14 DAY TRIAL // Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void is currently in closed beta, and I'm trying not to feel too bad about being bad at it.
The real-time strategy game from Blizzard Entertainment is the cream of the crop when it comes to a smooth and challenging competitive experience, blending physically demanding control with mentally taxing attention to detail.
The second expansion pack, Legacy of the Void, will deliver the conclusion to the storyline started all the way back in 1998 with the original Starcraft, and will pretty much offer the definitive edition of the game's multiplayer clashes.
Blizzard is hammering away at the game for the time being, because it added quite a lot of new things, most notably five new units, with a sixth on its way, and upped the starting worker count to 12, which completely changes the way you approach the game.
One of the reasons I stopped playing a couple of years ago was that playing the game well had become too taxing. I was simply too stressed out, because there were just so many things to juggle while inside the game.
Returning to it after a considerable break, I kind of feel like there are several things that contributed to us becoming estranged. One of those things is the evolution of micro.
A brief aside
The big challenge in the game is finding enough time to do everything there is to do. The way good gamers do this is by becoming faster and faster.
The fastest you are able to move, the better you can satisfy the demands of micro and macro management. They are both important in their own way.
Macro helps you get resources faster and prevents you from running out. You have to learn to build new production facilities in advance, in order to be able to capitalize on a new source of income in a timely fashion, and so on and so forth.
Micro is the fine art of fiddling with the units in order to get the most out of them in any situation, and in order to continually pester the enemy through drops and harassment, and thus distract their attention from his own macro game and maybe even cause some damage.
Although I liked Starcraft when it came out, I didn't play it all that much in multiplayer, aside from lame games against my friends, until I came upon movies and replays of Korean pro gamers. That moment completely changed the way I saw the game and made me fall in love with Starcraft.
Initially, I used to turtle and then amass a huge army, after which I would send it all to the enemy's base crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, with little strategy involved.
Watching how the pros played the game opened my eyes to build orders, and taught me that you don't need huge armies in order to inflict damage, and that even your first unit can make a difference, if you use it right.
I particularly remember the insane micro skills of SlayerS_`Boxer`, doing things that I would have never imagined possible, like irradiating his own Science Vessels in order to quickly take out the drones in a mineral line.
You can see some of his insane control skills, especially when it comes to maneuvering squishy marines around deadly lurkers, in the video below this article.
A new kind of micro
All that extra control over units translated into a significant bump in efficiency, and I started slowly climbing the ranks on Battle.net.
But back then, it felt like there weren't as many hard counters as today. Zerglings were very good against Dragoons not because they were made to be so, but because of their speed and numbers.
Zealots were great against Siege Tanks because of their speed upgrade, because four would fit inside a single Shuttle, and because you usually had a ton of extra minerals in PvT.
Micro used to be more about moving your units so that you get a better spread, drawing Lurkers' spines in several directions, surrounding units with your Zerglings more efficiently.
Nowadays it feels like micro is about using the units' abilities, which isn't all that exciting. It just feels like something extra that you have to do in order for the unit to work as intended, instead of adding a new layer of depth to the game.
Smart casting is a great addition that makes using your spells effectively much easier, but the fact that there are a ton of abilities on every unit makes the entire thing seem even more complicated than it used to be in Starcraft 1.
On one hand, it's exciting to have more options available and for the game to be more complex, on the other hand, it forgoes the elegance of Starcraft 1's design in favor of artificial complexity.
Now especially, this comes into context, as the focus is shifting toward bigger armies and less early game harassment. It used to be that micromanagement shone in situations where only a handful of units were involved.
There is less excitement
The beauty of microing an early tank drop or the first couple of vultures has now been replaced with a mass of different units. Taking care of a group of around ten infantry units used to make the difference between victory and defeat.
Now, you just pile on some, and by the time the enemy reaches your base, you already have more units than you initially had.
It's much harder to micro the dozens of units that are involved in combat now, as players start with their economy in full swing. The early game low economy situations in which players did a sort of back and forth, reticent to expand too early and constantly pressured by early harassment are now almost gone.
That means that the context in which micro could really alter the course of a game is slowly disappearing.
Instead, now players struggle to simply use the units the way they are supposed to be used. You try to target your area-of-effect attacks in order to strike several units, you stim your Marines, you blink your Stalkers around.
But that is just what the game requires you to do in order to play it in the normal fashion. Micro used to do much more. Dropping hasty zealots on top of Siege Tanks to attract friendly area-of-effect fire, rushing them through mine fields in order to get the mines to blow up the Terran siege lines, that was true micro.
Popping units in and out of dropships in order to let them avoid enemy shots, and other such things that nobody designed, things that emerged naturally from the way the units worked.
Kiting Zealots with the much faster Vultures was what micro was actually all about. The normal way to use them is to attack-move and then see what happens. Or use some of their abilities.
Micro meant that the squishy vultures would destroy the slow Zealots instead of getting pulverized. Micro meant that you planted Spider Mines right next to a Dragoon, and then watched an entire group of SCVs go up in flames.
It meant the difference between using a unit in its normal, intended way, and making it super effective, even game-changing.
Micro used to mean the actions you do without actually having to perform them, which result in a significant increase in your army's efficiency.
Now it seems like it's something that's expected of players. You have to activate your Immortal's shield, slap down force fields, stasis traps, and so on.
That means that watching the pros do it all is fun when you've got your hand on the popcorn, but it also means that it's really frustrating when your hand is on the mouse.
Design versus evolution
It also seems that, after Starcraft: Brood War became an unintended eSport, Blizzard tried to design Starcraft 2 around the things that players used to do. Instead of someone coming up with the idea to irradiate your own science vessels and destroy workers in a couple of seconds, you now have Distruptors with an activated ability.
It seems like there is more active design and meddling from the makers of the game, and less exploration on the side of players. When Brood War came out, I don't think somebody actually planned how PvT, TvZ and so on would play out. I don't think anyone tested and min-maxed everything.
I think it naturally evolved from trial and error and a lot of practice.
This time around, it seems like Blizzard already knows what role every unit will have, which unit it will counter in which matchup, with a smaller margin for control on the part of players.
It's like things moved from being organic and let's say more physical, more visible, to each unit having an activated ability that does x amount of damage to a certain class of unit it's designed to counter.
In order to further make things difficult, there are now a ton of visual flourishes that make the game look great, but that significantly increase the challenge of actually being able to discern what's going on.
Brood War used to look pretty crisp, you could generally tell how many units there were in an army at first glance, and the visual effects never got in the way of the strategy.
Now army compositions are much more heterogeneous and there is so much stuff going on, especially when you start getting near the supply cap, that it becomes difficult to control your units, let alone micro.
The way I used to feel about micro is that it was something exciting to do that makes the game even better. Now it feels like it's just something you're supposed to do in order to play it as intended.
It may just be that I'm really rusty and I still need to sink a lot more time into matches, but it somehow seems off, and somewhat less exciting than it used to be in the original Starcraft, overall.
