Author Archives: kevin

First version of the ground-up tutorial

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Check it out at http://starcraft.kevinleung.com/?page_id=430. Like my other guides, I’m happy to iterate on it, so comment if you see any big holes or have any tips on it. Otherwise, I might be iterating somewhat slowly on it while I refocus on my strategy guides for each race.

Also, check out the replays from DreamHack Summer 2013 and the 2013 MLG Spring Championship on the Spawning Tool. You can find build orders far more efficiently there than from my write-ups. Again, let me know if you would like to see a write-up for anything from those tournaments, and I can dig up the games and do some analysis there.

Minor update to Protoss Strategy PvT

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Previously, I was recommending this interesting opening for PvT

The 1 Gate Expand is from itsgosu and is used in PvT (and PvZ if you don’t want to FFE). Note the very aggressive poke with the first 3 units: it’s a little odd but possibly valuable.

Perfect’s PvT 1 Gate Expand

  • Standard opening
  • 18 Zealot (rallied to enemy)
  • 22 Stalker (Chronoboost),
  • Mothership Core
  • 4:20 Nexus
  • Warpgate
  • Assimilator

I don’t really recommend this anymore. In fact, this was probably outdated before HotS was even released. It turns out that running across the map with your Stalker and Mothership Core doesn’t really help when Reaper openings are so common.

Instead, I slapped in a very standard, safe 1 Gate Expand from Mana. Read more on the Protoss Strategy page. And if you want to browse real build orders, check out some of these PvTs at the Spawning Tool. You can filter down to your favorite players and events on the right hand side.

One more thing: you may remember my spawning setup guide from a few weeks ago. This made me realize that there’s a gap in what I provide here. My current strategy guides assume that you understand the mechanics of the game and even what all of the units do. I was thinking it might be helpful to have guides that bridge a bit of that initial thinking as well. I’m not really a video guy, so maybe YouTube videos would be more suited for it, but I could slap together a guide on what parts of StarCraft you should use to learn how to play (tutorials, training, playing vs ai) and a brief explanation of units and compositions.

Vote in the poll below.

Would you use or share a ground-up tutorial for StarCraft?

  • Yes (83%, 10 Votes)
  • No (17%, 2 Votes)

Total Voters: 12

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Some interesting stats before Dreamhack

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Dreamhack Valencia is coming up this weekend, and in preparation for that, I fired up Spawning Tool for some analysis. Check out a few observations I made in a TL post http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=421974

Because Dreamhack releases replays after their events, we actually have a ton of data available for each of these players. I went through the players seeded into Group Stage #2 and checked their performance at Dreamhack Summer. Here’s what I found:

1. Lucifron beat Sonder 2-0 using almost the exact same opening in both games. He opened with 2 Reapers into 3 CC and Hellions. The builds only start to diverge around 7:00 (ref)

2. Harstem went 4-4 (50%) in PvZ. He cannon rushed in 3 of his 4 wins, and in none of his losses (ref)

3. TheStC only played TvT in 1 series, going mech in both games against Morrow in by far his longest games (24 and 31 minutes) (ref)

4. Hyun went 7-1 (82.5%) in ZvT (ignore the issues parsing gameheart games). The games lasted between 9 and 19 minutes, with his 1 loss coming against TheStC in the longest game. His 3 fastest wins, unsurprisingly, came off of Roach-Zergling all-ins (ref)

5. StarNaN went 0-6 in PvZ. Granted, it was against Hyun, Life, and Pig, but YugiOh isn’t going to be much easier (ref)

6. Stephano went 6-2 (75%) in ZvZ, losing only to Hyun. He doesn’t build very many Roaches but does build a lot of Zerglings(ref)

7. Tefel went 8-1 (89%) in ZvP, losing only to Harstem’s cannon rush. He went Roach/Hydra in ALL of these games (ref)

8. NightEnD went 3-1 (75%) in PvZ, using a Gateway Expand build in all of them (ref)

I thought those were pretty interesting, but they also show off some of what you can do with the research tool. You might have noticed that this looks a lot different from the old research tool. After getting some feedback about the valuable parameters and developing an approachable interface, I scaled back the page a bit. The fancier bits about searching over the build orders are still around in advanced search, though I’ll need to revisit that code, too, probably.

Oddly, my work recently has been at 2 extremes. There was a lot of parsing stuff I needed to go through that basically just result in more accurate data and low-level extraction of data and tags. On the other extreme, I worked with Julie to get a splash of purple and revised interfaces. The result is that the actual core functionality of the site (somewhere between those 2 ends) didn’t change much, so not too many new features to hawk. Despite that, the site is in much better shape than before.

Anyways, enjoy Dreamhack. I think we’re on the cusp of some really exciting developments with Spawning Tool as we get more replays and hit the core functionality.

Slowing down on content

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You might have noticed that I recently have been posting less frequently. I have a few reasons for this.

First, my personal motivation to ladder has dried up. I have fizzled on laddering in many past seasons, and the release of HotS only slightly prolonged my interest. Without actually laddering, I can’t claim to be any sort of authority here.

Second, the HotS meta-game has somewhat stabilized. When I restarted this blog, I was really trying to make some accessible guides in a chaotic landscape and help new players get into multiplayer. Since then, we have seen a few meta-game shifts, and while that will continue, it at least means that there’s a coherent meta-game.

Third, I figured that my StarCraft time is better spent working on Spawning Tool. Truth be told, I don’t know if I was ever authoritative enough to be worth listening to, but Spawning Tool is much more up my alley, and I hope it becomes just as useful.

Of course, this blog isn’t completely abandoned. If I see something really cool, I’ll write it up. I’ll also be putting Spawning Tool updates here. To get your fill, you should check out http://imbabuilds.com/. NoseKnowsAll is a great guy and has been putting together a lot of valuable content.

And quick Spawning Tool update with 2 big features that I haven’t shared yet. First, the research tool. With it, you can put together more advanced queries for replays based on actual timings from build orders. For example, you might be curious to know how effective DT rushes are in PvP (answer: enough), or what the dangerous timings are in TvZ (answer: Roach all-ins from 12-15 minutes, but oddly enough, not Hellion-Marauder play). So play around with that and see what you learn. And please let me know if you have other criteria you would like to see there. I welcome any enhancements to make this tool very powerful.

Of course, that is all limited by the amount of data available, so the other big improvement is that you can now upload replay packs, and it’ll unzip and upload all of the contents. Spawning Tool is also hosted on its own server now instead of piggybacking on my personal server, so it should be better able to handle the load. Keep that coming, and if you hit any server errors, come back to try again later. I receive emails every time there’s a server error, and I do my best to fix them immediately.

So that’s it for now. As always, feel free to reach out to me with questions, suggestions, and feedback. I’m always down to listen. In the meantime, keep laddering in my place.

StarCraft Spawning Tutorial

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Presumably in an effort to compete with other free-to-play games, Blizzard revived Spawning, a feature where players who haven’t purchased StarCraft to get (almost) full multiplayer access if they play with a friend who has purchased StarCraft. It’s awesome

Just last night, I pulled 4 friends (who had never played StarCraft 2 before) onto StarCraft with Spawning, and we ended up playing around 5 games together. Surprisingly, the initial learning curve isn’t as tough as you might think, and if you mix in arcade games (we played 1 round of Star Strikers), I think you might win over your friends.

To get my friends started, I wrote a quick guide for getting setup and learning about StarCraft. Hopefully you can use it to show more friends how awesome StarCraft is!

Install StarCraft

To install it on your computer, go to https://us.battle.net/account/download/?show=sc2&starter=sc2. Download and run the installer. When it asks you if you have activated the game or not, say that you have and wait for the 15GB to download. Meanwhile…

Get a Battle.net account

If you already have a Battle.net (bnet) account for StarCraft, Diablo, WoW, or other Blizzard products, you can sign in using that. Otherwise,, go to https://us.battle.net/account/creation/tos.html?theme=sc2&style=sc2-trial and signup

Learn about StarCraft

If you’re unfamiliar with what StarCraft is or how real-time strategy (RTS) games work, check out the game guide. The first page is an overview http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/game/guide/whats-sc2, and the second page will explain the gameplay http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/game/guide/gameplay-overview

In-Game Setup

Once the installer is finished,

  1. Start StarCraft 2 on your computer
  2. Hit “Options on the bottom left”. The best settings are probably to set your resolution to your native resolution and then set texture and graphics quality to low
  3. Sign in using your email and password

Add your Spawning Host as a friend:

  1. Click on the person on the bottom right of your screen
  2. Click “Add Friend” in the popup
  3. Enter your Spawning Host’s email and hit “Send Request”

Trying out the game

If your host is ready, you can jump in a game there. Otherwise, there are a few ways you can get started on your own.

FIrst, you can play the in-game tutorial

  1. Start the game and sign-in
  2. Click on “Campaign”
  3. Click on “Launch Tutorial”
  4. Go through the various options
  5. After that, you can try out the Campaign by
  6. Start StarCraft and sign-in
  7. Click on “Campaign”
  8. Click on “New Campaign”

Alternatively, you can start the “Wings of Liberty” campaign, which also walks through the gameplay.

If you’re familiar with the basics, you can learn about basic build orders and what units are available from the multiplayer training:

  1. Start StarCraft and sign-in
  2. Click on “Matchmaking”
  3. Select “Training”
  4. Pick a race and hit “Play”
  5. Work from Stage 1 up to Stage 3

A few suggestions to Spawning Hosts

I’m sure many of you have much more experience with new players, but here are my thoughts:

  1. Don’t overwhelm them. Start easy, and let them play around with the interface
  2. They will probably ask you “What should I do?” or “What should I build?” or “What’s the best unit?” Strike a middle ground in your feedback. Give them something concrete to do but keep things open-ended (“You can build a Barracks to get infantry units”). Again, don’t overwhelm them
  3. Take it easy yourself. Play with only your mouse hand, keep your in-game sound dialed down, and focus on the social part of the game rather than playing well. You will crush them anyways
  4. If they ask how they can improve or broadly are looking for advice, I think there are 2 important stepping stones. First, you can point out the keyboard shortcuts for them to slowly learn. Second, give them the Day[9] mantra of Probes and Pylons. The 3 parts of that are 1) Keep building workers, 2) Don’t get supply blocked, and 3) Spend all of your money
  5. Really pay attention to how they feel about the game. 1v1 is scary, even for experienced players. On the otherhand, 2v2v2 is always hilarious, and arcade games may be good, too. If you’re reading my blog, you’re probably decently intense about StarCraft. Maybe your friends will be there one day, but in the meantime, don’t lose them

I hope you guys manage to spawn a few friends in, too!

P.S. When did Spore Crawlers no longer require the Evolution Chamber? Okay, I now know the answer to that, but I completely missed that change. I don’t think it has ever affected me, but I either completely forgot or was unaware of the change before it was mentioned on Meta. Anyways…

WCS Season 1 Finals brought to you by: Hellbats

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Unless you’re in Europe (or similar time zones), I hope you caught the WCS season finals last night. Well, at least I hope you caught the semifinals because both of those series were very entertaining. The finals were mostly forgettable as INnoVation rolled SoS, which is really too bad.

I think it would be fair to summarize all Terran play this weekend as Hellbats. Terran strategy has shifted to drop-focused play, and they’re really preferring Hellbats over Widow Mines. I noticed that even when Hellbat drops appeared to be ineffective, Terran still didn’t fall behind. My guess is that the combination of

  1. cheap Hellbats (it’s cheaper to fill a Medivac with 2 Hellbats than even 8 Marines)
  2. money spend on required static defense
  3. lost mining time

make it a tricky proposition to deal with right now. The INnoVation versus aLive quarterfinal game was just painful to watch. TvT seems the most affected by Hellbats at the moment because mech has become the standard style (as opposed to bio or bio-tank), but we’ll see if that mobility swings things around again.

Anyways, I got 1 interesting strategy out of this. On Neo Planet S, SoS pulled out a Tempest-High Templar strategy on INnoVation that looked awesome (VoD here). Standard TvP is bio with Vikings for Colossi and Ghosts for High Templar. SoS’s plan was to use Tempests to shoot down everything, and when the Vikings and Marines came, he would back off onto 1 of the many high ground areas around the map and storm the Vikings/Marines. The strategy is very gas-intensive, so a lot of minerals get dumped into Photon Cannons (Tempests are slow to defend against a mobile bio army) and Zealots to take damage and harass.

By this game, SoS wasn’t playing very well, which has been attributed to nerves. There was a time when INnoVation wasn’t mining, so I like to think that the strategy might have worked. I think it is pretty specific to Neo Planet S and its rings of high ground, but you should try it on other maps and see how it goes.

Let me know if you want me to write up any rough timings or build order from the game.

ZvZ from WCS America Premier League

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About a week and a half ago, WCS America season 1 Premier League had a group (stage 2, group C) with 3 Zerg players. With the patch out increasing Spore Crawler damage against Mutalisks, we got to see what ZvZ looks like when you can actually do different things.

Before this balance patch (which doesn’t have its own number, unfortunately), ZvZ was all Mutalisks. Early game was Zergling and Baneling trades, where the defender usually had the advantage. Once it got to Lair, Zergs would invest gas in Mutalisks, and getting the 1st volley or having 1 or 2 more Mutalisks was the difference.

Post-patch ZvZ looks more like WoL ZvZ. The early game is the same, the midgame is mostly Roaches, and then you mix in Hydras or Infestors (and eventually both) until the late game comes late. Most games would be decided around 3 bases in the midgame, however.

So the builds. Unfortunately, the matchups, cheeses, and technical difficulties mean that we have 3 games between Suppy and Revival and only 1 between Revival and Scarlett, but this is a good set of them. All of those are below in long form. Just a few notes ahead of time. I’ll be updating my Zerg strategy guide based on the recent changes to ZvZ, so read that for the bigger picture.

Continue reading →

Spawning Tool upgrades: authentication and an improved schema

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For all Americans, I hope you had a good Memorial Day weekend. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Memorial Day is a federal holiday for honoring departed members of the US armed forces. Given the time of year, many people will go out to grill and enjoy the weather. I did some of that, but I also got started on the new season of Arrested Development and built a number of new features for the Spawning Tool.

First, I added basic authentication so you can login and upload replays. This mechanism isn’t particularly interesting, but it’s necessary to restrict who can edit the tags on a replay. I once thought it best if anyone could edit any tags, but I think that’s inviting vandalism. If anyone feels so strongly to add tags to other replays, we’ll come up with a mechanism to enable that.

Second, I improved the Browse Replays interface. You can now do text search and toggle a few options. The actual list of replays is now much more readable thanks to built-in bootstrap styles.

Third, I actually incorporated more parsed data from the replay into the actual database schema for the site itself. The full explanation requires some context.

The Spawning Tool is primarily composed of 2 parts. First, there’s the spawningtool tool, which actually goes through the replay data and pulls out the build order. The result of this tool is basically just a bunch of structured text. Second, there’s the spawningtool site, which gets this text and turns it into a presentable website.

Previously, I was just taking the raw build order data as a whole and re-rendering it from scratch every time. It was easy and was sufficient for displaying builds. The downside was that the spawningtool site was pretty blind to what the data was. I re-implemented it so that the build order is stored in the database itself: instead of a raw build order in text, the build order itself is stored with times, units, and supply counts in the database.

The biggest benefit is coming soon: more advanced filters and statistics from replays. With this data, we can make database queries that translate naturally into questions like, “If you build a Robotics Facility before 7:00 in PvT, how often will you win?” It’s just a matter of finding all replays with builds that fit the criteria, then counting the wins and losses.

I’m very excited about the next steps for the Spawning Tool, and I think that advanced filters is a big part of that. Additionally, I’m working with ChanmanV to make the Spawning Tool a replay archive for practice games. Tune in at http://youtu.be/vstWWo0Gmao?t=29m30s for more about that.

One last thing: I’m in the process of moving the Spawning Tool off of my personal server and onto Amazon Web Services. As such, there may be some downtime in the near future. Deployment might be rough, but I think this will ultimately lead to a much more stable environment.

MVP’s 2 base Marauder/Hellbat/Marine All In

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Game 3

Game 4

If you weren’t watching the WCS Europe Finals, you were missing out. I myself happened to only catch the finals after sleeping in, which were some fun games. Games 1 and 2 were pretty standard, but in games 3 and 4, MVP came out with a sick 2 base all in.

It starts with Hellbat drops shortly after 7 minutes, which is relatively normal and can do some damage. From 7 to 10 minutes, MVP gets a Hellbat Marauder composition, which can defend against Roach Zergling pushes (especially if the Hellbat drops force the Zerg to go all in). Then, he cranks out 4 Marines at a time with 2 Reactored Barracks to have Marines ready for 11 minute Mutalisks. The push then goes out slightly after that.

So here are the builds.

MVP v. Stephano, WCS Europe Finals Game 3, Newkirk District

Hellbat drops into a 2 base Marauder/Hellbat/Marine All In

  • 10 Supply Depot
  • 12 Barracks
  • 13 Refinery
  • 15 Marine, Orbital Command
  • 16 Supply Depot
  • 16 Marine
  • 18 Factory
  • 19 Reactor
  • 22 Command Center (low ground)
  • 4:45 Swap, Hellion x2, Supply Depot
  • 5:15 Armory, Hellion x2
  • 32 5:50 Starport
  • 6:00 Barracks Tech Lab
  • 6:10 Orbital Command, Refinery
  • 6:15 Hellbat x2 (continuous)
  • 40 6:40 Medivac (continuous)
  • 7:15 Stimpack, Marauder (continuous), Hellbat drop goes out
  • 8:00 Barracks x2
  • 9:15 Barracks Reactor x2
  • 10:00 Marine x4 (continuous)
  • 10:50 Concussive Shell
  • 110 11:15 Push, SCV pull

Some notes:

  1. MVP never gets a Reactor on the Starport. I think Terran players just instinctively swap, but he wants the Reactor for the Hellbats.
  2. There’s no 3rd Refinery, which may contribute to the lack of Medivacs
  3. There’s also no Engineering Bay
  4. He cuts SCVs from 7:30 to 9:00, then again after 10:00. He has the money, so maybe it’s a mistake, but this is MVP, so maybe he really need the money

And the second build. It starts with Reapers, but the rest of the build turns out similarly.

MVP v. Stephano, WCS Europe Finals Game 4, Star Station

Reaper Expand into Hellbat drops into a 2 base Marauder/Hellbat/Marine All In

  • 10 Supply Depot
  • 12 Barracks
  • 13 Refinery
  • 15 Orbital, Marine (canceled for Reaper)
  • 16 Supply Depot
  • 18 Reaper (both out to harass and scout)
  • 20 Command Center
  • 21 Factory
  • 23 Barracks Reactor
  • 24 Refinery
  • 26 5:30 Swap, Hellion x2, Armory, Marine
  • 6:00 Starport
  • 6:15 Hellion x2
  • 6:50 Barracks Tech Lab, Hellbat x2 (continuous), Medivac (continuous)
  • 54 7:30 Stimpack
  • 7:45 drop goes out
  • 8:00 Marauder (continuous)
  • 8:15 Barracks x2, Bunker
  • 9:25 Reactor x2
  • 9:45 Barracks x2
  • Marine x4 (continuous, x6 with
  • 10:55 Combat Shield
  • 120 11:15 Push, SCV pull

Some notes:

  1. The big difference is that he goes for a Reaper opening in this game. He doesn’t cut the 13th SCV to get out a faster Refinery, though, so perhaps it’s not too important
  2. Compared to the last game, he isn’t cutting as many SCVs. Again, not sure how to read that.
  3. At 9:45, he gets out 2 more Barracks for more Marines. Again, I’m not sure how to read this choice.

I like the build a lot, and because of that, Zerg players beware: you might be seeing a lot of this on the ladder.

Terran Strategy guide completed (and some Spawning Tool news)

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I feel like I took far longer to get the Terran strategy guide up than either of the other guides. And this is despite actually playing Terran nowadays. In any case, I finally got the last of my edits in, so it is out of construction and worthy enough of your attention.

Like the other guides, I’m committed to maintaining it for the foreseeable future, so let me know if you see any mistakes or have any recommendations. Already I’m seeing that the Protoss and Zerg guides have gotten out of date. The Zerg guide is actually painfully underspecified, and Protoss play has changed dramatically. Some of that is Naniwa’s PvZ 1 Gate Expand, and some of that is better defense. So you may see some updates there, and I will of course post here about the big edits I’m considering.

In unrelated news, ChanmanV shared some exciting developments about Spawning Tool on Pro Corner earlier today. Tune in at http://youtu.be/vstWWo0Gmao?t=29m30s for about a 10 minute discussion of his thoughts (pretty well aligned with mine) on what the rough vision of the site is.

Development is going to be continuous, so look out for more updates there. In the meantime, please upload any replays you have handy. To do good analysis, we need both good tools and lots of data, so please send your replays our way.