StarCraft II is a Real-Time Strategy game by Blizzard, originally released in three parts:
- Wings of Liberty (2010)
- Heart of the Swarm (2013)
- Legacy of the Void (2015)
Blizzard has continued to support the game since launch; the game went free-to-play in late 2017.
The main objective of the game is to build an army and defeat the opposing armies. To do this, you first build a base with buildings, which you use to produce units, which in turn you use to destroy your opponent. The player who can produce more units and who uses them more effectively always wins the game.
Before you start a game, you pick one of the three races in the game. Each race is wildly different from the others; you have completely different units and playstyles for each of them. The races are Terran, Zerg and Protoss. Each matchup between these races plays out in completely different ways. The balance between three different races has been very carefully tuned to be near perfect, but there are definitely situations where playing to the strengths of your race and abusing your opponent race’s weakness can shift the tides of battle.
So what makes this game hard? You need to multitask like a god to keep up on your various duties. You need to keep building your base and new reinforcement units while destroying enemy forces. These different aspects of the game are called macro and micro, and you will need to excel at both to be a good StarCraft player.
StarCraft II has been continuously updated since it was first released in 2010. It has gone through two large expansions and a large free-to-play content patch which all introduced, removed and reworked many units in the game. To stay up-to-date on StarCraft II, you will need to follow the latest patch notes.
To build units, buildings and upgrades, you need two resources: **minerals** and **gas**. Both of these can be found around the map, clustered together in what are called “expansion sites”.
You harvest resources with your worker units; they collect resources from a resource node and deliver them to your HQ building. Workers are mostly automated. (You need to build a building on top of geysers in order to harvest gas from them.)
Your workers and basic units cost only minerals to build, but when you want to build more advanced units and buildings you will need to spend gas. Gas is slower to harvest than minerals, and thus more valuable on a point-to-point basis.
Some maps feature “gold bases”, which have rich mineral fields and vespene gas geysers. These give more resources per round-trip than standard nodes.
Third resource you need to be mindful of is **supply**. Each unit you build costs some number of supply. If you reach your maximum supply, no new units can be built. Each race can increase their maximum supply (up to 200) by building either Supply Depots, Overlords or Pylons. (Creating a new HQ building also increases supply.) Reaching your supply maximum and not being able to build new units is called being supply blocked.
You start with 12 workers of your chosen race when the game starts. It takes three workers to optimally mine a mineral or geyser; a base where every resource is being mined optimally is called “saturated”.
Unless you’re going for a worker rush, you will need to create more workers immediately when the game starts to boost your economy. While workers can attack, they are very weak units and thus very vulnerable to harassment.
- Terran - Command Center
- Zerg - Hatchery
- Protoss - Nexus
This is the building you start the game out with. You will build your workers from this building. You will need to build more of them at other sites to gather more resources faster.
This is the most important building in each of your bases; without it, your workers can’t return the minerals and gas they have harvested. Conversely, this is the building you want to destroy when you attack your enemy’s bases.
Command Centers can be upgraded to either Orbital Commands or Planetary Fortresses. Orbital Commands have energy and three different abilities – Calldown: MULE, Calldown: Extra Supplies and Scanner Sweep. Planetary Fortresses are equipped with two cannons that deal splash damage. Command Centers and Orbital Commands, like many other Terran buildings, can fly; Planetary Fortresses lose this ability. Command Centers and Planetary Fortresses can load up SCVs to protect (or in the case of Command Center, transport) them.
Hatcheries can be upgraded to Lairs, which in turn can be upgraded to Hives. Many advanced Zerg buildings and upgrades require either a Lair or a Hive before they can be built.
Nexus has the ability to Chrono Boost Protoss structures (including itself) at the cost of some energy. It can also recall units back to itself.
- Terran - Supply Depot
- Zerg - Overlord
- Protoss - Pylon
These buildings (or in the case of Zerg, a unit) increase your maximum supply. You will need to keep building these regularly to increase your supply as you build your army; once you reach the maximum of 200 supply building more is optional.
Supply Depots can be lowered to the ground, so that units can walk over them. This is explicitly designed for walling off your ramp (to prevent Zerg rushes for instance).
Overlords are actually flying units. You can use them to scout your enemies. With upgrades, they can fly faster, spread temporary creep, detect invisible units and transport your troops.
In addition to increasing supply, Pylons provide a blue field called “Psionic Matrix” that is required to warp in additional buildings. If Pylons are close to a Nexus or a Warp Gate, they can warp in units faster (and the psionic matrix looks brighter).
- Terran - Barracks, Factory, Starport
- Zerg - Spawning Pool
- Protoss - Gateway, Robotics Facility, Stargate
These buildings enable building your units. For Terran and Protoss, it is generally advised to build more than one, so you can produce multiple units at the same time. (Zerg only needs one Spawning Pool to keep building units.)
- Terran - Engineering Bay, Armory
- Zerg - Evolution Chamber, Spire
- Protoss - Forge, Cybernetics Core
Researching basic stat upgrades for your armies makes them much more effective while not raising their supply count. Upgrading your units throughout the game is a matter of ‘when’, not ‘if’ in high-level play. Being ahead in upgrades is one of the easiest ways to gain advantage over your enemy, and abusing timing windows around completing upgrades is what many build orders aim at.
- Terran - Tech Lab, Ghost Academy, Fusion Core
- Zerg - Roach Warren, Hydralisk Den, Ultralisk Den
- Protoss - Twilight Council, Robotics Bay, Templar Archives, Fleet Beacon
Unlocking abilities through unit upgrades often completely changes the way you can play with those units. One of the canonical examples is the protoss unit Stalker, which can unlock the ability to teleport a short distance through ‘Blink’. Suddenly this relatively immobile ground unit can jump great distances and finish off their escaping prey with ease. Most units can benefit from some upgrades; researching which upgrades are available for your units is crucial.
- Terran - Bunkers, Missile Turrets, Planetary Fortress
- Zerg - Spine Crawler, Spore Crawler
- Protoss - Photon Cannon
Each race has options for building static defenses. These are very useful, especially in the early game, to ward off early attacks with smaller armies.
If your opponent has any air units, you will more than likely need to protect your mineral lines with air defense throughout the game.
Creating effective unit compositions means picking different units with different strenghts and weaknesses and using them effectively in the heat of battle.
Some units walk on ground, some units fly. This obviously matters a great deal in how these units traverse over terrain. Flying units tends to be much faster than ground units, so they can often be used to outmaneuvere ground-based armies. This is also where the strength of drops comes from: you load up your flying transports full of ground units, overcoming their lack of mobility.
There are many units in the game that can only fight in melee range, all workers for instance. This means they can be kited around by ranged units with good enough micro. This also means they can’t fight back at all when flying units attack them. Protoss can’t exclusively commit to zealots thanks to these disadvantages (although their charge upgrade evens things out later on).
Most ranged units can also shoot flying units, roaches being a notable exception. Zerg often needs to bring queens along their main force to protect against flying units if their unit composition is zerglings and roaches.
Some units are cloaked, meaning they are invisible to other units without detection. This means you can’t see them on the map and can’t fight back, which of course quickly leads to losing the game unless somehow managed: even a few cloaked units can tear up a worker line if adequate detection is not in place. Certain buildings and units have detection, which reveals these cloaked units to all other units.
Protoss observers have both of these attributes: they are permanently cloaked and they can detect other cloaked units. Protoss can gain tremendous amount of information by carefully placing Observers around the map, or even following an enemy army with one. Eliminating this key advantage is one of the most important metagames in every matchup against protoss.
The most famous strategies involving cloaking involve Dark Templars and Banshees.
Many units in the game have ‘castable’ abilities, often called spells. These have generally powerful effects, but they cost energy; managing caster energy wisely is both very important and very attention-consuming. The canonical example is Psionic Storm casted by protoss High Templars, but Stimpack used by Marines and Marauders is likely much more often encountered (costing life rather than energy).
Almost every unit in the game has some attributes like this. Many units deal bonus damage against certain types of enemy; for instance, the Thermal Lance used by protoss unit Colossus deals extra damage against light units, tearing up terran ground forces with ease. Knowing which units your units are effective and vulnerable against is one of the keys to winning the game.
Terran strategies can be roughly categorized as “bio” or “mech”, referring to which units form the army’s backbone.
Terran’s unit-producing buildings can be enhanced with two add-ons, Tech Lab and Reactor. Tech Lab enables building advanced units and researching upgrades; Reactor allows building two basic units at a time.
Command Center can be upgraded to Orbital Command, allowing it to use three excellent abilities: calling down MULEs and extra supply or scanning.
SCVs can repair buildings. This is much faster than zerg’s regenerations or protoss’ shield recharge, but on the flip side after taking enough damage terran buildings will catch fire and burn down to ground unless repaired.
Most terran buildings can be lifted off. This is most commonly used with Command Centers in expansions, where you load a Command Center full of SCVs before flying it to an expansion. When you unload it you can begin mining straight away.
All zerg units are spawned from larva, which spawns at your Hatchery / Lair / Hive. Up to 19 larvae can surround a hatchery.
Zerg units move faster on creep, and creep provides vision (but not detection). Thus spreading creep is absolutely vital for zergs; the main way to do this is to spawn creep tumors with a queen.
Queens can spawn additional larva at a hatchery; this is generally used all the time to dramatically boost zerg unit production.
All zerg units and buildings regenerate slowly.
After researching Burrow from a hatchery, most zerg ground units can thereafter burrow and hide underground. (Detectors and scans can still find them.)
Protoss buildings require a blue field called “Psionic Matrix” to be warped in. Pylons are the building which generate this field, providing energy to the buildings that are warped in. If a pylon gets taken down, its energy field is also taken down – make sure all your buildings won’t power down like this if you play as a protoss!
Protoss units and buildings have energy shields in addition to health. After 10 seconds of being out of battle, these shields start recharging. You can also replenish these shields with a Shield Battery.
After building a Cybernetics Core and researching the Warp Gate upgrade, you can transform your Gateways to Warp Gates. This allows for very quick deployment of troops anywhere within a psionic matrix – regardless of whether it’s provided by a forward pylon or a Warp Prism. This enables all sorts of new approaches.
You start the game with one base and some workers. Very soon you will want to ramp up your production, requiring more resources than you can harvest from a single base. You will need to build more bases around the map. We call these additional bases “expansions”. It is not uncommon to ultimately have 4 or even 5 bases up and running.
Each resource node in the game carries a fixed amount of resources; when games go on for a long time these run out and become “depleted”. Eventually the bases you’re mining from “mine out”, stopping the flow of resources.
Not being able to use the resources you’ve gathered is called floating, which is a sign that you need to focus on your macro for a while by making units, buildings and upgrades. While building two or three unit-producing buildings might be enough in the early game, you will need more by the late mid game and especially in the late game to make good use of your resources.
It is very common for beginning players to float thousands of minerals and gas in the late game. This usually happens when you become completely absorbed in micro and not paying enough attention to macro. This is a very vulnerable position: all those resources could be units on the field. Moreover, building units takes time, which you never have enough of in StarCraft.
It is a great idea to harass your opponent by killing their workers, forcing them to remake them – costing valuable time and resources.
By finding and exploiting a hole in your opponents defenses you can change the course of the game. However, the point of harassment is not to win a battle or the game outright; often the units doing the harassment are going to be lost. The question is did they do more damage to the opponents economy than they cost?
Of course, if you happen to find a large enough opening, a harassment can turn into a full-blown attack easily. Be ready to resupply your forces!
Conversely, defending well against an attempted harassment can really swing the momentum your way.
Gathering information about your opponent is called “scouting”. It is crucial to get information about your opponent: you have to know what you’re up against in order to build the right unit compositions. As you get more experienced in StarCraft you learn to identify different common builds from the early structure placement; knowing what you’re up against is half the battle.
Every unit and structure has a field of vision, beyond which they can’t see. As they move around the map the sections between your units are covered in “fog of war”, enabling for instance enemy units to move there without your knowledge. Building Observers, spreading creep and Overlords, spreading your units and scanning are some ways to retain vision in these areas. The less mobile your army is, the more this war of information matters to you.
Knowing the maps you will be playing on is obviously really important. There is no shortcut here; you will have to play on them and discover their nuances individually. However, there are some features that are nearly always present in modern maps. We will be going through some of them.
In nearly every map your main base will be on high ground, only accesible through a narrow ramp up. Sometimes even your natural expansion will be on higher ground. Using high ground to your advantage is one of the best defensive plays you can make: units on lower ground don’t have vision higher up without a flying unit accompanying them. Similarly, the ramps between low and high ground are really narrow, which can be easily walled off by Terrans and Protoss. This provides protection against early ground unit rushes, especially by Zerglings.
Sometimes in the middle of the map there are towers that get powered up when you place a unit near them. These provide great vision coverage. Controlling these Xel’Naga watchtowers can be really beneficial; you can see upcoming attacks before the opponent can see you. Even a single ground unit is enough to keep a Xel’Naga watchtower powered.
In many maps some ramps are protected by destroable rocks. These take some time to destroy, but once the rock is gone it won’t come back – enabling permanent access through that spot. Many StarCraft II games have been lost over not being aware that the rocks protecting your third base were suddenly destroyed.
Each race has multiple different upgrades available for their armies. These range from simple stat boosts to new abilities. In general, staying on top of your upgrades is one of the strongest macro moves a player can make; conversely, falling behind often leads to defeat.
Stat upgrades usually affect most of your army with a single upgrade. This makes them really cost-effective. The increased stats might not sound like much, but the difference is multiplied by the number of your units: a small fully upgraded squad can punch way above their weight. Ground units and flying units always have different upgrade trees, but Protoss have the additional unique ability to upgrade their shields, affecting every single unit in their army.
Ability upgrades are also crucial, often changing how the units work to a significant degree. The canonical example is Zergling upgraded with Metabolic Boost (speed), leading to “Speedlings”. This boosts their strategic value by a great deal, allowing them to move in and out of combat seamlessly. Most units in the game can benefit from an upgrade; you will in time learn them all by heart. When you pick your race make it one of your top priorities to learn how to effectively use the upgrades provided by your race and favored units.
It is often beneficial to have more than one facility for basic upgrades, as they take a long time to complete. This naturally leads to getting two upgrades more or less at once, temporarily giving you a great edge on battlefield. Timing your attacks to coincide with the completion of these upgrades can often take your opponent by surprise and swing the momentum of the game; so much so that many build orders aim for these “timing attacks” from the get-go.
StarCraft II is a very versatile game, and with that comes the option to launch early surprise attacks that often catch your enemies by surprise. These are used even at the very top level of competitive play; while they can feel unfair they are absolutely part of the game. It is the true test of a build order to see whether it can survive against cheese openings you encounter in the ladder.
These ‘cheese’ strategies are often really micro-intensive, which naturally hampers the attackers’ macro game by a great deal. Should the attacker fail to great significant advantage due to their cheese, they are usually far behind in economics and will tap out immediately. (Note that outright win is not necessary for cheese to have worked.)
Cheese strategies are usually “all-in”, with one battle deciding whether the game continues or not. This term is also used for attacks where a player puts most of their units forward in a single grand fight, seeking to deliver a knockout attack (or die trying). These are also part of StarCraft, and they are usually very easy to scout out in advance.
If both you and your opponent attack each other at the same time with all-in attacks, it becomes a race to see which army can destroy the other’s base first, “a base trade”. In these situations you need to remember the exact win condition of StarCraft II: the side with no buildings left loses. If you lose your last building the game is over and you lost, no matter the size of your army. (This is often a surprise to new players.)
After playing a lot of StarCraft games, a certain rhythm can be identified that is common to all games. The game starts with ramping up resource production and scouting, followed by skirmishes and fight over map control, ending up in a macro-focused fleshing out of armies towards the maximum supply cap and finally the epic battles between two “maxed out” armies. These phases of the game are called early, mid and late game.
Of course anything can happen in a game, and often you’re taking in by a surprise when your opponent starts producing units they previously did not. This change is called a “transition”, and you most likely need to transition yourself to not give your opponent an advantage. A feature of high-level play is smoothly transitioning between different unit compositions over longer games, kind of like a continuous game of rock-paper-scissors. In contrast, many low-level players don’t really ever transition from the one unit combination they’ve been practising with – using this to your advantage can easily win you games in lower ladder leagues.
It could be said that StarCraft is all about continuously managing smaller and bigger crises all over the place. You start the game with a minimal economy you need to greatly expand throughout the game by creating workers and new expansions. You need to protect your workers constantly. You need to stay ahead in supply. You need to constantly scout your enemy to know what they are up to. You need to build and upgrade an army based on what you are up against. You need to harass your opponent, finding their weak spots and milking them for all they are worth.
Inevitably, you will lapse in one of these dimensions. Even the very best players in the world do. This is in a sense where the real game begins: who can stay cool under this tremendous pressure the better? If you take any top-level tournament replay, you will find out some key mistakes were, usually on both sides. Often the path to a loss begins from a small mistake that the player didn’t either notice or didn’t act on fast enough, until it together with its compound effects snowballs out of their control.
It is often said that the fourth resource in StarCraft is attention. Multitasking for a long period of time like this is just something we humans are not very good at, even after years of practise; you will need to pick your battles and focus on some key areas while dismissing others. Knowing what to pay attention to comes with experience, but it is safe to say that you can’t ignore either macro or micro for long periods of time.
Beginning players find themselves completely unable to both macro and micro at the same time. This is to be expected. One of the absolutely first things a player should do is to learn their keyboard shortcuts; you just don’t have the time to click on buttons to accomplish your goals. Over time you learn how to keep up with macro using hotkeys alone; this is one the greatest steps towards advanced play.
The key to effective micro is utilizing control groups effectively. You will often divide your units in multiple control groups, maneuvering with them independently on the map.
Many players who fall in love with StarCraft have to learn how to control their body and mind when the adrenaline surges come and go. It is not uncommon to be so flustered after a long match against a human opponent that you are physically shaking. This is the physical aspect of the game.
Mental aspect of the game can be either overt or subtle, depending on the player: winning a game will lead you to euphoria and a long winstreak; losing a close match could tilt you so badly that you can’t let go of the last game in your next one, and end up losing because of that. This vicious cycle can easily continue for the whole night unless reined in.