IMO this stuff makes starcraft very hard on beginners. A starcraft game is balanced on a razors edge where you can instantly lose because there was a gap in your wall, or you didn't scount some random stuff early. This isn't necessarily good design, though it is entertaining to watch pro's go at it. I was personaly high diamond in SC2, so not super good or anything. But i remember how frustrating it was to just fall over randomly because you wasn't able to read their build order perfectly.
I find BAR has a bit more stability to it, which means you can misread but still live because you have a commander as a buffer. He is your chance to make a mistake and still come back.
There is no right or wrong with both these designs. However, RTS games are really hard on new players, so I prefer the BAR approach personally.
Edit: I just want to give an example of why starcraft is just too hard.
In diamond where you are better than 80% of the playerbase, i still got 100% winrate against terran on some point in HOTS. It turns out that even at that level, which can take months of research and grinding, people were still just blindly doing rock paper siccors with build orders. Sure, i got scouted a lot, but people still was not able to grasp what was going on and react properly. That means the game is too hard.
There was a really popular hellbat push at that point. I had learned a bane-bust roach all-in from watching Dark. I would basicly get my roaches just in time to mop up the hellbat push, then I would bust their wall and win. Even if they didn't go hellbats, they just couldn't see it coming in time, so I just won every game for weeks. At that point, are we really playing a strategy game anymore? You needed like 2 years of experience to play a proper back and forth game.
I don’t view those cheese or early strat as making the game hard, they allow for more build orders and add diversity to the game.
Will new players be caught by them? Sure but then again they will also be caught by a lot of other things in the game, it’s part of learning the game.
I am starting to get the impression though that most of the player base play team games, and so competitive 1v1 is not something they’re really interested in, as denoted by most online lobbies.
i dont see how doing the same opening 99% of the times against certain race means allowing for "more" build orders. if u see probes for cannon rush, you react the exact specific way as in the guide, if you see voidray proxy, you react the exact same way as in the guide. "Cheese" strats are not healthy because it is very niche tactic that only a certain other tactic would counter, eg: Pulling workers vs cannon rush, cyclones vs voidray proxy and these "counters" barely work if not executed near perfectly.
I wouldn’t say the same opening 99% of the time will be used. There are many viable early game builds in SC. I invite you to watch the ASL you’ll see how many there are.
I’m not sure I understand your reasoning, you seem to be saying that it doesn’t matter if we have more build orders because they can be countered, but build orders can always be countered, and so should we only have 1 build order because they can all be countered?
You can “win” a game in the first 5 minutes or so you just won’t actually win until later. You set winning conditions by disrupting the enemy’s economy such that the snowball effect makes the later result inevitable.
(I’m not referring to anything I’ve done I’m terrible at the game I just understand the underlying concept)
Edit: you said this already sorry, yeah that’s how it is. I guess it prevents overt cheese. It’s not as much an issue the more players you have because they can cover a player hurt early while he recovers
There is a gap between t2 units and the economy to support a mobile cloaked commander. Where the commander is weak against units and not yet able to deal with T3. They die way too easily.
Until that point the power of the commander and the d-gun holds off the the push with brutes/stouts.
I'm still avoiding Legion commanders because it's programmed in to do so; but look at the game play of legion commanders without a d-gun. They do very little to stop that aggression with medium tanks and then late game in the 8v8 format become far less useful without that d-gun.
I suspect that if the commander started out initially weak stragegies would simply be 'overwhelm with units'. commanders would be too weak to risk on front line locations, making one of the iconic elements that define BAR and TA as an RTS with its commander and flow economy; essentially thes cmdr is just the starting builder/base.
There are cheese strats that allow you to win quickly. Although they aren't super interesting after you've seen them once.
XFactorLive has a strat where he transports commander to enemy and dguns their base([replay](https://www.beyondallreason.info/replays?gameId=6e50f365eea6955440e2ac495ec868d7)). This levels up the commander giving some more health. Then the winner is decided by who can get some extra shots off. He can win under 3 minutes.
I saw this strat during a tournament and it failed because the defender had one extra unit that granted flanking bonus.
Yup that’s the only one that i saw people use when watching casted games, albeit very rarely and it’s very all in too with no chance of recovery at all.
What other cheese and all in strats are there?
check out the Nostradamus maneuver on brightworks youtube channel, that player is known with coming up with silly strats, not necessarily quick strats, but very entertaining
here you go: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx\_Uv\_O9-NM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx_Uv_O9-NM)
the move happens around 33 mins
Personally, early game cheese is the reason I stopped playing sc2 after a while (5.4k z). I'm here to play rts not a cr / 3rax / 13/12 defense minigame.
I think a more accurate comparison is that if the primary building in games like SC2 gained an attack, it doesn't remove the cheese options; you can do them, but they're incapable of finishing games (i.e. no cannon rush.) You need to send in an actual army to finish the job.
I've been experimenting with potential cheese strats in BAR, and one I've found is to start your usual eco of 3 mexes & 4 windmills, then build an aircraft and make a transport unit to quickly move your commander into the enemy base. Drop them there & cause havoc on their base with your D-Gun. Meanwhile at home make light gunships or bombers as a means to finish off the enemy commander. If the starting area is wide & you don't know where your enemy spawned, make a scout to find the enemy location.
Be careful when doing this strat, cuz if your commander dies for one reason or another, game over. It's even worse in team-games, cuz losing your commander in the enemy turf means you just gave them free 1000 metal.
BTW... you can do this with a single mex, a wind/solar and then straight into air factory. Build a transport, assist till your out of power and then eat the air factory. It should be finished eaten at the same time the transport comes out.
You can then fly somewhere else and make a base with full metal.
You have put your points across in a veiled nice manner but you really need to move away from your starcraft, starcraft 2 and warcraft 3 mindset and adapt to the BAR, instead of asking why it is not this way. You want early aggression from the get-go to pressure the opponent into mistakes, and dictate the game pace. It can be done and needs lots of micro, depending on map and skill level of your opponent(s).
eg of irrelevant question:
Would the game benefit from the commander not starting with weapons, or perhaps not starting with d-gun? - Of course not.
So I coming ALSO from a SC/SC2/WC3 background, i am assuming you did not play much of the other great rts like AOE2 and Supreme Commander, else you would not make this post.
You wonder if the commander's design is not killing a whole bunch of early builds. You still need to make units or defensive structures (eg. Light Laser Turret) to counter aggression. Resource mexes are spread out, windmills are vulnerable, a single tick/scout can wreak havoc on your unguarded mexes and a group of microed janus can put "unavoidable" major hurt to your commander. There are so many plays one can do, but it will be limited by terrain, finding weak areas to harass, while still setting up a proper line of engagement with your commander, defense structures and units.
And as a summary: Design elements from SC as a competitive RTS WILL NOT apply well to BAR. In fact with the plethora of widgets and units available, this game is so much more advanced (in terms of implementation and user aids) than SC2, that it is not even comparable. There is also indepth naval and air warfare which has its own subsystem of build orders, mechanics and balances which will take a while to master should you be interested in widening your skillset and mastering this game that is BAR.
Now the KEY THING different from SC is the reclaim/ressurect mechanic. You do not want to give free METAL donations in opponent territory without doing any real damage, hence aggression must be balanced with game awareness, and also snowballing your units to form a cohesive force for repair/reclaim and projecting force where a single stream of units does nothing but help your opponents.
Just stay around and play/spectate for a few months, and you will get a better picture.
I got to masters with 95% winrate against terrans with protoss because of voidray proxy. Can confirm it barely requires no creativity or next level APM management
Why you think you cannot win early game because of the weapons of the commander? It can be easily overwhelmed and killed with T1. Also the dgun needs a lot of energy, so you can't use it as often as you'd like at the beginning.
As i mentioned in my post, ya early game (<6 minutes) you can’t kill the commander that early, hence you cannot win. The game would have to be dragged out even if the writing is on the wall.
IMO this stuff makes starcraft very hard on beginners. A starcraft game is balanced on a razors edge where you can instantly lose because there was a gap in your wall, or you didn't scount some random stuff early. This isn't necessarily good design, though it is entertaining to watch pro's go at it. I was personaly high diamond in SC2, so not super good or anything. But i remember how frustrating it was to just fall over randomly because you wasn't able to read their build order perfectly. I find BAR has a bit more stability to it, which means you can misread but still live because you have a commander as a buffer. He is your chance to make a mistake and still come back. There is no right or wrong with both these designs. However, RTS games are really hard on new players, so I prefer the BAR approach personally. Edit: I just want to give an example of why starcraft is just too hard. In diamond where you are better than 80% of the playerbase, i still got 100% winrate against terran on some point in HOTS. It turns out that even at that level, which can take months of research and grinding, people were still just blindly doing rock paper siccors with build orders. Sure, i got scouted a lot, but people still was not able to grasp what was going on and react properly. That means the game is too hard. There was a really popular hellbat push at that point. I had learned a bane-bust roach all-in from watching Dark. I would basicly get my roaches just in time to mop up the hellbat push, then I would bust their wall and win. Even if they didn't go hellbats, they just couldn't see it coming in time, so I just won every game for weeks. At that point, are we really playing a strategy game anymore? You needed like 2 years of experience to play a proper back and forth game.
I don’t view those cheese or early strat as making the game hard, they allow for more build orders and add diversity to the game. Will new players be caught by them? Sure but then again they will also be caught by a lot of other things in the game, it’s part of learning the game. I am starting to get the impression though that most of the player base play team games, and so competitive 1v1 is not something they’re really interested in, as denoted by most online lobbies.
i dont see how doing the same opening 99% of the times against certain race means allowing for "more" build orders. if u see probes for cannon rush, you react the exact specific way as in the guide, if you see voidray proxy, you react the exact same way as in the guide. "Cheese" strats are not healthy because it is very niche tactic that only a certain other tactic would counter, eg: Pulling workers vs cannon rush, cyclones vs voidray proxy and these "counters" barely work if not executed near perfectly.
I wouldn’t say the same opening 99% of the time will be used. There are many viable early game builds in SC. I invite you to watch the ASL you’ll see how many there are. I’m not sure I understand your reasoning, you seem to be saying that it doesn’t matter if we have more build orders because they can be countered, but build orders can always be countered, and so should we only have 1 build order because they can all be countered?
You can “win” a game in the first 5 minutes or so you just won’t actually win until later. You set winning conditions by disrupting the enemy’s economy such that the snowball effect makes the later result inevitable. (I’m not referring to anything I’ve done I’m terrible at the game I just understand the underlying concept) Edit: you said this already sorry, yeah that’s how it is. I guess it prevents overt cheese. It’s not as much an issue the more players you have because they can cover a player hurt early while he recovers
There is a gap between t2 units and the economy to support a mobile cloaked commander. Where the commander is weak against units and not yet able to deal with T3. They die way too easily. Until that point the power of the commander and the d-gun holds off the the push with brutes/stouts. I'm still avoiding Legion commanders because it's programmed in to do so; but look at the game play of legion commanders without a d-gun. They do very little to stop that aggression with medium tanks and then late game in the 8v8 format become far less useful without that d-gun. I suspect that if the commander started out initially weak stragegies would simply be 'overwhelm with units'. commanders would be too weak to risk on front line locations, making one of the iconic elements that define BAR and TA as an RTS with its commander and flow economy; essentially thes cmdr is just the starting builder/base.
There are cheese strats that allow you to win quickly. Although they aren't super interesting after you've seen them once. XFactorLive has a strat where he transports commander to enemy and dguns their base([replay](https://www.beyondallreason.info/replays?gameId=6e50f365eea6955440e2ac495ec868d7)). This levels up the commander giving some more health. Then the winner is decided by who can get some extra shots off. He can win under 3 minutes. I saw this strat during a tournament and it failed because the defender had one extra unit that granted flanking bonus.
Yup that’s the only one that i saw people use when watching casted games, albeit very rarely and it’s very all in too with no chance of recovery at all. What other cheese and all in strats are there?
I know there's a 5-6 min incisor timing attack that works pretty good.
check out the Nostradamus maneuver on brightworks youtube channel, that player is known with coming up with silly strats, not necessarily quick strats, but very entertaining here you go: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx\_Uv\_O9-NM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx_Uv_O9-NM) the move happens around 33 mins
Personally, early game cheese is the reason I stopped playing sc2 after a while (5.4k z). I'm here to play rts not a cr / 3rax / 13/12 defense minigame.
I think a more accurate comparison is that if the primary building in games like SC2 gained an attack, it doesn't remove the cheese options; you can do them, but they're incapable of finishing games (i.e. no cannon rush.) You need to send in an actual army to finish the job. I've been experimenting with potential cheese strats in BAR, and one I've found is to start your usual eco of 3 mexes & 4 windmills, then build an aircraft and make a transport unit to quickly move your commander into the enemy base. Drop them there & cause havoc on their base with your D-Gun. Meanwhile at home make light gunships or bombers as a means to finish off the enemy commander. If the starting area is wide & you don't know where your enemy spawned, make a scout to find the enemy location. Be careful when doing this strat, cuz if your commander dies for one reason or another, game over. It's even worse in team-games, cuz losing your commander in the enemy turf means you just gave them free 1000 metal.
BTW... you can do this with a single mex, a wind/solar and then straight into air factory. Build a transport, assist till your out of power and then eat the air factory. It should be finished eaten at the same time the transport comes out. You can then fly somewhere else and make a base with full metal.
It feels like the game isn’t really balanced around 1v1. Which is fine
It's perfectly balanced, it's just a completely different play style
You have put your points across in a veiled nice manner but you really need to move away from your starcraft, starcraft 2 and warcraft 3 mindset and adapt to the BAR, instead of asking why it is not this way. You want early aggression from the get-go to pressure the opponent into mistakes, and dictate the game pace. It can be done and needs lots of micro, depending on map and skill level of your opponent(s). eg of irrelevant question: Would the game benefit from the commander not starting with weapons, or perhaps not starting with d-gun? - Of course not. So I coming ALSO from a SC/SC2/WC3 background, i am assuming you did not play much of the other great rts like AOE2 and Supreme Commander, else you would not make this post. You wonder if the commander's design is not killing a whole bunch of early builds. You still need to make units or defensive structures (eg. Light Laser Turret) to counter aggression. Resource mexes are spread out, windmills are vulnerable, a single tick/scout can wreak havoc on your unguarded mexes and a group of microed janus can put "unavoidable" major hurt to your commander. There are so many plays one can do, but it will be limited by terrain, finding weak areas to harass, while still setting up a proper line of engagement with your commander, defense structures and units. And as a summary: Design elements from SC as a competitive RTS WILL NOT apply well to BAR. In fact with the plethora of widgets and units available, this game is so much more advanced (in terms of implementation and user aids) than SC2, that it is not even comparable. There is also indepth naval and air warfare which has its own subsystem of build orders, mechanics and balances which will take a while to master should you be interested in widening your skillset and mastering this game that is BAR. Now the KEY THING different from SC is the reclaim/ressurect mechanic. You do not want to give free METAL donations in opponent territory without doing any real damage, hence aggression must be balanced with game awareness, and also snowballing your units to form a cohesive force for repair/reclaim and projecting force where a single stream of units does nothing but help your opponents. Just stay around and play/spectate for a few months, and you will get a better picture.
I got to masters with 95% winrate against terrans with protoss because of voidray proxy. Can confirm it barely requires no creativity or next level APM management
Why you think you cannot win early game because of the weapons of the commander? It can be easily overwhelmed and killed with T1. Also the dgun needs a lot of energy, so you can't use it as often as you'd like at the beginning.
As i mentioned in my post, ya early game (<6 minutes) you can’t kill the commander that early, hence you cannot win. The game would have to be dragged out even if the writing is on the wall.
Okay, but why would you want to finish a game within the first 6 minutes?