Starcraft Junkie

Glynnis Talken (Sarah McKerrigan) has a book signing schedule on Saturday, October 11th at Seaside Highland Games at Seaside Park in Ventura, California. You can find her at the Tea & Sympathy booth. If you go make sure to send us photos or video of your meeting with the voice behind Kerrigan the Queen of Blades … of course, if you survive the experience.

Keith R.A. DeCandido revised the proposal for StarCraft: Ghost Academy Volume 1 and sent it off to TokyoPop. The manuscript for StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres is due to Pocket Star Books on 31 October. The author is hard at work to meet up deadlines on various projects such as Star Trek, Blizzard Games and other stuff. Both the Starcraft Manga: Ghost Academy; and the Starcraft: Ghost: Spectres are expected to be on sale around Summer 2009. Keep an eye on those. Starcraft: Ghost is not dead.

My personal hunch, if that means anything to anyone anyway, based on what Rob Pardo and other folks have said, such as no plans for console development in the near future, and that Starcraft: Ghost is something they would like to return to when a team is available and wishes to focus on working with it is … Starcraft: Ghost could return on PC/Mac and possibly as an MMO? Those who attended BlizzCon 2005 played Starcraft: Ghost multiplayer. And that game pretty much looked like an MMO. Personally, I enjoy Half-Life 2: Deathmatch when I am not hooked on Blizzard games. I would like something that beats that experience. I want Starcraft: Ghost !!! In the meantime, we got these two books to look forward to.

Keep the good work: Keith, Marco Palmieri, and Chris Metzen.

The Starcraft 2 team has changed the name of the protoss unit from Warp Ray to Void Ray. Karune also explains the differences of armor attributes between units.

Karune: At the moment, there is ‘light’ and ‘armored’ armor classes. Buildings also fall under the ‘armored’ armor class.

Attacks on the other hand are a bit more varied. There is bonus damage towards, ‘light, armored, biological, and massive.’ Knowing a unit’s damage bonuses will be very important in knowing what to use to counter certain units.

Biological units usually just mean they are not mechanical. Marines, Zerglings, and Zealots are biological. Non-biological units does not however mean they fall under the ‘armored’ class though and vice-versa.

For instance, Marauders are biological units but are armored. Nullifiers are mechanical units, but have light armor. Ultralisks, would fall under massive, biological, and armored. Though Battlecruisers would be massive, mechanical, and armored. These new categories also allow for many more soft counters in the game as well, giving slight bonuses to units against a certain type, but not have it as an overwhelming hard counter, where one unit wins the game easily.

Warp Rays, also known as Void Rays now, are especially good against high hit point units, as well as buildings.

Often, the strategy that sees the most Void Ray use is against Zerg, using these units to do surprise attacks or joint attacks. Many Protoss players who scout Zerg players going mass ground units, will fast tech to Void Rays in hopes to catch them without anti-air capabilities. Void Rays are also great to do an attack on their base while you have a diversionary force distracting them in another place. 2-3 Warp Rays could take out a Hatchery much faster than say that equivalent in resources of Mutalisks.

Karune shared details of the Reaper vs. Hellions’ effectiveness against enemy units and the differences between both units in certain combat scenarios.

Karune: The Hellion is faster than the Reaper side by side, but the cliff traversing talent often gets the Reaper to the place you want to go faster.

In raiding, it really depends. Hellions will be able to hit several workers at the same time, but Reapers have much more direct damage. Choosing what to use may also depend on what you are up against. Hellions are armored, whereas Reapers are light armor. Both are very useful for raiding and used in conjunction effectively could easily mean GG quite early, bleeding the enemy economy and tech.

Not a StarCraft related news, but I love to do follow ups on Glynnis’ careers: both voice acting and book writing. She is the voice of Kerrigan the Queen of Blades in Starcraft II. On her role as a writer, Glynnis Talken-Campbell, under her book writer pseudonym Sarah McKerrigan, recently announced DANGER KISS (a medieval romance novel). Her DANGER KISS trailer has been nominated as a finalist in the New Covey Trailer Awards contest.

• Watch the nominated trailer, and Vote (Voting is in the dark box in the upper left. You must disable Firefox noscript addon in order to see it.)

Title: Danger’s Kiss
Author: Sarah McKerrigan
Trailer Producer: Richard Campbell
Genre: Historical Romance

Links
http://www.sarahmckerrigan.com
http://www.accessbackstage.com

Description
Danger’s Kiss is sort of a Sheriff of Nottingham meets The Artful Dodger adventure in which Nicholas Grimshaw, upstanding officer of the law, living happily alone in his thatched cottage, makes the mistake of taking mercy upon a beautiful scam artist by the name of Desiree and, instead of hanging her for her thievery, indentures her as his servant.

Sleight of hand and sleight of heart ensue as the two clash over what’s right versus what’s just, and moral lines become blurred as lawman and outlaw fall recklessly in love.

Starcraft II Community Manager Karune seeks fan feedback concerning Zerg Creep. Read below the details surrounding the latest new changes for the Zerg, and post your feedback at the following Battle.net forum.

Discussion Topic: Zerg Creep

One of the distinct features of the Zerg is their fast movement, quick reactions and their large numbers. With the newest changes to the StarCraft II build these attributes are bound to reinforced once more.

Here are a couple of changes to the Zerg:

• Zerg units except Drones can now move 30% faster on creep

• Creep Tumors are smaller and burrowed

These changes will have a big impact on Zerg strategy, since covering terrain with Creep will now be very important. We will see Overlord rushes with mass spewing of creep and Zerg fast micro on creep. The burrowed Creep Tumors will force the other races to get quick detection to push back the Zerg Creep and take their fast movement.

If you have a StarCraft II fan site and would like to participate, please email me at karune@blizzard.com.

Questions for Fans:

• What do you think of the speed increase on Creep?

• How do you think this change will effect Zerg, Protoss and Terran?
• Do you like or dislike the change? Why?

Each StarCraft II fansite will be featuring different types of questions, so be sure to also visit those sites. All of this feedback will be compiled and sent to the dev team.

Please structure feedback as follows:

—–
(question you’d like to answer)
(your answer)

(question you’d like to answer)
(your answer)
—–

Were looking forward to seeing great discussions on the Zerg Creep.

MikeN from Blizzard Technical Support informed fans that Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War have been updated with patch 1.15.3 which fixes a few problems on Windows and Mac versions.

MikeN: We have just released a new patch for StarCraft! Just connect to Battle.net and the patch should automatically download. If you wish to download the standalone patch, please go to our support site here.

Patch 1.15.3 - Bug Fixes

• Fixed a communication bug affecting third party leagues.

• Alt-F6 no longer stalls the game on Windows.
• Game now works correctly on versions of Mac OS X which do not support 256-color mode.

Starcraft 2 Beta doesn’t seem to be on the radar yet. As of WWI 2008 in Paris, a third of the single-player had been done. Crispy Gamer got a four=pages interview with Bob Colayco and Frank Pearce discussing several topics about Starcraft 2 including voice chat. Blizzard is looking closely at some Steam features.

Crispy Gamer: What about plans for an open beta for StarCraft II?

Pearce: A beta is very important from the perspective of getting feedback from the community and continuing that process of iteration. A beta is something that we’re very likely going to need to host. But we haven’t made any determination whether we’re going to have to host a closed beta or an open beta, or both yet.

The Starcraft 2 terran unit Nomad has now been renamed to Vulkan and its graphics revamped. The Protoss Archon’s graphics have also been updated. This reminds everyone nothing remains the same throughout development, and even through beta things may still change drastically. The same held true in the original Starcraft game where units were added and removed constantly prior to release.

Karune: Speaking of the Nomad, it has actually gotten it’s new art update, and a name update as well. It is now known as the Vulkan, and will be resigning down chaos at your expansions with its Auto Turrets.

On that same note, the Archon has also been updated visually with an amazing portrait animation that will surely command respect when ordering this guy around. Furthermore, say good bye to the ‘walking’ Archons as the ‘legs’ to the unit model have been removed. This unit now hovers around the battlefield decimating enemy forces like a true ominous being. Keep a look out for these two art updates in future screenshot releases This new Archon is also ‘leg-less’ and has updated art from any build or screenshot seen thus far is what I meant.

Source: Battle.net

Thanks, Handclaw

Chat with Devs: Something I noticed during our recent shows at Games Convention in Leipzig and PAX in Seattle is that many new players trying out the game who played Zerg built several creep tumors, thinking they were either defenses or going to morph into defenses. This eventually lead into a conversation with Dustin about why Creep Tumors no longer morph into base defenses. For those who dont know, a Creep Tumor is a building which expands creep around it significantly. Building this building is an excellent way to cover additional ground with creep, allowing for many new strategies, including aggressive Spine Crawler pushes (the mobile Sunken Colony).

Dustin brought up two scenarios to why Creep Tumors no longer morph into other Zerg defenses:

1) You would be able to creep across the map by moving your creep-spawning base defenses.

2) It would be easier to accidentally end up with buildings off of creep because the creep-generator moved away.

Thus, since the development team definitely wanted to give Zerg mobile defenses, they decided to split the roles of the Creep Tumor and the other Zerg defenses. This also allows for the team to make these Creep Tumors burrowed and very cheap in the latest build.

As always, feel free to give the Devs and I a w00t if your enjoying these Q&As!

—StarCraft II Q&A Batch 44—

1) Is it possible for replays to contain more in depth player statistics such as average clicks per minute, number of hotkeys used, etc.. ? (starcraft2.com.au)

Replays will have much more info available in them that will include more detailed stat tracking, as well as other useful eSports related features.

2) Terrans currently appear to be at a disadvantage in terms of troop mobility, (as compared to ‘Warp-in’ and ‘Nydus Worm’) are there any plans to bring back the, ‘drop-pod’ or other new transport mechanic? (sclegacy.com)

Actually, the Terrans have many units and mechanics that empower them with more mobility than the original StarCraft. The Reaper and Viking is a good example of new units that extend the Terrans raiding capabilities. Furthermore, Medivac Dropships offer more incentive to build lots of Dropships, which translate to more mobility for their entire army. Salvage is also another mechanic that helps in terms of rebuilding and moving a Terran base to new locations. Lastly, the Terrans are still the only side that can pick up and move their whole entire base, as well as being able to load SCVs in their Command Center now, allowing for quicker fast expanding strategies.

3) With the new high ground mechanic in place, an army can’t fight units that are on higher ground anymore until they get a spotter up the ledge. Both Zerg and Terran have the possibility to spot units on high ground with Overlords and floating buildings right from the start of the game, but the first Protoss unit to fly up there would be the Phase Prism. Could it be that Protoss players have a significant disadvantage on some maps because of this?(GameReplays.org)

In the latest builds of StarCraft II, the Protoss no longer need an Observatory to build Observers. Observers will be able to be built straight from the Robotics Facility, allowing earlier eyes on the battlefield.

We definitely saw that especially on certain maps, Terrans were able to block their choke point early, taking away much of the scouting portion of the game from Protoss, and are trying out this new solution for it. Additionally, we felt that Observers were too a crucial to the Protoss army to have them that far up the tech tree.

4) Will the Unit Portraits in SC2 be pre-rendered high quality video clips like in SC1 ? willygundersen (Battle.net)

The unit portraits will be shown in much higher quality than the actual units on the screen, similar to the original StarCraft and Warcraft III. They will not be video clips, but will be animations rendered in game. There will be several examples of their unit portraits in the next BlizzCast, where we have Dustin and Sammy discussing the process of creating a unit.

5) We all know how important it is that tier 1 units be effective at later tiers, which has prompted different unit abilities like the Zealots Charge. But it seems that the Protoss have a leg up in that they have Charge while the Zerglings have only their traditional speed boost without any AI enhancements. Is anything being planned for the Zergling? (starcraft2forum.org)

Due to the new game engine, Zerglings have much better pathing in StarCraft II, meaning they move much more efficiently. Zerglings are able to both surround enemy units easier and are more easily selectable as well, being able to control more than 12 at a time. Furthermore, Zerglings are also slightly smaller than their original StarCraft counterparts, and able to be morphed into Banelings, which are extremely effective against Zealots. Lastly, Zealots have also had their shield hit points reduced by 10, as compared to the original StarCraft Zealots.

—End of Transmission—