The Extra-Solar Union of Systems Archive

That will be all.

Celestial Seibutsu wrote: Having not played it, I'm not going to take a crack at it, but I can tell just from the fact that there aren't multi-million dollar competitions and professional players who's sole career and bread on the table rely on the game, tells me there's some sort of imbalanced property somewhere about it.

Starcraft went big because of the timing, not just quality - it was released before most/all of these other games, and at a time when computers and net access were rapidly becoming wide spread. It got in there first and entrenched itself, basicly - that other games haven't come to rival it in competitive gaming has atleast as much to do with inertia as anything else.

"Have you tried it with Hamachi?"

Explain Zerst. NOWZ

Starcraft's balance depends on the map. On balanced maps for a specific matchup, the winratio for every race in every matchup is within 1% of 50. In PGT and ICCUP, which are ladders for anyone from the newbie to professional koreans the results are about the same (Terran does a little worse when Koreans aren't involved, but this is more to do with the mechanical requirement to play a good terran). Only when they use massively imbalanced maps such as Troy and Andromeda II does the balance change, and even then there has never been a matchup in Starcraft Brood War that has ever had the balance go beyond 5% (Zerg/Protoss pre-bisu was around 53-54% for the Zerg).

The difference between Homeworld and Starcraft is Starcraft has three completely different races to balance. Homeworld's balance was around 50/50% split as well, however. Slight lean to between each side on different patches. Homeworld didn't have the macromanagement element of SC though, but you had to think carefully about unit positioning. Foree and Lazerflip were two of the top competitive players I remember in homeworld. SC gained it's longevity from balance, however. Mapadori and the balance of the game has led to so many eras of strategical changes in each matchup that there's always a change going on in one matchup at any given time.

Explain Zerst. NOWZ

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamachi

http://hamachi.en.softonic.com/

Basically, you connect directly to other players over Hamachi and it allows you to play over a LAN connection. So you can play with people over the net without using Battlenet or the more fiddly-ingame direct connection.

Foree and Lazerflip were two of the top competitive players I remember in homeworld.

Tee hee, I beat Lazerflip's SM on BR once. Damn that guy was/is a faggot.

Just played HW2. Me + Ani vs captsmasher and War_hammer333. Although Ani did most of the work. And W_H's PD ion cannon array was sufficient to inspire groans of "AAAARRGGGH IT BURNS".

Xenonier wrote:The difference between Homeworld and Starcraft is Starcraft has three completely different races to balance. Homeworld's balance was around 50/50% split as well, however.

Homeworld didn't have the macromanagement element of SC though, but you had to think carefully about unit positioning.

Bullshit. Research priorities win or loose the game, and knowing what units to build when is crucial. I know great players - masters of micro - who cannot beat me because they can't figure out how to manage their resource harvestors as well as I do; they either invest too heavily in resource aquisition, and I Zerg them, or too lightly, and I go all USA (show up late, but with overwhelming force) on their ass. There have been times when I was saved solely by the decision to build light corvettes, that's right LIGHT CORVETTES, and invest my research efforts in Missile Destroyers. Other times such a move would have been suicidal at best.

SC gained it's longevity from balance, however. Mapadori and the balance of the game has led to so many eras of strategical changes in each matchup that there's always a change going on in one matchup at any given time.

SC gained it's longevity from popularity. There are plenty of fish in the sea when it comes to balance. Black & White had great balance between creature types, racial advantages, and alignments. Age of Mythology, was, before the titans expantion, very well balanced. You don't see them around much anymore though, do you? SC, meanwhile, was releaced at just the right time to hit a massive drooling multiplayer market, and was aided by the lack of an immidiate surplantor. Halo, for instance, has lost much of it's steam by the releace of Halo Deux, and of course Halo Ooh-Pretty! Because of this, even though Halo is just as much a nitch clasic as SC, it will always have difficulty attracting the same magnitude of a following as players have other, similar, options. The only thing that's really similar to SC that has been releaced is WC3, which sort of sucked in multiplayer. [/rant]

Well, WC3 is fairly balanced, there will just always be certain tactics when employed a certain way that will always win, provided you can do them first amd they pay off.

(Like hero rushing + rushing)

There was no statement in which I said macromangement wasn't important or integral to being good at homeworld. Macromanagement is key in any decent competitive game. However, it's still not as taxing -> or as important towards the game as Starcraft is. People like to work up the advantages Koreans have over foreigners in actions per minute, but it's really all down to superior and efficient macromanagement. The average APM of the time [TLSC] players were up amongst the best in homeworld was somewhere around 125-150 per game. That much per game is dedicated to the production of units alone in starcraft at even the non-korean level, while things such as expansion timing (perhaps the best equivalent towards tech research one can draw in HW) are equally as important as they are in Homeworld, if not moreso. Let's not also forget that unlike Homeworld, there's no easy access menu to any method of ship production, nor is there the ability to end up macromanaging in excess of 20-25 production facilities all at once, off multiple bases, all which have their own maximum worker saturation levels, timings and even drop responses.

SC gained it's longevity from popularity. There are plenty of fish in the sea when it comes to balance. Black & White had great balance between creature types, racial advantages, and alignments. Age of Mythology, was, before the titans expantion, very well balanced. You don't see them around much anymore though, do you? SC, meanwhile, was releaced at just the right time to hit a massive drooling multiplayer market, and was aided by the lack of an immidiate surplantor. Halo, for instance, has lost much of it's steam by the releace of Halo Deux, and of course Halo Ooh-Pretty! Because of this, even though Halo is just as much a nitch clasic as SC, it will always have difficulty attracting the same magnitude of a following as players have other, similar, options. The only thing that's really similar to SC that has been releaced is WC3, which sort of sucked in multiplayer. [/rant]

Wrong again. There have been few, if any competitive RTS that have managed to even hold a 60/40% winratio for imbalanced matchups when played the level of competition approaching the WCG, nor have they managed to hold those statistics over the a period of more than five years. Black and White isn't an strategy game in the way SC is, AoM had internal balancing issues out the wazoo before or after titans expansion. Starcraft's future in the early years of professional videogaming, as per the era of XDDDD'S grr and Slayers Boxer was very much a situation of doubt. It was only the efforts of HanbitSoft and Slayers Boxer, that the entire era of Professional SC continued because Boxer proved Terran was entirely competitive as a race. It was pushed and maintained as a popular game because of the combination of interesting gameplay and constant evolution of the metagame, which while always introducing new styles and ways to play the game -> always remained very balance on a racial level. Interestingly, Boxer's opponents (Garimto for P and Yellow for Z) had 6:6 and 29:31 win ratios against him respectively iirc -> another classic example of how balance in SC has always been very consistent.

As for 'similar', WC3 is in no way whatsoever similar to WC3, and actually wasn't even taken seriously by any of the professional SC players or backers in Korea, as it has always been (It's taking off in China, mostly because the Chinese know they can't top the Koreans at SC). The reason why? As was best said in an interview with Freedom.Werra, probably the greatest WC3 player ever in terms of Raw skill before he left to SC.

"The balance wasn't as good, the game wasn't as obvious."

As for SC's lack of competitors, it was SC's uniqueness that lead to the Koreans to pick it up. However, it was the balance of the game which led to it's continuing popularity in the hearts of the Korean people, because it was reinventions and new discoveries of balance and how to respond to balance which lead to the rise of the popular SC players. Iloveoov was feared because he made Terran seem unstoppable in TvP with a third base-no-vulture-harass approach (well, on top of his TvZ), yet Reach was held up to become probably the most loved Protoss Progamer up until Bisu because he cracked that difficulty for Protoss and made the matchup balanced again. Bisu made PvZ 'fair' and he's a fangirl target. The most popular players in SC are the ones who add a new spin on a matchup and solve conundrums faced in that matchup, which says something about how important the balance is to Koreans. The same balance the Korean telecommunications/broadcasting companies invest thousands into every time they pay Mapadori for new maps which they want to be balanced and fresh. Now, care to tell me why if Balance isn't considered an important part of Starcraft's longviety by the people who set it up and invest millions into maintaining it and pleasing the focus groups, why they keep investing money into ensuring it stays that way, and slapping as much positive media coverage on players who solve balance problems (Savior's ZvT, Bisu's PvZ, Stork's PvT, Flash's TvP) as possible?

How does it work exactly, Zerst?