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Comment by eykanal | Hacker News Reader

The best analogy I've heard is that a good game of Starcraft is very similar to fencing; you have to predict what your opponent will do, and react accordingly, with speed and agility. Another good comparison is chess; see where the pieces are going and be sure to be ready when the battle comes.

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One thing those analogies miss is that starcraft is an imperfect knowledge game. You don't know everything about your opponent as you would in chess and fencing. It is similar to poker in that regard.

This is probably my favorite part of the game -- watching pro level players react perfectly to even the slightest tell.

That's not true. Starcraft is a game of perfect knowledge. For instance, good scouting and/or good observer placement can reveal what units are built, what is being produced, and what technology has been researched. There is nothing that a player can hide from well-executed scouting. Unlike poker, where you can never see the opponents hand, in Starcraft you can see everything your opponent is doing if you scout well.

There's no such thing as perfect scouting: at all levels of the game there are points where you have no idea what's coming except by reading your opponent and the metagame. For example, expecting a 6 pool or early all-in after your opponent has just taken a game in a 5 game series. Or, figuring out it's a banshee rush based on nothing but a blocked ramp.

So no, Starcraft is not perfect knowledge; much like poker you do a lot of reasoning and what amount to Expected Value (EV) calculations to figure out what your opponent is most likely to do. To gain information about what your opponent is doing in the game requires expending in-game resources, which is pretty much the exact opposite of perfect knowledge.

This is 100% incorrect, sorry.

To obtain that information, you have to invest resources first. Therefore, it is a game that requires you to make decisions with imperfect knowledge.

I think you misunderstand what is meant by a perfect knowledge game. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information . Basically, it would be perfect knowledge if there was no fog of war, if you could see what was in your opponents medivacs, what their buildings were producing, what tech they were researching...basically, if both you and your opponent had ready access to all the same knowledge.

Starcraft does not have this, even with impossibly perfect scouting, so it is not a perfect knowledge game.

I'd say levelling (getting inside a players head, understanding how they'll react to a situation and staying one step ahead) is important for higher level play in both games.

Starcraft is arguably a more difficult game due to the real-time element and the fact that the pieces aren't constrained by squares on a board (meaning there is more positional variation). As Bobby Fischer complained, chess between accomplished players can seem stale when the first twenty moves are often played from memory, following opening theory and leaving no place for experimentation.

The beginning of Starcraft can be stale too. You're probably going to follow one of the standard builds at first.

you say that, until you get proxy everything'd

I haven't been successfully proxied in a very long time and I'm an awful sc2 player (you see many more proxies in bronze than silver). A standard build order will crush a proxy 99/100 assuming the players are vaguely close in skill.

I played proxy oracle vs terran in silver and gold and had 80% win rate with them. I stopped doing it cause it's not fun the 30th time, but it works very reliably.

If you really believe that, I'd suggest you check out the WCS Season 2 Grand Finals from last night. Really, all of the WCS event. Proxies do quite well against standard build orders--that's one of the things that makes pro play so much fun to watch.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of strong economical/greedy build orders which are vulnerable to proxy play, esp if you don't scout.

Actually, some of the recent WCS games are great examples; there's a reason why people will proxy or 6 pool. Sometimes it really does come down to luck, as in whether you scout at a specific time or not.

I dunno, I follow a build order to the point that I can actually read a news article or two until about the 4 minute mark, and I've successfully stopped proxies more often than not.

Starcraft has codified openings too. Even casual players use them, and on high level these are almost mandatory (except for a few players that develop their own buildorders). First 3 or so minutes of proffesional games are usually played "by book" with very small variations, and you can recognize from minor details how the game will look until someone make a mistake.

The difference is - in starcraft the metagame isn't stable - in a year buildorders that were very strong become almost useless (because of balance patches, better strategies discovered, and most often because the popularity of buildorders make them weaker - more people blind-counter them).

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