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by skciva
1853 days ago
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Love this, thanks for sharing. I'm sure I'm not alone in the HN crowd of having fond memories of BW playing days. The sonic weapon, while accidental, feels similar to tactics used to disrupt concentration and logical thinking. E.g. taunting, trolling, cheese strategies, or your opponent getting tilted from something you didn't intend to annoy them with. Often think of how keeping a cool head is incredibly important in games like this, specifically for the pros. IdrA comes to mind as a technically gifted player who was often his own worst enemy due to his temper. He never did crack into the top of the pro scene (hard to do as an American in general) but felt like he really held himself back. |
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Yes, we did plenty of that.
Between Internet cafe days and high-school SCBW matches, I think I've got a dozen people to fall for the simple trick of writing "[a bunch of spaces to manually center the message] nuclear launch detected" on chat[0]. Most of the times it only caused a laugh from everyone, but once I actually won a game this way.
It was the late phase of a match, myself and my opponent were in a sort of stalemate - his army held a strategic position; we both knew it, so he just held position, and there was no way I could get through[1]. Not sure how to solve this tactical riddle, I just pressed ENTER and sent the " nuclear launch detected" message. It caught him off-guard, and in a moment of frantic confusion, he decided to move his army elsewhere. Of course, there was no nuke, but I suddenly had an opening I could exploit and win the match.
EDIT: I miss the tactical depth of SC:BW. I haven't seen any other game that came close. Not even StarCraft 2. In particular, all the cheese strategies we tried against each other. Most of cheesing happened early-game, but I was particularly fond of creative abuse of Terran Science Vessels in mid-to-late game...
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[0] - For non-SC players: Terrans have tactical nukes in their arsenal. Launching one causes a warning message (and audio) to appear for every player, which gives the opponent a few seconds to try and figure out where the nuke will land, and either kill the unit that's laser-guiding it in, or evacuate from the area. People who played SC a lot develop a habitual reaction to this message, overriding whatever they were doing and thinking for a moment.
[1] - I unfortunately don't remember the details about the tactical situation and composition of armies. All I remember is that I was playing Terran, like I almost always did.