Saturday, November 6, 2010

We're #1, We're #1!!

So what have Crimson and I been playing these last few weeks, with nary a posting between us? Two things:

1) MineCraft for a while - we're waiting on the multiplayer to becomes patched so that you aren't invulnerable to being poked at by zombies (much less atmospheric than the single player to me).

2) StarCraft II:



As you can see, we have climbed our way up through the ranks and made it to #1 of some Diamond league. There are many Diamond leagues so it's not like we're #1 in the world. It would be disappointing if we were, because we have gotten here through the use of the following build:



Yes, cheese. We have tried many flavors of cheese in our ruthless quest for the top. Such cheap tactics will only get you so far as silver-gold league if you're playing in 1v1, but in 2v2 it seems that the combined might of focused cheese is nigh on unstoppable.

So what is our favourite flavour of cheese? It's not very complicated. Crimson is a Protoss, and very sneakily lays a pylon near an enemy. He then lays down Gateways and starts pumping out Zealots. I am a Zerg and follow a "9 pool" Zergling pump with a Queen and Zergling speed boost as soon as possible.

Frequently, our early aggression is scouted by the enemy. Usually, this makes little difference, as we proceed to focus fire one of them down and then the other.

Fear the might of our 30 APM (actions per minute - a common metric of measuring how Korean somebody is.... pro 1v1 players have somewhere in the vicinity of 200 APM)... fear our hotkeyed production buildings, and our pushing of 1-A-click. Rawr.

4 comments:

Jayedub said...

30 apm!?!? I think I have done 5 apm's in a rts, six if I am really pushing myself. One of these days I will devote myself to improving my online rts play.

Chappo said...

Grats on diamond.
Your on the NA server right? Blizz has allowed us SEA pepople to have another account on NA where there are more people. We should have a game sometime.
I see you are in Plat 1v1 too, so you can't be that terrible. :S

mbp said...

As someone who is too chicken to ever even have competed in an online RTS I stand in awe of your mighty achievement.

Melf_Himself said...

@ Jayedub: Once, I saw myself get up to 60 apm in a replay. It was a proud moment :S. Then again a lot of the time I seem to be sitting on 0 apm :)

@ Chappo: I hadn't thought about what server I'm on... it must be local (SEA) because the ping is pretty good. Didn't know about the second account thing, that's brilliant because I need another account so that I can test builds and actually "learn2play" without tanking my/our rating.

Amusing follow up to the original story: we tried to invent various other, more fun builds after the initial post. After quite a few losses it put us from #3 Diamond straight to #2 platinum! Now we have to grind back up again... will definitely try that alternate account trick next time!

Re: having a game, that sounds cool :) Though I am pretty fail in 1v1, I pretty much just use the same cheese every time regardless of what I scout, and hope for the best. I seem to have perfected it to the point where I'm beating diamond players though, I just need to grind up the rank until I encounter people that know how to scout!

@ mbp: I've always been too chicken as well. I love PvP in every other type of game, but historically not in RTS (and certainly not in SC1). But you can jump in multiplayer and it's much less stressful. The system is quite good at pairing you with team mates and opponents who are just as awful :) You also don't need a play group, you just hit find game and you will get paired randomly with people. So I definitely recommend SC2 if you like RTS's in general.