2009: Into the Nexus

Up until a few days ago, I thought I hated MOBAs¹. Turns out I just hated Dota 2.

Actually, let me qualify that. I hate playing Dota 2, but I don’t hate it. It’s one of those games that, like Dark Souls or any fighting game released after the original Street Fighter II on Super NES, I feel like I’m doomed to never be any good at, and consequently have reached a point of acceptance where I feel I can and should respect it from afar, but not even attempt to get into it. And that’s fine by me.

Let me qualify that further by saying that I feel there are way too many MOBAs on the market these days, as many developers appear to be seeing it as the new² fad to latch onto in the (usually vain) hope that they will attract a large, world-beating multiplayer community.

With all that in mind, well, Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm is really good.

Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA that brings together a series of characters from Blizzard’s various games from over the years — primarily Warcraft, StarCraft³ and Diablo, with a guest appearance from The Lost Vikings — and throws them into battle against one another in the usual 5v5, destroy-the-other-team’s-base-before-they-destroy-yours MOBA gameplay.

Heroes of the Storm has a few little twists on the formula, though. For starters, individual players on your team don’t level up independently of one another; you have a collective pool of experience that you share, so you all level up at the same time. You still need to do your part to make sure your team levels up faster than your opponents, particularly in the early stages of a match, but there’s less feeling “left behind” than there is in stuff like Dota and League of Legends, in my experience anyway.

Tied in with this is the fact that a lot of the stupid arbitrary maybe-skill-maybe-luck-based bullshit that Dota includes — “Last Hit”⁴ being the one that always wound me up the most — is conspicuously absent from Heroes of the Storm, and it’s much more fun as a result. It means you can focus on the overall team strategy rather than micromanaging your character to such a degree that it can become very distracting — if you’re a newcomer, anyway; I’m sure veteran Dota players can Last Hit pretty much at will.

Then there’s the fact that there’s more than one map, and each map has its own little quirks. Some have two lanes to attack down, some have three. Some have objectives you need to defend to gain a temporary advantage, some have special enemies you need to defeat. Some have collectible items to unleash powerful attacks, and one even has an entirely separate “dungeon” map for you to descend into when the time is right. The objectives and the rewards you get from them don’t necessarily make or break a whole battle, but they can make things swing one way or the other — and even provide a means for a struggling team to make a spectacular comeback, rather than being stomped into the ground.

All of this is wrapped up in matches that generally don’t take any longer than twenty minutes to play, as compared to the 30-90 minute slugfests that games of Dota can easily become. It’s simple to understand, accessible and actually enjoyable to me, even as a newcomer and someone who is not generally very good at strategy games.

I haven’t yet dared play a game against human opponents, but I feel much more inclined to give it a shot in this than in the notoriously elitist and short-tempered communities that play a lot of Dota and League of Legends. If you, like me, have been skeptical about MOBAs but like the idea of them, give Heroes of the Storm a shot. It is free, after all.

¹ MOBA: Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, a team-based game where two teams compete for dominance of a map by attempting to destroy the other team’s “core” by infiltrating their base.

² Well, not that new any more, I guess.

³ The way they’re capitalised differently has bugged me for years now.

⁴ Last Hit: a mechanic whereby you only get experience points for a kill if you were the last person to deal damage to it. Satisfying to veterans, the most fucking annoying thing in the world for newbies.

#oneaday Day 142: StarCraft: The Board Game (Part 2)

[Compromise: Have decided on a new format. Weekends will have individual pictures like what I used to do. That way I can do them in Paint if I’m away from my Mac.]

So we finally got through a complete game of StarCraft: The Board Game. And after a bit of initial confusion over a few rules-related bits and pieces, the three of us found ourselves understanding the way things worked quite well. It’ll probably take a few more games for us to be able to strategise with any real effectiveness, but for a first game, we didn’t do too badly — and more importantly, it didn’t last for six hours like we were expecting it to. In fact, due to the “Special Victory” conditions, the whole thing ended up being over a little quicker than we anticipated. No bad thing — it means that it doesn’t go into that pile of “games that are good but take hours and hours to play” and will hopefully be trotted out relatively often.

It’s an interesting game, really, with elements of Risk and Civilization present. There’s empire and unit building, conquering opponent territories, researching technologies, and an interesting card-based combat mechanic that gives something of an element of chance without making it completely random. There’s also a very wide array of possibilities for things to do, and this coupled with the randomly-generated game board will make for a game which is unlikely to be the same twice in a row.

Things we have learned so far, then:

If someone has a Z-Axis Navigation Route (or “warpgate” as we kept calling them) linking to one of their own planets from one of their own planets, you’d better assault them sooner rather than later, otherwise you’ll find them building up an unassailable fortress.
Building the Air Support module which, among other things, prevents people from landing troops directly on your base, is an expensive investment that is very worthwhile as it makes life quite inconvenient for invading armies.
Ultralisks are tough.
Archons are tougher, especially if they have some fortunate combinations of Reinforcement and Event cards.
Obstructing another player’s orders isn’t necessarily a good course of action, because it lets them draw Event Cards, which are quite powerful and also act as the game clock.
Knock people off Conquest Point spaces as soon as possible rather than trying to do something clever like cut off someone’s supply line. If someone has captured conquest point spaces worth a total of 3, it takes them just 5 turns to win.
Attacking is better than defending to quite a significant degree, so it pays to go on the offensive.
Force-mining someone’s resources then retreating is a petty and amusing way to wreak revenge without destroying your own units.

I’m looking forward to trying the game again soon. It was a lot of fun and despite its apparent complexity (this is a game that easily takes up all of a large table with board, figures, cards and lots of chits) it’s relatively straightforward to play once you get how the rules work. Approve, then!

#oneaday Day 141: StarCraft: The Board Game (Part 1)

[I’m away for the weekend so am away from comic-making tools. I could use Windows Paint, but I’m not going to. So there.]

We tried StarCraft: The Board Game for the first time tonight. My brother got it for me for my birthday back in April and I know he has been quite curious to hear about it, and I’ve been pretty interested to see how it plays, too.

Tonight, we spent a little while going through the basic rules and figuring out how everything works, but didn’t play a complete game. As is our norm for starting a brand new game — especially a complex one — it took us quite a while to get through even a single turn, so we decided it would probably make sense to treat tonight’s session as a learning experience, then have a proper game of it tomorrow.

As with many games, the rules initially seem quite complex but once you get them figured out, it’s fairly straightforward. Turns are split into three phases — planning, execution and regrouping. Planning involves every player assigning orders to the game’s planets, and these orders can either be “mobilise” (move units either between areas on one planet or from one planet to another, assuming you’ve built a transport covering the necessary navigation lanes first), “build” (build stuff, be this new bases, units, workers or upgrades) or “research” (acquire new tech and/or provide yourself with additional options should combat become a possibility). Execution involves taking it in turns to make these orders happen — but the order in which the, err, orders were laid down on the board is important here, as it’s possible for players’ orders to “obstruct” each other at times. Finally, regrouping involves “cleaning up” everything, making sure everyone has the right resources, and so on. Then you repeat. In theory, it’s relatively simple. In practice, there are a lot of variables to consider.

For starters, there’s combat. Combat is resolved through the use of cards which display two different attack and health values, along with a picture of one or more units. If the unit you’re using matches the one on the card you’re using, you use the higher attack and health values. If it doesn’t, you use the lower ones. Then there’s all manner of special abilities along with technologies that reinforce and upgrade your units to be more badass. It’ll take a while to figure out all the possibilities, but it looks like there’s lots of potential for strategic play with enough randomness to keep things interesting. Which is nice.

Anyway. It’s about 2:20am right now so I should get some sleep. We’ll be trying a full game tomorrow, so I’ll report back on how that goes tomorrow evening.