UC Berkeley StarCraft Class, Week 4

I was not able to attend the week 3 class, but here's the summary of week 4.

Professor Feng started with an analogy of the game Battleship (you know, that game where you say "H2," then the other guy says "You sunk my battleship!") What if you played a game of Battleship where the number of attacks you get per turn is equal to the number of ships you have left, he asked. Feng is pointing out the essential slippery slope nature of the game, that your ability to attack is reduced as you start fall behind (as opposed to many games where your ability to attack is unaffected by falling behind--I wrote about this here).

Perfect Micro

Then we explored the math behind this idea. To make it easier, we considered the damage done between two packs of marines assuming all marines are within range of each other in an idealized situation. One player has N1 marines versus the other player's N2 marines. Assume the first player has perfect micromanagement while the other player has the worst micromanagement possible. In perfect micromanagement, as many of your units as possible deal damage for as long as possible. In other words, you focus fire on a single enemy marine and kill him as soon as possible so that the enemy's damage output is reduced. You then immediately switch to a new marine, focus fire on him to kill, switch targets, and so on. Meanwhile, your opponent is attacking in the worst way possible: he spreads out his damage evenly amongst your marines, not killing any of them (thus allowing you to keep your overall damage per second high while his declines).

If each marine deals D damage per shot, then after volley 1, player 1 dealt N1D damage while player 2 dealt N2D damage. Player 1 killed N1D/K marines where K = the hit points of a marine. Player 2 killed 0 marines though.

After a second volley, player 1 still deals N1D damage and again kills N1D/K marines. Player 2 only has N2 - (N1D/K) marines left though, so he deals (N2 - (N1D/K)D damage and kills 0 marines again.

After m volleys of this, how many marines are left on each side? Player 1 will have the same number of marines he started with (N1) for a long time, then they will all suddenly die at about the same time. This is because the opponent is attacking in the least efficient way possible here, basically keeping player 1's marines alive as long as possible. Calculating player 2's remaining marines is more tricky though. Player 2 will deal this much damage after m volleys:

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UC Berkeley Starcraft Class, Week 2

Week 2 of the class was better than week 1 because most of the administrative stuff was out of the way so more time could be spent discussing StarCraft itself.

This week was about units. Professor Feng started by explaining that units are your eyes, ears, and hands in the game. Units give you vision through the fog of war (eyes) and are they are what you use to perform actions such as attacking, repairing, building, moving (hands). What he said we might not realize is that they are also your ears. He mentioned one match where the famous player Boxer put an SCV kind of near some minerals to scout, but it was actually the sound effect for gathering minerals he listening for, rather than the sight the SCV provided.

The next topic was something I refer to as local imbalance, though that term wasn't used in class. Explained in my terms, a game is supposed to have global balance (Zerg vs. Terran for example) but it's supposed to NOT have local balance, or it would be too boring on homogeneous. StarCraft has massive local imbalance amongst units and that is a very good thing.

One example was siege tanks. The longest range Protoss ground unit is

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Kongai Award

Kongai won both the Best of 2008 award and the audience award from Jayisgames.com. He had this to say about the game:

Why we picked it: The 2-player card combat of Kongai mashes so many ideas together, it's a miracle that it's a playable game at all, let alone one of the best free multiplayer games on the web. Superstar game-design analyst David Sirlin built Kongai on a simplified skeleton of the Pokemon battle system, incorporating several new layers of interlocking strengths and weaknesses, as well as a strong emphasis on mind games. It's a great game, but what makes it a revolution is the way you collect your warrior and item cards by completing challenges in the other games posted on Kongregate. By helping to bring attention to the efforts of amateur designers, Kongai sets a new standard for community-oriented gaming.

Thanks Jay!

You can play Kongai here.