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)
> If so, you're probably pretty impressed with that clip, which is basically some
> of the best usage of that spell ever seen.
Honestly, the spell spam was pretty much what I would have expected to be typical from a good psi storm user. My impression is that the clip starts _after_ the interesting stuff already transpired, leaving us to wonder what circumstances transpired to allow the protoss player to launch an attack (with his spellcasters adequately placed) when the majority of the tanks were unsieged and without mine support.
Which do you find more interesting?
1. That the protoss player had the good timing (or good planning or good luck, as the case may be) to capitalize on the opening? And maybe even used the recall threat to force the terran player to be hasty, rather than making a well-disciplined push?
2. Upon catching his opponent with his pants down, he had the manual dexterity needed to actually deliver an attack?
So I keep seeing chess bandied about. Let me introduce a terms here:
Let's call the number of positions (usually opening positions) that the player is familiar with as Positions Per Brain (PPB). A quite fundamental tenet of chess is that past a certain point (looking at the top Grandmasters in the world), having a very high PPB. For example Magnus Carlsen, the #2 or #3 ranked player, has played almost every opening competitively, as opposed to top players 50 years ago. Carlsen has a much higher PPB.
as an immediate interrupt right here I'm going to answer people that say that opening theory is irrelevant and that the better player wins long term in chess -- your argument is besides the point. I'm talking about the top GMs in the world. At this level, opening theory and preparation is a large facet of the game.
So for the sake of this post, I'm going to rename chess to Chess with UNBOUNDED MAXIMUM USEFUL PPB (Chess-MAX-PPB)
I'm now going to pardoy this chess-with-baking-a-cake argument.
Why are we the servants of PPB players? There's plenty of otherwise very talented chess players (Morphy) that don't have crazy high absurd PPB. Why be slaves to high PPB players and audiences that enjoy PPB? High PPB might as well be baking a cake or juggling tennis balls. Who cares how high a player's PPB is, and why make this a MAXIMUM UNBOUNDED PPB game?
Now there is actually an answer to my parody-argument. This argument has actually been made before by Fischer, who created a variant of chess where the starting position is randomly generated, to avoid the need for high PPB players. I made up the term PPB to make it clear I was making an analogy to APM, but Fischer did invent this variant for this reason.
But the variant did not take hold, and it's a (somewhat popular) side variant, and not taken seriously by the real chess world.
Great discussion here. As usual I agree with Sirlin and Co., but it is for purely selfish reasons. I want to be able to compete in starcraft 2. I cannot do that if I have to do 200 APM because I 1) cannot maintain 200 APM; and 2) do not have the time or inherent raw ability to develop that skill.
Starcraft is a hybrid game as it stands. Its deceptive, but just as in basketball or football you need physical ability to compete at the highest level. I wish it wasn't that way and I do not think it would harm the game if it wasn't.
Yes, I am familiar with SC. It's been several years since I've played it regularly, but I still watch VODs of professional matches on a regular basis.
The question is intentionally silly. It has to be in order to force people to think about what they really consider valuable for a spectator-friendly game.
The point is that a spectator unfamiliar with Dune 2 would be absolutely clueless what the commotion was about. The whole thing would look very simple to him, and he would be right - it is a simple thing to attack a target with five of your units. The execution of it may not be simple, but most people who enjoy spectating video games enjoy watching the game itself more than how the players interact with it. If a spectator who has just discovered the game cannot understand why it's such a big deal to do something like that, then he will begin to think that there's some part of the game that he doesn't understand (strategically). That kind of game is not spectator-friendly.
this whole idea that APM and dexterity adds nothing to the strategy of the game is flawed. You don't get 400 APM just by having "skill," these players practice all the specific strategies they plan on using for a week+ before the big games.
As a result, forcing an opponent out of their groove by using a strategy that forces your opponent into a situation for which you have better prepared for gives you advantages in APM, attention, valuation, basically every other physical resource against a player with whom you would normally be evenly matched physical resource-wise. Watch the match where boxer bunker rush yellow three times in a row for an example of this (shouldn't be hard to find on youtube).
Because of this dynamic, a lot of strategies become viable that would not be if you got rid of all the unnecessary clicks. Don't get me wrong, I would rather PLAY a casual-friendly version of starcraft, but I would rather WATCH progamers play an APM intensive version.
Unfortunately this entertaining mechanic does come at a price. When progamers are participating in multiple tournaments (as many do), an unwelcome advantage goes to the player who has only one tough fight in a given week, but is matched up against a player who has to split his practice time in preparation for two important matches.
It should also be noted that coaches for pro starcraft teams recruit players based on mechanics and not on their strategies at all, claiming that strategy is easy to teach, while mechanics are not. not surprising since most of the strategy has to be ironed out before the game starts for the aforementioned reasons.
If incredibly high APM is an impressive skill, why don't people enjoy watching button clicking tournaments? If doing an old-school SPD is such an impressive skill, why don't people just compete to see who can do more 360 motions on a joystick in a timed race?
steve: forcing an opponent out of his grove and shifting the game into areas you are more familiar with happens in Chess, Street Fighter, and probably every competitive game. It is a concept unrelated to APM and whenever you're able to do it, you have many advantages over the opponent.
It should also be noted that for coaches of Chess-With-Baking-Cakes and StarCraft3-With-Tennis-Balls recruit players based on cake baking and juggling, claiming that Chess and StarCraft strategy are easy to teach, while gourmet cooking and juggling skills are not. But you see, that's the problem...
I'm surprised you'd bring up a point steve. What you're really saying is that fast-clicking is so important that coaches recruit based on it, so when we ask "how important is strategy vs APM in StarCraft?" you're saying "almost all APM, strategy can be taught." That is a problem, don't you think? Imagine if Chess were shifted so far toward cake baking that Chess coaches only recruited based on that. Then we have to ask WHY are we playing a game so much about cake/tennis balls/APM?
Crackbone: good question. It sounds like 1p clicking exhibitions and 360 SPD races would have a huge audience. Maybe we could call them part of the "real-time strategy" genre?
I'm still waiting for anyone to answer Phantom's question about Dune 2. Wouldn't StarCraft with an even more cumbersome and badly designed interface be even better? Imagine how impressive it would be when you saw a pro player attack with 5 units. It would add so much depth because he'd have to choose between that and building more units (unless he plays at 400APM, then he gets to ignore the choice and do both).
Sorry for being increasingly snarky about this. I don't know how else to respond to some of these things.
Phantom: Starcraft is spectator friendly enough for me. If you expect to enjoy watching a game without understanding it, try reality TV. The point of any game is that is has certain rules and mechanics, that you NEED to understand before you can make any judgments about it.
Hurkyl: Your comment displays exactly what i'm talking about. You have little to no experience with the game, so you aren't impressed.
The Dune 2 question: Starcraft is complex enough as it is; the meta game is still changing constantly, and the pros now are 5 times better than they were 5 years ago. Making it more complicated wouldn't make a difference in the long run. You are drawing a false dichotomy.
*As long as a game is limited by the players' skill, it will remain competitive*
Read that line again, slowly.
Dumbing down a game, which is what you're all suggesting, means the game limits the player. Then the game become rock, paper, scissors.
Shouldn't all spells in RTS games be autocast? Why not just have workers build automatically? Well why not have your whole army build automatically? It would eliminate all that pesky clicking. Actually, it would be easy enough for the AI to determine when to attack and when to retreat, should that be taken away from the players too? That way players wouldn't have to be obsessed with APM and could just use the time to knit a blanket.
No one is talking about dumbing a game down. We are talking about smartening it up. That's what happens when you commit fully to the idea that strategy matters and measuring cake-baking, tennis ball juggling, or APM skills do not.
Is Street Fighter "dumbed down" now that dragon punches are easier? No, it's smartened up. If your decision is to dragon punch (that's a strategic decision that involves choosing a move and choosing which 1/60th of a second to do it) then you are better able to execute that decision. Putting a barrier in place to make the move artificially hard dumbs the game down and gets in the way of strategy. Likewise, any intentionally bad interface does that. It dumbs the game down to the level of a physical sport. If you're looking for a dumbed down game (one that is based on APM and execution barriers) then fine, that's your preference, but don't pretend that it's the smartened up version.
First off I want to take up complaints against the concept of an unbounded maximum APM. That simply doesn't exist. There's both a physical maximum APM based on a maximum speed of input processing both by hardware and software (in this case the OS and SC). Second, and the more relevant boundry, is that at some point in any RTS you're going to be doing everything as fast as you can or as fast as is relevant. Move speeds, attack animations, unit population limits, are going to give some upper limit. For Starcraft this limit is probably closer to 500, 600, or 700 APM peaks moreso than anything human obtainable but there is a limit.
While some people are still debating the whole merits of not reducing APM I think many of us are more in a agreement that there should be a target 'max APM' in place where you stop really getting new benefits for going faster. At this point I'm more interested in what levels of APM this should be at. Obviously you can lower APM as low as you want but I'm interesting in what we can push towards the upper end (I think there's room for games of both ends of the APM spectrum). Now the goal is to find an APM that provides fast-paced gameplay and maintains the excitement of split-second decisions and many things going on at once. So what kind of target APM can we think as a good 'max APM' goal?
Personally I think the majority of APM is mental rather than physical. Type out the word 'feared'... go ahead... How long did that take you? Probably under 2 seconds right, most likely 1sec or less. If you can type out a word like that then you're ALREADY operating at 300APM with 1 hand. Now that's a series of action with no decisions involved. Your Mouse Accuracy and left-handed keyboard speeds are all things that we can test the physical limits for outside of the game and I'm willing to wager that when you remove the decision making process the 'APMs' achievable by most people are going to already be up around what we expect from pro-SC players (300-400+) for almost any player comfortable with the input devices. Now because we DO have to make decisions and decisions take time and some actions require longer periods of time (specifically mouse aiming) this is a horrible upper limit for max APM. The point is that I believe that most players who lack APM lack APM as a result of not being mentally prepared to achieve those types of speeds. It's not something that's a physical limitation until very high levels of APM.
The issue limiting most players APM are going to be situations like the follow. Lets say player A sets out to do something their thought process might be like this:
I want to make 3 units -> I need to select my barracks -> I need to push 5 to select my barracks -> *player pushes 5 -> I need to hit q 3 times to build the unit I want -> *player hits q 3 times*
Each step in that proces takes time and has a delay. Pro players or top end gamers at an RTS essentially have brains that don't work like this, the system is so wired into their brains that they skip all of the mental delays along the way. A pro player will have a process like:
I want to make 3 units -> *push 5* -> *push q*x3
I know for me at least this is how it always how it seems to work. Whenever I operate at my highest APM levels I realize (and if I realize while going fast it completely stops my speed) that I'm not actually thinking at the same level while playing so fast. When new to an RTS game or not playing so much 'in the zone' I have a clear thought process on low level mechanics. When playing 'in the zone' at high speeds my brain has completely shut off thought on these low level mechanics and I just make them happen while thinking through the higher level portions of the game.
The point of the long aside is that players WILL improve their APM over time (all the way from 40 up to 200+) if they decide they want to master the game. It's by and large a natural extension of how comfortable they are with the decisions they have to make and how many decisions they can see need to be made. Not so much that they're making the proper choice for each decision but that they know at least which ones are available. So to bring this long-winded post back around given that I really think most APM is mental-capped and not physical I personally think a good target max-APM would be around the 200-250 mark for a 'fast paced' RTS game but I'm curious what other people would believe is a good level. This is obviously assuming a minimal amount of useless APM filler.
I completely agree with Heathen here.
Sirlin's cake baking/tennis ball juggling = APM is completely wrong because APM is an "activity" that measures how quickly a Starcraft player can perform actions IN STARCRAFT. baking a cake doesn't have anything to do with chess.
Sirlin seems to think that smartening a game up involves letting the player do anything he pleases with ease... essentially, all the tools are laid out for the player and he should be able to use any of them at any time because this would make for a more strategic game. This is true for a turn base game when every decision can be weighed out, but for a real time strategy game, there is a reason why certain tools are harder to use (require more APM). That reason being, the desired outcome would be fantastic toward you winning the game. A perfect example is Jangbi's amazing psi-storm posted in Heathen's youtube link. This excellent display of storming is VERY hard to do, but if you can pull it off, the results are excellent.
Sirlin "rebalancing" Street Fighter and making Dragon Punches easier could very well be dumbing down the game. Perhaps Dragon Punches were designed by the original game developers to be somewhat difficult to execute, but yield powerful results. This is the same as Jangbi's psionic storms... something that should be hard to do, but yield powerful results.
I realize that most people's complaints about APM regard base management and production. However, I believe that building a strong economy and producing from several hatcheries was a tactical decision the player had to make, and in making that decision, he also had to consider the attention it would require (and thus the attention it would take away from micro managing his army). This type of "macro" gameplay is something difficult to execute properly (just like jangbi's psionic storm) but if executed properly, also yield powerful results. Base management should NOT be automated because it's very much a part of Starcraft, just like army micromanagement.
I realize I JUST submitted a post, but in reading Sirlin's new post, I can't help but respond immediately.
Sirlin wrote "If you're looking for a dumbed down game (one that is based on APM and execution barriers) then fine, that's your preference, but don't pretend that it's the smartened up version."
Sirlin took the words out of my mouth, but with the exact WRONG argument. Starcraft has these APM and execution barriers because they NEED to be there to balance the damn game. Jangbi's Psi Storm "Carpet" and Julyzerg's godly mutalisk micro NEED to have these execution barriers because if they didn't, they would be overpowered. Similarly, the new zerg player 815 playstyle is one with near perfect macro, which is something that can only be accomplished if you can pass the necessary "execution barrier." These are all styles and strategies implemented by the player because it was their own strategic decision. If you were to remove the execution barriers from these examples, Starcraft would become a very boring game indeed.
Also, having these execution barriers also makes the game more exciting to watch. If Starcraft was a turn based game, then yes, i agree, the execution barriers should be removed. But, it's not! Starcraft is an RTS.
I'm afraid I, too, take argument with Heathen's words here
No one is talking about "who can write the best SC-playing AI script here" (Although I personally might find that an interesting diversion of a competition). I'd rather play the game live like most anyone would. It isn't about automation of *STRATEGIC DECISIONS*. It's about EASE of performance. It's about automating the mundane, repeated actions that are a part of every game NO MATTER WHAT the strategic circumstances. MBS and Automine-like actions. Making all spells autocast and massive build orders "1-click and forget" is automating reactionary decisions you would make strategically. This is a gross simplification I was hoping no one would go to as it's missing the discussion entirely.
If your opinion of SC is that removing the thousands of clicks and keystrokes, the "hoops" or "barriers" that could be avoided by a better UI, would boil the game down to rock-paper-scissors, it would seem that either A) You have an extremely low opinion of your game as a strategic battle, or B) You really do value something else entirely. It would follow logically from such a statement that you want to play something like a glorified version of IIDX or DDR/Stepmania where we "see who can click the fastest accurately while dividing their attention across multiple areas/screens" or something of the sort. If that is your personal preference, I wish you the best in generating interest in such a competitive community; I'd certainly be entertained occasionally by such a contest.
While seemingly silly, I don't think it could put it any more plainly than Sirlin's cake & tennis ball analogies. His argument is for his opinion of what makes video games great, his personal preference, which is that a mind game first with performance of actions thrown in to make it real-time and intensify it beyond the realm of pure strategy i.e. Go Chess etc. is much more interesting to watch, play, and wax intellectual about. I have to say I wholeheartedly agree.
Lore, again more wrong ideas there. Should it be difficult to psi storm an entire fleet of siege tanks? Yes. If you are able to pull off this very difficult maneuver, should you be rewarded (by being able to kill the tanks)? Yes. It does not logically follow from that that we need the difficulty to come from the fast clicking. It can (and already does?) come from the nature of having to be in range with Templars. Templars that need protection, that need to sneak up to even attempt this. There are many in-game reasons why such a thing is difficult that are unrelated to playing at 400APM.
Your other wrong ideas is that "maybe it turns out Street Fighter is shallower with easy motions." It's not even theoretical anymore. The game is out, it's good, people like it, and removing execution barriers really did make it a better game. We don't have to wonder about it. I think Street Fighter players will show up an actually laugh at you if you try to argue that the harder motions in ST would be better for the game in HD Remix.
And yet again, there's this false dichotomy that says I have to play a turn-based game to get strategy. I don't want to play a turn-based game, I want to play a "real-time strategy game." That means that playing fast is expected, but playing "faster than fast" gives no strategic advantage. For example, Puzzle Fighter requires you to play at a certain APM to even be playing the game at a competitive level. Can you play faster than that speed? Yes a little bit. But if you try to play very much faster, you soon run into a wall because the game's design simply doesn't support playing 2x or 3x faster or something. There is an upper bound. I actually think the upper bound is slightly too high and the game of Puzzle Fighter just slightly tips more toward speed than strategy than it should, but it's close to right and in the right ballpark at least.
I don't think the PSI storm is a good example of something that shows having high APM is needed for hard and easy strategies to make the game work. How is casting psi-storm requiring useless APM just to execute? Lets say Starcraft had smart casting. Would that reduce the depth of such a move or the risk of it at all? It's still difficult to pull off, the Templars need to be positioned properly and the psi-storms need to be aimed properly as well. On top of that the Templars are a large investment and quite fragile. The riskiness and difficulty of the move has nothing to do with the APM involved by rather in several other strategic factors.
Sirlin wrote: "Lore, again more wrong ideas there. Should it be difficult to psi storm an entire fleet of siege tanks? Yes. If you are able to pull off this very difficult maneuver, should you be rewarded (by being able to kill the tanks)? Yes. It does not logically follow from that that we need the difficulty to come from the fast clicking. It can (and already does?) come from the nature of having to be in range with Templars. Templars that need protection, that need to sneak up to even attempt this. There are many in-game reasons why such a thing is difficult that are unrelated to playing at 400APM"
I'm not sure where you want the difficulty to come from then if not from fast clicking. You say it should come from the nature of having to be in range, needing protection. How do you propose to make psi storming the entire tank battalion a difficult task then if not from needing to act and click quickly? Are you arguing that storming the tank squad should be a 1/60th second decision for ALL players regardless of their APM? Or should it be longer based on the results? No, I believe the players who trained to play more quickly and make decision more quickly should be rewarded with the ability to perform these tasks faster than other players who didn't train as hard. Once again, if you think that all players, even if they had amputated hands should be able to play Starcraft just as fast as Jangbi, I'd have to say that you are wrong and your idea should only work in turn based games.
Another misconception that people in this forum have is that they think the magic number for pro starcraft is 400 APM.. but it really isn't. As i posted before, Savior plays with roughly 250 APM and he still mops the floor with players who play at 400 APM. And 250 isn't impossible to achieve for most people who are serious about Starcraft.
Sirlin, I think you might be right about your SF HD Remix, but as someone posted earlier, the game itself is limited by frame rate and by the fact that you are only controlling a single character at a time. I dare say that you are treading unfamiliar ground when you try to apply the same re-balance designs to Starcraft because I honestly don't think you've played very much of it.
Logo brings up something important to make a distinction about here.
Playing "in the zone" as you put it is not what I personally am against (and I think the Unbounded MUAPM crowd would be in agreement). I think that's definitely a good thing, that the mechanics should be second nature to a player and that higher-level strategic decisions should take center stage of the fast-paced process that occurs in one's mind whilst playing any game in real time, be it positioning or weapon selection or move progression or prediction in any FPS/Fighting/RTS/(Your Genre Choice) game. I'm also not against these motions needing to happen quickly; I personally enjoy the feeling of being faster than someone else, be it thinking faster or physically performing faster, and I think to some extent rewarding quickness should factor into the game.
The distinction here is *HOW MUCH FASTER* and *FOR WHAT REASONS*. I think the powerhouse SC player who can *THINK* of splitting his attention across economy/infrastructure, scouting, and battle should be advantaged. But it should be because he can THINK all those things at once, not because he's programmed himself over countless hours to memorize hundreds of different hotkey combinations and can perform a mundane task everyone would perform (i.e. building three marines at 5 scattered barracks) faster than everyone else. This is what I think most everyone in the gaming community knows as an "overly steep learning curve."
Now, it's true that it's easier to pick up and "play" SC than SF if you're not "physically skilled". I'll be the first to admit for the majority of my adolescence I couldn't consistently perform over 75% of the motions required in SF (half circles, full circles, dragon punches, charge back-forwards and down-ups) but could definitely perform every action (albeit slowly) in SC. But I wasn't really "playing the game" as Sirlin states in his many articles; I was a scrub. I couldn't hope to learn the necessary amount of keystrokes in the time I had to play SC. So while I could "pick up and play" SC b/c I knew how to type and click a mouse, I couldn't "play" it at all. And this isn't one of those "minute to learn, lifetime to master" types of lack of mastering in the theoretical sense; if the game were simply easier to use by ways of a better UI, I would have had sufficient time to become a much more competitive player, would have liked the game better, and would have (I would hope at least) have contributed more to the SC community by throwing one more mind into the mix of theorizing strategies and such, what I would hope is the goal of any SC or really any player in general.
It's okay that you're getting snarky. It is your blog after all........I just feel bad that the posts now have absolutely nothing to do with the original post. Sorry about that @_@This will be my last post though.
I noticed you're mentioning chess a lot as a "pure" strategy game. I agree that it can be a pure strategy game and often is played that way. But most chess played casually and competitively is rigidly timed. Shit like, each side gets an hour to think about moves overall, if you go over that time you loose. So that often times, the most strategic move must be passed up, because it will take too much time to think up. Certain moves are obvious if you check all of your opponents counter moves manually, but aren't worth the time wasted *That's basically an example of the first point I mentioned* Some players are capable of checking many opponent counter moves very quickly (similar to APM) and some can't. My friend used to drink massive amounts of coffee before he played chess for that reason. Another, probably more important point, is this style of chess favors players who memorize openings. Which is basically baking a cake before a match. You memorize directions just like you would a cake. Now, for the sake of the argument, lets say i suck at memorization (l have a learning deficiency or something). How the hell am i supposed to beat someone who is naturally good at memorization.
If we played in an environment where time isn't an issue, this wouldn't matter, but 90 percent of the time chess is played it is an issue.
Either way, LIMITS of human dexterity add to the depth, or overall bank of strategies available to be used. Although, i will admit, they do drive casual gamers away from games.
I think your whole view on this sort of thing is.........a new school and very contemporary, and it's obvious the games you enjoyed so much were made in a different era. For example, the street fighter franchise was designed to be played in arcades. How do arcades make money? Regular customers and not so much novice players who drop by every once in awhile. In those games, lots of times, there are situations where a player can take a gamble and land a combo for 60 % + damage. The concept of a noobie landing one of those on the best player in the arcade and embarrassing them in front of lots of people is pretty cool, but it's hella bad for business. The expert player will go "fuck that, i wasted all this time playing at the arcade for cash, and i get embarrassed by random luck. Fuck playing at an arcadde" The better way of avoiding this, was the same chance situation is allowed, but with a combo, that only allows other arcade players who invested at least a little time playing in the arcade to perform it. Same thing with Starcraft at Battlenet. For a game to be sucessful you have to have battlenet full of games, casual players don't really accomplish this.
It's weird, most of the games you mention as being good strategically were what i played in middle school. I guess game developers were really on fire in those days!
When I say 400APM, I am mostly joking as an exaggeration, I don't mean it literally.
Where do I propose the difficulty come from in pulling off the psi storm maneuver? I don't get it. It's inherently difficult to pull that off with expensive, mostly defenseless units that you have to sneak into range. And as I have to repeatedly bring up, I accept and embrace that the game takes place at some reasonably fast speed. I don't understand the question, it's just difficult psi-storm like that because of the game's tuning values (speed, range, hit points, etc). It's not like super high APM is needed to make that difficult.
As a minor point, stop saying that Street Fighter is "limited by frame rate." The game takes place at 1/60th of a second intervals and requires more precise timing than any other genre. I'm not bragging about that like it somehow elevates the game to greatness, I'm just saying you seem to have it backwards on what's what. It would be correct to say that you only control a single character, so there is no splitting of attention though. Whatever, this mini-topic doesn't matter.
"I am in unfamiliar ground." I don't think that is a valid argument at all. By that logic, I will claim that you are on unfamiliar ground when answering about Dune 2. I mean, have you even played Dune 2? Are you an expert at it? Have you won tournaments at it? How can you even speak about Dune 2 or say things like it's a bad idea to make it hard to attack with 5 units unless you are a pro player of Dune 2? The answer is that of course you do not need to play even a single game of Dune 2 to know the answer. The notion of making an interface so bad that attacking with 5 units is hard...is not a good idea. Regardless of whether you play the game of Dune 2, the idea is bad either way. Likewise, I see how much high APM is rewarded in StarCraft. I read about it in this very thread. I heard about it in the StarCraft class. It's very important to being good at the game. This has nothing to do with whether I play the game a lot or don't. I see what's rewarded and it makes me sad to see "real-time strategy" dumbed down like that.
Taking a step back here, I don't even know what we're talking about anymore. Am I seriously having to defend that if we made a new RTS game that we give it a good interface rather than an intentionally bad interface? Remember that the good interface still allows you to play fast (capped at lower than 300 APM though) and it still allows micro and it emphasizes strategic decisions. And people in this thread are AGAINST that?
FrozenStorm really hit it on the head when he says that you either have a very low opinion about the core of StarCraft (is it just a terrible game underneath the hood and it needs bad UI hide this from us?) or you value something else entirely than "real-time strategy." Sounds like a DDR or IIDX tournament would be right up your guys' alley. Attention splitting, incredibly high APM, lots of skill-testing of non-strategic moves. Why not play that? Not enough strategy? Then why not play the game I'm theorizing about? Too much strategy? Too smartened up? You can't say my theoretical game is non-strategic (it's more strategic) and you can't say it has slow gameplay (it has fast gameplay). So...what's the problem again? The UI allows makes your peons automatically mine (which you would want to do almost every time anyway, and you can override if you don't) and that is a problem? How can you possibly defend this "I want bad UI" stance, in a case where it removes non-strategic clicks?
"I'm surprised you'd bring up a point steve. What you're really saying is that fast-clicking is so important that coaches recruit based on it, so when we ask "how important is strategy vs APM in StarCraft?" you're saying "almost all APM, strategy can be taught." That is a problem, don't you think?"
I intended to draw at the bigger picture and look at the pros and the cons instead of trying only to contend my point of view to the exclusion of others. I totally understand what that recruiting pattern says about starcraft, and that is why I brought it into the discussion. allow me to extrapolate:
In the context of me playing what I desire to be a strategy game which I can play at the highest competitive level without practicing 10 hours a day, an APM barrier is a huge problem. If I am watching a real-time strategy game as a spectator, an APM barrier doesn't impact my enjoyment at all, it enhances it. If you want to see a battle between two minds locked in a competition to spontaneously predict one another's decisions, and nothing else, that's cool (I like that too), but starcraft might not be for you.
Even if I agreed with taking out "useless" actions (like pressing "1sm2sm3sm4sz5sz6sz7sz" instead of simply "1mmmzzzz"), even if starcraft was controlled directly by your thoughts, I would still want unbound maximum useful APM. I'd still want to see the guy who can keep track of 10 battles to overwhelm the guy that can only think about 9. Although that wouldn't be as fun to watch as it could be, of course, because the spectators couldn't follow all 10 battles either. Starcraft walks a fine line: a set of actions can at once be hard to execute, easy to understand for a spectator, and yet be impressive to the spectator that thought it was easy to understand.
As for phantoms question: Would I be impressed by 5 soldiers attacking at the same time? I don't know, I never saw someone play dune 2, but I can assure you that if the strategy, action and metagame were interesting when only five soldiers could attack simultaneously, than it will be an exciting moment when after years of a metagame assuming that you could only attack with 5 soldiers at once, someone comes by who can attack with SIX!!! (ZOMGWTF?!?!?!) These are the moments when thousands of fangirls squeel: suddenly everything is turned on it's head and the game is fresh again.
when players started making few or no tanks in TvZ and spent the gas on more science vessels, it wasn't because no one realized how good science vessels were, it was because terran players realized a newfound application for their increased speed and attention: they could rapidly cast irradiate dozens of times and still pull their science vessels back before the scourge got them.
I wouldn't find it fun winning or losing to someone else just because he can irradiate with more science vessels, but it absolutely makes the game more fun to watch for the spectators when players are forced to innovate and adapt in such a fashoin. Starcraft's metagame evolves in a unique and interesting way because of this.
TL;DR:
Starcraft is not the epitomy of what dave sirlin wants a strategy game to be, in fact it is not a strategy game at all, it's a REAL-TIME strategy game! Calling a RTS a "RTS-game-with-unbound-maximum-APM" is as redundant as calling a FPS a "FPS-game-were-you-control-a-character-from-a-first-person-view-and-shoot-stuff."