r/starcraft2

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I'm a casual, not a hardcore fan of starcraft 2. I feel like protoss's whole identity is using smaller numbers but advanced technology to beat their opponents. Right now in PvT it's too common for protoss to just mass expand and spam zealots and stalkers, and it feels like the protoss is the zerg. Protoss kind of loses its identity a bit.

I downloaded the game about a week ago, I play periodically, gain experience, but I constantly lose, and not in battle, or because I didn’t control the army well, but because of some crap. Several times enemy ships teleported directly to my base, many times I was destroyed by several ships to which I could not do anything because they were invisible, several times the enemy built some kind of garbage right under my base which prevented me from playing, nuclear bombs flew straight into the base. It feels like direct clashes between armies are not held in high esteem here at all, everyone is trying to win in any way they can, except by clashing armies and testing their skills. But this is not even a rating.

Been having so much fun! Back from a huge 10+ year break. My top played was Masters top 8 and set a goal to get diamond. Was more challenging to get used to all the new units and counters ect. But, I just got back in diamond in less than a week. Onwards and upwards to masters.

Too the ppl that told me I'd peak at Platinum. :P

Plat Zerg here

Started getting into SC2 about two months ago, how the fuck do I beat cyclones? I just played a game against a terran and cyclones started showing up at the 5 minute mark. Extremely frustrating to play against as my roaches just got kited around. Is this a build issue since I don't have any other tech available or is there a micro trick that I can use?

just curious

I'm a completely new player, and Starcraft is my first RTS, so perhaps my question will seem stupid. When choosing which faction to play for, I chose the zerg, I like their vibe too much, and the gameplay for them is also very funny, but the mechanics with larvae just kill me, this is essentially the main limiter, no matter how many resources I have, I am limited by the number of larvae, I know that their number can be increased if you manually press the mob’s active, but doing this manually is extremely time-consuming and inconvenient, especially considering that you need to press the active many times, while having The cooldown of the ability is approximately one and a half seconds. Can anyone give advice on this?

Just a wall of race whining. And I'm also curious to hear from other Zerg players which matchup(s) you dread. Zerg is by far the race that feels the most intuitive to me, but ZvT makes me want to race switch to Protoss and pray that I don't hate any PvX matchup more.

I'm low Diamond, so I obviously don't have a deep enough understanding of the game to say with any level of authority what's balanced or not. I'm not claiming that anything in StarCraft in particular is technically imbalanced, but I will say that literally every single Terran unit feels like it was designed to be as tactically powerful and unfun to play against as possible. Each race has some examples of this, but Terran is the race where the smallest number of units/supply, can utterly lock you out in the game, or even just kill you.

There's such a ridiculous variety of openings Terran can go for, and they're all really strong if you don't have the correct response. Look away for 2 seconds, Hellions slip into your base and your drones are dead. If you're not watching the minimap, a medivac will drop Widow Mines and your drones are dead. A single Liberator completely shuts down an entire mineral line and has a chance of getting lots of kills if the Terran puts minimal effort into distracting you while it happens. A single Medivac full of the cheapest units can pick up and go back and forth between your bases and cost you tons of mining time or drones, or units. Even if you REALLY want to keep the Terran out of your damn base and you load it with static defense, too bad, they can just scan your base and see everything without any risk. In ZvT, no territory is truly actually yours, because Terran is designed from the ground up to allow them to just walk in and dig their heels in like parasites.

In preparation for all of these threats, you fly an Overlord in to scout. You're basically guaranteed to lose that Overlord unless you invest precious resources into Overlord speed. And then of course, Terran can just sit on their two bases macroing all day. Doesn't matter if you have twice as many workers, bases, and army as they do, because they only need a few units to hold off your army, and once they expand, MULEs are free and they mine way faster than the Drones that you had to spend your minerals and larvae on. There is no such thing as "behind" for them unless their macro is several leagues lower than yours, or you manage to do devastating damage to them. You macro up and throw Roaches at their wall, but the Terran has 10 supply of Tanks situated way out of your reach, which makes it so that you could never actually win, even if you manage to break the wall and step inside for a moment. So you try to keep them from taking a third, but it turns out with the Tank's near-infinite range, it only takes a few to leap-frog their way out of the natural and zone you out. The defensive tanks around their third don't have the natural ramp and choke to protect them, so you prepare a big force with Ravagers and bile them down. But it turns out the third is a Planetary, and they can just repair it to keep it alive unless you have an utterly overwhelming amount of forces. Oops, I forgot to build my safety spores because I was distracted fending off the Hellions -- cloaked Banshees show up deal devastating damage. Oops, my scouting Overlord didn't get far enough into the base before dying, so I never saw the Fusion Core -- 2 Battlecruisers casually fly in and wipe every single Queen I've made, plus several Sporecrawlers. And of course, even if I do have an overwhelming defense prepared, they can still one-shot my Queens and teleport out to safety for free. What's that, the 3-base Terran is starting to make Thors? Alright, Lings are apparently supposed to counter those. Nope, the Thors are being protected by Hellbats and Siege Tanks that vaporize all my Lings like a fart in the wind. Alright, I'm on 5-6 bases, I can make Brood Lords. Nope, the uLtImAtE Zerg air unit is actually just casually defeated by the Thors very easily because they SOMEHOW also have Tank-like range. The fact that Medivacs can transport EVERY TERRAN GROUND UNIT no matter its size at rocket speed is utterly insane. Units that take up more than one of the Medivac's 8 slots should slow it's movement speed. I'm honestly surprised you can't put the Terran's building in Medivacs.

And that brings me to the 2 Terran units I hate the most:

Cyclones: These just feel awful to play against. Not fun, not interesting, not exciting. They have way more range than your units, and they move way faster, and they can hit ground AND air, and they do an insane amount of damage, and they can deal that damage while moving. I feel like one of those qualities needs to be entirely removed from the Cyclone for it to make any sense as a unit.

Widow Mines: The holy grail of units that shouldn't exist in StarCraft. When the Terran makes Widow Mines, I either have to just make peace with randomly losing enormous amounts of lings, or I have to watch everywhere I go and move really carefully (NOT a luxury I have when I'm inside the cartoonishly huge range Tanks/Thors/Cyclones). Widow Mines are perhaps the most egregious unit to exist in StarCraft, because simple unit AI can wipe your army. I said before that I'm aware my skill level is too low to talk big about balance, but in this one specific case, I don't care if you're Serral, you're wrong if you think it's totally fine for the AI of a low-tier unit in an RTS to be powerful enough to wipe significant portions of army with zero micro or effort. In fact, Serral himself has lost quite a few extremely important games where Widow Mines simply killed too many of his units for him to have a chance. In this one particular case, I declare that you're flat-out wrong if you think that it makes sense for an idle unit (essentially static defense on crack) to be so powerful that 7K+ MMR pros lose their armies to it. That sort of power is something shouldn't exist in an RTS, or at least only be relegated to ultimate units. But no, you can produce them two at a time from the second building a Terran makes, and they cost very little. Zero effort for a huge threat. Zero-effort units that sit idle should either be very expensive and locked behind significant tech, or they shouldn't do enormous damage to ground AND air. I could grant that Widow Mines aren't overpowered on paper, but the counterplay costs attention and micro that even the pros don't always have the bandwidth for. They should never have been added to the game.

In conclusion, I'm not saying that these don't have counterplay or that they're necessarily overpowered. Obviously if they were insurmountable, there would be no such thing as pro Zerg/Protoss players. But what I am saying is that Terran is suspiciously loaded with scummy tactical utility that requires disproportionate effort/investment/counterplay to beat, and are just unfun to play against. I really dislike that the answer to a lot of Terran strats necessarily requires spellcasters (which are unwieldy for low-level players) or to catch them from multiple angles (which isn't a guarantee even for GM-level Zergs). Zerg and Protoss both have units that pose a significant threat even in small numbers, but those units are generally locked behind more expensive tech commitment (e.g., Archon drops, Lurkers) or simply come later in the game. Terran gains access to most of their units by default quite early in most builds, and a huge amount of their early/mid-game revolves around trying to deal massive damage with tiny amounts of units. I hate Terran. It's a scumbag race for scumbag players.

Which matchup(s) makes you want to rip your hair out?