Thursday, May 16, 2024

Excessive Starcraft Posting

 I solved the late game, and it has applications to real warfare.

 By the late game, you've already lost and the game finished minutes ago, or your armies are more or less evenly matched. Also even pros can't reasonably command 200/200 armies, so they just kind of stupidly slam into each other and die, making engagement very risky. Since everyone is playing very fast to get through the agonizing first 3-5 minutes, by the time you notice you're engaging at a bad angle - if you can even tell in advance which angles are bad and which aren't - half your army is already dead.

 Solution: bait. Supply as many opportunities as possible for the enemy general to make a mistake, while, as much as possible, preventing him from baiting you into mistakes. 

 Present your army as bad, then - surprise! you have good units just out of sight range. Or use colossus to bait him into building infinity vikings, then suicide your colossus so they have nothing to shoot at while you wipe out the rest of his forces. Funnel him into a counterattack at a predictable location. Leave an expansion open; either he naked expands to it, essentially gifting you an expansion, or he guards the new building....meaning your full army can smash into his bases on the other side of the map. 

 Find every opportunity for the other side to fuck up, and present it to them as temptingly as possible, as long as you can do so without exposing yourself to a symmetric risk of mistake. 


 Shockingly it's, like, genuine gameplay. Has little to do with build orders or unit counters, and has a lot to do with your enemy's psychology, meaning it generalizes far beyond Starcraft in particular. 


 If you can't bait him into making a mistake I guess you default into the coinflip. Either build a-move units and hit every forward expansion at once (while also dropping in the main, because why not?), or simply slam your army into his army until you find out who runs out of cash first. 


 P.S. SC players should be thinking a lot more about manoeuvre and chess. Place your army such that their army is forced to either take a bad engagement or go stand in an unfavourable location, then relocate your army so they face the same choices until they're entirely boxed in and have to take a bad fight. Then you win. If you can't see how to do that, figure out how to zone his army into a place where you can do that. (With e.g. disruptors.) 

 Sadly this doesn't require hand speed, so players that can, like, actually warfare don't end up as SC pros in the first place. "Why would I do all that thinking when I can just macro." "Because you're already at 200/200, genius...." 

 Though I suppose that's how Serral always places his infestors in the right spot. If he isn't forcing their army into range of his infestors, he disengages. It's easy to place the infestors right when you choose where to engage.

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