The first thing I did when I reached home was to boot up my computer. Launching my game, I waited for Spacecraft to update itself with the new patch. Honestly, I wasn't being entirely truthful when I told Gary that I hadn't touched the game for months. I wasn't shameless enough to go back to Team Solid without at least checking out the new patch and having a few trial games the previous night.
Needless to say, I lost almost all of them, but I was too embarrassed to admit that fact to Gary. As a former professional gamer (who retired a couple of years ago), how could I tell Gary that I got crushed like a noob a couple of times last night?
Nope, I was taking this secret to the grave with me.
Even so, I didn't feel disheartened. Losing was only natural. As much as those crazy webnovels would have you believe, there was no player who won every single match. Not a single one. Invincible god mode Mary Sue characters did not exist in real life, no matter how much you wished they did.
The true test was not whether you could win all your matches or not, but how you bounced back after a defeat.
Yet so many readers and writers didn't understand – the former, in particular, would haunt the comments crying and wailing about how "pathetic" or "weak" the protagonist was the moment he lost a game. Like, seriously? Don't underestimate professional gaming, you bloody amateurs! You think the rest of the world exist for you to curbstomp and own, is it? Don't be ridiculous. Even champions could be defeated. Naru, who won 4 GSL titles, did so not without a 100% win-rate, but because he won more than he lost. Losing was not the end. Everyone lost. The challenge lay in how you react to your loss, and how you clawed your way up for a comeback.
I wasn't arrogant enough to think I could just waltz into the professional gaming after having retired for two years…okay, maybe I was. what I meant to say was that I wasn't arrogant enough to think that I was entitled to be placed in Grand Masters rank right from my first game. If so much had changed over the last two years, then perhaps I should first return to the basics and begin from there. Start from scratch and slowly climb my way up the leagues.
After all, that was how I first started. Nine years ago, when I first played Spacecraft (right from its release date), I had been placed in Bronze. Okay, that wasn't entirely accurate. I was placed in Bronze several weeks after I first played Spacecraft, mostly because I spend those first weeks completing the single player campaign and getting all the Achievements (I was particularly proud of my Feat of Strength achievements where I completely destroyed the enemy even though the objective only needed me to collect a certain amount of resources).
Those were the days…I fell in love with Spacecraft because of its story…the narrative, the lore and the fluff behind the universe, and not solely because of the RTS game itself.
"Huh, there are no new races."
Despite the newest expansion, I noticed that there were still only three races. The human Terrans, the alien Demons, and the highly advanced Psidorks. According to the storyline, forty millenniums have passed, and humans had spent it cultivating…ahem, I mean expanding an intergalactic empire throughout the stars. In the midst of their colonization of planets and terraforming them for human habitation, they encountered the interdimensional Demons, which emerge from an alternate hellish reality, invade our material universe, corrupt our planets and basically…maim and slaughter. Then we had the aloof and conservative but highly technologically advanced and psychic alien race, the Psidorks, who were alarmed at the rate the humans were expanding across the galaxy, and reacted…pretty in a hostile manner, to say the least. They were also targeted by the Demons, who were drawn to their psychic powers.
Yeah, humans also developed psychic abilities, but these were far and few in between. You could build them as special operative units in the game, and they were spell casters.
Anyway, the three races waged an eternal war against each other, and that was pretty much the state of things. There were rumblings in the Internet that the company, Hailstorm, planned to advance the storyline through online multiplayer campaigns and new added content, but for now they remained obscure rumors in the War Net forums.
For now, I decided to play a practice game with the artificial intelligence instead of plunging straight back to online multiplayer (and getting owned like a noob again, like last night). The goal this time was to familiarize myself with the new units and mechanics, not win. Well, it was related – if I wanted to win, I need to relearn the game instead of experimenting blindly against a merciless human opponent.
"I'll go with hard difficulty, though," I mumbled, selecting the second highest AI. Brutal was a bit too much for me at the moment (and I might as well practice against fellow Bronze League heroes instead), but easy and medium AI were too…bluntly put, they didn't offer any challenge to me at all. Even though I was out of practice, I was still a seasoned veteran. Also, the easy AI tended to go MIA once they failed to kill me in the first few waves and stopped building new units. I didn't know if it was a bug or something.
The medium AI was too forgiving, and I wanted the AI to tech up all the way to its strongest units, or I wouldn't familiarize myself with the other races either.
"Of course I'll choose Terran," I mumbled when the game prompted me to select a race. I did so, and found myself placed in the shoes of an Imperial Commander defending a human colony. I selected Demons to be my opponent for now, and waited for the game to load. A few seconds later, I was staring at my Command Headquarters. The Engineers, which served as worker-type units who harvested resources and repaired mechanical units and structures, automatically hovered toward the mineral patches and began mining them.
Pushing my glasses up my nose, I nodded thoughtfully.
"They really changed how the economy works, huh?"
In the previous iterations of the game, we started out with five workers each. However, in the latest iteration, we now had eight workers right from the start. I could see my resources tab spiking up quicker than before.
"They weren't kidding when they said they increased the number of workers to make the game faster," I remarked. As Spacecraft was meant to be an esport – in other words, a game designed to be watched by spectators, having a slow start would kill off viewership, unless you were one of those puritan, hardcore fans who hated any kind of changes. I was able to build a refinery over a gas geyser, to collect terrazine gas for hi-tech units and structures, a second supply structure to raise the supply cap of my army, and soon I could begin constructing a Barracks.
The game was divided into three different types of resources – minerals, gas and supply. All units and structures required minerals to build, no matter what. They were the basic building block and the most readily available currency – I could see eight mineral patches, and it was optimal for me to have sixteen Engineers mining from them. Another three were required for the refinery I had just built on the gas geyser – gas was a relatively rarer resource, but the geysers offered an abundance of terrazine gas. They were required for hi-tech, expensive units, some of which had abilities. Almost all of the hi-tech mechanical units I favored cost gas, as well as the upgrades for them.
The last resource was supply, and unlike the other two it wasn't something you could collect. The headquarters structure offered 15 supply (which was an increase, compared to the 10 supply it offered in previous iterations). So we usually started with 15, which meant we could only build a number of units of the equivalent supply. Let's say Engineers – since these basic worker units each cost 1 supply, I could only build 15 of them before I was forced to find a way to increase my supply cap further.
That was where the supply building for me came in – supply warehouses provided 8 supply each, and by building these structures, I could increase my supply cap and build more units for my army. Of course, they cost a relatively cheap 100 minerals to build.
However, I couldn't just build 15, or even 19 workers (20, because one was always building a new structure somewhere in my base) immediately. While developing a robust economy was important so that you would have enough resources to build a sizable and strong army, you needed combat units to defend your workers and bases. Otherwise having all the resources in the world was useless while your base gets razed to the ground and your workers get slaughtered. And since the victory condition was to destroy all enemy structures (or get your opponent to surrender)…as long as your opponent doesn't have even one combat unit to defend, you could raze all of his structures with a single squad.
That was why I built a Barracks immediately after laying down a supply warehouse. I watched the mini-map on the bottom left of my screen warily, but my AI opponent had yet to send any forces to harass my base or scout my build order. If it was a human opponent, he would have been a bit faster and a lot more fastidious about scouting me out. I would have too, but I was familiar with the AI's build order and strategies, so I focused instead on familiarizing myself with my army and structures.
By the first minute, the Barracks was done and I was training a new Marine. At that moment, I noticed the first signs of hostile enemies in my mini-map. The AI had sent a couple of hellhounds into my base, to harass my workers and disrupt my economy as much as possible.
"Naïve."
I immediately raised the supply warehouses. Even though they were structures that provided supply, they could also be used as defensive walls to deny my opponents entry into my base. By building them at the top of my ramp, I cut off all access to my base.
The supply warehouses were flexible structures that could be raised to block off enemy access, and lowered so that my own units could exit my base down the ramps. For now, the hellhounds tore and attacked my supply warehouses, but structures had a lot of health and armor. They would need to assault continuously for a minute or two before it went into the red and blew up.
By now the marine was completed. Exiting the barracks, he raised his pulse rifle and blew one of the hellhounds to bits. The other turned tail and fled, and while the rudimentary AI of my marine automatically directed him to pursue, he found his path blocked by the raised supply warehouse and thus couldn't go anywhere.
"Good," I murmured to myself. I trained a second marine for safety, and then began building a Factory. By now I also had enough minerals to build a second headquarters, and I did so in the safety of my walled off base. Once I had enough marines, I added a medic to heal them up and sent them to a second area where more mineral patches and a geyser lay. As I expected, my opponent had posted a force of hellhounds there to delay my expansion, and I ordered my units to open fire. The hellhounds twisted around and pounced on the marines, who lay down a suppressing hail of fire to tear them open. A couple of them managed to reach one of my marines and tore into him.
The marine neither flinched nor faltered, and continued firing into his assailants, and would have until he was dead. Thankfully, the medic was around, and she immediately cast a healing spell to restore his health back to full.
By the time the six or so hellhounds were slain, I had lost none of my three marines and medic. With the medic around, my marines could defeat an enemy twice their number. Well, obviously the larger the armies grew, the less the medic's healing abilities scaled. I would need more medics in a bigger battle. For example, twenty-five marines were not going to win against fifty hellhounds, not unless I had twenty medics or so backing them up. By then, marines weren't going to win a battle on their own, they were going to need more support, such as Dreadnoughts, and perhaps tanks. However, Terran players who chose that route rarely built mechanical units like tanks, Titans and Salamanders. They were playing what we called biological (or bio for short), relying on cheap, biological infantry that could be amassed in huge numbers, receiving healing support, were fast and mobile. They couldn't win in direct fights, but excelled in hit and run tactics, were easily and quickly replaceable and rebuilt. Many of the younger players favored them in particular because of their micro potential.
Being an older player, I disliked them. I preferred hi-tech, mechanical units that possessed immense firepower, incredible durability and armor and high health.
That was why I was building several factories right now. I only needed that single barracks because I didn't plan on building any more marines or infantry. However, the barracks was a prerequisite to building a factory, otherwise everyone would rush up the tech tree to build the most powerful units.
While I expanded and developed the infrastructure in my base so that I could begin building an entire army in bulk, the enemy had not been idle. Hordes of hellhounds roamed about a small distance away from my recently acquired expansion. Gargoyles swooped in from above to harass my base, but I made sure to construct missile turrets to chase them off, along with the patrolling squad of marines. Alas, I lost my infantry to a roving band of hellhounds when I strove to expand to a third base and patch of resources, but my new squadron of Salamander scout buggies rolled up and torched them with their flamethrowers.
Once the area was clear, I floated a third headquarters into the base so that my new entourage of workers could begin harvesting the resources located there. Another stream of hellhounds, accompanied by brutes, came in, but I had my Salamander scout buggies transform into Salamander battle armor, bipedal walkers with 50% more health and armor than their scout forms (which were 50% faster). Raising their shields, they formed an impassible wall and incinerated the incoming demons. The dog-like hellhounds were the first to die, but the four-legged, horned brutes took a bit more heat. Reminiscent of buffalos, the heavily armored brutes withstood most of the flames before they were finally scorched into ash and blown away. I had several of my Engineers quickly repair my Salamander battle armor. They were cheap – costing only 100 minerals – but I needed to keep their number high, or they wouldn't serve as sufficient meatshields for my much more expensive tanks and Titans.
A hiss and the red icons indicated on my mini-map – thanks to my newly constructed radar tower – told me that I had company.
"Vipers," I murmured. The ranged monsters reared back and spat acid at my Salamanders, who bravely marched forward amidst the deadly sprays to bathe the approaching demons in hellfire. However, most of my Salamanders, despite their high health, were destroyed before they could reach the Vipers' lines.
It was time for some heavy firepower.
"Bring in the big guns," I ordered as I moved my mouse and commanded a new unit to take up positions in my third base. As they rolled into view onscreen, I smiled to myself.
It felt good playing the game again.