Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Starcraft 1

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On August 08 2007 11:56 XG3 wrote:
Have you heard of firebats vs zerglings? I'm not sure what the point of this thread is. RPS exists in Starcraft in varying degrees, but it's definitely there and an important part of the game.

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On August 08 2007 11:56 XG3 wrote:
Have you heard of firebats vs zerglings? I'm not sure what the point of this thread is. RPS exists in Starcraft in varying degrees, but it's definitely there and an important part of the game.

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On August 08 2007 11:59 RaGe wrote:
I think you're forgetting the main use of the RPS principle: Build Orders, not units.
Think of ZvZ and PvP.

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On August 08 2007 11:29 Waxangel wrote:
In conclusion, Starcraft 2 better be fucking awesome.

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On August 08 2007 12:36 MYM.Testie wrote:
Brood war isn't rock paper scissors.

It's a fucking intricate dance of awesomeness on good maps and most matchups.

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On August 08 2007 12:43 Asgard wrote:
Starcraft is based around emergence: units are designed with vague strengths and weaknesses with rarely any assumptions about what they're "supposed" to counter or what their role has to be. It is then left to players to work out which the best combinations and usages of units are. Damage and armour (size) types are used as just another strength/weakness, they are not law (most units with explosive damage are still great against small units, for example).

This is how Starcraft gives the illusion of being designed to an incredibly deep level, where units seem to fit together in marvellous ways that couldn't possibly have all been imagined and explicitly designed (because of course they weren't). In fact it's part of the genius of Starcraft's design that, all the way back in 1998, they didn't need to imagine what pro Korean players might do to the game to still have confidence in the robustness of their design.

Games like Warcraft 3 which prescribe a unit's role a lot more with much stricter adherence to damage/armour types can potentially curb player freedom. They also foster a culture where it's sometimes viewed as "wrong" or a design or balance problem when a clever player finds a way of using a unit for a purpose for which it doesn't appear to have been originally designed.

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On August 08 2007 12:19 NonY[rC] wrote:
I agree with RaGe. The primary use of RPS in BW is with build orders and strategies, not units. Perhaps that is more evidence to support your case -- since no one has thought it useful to discuss RPS with regard to unit counters, it indeed is not an issue in BW. I think the interesting question is whether or not SC2 will have similar build order RPS as BW. But really that's a question that truly cannot be discussed for practical purposes until after release and Blizzard is faced with making balance patches.

In professional BW, we see players making RPS-decisions with fast rushes or fast expansions. Is that a part of the gameplay that people want to see persist in SC2? Should professionals sometimes feel obligated to take big risks in the first few minutes of the game? I would like to see less of the RPS principle in SC2 than there is in BW. I don't like the idea that a player can be granted a huge advantage just by luck. I haven't seen any convincing arguments that is anything but luck, either. Perhaps a year or two ago players could plan a cheese against a macro player or a fast expansion against a conservative player, but nowadays the players know to do something unpredictable every so often just for reputation's sake, to counter the phenomonen created by the RPS principle. It was cool at first, but now it just seems destructive to me.

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