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-Breeze
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| The Basics of Starcraft | | | Author: | | | IP: | 24-90-13XXXX | | Date: | 09/23/02 01:09 | | Game Type: | Starcraft | | Labels: | none | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 0, Max: , Min:
Lifetime Rating for YourButteredBiscuit: 6.7500 | | Its a tribute to the quality of SC that so many years after its release, there are still plenty of new players joining battle.net everyday. For these players, the experience can be intimidating, I know this from experience as we all do. So for them, I have written this guide. If you're not a newbie, this guide will probably tell you nothing you don't know already. Enjoy. Or wretch in disgust. I honestly don't care.
There are a few basics in Starcraft that will apply in any game, no matter what race you're playing as and what race you're playing against. Most of these basics apply to just about any RTS game as well. The first one I shall outline is simple: Watch your ass. Every base, and every attack has an ass just waiting to be kicked by your opponents booted foot. Take a look at your base, is there an easy way for your enemy to waltz in and launch a crippling attack on your workers? If you answered yes, you sir, have an ass. Do you have a good defense but no detectors in sight? Yes again? You sir, have two asses. The more asses you have, the more you become one. And when you are nothing more than just a big ass, you will get kicked quite often. Asses come in all shapes and sizes, some are obnoxiously obvious, but most are subtle. Constantly assess your base and your attacks and think to yourself, "How would this get beaten?" and take measures to prevent whatever counters you can think up from happening. Likewise, you should always be looking for your opponents ass(es) and ways for you to kick it(them). How do you find these? Thats coming up next in......
Reconnassaince! You should always be conducting it. The dictionary definition of reconnassaince is: In military science, the act or process of obtaining information about an area, the troops in it, the terrain etc. by examination or survey. I couldn't have said it better myself, thank you Mr. Webster. Since Starcraft has the fog of war, you must be constantly scouting. Early in the game, your main purpose is to find your enemy and find out what race they are if you don't know already. Your secondary purposes are to find out how many entrances there are to your base and your opponents base, and where they are located. You should also be looking for places to expand, defensible locations such as cliffs where you can establish a foothold, and every conceivable path to your base and your opponents base. If you know the map you're playing on well enough, you can get away with accomplishing your primary purpose and not bothering with any of the secondary ones. This early in the game, this is usually done with a worker or the basic unit of your race, a marine, a zergling or a zealot. Once you have accomplished these things, you don't have to worry about recon for a little while so what do you do? See to it that you get the economic and military power necessary to do so on a grander scale, because soon enough a worker or a basic unit just won't cut it.
Roughly seven minutes into the game you should have just that. Now you can launch what I call a scouting attack. Send a sizable chunk of your forces at the enemy. Your attack should consist of melee units and range units for support fire. So if you're terran Marines and Firebats (medics always help), if you're zerg its zerglings and hydralisks and for protoss its Zealots and Dragoons. The melee units should outnumber the ranged units unless you are terran. There are a few purposes for this attack. The first purpose is to test your opponents defenses. If you can, just run your units by them so you can see what buildings they have. It helps to leave a couple of units behind to take fire from the defenses so everyone else can keep moving. Keep running your forces around until you hit the worker lines. Concentrate your attack on these guys, and you'll have fulfilled the secondary purpose of this attack which is slowing your opponent down. More often than not, this attack won't kill your opponent, but if your fast enough it'll knock them off balance and provide you with valuable information about them. Suppose you see every building your opponent has, if not in this attack then another. You shouldn't just think to yourself, "How nice." you should actively incorporate this intelligence into your plan lest this intelligence become moronic stupidity. Example: You found a spire. Obviously, your opponent is going for air units. Act accordingly and get units that counter air units like goliaths or scourges. If you see a greater spire you know for sure to expect guardians. Now you really need air counters. Sometimes its not always what structures they have but how many. If you see 6 barracks, 4 factories and one starport, ground attacks are going to be your main concern.
Ok, now we're going to get a little race specific because at this point in the game the one size fits all formula stops working. I'll start with the Terrans. True to their defensive style of play, a terran player doesn't always have to leave his base to do some scouting. As soon as it becomes available, you'll want a comsat station. With this handy building, you'll have the luxury of checking on your opponent without ever having to leave the comfort of your base. But this only gives you a glimpse of whats going on. So use of the comsat should be limited to seeing what your enemy is building, finding weaknesses in their base and spotting cloaked units that snuck into your base. No matter what race you are, it helps to be watching certain parts of the map. The first spot you want to always know whats going on is the path(s) leading to your base thats out of your normal sight range. This includes the paths a dropship might take to conduct a drop on your base. I like to place turrets in these spots since they're detectors, other people like marines. Whats important is that you can see attacks before they hit you. You should also be watching for places where your opponent might try to expand or establish a foothold. One thing to keep in mind with the things you send out to watch an area is cost effectiveness. A battlecruiser makes an awful scout because when its alone its easily taken down by a group of units far cheaper than the battlecruiser. Like I said before, turrets work well because they can spot cloaked units and they're cheap.
While the zerg lack the comsat station, they have many methods of scouting. My personal favorite is burrowing zerglings in all the spots I told you to place turrets in above. They're extremely cost effective and more often than not they'll go unspotted for a long time. One thing NOT to do when placing them in an expansion site is burrowing them where the nexus/cc/hatch is going to be built, thats going to give the little guy away. Some zerg players burrow an entire squad of zerglings and wait for the expansion to just start booming and then ruin it all by killing all of the probes and setting it back. Another method is the parasite. I'd just as soon plant a parasite on one of the siege tanks at my enemy's choke as I'd spawn broodling the bastard (unless I was about to attack). My motto with parasites is if you can plant it, go for it. One zerg player I know will slip two queens in as soon as he can to plant a parasite on one worker and use the other to ensnare them. Its very annoying. If you're attacking an enemy and manage to get into his base, burrow a unit or two. If he gets spotted, who cares? You're zerg! Theres plenty more where he came from! Extra overlords are good to float around the map, but I'd advise against using them early in the game because more often than not they'll give your position away or just get themselves killed. There are many who'd disagree with me, and some of them are better zerg players than me. But I can't tell you how many times someone did the scouting for me by floating their overlord over my base. The formula is very simple, "The slow bastard came from over there, so my enemy must be over there too." Its not like you can dance an overlord around and come from another direction because by the time you do, your enemy already has air defenses. With the zerg, its hard to go wrong with scouting since so many of their units are fast and cheap. The units that aren't cheap or fast, obviously are not meant for scouting.
Come on now, I don't think I have to tell you what unit is going to be doing the majority of the scouting for the protoss do I? I do? ::Sigh:: The observer! They're cheap, they're cloaked, they're detectors, what more do you want?! And despite what the name might imply, Scouts aren't good scouts. In fact, I'd say if you're going to scout with any air unit besides an observer, make it a corsair. They're cheaper and you don't need a speed upgrade to make them fast. But then again, observers will fulfill almost every scouting need you'll have. The only situation where they won't work is when theres a cannon/turret/spore colony wall that you can't fly by. In this case, I'd say a group of corsairs with disruption web do the trick. But if you're going to go through all that effort and send that many corsairs you may as well bring an attack with them like an arbiter doing recall or something to that effect.
Observers should always be:
(A) watching the places that need watching (I've already outlined what qualifies as a place that needs watching)
(B) Trying to sneak into your enemies base to OBSERVE what he is doing.
(C) Following an attack to protect them from lurkers and other cloaked or burrowed nasties.
You can not do anything without proper finance. So crank out workers. Lots of them. You should have 2 on every mineral patch, and 3 or 4 on each geyser. On most maps, this formula will mine out your starting position in about 15 minutes. This isn't a bad thing as long as you have expansions. Expansions are an absolute must. Once your population his about 30-40, its time to expand (this varies on certain maps and against certain players). The bread and butter method of doing this is sending a handful of units and some workers (protoss players can get away with sending one probe) off to the desired expansion site. As your cc or whatever is building, start work on a few unit producing facilities. There is hardly a circumstance where tech buildings should be placed in an expansion. Once your cc is built, obviously, the thing to do is start mining the place out. The unit producing buildings you built should be cranking out units to defend the expansion and aid in your attacks.
Drops with a handful of units can be more devastating than an army attacking through a choke. The keys to drops is reconnassaince, which we've already learned, and microing, which cannot be taught. You should never bother attempting a drop if their defenses are too formidable for one. But should your intelligence show you a hole where you can slip some dropships in and a vulnerable workerline by all means go for the gusto my friend. The key to making a drop work after that is maximizing the potential of every unit you send. For instance, you decide to capitalize on the hole you've found before it closes up so you send a shuttle with only one reaver in it. It would be a mistake after planting that reaver to just leave him to die. Treat this drop like its your last chance for a drop, because more often than not, it is. As soon as the reaver is threatened get him back in that shuttle and plant him somewhere else. Keep dancing until he dies. I'll be more specific with drop tactics in my next guides. The Basics of (insert race here.) The next one will be Terran and should be posted a couple of minutes after this one because I've already written most of it up. Until then, Happy Starcrafting.
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