StarCraft 2 Race Differences

[edepot]

StarCraft 2 is one of those games where balance is key to its popularity. The first version, StarCraft: Broodwar was kind of imbalanced. In particular, the Protoss race was weaker and difficult to win with, even though it had the more powerful weapons. This was due mostly to the high expense needed (minerals and vespene gas) for units, buildings, and upgrades. Once the Protoss race has enough units to do damage, the game was already over because the Zerg and Terrans would have too many units for you to counter. StarCraft 2 seems to have fixed some of these issues with the Void Ray. This weapon increases the damage rate as time passes, so a few of these units better balanced out the weakness of the expensive Protoss.

The Protoss race is supposed to have very powerful static units that do lots of damage and easy to control (point a few units to the enemy and forget about it). People who play the Protoss race should be skilled at playing SimCity type of games where you build the city (buildings) correctly to get quality outcome (powerful units upgraded to the max). It is too bad that Blizzard didn't add in plumbing features so you can connect certain buildings to get them to produce powerful features.

The Zerg have very cheap to produce units (produce mass expendable units and send them to the enemy, quantity versus quality). People who play this race usually don't care about upgrading and quality of the units. Just mass produce units at will, and overwhelm the enemy. The key is to get as many unit producing hatcheries as possible and produce the most units in the shortest amount of time.

The Terrans have flexible units (micro manage your units to gain advantage: examples like the two mode siege tanks and with SC2 the transformer influenced Vikings). The key for players that use this race is to have a liking for controlling individual units, modifying their behavior to get outcomes. So to win with this race, concentration is on micro-managing the movement and behavior of your units.

The above are just simple generalizations and the truth is not so cut and dry. But I think Blizzard should market the races like that, and try to make units that fit those generalizations because certain players just play better with different play styles. Of course, allow each race to be able to have features of the other races in certain units or buildings to satisfy people who want to try other races.