Starcraft's Essence in Card Form?

A Puzzle Strike player named BT mentioned that he thought Puzzle Strike captures what Starcraft is about better / more elegantly than the Starcraft board game. I thought it was an interesting statement, so I'll explain what he meant.

First, I should say that I have not played the Starcraft board game, but a quick look at it shows that it comes with about a thousand pieces, and looks complicated and long to play. My guess is that it tries hard to capture literally what's going on in the computer game, but that is generally a dangerous approach. Computers are good at keeping track of all sorts of numbers and resources that would be tedious (and yeah, "inelegant") in a physical game. Sorry if my impression of the board game is unfair though, I stress again that I have not played it, but BT said this is part of what he meant.

Meanwhile in Puzzle Strike, you have choices that basically amount to "expand," "tech," and "army."

Expanding

In Starcraft, you ideally would like to invest as much as possible in your economy, as a way of being weaker now but very strong later. In Puzzle Strike, this means spending your money to buy more gem chips for your deck. Gem chips basically are money, so buying them will make your economy much stronger later, but at the expense of not building "tech" or "army" now. In both games, you have to keep an eye on how much the opponent is threatening you with his army to know how much you can safely invest in your own economy.

Tech

In Starcraft, investing in tech gives you the potential to do powerful things. For example, building a Templar Archives gives you the ability to build High Templars and researching Psionic Storm gives your Templars access to that powerful spell. In Puzzle Strike, the analog is buying what players call "engine chips." These are chips that all work together to produce powerful combinations. For example, chips that give you more actions and chips that let you spend those actions drawing more chips. Building an engine in your deck is sort of like teching up in Starcraft, as it gives you access to powerful turns, but it's not the "tech" itself that wins--that's what your army is for.

Army

In Starcraft, your army is your set of attack and support units. It's your army--not your economy and not your tech buildings--that actually apply force to the enemy and win the game for you. In Puzzle Strike, your "army" is your set of purple chips, the ones capable of combining gems in your gem pile and crashing them so they leave your pile and go to your enemy's. Filling up his gem pile to 10 is how you win, so these purple chips are what allow you to directly attack the enemy and to defend against his purple assaults.

Putting it all together

It would be nice if you could just sit back and build economy, but if you take too long to build any tech or army, you're going to lose before you get to use all that money. Having just a bit of army early can let you hold off incoming attacks long enough to let your economy kick in. How much tech and when to build it is also a hard question. It's possible to completely overwhelm other players if you build a solid tech engine, but you could very well be overwhelmed by an opponent's army while you're trying to get that together.

Asymmetry, Build Orders, and Maps

In addition to the expand vs. tech. vs army concept, Puzzle Strike also has asymmetric starts (3 races in Starcraft; 10 characters in Puzzle Strike) and it has the concept of build orders and maps. A build order in Starcraft is a combination of moves that results in a certain level of expansion / tech / army and a certain composition and timing of that army. Doing a Zealot / Stalker rush is a very different build than putting up some static defense and going for air units like Void Rays. Likewise, trying to clog up everyone's deck with useless wound chips while yours stays tight and efficient is a very different "build" than a draw engine or a mono-purple rush.

In Starcraft, your choice of builds depends partly on the map you're playing on. While any given map allows for many viable builds, some builds become stronger or weaker--or even possible / not possible--on certain maps. In Puzzle Strike, the "map" is set of bank chips you can buy for your deck in the current game. There are 24 types of these chips total, but each "map" consists of a set of 10 of these, so that there are millions of possible starting conditions. Your build depends a lot on which of the millions of possible maps you're playing on.

Conclusion

Puzzle Strike certainly isn't the same game as Starcraft, and I'm sure you can easily think of differences, but BT's point is that it's striking how many core similarities there are. None of it was even intentional except for the inspiration of using 4-gems to fill a similar role to Protoss Carriers that I mentioned in this article. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the game, it's got a lot of really interesting dynamics.

• Quick game overview
• Read an article about Puzzle Strike's design
• Buying options for Puzzle Strike

Puzzle Strike Launch

This first copies of Puzzle Strike are shipping this week, though inventory is very limited at first. Here's a puzzle to commemorate the launch.

• Quick game overview
• Read an article about Puzzle Strike's design
• Buying options for Puzzle Strike

Analyzing Starcraft 2's Ranking System

Updated on Sunday, July 25, 2010 at 3:03PM by Sirlin

Updated on Sunday, July 25, 2010 at 4:33PM by Sirlin

Let's talk about Starcraft 2's ranking system, specifically the bonus pool system, the focus on ranked matches, and the division system. Before we get into all that, I'll give some background info from three years ago when I talked with Rob Pardo (VP of Game Design at Blizzard) about me possibly taking on the role of ranking-and-tournament systems designer at Blizzard. I ended up having to back out of that race because the Street Fighter HD Remix project suddenly became a reality, and I couldn't pass that up.

The reason I want to tell you about the ranking stuff from back then is to illustrate two points of view--mine and Pardo's--and to explain how it took me three years to understand that his point of view is probably best after all.

TrueSkill vs. Monkeying With Rankings

He asked me to come up with a ranking system for a game, we'll just call it Game X. My first response was that this is easy because it's already a solved problem: Microsoft solved it with what they call TrueSkill. TrueSkill is a refinement of the well-known ELO system used in Chess. One of TrueSkill's main features is that it can apply to games with more than 2 players, while ELO can't. Also, TrueSkill uses a bell curve rather than a single point when referring to a player's skill level. As the system gets more information about the player, it becomes more "certain" that the skill ranking is accurate, and that player's personal bell curve shrinks.

More important than any of those details though, is Microsoft's philosophy about rankings. The premise of their whole system is that players will have the most fun if the ranking system can give matches as close to 50-50 as possible. Yeah it's fun to have to have a few matches that are easy and some that are hard (and you will because of the inevitable variance), but you really do want the ranking system to try to give you close matches. Consider a matchmaking system that simply gave you random opponents, and how from the perspective of a bad player, he just gets stomped repeatedly then probably quits. He is better served by getting evenly matched with other bad players. Over time, he might become a good player rather than quitting.

Microsoft makes another good point here that ONLY winning and losing can be allowed to affect these stats. You can't adjust the matchmaking stat by "experience points" or even by any skill-based stats such as headshots, number of kills, time to finish a lap in racing, etc. All those stats can be gamed, and you will end up trying to get more headshots or something instead of winning. Any formula that equates number of headshots (or any other stat besides wins/losses) with how likely you are to win or lose introduces a layer of imperfect simulation. If we want to know how likely you are to beat someone, we should only consider your wins and losses, and not any in-game stats.

Short version: Microsoft's philosophy is correct (or is it...?), our ranking system should only consider wins and losses and should maximize close matches using TrueSkill, or a close implementation.

But Pardo was not quite on board. Such a ranking system is harsh and while hardcores are ok with it, regular people just get crushed and discouraged. They don't get to see any real progress, he said.

Click to read more ...

Evolution 2010: The Miracle Man with Zangief

I want to tell you about Snake Eyes. To me, he really was the most interesting story this year at Evolution 2010. Everyone was talking about him the day or two before the tournament, and how great he was. Snake Eyes is a pretty new player (strike one) who plays Zangief (strike two) on a pad (strike 3). "Real" players play on a joystick, and it's rare for pad players to do well. It's also rare for Zangief players in ST/HD Remix to do well, not to mention players who are unknowns on the tournament scene.

I played Snake Eyes a long time ago on Xbox Live, and I didn't think a lot of him. Yeah he's good, but so are a lot of other players. Zangief has a lot of bad matchups, so I can counterpick and be fine, whatever. But people told me "no really, this guy is GOOD." AquaSnake claimed Snake Eyes would make top 8 "for sure, guaranteed" and that he would probably make top 2. This seemed crazy to me. Another player told me there was some casual play of Street Fighter HD Remix with about 20 known players, and Snake Eyes beat all of them in a row with no losses, then beat all of them again. (What??)

Another thing to factor in was the other tournament he attended. Yeah "the" other because he had only ever been to one: West Coast WarZone 2. He lost to AfroLegends there (winner of last year's Evolution), but he had an incredibly good showing. He beat superstar player Alex Valle...twice in the same tournament. I didn't see the first time they faced each other, but the second time Snake Eyes won 6 rounds to 0. Pretty much no one beats Valle like that. Even a hero like Valle can have a bad tournament or a bad day though, so maybe that's all it was?

Snake Eyes was in my pool, along with Kuni the famous Zangief player, John Choi, Pete Talley, Masaka, and some other good players I'm probably forgetting. Incidentally, I double eliminated Kuni (I played Cammy both times), but I lost to Choi. I was too busy playing to see much of Snake Eyes play, but i saw a couple rounds where he just stomped whoever it was. At some point, he beat Choi but that might have been in the semi-finals, I'm not sure. By that night, Snake Eyes made top 8 (winners side, so no match losses yet) and he would face Tokido the next day. If he won, he would face the winner of DGV (Ryu) and Jason Cole (Dhalsim) for the top of the winner's bracket. If he won that he would need only one more win to win Evolution 2010.

He seemed like a nice guy and all, so I made sure he understood some facts of the match, such as how useful low fierce is against a far-away Vega wall dive, and how good lariat is against a crossup dive. We decided to go practice for his sake, because I had made top 8 at Evolution with Vega before, so he could at least prepare for his match against Tokido a bit. After a bit of Vega, he said to play whoever I wanted so as I usually do, I picked like 8 different characters against him.

In casual play, I do fine against even top players. The one player who has beat me worse than anyone ever in casual play was AfroLegends. Like 25 to 3 or something once, just destroyed me. Now I have to add Snake Eyes to that list. I think the score was about 40 to 8, it was brutal. It's actually nothing like being beaten by AfroLegends though. Against Afro, I struggle to even play my game because he controls the whole match, and he sets the pace. Against Snake Eyes though, I can do whatever I want. I'm in control and I keep him out...and then suddenly I lose. I knew all about this phenomenon from Kuni's Zangief. He taught me long ago that Zangief can literally win the entire round off one of your mistakes, but somehow Snake Eyes implements this even better than Kuni. It's all well and good, then suddenly he gets in, and that's it. (Safe jump, some unknown number of force blocked jabs into spd or bait your reversal then sweep, repeat).

I started keeping track of just how Snake Eyes managed to get in each time. I played my impenetrable wall of Cammy stuff, thinking "seriously, how can this go wrong?" Or just stand there with Blanka doing stand strong (beats all Zangief jump attacks) wondering what he could possibly do, even theoretically. Remarkably, I lost several rounds without even KNOWING what went wrong. SweetJohnnyV was watching and he didn't know either half the time. The times I did keep track of it, the critical mistake was when he a) got a jump in I didn't counter, b) snuck in running grab, c) did walk up sweep, d) did walk up spd, e) hit a random move of mine with lariat for the knock down, f) hop into spd...and so on. The point is that there was no single thing, it was a whole lot of different things. Too many things to think about avoiding at any given time.

I now realized...he could actually win this thing. Judging by how he fought my Vega, then adjusting for the Tokido-factor, I thought he had advantage against Tokido. I also thought he actually had more advantage vs Jason Cole (Dhalsim), if they were to play. Could Zangief actually win a tournament though?

I asked Kuni (remember, he's the Japanese player who's famous for Zangief) about the upcoming match and told him how good Snake Eyes was and how soundly he beat me. This was after I had double eliminated Kuni, ha. I asked if Tokido has any special training in this particular match, because I remember I picked Blanka against Tokido before as a surprise, only later to find out that Tokido had recently lost a big tournament to a Blanka and practiced for days and days that match only, vowing never to lose it again. Kuni's response was "hmmmmm....could be an upset." Ha!

Finally the time for the tournament came. Snake Eyes was so far undefeated, in the winner's side of of top 8 with a match against Tokido. That's the exact same situation I was in two years ago, but I lost to Tokido. I told Snake Eyes it was up to him to do what I didn't...and he did. He beat Tokido, but he then lost to DGV's Ryu (barely!!!) and was sent to the loser's bracket. He fought his way all the way up, beating AfroLegends along the way. Remember that Afrolegends won last year's Evolution tournament and also beat Snake Eyes at the only other tournament Snake Eyes attended. Afterwards, Afro told me he really underestimated Snake Eyes and had no real "plan B" approach to the match because he didn't think he needed one.

Snake Eyes made it to the top of the loser's bracket and into the grand finals with DGV (Ryu). Snake Eyes had to win two sets of 3 out of 5, and he did. DGV did well but it was a pretty convincing win. A Zangief just won Evolution. On a pad. And it was his second tournament ever.

I thought it was a pretty interesting development in the metagame, something that was kind of begging to happen if only a Zangief player ever appeared to do it. Balrog is certainly one of the best characters in the game, probably THE best, and we all know that Afrolegends has the ability to win (and he plays Balrog). We also know that Ryu is strong, and that regardless of how good he is, there are several top players who will play him almost no matter what (Choi, Valle, DGV to name a few). Then there's Daigo who plays Ryu and Balrog. But the thing is, Zangief is good against both those characters, so even though he has bad matches against several other characters, he just happens to have an edge on the two characters that are most likely to show up at the end. If only there were some Cammys, Blankas, and Fei Longs to take him out, maybe it would have ended differently?

Those characters would have made it tougher on Snake Eyes, but in the end, let's be real. He played the best of anyone this year, hands down, no question. And as if all that wasn't enough, the night the tournament ended, about 15 or 20 of us were in a hotel room for HD Remix casual play. Snake Eye's Evolution 2010 first place trophy was right next to the TV. He dominated us all for hours on end as we all looked at each other, confused. Two-time Evolution champion Jason Cole was there too, and when Cole played him, we were all ok with stopping to rotation to let them get in several games. This was the match they *almost* had to play on stage, after all, if only Cole had beat DGV. I don't know the actual match score here, but it was a massacre. I'm guessing like 8 games to 0 or something (correct me if I'm wrong, Cole).

Snake Eyes, the Miracle Man of Evolution 2010.

Extensive Interview from HatchetJob

HatchetJob did a very extensive interview with me. I was really impressed with his knowledge and understanding of all the topics we talked about. It might be the best interview I've ever done thanks to him.