StarCraft 2

This article is a list of the 6 most important things you should know about StarCraft 2 if you are an “outsider” and have never played StarCraft. StarCraft 2 is one of those games that if it were a person, it wouldn’t care about your opinion of it. The only opinions it would respect would be those who played the original StarCraft – the only game StarCraft 2 looks up to. At the end of the day, StarCraft is the most challenging RTS to date, and the opinions of those without experience playing it have little sway on the way StarCraft 2 has been designed.

1. StarCraft is the greatest RTS of all time

Somewhere between fact and opinion is where the above statement lies. In terms of sheer number of sales, the statement is true. In terms of current number of active online players, the statement is also true. In terms of being the only RTS to build a multi-million dollar professional gaming industry around it, that statement is true as well.


The single most important thing people who are not familiar with Starcraft need to understand is this: Korean Esports. StarCraft is played professionally in South Korea, and its matches are televised on a number of different networks. It is part of the culture there and has been dubbed the unofficial national sport of South Korea. Is the RTS you play a national sport? We didn’t think so.

How did StarCraft achieve such an amazing status in Korea, where so many other games failed? It’s a long story, but it basically just boils down to the way the game is made: it’s incredibly difficult to play, and it’s very dramatic to watch because of it. The level at which top Korean players play the game goes beyond “cool”, it’s very much “HOLY SHIT HOW DO THEY DO THAT???” That kind of appeal has turned the game into something that is fun and awe-inspiring to watch. If it was easy to play, everyone could do it, and it wouldn’t be all that fun/interesting.

2. StarCraft 2 is more like StarCraft 1.5

Blizzard has gone through a great deal of trouble to make sure that StarCraft 2 plays and feels identical to StarCraft – the most successful RTS of all time by almost every metric imaginable. Everything from the economic design, pace, tech trees, and unit counts are identical. The only differences really are the units, some buildings, upgrades, and a few other things. The way they’re all put together, however, follows StarCraft 1’s formula almost exactly. Thus StarCraft 2 is the way it is, because StarCraft is the way it is.

3. StarCraft is a heavy macro-management game

Now that the background is out of the way, we can get into some details about StarCraft 2 itself. Micromanagement is one of the staples that defines StarCraft (and by extension, StarCraft 2). Macro can be considered any action that relates to army production. Everything from collecting resources, to building your base, to producing units = macro. Additionally, it’s often used to describe multi-tasking in general, and includes switching back and forth between controlling your army (micro), and managing your base/economy/upgrades/production structures (pure macro).


What has made macro such an important part of gameplay boils down to three things concerning the game’s design:

1. It has a very large economic scale, but units build very slowly. This means you need to add more production structures to get a large army as quickly as possible.
2. It has deep tech trees and things like the need to constantly expand your supply in order to build more units
3. It has a sub-optimal interface that makes all of the above challenging in its own way. More on that later.

Thus don’t expect StarCraft to be like Company of Heroes. It is SUPPOSED to require a very heavy focus on managing your economy, building your base, and producing units. And for that matter, don’t expect it to be like Supreme Commander in that it handles all of the macromanagement for you through the use of automated scripts and a super-streamlined interface.

4. You have limited starting resources for a reason

This one is aimed at those Command and Conquer players out there. C&C games traditionally give the players an enormous amount of resources to start with. This often allows them to get production structures up and producing units within the first 60 seconds of the game. StarCraft & StarCraft 2 start you out with just enough resources to build an extra gatherer, and then you have to constantly re-invest the initial amounts of money you get into more gatherers + supply increases.

The result is that the early game of StarCraft feels kind of slow to build up, and boring/tedious. However, there’s an important benefit to this design: it allows scouting to become a true strategic element of the gameplay. In Command and Conquer games, the resources you’re given require you to spend them and commit to a build order before you even know what your opponent is doing; this results in a fair amount of build order poker and blind guessing. With StarCraft’s paradigm, players can use their starting gatherers to scout each other well before getting through their first tier in the tech tree and well before any units are on the field. The effect is a game where scouting leads to more strategic level adapting rather than blind guessing.

5. Limited camera height in StarCraft 2 doesn’t mean Supreme Commander has a better interface

Sorry SupCom players, but don’t think for a second that unlimited strategic zoom is some revolutionary improvement to the genre that StarCraft 2 should also have. Let’s forget the fact that StarCraft 2’s maps are nowhere near as big and that it’s completely unnecessary for that type of gameplay, it’s also something that hurts the “feel” of the game.


The focus of StarCraft 2, like pretty much every RTS except for Supreme Commander, is on combat. Supreme Commander is more about playing arm-chair-general and making big sweeping decisions rather than getting involved in ultra-specific control of individual units. Unlike in Supreme Commander, a single unit or small group of units can mean the difference between winning or losing, thus the scale of the game is significantly smaller. The camera simply matches the scale of combat in StarCraft 2.

So why is the scale of combat so much smaller than SupCom? See points #1 and #2.

Besides, being able to see that much of the map at once would make StarCraft 2 too easy to play. You can argue all you want about how the interface should help the player instead of hinder them, but being able to zoom the camera all the way out is NOT an interface thing, it’s a gameplay thing. You are not supposed to be able to control all of your units from one screen because then it makes things like ambushes, fake attacks, distractions, proxies, and multi-front combat pointless.

Part of what makes multi-front combat so challenging (and thus exciting) and important to allowing players to gain an advantage over one another is specifically because you can’t control each separate group of units from the same screen. It requires you to split your attention between them. That is a gameplay thing, not an interface thing.

6. Interface limitations are part of the gameplay

Speaking of the interface, this is probably the most hotly debated topic in all of gaming, especially within RTS. One side argues that the interface should be so streamlined it all but removes the need to use your hands to input orders entirely. To that group, the holy grail would be a device connected to your brain that lets you control everything just by thinking.


The other side argues that there is something to be said for the “athletic” side of gaming, which is your hand-eye coordination and your ability to get around the interface faster and more efficiently than someone else. They go so far as to argue that it’s a GOOD thing for the interface to get in the way, as it’s one more skill differentiator to add to the game, and at the end of the day, skill differentiation is really all that matters.

Whichever side you’re on is irrelevant, because Blizzard has already made significant interface improvements to StarCraft 2 compared to StarCraft. However, if those interface improvements aren’t “EZ mode” enough for you, tough. Remember points #1 and #3? Well part of the mystique and appeal of StarCraft is that it is both macro-intensive, and the interface isn’t all that macro-friendly. This means half the fun of the game is macro-managing through an awkward interface that does the bare minimum. It’s fun because when you practice it and get good at it, it becomes a very powerful tool in your ability to stomp other players. You can’t just know strategies and build orders (which arguably is too easy anyway), you have to be able to execute the thousands of commands needed to play the game properly as quickly and efficiently as possible. Again, this becomes a skill differentiator that is really no different from your knowledge of units and build orders.

So if you’re wondering why StarCraft 2 doesn’t have a particular hotkey function or interface function that your current favorite RTS game has, it’s probably because it would make the game too easy to play, and thus less fun to play competitively. Any argument that Blizzard should have made the game deeper to compensate doesn’t hold any water because at the highest level of play, StarCraft is far deeper than any current game on the market anyway. While StarCraft 2 has yet to prove itself in this department, it’s so similar that it certainly has the same potential.

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