A Quantum Immortal

Still no release date 🙁

I think RTS games are currently wrong. What do I mean by that?

Current RTS games do test strategy and tactics, but they also require a high degree of micro-management. Top Starcraft players are measured by their APM, and a player with high thinking skills but a less than agile hand is at a disadvantage. The anticipatd Starcraft 2 doesn’t seem to hold great promise to change this.

What I want is this: In addition to the point-and-click action we all know (and love), I want RTS games to offer me strategy/tactics menus. I want to be able to order the computer AI things like:

• “build the base, 10 drones, and the entire tech tree up to Guardian

. Then build 10 of these and 25 Mutalisks and send them after the nearest Terran opponent.

• “Organize all my troups into battle formations while leaving 10% on defense and go search & destroy all opponents”
• “Build up to 3 overlords and scout for Vespene gas. Once found, take a drone there to build a base. Once the base nears completions, send other drones there to mine the gas”.

Such commands should be easily programmable in the game as it ships. Special player-made commands could be added before and during a game. The player’s major role should be to select and define strategies, not to gather up individual drones to build structures or to micro-manage an attack. Of course, as I said, the micromanagement can stay, but it must not be how you spend the better part of a game.

Note that most of the “strategy commands” I want are probably already present at some form inside the computer’s native AI player. As a player, I want to have access to this AI and parts of it. Once this is developed enough, I can imagine different Starcraft tournaments where players are only allowed to pre-program the strategy.

Now I wonder how long till these ideas become reality and how difficult it would be to program a extension for the existing Starcraft that accomplishes something like this.

After some posts containing only links I thought I’d update a bit on other recent events:

1. LAN Party at Oren’s place. Great games of Starcraft and UT. I still hold it again Zelner for dropping out 2 minutes after the start of a game, where him, his brother and I were against 4 players. That left only Ari and me vs the other four players. We fought bravely, but lost as expected. This was the first LAN party in which I actually somewhat enjoyed a game of Call of Duty. Next party should be held sometime after Starcraft 2 and UT3 are out.

2. A week of diving in Eilat with the family. Well, we dived only a small portion of the week due to the cold water running nose. Aya started her 1st star diving course, but unfortunately failed to complete it because of an ear infection. BTW, except for weekends, Eilat is a ghost town in the winter (and with good reason :).

3. In January I’m going to snowboard in France for 8 days, with Jonathan, Pisnoy and more.

4. A small breakthrough with my thesis. After about a month of being stuck, I managed to prove something 🙂 Huzza for me.

5. I joined Facebook, but am still very neutral/ignorant towards it. Luckily I refuse to install any applications or causes. I do like its image tagging mechanism though.

That’s it folks. After a long time of being away from Herzelia, Aya and I are heading south for the weekend. CYA.

Money milking, 79$ Starcraft board game.

Sad but predictable.

This always happens with Starcraft, even at lan parties.

1. Everybody has a different starcraft version, some might not play nice with others.
2. We tried playing over the internet with hamachi (lan simulator). I think this failed because Starcraft doesn’t let you configure the network interface to listen on, so it probably chose the real NIC and not the fake one hamachi created.
3. While 2 of us have real Battlenet keys, the others could not connect to BN. Spawnning the game didn’t help (and why would it, actually?)

At least in lan parties you can give everybody the same copy of the game and this usually works at the end (after an hour of hard labor).

Bummer.

I’m planning to play some Starcraft with friends this weekend. This prompted me to look at Starcraft vids on Youtube, and found this amusing one.