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Comment by seigenblues | Hacker News Reader

Starcraft has always struck me as a game of compound interest, and the optimal early builds always seem to be just that: maximizing an instantaneous rate-of-production, which will correlate to maximizing your instantaneous rates-of-doing-damage

It's always seemed like more of an economic strategy game than an actual "fronts of battle" kind of strategy.

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"Amateur's discuss strategy, professionals discuss logistics"

And more specifically, it's not about maximizing your rate of production, its about maximizing the difference between youres and your opponents (this is both RTS and real life war).

That's the basis of rush tactics. You actually stunt your own rate of growth in the hopes of stunting your opponents even more.

Totally -- not to mention surviving long enough to let compound interest naturally magnify that difference.

As for the tactics or "logistics" -- if that means clicking 500 times/minute, then i really don't see the appeal :)

StarCraft 2 has tastefully upgraded the UI so that you can do lots of things with less clicks than before in SC 1. (Of course, that means at the higher end, people will just do more now than they did. But it's quite a nice feeling on the beginner level, too. E.g. you can get a worker to work right after it's build. And there's also a button for finding idle workers.)

Honestly, the graphics may be better, there may be new units, and balance may have improved or whatever else, but the UI improvements are the thing I love the most.

They could have done more with automation though, like Rise of Nations has superb automation and controls.

Indeed it did, to the point where it wasn't interesting. Which is why RoN didn't pick up on the e-sports (or even multiplayer) scene, unfortunately.

Starcraft isn't about clicking fast, it's about doing a lot of things at the same time. As you think about the game better you'll do more things faster, not the other way around.

It certainly is a game of compound interest! On top of that the system has three features that interact to give it its depth:

1) There are several opportunities in each game to sacrifice your rate of growth to obtain a temporary advantage in present value (ie. cutting workers to rush).

2) Because present value is multidimensional (you can't measure the value of a Zergling directly against that a Mutalisk), you can sacrifice your rate of growth or your present value in order to obtain a temporary advantage in what kind of value you have (ie. cutting units or workers to tech).

3) Information asymmetry. While trying to gain these mathematical advantages, one has to act on information that is increasingly out of date. One can not usually predict the opponent's exact present value and rate of change, but can only estimate ever-widening bounds on their values.

"Micro", or managing your units in battle, is also vital. I've lost 4 bases worth of Zerg units against a 2 basing Terran through horrible micro.

I've had that happen more times than I can count. It's hard, because all the terran has to do is hit stim on his MMM ball and A-move. As zerg you have to pull off some Robert E. Lee shit to have a chance.

My biggest problem is pushing into an army backed up by a planetary fortress. I think I need to wait for the Terran to push out more and then destroy his army in the field or drop into his main. Pushing the front of a Terran base is suicide.

if you see that go hard into broodlords. A PF in a home base is a giant waste of money if not used, especially considering the additional building armor upgrade and range upgrade he spent on it and the lost time-income of no mules. You will easily out macro him.

Normally it's at his natural, like the open forward expansion on Delta Quadrant. I lost a game just today where I had a huge macro advantage over the Terran because of that PF. I even had Broodlords but I wasn't good enough to micro them against the SCVs repairing the fortress. I ended up destroying it with banelings, but by that point it had eaten up many thousands of minerals worth of my army.

That's true, but if you're evenly matched with your opponent, your initial economic curves will be identical, and then strategy and tactics come into play. Obviously it can be more valuable to strike the opponent's miners and factories than to engage his main army -- but real war is no different.

That's actually not true.

There are two ways to look at economic production in SC2. You can spend your time and money producing items that will do damage (e.g. units), or you can spend money on things that will increase your production rate (e.g. more barracks, hatcheries, etc).

Then there is a tech tree to factor in, how far up the tech tree should you go. It's all about understanding how far up the tech tree you need to go.

Say you are facing an opponent that is going to rush with level 1 units, if you know this, you can build defenses at choke points that will cost you much less than his units will cost to break through. At the same time you are rapidly climbing the tech tree to get more powerful units and spending less on the lower tier units.

On the other hand, if he has just enough units to bust through your defenses, it's game over.

That's how strategy comes into play in SC2. Often part of your early game strategy is figuring out how to disrupt the opponents supply chain (particularly along their critical path) while continuing to increase your own production capacity.

Long post - but in general your economic curves are not necessarily the same. Early expand, versus more units and pushing, etc.

WW1 and especially 2 were an economic strategy game. The Cold War was an economic strategy game.

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