Starcraft 2 Discussion Thread

They're not terribly tough, but their offensive power is amazing and the siege range upgrade makes it easy to keep them in the back of your army where they can be protected.

They can mind control any unit, even a mothership, but the infestor has to stand still and channel the ability which means you can just pick it off and get your unit back.

 

It looks to me as if roaches are overpowered a bit. Plus...how many people are going to bother with hydras anymore?

 

Well, since roaches can't attack air, you're still going to need hydralisks.

One of the things I noticed in the gameplay vids from HDStarcraft is that you need unit diversity. There was a 2v2 game where HD and his partner were basically screwed, except one of the opponents had gone single-unit (stalkers), and was able to be hard-countered by zerglings and zealots with void ray and roach support. Team HD eventually beat them.

Even in the endgame relatively low-tier units can still stay relevant.

 

Are you guys allowed screens?

 

Yes, you can even find videos, videos, and more videos of starcraft II beta matches on youtube.

 

Another question for you beta testers, what building is the medivac created from, is it starport? It seems kind of late to be put on the starport but I don't see how they make a flying unit from the barracks/factory unless they're not restricting themselves that way... (since I guess Viking can be made from factory and still be an air unit technically?)

 

Medivacs and Vickings both come from starports, they are available as soon as you get a starport down. Marines/Marauders are strong enough in the tier 1 game that you don't need to go for medivacs ASAP for them to be useful. Starports with reactors can also build 2 medivacs/vickings at the same time since they don't require a tech lab so it's easy to pump a good number of medivacs once you get to the mid-game.

Vickings count as air units primarily, even in ground mode they still use air unit damage/armor upgrades.

 

How is performance for your systems?

 

Performance has been good! However, I cannot max my settings. Which kinda makes me sad.

For those of you with high end gaming laptops, there is an Ultra setting to conquer =P

So far my graphics are set to medium and it looks real good for me. My biggest concern with the graphic settings are to have a setting that will not make my FPS drop in crazy battles with 100+ units. I can play on high but my FPS would suffer and I would not get that smooth scroll.

Blizzard made it so that even low end computers can play. The lowest of low settings (shader level set to low) actually makes SC2 look like a totally different game! Looks toony but I actually kinda liked it.

Concerning graphics performance, I heard that Blizz will make changes to their graphics to allow more systems to efficiently play and to tweak them for better performance. Not sure if this is for sure, would like confirmation.

 

Try to turn of reflections that is a major FPS dropper.

I play at ULtra with some HIgh and Extreme.

 

For those of you who dont have a beta yet, apparently my friend has the beta without the key and showed it to me today. He told me it is a cracked version that has been released so its playable without the key. Can't post links though, but just news.

 

I haven't been really keeping up with the SC2 news, just gonna play it when it comes out. A few protoss questions though:

Are the reavers still around? Any changes/upgrades or replacements? Reaver drops were fun.

What about dark templar, and has the zealot been changed at all?

 

Reavers are gone

They've been replaced by colossus which can walk up and down cliffs and does a sweeping horizontal beam (splash to eat massing small units like marines/hydras). They can be hit by air as well as ground.

Dark templar are still around but require their own tech building, the Dark Shrine.

Zealot is essentially the same... but legs have been changed to a charge upgrade which also gives them the ability to charge (move to target extremely fast) every so often.

 

I can play all ultra at 1920x1080 around 25-30fps constant.

The problem is on the big fights, with all the effects going on making my go around 20 and sometimes sub 20fps.

I can probably play all meidum really fluently though.

 

The changes are quite nice.

-You can still only see 24 units at a time, but when you click more than the amount shown, it'll be automatically grouped. I think it means the maximum units you can select at once is 24 units x 10, or 240 units.

For example, if you have 72 units, you would still only be able to see one group at a time, but there would be a tab for groups 1, 2, and 3. Meaning you can still track the energy and hp of every unit you have selected. Simple but innovative way actually.

-This has been revealed by the developers themselves, but if you do attack-move command and you have a unit with no attack like a medivac, previously it would just get to the point and get itself killed, with SC2 the unit stays back until the other units have moved forward.
-You can select the SCV that's building so to queue up for more work later, the building that is being built has an icon to select the worker. Only relevant for Terrans though of course

Performance: On the system you see in my sig, it gets 30-40 fps when everything says "Medium" 1280x1024x32. Though I found out adjusting CPU-intensive settings like reflections/physics/sound to Ultra doesn't drop frames much so those with relatively powerful CPUs but lower end graphics can do the same thing.

(And yes, Reflections are handled by the CPU in SC2)

I think on the Core i series you'll get small improvement by using a quad core instead(10-20% faster), even though the game doesn't look very multi-threaded. Still irrelevant on laptops as the 4 core Core i7's clock so much less than the dual core Core i's.

 

Isn't this a W3 modified engine? from what I could tell the zerg is a disaster air-wise, the immortals are really...immortal and the roaches are abnormally strong.

 

It may not look much better, but it is a new engine. The devs have stated the 3D engine is capable of near-Cinematic quality graphics, they just don't use it on the main game engine.

For example, the unit portraits are done by the game engine.

It is debatable what "new" is though. Who really completely redos a game engine for every game?

 

The slowest quad core i7 720 has 2.4ghz clock speed on dual core mode. That is not "much less" at all.

 

I really haven't been following any of the news behind this game. Unfortunately, I'm finding there's really not much else going on in the RTS market so I'm going to have to start paying attention. I'd like to enjoy a modern RTS game that's newer than Rise of Nations. So here's a question.

How is the balancing between the different factions? One thing I really did not like about Brood War is that everyone nearly always chose Protoss due to them being the strongest faction. Has this changed? Everyone seemed to avoid the Terrans or just play Zerg for the early rush.

 

There is no strongest faction in Broodwar, just so you know. Easily the most balanced RTS in history. As for SC2, that remains to be seen.

 

I can confirm the game runs like balls on my ultraportable with integrated Intel x3100 graphics.

@ 1280x800, it's running at about 20fps. at best.

 

I wonder how the new intel integrated graphics with the core i5/7's would handle this at 1280x800.

 

620M can clock nearly 30% faster when comparing with 2 cores, and benchmarks have shown it does utilize 4 cores somewhat, huge difference.

http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/starcraft_ii_wings_of_liberty_beta_performance,7.html

Not even a chance. SC2 scales linearly with clock speeds and 1 core at 2.3GHz is already fast as 4 core at 1.7GHz.

 

What do you mean? the Core i7 620m is at 2.66ghz up to 3.33ghz single core. COre i7 720m is 2.4ghz dual and 2.8ghz single.

Dual core difference is about 10%. Both can increase their base speed a little more by a similar %. Such as the 1.6ghz quad core being actually 1.73ghz when on full power.

I haven't tested for quad vs dual on SC2 though.

 

No, the 620M can do Turbo Mode with all cores active too. It can run at 3.06GHz with dual cores. Even the 540M can do 2.8GHz with 2 cores active. Look back at the legionhardware link I have updated on my last post too.

On the desktop the Clarkdales aren't so well priced, Arrandales on laptop is giving you a run for its money. They never confirmed it but I'm pretty sure 620M is there to kill off 720QM.

I'd figure a 540M with the IGP would get 40-50 fps at 1280x800 low.

 

Ah yeah, I get what you mean about the speed difference but also take into account that the 720qm has a 50% larger cache, a 30% faster bus, and an on-die memory controller vs the 620m on-package memory controller.

So it is not direct performance increase Both are good processors in the end, and both will work well for whatever you need and they are very close in performance.

 

Remember this is a Starcraft II discussion thread.

I've already shown you even in multi-threaded apps the 620M is on par with 720QM. In SC2, its likely even the i5-430M will be faster.

 

True, this is a SC2 thread haha. Well from your link they do mention this:

"That said, while the game only appears to heavily use two cores, we still saw some activity across four when enabled. Moreover, the performance was considerably better when enabling all four cores with Hyper-Threading, not that we think Hyper-Threading is making any tangible difference here. Bottom-line, you are going to want a dual-core processor at the very least to play StarCraft II, while we recommend getting your hands on a quad-core processor for the best performance."

So in the end any Core i5+ users should be fine CPU wise.

EDIT:

Just ran a quick test with CPU 1 core at 2.9ghz and regular use (letting the CPU decide how much to use). Graphics settings: All ultra, enabled and 1920x1080 res:

1Core:
24-27fps

Regular use:
27-30 fps

It seems task manager shows one core heavily used, two cores someone on 40% and the last one in less %30. All threads appear to be used somewhat, in rather medium-low % too. CPU-z was jumping around in performance too going up to 2.5Ghz sometimes. That's a weird clock speed I guess.


Anyways, if you have a single core CPU, prepare to be heavily bottlenecked

 

The lower performance when using less than 4 cores seems to happen primarily with CPUs that feature 3 level cache hierarchies, like Core i series, and AMD's Phenom.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...CPU-benchmarks-x-Core-i5/i7-leading/Practice/

You can see Core 2 Duo vs Quad has no difference. I think this is due to the fact that the L2 cache is being heavily hit and on the CPUs with 3 level cache, the L2 cache sizes are miserably small, especially on the Core i x.

Usually game developers dedicate one core for each of the tasks like main code, AI, physics, and sound. Using 4 cores mean the misc threads can stop using the "main code core" which results in less L2 cache usage and be faster.

 

Well I gotta say I'm happy. This plays on my lappy quite well at medium settings. T7200 and 7600 Go. I can only play against computers without a beta key, but o well.

 

Any of you guys get into the beta today? I didn't get into this recent wave =(

 

I'm testing it out, using uh, something that rhymes with tracks.

Seems fun, and you'll have to let some old habits die if you want to get successful at this game.

 

My impression was that the Zerg needs some work , air wise, and the Protoss, once again, is amazingly advanced technologically.

Broodwar is indeed ballanced, SC2 from the looks of it, is not.
Well, this is still a Beta, I guess.

 

What do you think is unbalanced about it?

 

Chrono boosting zealot rushes are pretty broken from what I've heard. I feel like nukes are too weak as well.

 

What do you guys think about Banshees btw? I used them a lot of times against computers and it seemed to work pretty well. Either they couldn't target air, or they couldn't target invisible units, and eventually got slaughtered. Doesn't seem like many people like the Banshee a lot though.

 

I hate how Banshees can't target air, so I rarely use them. At first I liked them, not so much anymore. They're pretty good, but I'd have to bring Vikings and Ravens with me if I wanted to use them...

I suck at microing.

 

I hear you. Gone are the days of who could better manage their economies, unit production, and upgrade paths. Now you're stuck microing a group of Stalkers as they flee from a pack of Zealots. Oh well, I can get used to it, I guess. I'd get stomped in multiplayer.

A Viking/Banshee combo looks like a terror, especially if you have the token Nighthawk and/or Battlecruiser to back them up.

 

Damn I want to get in so bad

 

I still maintain that Brood War was unbalanced in favor of the Protoss. As long as people actually use the other two factions in Starcraft 2 then I'll be happy. No beta for me, but I will be waiting to see how the retail release turns out. I really want a new RTS game to enjoy that doesn't take forever to complete a match or end too quickly.

 

Me and my brother got the beta :3

 

Protoss with mothership and carrier spam seem to rip everything apart.

 

Air wise, from what I gather, the Zerg aren't very good. That's one querk, then there's the Immortal, and on several ocassion where I've seen it in action, it literrally dominated ground attacks...
And so on.

Kinda reminds me of the old starcraft, where there were no devourers, lurkers,medics, valks, corsairs etc. Needs a few improvements.

 

Can anyone confirm that the zerg announcer voice is a female, and that it's ridiculous?

 

Zergs have a really good air unit, that you have to upgrade from Corrupters I think.

I watched someone named HDstarcraft on youtube and hes a very skilled Zerg user.

 

I can confirm it.

 

It's not ridiculous, it's Kerrigan who controls the Zerg now, not the Overmind.

 

If that's what Kerrigan sounds like...

FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

 

You mean that unit that shoots broodlings? that's like a guardian replacement.
I was referring to air-air attack...

One other cool thing I learned about. You can move the zerg defences around

 

Yeah the brood lords look pretty cool. Nice replacement for the guardians.