DOW2 is a much better game IMO.

Did not play it, but i believe you. I liked DoW1 much more than SC so far. I know that DoW2 is kind of different, with less base building.

@Timmaigh:

Also the game has a nice challenge system that teaches you some basics about the game. Try to finish all challenges (and try to finish them as best as possible).

The campaign is the best of any RTS game ever. Well the story is second best to Starcraft 1, but the missions are just a blast with each one being very different from others (unlike most RTS games where you only got 2-3 different type of missions). I highly recommend you to play it. Is it also not linear and lets you choose the order of doing missions (something I really liked in Dawn of War expansions).

I also wanted to say why other games do not need more production facilities. I played all major RTS games except CoH, and in all of those you get less resources per minute in proportion to the cost of units and the amount of time those units need to build. Starcraft 2 asks you to build more and more often to spend all your money and you can only do that by getting more production buildings (actually I remember Red Alert asking for this as well if you expanded properly and so did C&C Generals up to a point).

It is just a different game. The only question is if you are willing to learn how to play it or not.

Well this is a subjective opinion. It comes down to what you prefer more. Having few supertroops fighting each other for longer periods of time, or having a balanced macro/micro game with fast dying troops that ask you to get the most out of them in their lifetime.

As was mentioned in other posts in the thread, this is all about streamlining your play. One of the biggest things to learn in SC2 that makes you good is "when" is a good time to do stuff. When is it a good time to add production facilities? When is it a good time to switch to Collosus? When is it a good time to expand? These come with practice and playing a lot.

There will come a point in the game where you will always need to have a pylon or 2 building, because you produce so fast that you always need more supply with every warp-in cycle.

My advice is to visit a replay site, and download a bunch of replays of high-tier Protoss play (as it sounds like that's your race of choice). Find a build that you like, and then find a bunch of other replays that show off that build. And then just practice it against the AI for a while. A couple Day[9] Daily episodes were recommended, you can watch those onhttp://day9tv.blip.tv - I fully encourage you to do that. When you watch the replays, note down broad but important milestones ("At ~7 minutes, he has 3 gateways and is expanding", or whatever), then try to practice it. A lot of builds you'll find online go by worker count (9 Pylon, 13 gateway, etc) - forget about those, start more general. Focus on the big goals, and then play around with making it faster. Maybe you can swap some building production to get that Colossus out faster. Maybe you need a little earlier gas, etc. 

I played roughly 2000 games of DoW2 online during the first year of it's release and I can safely say its a buggy, imbalanced, infuriating game.

Sc2 IMO is a much better example of an online RTS. DoW2 is a lot of fun 2v2 though, and 3v3, the imbalance is mitigated somewhat and it was initially designed as a team game. Sc2 not so good at team games, but awesome 1v1.

But Timmaigh, read my other post dude.

Well SC2 2v2 and 3v3 and 4v4 is not balanced for competitive play but it is really fun for casual play, much more then 1v1.

Uh, which one, sorry i am at work, so i might skip something, i will read all the posts properly, when i get back home. Anyway thank you all for the advices. It seems this is really a game, which needs to be played lot to be at least decent, and i am not sure yet, if i like it enough to play it so much or download and watch those replays. This will come naturally, if ill play the game in a month or 2, then i probably overcame those issues i have with it.

@Annatar: yes Protoss are my race of choice, but i might try Terrans as well. The only race i do not like are Zergs (but funnily, maybe if i tried them, they will suit me best). Seriously though, when you speak about those 3 gateways in 7 minutes and number of probes etc...simply those build orders, did it not become too mechanic and mindless? This is perhaps my biggest gripe, it seems that to play the game properly, you need to turn in some kind of robot, who practised so much, that first 5 minutes of the game he does not even need to think, everything just needs to be memorised and executed. I know there is the need to scout, what is the enemy doing, but so what? You just switch to another memorised build to counter him....

How come that you guys love the game (multiplayer, not single) so much? I suppose the build orders are part of every RTS, even Sins might have it, but StarCraft seem to exaggerate this part too much.

One last thing i think about, the ChronoBoost of the Protoss, what is the purpose of it? I know what it does, but imho its just

another artificial BS. All those things could be built/researched at speed of chronoboos, but no. You have to constantly check if its already charged and ad nauseum cast in various buildings, its repetitive and pointless and its there just to make the difference between good and bad players bigger. Is it really fun for you? Do you really think this is the way which should the future RTSes take?

Ok, i am off.

It depends on what you want out of it. Starcraft 2 is the best competitive RTS around. It's built for 1v1 competitive ranked play, and it excels at that.

If you're not interested in highly competitive esport style play, then the game isn't going to appeal to you very much.

Stuff like build orders are simply a result of a competitive game. It's the same thing as cookie cutter builds in MMOs, particularly for the harder and more competitive content. People will find the optimum way of doing things when pushed to beat other people. Sometimes they'll then post that for other players to learn from, and that optimum method becomes your build order.

It's part memorizing and executing, for sure. In the beginning, you need something "constant" to practice on. The reason these builds exist is because they have been proven to work. By doing them, you learn the intricacies of the game, you get better at never getting supply capped, better at spending money, and better at strategic thinking.

When you get higher up in the ladder, things change a bit. You can rarely rely on a predetermined build to "work". You might go into a game thinking you feel like doing a 3-gate expand, and then your opponent throws a wrench in it and you have to figure out how to deal with it. At the later stages the "builds" become guidelines more than anything else, and you can rarely rely on one to actually work past a few minutes.

And when you get higher up you'll be able to add your own flavor to it. Maybe a different unit mix that works better for you, a faster unit A here and there, maybe you figure out that putting some cheap Zealot/Stalker pressure early on gives you some time to get Void Rays out safely and those help a lot later.. 

But at the moment, having a "build" allows you to learn the mechanics of the game and teach you macro (always building probes, never getting supply capped, etc) without too many things changing at once. All of these builds come from higher-end players who think up something new and it gets broadcast in a tournament or after they beat someone in a ladder match and post replays. 

It becomes a lot less about memorization of a static build, and a lot to do with improvisation - but in order to be good at improvising, your basics have to be second nature.

Well, SC2 is a competitive game. Every race has a macro ability that requires good usage (admittedly, Terran's is the easiest). Chronoboost is both a measure of balance and a means to develop your own strategy/build. In some cases, you need a really fast Sentry to forcefield your ramp. In other cases, you need a really fast Warpgate research so you chronoboost that. In yet other cases, you just want to get more probes faster. You can't just have everything going at the chronoboosted speed because it would be imbalanced - the other races wouldn't have time to build up as much as you.

The great thing about the links in my other post Tim is that they aren't just replays, they're VOD's, which is basically a guy commentating the game as it's played.

Day9 also does special VOD's which are solely aimed at turning people into better gamers!  They're often pretty analytical and in depth, but in a good way. If you just want to watch games for fun and to see how teh pro's play though, check out HDStarcraft on YouTube or go to TeamLiquid.net.

In response to your last post though, the first 5 minutes of any game (even Sins) are fairly scripted. Same with SC2 only with SC2 there are usually a few diff openings with each race. What's important is how you use these openings to your advantage and transition out of them into pressure/tech play.

It's a lot to take in right off the bat, specially if you've NEVER touched an RTS with this kind of pace. All I can say is Sin's has its place in my gaming heart, I play it when I wanna chill and just play a slower kind of game, but for multiplayer 1v1 RTS, Sc2 is the go to game.

Also read that other post when you get in! Lol :PP

 I however do not ask for everything chronoboosted by default, cause i feel Protoss are underpowered, this is not the case, i did not play the game that much to judge the balance. Obviously making chronoboost default speed of everything would require decrease the building/research times as well for other 2 races... or find another way to balance it.

All of you speak a lot about competitiveness, this intrigues me, as i want really now to speak about SC from the outer perspective. After all, this is the game getting 9/10 from all the sides of th worlds, millions of people love it and play it, its critically acclaimed, i think its given its succes will influence many game developers, who will eventually try to copy it (does not matter if they succed), and i wonder do we really want this? EA might come with new CnC and i really would not be surprised if they tried to copy SC with all its flaws.

So, the competitive nature of SC, i always thought that the old one was so competitive, cause Blizzard put lot of work into the balancing, i do not think there was ever RTS getting balance patches after almost 10 years from the release. However now i read a fair bit about it and SC2 (on Team Liquid for example) and it seems, that its so competitive cause of the things like aforementioned chronoboost and generally lot of otherwise unnecessary macro and micro, which basically increases the demands on player´s ability to multitask (his APM count) and this way separate good and bad players. Now i wonder why is adding more repetitive activities to make the game more "competitive" universally accepted as a given and good thing? Please explain this. IMHO its artificial and completely unnatural and does not make the game better one bit. I can however give you a good example for a gameplay aspect, which adds competitive level to the game, but its natural at the same time. Third dimension in Homeworld. There is a lot of people who have problem with a 3D orientation, so it definitely separates players, at the same time, nobody can argue, its an artificial thing, which should not be there. The world around us is 3D, right?

I am aware this is not a solution for SC, but i am sure there can be found something else. what will tick all the boxes. 

I am on it!  

Well, I can see your point. But it's not entirely APM. Once you get *really* high up to be one of the top players in tournaments, APM becomes almost as important as decision making. Until you get there, though, it's more macro and strategy.. multitasking isn't really directly related to APM in SC2. It was in SC, because you couldn't group very many units together, you couldn't group buildings.. in SC2, you can throw all your production facilities into a hotkey and quickly train from all of them without having to move your camera from battle. The important thing for you while you're ranking up is not to worry about APM. It's remembering to do everything you need to do. Always have probes building. Always make sure you're not going to get supply blocked. And this isn't APM intensive, since you can hotkey everything. It's just training your brain to remember to do it. It gets more involved when you go to 3+ bases, but a lot of games don't get that far. The best advice anyone can give you is not to worry about doing fancy tricks with your army. The most important thing is learning how to have a bigger army than the other guy, because he can be as fancy as he likes but if he spends all his time controlling the battle and not doing anything else, you pretty much have an advantage. As time goes on, APM will come to you much more naturally. All of these functions of keeping production going, keeping probes going, building pylons will become automatic and you'll find yourself having time to control the battle while doing all of that stuff without realizing it.

As far as having "artificial" stuff.. there's actually less of it in SC2 than in SC, by a considerable amount (so much so that many die-hard SC players complained that Blizzard trivialized micromanagement in SC2), and again, it really only matters a lot when you get to the highest tiers of gameplay and your macro is already as good as it can get. Then it's all about fast reflexes and making accurate and fast decisions on the fly during a battle. But there's a long way to go until then, and you shouldn't even worry about it.

There are some professional gamers who compete and win in tournaments and who are also known for having very low APM compared to other pros.

Played the old SC since practically forever. Tim, I understand your frustration. SC 2 like SC is tuned for esports competition. Thus it requires much study and even more practice. It is in the very hard category. Maybe harder than that. SC 2 is the Tour de France racer of online RTS competition. No comfort bike for casual rides.

Bottom line is this. Do your first impressions convince you that this is the way you want to spend  your time? Because you are about to spend a very large amount of your time to get good at this game. If not, cut your losses. Dabble with SC 2 now and again, but find a game that you truly like; a game that fits your personality.

There is no great virtue in becoming a supremely good SC 2 player. The world has plenty of those already.

Besides which, Diablo III by the end of this year possibly! Guild Wars 2 probably a year from now. Completely different genre, but for immersion including a lot of just plain old fun both are going to be hard to beat.

So i finally read it LOL, thanks again for the suggestions and the links, i put bookmarked them and look at them tomorrow after work or on th weekend.

Anyway i would like to react to few things:

first of all, that i cant scroll to the place of the battle, oviously it would be more efficient just to click on the minimap or use hotkey for the group...however this still does not make up for the fact, my army died in literally 5 seconds, no exaggeration here... i accept the game is fast paced, but isnt this over the top? Somebody called this twitchy and really that is, what it is. I am used to play Call of Duty, so my reflexes are ok. However somehow i fail to see a logic behind the need to have reflexes like in CoD in a STRATEGY game. I really have to look at those VODs, how they managed to comment these lightning fast battles.

Othe thing, the MACRO, i suppose you lot mean with macro the process of building the base, expanding, building new workers, setting rallypoints , producing units, researching etc... everything related to the economic side of the game, not unit control, right? Well i played Supreme Commander, which was a game i would say all about macro, it played completely different to classic RTSes like CnC or others, it was all about getting your eco going, setting the rallypoints and get your army to the front. Basically who managed to do this better, would ultimately outproduce the opponent and steamroll him. 

Anyway, it made sense in that game cause of its scope and scale. If i understand it now, SC2 is trying to do something similar, the key difference for me, is the number of units you can have. The proper eco in SupCom would result in you having massive army, you could see the "fruit" of your good macromanagement in the steady flow of units to the front. The units at the front had actually some kind of autonomy, so you could concentrate on the macro, not to mention, the sheer numbers made inidvidual units unimportant, With SC2 this is completely different, although you have to build massive bases, you wont ever have a massive army and therefore individual units do mean somthing. Unfortunately they are totally dependent on your actions, as they act as a bunch of f*ucktards, ignore enemy fire cause you issued move command...etc.

When you're starting out, it's actually recommended to NOT focus on the battle. The important skill to develop is the macro (which you defined correctly), which generally means you can have more units than the other guy, and his fancy unit control won't mean anything. There's of course also knowing when is a good time to attack and when isn't

Reaction time is important in battle since, yes, units do die quickly and you have less of them than in SupCom. There is a way to help a bit with that, though.

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Hotkeys

Scroll down to the bottom, the Camera section. Basically, SC2 allows you to keybind a position on the map to an F5-F8 key, so you can switch to it with the press of a button. If you know where you're attacking or where the fighting is, you can bind the view and then go do other stuff. Also, hitting Space instantly takes you to the last notification, which should be when your units get shot in most cases

Also, try to avoid straight move commands. Always do attack-move (A+Click default, or T+click if you have grid binds enabled).

Thanks for the words of wisdom 

Its bit different though, the game does not frustrate me, cause i aspire to be good at it and i fail. Frankly i did not buy it to play it online, i plan to play with my buddy only against AIs or maybe against him at some point.

My frustration is out of disappointment how the game does not fit my expectations from the modern RTS, indeed i knew about few obvious things when i bought it (like lack of zoom). Still i find it archaic (because of lack of zoom and small scale, low unit count - didnt know about this one though), flawed (need to have many production buildings but cant have many units, units build for ages but die very quickly, etc..) and generally it puts emphasis on all the wrong things for the strategy game, like ability to play twitchy and multitask all those boring and repetitive things)...

I havent played old SC in ages, and perhaps there are less of these annoying things, its more user-friendly. I read a topic on TL called "SC2 too easy", where the community was thorn, whether making the game better controllable is a good thing as it lowers the "ceiling." I suppose they never played other RTS, cause SC2 is still very lacking as far the interface possibilties go (compared to SupCom). 

I am not angry at my buddy for making me buying this game, but really i wont probably follow his advice next time His affinition to Demigod (which i did not like much as well) should have warned me, LOL. 

lol Timmaigh. You're being SOOOOOOOO critical of a game you haven't even learned how to play yet. Unit control is very important as is the unit compostition within your army, the positioning of the army and using the special abilities of your units. Its not all about base building and macro, its about both at the same time. I'm not sure why you keep talking about how limited and small the army sizes are in SCII. Have you ever gotten to max supply yet? Have you made a 200/200 army? Battles are not as lightning fast as you think, you're just new to the game and need to learn the basics. IT sounds like you're sending out very small armies to die every time, why not train a bigger army get some upgrades and try attacking a little later? Play through the first handful of single player missions AT LEAST and play the single player challenges like another poster mentioned above. Stop trying to break down and analyze everything you like and don't like about the game without giving it a chance first.

There is WORLDS more strategy in this game than DOW and it requires MORE reflexes and brainpower than Call Of Duty ever will. This is a REAL TIME STRATEGY game. Things need to be done QUICKLY. Why wouldn't you get units as fast as possible? Whats the point in playing slowly and letting your opponent get ahead? Don't get so intimidated, its not hard to learn enough basics to hold your own in bronze league or against the AI. Just stop critiquing so much and spend some time playing before you decide if its right for you or not. Writing pages of hyper critical reactions to your limited experience with the game is only going to discourage you. There are many posts on this thread trying to help you learn and you're responding by continuing to be critical. Add me on battle.net and watch those Day9 Dailys I listed.

Oh, thanks, did not know about that, i would need to write all these things on paper 

And since I mentioned it in the other post, if you go into the keybind options and switch to Grid mode, I think you'll have an easier time with hotkeys - especially as a Sins player. It does the same thing that Sins does, and you use keys assigned to the grid positions of the command bar. There's also a setting to show the hotkey on the commands, if you don't have it enabled already

You keep saying things like this in reference to the "small" supply cap and how you end up with more structures than you can have units. This is puzzling to me. You do realize that if you keep building more pylons your supply cap increases right? NEVER STOP BUILDING PYLONS UNTIL YOU ARE AT 200 SUPPLY! One at a time in the early game and once you have a lot of unit producing structures start building two at a time. PYLONS AND PROBES PYLONS AND PROBES PYLONS AND PROBES! Never stop building them.

Hehe, actually analysing the game from the design standpoint is more funny for me than play the game. And yes i am really critical person, i do not know when i became like this though LOL, probably at the university. They forced us to have opinion, you could not just say "i do not know", i always though that is pretty stupid, but somehow i changed that way. I do not bitch about things i know shit about (for example i would not say a bit about how SC2 is coded, as i know nothing about coding)....but when it comes to things related to my profession or things i am interested in, i can be really bad. With games, after all those years i can exactly say what i like and what i do not and i have quite a detailed idea, what i expect from the game. If its somewhat different, i will bitch to no end

Regarding unit count, no i did not have full 200 cap, but i had slightly above 100. Still had about 20 individual units, which means i could have 40-50 on max cap. Is this good enough to you?  Not for me, it does not need to be like SupCom, but for me army means certain level of uniformity and numbers, if i have army of 5 different units, i do not feel like commanding army, but like playing an RPG with a group of heroes. The rest you wrote is probably right.

The other thing, i do not like fast battles, But otherwise i do not like slow games, i would pretty much love to have Zealot built in 5 seconds, not a half minute or minute or what it takes.... its this obvious disproportion between how long units take to build and how fast they die, what i despise. 

I guess I should explain myself a bit more. 

Starcraft 2, is just a bit archaic to me, it's a good game surely but I feel blizzard are just resting on their laurels but they gave the community what it wanted SC with shiner graphics. Typical resource collection base building build order blah blah, over it.

Dow2 doesn't have a great single player experience, it's better now with the new expansion but single player is not why I love this game.

DOW2 has very polarized opinions, this I understand, it's a vast departure from traditional rts gameplay to the extent it's also nothing like dow1 and it's more of a real time tactical game. But I was never really big into the traditional style so much so it's a big breath of fresh air for me. The strategy comes from actual battle tactics and equipment counters and the cover system and the upgrades are on the units themselves and it's very deep.

I enjoy firing up a multiplayer match of dow2 and being in the action within a few seconds, instead of boring resources gathering you can this by capturing map position with your forces.

If you played dow2 at it's release and were disappointed, I would urge you to give it another go. (with latest stand alone expansion)

Ok guys, just played 2 games again with my buddy, took your advices and played the macro game the way it probably has to be played and we finally won! I even built mothership, the cloaking effect is really cool.

Anyway though my points regarding the game stand, i admit now, as i got bit deeper and managed my eco going, it was really nice watching the zealots coming out of the gateways one after one, finally i got THAT feeling i expect from RTS and it was not initially there. 

BTW i checked the replay and my average APM was 25  , really long way to go hehe. My friend had almost 50, i wonder if its cause he plays the game for a longer time period, or he is simply faster in any other RTS. Ts ts ts