well i just got done with an epic game- me vs one of my best friends.
he and i got good at the game by playing off each other, allied or 1v1, constantly learning from each other. then for one reason or another, we stopped playing eachother for a while. he proceeded to perfect the fastest early rushes on battlenet, and never-ending streams of them, and i learned very fast defense & late game waves.
finaly, in an epic showdown of adversaries, we versed each other yet again.

we kept taking turns with the upper hand, and were constantly fighting on two or three fronts. was very evenly matched, inspite of the fact that we had parted ways in it for so long. we both changed our tactics a few times throughout the game, took numerous risks and gambles, and threw several surprise attacks. it finally ended with an all-or-nothing attack on both our parts. not just brute force, but a well planned all-out that attacked different angles and with different combinations.

yeah, im proud to say that i won in the end, but he took out a third of my base and two thirds of my forces in doing so. we were even forced to do a few uncharacteristic things just to keep each other off guard. ironically the thing that won the game was the same tactic i usually use, but had avoided for the entire time up to that point because he was familiar with it. falling back on it was what finally caught his weak point in what otherwise may have been a stalemate.

as we agreed at the start, we allied at the end so as not to have any points counted against whomever lost.
the game on the whole was one hell of a fight . was the kind of game i wouldnt have minded losing so much, knowing i had put up that kind of fight.

so, as i signed on to the board today, these thoughts were still lingering in my mind, i found the 'off topic' forum. seemed like a good place to post the question, does anyone here play SC?
post your Bnet screennames and prefered gaming times here. always on the lookout for new opponants that i can play regularly. adds a whole new level of strategy when you know your opponant.

i used to play it a long time ago. i hadnt played it for like 2 years and just a few weekd ago i played it with a friend of mine and struggled like crazy. thats my story.

Starcraft's one of my fave computer games ever! It's still as popular as ever, even though the expansion set came out in 1998. I don't play it much anymore though. I think I'm still as horrible as ever! Tactics and stuff just aren't for me. I build fast, and then I attack with everything up front. Doesn't always work, but sometimes I'd overwhelm the guy with mah puny zerglings , especially if he went for an early expansion before building adaquete defences. Dropping off troops near enemy miners is something I do a lot too. A lot of my games end in 5 or 10 minutes, usually neither side climbs up the tech tree very far. 6 or 12 zerglings are great for rushing I own on 1 v 1 small maps. Anything bigger where I can't rush the opponent, bleh. I'm pretty sucky in late games, at using a combination of units and micromanagement of their special abilities and crap.

so am i. i usualy go all out mass scouts after a level 2 upgrade & nothng else. and micromanagement usualy ends as soon as i start one buildgin forces. a lot of that game was luck. i had no choice but to attempt some unorthodox things that i had never used before outside of comp games, because he already knew how i usualy played. the combinations were just a side affect of constantly having to change tactics because he was adapting too quickly for any one to work. there were leftovers from a previous wave working with the new one.
the fun part was having both of us working on more than one front most of the time. doesnt happen very often in that game.

as far as special abilities, they are extremely underrated. 3 or 4 good psi storms can take out an entire wave of carriers with ease. get a dozen or so templars together and you can wipe out pretty much everything. only problem is getting them within range. but they make exilent backup defence & can even take out undetected cloaked units.
the best part of using any spell though, is that because theyre underrated, no one sees them comming. usualy theyre a major inconveniance to your enemy. enough to slow them down or distract them.
for example, a medics optic flair can render a siege tank useless. they cant attack what they cant see, long ranged or not.
arbiter recall can transport more units than 8 shuttles, and actualy defend itself. and of course, it cloaks the units it warps in. if a wave is about to take it out before it has a chance to warp them in, a stasis field can delay them long enough to move in the reinforcements.
a queens paracite can be a more affective than an observer or com stat scan.

moral of the story, dont overlook the special abilities.

I like it but I'm terrible at it, I can never beat anyone

True dat, but they're not very easy to use right. If I get to late game, using hallucinations to make 10, 12 arbiters and having 2 real ones, and recalling masses of troops in middle of enemy bases is something I do a lot of. It's pretty effective, you can recall a lot more than you can drop off in a much shorter amount of time. I'm not too bad at using special abilities actually, but I'm horrible at moving units around the battlefield into good position while fighting at the same time. Sometimes a battle could be won just by having certain units in certain places - usually the most effective positions are melee units in front, range in the back, melee just attack at will, range units concentrate on one enemy at a time. But once the battle starts, all that flies out of the window

if there's anyone currently active in SC, post some usernames here.
mine is D)C-Custodian. a custodian being a guardian of sorts, which is how i play. it also means ill be claening up the mess .

Starcraft..... ooooh, the memories! This is my favorite computer game of all time, and probably will remain as such until they release SC2 (if they do).
Thinking back, I can remember awesome afternoons, warring with and against my friends, trading with my brother for control... All those little units and bases. Man, it was just awesome.
Muenks - excuse me if you said it and I missed it - what was your prefered race?
I took pride in playing Zerg, because they never got too much respect. Though I never got good enough to back my claims, I still saw them as the best.

...Man... I think I should play that again.... I'd better go clear some hard-drive!
If I manage to get back in, I'll see you on bnet!

nice thing about the game is it's so well balanced. my favorite race is Protoss, because theyre late game players. i never really got that hang of early attacks. i also like the fact that their defencive structures can attack both air and ground. one less thing to worry about, because i mircomanage as it is. the forst 2 minutes are spent repidfire clicking, and i have some things timed for max efficiancy down to the second. my game overall is only a little above average, but im working on that.
you want to get good, you watch the replays of eveyone who beats you and figure out why it happened. i jumped from newb to intermediate within a month by doing that.

I still think luck is a big factor - especially in games with more than 2 players. FFA games, stay defensive and let everyone else duke it out, but if you have bad luck and people attack you first, you're screwed no matter how good you are.

An important thing when playing 1 v 1 games is to build up sufficient defences to prevent a fast rush, but not sacrifice too much resources and time in the process. If you climb the tech tree too fast and the enemy rushes you, you're dead. If you bulid up a large army with basic units early on in the game, but the rush never comes because the enemy climbed up the tech tree much faster than you, you're probably gonna lose unless you build fast, and hopefully the other person sucks. So basically, you have to guess at what the opponent's doing early in the game - if you're lucky, (that is you build the right things by chance early on), you can probably win the game.

Scouting works, but you gotta be lucky with that too! On big maps, dont' even bother. On small maps, again, gotta be lucky to find the opponent fast. The game's half luck half skill