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Comment by papreclip | Hacker News Reader

IMO it's a testament to how games like SC are collectively and thoroughly "solved" by the community, and how the games aren't that complex after all. I never followed SC or SC2, but my observation of the pro scene and competitive ladder for Warcraft 3 was that cookie cutter strats dominated. Pro players were typically those who executed best, not those who innovated best.

Personally I felt disappointed by the fact that real-time strategy played a pretty minor role in RTS games. If you left the well-beaten path of cookie cutting and tried something new you invariably gave up a pretty obvious advantage to do so.

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Former masters Zerg here. You are partially correct, but actual high level play involves a great deal of small variations to these cookie cutter strays, and these small variations lead to a constantly evolving metagame. A good example was the kespa league during hots where innovation and strategy played a big role.

It’s just that a lot of that strategy is irrelevant unless you have amazing mechanics - and the difficulty of those mechanics means that you can’t as easily think, plan, or adapt in-game (because your brain is busy)

A big part of the game is thinking about “how do I win against somebody who does that...” between games

There is a lot of strategy in RTS's but alpha star doesn't need to exploit any of it because it can win on mechanics. It has perfect macro, and perfect micro, which allows it to beat players without having to learn strategies or tactics.

It's kind of like competing against a gorilla in boxing chess. Just because a gorilla is dominant doesn't mean boxing chess doesn't require chess skills, only that a gorilla doesn't need them.

Are you sure it has perfect micro? Can you even execute perfect micro on 30 actions per 5 seconds?

"Perfect" no, much better than any human yes. 30 actions per 5 seconds is 360 actions per minute. The very top players might have similar stats, but the similarities would end there. A lot of human actions are mindless spam clicking and those 300+ actions would contain several misclicks. The ai would never misclick. They can also do things like pull back every weakened unit before it died much more accurately than a human. A human knows to do these things but it has much less mechanical skill than the ai.

Cookie cutter strats or the metagame changes over time. Knowing what strategies you are likely to face influences what strategy you are likely to try. The meta is different across regions. The europeans play differently to the americans who play differently to the koreans. Some people dedicate themselves to different playstyles and your 'cookie cutter' strat will have to grow with everyone else's. They patch the game often to update the balance.

Designing a game that is a fun and balanced experience whilst also encouraging true innovation is a difficult problem. Every game ever has this problem, putting thousands of minds on a problem and letting them confer about their results usually solves all the low-hanging fruit in about a week. Creating a game where you only play to share a new idea makes each match feel like a dice roll.

> my observation of the pro scene and competitive ladder for Warcraft 3 was that cookie cutter strats dominated. Pro players were typically those who executed best, not those who innovated best.

Warcraft 3 and broodwar were much more micro-oriented than sc2 (because ai was much worse for example if you let dragoons to walk to their target on their own they spend half the time fighting broken pathfinding while the enemy shoots at them :) This almost never happens in sc2, and microing units below master league is usually detrimental to the game).

I think the micro vs macro is not the full image, and sc2 lets player express themselves on what i would call mediumgame (something that is between buildorders and microing - like deciding when to expand, what tech-switch to make, how to position your army in between fights, etc).

There's lots of decisionmaking that isn't APM-limited but thinking-time limited in SC2, and it's not as codified as buildorders. But you can certainly simplify the games to "archon immortal vs bio terran", and then it's very repetative.

It's a bit more interesting when people play several matches against each other. They are forced to switch tactics.

Raw, spur of the moment, innovation probably isn't a good idea generally, as you'd be doing something with no practice. People do have a fairly big bag of tricks from older tactics that are less common these days.

because the real skill is in the micro

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