surplus and he was running on empty constantly. That many units getting toasted at once in our opening battles really took its toll on the rest of his game.

From now on, if I play Protoss and the opportunity presents itself, I build Colossi.

[Sneaky Snake]

Oh yes, games like those are awesome. You'll have many more highlight games to come!

Just make sure you add sentries to your protoss army compositions. A few sentries tips the balance MASSIVELY in a fight. Use one of them for guardian shield, which adds 2 armour to everyone near the sentry. And then use the rest for forcefields. 3-5 well placed forcefields cut his army in half. Meaning your full size army gets to engage their's in 2 bite sized portions, plus they're amazing for funneling units where you want them to go. you can put up a wall of forcefields to prevent his zealots or zerglings from flanking, and funnel them into a narrow channel, where your colossi can stack all their attacks in one small zone = pure death hose.

[Thain Esh Kelch]

Keep the gameplay experiences coming Frost, I'm enjoying reading them.

[Frost]

Had another Protoss win, this time against a rather well-played Zerg. Remembering the lessons learned above, I brought Colossi to the fight, and ohhh my. I thought they were good against other Protoss; they were impotent in comparison to the effectiveness against Zerg. Met his army outside his base in a giant all-in clash and I think I lost like 3 or 4 zealots and 3 stalkers in the entire thing. The Colossi just boiled everything else away so fast before I knew it the fight was already over and my army was on its way up his ramp. He did a good job keeping heavy pressure on me at the start with Zergling rushes, and then harassing my mineral lines with mutalisks once after which I tossed up a bunch of cannons, but he probably should've just forgotten all that harassment and built ultralisks to fight the army I had massing at my gates. Even if he'd wiped my base with the mutas he'd have lost at that point.

Oh, and then...




Set up siege tanks below the ramp to the north out of the picture supported by Marines/Marauders/Medivacs, then called in a nuke strike with my Ghost just south of his army to flush him north into the trap. Half his army didn't flee fast enough and got vaporized by the nuclear blast, the rest ran headlong into the siege tank barrage as they tried to flee the nuke and half of them got blown to kingdom come. 2/3 of his forces gone in the blink of an eye. Note the Ghost's status after calling in the nuke. Went so absolutely according to plan I was laughing because I didn't expect it to go half as well. Nuclear Launch Detected achievement in 1v1! Epic. Unfortunately, I lost that one because he caught my siege tanks in the middle of transforming later, and I couldn't come back from that. Player was piss poor in the field, but without my siege tank cover he was able to keep me from expanding and eventually just swamped me in units. Watching the replay though, it makes me upset because I would have won out of hand if after that little nuke/siege set up, I'd pulled back and done something similar to the below game, as he was wide open for it...

Final game I had a hilarious TvT on Metalopolis with us facing each other at the north side of the map with a little chasm in between our bases. He and I both had the idea to do a drop in the back of each other's respective bases. Only, he timed his EXACTLY wrong and did it just as I was about to load my entire army into medivacs. Came crashing down on his drop and annihilated it. He got a refinery and several SCVs, but it hardly mattered at that point, because immediately after I loaded 4 medivacs full of marines and marauders and 2 full of siege tanks, then counterattacked with a drop twice as big in his little steam-vision-block-thingie in the corner of his base.


Not something you want to have suddenly appear in the back of your base...


Sieged the tanks, then stimpacked my infantry and charged the MMM ball out into the undefended back of his base. Dishing out damage so fast several buildings were gone by the time his defensive forces could even respond, and they just got CRUSHED. I lost a whole TWO Marines. That was gratifying, and taught me a valuable lesson about the effectiveness of a large drop vs a frontal attack if there's a lack of air defenses. He did have three turrets, but... I landed in range of only one of them, and it only damaged one medivac before it got blown to kingdom come. Thinking of adjusting my tactics to save Orbital Command energy for more scans, and if it looks like he doesn't have many defenses aside from his ramp, turtling up a bit and then dropping an army in the back of his base rather than making my usual up-the-ramp charge. At least three of my Terran losses can be directly attributed to the other player successfully microing me out of using my siege tanks to full effectiveness through the elevated fog of war. That... was not an issue here. Not to mention a frontal attack gives him some time to react. A drop? Oh, hi, I'm in the least defensible part of your base. What's up!

I still can't get outta bronze though. I think I've been playing pretty dang well, but geez, I guess not well enough. Or maybe I just did so awfully my first night that I'm still coming back from that. Anyway, I've got 15 1v1 wins under my belt, 10 of them as Random, 10 as Terran (5 random wins were Terran). That's enough trial by fire for now, I think I'll give 1v1 a rest for a while and venture out into team and FFA next.

[Sneaky Snake]

It's takes a while to bump up leagues. Just keep at it. They don't bump you/demote you on a whim.

[badger2d]

Frost, on 25 May 2012 - 11:28 PM, said:

My third win, which I just played, I was against the #4 ranked guy in the entire Bronze league.

There are actually a lot of #4s. Or any other number. The SC2 ladder subgroups all players in each league into arbitrary divisions of 100.

The ladder system is a slightly creepy masterwork of psychology. Your true ranking number is never revealed to you; instead you see a lot of meaningless stuff that superficially makes it look you're always doing well. All you have to do to reach top 25 in your division is just play on a regular enough basis to use up the "bonus pool" points that accrue automatically over time, even at a flat 50% winrate where your true ranking is going nowhere.

It's all so meaningless and it all works so very well, which is the creepy part. On the Blizzard forums you perpetually see people brag that they're "top 5 Silver" or "high Platinum" or whatever; you never ever ever see someone say they're "low" anything, because the only people who are ranked low in a division are the ones who just hardly play!

The only thing that can clue you in to whether your rank is truly moving is who you're being matched against. You can see the other guy's ranking on the postgame stats screen. If you as a Bronze have been playing against and regularly beating Silver players, then you're on your way up.

Quote

EDIT: Watched the replay just to see everything from the opponent's POV... I am actually shocked I won now. His macro just destroyed mine on every level.

This illustrates one of my favorite things about this game. Your opponent may have outmacroed you, but he took on bad engagements and canceled out his advantage. Fortunes can change very quickly, you always have to be on your toes making smart decisions even when you're ahead.

BTW, also have to add, those nuke screenshots are hilarious. And so pretty! I can only run this game on lowest settings. :/

[Sneaky Snake]

badger2d, on 29 May 2012 - 04:14 PM, said:

The only thing that can clue you in to whether your rank is truly moving is who you're being matched against. You can see the other guy's ranking on the postgame stats screen. If you as a Bronze have been playing against and regularly beating Silver players, then you're on your way up.

Well your win ratio is also a great indicator. If your winning more games then you lose, your rating is going up, and vice versa. Come to think of it though. Everytime I've been promoted a league. My win ratio was at least 70% over the last 30 games or so. One time in silver league soon before I got promoted, I went on a 22 game win streak. Then a little loss streak (I think 5). And on the 5th loss I got promoted. You don't get insta promoted with a certain number of wins, nor do you get insta demoted with a certain ratio of losses. It's all some very hidden, but very effective system.

[badger2d]

Sneaky Snake, on 29 May 2012 - 06:09 PM, said:

Well your win ratio is also a great indicator. If your winning more games then you lose, your rating is going up, and vice versa. Come to think of it though. Everytime I've been promoted a league. My win ratio was at least 70% over the last 30 games or so. One time in silver league soon before I got promoted, I went on a 22 game win streak. Then a little loss streak (I think 5). And on the 5th loss I got promoted. You don't get insta promoted with a certain number of wins, nor do you get insta demoted with a certain ratio of losses. It's all some very hidden, but very effective system.

Yeah, true enough. Both of what we said goes together. If you're winning more than you lose you'll be matched against harder opponents, and if you keep winning, eventually you'll cross a new league threshold. I just find it easier to simply notice the league ranking of my opponents than to track my win ratio. That's how I know, for example, that I'm low in Gold league, regardless of how high I get in the meaningless division rank, because I regularly get matched against a mix of Silvers and Golds, hardly ever seeing a Plat.

[Frost]

Sneaky Snake, on 29 May 2012 - 06:09 PM, said:

Well your win ratio is also a great indicator. If your winning more games then you lose, your rating is going up, and vice versa. Come to think of it though. Everytime I've been promoted a league. My win ratio was at least 70% over the last 30 games or so. One time in silver league soon before I got promoted, I went on a 22 game win streak. Then a little loss streak (I think 5). And on the 5th loss I got promoted. You don't get insta promoted with a certain number of wins, nor do you get insta demoted with a certain ratio of losses. It's all some very hidden, but very effective system.

Ahh, okay, probably need to just play more then. Been winning about 70% to 80% of 1v1 games, but haven't really played all that many total, and I racked up a LOT of losses to start.