UC Berkeley Starcraft Class, Week 2

Week 2 of the class was better than week 1 because most of the administrative stuff was out of the way so more time could be spent discussing StarCraft itself.

This week was about units. Professor Feng started by explaining that units are your eyes, ears, and hands in the game. Units give you vision through the fog of war (eyes) and are they are what you use to perform actions such as attacking, repairing, building, moving (hands). What he said we might not realize is that they are also your ears. He mentioned one match where the famous player Boxer put an SCV kind of near some minerals to scout, but it was actually the sound effect for gathering minerals he listening for, rather than the sight the SCV provided.

The next topic was something I refer to as local imbalance, though that term wasn't used in class. Explained in my terms, a game is supposed to have global balance (Zerg vs. Terran for example) but it's supposed to NOT have local balance, or it would be too boring on homogeneous. StarCraft has massive local imbalance amongst units and that is a very good thing.

One example was siege tanks. The longest range Protoss ground unit is

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UC Berkeley Starcraft Class, Week 1

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

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