Prelude – Orders – Protoss – Zerg – Terrans – Wrapup

This is the first in a planned series of posts on StarCraft Boardgame strategy. In this first post, I’ll merely gloss over factions and races, and show up some general strategies that work with all races, and apply to all games. It will also mostly be about what choices are possible, since most paths can lead to victory at this stage. Later posts will cover orders in the planning phase, and individual races’ available rough strategies.

If you only have time to read a few posts, reading the one(s) about your race(s) of choice will probably be what’s best. Also, read this introduction by MrWeasely on the BoardGameGeek. The first post here is pretty generic and probably won’t teach you many new things if you played the game before, I plan to add more hints and tipps to the ones after this one.

I am talking about StarCraft plus the Brood War expansion by the way, as I really feel the expansion added some much needed diversity to some strategies and also balanced out some of the shortcomings of the original StarCraft.

Also, playing StarCraft and not having Lurkers is out of the question.

Politics

Keep in mind that StarCraft, particularly in its FFA variant, is a multiplayer game. This means that not only will you fight and threaten and act through game mechanics means, but also and in particular will you act through and with diplomacy, negotiation, generally ingame politics.

Some people don’t like ingame politics, and consequently don’t like FFA games, and that’s fine. If you play StarCraft FFA, be prepared to negotiate, bluff, and be bluffed. If you don’t like that, try to persuade your fellow players to play a team game instead, StarCraft does have rules for that.

Races

Choosing your race is the first thing that will influence your strategy, and it is very fundamental at that. It influences all the other steps in this post – but since I’ll make separate posts for all races, we’ll skip this for now.

Leadership Cards, Special Victory

The next big choice you’ll make is which Stage 1 Leadership card you want – it decides whether you have a special victory condition, or whether you’d prefer having a boost earlier in, and possibly throughout the entire game.

Not having everybody have a special victory condition will mean that if you have one, people will make sure they try to deny it to you – that’s quite different from the original Starcraft where occasionally, it was possible to sneak your special victory condition past your fellow players. The “Oops, I won!” that we’ve all seen – I remember a player being surprised by it himself, needless to say it wasn’t the most climactic game. On the other hand, those who don’t choose their special victory condition will have to go after conquest points, which makes them more predictable.

The boosts offered by the non-special victory cards can be quite significant. They also lay the path for future expansion and benefit some strategies more than others – I’ll expand upon this point in the race-specific posts as well.

Another thing the stage 1 leadership cards lay down is what starting units you will get. Those also influence your strategy and available choices … if for example you have no air defense, you will have to build it sooner than if you start with anti-air troops. If you have Ghosts at the start, it might make sense to go for Nukes. If you have many troops, you can defend a bigger area without having to build more units early on, and can expand a bit faster without leaving empty areas (where enemy troops can fall in through Warp Gates, event cards, or other silly things).

Those starting units include workers – interestingly, every faction has a card each with 7, 8 and 9 workers, being stronger and weaker unit-wise in the start, but more or less open for later expansion. If you want a slow build or much tech, you’re usually (although there’s exceptions) better off taking the one with more workers.

Planet and Base Placement

Planet placement, setting up the game board, is a very important step in the game. It might be short, and a prelude to the actual game’s happenings and battles, but it will set the stage upon which later decisions are made. It establishes who is going to be neighbours with whom, who is surrounded by enemies, and who is sitting qietly in his little corner of the galaxy, able to tech up.

There is a formula for planet resources, as found by HëllRÆZØR on the FFG forums. Unfortunatly, it doesn’t work anymore for the new Brood War planets, if somebody knows of a new formula I’ll be happy to listen. The old formula is:

3x#CP + #resources + total (unit limit above 2) – #connections + 1 if (planet has only 2 areas) + 1 for dead-end planet + 1 if (planet is named ‘Braken’) = 8

Essentially, there’s a tradeoff: More resources means more connections and areas (and thus potentially more combat), and vice versa.

What planets you get is entirely random – it can be two resource-starved ones with few connections, or two rich ones with tons of areas and many connections. If you get both a small and a large one, you have a decision to make: Will you protect your home but have fewer resources at your direct disposal, or will you have an easier time teching without expanding, but be more exposed? Personally, I usually prefer better protection – good resource areas don’t help if they’re not under your control – but that’s a matter of preference.

A good scenario is if you can seal off a smaller planet so you’re the only one who has access to it, starting from your larger planet. That probably won’t be possible if you’re among the first players, since too much will happen between your two planet placements (unless you can place the small planet second and help out with Z-Axis connections, although that would mean you’d have to place your base on the first planet), but if you’re among the last players it’s a very viable strategy. Particularly awesome if you have Typhon, of course. If you pursue that course, it can make sense to place your base on the first planet you put down. Since offense usually beats defense though, you don’t want to “dig in” or anything – treat the sealed-off planet like a satellite to the planet before it, and see to it that you have more than one connection there – or you might build yourself a death trap.

In all other cases, it’s usually better if you place your base only on the second planet – it leaves you way more strategic choices, and allows you to react to those who placed their base before you. Optimally, you want to negotiate with your neighbours, agreeing on planets you can expand to without bothering anybody too early, while preferably seeding dispute between two other parties.

Z-Axis connections then can fundamentally alter the game board, and for them it’s really important how many connections your planets have remaining – so think ahead to this bit while placing your planets already. An aggressive rush-prone Zerg will want to get close, while a Protoss planning to tech wants no direct neighbours.

As for placing bases, you’ll generally want to place them on areas that provide conquest points – as you’ll keep the resource areas even if they’re empty, but conquest points are only gained if you actually control their areas.

Strategic Rethinking

After the planets are placed, have a good look at the map. Not only is it important to realize which your neighbours are at this point, but also it’s important to see which areas around your base are available to which troops, and what areas and planets are strategically important – bottlenecks, central hubs. If you didn’t manage to get those Z-Axis connections on the board that you’d have liked, it might be time to slightly adapt your planned first turns to preemptively face a threat you didn’t anticipate.

It might even make sense to re-evaluate your long-term strategy. For example, if there’s plenty of air-only conquest point spots around your base (with Brood War and Typhon that’s the case on 5 out of 16 planets with conquest points), it might be wise to go for an at least partially air-based strategy. Or you can try and be the only one to go after the non-air spots and field anti-air (Scourges, Goliaths, Dragoons) instead. On the other hand, the Gehenna Station and Avernus Station with primarily land-only areas (and one air-only area with unit limit 2) don’t allow you to pursue an air-focused strategy if they’re the planet you start from, since you’ll just have too little space to actually build your army.

There are people who don’t like such forced strategic choices, particularly if they’re enforced by random planet distributions in the start of the game. If you’re one of them, you can always leave those planets out, or house rule that all troops can be in all areas (although you’ll probably increase the power level of the new planets by quite a bit then).

Alternatively, if you have chosen a special victory condition earlier, you might want to evaluate what the best (and sneakiest) path to that special victory condition could be – which planets have many of the areas you want to be going for, or which planets that have what you need are furthest away from what you think will be the main fight areas between other factions.

Outlook: Planning Phase

The planning phase, with its very innovative order system, is one of the areas where StarCraft really shines in my opinion. But I’ll make a separate post about this, this one here has gotten long enough already and orders do deserve special attention.

Prelude – Orders – Protoss – Zerg – Terrans – Wrapup