UC Berkeley Offering Starcraft Course

The Tumeroks blog reports that the University of California, Berkeley is now offering a class on Blizzard's Starcraft real-time strategy game. "This course will go in-depth in the theory of how war is conducted within the confines of the game Starcraft. There will be lecture on various aspects of the game, from the viewpoint of pure theory to the more computational aspects of how exactly battles are conducted. Calculus and Differential Equations are highly recommended for full understanding of the course. Furthermore, the class will take the theoretical into the practical world by analyzing games and replays to reinforce decision-making skills and advanced Starcraft theory."

Re:Starcraft theory...

[FTWinston]

In starcraft, you often have to make complex decisions: getting cheaper units quickly, or more expensive units later, or some combination of the two.

By breaking down and analysing the simultaneous equations involved in these decisions, voila, they make math "cool" and students actually want to go to class. Win-win.

Re:Starcraft theory...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If conducted at the same level of depth as TFA, a course on spreading butter on bread could well be a quite tricky one. Doing an analysis of how an irregular mixed water/lipid substance(whose properties change rapidly with temperature) behaves when applied to an irregular heated surface could be pretty hairy.

Re:Starcraft theory...

[petermgreen]

I don't see how it's any different from say studying the theory of chess

Re:Understanding?

[jellomizer]

Sorry I haven't played in years. Even though I had fun with the games, I didn't have it run my life and really get to know each character personally.
I never said I was a master, but it was sure fun to come up with different strategies, that some times completely obliterated the guy who though he was all that.

Re:poor choice for a contemporary RTS game...

[Judinous]

I agree with the parent completely. There has not been a comparable RTS since Starcraft, and there most likely never will be. There are two main aspects of a player's actions that have an effect on the outcome of a competitive game: strategy and execution. A few genres will forgo one entirely for the sake of the other. Chess (or any TBS game), for example, removes all execution for the sake of creating a pure strategy game. Fighters remove all strategy for the sake of creating a pure execution game. RTS games are one of the few genres which embrace both aspects to the fullest extent.

Or, at least, that is what they claim to do.

Every RTS game that I have seen or heard of since Starcraft was released has sought to remove execution from the equation, and those which fail at balance inadvertently remove the strategy, as well. While lowering the execution bar makes the game more widely accessible for competitive play, the amount of depth in the game is lowered with it. Squad-based RTS are the most glaring example of this. In Starcraft, you could easily write entire books on each unit in the game and the various ways to micromanage them in nearly every situation in order to utilize them to their maximum effectiveness. To this day, people are still discovering small AI quirks which you can exploit to your advantage. In a squad-based RTS, however, this kind of control is removed from the player's hands. Units can only be given approximate orders, take cover on their own, are impossible (or incredibly difficult) to use individually, etc. Another major change is that the overall pace of combat in Starcraft is incredibly fast compared to most other RTS games since. In Blizzard's own WC3, for example, the unit health has been raised so high and the unit damage lowered so much that it takes an order of magnitude longer for units to be destroyed. Contrast this with Starcraft, for example, where the lowly zergling (when upgraded) is one of the highest DPS units in the game (and the highest by far when comparing by resource cost) and 2-4 of them can flatten almost any ground unit in a matter of seconds. You might argue that Starcraft has a relatively high unit count, which is why units in other RTS seem to die so much slower, and you'd be right. This is also yet another example of removing complexity and depth for the sake of accessibility.

Now, it's hard to fault game developers for these changes, though. The fact is that these days, the "hardcore" market is significantly smaller than the more casual market to which these games are catering to. Game companies are, in the end, looking to make money. Creating a game which can be played on a deep competitive level is either an afterthought at best, or more often, simply not considered. Starcraft is likely to be the last truly competitive RTS that we will ever see.

As a side note, if you're interested in the topic, I would recommend heading to http://www.sirlin.net/ [sirlin.net] and checking out their lengthy running discussion revolving around their hopes for Starcraft 2.

Re:Understanding?

[Anonymous Coward]

How in the world was this modded insightful? Getting things wrong and defending yourself when you're wrong is insightful? You don't have to have something run your life to avoid giving inaccurate information about it.

Fake Fake and Fake

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been punked, /.