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S1 Ep25: Starcraft
75 Plays7 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they explore a long time ago... (1998) in a galaxy far, far away (Koprulu Sector).
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Transcript
Introduction and Niche Humor
00:01:17
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I am joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? It's going good, but I'm feeling a little bit under the weather, like I require something. Oh. Like maybe a little more Vespene gas. Oh, we need more Vespene gas. Construct additional pylons. What are we talking about? Physically, I don't know if that's right. Was it we need additional pylons?
00:01:48
Speaker
We must construct additional pylons. But then you're working on it. We're gonna head on mechanics I think.
00:01:58
Speaker
This is Starcraft. This sounds like Starcraft. Yeah. If you couldn't tell from, like, the intro tunes plus the vague keywords we're throwing out. There's some people. And if you didn't read the description, you just clicked the blind link from a stranger because you trusted them and you're foolish. There's going to be a Venn diagram of people who have never played Starcraft and they can't read and they listen to her podcast. It's a small demographic that we're reaching out to here, but they exist. More niche than a baloney quiche, I always say.
Starcraft Memories and Impact
00:02:28
Speaker
That's pretty niche though. I don't know if there's anything that neat That's what I'm saying. It's very unlikely. Yeah. Yeah Most people probably played Starcraft I did it's been a long freaking time because we're talking about og Starcraft, right? Yeah, Starcraft one was like Back before it was even called Starcraft one times. That's how long it is. Remember was just Xbox. Yeah Pepperidge farm remember
00:02:58
Speaker
But yeah, Starcraft, grandfather of modern RTS and also a game. It is a game. This qualifies for podcast discussion. Yeah. It passes through the board. So I think we've beaten around the bush enough. It's time to beat the bush. Starcraft, I played it, like I said, way back when you played it. So did you play it like when it came out? Because I know I was a little late.
00:03:26
Speaker
I was always a little late for most games because my parents weren't huge on gaming, so I'm like, hey, can I do these things? And they're like, no, play outside. I'm like, the son of my skin sucks. But the son, it hates me. Father, no.
00:03:43
Speaker
But I think I got in around when battle chests were becoming a thing. They're like the compilation things. Yeah, where you'd have like, oh, Starcraft and Starcraft brood warrior, like, oh, you can get them together for 40 bucks. That's so cool. Yeah. And then like a week later, they're immediately 20. But around the same time as like Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, battle chests, obviously
Gameplay Mechanics and Storytelling
00:04:03
Speaker
Warcraft 3 was after. But all around that time.
00:04:06
Speaker
I was big into the only thing I had was PC gaming. Yes. And my dad was also in on that Blizzard mindset. So like we got it and we kind of like alternate playing missions and stuff. I'm like, fuck, yes. Like you would actually play one mission and he'd play the next. I think we had like separate campaigns. OK, gotcha. Like he had his own profile as Daddio. Right. Because that was his cool name. Right.
00:04:33
Speaker
I thought I would do something, you know, surprisingly edgy. I guess not surprising. I was like 13. Yeah. Yeah. Those are prime edgy years. Yeah. I'm imagining that you do like play the same profile, taking turns on each mission. You're like, the story doesn't make any sense.
00:04:48
Speaker
Wait, am I a different race now? We meet in between missions and they kind of do like a handoff. Yeah. So here's what happened. Yeah. I'll give you the debriefing, right? Well, usually like if one person would play, the other person would kind of like sit by and watch. Right. Like you comment a bit, go, hey, watch out for this thing. It was like a group gaming experience. Yeah. For even just the single player and my household, at least. That sounds really cool, actually. My parents never got like big into games. Yeah, they never sounded very gamey from your description. Yeah.
00:05:18
Speaker
It's like a separate thing. There were some games they got into, but not necessarily the same games I played. It was just like... The jeweled on mobile apps. Yeah, I know, right. Freestyle and Korean games. I don't know. Weird stuff. But yeah, I remember the first time I saw Starcraft, my friend Tony was playing it back in Washington and I saw like one of the units die and Starcraft's like pretty violent.
00:05:44
Speaker
I would say not necessarily by today's standards, but to a kid. But for like late 90s, if it wasn't like a shooter like Doom. Exactly. Yeah. It's like back when my parents were just not really sure if I should play T-rated games. It's just like I saw a unit die or something. There's blood on the ground. I'm like, my stomach feels weird. It's just actually uncomfortable watching Sarcath. I thought that and I was like, this game looks awesome though.
00:06:11
Speaker
Finally got it and went back to play it. That might've been a incognito mode. I don't know if my parents knew that I ever played Starcraft when I did, but yeah, you do what you gotta do. Play good games. They just uninstall the game before they came home and replay the same mission over and over.
00:06:28
Speaker
Yeah, I wasn't too worried about that. They weren't very technically savvy. I could just like... Just rename it to, uh, not Starcraft. Oh, okay. Got it. Change the icon. If you don't have a shortcut on the desktop, then you're basically invincible. There's no way they can find out what it is.
00:06:45
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that'll be like a separate thing, but it's surprising what you can hide just a one-fold. Yeah. But yeah, uh, Starcraft came out was, um, kind of built off of Warcraft, right? Which I, I personally had never played. Uh, did you play Warcraft? I didn't get around to Warcraft until like, so it kind of goes to battle chest days or Warcraft three and frozen throne. Is it frozen? I know frozen throne is the name of one of the expansions.
00:07:13
Speaker
I think that's Warcraft 3's other expansion. When all that came out, but I had never heard of Warcraft 1 or Warcraft 2. I didn't really know of Blizzard as a whole.
Terran Faction Deep Dive
00:07:24
Speaker
I'm just like, this game looks awesome. Yeah. We had pretty good judgment, I guess, as a kid, because the game was actually awesome. But Starcraft, I think, was built off of the same engine, similar engine.
00:07:38
Speaker
And obviously, I mean, I don't know if this was meant to be one in a continuation of craft-like games where they just continued to modify it, but they stopped after Starcraft, I think. I think they just realized that they had a good thing with Warcraft, but hey, let's try something else to branch out into a different genre of space. And then they had this whole fucking space opera of shit. Yeah. And I think it's stayed pretty well.
00:08:06
Speaker
Yeah, I would agree. I mean, the fact that they went back and made a remaster and changed like nothing about the game other than graphics and improved the audio quality, whatever. That's a pretty good sign that your game's got some longevity.
00:08:25
Speaker
But yeah, the game itself jumping into this was a real time strategy game. Kind of fixed view camera. You couldn't really zoom out or zoom in. But this is back when everyone had like low resolution monitors anyways, right? Yeah. So it's like 640 by or like 800 by 640. Yeah. I mean, that's your standard resolution. That's quite like play on like Windows 95, 98. Yeah.
00:08:48
Speaker
Um, but you'd jump in there and I know I did campaign first. I never really did anything other than a campaign. Um, but like right from the get go, uh, I was like, all right, this game's different from other things I've played. I've played like Sonic the Hedgehog and like army men and other games that have been forgotten by time, but, um, yeah, it's not as much of a linear game where it's like, Hey, you're going through a thing.
00:09:15
Speaker
The campaign was actually like a really well-storied mission. And it was, I'll say riddled, because littered sounds bad, with a lot of different characters. And there was like a main plot line, but like one or two side plots. But it was just surprising the depth that they put into it, compared to like another game of that time. Because it was kind of somewhat preaching new territory. And even like the mission briefings,
00:09:43
Speaker
you'd have little animations of characters as they spoke to you. There'd be like several different ones. There'd be like a big paragraph of like dialogue between people. So you've got like the full rundown of like, here's what you're doing and why. Yeah. I remember those, uh, those debriefing screens had really cool aesthetics to them. They had like the, um, the Terran AI, uh, machine, uh, like the little, the lady's face kind of on it. And this, uh,
00:10:10
Speaker
kind of like iRobot style future setup. And the other campaigns had other screens that were equally cool. I think Zurg was probably my favorite.
00:10:21
Speaker
All the backgrounds were kind of different based on the races, like you're saying, like Terrans you were in inside of like a ship. So it's all very metallic in the background, very spacious. Zerg, you were inside of something very Zerg-y. So it looked very alien and slimy. Yeah. And then for Protoss spoilers, there's a race called Protoss. Yes. It was like, you're looking out onto like the Citadel and you see all these futuristic buildings in the background.
00:10:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think this is back like, you could almost like compare them as different skins for whatever debriefing screen is. I'm just like, oh yeah, like this makes sense because this is back at like when amperes or like when everybody has different skins. Or it's like, oh, I use Windows Media Player. What skin do you use? Did you download this one? This one's really cool. What's your visualizing? Exactly.
00:11:06
Speaker
What was your visualizer, by the way? I can't remember what I had back then. I know at some point we upgraded to Windows or something and the DLL stopped loading, so we literally couldn't use Visualizer anymore. But yeah, hashtag just 90s things.
00:11:21
Speaker
There was a time where I found some really cool ones, but then as it got older and more mature, I went back to just a cooler version of the bars and like, yeah. And now I'm like, I haven't thought about that in years. I haven't even had a visualizer in the eyes. I know the music sounds like I don't need to fucking see it. I got things to do.
00:11:42
Speaker
Actually, why did I ever care about the visual? Did I actually just sit there and watch it while I listened to music? You did, and so did I. What in the world? It was a different time, Jake. A different time. I don't understand young people, I guess. Yeah, anyways, back to Starcraft.
Exploring the Zerg Faction
00:11:59
Speaker
So starting out here, you jump in as Terran, which are basically, I'm going to use the term space marines. That might not be absolutely correct, but it is. It's the human race, right? Yeah.
00:12:11
Speaker
They're your future humans in this kind of dystopic, not necessarily dystopic, but hyper-futuristic society where humanities expand, expanded like all across the galaxy. Just like, hey, you know, this is as many sci-fi series are. It's like, we've got an outpost on this planet and that planet and that planet. It's like humanity like numbers in hundreds of billions or trillions or whatever it is. Ridiculous amount of people.
00:12:39
Speaker
just a really cool setting to drop you in right off the get-go and it's also got this kind of like western vibe to it where even though they're all wearing power armor basically all the the space marines are they're kind of like cowboys and like their attitudes well in like the outskirts of space you're not as directly governed by yeah earth and you're on like a satellite planet you're like
00:13:06
Speaker
This stuff, we do things around here. Exactly, right. It becomes like that Wild West, just kind of very freelance, open-ended, what you want it to be. It's like open up the visor in your power armor and down the shot of Scotch or whatever, light up a cigarette. Cigar, right? Not a cigarette. Obviously not a cigarette. Something classy. Yes, exactly. But they play probably closest to other RTS type races at the time. Like you said, they're the humans.
00:13:35
Speaker
They have mechanical units, things like that. My favorite were the siege tanks. That was my only strategy when I played this game was literally defend, don't lose, and then after I've exhausted pretty much all of the resources in my base, then use that army to try to win.
00:13:55
Speaker
Tempo was something I did not understand. So you just clump everything in your base until you're like, it's time. And then the floodgates would be open. Exactly, right? I am forced by necessity to do a little lack of resources to leave the confines of my sanctuary. I provided for myself. I'm going to have a question for you about that in a little bit. Just going over some of the units, though. Yeah. SCVs are the Terran Builder slash Resource Collector. Yeah.
00:14:21
Speaker
Um, so when you were building a structure, let's say like a barracks, cause you want to make Marines, the SCV has to take time and stay with that building until it's completion. Right. They like walk around it and like, so he's a welder. Yeah. It's basically just like a little, like an it guy who just got put in a suit. He's like, shit, I'm here. Is this the front line? I was told I wouldn't be put on the front line.
00:14:49
Speaker
But yeah, the SCVs, as many characters in the game, have pretty distinct personalities. Each of the things you'll run across or you can build, the units will have lines they'll say like when you click on them or tell them to attack and things. And Starcraft has like good personalities there, I think. Oh yeah, definitely.
00:15:12
Speaker
I think one of the classics, they obviously have the Marines, everything like that, but they have some variant units, like the fire bats. And I never really built them, because they weren't really my particular way to engage in combat, but they had great personalities. They were all just pyromaniacs, right?
00:15:33
Speaker
They're actually insanely good though. You're trying to get invited to my next barbecue. As far as... Because they technically count as a melee attack and not ranged, but they're streams of fire shoot at a good distance and have splash damage. Yeah. So when you're being attacked by a lot of ground units like Zurglings being the iconic one from Zurg. I only think of Zurglings. That's like the only thing I think of. Who else attacks bunkers? Nobody.
00:15:58
Speaker
They're really good for that, but they are kind of susceptible as units because they're pretty inexpensive to make. They're only like 50 to 75 minerals for a lot of the human ground units. Yeah, minerals are easy to get. Yeah, you just have SCVs, get them, you just wait patiently. But you can stuff your human units into bunkers, which is just like a defensive structure, which you can't attack the units inside until you kill the bunker. Right.
00:16:24
Speaker
So you can still hit things with range and kind of like build up a choke point to defend your base. It's kind of your fixed emplacement. That's I think definitive in my mind of Terran. Like when I think of Terran, I think of siege tanks. I think of bunkers. They have other units. I didn't build them. Yeah, but a lot of their stuff is like very static. I mean, so are most other races. Yeah.
00:16:49
Speaker
Terran are iconic for it though. Other races have other things that, like you said, fixed in placements. None of them stand out in my mind to the same extent of literal turtling as a strategy. You're like, I have surrounded my base with a wall of gunfire and explosives. I am safe. I will sit here and wait to expire all of my resources.
00:17:13
Speaker
Yeah, they were definitely good at turtling. Some of the other units you mentioned, like siege tanks, were insanely good. Because if you had vision, you could kind of plant your siege tank to put it in siege mode. Which is awesome. And then it would shoot for like a much greater distance and have this splash damage. Yeah.
00:17:30
Speaker
So if you could put some behind your choke point, anything that was rushing choke point would get fucking nuked. Yeah. The downside, though, is they don't have any anti-air capability. So if, like, some mutilists or other air units come in, you're just like, hey, guys, help, please.
00:17:45
Speaker
Guess I'll die. Yeah, you couldn't do such a linear strategy. Have it be viable.
Protoss Faction Analysis
00:17:52
Speaker
But typically you've built other anti-air, whether it be through another, you know, like a Goliath. Right. Which was insanely good for that. Yeah. It's like kind of mid-range. It's like a mech thing, but it's mostly guns. So if you saw Matrix 3, I think it was also in Matrix 2.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, but like the external like you put your arms in the machine guns. Yeah, basically They're like that but beefed up like more plating and arms and they also have anti-air missiles, which are just nuts really freaking good Let's see other Taren things that stood out to me were the the ghosts those were really iconic and Taren because they're like
00:18:33
Speaker
psionics that have been trained they're in the the military and they have aggression inhibitors and all of this conditioning to basically keep them from going crazy they're like professional assassins yes they're like professional assassins on drugs and like kept sedated and all of this nonsense so they don't like destroy other people like other than whoever's being targeted right
00:18:56
Speaker
But they have sniper rifles, they'll go invisible. Those are both very good abilities. So you kind of like pristinely pick off precision targets. Just like there's one guy in the enemy line that's causing me problems. It's in the ghost form. I probably used them a couple times in the campaigns, but it was like not a blunt enough weapon for me. Like an attack move and call it a day. Like it's not a...
00:19:24
Speaker
They don't have crazy DPS. Yeah. They had high burst. Yeah. There's like a lot of damage right out the gate, but they were like super squishy.
00:19:35
Speaker
So I feel like I happen to have somebody who can detect them. And there were some buildings in the game and other units that could actually provide vision. One example of those would be the anti-air turrets that Taren could build. It would take down flyers. Taren could also use an ability on their command center, which is like the main heart of your base. Each race had one, where you usually build your production units.
00:20:03
Speaker
they could scan anywhere in the world. So it's just like, hey, I think that there's some enemies here, like I'll drop a scan, see exactly what they're doing. Yeah, you get true sight of the area. That's the other reason Taren is great for for turtling, was you're just like, I can actually have some vision of the enemy base without ever leaving my safety circle.
00:20:22
Speaker
Do I need to build anti-air? Scan that base. Oh, fuck yes. Yes, I do. Another ability that Ghost had was lockdown, which could disable a mechanical unit. So if you're just like, hey, I scanned your base. I know that you're sending aircraft carriers at me or something like that. I'll position some ghosts as soon as those were in range.
00:20:45
Speaker
turn them off, let your anti-air take care of them. I think the ghost could keep sniping them while they were disabled, but I don't recall. The only downside is when you have those cool abilities on units, it's always taking some type of energy, which does recharge over time. But I don't think Taren really had a reliable way to get energy back besides waiting.
00:21:06
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's just called energy too. Like for all of the races, it's just called energy. I'd actually seen a couple of people while they were talking about like units early on, they would actually refer to it as mana like from, from Warcraft. They just, they had like that association. So they're just like, yeah, I'll just keep calling it mana. It was really weird. Since I started, you know, with Starcraft, I haven't played Warcraft. Like that's not right. You're wrong.
00:21:35
Speaker
But yeah, Taren had a lot of interesting units like that. They also had Wraiths, I believe. I was like, they're cloaked flyers. I did like those units. Those are insanely good versus air. Hit and run awesomeness. And you're like, if you're playing through the campaign or something, maybe the enemy only has so many detectors.
00:21:56
Speaker
take those out, call it a day. You're basically good. And then battle cruisers on top of that? Yeah. Which is like the top tier unit, which is like air superiority. Yeah. They could hit air and ground. And they have a special ability you can call the Yamato cannon.
00:22:12
Speaker
where you would charge and then just pour a shit-ton of damage on a single target. So if you had a couple, you're like, hey, the enemy base, like, they're a command center. You hear the charging, you're like, I mean, you've probably seen the Battle Cruise before that, but you're like, this does not end well. That's there, I want to kill another unit in the game button, basically. If you had a lot of them, that's a lot of burst. Crazy amount of burst.
00:22:37
Speaker
And the other iconic thing about ghosts, obviously, are the nukes. Oh, yeah. The nukes. Which is the whole reason that ghosts have cloak in the first place. That's true, right? Because they essentially channel. You hear the iconic noise and a red dot appears. But as the opponent, you just hear a nuclear launch has been detected and you're like, what?
00:22:57
Speaker
If you were good, I think certain units did have red spots on them or structures. Yeah. So you'd try and position it where it was like fucking invisible to the naked eye. Oh man, that's, that's devious. So you'd essentially have to, as the defending player, scan or move around your detection to find where the
Cultural Impact and eSports Legacy
00:23:15
Speaker
unit is. Cause the ghost is just standing there locked in position. You don't have that long, right? You got like 15, 20 seconds. Yeah.
00:23:24
Speaker
That's not a lot of time if your base is spread out. If you're doing other stuff too. Expansions and things. Or maybe you're dealing with a fight in the center of the map as well. Stuff's going on. Maybe he's nuking himself just to make you paranoid. That's a bad idea.
00:23:42
Speaker
Make them waste the skin. I'll just destroy my face It's like chess you gotta sometimes you just gotta give your king up Sometimes you gotta strip off your clothes and just run at the guy, right? But if the nuke did land It was pretty expensive to make and it also cost supply which every time you made a unit it would count towards your maximum things you could build
00:24:07
Speaker
if it actually landed it did a lot of damage would usually take out structures or severely damage them and pretty much kill any unit that was in the area yeah so you could get on their base and destroy their economy line collecting the resources it was a pretty big win oh yeah
00:24:22
Speaker
Oh, yeah, it's like they were they were slow and they probably worked best in things like the campaign Where you had all that time to turtle or maybe you're against, you know, somewhat of similar skill and you're both turtling That's your chance to use them. But yeah, I wasn't really Fitted for that. Yeah That really wasn't good. The best day I could do is maybe like type and chat like you fucking kidding me That was pretty fucking what pretty accurate. Oh man
00:24:51
Speaker
But yeah, that was probably my experience with Terran more. They had pretty cheap Marines, which were like, I think some of the best rounded early game units. Oh yeah, they had ranged, their damage wasn't bad, and they were literally no money. Like it's just 50, which is the same cost for an SCV.
00:25:11
Speaker
like super freaking cheap and then you could get the Stimpak upgrade which is just iconic like on Terran across every entry and basically lets you sacrifice their health in order to essentially upgrade them basically a tier. I know that these are just cheap like ground units and they're pretty much worthless but what if they were awesome for a couple seconds at the cost of their health?
00:25:38
Speaker
Yeah, but it bombed their attack speed enough where if things were getting dire, it helps to like mow down whatever you need to. Yeah. Yeah. Now they could just completely obliterate and usually like stem in a bunch of groups, right? It's just like a bunch of guys get together in power armor and do drugs before shooting or something. You guys want to shoot up and then go shoot up a school or something? Poor Zig schools.
00:26:04
Speaker
But yeah, I think that's pretty much how I understood them. They kind of had their main build paths. We're kind of like go early into bunkers and Marines, try to survive the early game. Maybe make some attacks with the Marines. Did they have any sort of drop ship type unit in StarCraft I?
00:26:26
Speaker
Yeah, if you built a Stargate, you could build a... I think it's literally just called a drop ship. Because, Taren, we're not imaginative. Yeah. What does this do? And you could just pick up ground units. But each ground unit had a certain space it would take. Yeah. So you could have like eight Marines in a drop ship or two siege tanks. Yeah. Which is space wise, it made sense. And you could go and like drop things on the enemies, which are nice.
00:26:49
Speaker
Yeah, I remember seeing in some remastered VMs siege tank drops above the enemy base. They'd use the drop ship for air. I didn't know it was called a drop ship. That's what I had to ask. They'd use it for a sight and then just drop some tanks on high ground above the enemy base and be like, what are you going to do? Are you going to shoot at me? Very, very debilitating sight lines. But yeah, that's Taren. Is there anything else that stood out to Taren to you? Did you particularly like the race?
00:27:19
Speaker
The other things that I remember are certain buildings would have attachments, which would allow you to get certain upgrades. And sometimes you might have more than one attachment, like Command Center could have the sensor or the missile silo, but you couldn't have them simultaneously. So you'd either have to pick up and move your buildings, which is another thing Taren could do, or build more than one. Which, I mean, if you had expansion, typically you'd do that.
00:27:49
Speaker
Also, their buildings, if they got damaged enough, would just start to burn out. Yeah. But what's cool about Terran is they can spend resources to have SCVs repair anything mechanical. So that's buildings, any mechanical units. Yeah, things like that Goliath or siege tanks.
00:28:08
Speaker
Bunkers, that was the other thing. That's probably one of the reasons that Tyrion had such crazy trouble and ability. Because they get to heal those mechanical things. Yeah, exactly. The other races didn't have that ability, so sustained fire to wear him down. Tyrion's just like, yeah, I'll just throw some guys at it. Yeah. But all in all, I don't...
00:28:26
Speaker
ctern is my favorite race by any means now they're kind of like the baseline like cool but we'll get onto the next subject transition noises that's better than i expected thank you it was actually added in post that's the funny thing so the next one is obviously zerg at least as far as if you're going the campaign way yes yeah i think uh...
00:28:54
Speaker
The campaign was actually really cool too, because you start off, you're introduced to all these characters, build some understanding of what they're doing in the world, but the transitions through the story from one race to another absolutely blew my mind when I played OG Starcraft.
00:29:13
Speaker
I had no idea that it would actually switch from one race to another in the course of the campaign. So I finished the mission. I'm like, oh man, it really sucks that Jim was betrayed and all of this is going on. He's left and he's really upset. Oh, you have to keep playing as Jim. I'm invested as Jim.
00:29:32
Speaker
And then the game's like, you are now a Sarah Britt. It's like, and you are entrusted in defending this Chrysalis. I'm like, huh? Hold up though. Fight for the enemy. I would never. Okay, I'm on level two now. Yes, exactly right. But man, that transition to Zerg, I just, I love because Zerg is so different.
00:29:53
Speaker
Like they yeah, I'll just leave it at that right. I won't describe All right, thanks for sharing. Yeah. Thank you Colin like they start you off and they're like, hey You have a hive now, you know, you can Spawn your larva like larva will spawn off of this then you can like build your drones and things I'm like, all right. Well, I'm not like Building my SCVs anymore. Yeah, it's like it's definitely a change-up because every other
00:30:23
Speaker
two other races, Protos and Taren will essentially have build queues and it'll produce the unit if it has enough.
00:30:32
Speaker
Resources, but it takes a set amount of time. Yeah, but it makes sense. It's like an assembly line, right? Yeah, the hatcheries layers and hives Will just spawn larva over time and then you can have larva go into Any unit you have access to build. Yeah, so you're building your drones from there Which are your resource collectors for comparison SCVs your zerglings your hydro lists mutilists overlords Everything is from that. Yeah, so you're kind of waiting on a
00:31:01
Speaker
passive timer to generate larva. So a lot of times Zurg will end up building a bunch of hatcheries in a row together to be like mass build this shit. Yeah. So then you'll have 12 of whatever unit coming out at once.
00:31:15
Speaker
Yeah, you can just rebuild your army almost instantly. You're like, all right, that offensive kind of failed, but I've got some resources banked, so I have a second army. Yeah, late game Zerg is nuts, which is why they're the fucking swarm. Yes, exactly. And Zerg is my favorite. They just play in such an interesting manner with their kind of hit and run tactics in the early game, where your units are faster, like your Zerg lanes, which are these just ravenous.
00:31:43
Speaker
Claude demon puppies demon demon puppies is a good way to put it I think But they just charge it enemies do tons of damage and die immediately Basically like no health on them. Yeah, they are the cheapest unit because if you spend 50 minerals to make it Every larva actually makes two zerklings. Yeah, so that's you kind of like throw them at the enemy. Mm-hmm, but they are fast They're good for scouting
00:32:13
Speaker
Yeah, they get completely mowed down by other fixed emplacements like bunkers and things like that. Like throwing Zurglings at a bunker is usually a losing proposition if there's anything in it. But if you say like you built one of your evolution units early in the game, not unit building, like spawning pool, which was necessary to create the Zurglings, one of the strategies was to build it
00:32:39
Speaker
basically as early as possible or as early as feasibly possible. And then just invest all of your resources into making a small army of zerglings and praying that your opponent didn't build defenses yet. Or the zergling rush or zerg rush, which as a term has just moved beyond the game and that just exists now. Just like, okay, no, we're all in right from the start.
00:33:02
Speaker
Just like Wombo combo has persisted through many things, but it only has one game of origin. Yeah. Dr. Wombo. We need, we need to have a talk after this. Oh yeah. But Zerg does really stand out because they are the first obvious and really non-human race. They're very xenomorphic. Yeah. I was going to say alien. Your term is way better. Thank you, Wikipedia article. Yeah. But they're very slimy, very,
00:33:33
Speaker
more beast-like than any of the other races. Yeah. They're just like flesh and tissue and biological organs. That's all of the buildings. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, literally, but it looks like it too. Like, yeah. Like the evolution chamber on the ground, the evolution chamber, which allows you to like upgrade. Oh, uh, ground defenses, ground attack and something else. I'm sad. I forget the moment the range attack. Or is that a different one? Was that the hydro list in or something? No, you actually might be right.
00:34:02
Speaker
Thing is mainly ranging that's all for ground, but it looks like a beating heart Yeah, and like all of you your buildings kind of pulsate. Yeah, and it has like a very
00:34:13
Speaker
It's alien. It's pretty much alien. It's like if your entire, if the human body was just all of the insides were just spread out across the base. That's basically Zerg and just continues to spread. Jake, if I die, not one if, I want you to have my body arranged in such a fashion. Make a Zerg base. So if people go to the viewing, they're like,
00:34:36
Speaker
Oh, I remember Starcraft. Oh, that's good. Yeah, I probably can't do that. I don't know if literally anyone who would be in charge of the way your main remains are handled would let me do that. I can just give you power of attorney. That's a bad idea. I'll be dead. I'm going to shoot.
00:34:56
Speaker
But they also have to build on creep. Yes. Or other restrictions. So you can build. Well, key thing, drones would essentially sacrifice themselves to become that building. Yeah. So this is another one of those economy hits where you can't have that unit collecting resources because it's becoming a building, whether it's.
00:35:16
Speaker
The key thing I wanted to transition to is the creep colony, which just exists as a building, but it generates creep under it, which allows you to build buildings on it. And there are also some other features of it, but the creep kind of spreads out over time.
00:35:33
Speaker
Yeah, and it's kind of the the creep. I kind of did it grant site to you in Sarcathorn as well. I know it does in later games. So it doesn't, but the colony itself would. OK, so you kind of just would have site around the area. It represents like the area of control for dessert. Did you move faster on it?
00:35:52
Speaker
I think certain, I believe ground units did. Yeah, I know fliers don't, but it's really important for transitioning between your bases, holding control of an area, and obviously your opponent wants to deny you that resource, wants to deny you the ability to place buildings wherever you want.
00:36:14
Speaker
Kind of like shut down their advances and be aware of what you're doing because even if the creep doesn't provide a lot of sight You have these colonies all over the place that's gonna catch something, right? Yeah, and you could transition those creep colonies into sucking colonies to attack ground units That's like our sport colonies like a spying thing, right? Yeah, it was like a subterranean thing. Yeah, kind of again pulsated Yeah, like you saw it kind of go down like a tongue attack and it'd be like like it would just come up and like two hits would kill a marine and they would just kind of explode and
00:36:43
Speaker
Freakin good defense like I don't know if fixed in placements was ever really a good meta, but man I love it's definitely needed for Some things though. It's not the way to win. Yes. Yeah, but it's a necessity. Yeah It's like badass though. Yeah, just everything's Eric has is awesome. They have the
00:37:03
Speaker
the the Cerebrate Commander kind of just like psychically controlling this section of the army, right? It's just like go out and expand and that's one thing like I loved about Starcraft is almost always at the start of a mission They give you like a basic base usually just the main unit and they're like, all right now grow
00:37:22
Speaker
And I love that kind of expand and they pretty much always start from scratch. Yeah. I really like building up from nothing and making something awesome. And Zerg conveys that I think more than any other race because it doesn't stop. It's all about this like cancerous growth on the map. Yeah. The evolution of Zerg. Of the swarm. Oh my gosh. You just get goosebumps talking about Zerg. Freaking awesome.
00:37:47
Speaker
I don't think it's too much, but in Starcraft 1, the Mutalists could transform into Guardians if you had that upgrade. Which made them a stronger air unit, but they could only attack the ground units. They could no longer combat with air, but they had insanely good range. So that was like your late game air siege.
00:38:09
Speaker
And it would just destroy bases if you didn't have a defense for it. Did they have broodlords in Starcraft 1? Mm-hmm. I'll just add later, okay. So Guardians probably filled that role a lot more. Yeah, you mentioned Mutalists. Mutalists were like my Zerg strategy. Again, these are super, like, if I liked Wraiths, I'm gonna like Mutalists super fast. These guys heal over time, which is awesome. Like, all the Zerg units do. They're biological, so...
00:38:34
Speaker
You know, creeps gonna heal it eventually. And, uh, mutilists were freaking fast. They'd have, like, the glaive attacks off of those, would bounce through the army, and you're just like, I'm just gonna obliterate everything. It was nice when you're going for, like, a group of something. Especially if you could ever hit that choice-choice economy line in the back. Yeah.
00:38:55
Speaker
Because you'd send out, let's say you had a unit of 12. You'd send out 12 attacks, but then those would each bounce and do a little bit less damage. But you're still doing a lot. So it's nice to attack and go in. And because of how fast they were, you can kind of go in and do precision strikes and then relocate them. Yeah. This is the other part to the turtling strategy. Defend your base. Send really fast air units to attack the opponent's base until you just win.
00:39:26
Speaker
yeah that was basically it didn't even matter the race that's the strat so i love i love mutilisks i never built like some of the the heavier units for zerg because i was so dependent on their air but they'd have hydrolysts which are super iconic like they shoot spines and are generally terrifying to
00:39:46
Speaker
almost everything because they get air and ground, right? They're just really balanced mid-range. Yeah, it's like they have like lower health than like some of the beefier units, but it doesn't matter because everything's dead, right? They did take Vespian, which was like the other resource you had to gather early, and that usually was used in your late game.
00:40:09
Speaker
units or more expensive ones. Yeah. So one thing I want to explain is Vespene was capped a little bit. So for like the mineral collective, you could have maybe 16 to 20 workers collecting minerals over time. And they'd always bring back at like eight a pop.
00:40:27
Speaker
But for Vespene geysers, after you had built something on to collect the Vespene, you could only have three workers at a time kind of cycling through. Right. You could have more, but it didn't mean anything. They would just be like waiting in line for Vespene. So you were kind of limited that way.
00:40:45
Speaker
So it was a more desired resource. Exactly. But hydrolysts were only 25 Vespene. So it wasn't a huge cost. But if you're trying to save it from utilize, which were 100 minerals, 100 Vespene. Yeah. You got to have something sort of way.
00:41:00
Speaker
And that's usually where like your army composition comes into play in Starcraft. It's like you choose where your evolution is going to happen. Now this is admittedly for players that are better than I am, where using one strategy is the only strategy. But you're like, oh, I saw that they're coming at me with all these Marines. I'm going to invest in this particular, you know.
00:41:22
Speaker
resource path. Maybe I'll build something like, I know that their army's kind of immobile, so I'm going to build a nidus worm. I will build the network, the actual nidus network, which
00:41:33
Speaker
It's kind of like a game finisher, right? It's essentially basically a cross map portal for your units. Yeah. Biological portal. The only downside or I guess limitation is it had to be built on creep. Yeah. So you could obviously in your base, you have creep, but just try and sneak up on somebody else's base. You'd have to have another type of colony built out there. Yeah. Where you have creep generated to then be like, Hey, what's up?
00:42:00
Speaker
They didn't have, did they have the, they didn't. Yeah, I'm already getting the head shake. So I know that Overlord can't do that. You're going to say the Overlord generating group. Yes. That's the cheap, really easy way to do that in later games. But this is, this is hard mode. You had to build your way there. So that was probably a little less viable, I'd assume, in Starcraft.
00:42:20
Speaker
But even so, let's say you were building an expansion, maybe a second expansion. You could quickly relocate ground units to be like, hey, we need some defenses over here. So your whole army could be wherever you are. I could see that being strong. It's still useful. It's just a more defensive tool.
00:42:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's just good to relocate units. You can get it offensively. You just have to be real sneaky. Like what is this creep doing? I don't remember my base being so purple. Did you do this? That was me. Another thing I really liked, but never using competitive. The defilers were an insanely good utility unit.
00:43:09
Speaker
They could do some stuff, but the main thing I care about is the dark cloud ability. It cost some amount of energy, but it put a cloud in an area and it lasted for way too long. But ranged attacks could not go through the cloud. So you could go up to, let's say, a Terran fixed base that has some bunkers, a couple missile turrets behind, and some siege tanks.
00:43:35
Speaker
And you're just like, hey, I'm going to throw up the cloud and throw some zorglings in. They can't be hit by ranged while they're under the cloud. So they just kind of work their way through that choke point, which is nuts. It's like situational invulnerability against certain cops. And that's just freaking amazing. Yeah.
00:43:54
Speaker
There's some of those Zurgling Specialists. I only build one unit. Interesting strat, Dimitri. It's got no counter. I attack his base before he attacks mine. I win. It's done.
00:44:11
Speaker
But now the specialist units usually had more in the cost, in the way of like, fesping costs, like those defilers. And they'd have active abilities, which is the reason I never built them. Like you had to hit keys on your keyboard other than like A and then left click. Yeah, I really understand. Like I was by no means a micro master. Some people are really good with it though. And those abilities basically allowed you to modify the
00:44:38
Speaker
They give you power modifiers for an army versus army fight. Because you're just like, hey, maybe I'm going to completely destroy one of your units with an ability from a queen, maybe, right? Spawn broodlings. Something that will completely shift the balance of the fight. Or Dark Swarm, something like that. Make that cloud. And then all of your Marines are completely worthless.
00:45:08
Speaker
just really, really impressive micro abilities are like required by Starcraft, which is probably the reason that I've never been great at it. Because it's really not like literally APM, like actions per minute, yeah, defined by Starcraft. But
00:45:28
Speaker
It's still great, even if I can't use the good guys. They're really big, like, specialists. I mean, you can just do what I do where you select all 12 in one unit, and you're like, do the one thing. You can set that one thing as a special ability and hope for the best. Yeah, they did it. I won. Yeah, I never experienced that.
00:45:46
Speaker
The last thing I feel we should mention about Zurg though is ground units can learn Burrow. Oh yeah. That's true. Which is crazy nuts. I don't think the Ultraless can because they're too big. Yes. But it's really cool if you have like a pack of Zurglings you can kind of just leave them out. They'll still have vision of the area if they're underground. Yeah.
00:46:08
Speaker
But they can just hang out there. And then, oh, something walked by. You just pop up right next to it and you're like... And everybody's dead. Yeah. Yeah, the ambush potential is absolutely crazy. I know it's less viable, like the higher tiers of play, because people have so much vision. Oh, they have detection for everything. Like literally everything. But what's funny is because it's not viable at the highest tiers of play,
00:46:35
Speaker
Like sometimes I just watch Starcraft matches because, you know, Lunch Break, it's fun. There have been amazing swings because of situational burrows, like specifically in later games. But I'm sure it's happened in Starcraft 1 as well, where it's like, once you're at the top tier and you're like, nobody's going to burrow against me. No one's going to pick up burrows. It's a waste of resources. You know, they know that I will know.
00:47:00
Speaker
So then it surprises you because no one will do it, right? So Starcraft's got a lot of that kind of rock, paper, scissors to it, where if you do something your opponent's not anticipating at all, that can be all it takes to win, like in an instant, which is awesome.
00:47:19
Speaker
But before we jump into the next race, do you think it'd be a good time to take a coffee break or are we good to go? I'm probably good to go. Not enough energy. On second thought, let's take that quick break. Yeah, I think it's for the best. So what was... Shit, I didn't hardly actually forgot the last race. Oh.
00:47:48
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, we should probably look that up. Research complete. Right. Oh, yep. Pro toss. Pro toss. Yep. Those are the other ones. Don't know how we forgot about those guys. So they're called protoss, but I am by no means pro at toss. Right. Because. Or tossing, protossing. That's what they call it, right? Playing the race. Shake no.
00:48:11
Speaker
No? Okay, no. They are also an A. Yes, yes. I'm just here to throw you off your game. That's all I'm doing. You're doing a great fucking job. No. So Protoss is the other alien arrays, obviously. But they're much more advanced, refined, very noble. Yes. Very smooth. Yes. I've touched one. They're very smooth. They actually have like a wrinkly kind of skin, though. Purple ring. They're basically Thanos type skin, I'd say. Yeah. Yeah.
00:48:41
Speaker
But if you consider like zergs to be like the very raw aliens, these are the very advanced aliens Who kind of a very dismissive of Terrans because they're just like they're fucking people they got they got nothing Yeah, but they have advanced technology. They have shielding. Yeah, they have pylons which they need to build things within like an energy kind of sphere of influence and
00:49:06
Speaker
Yeah. And pylons are also what gets them energy for like a unit camp. Yeah. Dual purpose thing. Yeah. Yeah. And the other cool thing is, um,
00:49:18
Speaker
as I'm just talking about buildings and none of the units. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, that's where the units come from, presumably. Ah, yes. We'll lead into it. And then we segue. So you can technically have one pylon and it has like a radius of things you can build on because the pylon powers the building. Right. So if you're a dumbass and you only have one pylon for like, I'm sorry. This doesn't need to be hypothetical. A whole horde of buildings. You can just take out the one pylon and you've depowered their whole fucking base. Oh, yeah.
00:49:48
Speaker
So you never want to do that. You technically want to have it like multiple pylons and you have double dependencies. I've definitely done the receiving end of that strategy where it's just like one pylon. Like it seems really inefficient to like have to, you know, put all of these pylons around. Here's one pylon. All of my defenses are around it. Excellent. Excellent. And then they just kill that. I'm like, where did all my, where did all my photon cannons go? Yeah.
00:50:16
Speaker
which I think is probably my favorite building out of Protoss. It's like, if bunkers are good, that's fine. These are bunkers, you don't have to put people in.
00:50:27
Speaker
and they do more single target damage. That's true. But not as fast. But I mean, the animation is kind of cool because it's just like a little, I think like a telescoping thing that comes up and it's like a little ball and it shoots like a little orb of light. Yeah. But the delay in it has like a weird effect, similar to how dragoons fire. And they can also attack air and ground. Which is nice. I do like that. It's really nice. It's like a marine.
00:50:52
Speaker
But again, not a marine. Better, because it's a different race. I'm going to just equate everything back to a marine. It's all too good, but marine. The marines though. They have like ranged side blades that they shoot from their gun. Speaking of zealots, their protoss is cheapest unit to my knowledge, outside of the probe, which is what you're building with. I use those ones.
00:51:21
Speaker
I mean, to build my base. ProtoS is going to take forever to get to, oh my god. They're all puns. It's all puns in any window. So real quick, with probes, when building, they can essentially summon in buildings under the radius of a pylon, and then they can kind of go fuck off and go back to collecting resources. Right. So that's one of the...
00:51:41
Speaker
more impressive things about Protoss, which is beneficial and almost needed because a lot of Protoss's costs are higher because their units will require more resources because they're usually dealing more damage or have more health. And on top of the health, they also have shields.
00:51:59
Speaker
So they're definitely more cost-effective units, but they're high investment. They will always be high investment losing protest unit sucks. Yeah. Cause how expensive they are. Yeah. And they're not usually too quick to build either. But technically if you have a good army of like zealots or your front, uh, front end up close melee unit, their berserkers charge in they, they're pretty decent. And then dragoons will be your mid tier range, similar to hydro risks or.
00:52:30
Speaker
What's the other? What are you talking about? I was hoping you were going to say Marines, but it was wrong. It was actually Goliath. Oh, okay. I didn't fall for it. Ha! Got him. But they can attack air and ground, whereas zealots are just ground units.
00:52:42
Speaker
Yeah. It would be really impressive if they could attack them. They'd literally be jumping at aircraft. They'd just punch the sky. Fuck you. I wish they had that animation, but it didn't do damage. It was just, ah. Frustration animation. That's great. Yeah, the protests have a lot of really cool designs and units are all like gold and blue. And like you said, they're sleek. If Zurg or the body organs protest or the skin, it's like, looks good.
00:53:12
Speaker
No, no much like the ghost could be your kind of subtle strategy for Terran Protots had access to the dark Templar Where they're more expensive. They take like a lot of your best being gas and
00:53:33
Speaker
And losing them again sucks, but being on the receiving end of just invisible units in your base killing all of your workers It's never that fun, and it's usually pretty effective to take you out of the game Yeah, and benefit of Dark Templar is that they are permanently invisible. Yeah
00:53:50
Speaker
and it doesn't require any energy, it just, this is me, this is who I am. Yeah, except me, mom. But again, they can only attack ground units, but their damage is like 40 or 50, which is insanely high. Yeah, they just kill stuff. They can like one hit kill workers, which is nice. Yeah. You just have to get them there.
00:54:11
Speaker
So if you drop, if you take a dropship over to somebody's base, and they don't see anything come out, they're like, Oh, no, wait, it just pauses in the air for a second and then turns around and goes back. So suspicious. Gonna drop a scan on that one.
00:54:29
Speaker
They're obviously really cool. They also have some of the, I'd say strongest casters in the game, in the form of the high templar, right? Oh yeah. I've seen plenty of matches where a key size storm absolutely turns the tide of the battle. You're like, hey, isn't it great that you have all of those Zerg and you got like 200 unit cap and they're on a big pile and they're dead?
00:54:53
Speaker
Yeah, the AoE damage on that is surprisingly nuts, and I think it does damage over time. So if you stay in the storm longer, you get fucked up more. Yeah, and I'm pretty sure it stacks. I'm not 100% on that. Oh yeah, you can definitely have multiple templar do side storms, I think. This is what I was talking about before, you have 12 units who do one thing. Yes. I have high templar who are like, nuke this area, please, thank you. Yeah, the area is dead. We have killed the area.
00:55:20
Speaker
But if you're like me and you're like, hey, card templar, those guys have buttons. I don't use characters with buttons. You take two of them and you like push them together and you're just like, yeah, push them together a couple of times. And you're like, all right, how does this work? Eventually, if you push them together enough, they form into an energy being called the Archon.
00:55:38
Speaker
and uh i liked our cons oh he's the coolest fucking unit in the whole game i agree because it's like a giant ball of energy slash a naked guy at the center right which is what more could i ask exactly right but it like shoots out like this psionic blast which does aoe damage it's like a chain lightning but it's honestly his normal attack it doesn't chain but that's what it looks like yeah it's lightning it's
00:56:03
Speaker
It's like a cool splashy lightning thing. It's like chain lightning, but without the chain. So lightning, what would you describe it? Yeah, it works really well against, in particular, Protosting to fight Zerg. It's, you know, a lot of their abilities are against that. So you got a bunch of Zerg grouped up, particularly things like Mutalist, right? They're all just sitting there in a pile and you're like, what if I hit the entire pile at once? So splash damage is beautiful for things like that. Yeah.
00:56:31
Speaker
Also, a lot of units in Protos are very, you have health and you have shields. Shields will recover over time. But for Archons, it's like 10 health and like 350 shields. Yeah. Which is on average better for Protos. More regenerable. Regenerating health is good. So the only downside of that is if you're against a science vessel for Terran, they can shoot out an EMP, which just, you know, remove shields from an area. Right. Yeah.
00:57:00
Speaker
You don't need those. You've got that 10 health you can fall back on. Yeah. Doesn't work so great. The other thing that's here on our list that I'm not as familiar with is the the Reaver. Because that doesn't exist in the games that I played since then, but I guess it was too impactful maybe.
00:57:23
Speaker
It was just a metric fuck ton of damage. Similar to the siege tank, it had really good range. You actually had to pay for the ammo because you create scarabs at like 15 a pop. And the unit would actually have to create it like it was...
00:57:38
Speaker
a building producing units. So you'd have to wait for that time. Did it have autocast kind of like continually rebuild these? Did that exist? Or did you have to manually do it? I think you had to manually do it. Because Starcraft was not as friendly as later Starcrafts. But it would shoot out like this little scarab and then it would reach a target and explode.
00:58:01
Speaker
So you have a couple of those on your back line, it was really hard to deal with. Yes. Again, AOE, tremendous burst damage. Zerg's gonna have a bedtime. This is acceptable to air, because they can't do shit. Exactly, yeah. Thankfully they got Mutalisks, so obviously Protas has no counter to that. And then they have Archons and their Mutalists are dead. This is the Rock, Paper, Scissors we were talking about.
00:58:27
Speaker
Well, I will say Protoss does have easily better anti-air. So in Sargraph 1, before even Brood War, just simple scouts, similar to the Wraiths for Taran, had pretty shitty air to ground damage, but had amazing air to air damage because they would shoot out these rockets. And they're also still fairly tanky because they're a Protoss unit. So if you have those against Mutos, we'd wreck them.
00:58:53
Speaker
also the fucking flagship the carriers oh yeah would it get the only the only offensive unit built you build if you're me and you're turtling for the early game you get that fleet beacon out and you're like i'm making carriers got them
00:59:09
Speaker
yeah just ridiculous investment in resources but you never it's like uh it's like a fritos i think something like that or is it lays you never you can't just have just one basically applies to carriers you never just send one is it pringles is it pringles
00:59:26
Speaker
It might be Pringles. I don't know. They're not sponsored now. Screw them. Fuck them. Yeah, don't eat chips. Don't be like me. But you always build in a group. You've got like a bunch of those things flying around and you just swarm the air with the interceptors. You're talking about how the Scarabs were building their ammo. Same deal with interceptors. Like building those ships that are going to fly out of this carrier and wreck stuff.
00:59:48
Speaker
And if I recall, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but the AI that was like, take care of your defenses and things like that, like, oh, I'm going to automatically attack enemies. It can get caught up on interceptors. We're just like, I see all these little flying ships. I'm going to shoot those. So if there's like something that's anti-air and you're not specifically controlling units to say, hey, attack this, it'll be like, oh, the first target that entered my range is this interceptor. I'm going to attack the worthless small thing. Yeah.
01:00:14
Speaker
Which, I mean, it was good to destroy them, but if you destroy the actual carrier itself, the interceptors would go with it. Yeah. Usually that was the strategy you want to do. You don't want to just ping them for like 15 minerals at a time. Yeah. Yeah. And also if you had like a full stack of carriers and they each had like eight interceptors and you slowly flew over to an area and then you just picked one thing to like right click as your target, all the interceptors would go out and kind of like swarm down at the same time. It looks so fucking cool.
01:00:43
Speaker
it's basically like the protos were like the zurger the swarm no yes what the heart of the swarm yeah interceptors and carriers yeah freaking good though protos had a lot of resource management that i kind of struggled with a little bit because since they're user their resources
01:01:05
Speaker
Their units were so resource intensive. And the fact that you could at any point just be like, I want a new base. It's all coming in now. I sent a probe out. I will have a new base and it will all be constructed. Here's a wall of proton cannons. I'm just going to set up.
01:01:24
Speaker
that kind of like instant decision making where you're like, this is where the entire wave of defense is gonna go, screwed me over. Cause I would make that decision at the wrong time, right? You're like, all right, time for a new base. Spends all of my resources at once. And then I lose my name. Yeah.
01:01:42
Speaker
Well, at least you tried to expand, though. I've never learned how to do that. I always grew up on playing fastest maps with people. Oh, yeah. So you just had the one base and you're like turtle up and build shit. I've heard you can. I've seen some like some rounds of the custom like eight, eight player maps where it's just.
01:02:02
Speaker
I was going to say smorgasbord, that's the wrong term, but battle royale basically, that's primitive form. They're just like, alright, I hope that I'm not the one that everybody decides to kill first. He goes, sit again, sit back, turtle. Wait for everyone else to kill themselves off. And pray that the other seven players aren't doing the same.
01:02:22
Speaker
that's the thing it's it's really fun to like try different strats if you're playing with friends because like there are other like things and mechanics you can abuse in the game so i know another you never got to mention for protoss was the arbiter yes which
01:02:38
Speaker
it merely existing near your units will cloak them all yeah which is again if you just see an arbiter by itself it's not by itself so that's really badass it also can throw out a stasis field to like freeze uh an enemy unit and hold it there for a set amount of time yeah a long time too it's like almost a minute or something crazy i think that's an exaggeration i think it's like 44 seconds
01:03:02
Speaker
That's an exaggeration. It's gotta be. I can see that I'm probably wrong. But just Google it, it's fine. But it will also chain the effect to other nearby enemies. So if things are clumped together, you can kind of isolate a whole group and say, I'm not dealing with you right now. So you can like, stall somebody's army, take the numbers of damage.
01:03:20
Speaker
Also, let's say an Arbiter is by itself and it's just in your base. It has the ability to do a recall. Yeah. Where it will just summon in units from an area and just bring them to where the Arbiter is. Yes. That's it. This is like your Nidus worm, but attached to a unit that can fly around the map. Yes. It can be pretty nuts. Yeah.
01:03:41
Speaker
And you could use that offensively or defensively, right? Because you're like, you could be super aggressive with your army. We're going it. We're losing. You're super deep. Guys, we're out. Yeah. Or perform feints, something like that. We're like, here's the entire attack. It's at your side base. I have now recalled all my units to your main, you know? Yeah, like if you move units from your main base over to like, I got to defend my expansion. And Arbery's like, hey, but no.
01:04:05
Speaker
Did it have like a global cooldown or could you have multiple arbiters that play like juggling your units? Yeah, you could. The only limitation was the energy that the unit had because recall is a pretty expensive ability. Right, but you could build a couple, let them build up energy in your base. Oh yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. You could juggle your base, sorry, your army around the map like a couple of times if you really wanted to. That's absolutely crazy.
01:04:27
Speaker
I explicitly know that they disallowed that in future games, so I understand why Arbir didn't make the transition. Yeah, it was broken as a standalone unit for sure. I could just imagine playing against that would be very frustrating. They're like, oh, my bad, I let you build a unit. Protests have a lot of really flashy, high-impact units, but they could never tear my heart away from Zerg's. Definitely not.
01:04:57
Speaker
There's a certain aesthetic about Zerg. I'll always admire and respect Protoss as well. They're all more interesting than Terran. It's easiest for me to play Protoss, hands down. Because I have a simple build order and things that I go through.
01:05:12
Speaker
Not well by any means. I want people to think I'm good. I'm terrible at this game. But Zurg will always be my favorite to actually play. It keeps you busy in the early game too. Like we were talking about how Micro is huge in Starcraft and Zurg is like always trying to do something on the map to always to keep expanding.
01:05:31
Speaker
Manage everything that they have going on in the fact that their units can be built really quickly Diversionary tactics things like that protos actually throws me off Because we'll be like alright. I need to build my base I have one guy IQ up like shift Q whatever up all of the buildings and then just go back to mining them like Alright, they're all summoning it What do I do? You actually have some downtime
01:05:53
Speaker
The downside, though, is you can't actually queue up builds. Oh, okay. Oh, well, oops. So that helps your micro, helps keep you active. Like I was saying, Starcraft's a very micro-intensive game. You couldn't shift queue at all? Wow.
01:06:12
Speaker
My technology has advanced. You had to go B-E for Pylon. Click. B-E for Pylon. Click somewhere else. It might have been P then. I feel like they did change it between one and two. Yeah. I know it's E and two. Yeah. It's like extractor for Zerg or something. Yeah. It's, it's just a lot of stuff, but it can always be rewarding. Like I said, I really enjoyed playing with friends because the campaign, super solid, great story. Oh yeah. How they set up the missions and
01:06:42
Speaker
let you learn units and how the race is played for that race war. For multiplayer I loved doing like the cheesy strats here and there. Probably the most notable for protoss is the cannon rush because you only need minerals to do that so you go build like a
01:06:59
Speaker
and away pylon towards their base. Like near their natural expansion or something, right? Well if you're the fastest, you could just be near their choke point. Just outside their vision, they just put a couple cannons. So even if they build a couple units to send it to attack,
01:07:14
Speaker
It's hard at that point to just group up on cannons and take it out. Yes. So you then keep pushing into the base with more pylons and cannons because you're only farming minerals back at the home base and people can get easily overrun. Yeah. It's like cannon was designed to stop early pushes from small groups of units, which is what they will be creating in the early games. So if you have that in their base already, their base is now your base.
01:07:39
Speaker
We're all in this together, but I'm going to kill you. Take your shot. But then it will just be me. Yeah, I think the diversity to ways that you can play the game and how you can adapt each match and how you have to adapt to like, you know, someone's going to rush you with cannons. How do you counter that? Well, you look outside of your base relatively early in the game, like, all right, well, maybe people check outside their base. How do you how do you counter that, you know?
01:08:05
Speaker
You like learn a couple spots maybe on each map where you're like This is a sneaky location where people might not check and you kind of just even all the way up to like pro games It's this back and forth of information where information information oftentimes wins games and Starcraft you're just like I know what you're building I know how to counter that yeah, cuz if you don't know that the person has air and you haven't accounted for air and
01:08:29
Speaker
You're likely going to be fucked. Yes. I have all ultra lists and he has all carriers. Cause like, let's say you've not built for it at all unit wise.
01:08:40
Speaker
and you find out and an attack comes to your base, you now have to react. And you have to spend that time, however long it takes to build a missile turret, or however long it takes to build a unit that has anti-air, and hope for the best, and you're on the back foot, and you never want to be. Because you have all this other shit going on.
01:09:00
Speaker
And it doesn't take long to lose, like in Starcraft, he mentioned that a little bit, but Starcraft is one of the faster paced RTSs. Like, you can literally lose a game in the first five minutes if somebody just straight up rushes you. Yep. And, I mean, that doesn't feel great, and some games can go considerably longer, and they do. And I think games where everyone's run out of resources on the map, and it's literally just my remaining army versus their remaining army.
01:09:25
Speaker
and like using flying barracks as like vision and decoys and things like that that's fun to watch but there's a whole range to how a Starcraft game can play out which is you know the reason I think it's lasted as long as it has
01:09:42
Speaker
And it has like amazing sound engineering. Oh, yeah. I mean, amazing. Like the soundtrack was wonderful, which it was fucking amazing still. Yes. But like all the units having different sounds for unit selection, movement, attacking other things.
01:09:58
Speaker
Just, it really all tied together to make it very cohesive. So when you were playing a specific race, you feel like the race. Exactly. Like we're talking, you feel like spider-man. We're talking earlier about, uh, all the Taren's voice lines. It sounds like they're talking through an intercom. Yes. Like every single one, because that's the technology they had access to. Right. And all the Zurg are just noises because they're just creatures and things. They're bestial aliens. Yeah. And then all the protoss ones are very,
01:10:29
Speaker
clean and crisp and have a little bit of a... They're like space knights with some verb on their voices. Synthesizer type. A little bit of a twinge to it, but it sounds badass, you know?
01:10:43
Speaker
It's I think you can there's plenty of things you can criticize Blizzard for, but art, sound design, like just multimedia in general, they're they're really freaking good at. And they started that early. But as far as.
01:11:00
Speaker
the impact of Starcraft on the RTS genre. I mean, a lot of games have fallen off in RTS's since Starcraft has been around. Gregoo isn't talked about anymore. That's true. I mean, one of the classics too, coming out as early as a few years ago. I mean, even when Warcraft 3 came out after Starcraft, it was definitely played a shit ton as we already had our Dota episode. Yeah.
01:11:25
Speaker
I don't ever hear about anybody who still plays Warcraft 3. Like name one competitive Warcraft we play. You can, you don't have the mic, fucker. Yeah, got him. But yeah, I just, I don't hear about that as a thing. I hear about Starcraft all the time and I have...
01:11:41
Speaker
they just did the remastered. When I was looking for some Starcraft clips on YouTube, it's just all remastered matches of just pro games. That's the scene that's been existing and still going on. As soon as the remaster came out, people started playing it and it's a lot easier to watch than classic Starcraft games in modern high resolution.
01:12:04
Speaker
That's pretty nice. You can look at what game they chose to remaster. They didn't pick Diablo 2, the game we all wanted. They picked... they picked Starcat. I'm still holding out Hope for Diablo 2.
01:12:16
Speaker
I mean, they made Diablo 3, so they're never gonna fucking do it. Yeah. Diablo 3.5. 2.5. There you go. A little bit in between. Don't do that. Just make two. But yeah.
Starcraft's Influence in South Korea
01:12:29
Speaker
Explode in South Korea became basically their national sport. I don't know if that's actually true, but it's what we all believe to be true, which is good enough.
01:12:37
Speaker
And they just held that game alive like I doubt Blizzard there's no way Blizzard could have known how big Starcraft and then particularly brood war. Oh my god. We're gonna be in the scene Because there was no scene they literally created like an industry that didn't exist prior to it and Yeah, I mean like that can't really be under saved it paved the way for modern eSports as a genre so
01:13:03
Speaker
Pay respects to everything that's paved the way for you, Overwatch. It's nuts how much, um, like a group of people can just binge play a game at, like, land cafes. Yeah. Like, I can't binge games that much. Yeah.
01:13:18
Speaker
But these people were able to and someone's a point that they drove the demand up. Yeah. That they were hosting their own tournaments. So then it became official to then became like a national stage thing. Yeah. It's like when the the athletes and the people who are revered in your society are people who are really good at Starcraft. Like that's that's an accomplishment for the game. Do you remember when the esports started being a thing? You're like, maybe I could do. Yeah. But then you realize you're already too old. Yeah.
01:13:47
Speaker
Yeah, that hit me when I was like 14. There's no way. That's a young man's game. But yeah, we mentioned remastereds available. Pretty cheap, it's like 10-15 bucks, something like that, you can pick it up.
01:14:03
Speaker
I think you also might get it for free if you already have the base game. That's possible.
Legacy and Nostalgia
01:14:08
Speaker
I don't have it. I don't know if they see the thing. Actually, no, I'm going to immediately say I'm wrong. I didn't think I'm thinking of. You can download the original Starcraft if you still had a CD key. Yeah, I believe that. I think the remastered is still 10 to 15 bucks.
01:14:24
Speaker
but uh definitely worth it and yeah i mean if you haven't experienced starcraft then that's your opportunity miss out yeah even just the campaign which is all i did dave did all the fun things in multiplayer but i did the campaign i had a heck of a time blew my mind as a kid um so as long as you're a kid you're listening to this i mean go play starcraft
01:14:46
Speaker
come join the legacy of the void of just of just starcraft it is honestly the void of starcraft it's the game's old as fuck but it's uh super solid whether you want to hop in starcraft one brood war yeah or even starcraft two which i specifically try to avoid not talking about yep that's what i avoid talking about gotta keep the that content gotta put that in the back pocket
01:15:13
Speaker
We'll save that one for later, possibly, when I can force Dave into it. Because that's the one I know more about.
Episode Reflections and Conclusion
01:15:23
Speaker
I'd like to thank everybody for joining us for another episode of Soapstone. This one was pretty important to both Dave and I for our cultural heritage, where we came from. Specifically Dave, but you know, I participate.
01:15:40
Speaker
I don't know where I'm going with this. My name is Jake. Joined always by my co-host, Dave. How are you doing tonight, Dave? I'm doing pretty good. How are you? But if you guys want to leave feedback on the episode, talk about it, talk about Starcraft RTS experiences, feel free to leave them on our Facebook page, facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. You can also email them in if you don't like communicating with other people other than us, which I understand, at gmail.com.
01:16:09
Speaker
Slash. Just kidding. That's not how that works. Substone Podcast at gmail.com. Listen, I know Jake fucked this up, but listen to our previous episode endings if you want to know how to contact us. That's the standard. This is the outlier. Don't judge me for this one. Yeah. It's also in the description. Just look at the description. But thank you guys again for listening. We always appreciate it. And we look forward to seeing you in the next one. Yep. See ya.
01:16:35
Speaker
Awaken my child, and embrace the glory that is your birthright. Know that I am the Overline, the Eternal Will of the Swarm, and that you have been created to serve me.