If there's a lesson here, its that strategy
gamers might benefit from doing some reading.
In short, I think there are very few if any sc2 players that would benefit (in terms of improving their game at least) from reading The Art of War.
You seem to be saying that by the time they are playing at a level where general strategic advice becomes applicable, they'll already have learned it. This is a little circular.
Also, I think it probably takes a couple of months, before you get to the strategic level, not years, but that's just an opinion.
You seem to be saying that by the time they are
playing at a level where general strategic advice
becomes applicable, they'll already have learned
it. This is a little circular.
I said that by the time the advice that can be learned from reading TAOW becomes useful they would have already learned it from their "battle" experience.
What I am saying is that reading it in book form will at most provide an "aha - that's why this strategy I've been contemplating is good!" moment, rather than a new idea about how to play the game.
I've been playing sc2 on and off (mostly off) since it was released and am a diamond league player & most of the time the game is still more about paying attention and tactics rather than high level strategy for me.
And I am pretty sure I would have not have even got to this level were I not already a somewhat competent wc3 player.
Maybe if you play 10+ hours per week of sc2 every week since it came out you would not need years to master the game, but as a busy professional with little free time and many games I doubt you could ever reach that level in a matter of months without having played a lot of sc1/wc3 beforehand.
EDIT: take a look at http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Battle.net_Leagues#Lea... - 80% of players are at platinum league or less, where the game definitively requires more getting over basic tactics than high level strategy. I would bet you can win with a marine/zergling/zealot rush in almost every match in these leagues if you have sufficiently superior micro to your opponent.
By definition, platinum or below is the bottom 80% of the player base. No matter how good the sc2 population gets, around 80% will ALWAYS be platinum or below.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the skill level for platinum or below will always be static though. For example, the korean server is generally regarded as more difficult. A platinum player on the NA server might only reach gold there (or might still be platinum but lose more).
But you are definitely correct that their mechanics are the main thing that separates most top players. I would emphasize macro as being much more important than micro though.
"The pinnacle of military excellence is not to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles. It is to subjugate your enemy without fighting."
Eg, to have the foresight and strategy to circumscribe and constrain your adversary's degrees of freedom until the only one left is capitulation.
Pretty cool that there are videogames rich enough for that to be applicable.
The point he's trying to make is that truly great (in his view: competitive) games are those that the most advanced AI algorithms won't have any real competitive edge, so that game "theory" would back-up game "reality" of winning with a marginal advantage is more advantageous than winning "big".
Anyway, I think most people study pure game theory, not because its directly applicable; they study it because there are some surprising results from it, that inform their strategic thinking - not because they apply it to evaluate their specific strategic situation.
>The point he's trying to make is that truly great (in his view: competitive) games are those that the most advanced AI algorithms won't have any real competitive edge, so that game "theory" would back-up game "reality" of winning with a marginal advantage is more advantageous than winning "big".
I'm not sure that's the point he's making. But anyway, I'm not sure its a valid point. For example, Chess is a game where the most advanced AI algorithms have a huge competitive edge, surely its a truely great, competitive, game?
It is desirable property in a game, that there is no obvious strongly dominant pure strategy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_dominance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_(game_theory)#Pure_and...
"winning with a marginal advantage is more advantageous than winning "big"" doesn't at all follow from: "those that the most advanced AI algorithms won't have any real competitive edge".
Unless it's a game of skill. E.g. you win a race by running faster than other people. That can still be fun.
(Gambling in the sense: You can create more or less complicated situations. There's more or less apparent entropy in the game you are playing then.)
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I think the spirit of what is being said in 'The Art of War', is the same principle that's being discussed in the article: Don't rush into striking before you are sure of victory, and lose everything; instead use the advantage to build yourself into an invincible position, with less risk.
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'The Art of War' has been around a long time.
If there's a lesson here, its that strategy gamers might benefit from doing some reading.
I liked the article, and thought it was good; but it comes across that the author has no education in either (economic) game theory, or the study of game playing AI (e.g. minimax, search based AI techniques like you'd see in a chess AI etc). (Two related, but sometimes separate fields).
Which is fine - but there's a lot of good work in those fields, that strategy gamers, that seek to understand games analytically, as well as intuitively, would do well to read.