StarCraft 2

I honestly wish they'd balance some of the MP around these single player options. I've been saying for a while the RTS genre still has room to grow and I think adopting a bit of moba-isms would be a good start such as these upgrades. Like have a pick/ban phase where you can pick and ban upgrades not dissimilar to the Nova equipment. Anything to make playing and viewing the RTS genre a tad less monotonous.

Ah fuck it, bought it, dunno when I'll get around to playing it though.

On a whim, bought it last night and burned through the missions on Hard pretty quickly.

The expansion, it's fine. a solid 7/10, about the same quality as the rest of the SC2 franchise. The last mission, where you take over parts of the town and garrison units in the buildings to act as permanent bunkers was pretty cool. I have always like the missions where you get to build stuff much, much more than the "dungeon crawl" mission styles.

that second mission is a bitch considering how limited your options are. How the hell am I supposed to keep Horner from losing ANY buildings on hard? The final rush during the last 3-4 minutes is ridiculous, even with an army of SCVs repairing bunkers.

Played through it, 7/10 seems about right since it's just 3 missions, but you get to do some fun stuff. The bike chase was a bit unexpected, but I have to agree with others, the second map is weird, like you are supposed to play tower defense, but spider mines are lacking and playing bunker defense without tanks is terrible, not to mention they throw at you pretty much the full zerg arsenal with defilers on top. I could understand it if spider mines were unlimited though, so you have to keep microing.

Meh I have a lower opinion of the Nova missions. No real base building at all. I'll say maybe a 5/10. I found the second map way, way easy. They even tell you exactly where to build bunkers. I just made 3 reactor raxes, built bunkers where they told me to build them while having a squad of 10'ish reapers + Nova mostly in charge of just clearing out Banes and sniping Defilers. Until the very end I don't think I even used the mines.

Twilight Sparkle_sl said:

that second mission is a bitch considering how limited your options are. How the hell am I supposed to keep Horner from losing ANY buildings on hard? The final rush during the last 3-4 minutes is ridiculous, even with an army of SCVs repairing bunkers.

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You can wall with depots at the chokes. I didn't get the achievement on brutal but it seems pretty easy to just wall the chokes with depots in range of your bunkered marines and use Nova for nothing more than killing Banes and sniping Defilers. You can even instantly call down depots on that mission so you can easily set up multiple tiers of defense if it is obvious a giant bane train is going to tear down one line of defense.

Teamliquid Map Contest #7

Here we go boys, time to get another map on ladder!

After like a year, I'm watching GSL. Lotv is kinda weird, I feel like there is so much going on at once that you don't get to see.

Blizzard is getting seriously shoddy with their launcher. Every single time I patch this game, I'm running into stupid problems.

On the other hand, they finally patched in support for UHD resolutions, so it doesn't look like it was made for ants.

Not sure if you guys saw this but its pretty amazing. Basically bringing a modern MP experience to Brood Wars.

ShieldBattery - BW Revitalized for Modern Mortals

It looks interesting, if it ever goes public I can see myself messing around with that, but it's the same problem Q3 has - you are most likely going to run into people who will stomp you into the ground since they were playing it for much longer. If they somehow port the original campaigns, it'd be great. Yes, I know about Mass Recall, but IIRC they changed the design significantly. What worries me is that there aren't any screenshots in the announcement.

I think you may have misread it a tad. This isn't BW in SC2. This is BW in BW but giving it a whole new backend. From the mods/admins on TL who have used ShieldBattery they say the automated match making, while buggy, is fully functional.

Yeah, but the whole thing is obscure enough so there won't be that many newbies messing around.

Jaedong might be retiring from SC2 and going back to BW like Flash did.

Highlight from dreamhack:

Zaphid_sl said:

Yeah, but the whole thing is obscure enough so there won't be that many newbies messing around.

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Lol well thats somewhat the nature of trying to get into a 15 year old MP game. I bet you there will be an influx once this goes for-real live. Not like everyone on iccup/fish are great players the majority are still D. You could probably pick the game up fairly easily.

That said I don't have a ton of interest in playing BW. 12 unit selection and lack of MBS are still tedious. The start of the game is still way, way slow and worker micro management is absolute trash.

3.3 is out, mostly co-op improvements, Abathur is 5$, but the rest is nice, mutators give the missions a nice twist, shame it apparently applies only to a single map, so you will play it like once and then wait for the next one. Hard didn't seem too punishing if you have lvl 10+ commanders, but for brutal you will probably want one of the cheesier ones. Or just Vorazun. Abathur is apparently also pretty OP, but I'll wait until everybody isn't spamming him.

I still haven't done co-op. I actually know nothing about it. Isn't it like defending mass waves of shit?

Depends, there are like 9? maps, each with different objectives, but usually you will end up running around the map with your big blob trying to clear it. It's closer to old fashioned comp stomps than a competitive starcraft game. You have 1 expo, that most people take ASAP and after that you just power units and upgrades into your final composition. The nice thing is that there's not much balance, so certain commanders can solo almost all of the map (Vorazun...) while others are a bit more limited, but unless you have a friend your partner's skill can be anywhere from a master to a baked potato. The game defaults you to hard and anybody who ever touched the competitive side will have hard time losing unless their partner is closer to the vegetable side of the spectrum.

You get experience, levels and unlock new units and upgrades, which turn slightly undertuned opponent into a joke. The mutators are supposed to remedy that, but don't expect a serious challenge (maybe on brutal). Probably the only way to lose is to go full eco at the start and get swarmed by the first wave since neither of you has any units. On the other hand there is something relaxing about marching your maxed out army into the enemy's stronghold, popping all your abilities and watching the fireworks.