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Comment by plushpuffin | Hacker News Reader

Back when I played it, there was a 50 game skill test for new players which determined which of the major rank pools you were placed in.

Those first 50 games were crazy because you were matched randomly with other new and established players, so sometimes you would play someone really good who would steamroll you in the first 5 minutes, and sometimes you got someone who had at most played the scripted campaigns against the AI and thought they could sit there for the first 30 minutes slowly building up an army.

It was actually pretty fun not knowing which way it would go, and whenever we matched with newbies my partner and I got to experiment with a bunch of different strategies that would never work in a real game.

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> played the scripted campaigns against the AI and thought they could sit there for the first 30 minutes slowly building up an army.

This right here is my fundamental problem with multiplayer RTS games. The fun I get out of them is in the slow burn long buildup, but other players always find ways to optimize the early game so they win fast and never actually get to the fun part where everyone has massive bases lobbing nukes at eachother. The fun way to play is not the optimal way to play.

It's now been about 10 years since I've even bothered trying an RTS online.

Yeah I've felt the same way at times, especially when the armor/weapon types make it very rock paper scissors. It wasn't as blatant in the original StarCraft, but WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 2 seemed to go hard into counters against certain types of units, so someone who either scouts a bit better than you do or picks an army composition that happens to perfectly counter yours will mop the floor with you.

My partner and I had way more fun in those early games when we could stretch it out to 30-60 minutes sometimes. Once you're playing against ranked people who are there to win it's just a mad rush to the first or second tech tier.

> It wasn't as blatant in the original StarCraft

It was pretty much the same as SC2, they just never told you in the UI. e.g. Dragoons do half damage to mutalisks. Yamato cannons don’t kill zealots.

Yeah, I was aware of the different armor types in SC1, but I thought they turned it up to 11 in SC2. Maybe they brought it down to the first 2 tiers of units? It didn't feel like armor types really came into play as early in the game. The impression I got was that you could get away with massing a single type of unit much more easily in SC1.

There's a game mode in AoE2DE where everyone's behind strong walls at the start. It takes a while to be able to bring them down. So you get to turtle for a while. A game mode like this is what you'd like to play.

I don't mean to be rude (I'm a very bad Starcraft II enthusiast) but most people who complain about this problem seem to want to play a solo game for 30 minutes and then eventually meet the other player in the field of battle at the half-hour mark. That's an obvious no-go, you can't ignore 90% of the game and expect to have fun.

The way to beat players who play strong openers is to play a strong opener yourself, but not necessarily all-in aggressive. If you want to get to the late game you enjoy you must get better at the early game. Harass the other guy early, scout their build, make sure you're building counters to what the other player is playing. Defend well. Deny their economy here and there. Inevitably crush them with nukes and capital ships after 30 minutes of solid fundamentals.

(Starcraft is still a lot of fun and I'd encourage you to get back in to RTS playing)

> you can't ignore 90% of the game and expect to have fun.

I think maybe what you meant to say was "... and expect to _win_"

Plenty of people have fun turtling (:

This is one thing I liked about Total Annihilation — defense tech was relatively strong, so some amount of turtling and racing to get high tech artillery (eg) was a viable approach.

There's plenty of turtling for Terran and Protoss in SC2. Defense tech like cannons, planetarys, shield batteries, and bunkers help. It's definitely not fool proof but is classically something people struggle against.

I think a larger issue is that there's like 3-5 games to get ranked and then a bit more to get really ranked properly. And by SC2 design the early game is resource constrained so decisions are important and even with the right decisions execution is hard.

Try playing Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance Forever - it's a Total Annihilation sequel that's now community supported. It's got a decent AI and an active community of all levels. It's on Steam and often goes on sale.

Watch a few games on Youtube.

Well, honestly both! SC2 in particular is a game of rock-paper-scissors, you must know what your opponent is building in order to stay alive. If you turtle blindly against a half-decent player you'll get eaten alive.

I used to play Age of Empires in treaty mode. You had XX minutes where you couldn't attack one another so just focused super hard on macro. Utter chaos when the treaty period ended as everyone had max size armies. Lagged the hell out of my computer. Good times

It was a fairly popular variant of the game too, never had trouble finding matches

It's more like 10 or 15 games before your MMR is pretty accurate.

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