Starcraft II beta is out!

[SwiftSpear]

I'll really miss line formations from spring in SC2, but the unit AI's are fairly good now. Especially the unit interaction AI, they flank and surround intelligently fairly automatically.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

the unit pathing is actually pretty fantastic, and it feels extremely smooth and polished if you can run it at high graphics + high framerate

[Machete234]

The new AI can kick your ass, in contrast to the standard AI.
Its really worth playing now.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

The new AI can kick your ass, in contrast to the standard AI.
Its really worth playing now.

starcrack v5? mehh beat it first time, and I have played SC1 for maybe 6 hours in my whole life

[Soul]

The new AI can kick your ass, in contrast to the standard AI.
Its really worth playing now.

starcrack v5? mehh beat it first time, and I have played SC1 for maybe 6 hours in my whole life

Don't worry about that, the v5 AI series got a few new strategies implemented.
They are not well tested yet, and i would say about half of the are quite crappy.

Just start a new game, and eventually the AI will use a decent strat and the game will actually be worthwhile.

The current AI isn't that hard to beat, but it is fairly good if you compare it to AIs in other games, especially since they started making the AI only a number of days ago.

One thing that i find quite funny and yet very annoying is how fast the AI scouts you, it probably uses one of its first workers to scout...

[PRO_rANDY]

So who else is in the beta? Always looking for people to practice with.

Europe server, platinum league standard please!

Also some things you can do in SC2 that you couldn't in SC1 that you may like to know:

- Select multiple buildings at once and tell them to build units.
- Shift queue buildings with probes/scvs.
- No limit on the number of units one can select.

Also more but I can't list them all off the top of my head. If you aren't in the beta and have any questions I may be able to answer feel free to ask.

Edit: I also stream first person view when I'm playing SC2 at www.livestream.com/igrandy . When the stream is offline it plays my old spring videos I made ^^ To check if my stream is online either click the link or check www.teamliquid.net where it will appear on the right hand side of the main page under "Live user streams"

[REVENGE]

All of the crack AIs are useless. They don't attack / retreat properly.

[Wombat]

- No limit on the number of units one can select.

such an epic pain in the ass in all blizzard rts/lot of rts :X

also, revenge, u suxx nub go listen to coldplay <3

[1v0ry_k1ng]

randy your channel seems to be streaming spring games when your offline

[rattle]

http://www.livestream.com/neoresponse
this guy is pretty pro(toss)

[Soul]

Things that are defined as micro in starcraft but are totally standard in spring and imo gay:
-You move a selectiongroup of marines&tanks around. You want to siege the tanks and use marines stimpack.
So to siege the tanks you have to deselect everything, select only the tanks and press o hotkey. Then select only the marines and press i.
If you have only marine selected together with your tanks, no hotkeys will work and the siege/stimpack buttons will not show in the interface.
All spells/building commands/hotkeys are affected by this.

If you have selected both the Marines and the Seige tanks,
you only need to press tab to switch between their hotkeys.

Thus to seige and stim marines would look like this: e + tab + t.
Even you should be able to do that under one sec.

No way (like waypoints) to make constructors return to collecting minerals after building something. SCV start harvesting gas on their own but everything else they just stay there idle.

Just press shift and then click on the mineral line.

Can not doubleclick buildings to select more than one. So to make 5 barracks each train one marine you need to click 5 times selecting the barracks and press m five times. And maybe scroll around a bit because not all barracks are on screen.
Lololol good players place their barracks close to each other or have them hotkeyed so no need to scroll: Uhm yea, gay interface dictates gameplay. lol.

Dubbleclicking on a building or a unit selects all of these buildings/units that show on screen.

The game even have the global short command "W" hardcoded to select all warpgates,
when no other unit is selected.

When multiple buildings of one sort is selected, for an example all your barracks,
then mearly press the shortkey for your unit and it will be built, pressing it multiple times will spread the order around to all your barracks to evenly destribute the amount of units that are going to be built.

If you have multiple different buildings selected, then just do as abow, and then press tab to switch to the next set of buildings.

This allows you to have all your buildings under one hotkey and then simply use tab to chose wich to use, however this is not something i would recomend being overly abused.

[knorke]

obv this was about sc1

[Soul]

obv this was about sc1

Ah, then its a pretty accuret description, except that you could still shift click the mineral lines with your workers... if you where playing protoss that is.

(I'm guessing you are a terran player?)

However i find it kinda strange that you would compare sc1 to spring, since spring is under constant development, and sc1 was released 1998, with only minor patches since then.

A comparison between sc2 and spring would have been far more logical.

Yet, i'm sorry that my assumptions where wrong.

[Machete234]

All of the crack AIs are useless. They don't attack / retreat properly.

I dont know as a terran I really have to dig in first because the AI rushes with strong protoss units.
So its pretty agressive compared to the standard AI.

[Soul]

All of the crack AIs are useless. They don't attack / retreat properly.

Revenge where did you get these fail AIs?
Sure i have no problem beating the latest version of the custom AI, but it is still fairly good, for being an AI.

All of the crack AIs are useless. They don't attack / retreat properly.

I dont know as a terran I really have to dig in first because the AI rushes with strong protoss units.
So its pretty agressive compared to the standard AI.

Yeah, the custom AIs later versions are fairly agressive.

"To dig in" with terran is quite standard, and the custom AI zealot rush can be deadly if you don't wall your ramp.

Unless you exploit some of the remaining flaws in the AI, like if they are attacking me with 20 zealots and are breaking the wall, i just need to attack a building in their base with a worker and the AI will retreat the zealots to deal with this "serius" threat.

But then you won't do this if you ever want to be a good player, since i'm quite sure this wont work against a real player ^^


So sure Revenge the AI isn't the smartest in the room, but it's not what I would call useless.
Maybe you just fubared the installation of the AI, and thus you are stuck with the "easy" version.


The current AIs level of "skill" isn't very stable, some of its strategies are like i mentioned eariler quite crappy, while other are decent.


The main reason of the custom AIs wasn't to give you a hard time playing, but to mearly keep the screaming level in the irc down while the devs kept on with their bnet emulator.
Still they did an amazing job with the AI, if you think about the short period of time they took into making it.

[Machete234]

When the AI is installed properly it will tell you you will be crushed or something when you start the game.

I just got zerg rushed as protoss in this game its very hard to defend yourself, everything needs long to build etc.

The standard AI really waits to be killed but starcrack gets on my nerves.
It tricks your units to follow their scouts so when you retreat the scout comes back into the attack radius of your units so they follow again, you go back the scout goes forward etc etc

[1v0ry_k1ng]

the latest starcrack gives an ok game for novice players (me)

[rattle]

The standard AI really waits to be killed but starcrack gets on my nerves.
It tricks your units to follow their scouts so when you retreat the scout comes back into the attack radius of your units so they follow again, you go back the scout goes forward etc etc

hold position + walling

[Erom]

I just got in through a friend of a friend @ blizz. On a trip for work (again, sigh) so I haven't had much time to play, but I can also answer some question if people have them.

The most surprising thing for me: the minimum requirements are pessimistic - my laptop is substantially below the minimum specs but still plays the game very fluidly and looks great, with no noticeable lag, graphical or otherwise. I do play on near-minimum graphical settings, of course. Blizzard continues to impress me with their really efficient engine code.

[Wartender]

native linux version or gtfo.... *sigh* ;-;