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The Bronze Report — A Noob’s Starcraft 2 Education: Episode 1 — Whine and Cheese

Nov 30

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Games, Humor | No Comments

Welcome to the start of a new feature on this blog!  I haven’t been writing much lately, partially because of burnout from writing interactive fiction, and partially because I’ve been playing a lot of Starcraft 2.  So I figured I’d try to jump-start my blogging again using my low-level Starcraft play as the subject matter.

So who am I?  I’m not an 1800-point diamond player, nor have I played Starcraft for the last 10 years.  I’m a 41-year-old guy with a day job and three kids, who enjoys gaming but has never really played an RTS title to any level of multiplayer skill in the past.  I tend to like RPGs and FPS-type games, but Starcraft 2 is different, somehow.  For the first time, due to the outstanding matchmaking system, I feel like I can learn without being repeatedly stomped into the ground by vastly more skilled players.

I’ve played the campaign, run through all the challenge scenarios, and learned to play the AI so that I can reliably beat it on Hard.  I’ve been reading TeamLiquid forums, watching Day9 and other tutorial vids, and generally trying to learn how to play correctly, but I’m coming up from zero as far as playing other players, and so I’ve spent quite a bit of time bouncing around the Bronze league.  I started off as Rank 25 Bronze, dropped down into the 45 range for a while, and slowly but surely dragged myself back up to my current level of Rank 8 Bronze.

Currently I have 83 games played, with 38 wins — I’ve been creeping closer to a 50% win rate after being at around 33% at the nadir of my play.  Oh, and I play Zerg.

So enough about my background — let’s get to the Starcraft talk!  I’m generally going to try to link a replay here with some commentary, but I don’t think it’s fruitful to look at older ones, so for today I’m just going to talk about the various pet peeves and cheese strategies I’ve encountered down with the dregs of the Bronze league:

A-Holes

I learned quickly that a quick “gl, hf” at the beginning of the game and a “gg” at the end were considered the bare minimum for courteous play, but I’m OK if the opponent just doesn’t type anything at all.  Particularly at the beginning of the game, things go quickly, and if you aren’t to the point where the opening build order is automatic for you, it can be distracting to try to type a response, and not everyone types quickly.  So I don’t let that bother me.  And if someone ragequits after a good, straight-up game that I happened to win, I almost take that as a compliment.

What does bother me is people who are deliberately rude.  So when I type “gl, hf!” and the opponent responds with “shut up” and then cannon rushes me, I do get offended.  Fortunately, these types of people are rare.  Choice responses to “gl, hf!” that I recall off the top of my head are:

  • “Shut up”
  • “NO”
  • “Zerg noob”
  • “dq plz” (I assume this is “die quick, please”)

And of course, there’s the fairly uncommon “bg” (“bad game”) comment at the end of the game, to which I would often like to respond “…4u” if the other guy had not already surrendered.

Cheese

Although I am never rude (I think I may have ragequit once to one of the guys above, who paired cheese with his rudeness), I cannot claim that I am innocent of cheesing other players.  I experimented with the 6-pool rush, the 7 roach rush, and the 3 roach rush, with limited success.  Although these rush builds can be effective, you just don’t learn much by doing them, and if you don’t manage a clean win it’s unlikely you can recover to transition into a good midgame.  I’ve actually pulled it off a couple of times, but it was a mad scramble the rest of the game, and I doubt it would have worked against a better player.

But some of the cheese I’ve been on the receiving end of is really obnoxious:

  • The Protoss cannon rush, where they plant a pylon and cannons in or near your base.  If they get a cannon up in range of your drones or buildings, it’s gg.  I’ve learned to defend against this by overlord scouting the ramp and sides of my base, and by preparing to build spine crawlers if I see a forge and/or any probe shenanigans.  This is by far the most annoying Protoss tactic.  I’d rather get void ray rushed than cannon rushed.
  • The drone/probe/SCV rush, where the other player sends all his starting workers to your base and micros them to kill all your workers.  The annoying thing about this is that they’ll show up in your base with 6 workers to your 9 or 10, but they’ve organized them into groups and have practiced fighting in the mineral line, and end up killing all your workers.  I have yet to figure out a good way to respond to this, but maybe practicing against the AI will help.  Oddly, the last person to do this to me surrendered to me after killing all my drones, which I assume means he was deliberately trying to drop his ranking quickly.
  • Bunker rush — the first marine push comes with an SCV, who plops down a bunker at the foot of your ramp.  The marines pile in, and now you have a very tough fortified position to take down to even get out of your base, which makes expanding almost impossible until you can pull the thing down.
  • Mass reaper harass — the only time someone tried this on me they were really late, and although they had a formidable force of reapers, I saw them and had speedlings, so I was able to completely destroy them.
  • Early Banshees / Early Dark Templars — not true cheese, but both of these strategies abuse lack of detection.  To defend you either have to get to Lair and morph an overseer, or build an evo chamber so you can get spore crawlers up (or both).  I’ve been abused regularly by banshees (I’ve now learned to build extra queens and ensure I have detection if I scout the early starport) but the one time I got hit with DTs he pulled them back to deal with the constant pressure I was putting on his base, and I eked out a win.

Next time I’ll post a replay or two with my own analysis of the games, and we can see where I’m weak and where I’m doing OK.

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Moaning Myrtle Has Left The Building

Jul 26

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | 2 Comments

My son Thomas has been voraciously reading the Harry Potter novels.  He’s now over halfway through the second one, and asked me the following question at dinner the other night:

Dad, why does Moaning Myrtle hang out in the bathroom?

I responded:

Well, she died in the bathroom, so that’s where she haunts now.

I kind of expected that to be the end of the conversation, but he had a followup:

Dad, did Moaning Myrtle die on the toilet, like Elvis?

Now, Thomas is 9.  I’d bet serious money that he has no idea who Elvis Presley is.  And he’s 9.  Did I mention he’s 9?  How did he possibly find out that Elvis died on the toilet?

No, I think she slipped and fell and hit her head.  But how did you know that Elvis died on the toilet?

Of course, I’m waiting with bated breath to hear this one.  And I guess it makes sense in retrospect:

Anthony [a kid at school] told me!

So now I’m left with trying to envision just how this came up in conversation.  Were they discussing Pokemon or their favorite Wii games, and Anthony just happened to bring it up?  “Yeah, the penguin suit is really cool, but the fireflower lets you shoot fireballs.  Hey!  That reminds me!  Did you know Elvis died on the toilet?”

I’m just coming up short here.

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Katherine the Chef

Jun 10

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | No Comments

Katherine has been very interested in grocery shopping and cooking lately.  Many times she will suggest a trip to the grocery store to Robin, where she insists on helping to load and unload the cart, and gets upset if the trip is too quick.

If she can’t go to the actual store, she will often pretend-shop at home.  She gets food from the pantry and refrigerator, loads it up in her toy shopping cart, and pushes it around the kitchen.  When she’s done with that, she gets plastic shopping bags from the pantry and bags the groceries, leaving them arrayed on the floor for us to gather up.  We have not yet been able to get her interested in the process of unloading the groceries and putting them back in their proper places, unfortunately.

But recently that has not been enough to fully satisfy her.  We came downstairs after doing some cleaning to find that in a remarkably short time, Katherine had gotten out a bowl, a spoon, soy milk, oil, eggs, hot chocolate powder, and Folgers instant coffee crystals, and had mixed them all together in what can only have been an attempt to make brownies.  In what may have been a tactical error, we praised her for the attempt because we thought it was incredibly cute.  So the next day she followed up with an even grander concoction of graham cracker crumbs, a full container of maple syrup, about two dozen whole strawberries, and milk.  We think the intended end product was strawberry shortcake.

She also had a can of blueberries from a blueberry muffin mix and had gotten the can opener out and set it next to it, which is pretty amazing since we open cans about maybe four times a year.  She’s obviously more perceptive and holds more in her memory than we sometimes give her credit for!

That attempt wasn’t praised.

Since then we haven’t had any more solo cooking exploits, although Robin has done a lot of cooking with her to keep her satisfied.  I’m just glad that she didn’t try to flambé anything.

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Who Moved Robin’s Cheese?

May 17

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Family, Humor | 3 Comments

The upgrade to Windows 7 has been mostly straightforward, but while getting rained on at Thomas’s soccer game on Saturday I got a text message from Robin:

I HATE THIS NEW OPERATING SYSTEM!

It seems that in the process of installing Windows 7 and reinstalling iTunes that her music files got moved around to various unintuitive locations.  While I feel that iTunes and, frankly, myself deserve as big a share of the ire as Windows 7, it was Windows’s overintelligent search algorithm that actually drove Robin off the edge.

She was trying to set up a Gmail account for Thomas, not realizing that he was too young to qualify.  After attempting and failing to set up the account, she found herself locked out of several pieces of Google functionality, so she thought Google had dumped a cookie on our machine that was blocking functionality.  She tried to search for “cookie” on the Start Menu search field, and although it searched within Outlook for every cookie recipe email we’d ever received, and gave her an option to clear all cookies, it didn’t actually show her any individual cookies.  It took me about 5 minutes of trolling through 3rd level menus in IE8 to finally locate them and confirm that there wasn’t a rogue cookie.

I’m firmly of the opinion that Windows 7 is the best O/S Microsoft has come out with, and I think it’s great, but I think I’ve got some work to do yet to clean up and relocate some files before Robin gets truly comfortable with it.

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It Seems I’m Actually A Woman…

Mar 17

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Humor, Reviews, Websites, Writing and Philosophy | 1 Comment

I had not come across this before, but there is an online analyzer for prose that purports to determine if the author is male or female, apparently by counting the frequency of certain keywords in your text.

So I scraped the front page of my blog and fed it into the analyzer.  Although the count was close, my “female count” was about 10% higher than my “male count”, so their algorithm guesses that I am female.

As a control, I also fed in the only actual female-authored text on the site, the post I Want Glue Teeth, which was written by Robin.

I’d love to be able to report that it thought she was a man, but actually the female/male ratio on that article was about 2:1, so at least Robin is more of a woman than I am, which is as it should be.

Oops!  Gotta go!  Gloria Steinem is guesting on Oprah today!

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Close Dog

Mar 3

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | No Comments

I’ve already written about Katherine’s reaction to having her four lower teeth extracted (“I want glue teeth“).  Lately she’s been a bit more OCD than usual — it comes and goes, but at the moment she really wants cupboard doors closed and pots centered on their trivets, etc.

Robin was privileged to see the newest manifestation of this yesterday.  Katherine was in the office with one of her teachers, working on programs, while Robin was working on the computer.  Also, Aurora (Rora), our female Sheltie, was in the office as well.  And she was panting — likely due to the fact that with all the floor lamps on in that room as well as the computers it turns into a reasonable facsimile of an Easy Bake oven.

This canine behavior, though, was apparently unacceptable to Katherine, so she expressed her objections forcefully:  “Close dog!”  “I want close dog!”  “Yes close dog!”

I’m not sure whether Robin took the dog out of the room or if Rora just settled down and stopped panting, but apparently the problem was solved without the use of duct tape, so all was once again well.

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So I Rewired It…

Mar 1

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Family, Humor | No Comments

One of Katherine’s more annoying recent habits is to flip off the light switch in our office.  That wouldn’t be so bad, except that the switch is a half-hot that controls some, but not all, of the outlets in the room.  My webserver and my own computer are not on it (although the monitor is) but the main email computer and the one Robin uses for her work are on it.

So after about the fifth time Katherine killed power to Robin’s computer this past week I decided to rewire the switch to a flat plate and remove the control over the outlets.  This was a pretty trivial change compared to some of the work I’ve done in our basement over the past couple of years, but it was pretty satisfying.

So far Katherine hasn’t made any comments about the lack of the switch — we were out of the house enough yesterday that I’m not sure she noticed.  I’ll be interested to see her reaction when she finally figures it out — I hope it won’t be to go over and shut down the computers manually…

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Ferb, I Know What We’re Going To Do Today

Feb 8

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor, Reviews | 2 Comments

I don’t really watch a lot of cartoons these days.  I’m pretty busy with 3 kids, plus I generally prefer to read or play on the computer rather than watch TV.  When we do watch TV it’s usually The Biggest Loser or American Idol — shows that Robin and I both like and that we watch together.

On weekend mornings, however, we usually turn the TV on for Thomas and Katherine, and what they generally watch are cartoons.  They watch a wide variety of different shows, but the one that always gets me to sit down and watch with them is Disney’s Phineas and Ferb.

This is a very cute show that combines kid-friendly situations and antics with humor that appeals to both kids and adults.  And unlike The Simpsons, the two aren’t really separate; there are not really two levels to the show.  If you’re laughing, your kid probably is too.

An episode of Phineas and Ferb is fairly structured.  The premise is that it is summer vacation, and the eponymous brothers are trying to find fun things to do to occupy the day.  Phineas (it’s almost always Phineas) comes up with a Big Idea, which they set about implementing.  This usually ends up being some mammoth construction or engineering project, such as building a giant car wash, rollercoaster, or day spa.  Phineas, the short redhead, is the “mouth” of the group and the idea man, and Ferb is the technical genius (although neither boy is a complete slouch in the other’s area of strength).

The major obstacle is almost always the boys’ older sister Candace, who plays Daffy Duck to the boys’ Bugs.  Early on, she catches on to their plan and tries (inevitably futilely) to “bust” them by dragging their mom over to see whatever giant construct the boys have put together in the backyard.

Depending on the episode, some of Phineas and Ferb’s friends might show up to participate in whatever the scheme might be.  The most commonly appearing are Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, the overachieving Fireside Girl and the ballerina to Phineas’s Harrison Bergeron; Baljeet Patel, an East Indian supergenius and geek; and Buford Van Stomm, a tough kid who oscillates between bullying and friendly behavior.

Candace, besides her obsession with “busting” the brothers, is even more obsessed with fawning over her boyfriend Jeremy, and she often ends up madly juggling these two imperatives (often failing amusingly) as the plot unfurls.

At the same time as this is happening, there is almost always a side plot involving the boys’ pet platypus Perry.  Perry is actually a secret agent known as “Agent P”, and gets summoned to his secret underground base under the kids’ backyard to receive a mission briefing from Major Monogram, the head of the Agency.  This mission always involves dealing with the nefarious schemes of Doctor Heinz Doofenshmirtz, a crazed evil genius who invariably hatches some grandiose plot rooted in one of his many childhood traumas.

In his agent persona, Perry sports a stylish fedora, and although he can’t talk, he communicates very effectively using eye rolls and other facial expressions.  As his struggle with Doctor Doofenshmirtz reaches its climax, whatever bizarre device the Doctor has created usually misfires and either inadvertently resolves whatever jam the kids are in, snatches victory away from Candace just as she’s about to bust the brothers, or saves the day for Candace just as she’s on the verge of doing something monumentally stupid in front of Jeremy.

It’s all put together with excellent comic timing, and the voice work is great.   Candace and Dr. D. in particular are excellently done — Candace constantly skates the edge of hysteria while still projecting a unique personality, and the Doctor delivers some incredibly bizarre dialog with feeling and humanity.  Another appealing thing about the show is that the animation is fairly normal-looking instead of the almost aggressively ugly drawings in some other kids’ shows.

But the thing that really makes the show shine is the message and the relationships between the characters.  Despite Candace always trying to bust the brothers, she really loves them and has worked hard to protect them when they needed it.  In turn, Phineas and Ferb always try to help Candace out when she’s distraught over something (usually Jeremy).  Likewise, Perry and Dr. D., even though they’re each other’s “nemesis”, have each gone out of the way to protect the other when something seriously threatening is happening, and in fact exchanged gifts during the Christmas special episode.

All in all, the show presents kids using their imaginations and having good clean fun while displaying positive personality traits and resolving conflicts in a healthy way.  And it’s freaking hilarious!

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The Fading Dream

Feb 5

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Games, Humor | 3 Comments

There is a once-great nation in the world today — a nation seemingly strong and powerful, but riddled with internal decay.  A land with an uncertain future.

This nation was founded in time immemorial by an intrepid few — settlers from a far more powerful country, who brought their culture along with them to this new, virgin land.  Over time the prevailing mores and social structures would change, but in the early days the new land was in many ways very similar to the old country.

The forests, plains, and mountains of this new land were vast, but required hard work to fully develop.  The first settlers of this nation prized self-improvement and expected that they would improve themselves with time.  This bred a spirit of rugged individualism, but also fostered cooperation.  Paradoxically, their self-reliance and desire to better themselves drove them to work together to achieve ever greater achievements.

It wasn’t long before the new nation eclipsed the old, boasting more settlers and far greater wealth, despite the greater age of the mother country.  The rest of the world started to look to the new land as the leader in innovation, and immigration boomed to unprecedented heights as settlers from all over the world wanted a piece of the “good life”.

Unfortunately, with the increase of population came poverty and other social ills, and political pressure increased to provide support for the ever-increasing members of society that couldn’t seem to be productive or carry their own weight.  The original culture, where skills were prized as essential for both personal and societal advantage, began to be replaced by a growing sense of entitlement — that the nation itself owed its citizens an ever-increasing standard of living, regardless of whether the people could produce it or not.

The politicians, of course, were more than willing to give in.  The currency underwent severe inflation as the administration sought to assure everyone a basic standard of living, and although ever more sophisticated consumer goods became available, the prices continued to rise to astronomical levels.  Unfortunately for the administration, however, the hyperinflation didn’t have the desired effect.  Currency was more plentiful, but you still had to earn that currency yourself, and not everyone was able to hold a job.

The next step was to provide full employment through a menial public works program.  Legions of the underclass flocked to these simpler, less-demanding jobs as a means to achieve their dreams.  But this type of employment was considered unpleasant and degrading, and the citizens agitated for their leaders to provide a mechanism whereby they could work in businesses of their choice, but be guaranteed a certain level of income regardless of their actual profitability.  This was a far cry from the successful giant corporations of the nation’s early days, which were large industrial enterprises that employed many workers with a high degree of competition for positions.  Workers were expected to be skilled in those days and those who couldn’t pull their weight were thrown out with little concern.  These new businesses were smaller, and government subsidies (at the cost of pushing the inflation rate ever higher) reduced the risk these businesses needed to assume.

In the end, even this was superseded by an almost Marxist regime.  No longer would small businesses be formed via a person’s circle of friends and acquaintances.  What about those people who didn’t have contacts even competent enough to file the government paperwork and go through the motions required to collect their paycheck?  The government solution was to remove the limit on the number of businesses a person could be a partner in, and at the same time randomly match aspiring business owners together, in the hopes that the more entrepreneurial types would carry the load for the less capable since they could collect an additional government paycheck for a small additional amount of work.

The nation wasn’t quite at “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, but it was close, and getting closer.  Could it really take long for them to take that one final step?

What’s that?  Oh, right!  What nation am I talking about?

Why, World of Warcraft, of course!

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Baby Eat Ham

Jan 18

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | 2 Comments

Katherine has been doing very well verbally lately since Christmas break.  Whether the cause is the reduction in stress from not having school for three weeks or just the increased time at home with people who (mostly) understand her, she is doing substantially more spontaneous commenting and complex requesting.  Rather than just fall back on her stock “I want help” phrase, which can be maddening when she won’t specify what it is that she wants, she’s now using complex and sometimes synthetic terms for things she wants.

For example, the Baby Einstein Meet the Orchestra movie for a long time was “white baby movie”, which is a good description but doesn’t narrow it down from the other Baby Einstein videos, which also come in white cases.  Just recently she further specified it as “orchestra movie” which is much more clear to us.

She also got a new Littlest Pet Shop playset for Christmas, and has been referring to it as “animal playground”, which is a description she’s definitely synthesized herself, since we just recently opened that toy up for her and I’m sure she hasn’t heard it before.  In addition to that, she’s also getting mad if Thomas tries to horn in on her new toys, which is pretty developmentally appropriate even if it does cause more friction between them at times.

Along with this increased verbosity, however, is coming some willfulness when it comes to diet.  She’s almost completely given up orange juice, and she’s balking at certain types of meat that she’s liked just fine in the not-so-distant past.  This last time it was ham.

We had a very nice little boneless ham that we were serving up for supper.  It was very tasty and tender, and Katherine ate the first bite just fine.  After that, however, the response every time we tried to get her to go for a piece was “no ham!”  We tried most of the usual incentives to get her to eat it, such as offering a chocolate chip cookie for dessert if she finished the ham, and then sweetening the deal with potato chips.  Usually that will work to get her started, but not this time.  Every gambit was met with “no ham!” and strong resistance.

Finally, after several rounds of this, Katherine took the fork and held it up to Robin’s lips and said “Mom eat ham!”  So Robin did.  This, of course, caused a light to go on in Katherine’s mind and she tried it again, only to be rebuffed.  Only one “get out of ham free” card per person.  So she turned to me, with “Dad eat ham!”  This was then followed with “Thomas eat ham!”, but that still left several pieces left on her plate.  The dogs would have volunteered to help, but they were disqualified on the grounds of inhumanity, so she got creative.  She scanned the room, and noticed that I was holding Jonathan.  She got a big smile on her face.

“Baby eat ham!”

Unfortunately, we had to make it clear that Jonathan doesn’t eat food yet, and so he was unable to help her dispose of the rest of her meat.  But it was certainly fun watching her use her brain and creativity to solve her “problem”.

We did, by the way, get her to eat the rest of the ham.  I was able to convince her that by coating it in Parmesan cheese, ordinary ham is transubstantiated into a foodstuff known as “cheese ham”, and this was acceptable to her where plain ham was not.  She ate the cheese ham, moved on, and that was the last of it.

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