Blizzard Releases StarCraft Patch

NRP128 writes "Blizzard has released an update for the aging StarCraft real time strategy game. From the official site: 'We have released a mini patch for StarCraft (1.12b) to address a crash that occurred for certain players using the new Korean chat functionality in patch 1.12. Please see the patch notes for further details.' Several new features seem to have been added in addition to the Korean chat functions. The patch notes can be found on the Starcraft site.

Comments

Re:Impressive

[Drac8]

Indeed, Starcraft was and still is one of the best RTS games and its soo cool to see blizzard still fixing it. I read in a CGW mag. that there is a starcraft mod in development for War 3. Lets hope Blizzard is as cool as they usually are and lets them continue (they were waiting a response from Blizzard about it).

Update: ladder for newbs now

[CrazyJim1]

I used to be a top ranked Starcraft player, I'd say changing the ladder speed from fast to fastest removes a great deal of micro tactics. So many tactics, I could make a good argument that there would be less skill involved. But I don't care anyway, I stopped playing because people started map hacking. If map hacking was stopped in its tracks early on, Starcraft may still be popular today.

Re:Update: ladder for newbs now

[CrazyJim1]

The race power question is answered this way: Which map are you playing, and is it broodwar. Broodwar islands has the most imbalanced race: Protoss. You can use a strategy I invented: DarkTemplar+ Shuttle + TONS of corsair. You can destroy any expansion with DT+ shuttle, and they can't run detection on you because the corsair defeat it. I went 72-0 on ladder with it, only to be defeated in semi-finals worlds (25,000$ tourney) because people scouted on me and the guy had good luck. If things get bad for this initial strategy, you mass expand to every island and put up cannontowers/templar for psistorm and its almost impossible to take out any of them.

If you're not on islands and start extremely close, its not zerg that wins, but terran. Do 4-6 marine + 4-6 scv, and nothing can stop it feasably. I dominated river styx with this opening strategy.

Like chess, Starcraft is all about who could get the upper hand fastest. Once you have the upper hand, you can use strategies to sure up your lead and theres little the enemy can do about it. I've played games that escalated the whole way up to Carriers and BattleCruisers before someone started to get an advantage, but those are 1/1000 games. Warcraft3 is a newb game, where you can lose half your army and come back to win if you click faster than your opponent. There was some solace in the rest you can do by changing up to a conservative strategy in Starcraft.

For the most part zerg has the upper hand though, especially on fastest. You need to be able to micro to stop a good zerg, and its unpredictability. To crawl up your forces with siege or microing psistorm, you need the game to be slow. The mass drop of zerglings/hydrolisks is the biggest imbalance in the game. Protoss and Terran have to pay for their dropships, but zerg gets theirs for nearly free. Terran almost has to put all their forces together to stop zerg, so when you spend time to push out from your base, and they drop way back inside your base, you lose all your buildings. Protoss's psi storm was weakened last patch so you can no longer rely on cannons/psistorm to stop the drop.

I also prefer traditional Starcraft over Broodwar. Broodwar's units completely cancel out the short game. You can have the upper hand early on, but the mid game units can level the entire playing field. Of course, most players aren't top notch and just like to use all the units in the game without earning them by playing a competitive game.

A majority of players aren't skilled enough to play a game of Starcraft and tech successfully against a good player, but teching is absolutely necessisary for Broodwar. So a majority of players like Broodwar over Starcraft because it makes them feel like they're using a wider range of units. They don't see that by being forced to tech to tier 3, they lose 1/3 of the game(tier 1).

Re:Update: ladder for newbs now

[CrazyJim1]

"I would argue that playing on fastest involves more skill since you have to make quicker decisions and control your units more effectively, etc; fastest is not warp speed or anything."

Thats the core of the argument. Maybe people who don't manage their base mid-battle have an issue with the speed, but I was always issuing commands to my units/bases on fast. Fastest means less commands over time. You have less time to keep your units in formation, which favors skill less players who simply rush in and attack. You can no longer do fancy stuff either like micro 2 marines against a zergling, by having one run away and the other shoot.

Fastest favors a style of play that blitzes in attacks too. Fastest favors players who take complete control of their army and neglect their base because there's simply not enough time to build while doing a good combat in fastest. I'd regularly be placing buildings as terran while my units fought on fast... But on fastest, I'd question the even thought of playing terran because zerg can make units via hotkey, but terran takes actual time to click the build, have the screen on the base and find a placement.

There's less skill involved because there is a great deal that can be done in fast that can't be done in fastest. There's no such thing as 'click quicker' as a top player is already clicking as fast as you can. You simply 'do less moves' in the game. When you look at a game where one side can't think of extra moves to do, and the other side is

Re:Update: ladder for newbs now

[CrazyJim1]

I played several maps, but none to the efficiency of dire straights. Most people played temple, and I played it ok, but nothing like dire. I would play against any race. Not playing against other races is cheese. And yes I'd want to play against high rated people, but I would steadily play against people up to 200 points below me, while many players were afraid of playing anyone but people above their rank. I think its because I started games: 1100+ only. And people thought smart players would only play people above them... If the game had no real skill, that'd be the case though.

Re:Update: ladder for newbs now

[Edmund Blackadder]

You invented dt + corsair?

What is your Starcraft name?

Re:Update: ladder for newbs now

[king-manic]

Like chess, Starcraft is all about who could get the upper hand fastest. Once you have the upper hand, you can use strategies to sure up your lead and theres little the enemy can do about it. I've played games that escalated the whole way up to Carriers and BattleCruisers before someone started to get an advantage, but those are 1/1000 games. Warcraft3 is a newb game, where you can lose half your army and come back to win if you click faster than your opponent. There was some solace in the rest you can do by changing up to a conservative strategy in Starcraft.

War 3 is a newb game? Losing half your troops to someone of similiar skill levels almost always means your death. Losing 1/2 to someone less skilled means you are in a hard spot and might recover. Just like in SC. I have been in games where I out number my friend 2:1 and control the map for the first 20 min annihalting him when ever I see him. When he gets his goon squad out, I'm utterly helpless. His micro is that good. By the same token my other friend (#3 us east for roc 3v3 rt "veryhappyjen") I have totally killed all her forces and her heroes and she always comes back to beat me. I have replays of me detroying all but one of her expos (funny enough the one with the gryphon averies and back up alter) and have seen her come back to control the game. I'm no slouch, #18 on both us west roc and us east roc for 2v2 ar (king manic).

Skill trumps numbers in both games. Ohh and inventign that corsair harass... I doubt it. It's a pretty obvious strat?

Patiently Waiting

[Donoho]

...For the next Starcraft. And no I don't mean Ghost.

Re:Koreans

[bongo69]

There are guys at my work that still play Solitaire and minesweeper through their lunch breaks, and I bet these games get played well after games like Halo and Grand Theft Autos of the current gaming age are distant memories. Starcraft is one of the best multiplayer games I have ever played, and while I enjoy modern strategy games like warcraft 3 and battle for middle earth, they do not give me that crack pipe addiction that Starcraft introduced me to.

Re:It's nice...

[snorklewacker]

You're one of the lucky ones -- my crash is every few minutes, and this is the experience of a number of players. This was after replacing the qmixer.dll with one from a more recent game, since the game was unplayable with the old qmixer.

I would be inclined to blame qsound, but other games work fine with it, and before the very last patch to the game, there was no problem. The last one broke it, and Bullfrog essentially refused to fix it after acknowledging the problem. Unfortunately, I cannot find a 1.0 version of the game now, with my first copy long gone. This was a game I bought twice ... more the fool I. Maybe the blame lies solely with Bullfrog, but this is a repeating pattern with EA-owned companies (I'll be fair and say Eidos also had a similar effect).

As for Alpha Centauri, I should have just gone to Firaxis's current site. Downloads there work great.