roy

I'm not a gamer by any means, but, boy, have I played a lot of Starcraft. Actually, I probably have Starcraft to thank for me being a webdeveloper today - my interest in websites was sparked once I had created a moderately successful Starcraft strategy site (the rest is history).

This past weekend, I vowed to defeat seven computers at once (on the Big Game Hunters map) with all three races. I managed to successfully accomplish this task tonight, and I've saved the replays for anybody who wants to watch.

I started off Friday night with what I thought would be the easiest of all matchups - using the Protoss race against seven computers. It wasn't easy, but I did manage to pull out a win on the first try. The trick was using the cannon lure trick to knock out an opponent early and expanding to their resource center.

The second matchup was with me using the Terrans. This one was a lot easier than I expected - I simply turtled and used tank drops on cliffs to disable two opponents early on.

The hardest matchup was Zerg vs 7 computers. I had to actually restart twice (I got it on the third try, though!). The problem with Zerg is that you basically need to build an assload of sunkens, but you don't get the benefit of turtling like the Terrans do. I got lucky and drew the 4'o clock position, which offers the best turtling chokepoint while also letting me expand. With Zerg on 7vs1, you need to expand to your choke point; after the 12th drone you've got to start building massive amount of sunken colonies. I managed to pull off a turtling of sorts (If you watch when the computer rushes, simply converting the larvaue to an egg blocks any ground units from coming in) and managed to stay afloat while hitting the computers with lurker drops and mutalisk attacks. I think I got really lucky in this game - if I had to repeat with Zerg in that same position (the best possible position to play with besides maybe 7 o'clock, I only think I'd win maybe 1/3 of the time.

Yush, Tony, Spike and I have been playing this Starship Troopers level I made for Brood War with some regularity (well, before this week at least). The map is quite hard - it requires all four players to play at a high level or they lose to the computers. The premise of the map is to survive for twenty minutes against a never-ending attack from the Zerg; you have a hero (I've named "Naomi Watts") who MUST survive. I think the map is very well made because even when we play perfect, our team barely survives - there's been multiple cases when we end up losing at under 30 seconds left to play (I've actually LOST with under a second left!). If you've got a few friends who like to play BroodWar levels, give that Starship Troopers map a try - it's good fun.