Steam was around as well as services like Direct2Drive but my Mom didn't have a bank account, so I just accepted that I'd be missing out on these multiplayer experiences as a teenager. I never did get to play the expansion, although I'm well aware it's considered the definitive experience.Ĭounter-Strike is similarly something else I had to miss out on, I just didn't have a way to purchase games digitally. I was itching to play online with a friend of mine.Įventually I got that key and enjoyed many, many hours of online play with a good friend.
It had a player-run economy, so I offered millions of the in-game currency for someone's Starcraft CD key, as all I had was a burnt CD. I used to play an MMO called The Realm Online from ~2003-2007. Of course when TA first came out the battle wasn't yet between TA and Starcraft, but between TA and Dark Reign. I think it pretty much shaped the attitude I have today where in game design, I think everything that has one "correct" answer should be automated away, and everything else made as simple as possible.
You could press Ctrl-A to select all units, Ctrl-W to select all fighting units, and other ones for airplanes, ships etc. You could tell construction units to assist buildings and they'd help build new units. You could tell construction units to patrol and they'd automatically repair damaged units and collect resources on the way. You could tell buildings to "move" somewhere and all units coming out of those buildings would go there when built. I used to set my Commander up to do about 15 minutes of building at the start of the game. You could queue an infinite amount of orders for each of your units - not just pathing waypoints but everything. You could queue multiple units to build, adding in multiples of 1 or 5 (Supreme Commander later made this into an even more powerful system).
Coming from clunky predecessors like Red Alert, the removal of micromanagement in TA was a revelation. Totally agree that the different balanced factions made Starcraft superior BUT, the beautifully designed interface made TA superior in another way. zerglings or hydralisks) supplemented by few bigger units (ultralisks) and you have to manage them all (usually without keybinds), keep producing units, cast spells (using defilers) and do that all at around 400 apm (action per minutes) facing against another dude who is doing the same. Zerg are the quantity race in the game, you'll often have a ton of cheap units (e.g. He'll usually have hatcheries (buildings that build almost every zerg unit in the game) bind to 0-9 keys and then he'll manage and micro huge swarms of zerg units. When you understand this watching somebody like Jaedong play zerg you'll understand how insane it is. That still leaves you with easily around 100 population or more of units that you have to micromanage. Population cap in game is 200 and depending on game quite a lot of that cap will go to workers which you don't have to manage. 36 units bind to keys 1-3 and 7 buildings bind to keys 4-0. In SC:BW you can only select and hotkey one building and unit groups are limited to 12 units. In SC2 you have multi building selection and you can select and group as many unit as you want under one hotkey.
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