UC Berkeley Starcraft Class, Week 1
Thursday, January 29, 2009 at 9:45PM 
A screenshot of how StarCraft looked early in development.Tonight I attended the much-talked-about StarCraft class at UC Berkeley as an observer. (Insert StarCraft joke about Observers.)
The main lecturer is the young Alan Feng. Mr. Feng is a physics student who says he's been playing StarCraft "for 2.5 years, 6 months on the pro level." He also had help leading the class from a guy named Yosh (I forget his real name, but I call people by their chosen names anyway), and a third guy who I only remember as Mumbling Guy. I would call Feng by his gaming name too, but I forgot what it was because he only said it once.
Feng and Yosh are an interesting contrast. Feng is endearingly highfalutin while Yosh is an old-timer (StarCraft-wise) who tells the young-uns how it used to be. Feng began the class this way:
There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.
There are not more than five primary colors, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.
There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of them yield more flavors than can ever be tasted.
In battle, there are not more than two methods of attack: the direct and the indirect; yet these two in combination give rise to an endless series of maneuvers.
--Sun Tzu
And he added:
In Starcraft, there are only three races, but more gameplay remaining than can be explored.
There was then a long stretch of administrative debris about notecards we were to turn in, about what percentage of the final grade the homework is worth, and other such banalities. Notably though, 40% of the final grade comes from the final project where students must attempt to make a new contribution to the StarCraft community in the form of an analysis of some part of the game. These final papers will be public and subject to peer review--no doubt incredibly merciless peer review, given the tone of most gaming communities.
Feng then gave us a short history lesson about the release of StarCraft. It was announced in 1995, though it didn't release until 1997. Feng showed us graphs and stats of how many people had computers back then, what power they were, how many had internet access, and so on. His point was that StarCraft had a dramatically larger chance for success in 1997 than it did in 1995, so their delay was fortuitous.
As an aside, I'll point out that this involved Microsoft Powerpoint slides. One student asked if the slides would be available and Feng said no, that the slides don't contain anything useful except pictures anyway. That's an interesting statement and he's right. I hope presenters will learn that Powerpoint slides are a generally terrible way of conveying information. Especially if they have terrible typography and blocky graphs as these did. (Apple Keynote can at least look nice.) But whatever, let's move on.
Yosh then gave us 20 or 25 minutes of reminiscing about the history of the best StarCraft players. Almost everyone he mentioned is Korean, of course. I felt I had something in common with Yosh as he told us he's been playing and following his game for 10 years now, competing in tournaments and trying to improve.
He explained how various players evolved or changed the game. Boxer's initial dominance gave hope for Terran players in the early days. In fact, when asked who in the room is a Terran player because of Boxer, several students raised their hands. (Nerdy joke: is Boxer overpowered in every game?) Apparently Boxer went to the army for 2 years, and although he didn't get to play as much there, he still did play and the army cadets created a special army StarCraft team, just so he could keep playing. When he returned to the game, he made up for his generally weaker game by becoming much more bold, and pulling off insane strategies that no one else would use, like a fake base in the middle of the map.
Yosh told us about the personalities of several players. One of them he said never smiles or frowns or makes any expression at all...except for the one in the picture he showed us. Another has bravado, another was extremely effeminate. Some were known for their micro-management skills, others for their creativity, others for their consistency. One top player is called "cheater Terran" because he always seems to have more units than you'd think he'd be able to at any given time. It seems that "every gaming community is a weird mirror image of every other gaming community."
After this walk down memory lane of Korean Starcraft champions, Yosh let Feng take over for the last leg of the lecture. Feng talked about the different kinds of resources in the game. There are raw resources, which he defines as those that the Starcraft game construct knows about. Minerals, gas, population limit, creep/pylon fields, energy (for casting psionic storm, etc). There are also physical resources, which he defines as things outside the game that exist in the physical world (perhaps a misnomer?). These are things like attention (arguably the most important one in StarCraft), APM: actions per minute (arguably the one that a supposed strategy game should NOT focus on at all), physical endurance, state of mind, knowledge of the game, analysis, etc. I asked him to add yomi to the list, the ability to read the opponent's mind. He did not know the term, but I had earlier given him my book, so I'm sure he will soon. Yes he said, ability to read the opponent is another resource to draw on that exists outside the game construct.
Then there are what Feng calls transformational resources. These are things you convert raw or physical resources into other resources. The most common one is simply your "army." You use your APM (clicking speed skills) along with minerals and gas and time, and you convert all that into units that compose your army. That army is capable of taking over territory or killing enemy units or defending a new expansions, etc.
Feng's point here is a good one. He's trying to get the students to think of the game as a big collection of resources and your decisions are about how to shift those resources around. It's easy to overlook how many resources are really involved in a decision, and if you overlook some, you aren't understanding the real implications of your decision. For example, if your population limit is 131/131, what do you do? As it stands, you cannot build more units. Should you build pylons? That means spending minerals and time. Should you attack with units you already have? That means spending units and possibly more of your attention resource. How long will it take the units to attack and trade with the enemy units? Did you scout enough to know what you'll be up against and what important thing you could attack?
Another example he gave was using raw resources to cover for a lack of physical resources. If you have very bad reaction time and you know this, then you are aware that in a surprise attack on your peons (resource gatherers), you might lose more than you really should. It might be worth it to spend minerals to build some cannons back there so that less depends on your slower reaction time. It's a tradeoff that might be worth it depending on your particular play skills.
The last example he gave was that of defending a choke point. If you control a choke point and put some cannons near it, but the enemy does not attack there, what have you spent and what have you gained? You spent time and minerals of course, but Feng was saying we shouldn't be so hasty in saying that we gained nothing. We did gain some resources here. If there is a pylon there, we increased our population limit. We also have vision to that part of the map. That means we have slightly better overall information about where the enemy is (or isn't, in this case). We prevented the enemy from scouting here, so the enemy has a slightly worse mental picture of the map. We control some territory that might not otherwise control (whatever is behind the choke point). So really there are a lot of resources to consider here, even in this very simple example where no one even attacked anyone.
And that was it for week one. A class about StarCraft at UC Berkeley.
--Sirlin
Reader Comments (238)
"No "have to be a ranked player in Dune 2 to make any statement about Dune 2" fallacy"
You often seem to assume this is what's meant when people mean you need to gain a basic working knowledge from playing the game. It's apparent from your comments that your view is almost entirely theoretical and not linked to experience of using the mechanics. If you were to use them more you would at least see, if not agree with, how the demands of APM and view shifting add to the game. It is certainly a question of degree, any action can be made arbitrarily difficult or easy (100 clicks to make one unit or the game plays itself from a script you wrote before hand), but what's being discussed is of a savage degree, the proposed UI changes will have a number of major effects that impact design and are not a little step away from SC's current level of interaction cost. 'Smart' casters for example inevitably lead to Psi storm getting nerfed as it's so much easier to spam. This devastates the tactical depth of the game and the strategy you're talking about.
I never thought of Starcraft as a deep strategic game until I was fortunate enough to watch people with decent APM battle it out in a LAN cafe. They were fast enough to play Starcraft as a STRATEGY game, with all that entails - tactical maneuvers, multi-front combat, decisions based on economy. After the match, I told them their version of Starcraft looked way more fun than the macro-dominated noobfest I had been playing, and that's when they proceeded to enlighten me about APM.
"It seems like most of anti-APM arguments in these comments are formulated around this false assumption that APM gives you a gigantic advantage. This is not true at all."
-- It is absolutely true. In all RTS games, more advanced strategies drain more APM and require higher burst APM. Players who lack the required APM can't execute those strategies at 100%; sometimes, they can't execute them at all.
APM is also a measure of how MANY strategies you can execute. If you decide to go 5 hatch hydra, for example, 45 APM will be tied up in building your army. If you decide to use move-stop-move to take potshots at an approaching enemy, that ties up 90 APM (or whatever). A 100 APM player cannot perfectly execute both of these otherwise nonconflicting strategies simultaneously. A 150 APM player can. A 200 APM player can do these, plus a third strategy. Look at it this way and you'll have to agree that the advantage higher APM provides is unquestionable. There are diminishing returns, but I don't believe you hit them until at least 200 APM.
Starcraft's "problem" is that its interface tips the APM vs. strategy balance so strongly in favor of APM. If it took 15 APM to go 5 hatch hydra and 40 APM to do move-stop-move, a 100 APM player would be able to perfectly execute three strategies instead of one. This is the balance modern RTS games strive for; higher APM still provides an advantage, but players reach the level of diminishing returns much faster.
There have been arguments put forth that APM is more of a product of mental ability than physical dexterity. This school postulates that the decisions made by the player are independent of the interface under which he operates: the 100 APM Starcraft player would be a 50 APM player in a game where APM was twice as productive. While this may be true for some players, it was definitely not true for me - the extra APM freed by the good UI was APM I immediately put into harassment and other strategies. At long last, I was finally playing the kind of tactical game I'd seen played in the LAN cafe, and I loved it. All it took was a moderate increase in APM, from 50 to 90, and a good UI.
It's a shame I never got to experience that with Starcraft, but here's to Starcraft 2.
Man :
You've quoted me. Yet to fail to see what I was defending. Sirlin used the numbers 300apm to 400apm as a huge advantage. If you look at my prior posts I have said that there are diminishing returns on APM. Of course you need a certain amount of actions to play the game. That's just entry level. Almost like saying you need to be this high to ride this ride. You can try to play it, but it's just a different game. Even Starcraft 2 will have an APM requirement. You can't play it with 1 apm [since you enjoy using the low extremes].
Unent, what I was trying to say was that going from 50 to 100 is waaaaaay more significant than going from 350 to 400. I'm unsure if you mean "Player differentation" as stylistic or skill level but I don't see how what I was saying changes the latter.. I'm not saying that it's completely useless - ie if you look at Bisu play PvZ you'll see he is literally *all over the map*, like when he was harassing By.Great's drones with zealots in proleague the other day, simultaneously attacking at the zerg nat, second nat AND main, and microing all of them to kill drones.
Even if the gains are small they are still gains so it's still a worthwhile effort.
I wouldn't say playstyles depend on APM (although if you want to play like Bisu you should probably be prepared to work on being at least somewhat fast), although certain styles are certainly more popular among faster players I'd think.
So it's more a question of what you choose to use your APM rather than some arbitrary number attached to each style.. IE BoxeR and Oov, same APM but choose to use it completely differently.
Hello Sirlin
I've read a fair bit of your posts on Game Design. I've recently made my first blog in regards to Competitive Gamign and skill, But i'm discussing it more in a Roleplaying game sense, such as World of Warcraft or Guild Wars, since that was where i made the blog. I think you might find it interesting as i think i have a similiar mindset to yourself, However i find RPGs to be a really good concept for a competitive platform, the implementation is just incredibly hard. The article does cater more to a World of warcraft player than just any gamer though.
Anyways here's my article, http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/The-Noob-Syndrome/The-Noob-Syndrome. I'm planning to make a blog on "Role-playing games" as a Competitive Platform sometimes, which will appeal to a wider audience. RPG games are more lenient to "Latency" and "Ping" problems that utterly destroys a Fighter Game, and makes FPSes sub-par to play on.
FA since you seem to be able to answer things in a straight forward manner, I'll ask you something. Why do you think that the hypothetical 250APM capped game would not allow players to "keep improving all the time"? StarCraft seems so complicated and gives so many ways to express yourself, that you would indeed be able to keep improving in the theoretical 250APM game. If that isn't true, it seems so sad of thing for the game. Do you really think the only worthwhile advancements in StarCraft take place at above 250APM? And further, do you think there would be no metagame at 250, no push to keep getting better and better? Of course there wouldn't be a push to play at higher and higher APM, by definition, but I'm saying you think there would be no push to get better and better? If you stayed at that speed, the game is simply too shallow to continue playing? I'm very surprised you would say this.
Also With the debate of RTS, where it favours repetitive actions over how can you say it Reasonable skill for competition, i feel as if RTS requires too much APM and is why i've strayed from that area and have been looking at Role-playing games such as Guild Wars, Fury and World of Warcraft. The Latter one is quite anti-competitive in nature though.
I Think that RPGs provide a simple enough interface to game that a Competitor can focus on Winning, Strategy and tactics. Every action has a visible effect, some invisible such as yomi which gives depth to a game, but does not appeal to an audience unless they're more experienced, or a situation is analyzed.
The problem with RTS and other things are the amount of work in which you need to do per second. I mean it'd be okay to focus on repetitive action and control to express yourself, but don't you think the requirement of repetitive action over outsmarting, outthinking your opponent is too lobsided.
@FA
"Even if the gains are small they are still gains so it's still a worthwhile effort."
Look at Mans post. He describes that for him APM was more worthwile than Strategy until he hit 200 APM.
That also matches with your APM Numbers. I interprete this as that only at 200 + APM the Value of each additional APM starts to be less than the value of each "additional Strategy".
For a Strategy game I expect Strategy to be worthwhile (ergo APM returns are less than Strategy advantages) at about the time I mastered the Interface/basic rules.
I think it's useful to think in terms of decisions per minute (DPM) instead of actions per minute (APM). Let's just assume that Starcraft is meant to be played in a very fast manner, and players like to be able to play very fast and have an advantage that way. Improving the UI doesn't somehow force players to slow down. Players who played at 200 APM before can still play at 200 APM with a better UI, only instead of doing 80 DPM he is doing 140 DPM. (Just throwing in some arbitrary numbers.) Same mechanical speed in clicks and key presses, but more decisions being made and more interesting things happening on the screen. Shouldn't this make the game MORE intense, not less?
Of course it is not a good idea to change the existing version of SC since everyone who still plays it is used to the way it already is, and that the game has been balanced for years around the primitive UI. You can't just change the UI without re-examining the rest of the game, and in any case you'll piss off a lot of fans any way. But you can apply this concept to new games, and that's what Blizzard is doing with SC2 any way.
Seriously I think all this argument is because people don't agree on what type of game it should be. For example, what if guitar hero UI was improved so that you didn't need to press a button at all, and it would do all the notes on its own?
Some people want a game that tends towards strategy, some people want one that tends towards action. That's totally fine.
This is a simple thing Though. Nobody makes a UI so it requires more finesse control to do something, you could otherwise do with a repetitive script. Now if the script takes away from repetitive action then that would be something. The point of a UI is so we can make what we want to "happen", happen within the confines of the game. The problem if you provide too much of this is either A, the game starts playing for you, if you gave it "AI to say micromanage your units if you forgot about them. Also, another problem is that, Humans may be able to control the units better than AI and Pathing provide.
You have to view the UI as a system that converts "Your actions", into actions on screen. If the UI could "read your mind" and this "UI" was available to everyone then we would probably use this UI. However the best input system atm or atleast that i'm aware of is "Keyboard" and "Mouse" and "Joystick". If you want a person to have as much control, because this "control", finesse or whatever issue is what you call "skill", then why not stick to a Mouse on 100000 sensitivity or an XBOX controller. They're harder to use, require more skill to use them as effective as other input systems.
Sirlin, no that's not what I meant to say, I was probably not clear: I think there wouldn't be room to improve MECHANICALLY (ie the APM side) if you put a cap on it. So we'd have everyone being equal in mechanics, which is fine if the game is deep enough - I'd just rather that that game was called something other than Starcraft 2.
There are so many RTS games out there, and they all strive towards being less dependant on mechanics, but I have always liked the mechanical side, ever since I first saw first person vods of Korean pros back in 2002~
Unent, I don't think it's true. With how developed SC is today, I guess it might be more true than it used to be, but I'll use the example of Fisheye again:
100 apm, and one of the very best players outside Korea. In PvP and PvT he was certainly strong enough to compete with Korean pros even. Saying you need 200 apm to be able to play SC the way it should be played (like Man is saying) is, I believe, very wrong - a 100 is probably more like it.
Another example is Testie - 150~ APM and the best non-korean between 2006-2007~.
How did they win vs people with twice their APM (at least)? By having a solid understanding of the game I would assume.
One more thing, Man uses APM slightly incorrectly - if you have 100 apm it's your average throughout the game, you may peak at a much higher number - hence you are pretty much able to do all those things he mentioned as long as you have it in you to go slightly faster than that (which from my own experience sounds reasonable, at 200 apm I usually peak around 300, and when I was a 100 apm player I peaked higher than that - although it was so long ago I don't remember what the peak was).
Chaos, this is basically the conclusion I and many others have come to as well. The actions lost with the update of the UI should be replaced by more thoughtful actions whenever possible.
Neber, isn't your last example a little bit like asking why they don't use bigger bats in baseball since it'd be easier to hit the ball.. :)?
I think I prefer having the mouse/keyboard setup. Don't get me wrong, a mind-controlled game would be fun, and we could probably make some pretty cool games around that concept.. But I wouldn't want to implement that UI for every game, just as most ball sports use different bats/raquets/clubs.
Garcia, I agree completely - I guess it makes SC a RTS/Action/Arcade hybrid but that's fine for me.
Ah, something I should probably add - I think it's entirely possible that the importance of APM varies from race to race.. Many of the low APM Players that were among the best in Europe/the US in the past, were Protoss players. I was a toss player too, so maybe my view on APM is skewed by this (although I did play a lot of Terran as well, and play Terran when I play for fun nowadays - but I'm already pretty fast from having played so long so my perspective is different).
The minimum APM for high level for TvZ is probably a LOT higher than the minimum APM for high level PvT. Actually, not even probably - it 100% is :) TvT and TvP you can get away with lower APM and more positional play I think.
Zerg matchups I dunno, need faster hands than toss at leas tho :)
Well I think FA explained it pretty well. The issue is the relative value of Strategy vs. Mechanics.
Or, If I want to become better asap how should my training scedule look? 50% "Strategy" (Maybe watching replays, read forums...) 50% "Mechanics" (Practice against the computer, Micro-Maps, increase APM...)?
Isn´t it one issue in the Class how the ratio actually is in SC(:BW)? It´s not fixed for the whole game, as FA mentioned there is quite a difference depending on Race/Matchup.
It would be interesting to find out what a pro at 100APM DOESN´T do - what kind of mechanical advantage is negated by Strategy when a 100APM Player wins against a 300APM Player?
No one here argues that SC2 should be 100%/0% of one thing or the other (yet that comes up as straw man all the time).
I´m more in the Strategy 70% / Mechanics 30% region - that is a opinion.
Warning that this is a slight digression from the main point of contention.
Not particularly directed at FA, but I am curious what you think about it:
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned about the theoretical 250 APM cap propsed by Sirlin that I think would be very interesting is that there is still lots of room for mechanical improvement; this would be, however, an improvement of EFFICIENCY rather than raw SPEED. Players might have to work out WHICH moves are worth making with such a cap.
I'm not exactly sure I'd like that in every game, as without the proper depth level to support evolution of strategic thought, the game might devolve towards "solving" the best possible moves to make with your limited 250 per minute (though I think 250 is likely a high enough number that it should be plenty of room on the ceiling for USEFUL moves that hardly anyone would be breaking it unless they were unnecessarily hyperactive.)
This game would seem to be Real Time, but in some ways it's a bit turn based as actions become somewhat of a limited resource. My question to the competitive SC crowd is, would you be interested in such a concept in a game (doesn't have to be "tainting" the SC we know you love)? Would this add another worthwhile dynamic to a game? I can't imagine it would be "too slow", as it's a pretty high number, but then again I don't know what too slow is for your community very well.
In the end the game is still going to have an APM requirement. Thinking about what type of game Starcraft II is going to be, all APM is going to be focused on controlling your units since your eyes never leave the battle. Your high apm will benefit you because you will be forced to control multiple battles at once. Forcing perfect harrassment and perfect micro on multiple fronts, or at least strive for perfect.
Attentions and actions is inevitably going to be a valuable asset to Starcraft. Let us have our game, we want some of our attention forced to be spent on making units. It forces you to do more with less in all battles and make more decisions. Everyone should be in favor of a higher skill ceiling. If you want things to control themselves go watch a movie. If you want a strategy game where you don't need physical talent, play Go.
Starcraft is not a boardgame, not an RPG, not an RTS. Starcraft is Starcraft.
FA explained things well. NoAPM however fell back on straw man rhetoric. "If you want things to control themselves, go play a movie" is not a real answer to anything people are saying. Likewise, "if you want a strategy game where you don't need physical talent, play Go" seems to ignore that we've said probably over 20 times now that playing at a pretty fast speed adds interesting time pressure and adrenaline situations. Finally, "everyone should be in favor of a higher skill ceiling" is vacuously true. Everyone who has posted here agrees with that, it's just that we don't agree on what "skill" means. Earlier examples show that you can add "skill tests" by adding a tennis ball juggling or cake baking mechanic, but those aren't really the "skills" that should be important.
Anyway, why spend time responding to that nonsense when FA can actually make a real point in reasonable way. FA your answer is good, but it still raises another question. Wouldn't there still be mechanics development in the theoretical game? I mean, the arbitrarily chosen number 250 is pretty high. There are lots of difficult combat micro situations that some expert player CAN pull off at that speed and others (even pros) cannot. (Right?) Yeah, yeah I know Street Fighter is a different game, but if you simply capped action speed at a pretty high level, that actually would do nothing to stop mechanics development. Really, really difficult combos would still remain.
I see that even if you agreed completely with that, even if you said yeah strategy development AND mechanics development would still occur, that you'd also say you simply prefer the balance of strategy and "fast clicking" (to use an inflammatory term, sorry!) as it is. I still think it's weird that you don't prefer it dialed more toward strategy considering it looks like that's possible without ruining mechanics at all.
It looks like you are already in complete agreement on the low end of the APM spectrum though. Meaning, a UI that gets rid of pointless stuff so beginners can get to the strategic part of the game faster. As you said, experts can just replace the old "empty clicks" with even more "real decision clicks" so it seems that everyone wins there. I'm not sure what those decision clicks would be in the actual StarCraft 2, but possibly it's combat micro on multiple fronts.
http://www.scforall.com/sctv/sc_tv01.asp?mNum=s03&movNum=246
Decent discussion. Take a couple of minutes of your time and listen.