StarCraft: A beginner's guide |
A port of the original Starcraft map for Starcraft 2. Nothing has been changed to make the map more friendly for the new units. I used the legacy map converter to get the basics into the map, then manually added the cliffs, water, and pathing. Big Game Hunters - where do we download it? My game said the map is invalid and corrupted. Lowko 4830 mouzHeroMarine 807 ROOTerdaM 787 Harstem. Just press f8 while in-game. OBLIVION NEW!: This hack fulfills the map triggers for any mode you play on (1vs1, melee, ums, etc) and gives you an instant victory. As a result, you will get the victory message and display any unusual comments, etc (such as 'xxx was eliminated.' ) Just press f12 while in-game. DOWNLOAD Oblivion Hack v.
Get the general idea
You should play enough to know the build tree of your race as well as others. If you don't know how to build a particular unit and don't know the utility of a particular unit, you are going to get burned by it sooner or later. In ideal games between evenly matched players given even mineral consumption, the game should come down to who makes the most efficient use of their resources. The winner should be the player that lost the least minerals in their units lost in battle.
In popular maps like Big Game Hunters or in maps where the number of players is less than the number of players that the map was designed for (such as a 2 player one on one in The Lost Temple) it comes down to who can build units the fastest.
In most games, however, the skill levels are not equal, and (sneaky) tactics of the moment will tend to dictate the actual outcome of a game. Learning the utility and strengths and weakness of each unit will be crucial.
Fundamentals
Like most resource-build army-things mostly equal kind of games, you wont get very far by simply sending your armies into one on one battles with the enemy. All things equal such battles will end up being a draw. As with any ordinary military tactics, you usually want to over power your enemy by attacking stategic weaknesses with strength, and delaying the attacks from your opponents strength. What this means in StarCraft is that you want to build up big armies, and attack your opponent's smaller armies, and weakly defended buildings. A common strategy to this end is the drop. Where an overlord, dropship or shuttle is used to deliver your army to an approach angle to your enemies base which they have not strongly defended. Similarly, though, if your enemy has more than one base, it is usually best to attack the weakest first.
Among beginners, a common problem is that they don't know how to build at top speed. So a skilled player can simply railroad a weaker player by building an small army at top speed and sending them to attack the opponent's base before they have build up an adequate army/defence of their own.
So an essential skill is the ability to build quickly. This is achieved by making sure you have the fastest possible resource collecting stream as well as building in units and buildings simultaneously with each other. Here are a few rules of thumb that should be follow roughly in order:
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There are certainly exceptions to the above rules. Different maps will dictate that you modify your strategies accordingly.
In addition to these basic rules, the beginner needs to be aware of how to perform many actions at once. Queueing up commands with the shift key is essential. For protoss and terran, your peons (scv/probe) should return back to gathering minerals or gas after commanded to create a building automatically by virtue of queued commands. Setting rally points are essential for organizing your troops later in the game, but at the beginning of the game (when you are spending time waiting for peons to build), they are effective for sending your peons to the mineral patches at the very instant they are created. These saved fractions of a second do accumulate and thus it is worth it to redefine your rally point to a new mineral patch after each peon is created at the beginning of the game.
The beginner must also become accustomed to the keyboard short cuts. Navigating the menus with your mouse while you are in the middle of a battle or other micromanagement is an unacceptable waste of time. Learn the short to building peons (terran: ss, zerg: sd, protoss: p) as well as making your common buildings (protoss probe: bp - pylon, bc - canon; zerg drone: bc - build creep, bh - build hatchery; terran scv: bb - build barracks, bu - build bunker) and common units. Look at the highlighted character in the menus to see what each key does. Press a to send a selected army to attack (to attack a sequence of points just hold down shift and queue the attack pattern up!) Also remember that audio queued events can be zoomed in on immediately by pressing the space bar.
A common mistake for protoss and terran players is to load up the unit queues in each of the buildings as much as possible at the beginning of the game. At the beginning of the game, when you have relatively little money, and little to micro-manage, you should instead queue up two units at each building and increase the queue as each unit is built. This is essentially 'cash management'. Doing this will leave you with more minerals on hand to build more buildings while not slowing down your unit build rate. Ordinarily the goal is to put those minerals towards making more buildings that will in turn let you make more units at once (it is better building 2 units in each of 5 unit generating buildings than 5 units in 2 unit generating buildings). Once this micro-management starts becoming overwhelming, use the full building queues (5) to maintain maximum build rate.
In Big Game Hunters (or a two player match on a four player map) as a rule of thumb, protoss should build towards having about 4 nexus', zerg should expand to 9 hatcheries, and terran should build towards about 3(?) command centers. The protoss are a special case, since its possible for them to be building multiple races at once (Dark archon can mind control friendly or enemy peons for other races and start building thier race as well.) A protoss player should, of course, also be trying to build 9 hatcheries and 3(?) command centers as well (if your brain doesn't explode from handling that much stuff at once.)
Then you should be building towards a situation where you can pump out units and constantly sustain a near 200 unit-slot limit while you are doing battle with your enemy. With the protoss, you should build about 8 gateways, or a similar number of telportation ports, and make sure the build buffers are always full. (These are late game suggestions that don't apply to the beginning of the game.)
Building units quickly
Building units quickly is different for zerg than for the other races. For zerg, you need to build lots of hatcheries. You know you are being inefficient if any hatchery has three larva that are not mutating to units. The reason is that the speed of building units will be limited by the number of available larva, and once your hatchery has three larva it will stop building more larva. Taken to the logical conclusion, what this means is you should be building units evenly over all your hatcheries, rather than building units out of your hatcheries one at a time. This applies mostly to the beginning of the game when you are trying to build drones to collect more minerals to build more hatcheries. Once you are really building later and in the middle of the game, you should either be at your 200 unit limit, or should not have 3 idle larva anywhere. For protoss and terran, the army builders (barracks/gateway and spaceport/teleportation port) have a build queue. It is temping to simply fill these queues, and let the build process take care of itself, however this is not a good idea at the beginning of the game. Instead you should build lots of ground army builders (gateway/barracks) and build evenly in each. In this way, more of your mineral resources are dedicated to units that are about to be built, rather than on units that you wont see for a long time down the road. In this way you are pushing for simultaneous building rather than sequential building. You units will pop out faster relative to the minerals put into building them. Later on, your mineral production and the number of army builders should make this amount micro-management prohibitive. At this point you should switch to simply filling the queues of your numerous army builders.
Standard armies
You should learn the standard armies for each race, just to give you a baseline for the minimum you should expect from an opponent. If you are a beginner, you should start just by building these armies, to get a feel for them.Standard armies (offence motivated) | |
Protoss |
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Zerg |
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Terran |
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Despite claims or theories to the contrary there are no unbeatable armies. There are no unfair units. Every attack has a counter attack that can beat it. You need to build up experience to learn how to beat any given individual attack. If you find a certain kind of attack difficult to deal with, adopt that attack yourself and see how others deal with it.
However creating a successful defense or counter attack to any impending attack requires reconnaisance to know what your enemy is up to. Also remember that an experienced opponent will also be trying to observe what you are up to.
The Rush
A lot of players are perturbed by some of the highly skilled players who will build an army as quickly as possible and send them straight at them. Just as they are starting to build up their tech, they are met with 4 zealots, or 6 zerglings versus no appreciable defence whatsoever. These players typically complain or request a 'no rush' time period at the beginning. But there is no enforcability in battlenet, and more to the point, its part of the game. The right response to a rush is: have a defence.
There are suitable defences for all variations of the superfast rushes (a handful of offensive units built at the very start of the game and sent to attack).
Suggested defences for the superfast rush. | |
Protoss | Build 2 probes, then 1 pylon ...
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Zerg | Build two drones, then three sunken colonies surrounding your base. This should hold off one or two player superfast rushes. |
Terran | Build two SCVs, then a barracks, then a bunker near your base, then a second barracks, then a second bunker, then marines as fast as possible (as well as supply depots as necessary. Send the marines to the bunkers of course. |
Slow rushes. | |
Protoss |
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Zerg |
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Terran |
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2015.07.05 - 7500 maps -- .zip Download | Mirror Download
Visit the forum to askquestions, report problems, or request maps!
Visit the forum to askquestions, report problems, or request maps!
Organized Map Categories
Click a category to download that map pack (890MBTotal)
F0: Melee– Play regular StarCraft in spaciousmoney maps.
Subfolders :: Island, Micro, Big Game Hunters,Fastest Possible Map Ever, Zero Clutter TvB
F1: Custom– Gather, build, and train to fightagainst similar foes in customized melee settings.Subfolders :: Campaign, War, 5v3, 6v2, 7v1,9999 Unit, Altered StarCraft, Art of Defence, Fast & Free, God's Land,Offensive Strike, OMFG THE UNITS, Phantom, Squad Support
F2: Defense– Prevent waves of enemies fromreaching a point with defenses or defenders.Subfolders :: Alphabetically Sorted Maps;Keyword Sorted Maps: Bunker, Cannon, Firebat, Ghost, Goliath, Hydralisk,Lurker, Marine, Matrix, Reaver, Spore, Sunken, Tank, Turret (all defense mapswith those keywords)
F3: Survival– Endure masses of attackers with agiven army or base with limited resources.Subfolders :: Arena: Mini Town Defence, SmashTV; Zombie, 20001 Attack, Dawn of the Dead, Defend the Temple, Protect the Guy,Protect the Queen, Resident Evil, Starship Troopers, Test of Survival
F4: Assault– Advance through an enemy strongholdacross the map with a given army or reinforcements.Subfolders :: Invasion, 300, Braveheart, Breakthe Condom, Dynasty Warriors, Heaven's Last Stand, Helms Deep, Lord of theRings
F5: Conquest– Battle with other 'nations' andcapture outposts with gained units in a world-scope map.Subfolders :: Civilization, Diplomacy, Risk,World War, Heroes of Might and Magic, LOTR
F6: Madness– Order masses of constantly spawningunits to massacre other players in a medium arena.Subfolders :: Madness, Blood, Bunker, E V O L VE S, Golems, Magic The Gathering (MTG), Rancher, Zone Control
F7: Tug– Push trained or spawned attackers towardthe enemy side to destroy their temple.Subfolders :: BattleCraft, Build Tug O' War,Desert Strike, Overmind Defence, Sand Castle Wars
F8: Control– Skillfully control a unit or squadto defeat enemy bases or scenarios.Subfolders :: Computer: Individual, Single,Teamwork, Unit; Human: Bunker, Deathmatch, Duel, Teams Choice, Teams Default,Tournament; Block the Gate, Bound and Control, Builders and Fighters,Impossible Scenarios, Korean/Lame/Spire Defense, Nexus Destroyer, Strip theGirl, Team Micro Arena
Humans vs Humans maps are called micro; Humansvs Computers maps are called control.
FA: RPG– Develop your hero and story as youtravel the map, kill monsters, and complete quests.Subfolders :: Horror and Haunted RPGs, OpenRPGs, Alien vs Predator, Diablo, Digimon, Dragonball, Dungeons & Dragons(D&D), Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto (GTA), Gundam, Lord of the Rings(LOTR), Metal Gear Solid (MGS), Pokemon
For RPG maps bigger than 2MB, you must download them separately.
FB: Warrior– Brawl with the enemy hero whiledefending your base from the stream of attackers.Subfolders :: Aeon of Strife (AoS), ArmoredCore, Defense of the Ancients (DotA), Dragonball Z (DBZ), Dynasty Warriors(DW), Hero Arena, Hero Wars, Star Wars
FC: Paintball– Snipe other players with selectedlow-health units in a small arena.Subfolders :: Deathmatch, Sniper, Team FortressCTF, 007 Arena, Assassinate the President, Commando Wars, Laser Tag, Tank Wars,V-TEC
FD: Tag– Evade a boss, rescue tagged partners,and build walls and fighters with a runner to take revenge.Subfolders :: Bomber, Killer, Maze, Nuke,Archon Tag, Cat and Mouse: Human, CPU, Crystal Wars; Cops and Robbers, FreezeTag, Hide n Seek, Jail Tag, Vulture Tag
FE: Obstacle– Move agilely to avoid danger and toreach a goal in the map.Subfolders :: Obstacle Course, Dodge, Race,Run, Tricks
FE: Bound–Run through obstacle courses by dodging successive explosions and solvingpuzzles.For 2000+ bound maps, go to http://bound.renaka.com
A-GH-RS-Z
FF: Games– Play small short games withtrigger-based features.A-GH-RS-Z
Subfolders :: Arcade, Board, Arena, Click,Games, Party, Sports, Dodgeball, Worms
FG: Social– Interact with other players in avirtual social environment.Subfolders :: Movie, Role Playing (RP), Sims,Chatroom, Don't, Hostage Negotiation, Sexy Pics
FZ: Personal– Webmaster's created maps, mainly ofmelee defense and RPG categories.
Setting | Cus | Def | Sur | Asa | Coq | Mad | Tug | Cot | RPG | Wor | Pai | Tag | Obs | Gam | Soc |
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vsHumans | |||||||||||||||
vsComputer | |||||||||||||||
AI Attacks | |||||||||||||||
Gather | |||||||||||||||
Build | |||||||||||||||
Mass |
Comparison Key:AlwaysMaybeNever. Move mouse over underlined words for more info.
Categorization Note: Categories are sorted to have similarones next to each other.
The subfolders go in this order: category >> genre >> series>> versions
Map Pack Note: If you have too many maps, there will be ashort freeze when joining games.
This is caused by StarCraft checking your hard drive for a copy of the host'smap.
If you are getting the The scenario map file is still beingdistributed error, then there is a
'^' or '&' or '+' symbol in the map's filename, delete them to fix themap.
Place all extracted F folders to: C:ProgramFilesStarcraftmapsBroodWar
Categorization Note: Categories are sorted to have similarones next to each other.
The subfolders go in this order: category >> genre >> series>> versions
Map Pack Note: If you have too many maps, there will be ashort freeze when joining games.
This is caused by StarCraft checking your hard drive for a copy of the host'smap.
If you are getting the The scenario map file is still beingdistributed error, then there is a
'^' or '&' or '+' symbol in the map's filename, delete them to fix themap.
Place all extracted F folders to: C:ProgramFilesStarcraftmapsBroodWar
SCMOTD features some of the best maps to have appeared to battle.net. Eachmap was selected out of many others from its subgenre and playtested to ensurequality and playability. Screenshot, description, and map tips are provided tohelp potential players decide whether to play and how to play.
View the list of allSCMOTDs or click the picture below to read each SCMOTD article.
SCMOTD Map Packs: 2009 April-AugustOriginally my experience with map making was in C&C Red Alert--simplymaking terrain maps, then WarCraft II nurtured my interests further with itsflexibility in adding units and editing their stats. When I installed Brood Warin 1999, I was not playing the game--I was fooling around with the 'CampaignEditor.'
I make the maps for my own enjoyment so they are not necessarily geared towardthe battle.net population particularly in terms of difficulty. All my maps areopen source for public enhancement and personal learning; please use SCMDraft 2 to viewor edit them.
I make the maps for my own enjoyment so they are not necessarily geared towardthe battle.net population particularly in terms of difficulty. All my maps areopen source for public enhancement and personal learning; please use SCMDraft 2 to viewor edit them.
Drant's Maps Portfolio
- V-Tec Paintball NXGPaintballRemake
- Labyrinthos RPGMaze RPG
- Sunken ArenaFFA Capture
- 10,000.000 Units DefenseDefenseMelee
- OMFG THE GHOSTS N NUKESAIMelee
- Ground ZeroesNukeDodging
- Stimpack DefenseTankDefense
- Starport CommandArcade
- Blast FurnaceDodging
- Firestorm DefenseNuking
- MazeMaze Bound
- The Labyrinth RPGMazeRPG
- 10000 Marines MyriadDefenseMelee
- Network ComplexSC Melee
- Perdition CampaignAIMelee
Perdition Campaign
4P Fast 4v4c Custom, Jungle 128x128 - ca 2003(Project started) - More Info
4vs4 Insane AI with prebuilt base for comps, heroes and bosses, very hardNetwork Complex
8P Asymmetric Regular Melee, Space 256x256 - ca2003-4 - MoreInfo
Play melee versus Computers in a huge Blizzard-style landscaping map10000 MarinesMyriad
7P Build Defensive Survival, Space 128x128 - ca2003-4 - MoreInfo
Fight a 10000 HP marine, then defend against 10000 marines with 1 HPThe Labyrinth RPG
Fight monsters and explore the maze with one upgradeable weapon,minimalisticMaze Pack
7P Maze Race Obstacle, Space 64x64 - May 25,2004
Get out of a maze of 1x1 path and wallsThree Mazes Pack
Firestorm Defense
Nuke strike flying enemies in a twisted course, purchasable abilities andbonusesBlast Furnace
4:3 Bombing Race Tag, Space 64x64 - June 13, 2004 -More Info
Cross the maze as marines or shoot them with triggered-fireballs as tanksStarport Command
2P Defensive Arcade Game, Space 128x128 - February 26,2005 - MoreInfo
Missile Command for SC, 3 missile types, 1 enemy type, incrementaldifficultyStimpack Defense
4P Tank Course Defense, Space 64x64 - March 11,2005 - MoreInfo
Deploy automatic tanks to kill your own stimmed/weakened marinesNuke Dodge GroundZeroes
6P Nuke Dodge Tag, Installation 64x64 - April 24,2005 - MoreInfo
Dodge a storm of nuclear explosions; tag-to-revive and FFA modesOMFG THE GHOSTS NNUKES
6P Modded Survival Custom, Desert 128x128 - August 12,2005
Build a base and defend against waves of ghosts and constant nuclearstrikes10,000.000 UnitsDefense
Starcraft 1 Big Game Hunters Map Download
7P Build Defensive Survival, 128x128 Space - January 16,2006 - MoreInfo
Fortify your base against any 10,000 super-strong SC units, racialfeaturesBig Game Hunter Hd 1.5
10,000.000 Units Defense.scx -Screenshots
Honeycomb Wars
6P Caster Arena Game, Space 128x128 - February 19,2006 - MoreInfo
Capture sunkens and use trigger spells to dominate the huge arenaLabyrinthos RPG
6P Greek Stages RPG, Jungle 256x256 - May 23, 2006- MoreInfo
Big Game Hunters Map Download
Fight through a giant maze divided into four unique parts, music and sfxLabyrinthos RPG.scx - Alpha Screenshots
V-Tec Paintball NXG
8P CTF Arsenal Paintball, 64x64 - May 12, 2007 -More Info
V-Tec remade with tiered upgrades and sound