Please Note: This guide is intending for those starting to play Starcraft, or those who wish to fine tune their skills. I am in no way a super Starcraft Pro, and this guide will by no means instantly make you better at starcraft, but it may help along the way. If you want the official Blizzard Guide check out www.battle.net/scc.
Starcraft Stratagy
Below, I have basic and advanced strategies for all 3 races in Starcraft. First, I will State the overall way you should play the race, then I will give some Pros and Cons for that race, then single unit strategies, and then maybe a few extras.
Terran
A race all about versatility, the Terrans are definetly not to be overlooked.
Pros
- Buildings Lift Off, this is explained in more depth further down
- SCV’s can rapidly repair buildings and mechanical Units
- Can be very strong both defensively and offensively
- Great at spying on the enemy’s base
Cons
- Buildings will slowly burn to their destruction if left in critical condition.
- Not necessarily slow, but not fast either.
- Can be very susceptible to cloaked units
- SCV’s have to stay at the construction site while a structure is being built.
- Many of the better units require that your buildings be attached with addons, which are time consuming to build, use up room in your base, and are very easy to be destroyed.
- Most of the Terran Units do Concossive damage. That means you do full damage to small units, 50% to medium, and only 25% to large. Keep this is mind.
Single Unit Strategy
- If you are attacking with an army of mostly infantry units, consider putting in 3-4 (or more depending on how big of an army) medics. With medic support, marines and firebats can use their stimpacks without regret, and if you use careful hit and run tactics, can make your group extremely difficult to kill. The medic also has to other abilities, Restore and Optical Flare. Neither of these are usually worth upgrading, because you’ll never find yourself saying “I wish this ONE unit didn’t have such-and-such on it,” and finding lone units to use optical flare on is very rare.
- Goliaths make excellent anti-air units, and can still attack ground units decently! With the Charon Booster upgrade, Goliaths can replace Missile Turrets. They also make great support for your BattleCruisers, which, while are devastating to ground, can be less powerful versus air.
- Siege-Tanks, probably Terrans most fun ground unit! When you originally create them, they are decent ground units, but you’d say yo yourself, “’d probably rather just have goliaths, tanks can’t even ATTACK air!” However true this may be, with the Siege-Mode upgrade, siege-tanks are probably the best defensive units in the game. They inflict a whopping 70 damage without any upgrades! And that’s SPLASH damage too! Not to mention they have the longest range in the whole game. Their attack range is actually farther than their sight radius, meaning it may be a good idea to bring some marines or goliaths along to increase the sight radius of the tanks. Tanks are offensively powerful too. With the help of a marine, the can easily take out annoying defensive buildings like the Protoss Photon Cannon from a safe distance.
- Ghosts are usually one of the less created terran units. They aren’t very powerful, they cost quite a bit, and the require you finishing the terrans tech tree all the way to the end. Don’t go thinking that they have no purpose though. Theres two things that make a ghost useful, and they almost go hand in hand. One is the cloaking aspect. “But why can’t we just use a cloaked wraith, they’re easier to get anyway, and they can fly!” You see, that’s what your opponent would be expecting. A cloaked wraith does make a decent spyer, but a ghost is more or less better. Wraiths will quickly die from any kind of missile turret defense. The ghost, on the other hand, cannot be attacked my missile turrets. The second aspect of Ghost, the more fun one, is the ability to NUKE! The ghost “paints” a target for the nuclear missile to land, and KABOOM. Don’t kid yourself, nukes take about 3 minutes to make, which is a long time, and require 8 supply. The approximate damage of a nuke is 2000 damage directly, and as the splash radius travels out, the damage decreases.
- Science Vessels are terrans only other detector other than their turrets. That means you should have at least 1 to accompany your army in battle. They automatically come with defensive matrix, an powerful defensive ability that makes the unit inside the matrix nearly invincible. They also come with two other abilities, Irradiate and EMP. While Irradiate is not of much use, EMP can be crucial against the Protoss. When you use EMP, the Science Vessel releases a small electro-magnetic bomb, diminishing the protoss shield all the way down to zero. This work on buildsing as well, a great way of taking out closely built photon cannons! EMP also removes all energy a unit had, so try and target those annoying high templars, defilers, or arbiters.
Other Tricks
- One thing you might try is the Mobile Base Trick. When your opponent thinks he knows the location of your base, liftoff all of your buildings and travel to a new place! Replace any missile turrets with upgraded goliaths.
- Something to try on an opponent who won’t explore his whole base: liftoff a Barracks, land it near his base, and start pumping at marines like there’s no tomorrow! Go for his worker units and mess up his whole entire economy!
A replacement for the above strategy, instead, create 4 drop ships, 8 Siege Tanks with Siege Mode, fly them over to your enemies base, and land them right next to there Command Center/Nexus/Hive. Siege the tanks and watch as your opponent quickly loses all his precious workers and buildings!
Protoss
When you place as Protoss, It’s time to get your tech on! Protoss has the most expensive units in the game, but it doesn’t matter, because all there units are that much more powerful!
Pros
- Probes warp in Rifts, which means they don’t need to sit and wait for the building to be done. This means you only need 1 probe to build while the others mine ore get gas.
- Features the strongest units in the game
- Cannons make the Protoss very strong defensively, and sometimes even offensively.
- Shields, part of the life force of all protoss things, regenerate over time. This process can be made faster with a shield battery as well.
Cons
- Units can be very expensive, meaning usually smaller armies
- Totally defenseless to the Terrans EMP
- Buildings require pylons to stay active. If a nearby pylon giving energy to a building is destroyed, it becomes disabled.
- Most protoss attacks are explosive based, which means only 75% damage to medium sized units, and only a mere 25% damage to small.
Single Unit Strategies
- High Templars are very versatile spell casters. They have one of the best offensive abilities in the game, psionic storm. Hallucination is a great ability for either intimidating your enemy into thinking he lost, or simply use the fakes as decoys while your real units go in for the kill. Not only are high templars efficient spell casters, with 2, you can morph them into powerful archons, which inflict a whopping 30 damage.
- Dark Templars, not to be confused with High Templars, are a very different unit (and personally, one of my favorites). They are permanently cloaked, which makes them excellent spiers. They also do some of the highest damage in the game, 40! They lack in the life department though, and can be easily killed if detected. That’s why its sometimes best not to mass them, and use them only at choke points, or to finish off you opponent after a carrier strike.
- Reavers, the protoss artillery unit, defines the word slow. For this reason, you need shuttles to accompany them. There ammo costs 10 minerals a pop, but withs worth it for 100 DAMAGE (yea, that’s splash damage, buddy). Reavers will completely destroy defensive units and buildings, makin them a great front line to your army.
- Arbiters are just plain cool. They passively cloak all units around them (but not other arbiters), and have two powerful abilities. Stasis field freezes a group of units in time and space for a duration of time. This is very useful for freezing half your opponents army, and saving the other half for later. You might even use it on your own units to make them invincible for a short period of time. They also have recall, which is basically a way to instantly teleport your army from one side of the map to another.
- On a shorter note, I thought I might like to tell you how to manage your Carriers. If you just let them sit there, attacking everything, nothing will seem to get done. Instead, right-click on the big threats, so all the interceptors go for that particular unit.
Other Strategies
- Like the Tank drop, you can also do a Reaver drop! Just replace the word tank with reaver and the word dropship with shuttle!
- A sometimes reckless attack, the cannon rush may or may not be to your liking. “Where’s the best place you put your defense?” In your enemies base! Find the entrance you your enemies base and start cranking out the cannons. They wont be able to leave!
- Hallucinate! One time I made a group of 12 high templars and 3 Carriers. I hallucinated the carriers 2 times with each templar, making it seem I had an army of 27 Carriers! Please note that this was very early on in the game, where it would have been impossible to have 27 real Carriers. When I sent them over to my opponents base, He immediately forfeited, demanding I told him how I built up so fast. I simply said “I didn’t,” and I left.
Zerg
Unfortunatly, the zerg are a race that I never quite got the hang of. I am going to keep this guide shorter than the others, becasue of my lack of knowladge on the subject. If you would like to submit a more thorough guide, feel free to contact me. My contact info can be found on the homepage of my site. I WILL give the author full credit for the guide. Ok, so here's my 2 cents on the zerg.
The zerg is a race to be played with intense speed. Build times for the zerg are considerably shorter, but units have a tendency to be weaker.
Pros
- Fast, quick, and deadly
- Can create units in groups of three's instead of one at a time (effectivly 3x as fast)
- Biological, so all units, even buildings heal over time with no help from other units.
- Most ground units have the ability to burrow, a great way to hide your army of hydralisks or jump out and go for a suprise attack.
Cons
- Majority of units tend to be weaker
- In order to make more units, you need more hatcheries, which can be costly.
- Non-hatchery buildings must be built on a creep, an area of purple goo that can only be made with the expansion of your base.
- The sunken colony only attacks ground, and doesnt detect. The spore colony only attacks air, but does detect. You may need both to create an effective defense.
This is as far as I'm going to go with the Zerg. Please, Please, PLEASE E-mail me with your own submissions!
