Do you ever sleep Digby? ;)
Equis
1582
So this is the place where you beg for a spare beta key? Apparently, Blizzard sent me an email that I got into the beta, but the game doesn’t show up under my Battle.net account. I tried emailing them a couple of times, but all I get is a cold empty wall of silence.
Look down near the bottom of the email, it should have your Beta Key in it.
Is it normal for the Blizzard downloader to be achingly slow? I reckon I’ve waited over 70 hours so far for the beta exe and various patches to download… and it’s still going! I have to keep switching it off because it kills my download/upload speeds dead otherwise, and the worrying grinding sound it’s making with my hard drive isn’t thrilling me either.
I think I might just wait for the retail version instead, which will probably be released before this thing finishes downloading anyway.
No, not much these days. :D
For those of you that missed the Day9 daily last night, watch it. Seriously that’s all I need to say at the moment, this advice is directed doubly towards new players.
Watch it, now.
Thanks for the link thinkingork, I wasn’t actually sure if the VOD was up yet.
Ayr
1589
I do believe the Blizzard downloader is using peer to peer technology when it can (same as torrents) so you might want to look into making sure you have the right ports open. I can’t access the battle.net forums from work, but a quick Google scan shows opening TCP ports 1119 and 1120 should improve the situation.
I had the intial client in ~53 minutes (slow internet…). So make sure you have p2p activated - though it sounds like you do since it killed your other downloads and uploads. When my internet was slower I usually downloaded my WoW patches from some alternative mirrors, which saved me a lot of time!
When does the advice start? I watched up to 6.x minutes and my heard starts hurting from all his off topic blabbing. The only useful thing I heard was that the likes some protoss 3 warp gate strategy…
Is there a good site for some good noob friendly replays with good commentary and build orders et al?
Alright I’ve played a few versus cpu games (it only lets me pick very easy cpu?!). And well those were pretty easy though I noticed I make lots of mistakes. Like after a few games I learned to keep ordering and setting their waypoint near the enemy base etc, but usually while attacking my base construction grinds to a complete stillstand… Any hints on that? Also how many workers per blue crystal/vespene gas factory? And what would be a good starter race? I’ve read either protoss or zerg are beginner friendly. Haven’t really played an FPS since SC 1 / broodwar (single player only), WC3 (~lvl 15 multi player).
Thanks!
Like watching sports, there are no noob friendly matches; watch by learning is my advice, watch a lot of replays and you’ll start to see patterns within differing builds; it also boils down to improving you macro and micro, regardless of race, the starting build is important but you also need a good expansion strategy, something that comes naturally through practice.
http://www.youtube.com/user/HuskyStarcraft
Watch these those collections of VOD’s, all of them, Husky even has a newbie starting build videos for all three races.
As for the easier class, well, opinions vary; some say the zerg are easier because of their one-building-all-encompassing tech, some say the protoss are better because of chrono boosting and linear tech tree and some say terrans are easier because they are the most defensive race and easier to macro once you can get mules; my opinion? Bullcrap, all have their quirks, the more you play with one the better you’ll play with it, just try them all out to see which one “feels” more like your style.
Also, about your question regarding minerals and vespene, 3 is the ideal number per node.
Thanks for the advice, but I’m going to abandon it. I’ve just discovered that it’s eaten around 12Gb of my monthly bandwidth allocation (out of 50) in the last 5 days, because my uploads go towards the total as well as downloads, so peer-to-peer really isn’t good news. If I end up buying the game (which I probably will, from the store) I’ll download patches from other mirrors like I used to do with WoW.
Yeah, it took me at least 5 hours to get the game and all the patches. I don’t know why the richest video game company can’t afford to do direct downloads.
Here are a few 2on2 tips; these are not always applicable in 1on1 because of how tight 1on1 games can be, but are good to keep in mind.
ZERG
-Always research burrow. Being able to burrow and hide your workers can mean the difference between victory and defeat if you get hit unexpectedly. An amazing no of Zerg players never research burrow.
-Use the Infestor. Probably the most criminally underused unit in the game. Infestors can 1)stop up a choke with that AoE goo 2)stop a Massive army (Thors, ect) in it’s tracks 3)slap down MMM spam. Infestors are probably (imo) better than High Templar now.
-Put a Zergling scout at every expansion. As cheap as they are, there is no reason not to.
-Use Overseer Chameleon unit to scout naturals. Those fake units are pointless at following real armies but are a great way to peek inside a base and see what’s up. Especially nice vs. walled in Terrans.
PROTOSS
-Feedback is also underused. Most important Terran units have an energy bar. It’s just hard to get a Templar or two out.
TERRAN
-Always, always, make a nuke. It’s amazing how infrequently i see them. Nukes are a pain in the ass even if you can avoid them. You don’t always have to aim for hard targets like their army or workers either; some players build all their pylons or supply depots right next to one another. Nuke it from orbit and ruin their production.
-Ghosts are a multifunction unit that take a bit of finesse to use. Snipe is not half bad either; 45 damage for 25 energy. That’s 360 damage from a full Sniper, which is close to a Yamato blast. I’m not saying it’s exactly “great”, but keep Snipe in mind if your facing lots of funky units like Broodlords.
Kurdel
1595
Thanks, I’ll be trying the Zerg tips :) !
If you actually watched the video you’d get plenty of tips, especially towards the end while he takes questions from other newbie’s in the chat. Also as Digby’s already said, there’s no ‘newbie friendly’ casts out there in the same way you won’t find ‘newbie friendly’ Football games on tv. Try taking a look at my Info thread, it has a number of resources in it that I’m too lay to re-link here. Day9 really is the best place for SC2 advice out there, but if you don’t like his colloquial style well… YMMV. Just remember before you judge he’s a person (geek, whatever) and not some robot that lives solely to give you Starcraft advice.
3 Workersoptimize gas and roughly 3 optimize minerals (although you do get higher returns from 4, it’s not as efficient).
The AI is stuck at Very Easy at the moment but if you google Dark Blizz you may be able to find better AI (I mean it’s certainly there, I just haven’t checked out that scene since I got a legal copy of the Beta so I can’t comment what’s good or not anymore). The AI Blizz gave you is basically a sandbox to let new players explore everything in the game, without fear of any kind of attacks, etc.
My advise is familiarise yourself with a race you enjoy and hit the ladder straight away. You’ll quickly improve and you’ll be matched against people of your own skill level.
My advice to new players remains the same: Play your practice matches until you lose. (That’ll probably be the first one, unless you run into someone just as new.) Then, watch the replay from the opponent’s perspective. You’ll pick up lots of basic lessons.
Pro replays can be overwhelming at first. Best to start small and just learn from your own opponents.
Alright thanks. Like I said I only watched the first few minutes since I’m in a bit of a hurry with an approaching deadline etc. In that case I’ll be sure to watch the entire video when I have the time. It’s the first commented replay of any game I’ve ever watched so I probably went in with the wrong expectation of an audiovisual FAQ or something similar.
Also thanks for the other suggestions.
yeah well drones don’t win if they don’t attack at all. You lost with 4 lings and ~12 drones vs 6 lings. Just attackmoving them should be more than enough.
