5. My Favorite Starcraft 2 Sites (Links)

Day9 Daily Archives 

“High level commentary on competitive Starcraft matches from an 11-year veteran and top player. Day[9] has been rated A+/A on ICCUP/PGT on multiple accounts over multiple seasons, has qualified for the WCG USA finals 7 times, has qualified for the WCG Grand Finals 3 times, and won the Pan American Championship in 2007. In Starcraft 2 Day[9] is a top rated diamond player as random.” 
-Daily tutorials, tournament casts and high level analysis 5 Days a Week! This guy really helped my game, he's also pretty funny.

GosuGamers 

“GosuGamers is a computer game community with 50,000 visits per day. The community, which has existed since 2002, focus on high quality eSport news and user created materials for the best-selling games by Blizzard Entertainment: StarCraft and WarCraft.”
-Gosugamers is where I go to check out replays. It’s cool cause you can check them out at your own pace and look anywhere you want unlike a cast. You can also check the overall rankings of the top players in the world. Get replays of the best/ your favorite player and learn from their build orders, strategies and tactics. What more could you want!

HD and Husky Starcraft 

“Meet HDstarcraft and HuskyStarcraft, or just HD and Husky, two dudes in their twenties who voice commentate (think football announcers) over recorded rounds of the computer game Starcraft 2. If you know nothing about Starcraft it matters little, these two guys are killing it without being mainstream. Nearly every video of a game that either commentates will rack up at least 75,000 views. If a game runs longer, more than 10 minutes say, it will get those 75,000 views per installment. A 40 minute game can blow past 300,000 views.” -TheNextWeb.com
- These guys are very entertaining, I always check up on these guys at least once a week.

Starcraft 2 Unit Stats

"Anything and everything you need to know about any units or structures for any race"- www.starcraft-source.com

TeamLiquid

AKA: Teamliquid.net or TL.net. A pro-gaming site dedicated to Starcraft and the Korean professional scene. Up-to-date, comprehensive, and dedicated coverage of the OSL, MSL, Proleague, and more with VOD's, replays and strategy discussion. Founder of one the largest foreign SC tournaments, the Razer TSL with over $10k dollars in prize money.

-The Forum of choice for the Starcraft 2 Gamer. Their strategy section is very helpful. 


7-29-2010

4. New Player Help

Since it's the first day of retail, and I've been playing against some new players who haven't quite got the hang of the game, I thought I'd help out and post a few some tips, tricks and a few build orders to help you guys out. I'll start out with some standard all purpose build orders for each race.

(What the build orders mean- When you start out you have 6 probes/scvs/drones, keep pumping them until you have the first number then build that.. For instance the Protoss standard would be keep pumping probes til you are at 9 supply then build a Pylon as the 9th probe is being made.. Then keep pumping probes again and while the 12th probe is being made, make a Gateway)

 Protoss 9/12
9- Pylon
-Chronoboost Nexus as Pylon completes
12- Gateway
-Chronoboost Nexus as the first wears off
14- Assimilator
16- Pylon
16- Cybernetics Core

Then continue building probes.. start building zealots when the gateway finishes,  adding on more gateways (or robo facilities or stargates as the situation dictates) as you have excess money. You usually want to expand when you have the advantage in army.
Note: A fully saturated mineral field can support about 4 gateways/warpgates


IdrA's Opener (Zerg)
9- Overlord
14- Spawning Pool
15- Hatchery at natural expansion
16- Queen
16- Extractor
18- Overlord

Then produce as many Drones as you can get away with. This build is fairly weak to cheesey all in rushes like a 6-pool zergling rush, but with scouting you should be okay if you scout. You may want to alter the build if you suspect being harassed early by getting Zerglings instead of Drones after the spawning pool comes out.


Terran 1/1/1 Build
10- Supply Depot
12- Barracks
13- Refinery
15- Orbital Command
Marine+ 2nd Refinery
16- Supply Depot
Optional: reactor or tech lab on barracks
@100 Gas get factory

When Factory completes get starport
The beauty of this build is that it allows you to quickly get one of each unit producing structure in the terran arsenal, hence the name. It allows you to quickly respond with whatever composition you need. Add on more unit producing structures as the situation dictates.


Tips and Tricks for new players

1. Scout early and often- Usually around 9-12 supply you'll want to send a worker to go check out the enemy base, try to keep tabs on what he is building and get a feel for what composition you need to make.

2. Don't forget to build workers!- I've seen a lot of new players with resources score half of what it should be on one base. Pretty much the only time you want to cut making workers is when you're gearing up for a push, cheesing or are already saturated. Other than that ALWAYS MAKE WORKERS. A good practice is to keep your nexus/hatchery/command center on a hotkey

3.  Micro. Pay attention to things like choke points, ramps and open areas and try to realize what position it would benefit your army to fight from. Turn health bars on and micro dying units and try to save them. You'd be surprised how often you can win an uneven battle by microing.

4. Use rally points.. Rally your Nexus/Command Center/Hatchery (Orange Line) to your mineral field and the drones will automatically start mining.During a push Rally your unit producing structures (White Line for Hatchery) to your army so they automatically start heading toward them and group up.

5. Don't put all your units in one control group. I usually put Melee units in 1, Range units in 2 and Casters in 3 Air Units or Special Units like Warp Prisms I usually put in 0. Put your buildings in groups, for instance I put my Barracks as 4, Factories as 5 and Starports as 6 when playing Terran. But do what works for you.

6. Watch your replays when you lose. Try to pinpoint the exact time you started to lose and why

7. Play often and play to get better. Doing the same exact thing and expecting different results is insanity - Albert Einstein. Try to experiment and see what builds, unit compositions etc. work in what situations. Don't just do the same exact thing every game in every situation.

8. Don't be afraid to lose. When you say to yourself, If I attack I may lose, just try it out if you aren't sure. Losing is part of learning and getting better. After awhile you will KNOW if you will lose or win with the attack.

9. Try to control Xel'Naga watch towers. The extra vision is SO good.

10. Spend ALL of your rescources. Having high mineral count doesn't make you good, you want to stay as close to zero as possible while continuing to produce workers.

7/27/10

3. Which Race Is The Strongest?

For a totally new player with minimal or no RTS experience, I think the best advice is to pick the race that you like most or seems the coolest and play it until you get the feel of the game, you will enjoy the game more if you’re playing the way YOU like. Don’t worry about which is the ‘Strongest’ race, Because in the end Blizzard will make the game as humanly possible. Or so we can hope :)

Say you don’t care how the race looks right? You’re more of a performance type of guy or gal. I can give you some advice in that case too. If you’ve played some RTS games, I think the race that would feel most familiar to you would be Terran, because they have a sort of typical playstyle when compared to other games on the market that would make sense to you. Many consider terran the most versatile race because ALL of their units are viable in high level play. If you’ve played games like DoTA, Warcraft 3, HoN (games that are more about micro managing units and not too heavy on macro) you may feel comfortable with Protoss. Protoss armies rely heavily on spell placement and micro management. If you like ‘Massing’ in RTS games, Zerg may be for you. Zerg typically has the easiest time securing additional bases on most maps than any race, they are the most macro intensive of the 3 races taking a lot of APM (actions per minute) to manage their bases. Zerg units die quickly but are easily replenished.

Protoss (Aggression, Powerful spells) 
+ Have shields that quickly regenerate
+Observers are a great scout once you get them
+Forcefields and Storms when well placed and especially when your army is in a good position in relation to your enemies are devestating
+Warpgates allow units to be warped in anywhere there is a pylon or warp prism.
+Chrono boost allows for the player to speed up unit production and upgrades (Often used for aggressive timing pushes)
+Gateway units are very powerful (cost for cost vs other tier one units)
+Buildings warp themselves into play allowing the probe to do other tasks during it’s construction

-hard to scout early game (terran gets scan, zerg gets overlord)
-lack of versatility outside of gateway builds
-Units are expensive
-Extremely weak to EMP

Zerg (Highly Mobile, Overwhelming) 
+Reactionary macro- able to devote all production to one type of unit if need be making them very adaptable when responding to enemy compositions. Because all units come from the hatch and hatcherys can build many units at once
+ Highly mobile, especially with creep tumors spread, nydus worm and deathdrop options
+Units are easily replenished
+”Masses” the quickest of the three
+ Spine Crawlers are able to uproot and change positions
+Land units have the ability to burrow underground becoming invisible
+Units heal slowly on creep and gain 30% movement speed on creep

-proxy strategy or hiding tech is difficult
-drones lost when creating buildings
-units are fragile and die quite easily
-diffucult to defend against air without static defense because hydralisk is a tier 2 unit

Terran (Defensive Prowess, Versatility) 
+Can build structures anywhere
+Can repair vehicles and buildings with SCVs
+Buildings can lift off the ground
+Supply Depots can submerge under ground
+MULES are the easiest of the new ‘Macro Skills’ to use
+ALL of their units are viable In high level play
+Bunkers can be salvaged for their full worth
+Two separate VIABLE ground tech paths MMM ball and Mech
+A siege tank “death push” is almost impossible to beat head on

-Buildings burn to the ground if low health
-Siege tank compositions (Arguably Terrans bread and butter unit) makes their armies fairly immobile
-MMM balls are weak to any form of AOE
-Difficult to use both Factory (Mech) and Barracks (MM) Units effectively, many times Terrans will overuse their versatility and leave themselves a little weak in one area. 

For all of you saying to yourselves "This post was a rip off, I want to know what the strongest race is!" I would Again Strongly suggest you to play the race you LIKE. That being said.. If I had to pick one.. I'd say Terran is currently the most Overpowered Race. I know I'm going to get a lot of shit for this but remember I said 'If I had to pick one'. Honestly imbalance can only be decided at the highest level after months of programmers testing it out. 

Many extremely high level SC2 players have also hinted at Terran being OP

Tester "Terran is the Strongest Race"  (6:50)- Tester is often regarded as the best player in the world currently.  This video is fairly old (2 months) and there has been a mech nerf since then. I haven't of him changing his stance on any of the sites I've visited.

Idra "I might switch to Terran, Just because they're so good" (Start watching @ :50 til around 2:30)- Idra is widely regarded as the best Zerg playing SC2 currently.

There have been numerous posts on Teamliquid.net regarding Terran being OP. Here's One such poll off the top of my head.

[Poll] Racial Matchup Balance in SC2

Starcraft 2 Ladder Rankings - You might argue that many of the top players are Protoss and Zerg on ladder, but I would remind you that ladder isn't the highest level of play. Most of that happens in tournament LANs.


BTW: You guys HAVE to check out this new Iron Maiden video.. It's the title song off their new upcoming album The Final Frontier. I had to post it because it has kind of a Sci Fi theme to it and the song is just plain awesome!
THE FINAL FRONTIER

7/26/2010

2. A Quick Guide To Upgrade Your Rig For SC2

The system requirements for Starcraft 2 have been out for awhile now, but just in case you need a quick reference to them I'll repost them here.

PC Minimum System Requirements*:
· Windows® XP/Windows Vista®/Windows® 7 (Updated with the latest Service Packs) with DirectX® 9.0c
· 2.6 GHz Pentium® IV or equivalent AMD Athlon® processor
· 128 MB PCIe NVIDIA® GeForce® 6600 GT or ATI Radeon® 9800 PRO video card or better
· 12 GB available HD space
· 1 GB RAM (1.5 GB required for Windows Vista®/Windows® 7 users)
· DVD-ROM drive
· Broadband Internet connection
· 1024X720 minimum display resolution

PC Recommended Specifications:
· Windows Vista®/Windows® 7
· Dual Core 2.4Ghz Processor
· 2 GB RAM
· 512 MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800 GTX or ATI Radeon® HD 3870 or better
*Note: Due to potential programming changes, the Minimum System Requirements for this game may change over time.

Mac Minimum System Requirements:
· Mac® OS X 10.5.8, 10.6.2 or newe
· Intel® Processor
· NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT or ATI Radeon® X1600 or better
· 12 GB available HD space
· 2 GB Ram
· DVD-ROM drive
· Broadband Internet connection
· 1024X720 minimum display resolution

Mac Recommended Specifications:
· Intel® Core 2 Duo processor
· 4 GB system RAM
· NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600M GT or ATI Radeon® HD 4670 or better

For a brand new game, the system requirements are fairly low. Any rig built within the last 5 years or so SHOULD be able to run it. My brother was running SC2 fine on low settings on a Pentium 4 2.0 ghz cpu (Well below the system requirements) with some crappy FX 5600 I think it was . It worked great in 1v1 matches on all low settings until you got upwards of 150+ supply at which point it was still very playable but a little choppy. My main rig was using an 88000gts 320mb and a E6400 Duo core 2.14 ghz cpu, The default settings for the gpu were all damn near ultra!. It was capable of running everything on high-ultra in 1v1 matches without being choppy. I never really pushed it in 2v2+ because I was afraid of it overheating, an issue I had when playing Heroes of Newerth. Most people on hardware forums I've visited say that 4GB of RAM is the sweet spot for most gaming rigs nowadays, so keep that in mind. Also, I'm not a hardware nut, I'm just sharing my experiences with you to save you the trouble of registering and posting in tech support forums or the like. Hope I help at least someone. :-)

For all the people who know their computer won't run SC2 but are still trying to play or are just generally trying to upgrade theirs, I thought I'd link some useful articles from tomshardware.com. This site has been really useful while I was helping my brother upgrade his PC to run SC2 at a higher level.

Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart

Best Graphics Cards for the money- July 2010

Best Gaming CPUs for the money- July 2010

The GPU and CPU are the most important parts of your computer so I'll just link these, but definitely check this site out for any advice on updating your rig.

Oh, and for those of you who still run 2002ish era pentium 4 rigs and on an extremely tight budget, you can get a 3.0ghz cpu for around $40 from various sites and a graphics card capable of running SC2 on low settings for around $40 as well. 8400gs just for example. My secondary rig uses a radeon 4650 which was $55, I could have gotten a better gpu, but my secondary rig is a Vostro 220s i got for cheap and only has a 250w power supply. Nice thing about this card is that it's low profile too and fits in a slim case.

7/24/2010

1. SC2 almost out! Checkout the countdown party!

Hey Guys, I'm just trying to stay sane before the release of SC 2. Luckily there's been a lot of interesting games being casted in the Razer King of the Beta tournament which showcases some of the best players duking it out for the title of "KING OF THE BETA". If you guys are interested in checking out the matches from this tournament go to the 'Day9 Daily Archives' Link and check them out.

If you guys are new to Starcraft 2 you probably don't know about Day9, the commentator on this tournament. He's a high level player and is very well respected in the SC2 community, he does daily tutorials or commentaries that will really help your game. Anyways, he's hosting a livestream on his website to countdown the 'birthday' of SC2. It's an actual event that you can attend as well.

You can buy tickets here.

http://day9tv.eventbrite.com/

If you can't make it you can always watch it here

http://www.ustream.tv/day9tv/v3

I know it sounds lame watching a party, but actually they're going to be showing some high level match ups.. Including the finals and grand finals of the Razer King of the Beta tournament.

7/23/2010