Anatomy of a StarCraft 2 Multiplayer Match

This was originally going to be Terran-specific, but I decided to make a fir

A match of multiplayer StarCraft 2 has two specific focuses: Timing and Efficiency.

“Timing”, in this case, refers to the balancing act that one plays between economy, buildings, and army to purposefully engage the enemy player(s) at the earliest possible moment.

“Efficiency”, in this case, is making the most effective use of units to deal the most possible damage to the opponent while limiting or negating any potential damage to yourself.

In an ideal situation, before their opponent has a chance to meaningfully respond, a player would fatally cripple the opponents ablity to engage them meaningfully in the early minutes of the match, all while not losing any of their units in the process. However, the reality is that matches tend to become knockdown-dragout races to the finish, with each player attempting to get a slight advantage over the other and attempting to maintain that advantage until the game has ended. This is done typically with matchup knowledge, trading units efficiently, and subversion (that is, “mindgames”; leading the opponent to make decisions based on false knowledge, and then using that against them).

The match ends in one of two ways: either player submits, or all of their bases and buildings have been destroyed.

In our earlier “timing” definition, we described a balancing act between the economy, buildings, and units. Just to go into two of the three subjects briefly:

Economy:

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In each match, both players have 3 resources from which they can draw from in order to serve their purposes whatever that may be: Minerals, Gas, and Energy.

Minerals, which take the appearance of light-blue crystals, are the general-purpose resource. They are used for everything in the match, from making buildings to creating new units. These resources are collected by worker units, which each race in the game have variants of.

Gas (or Vespene Gas, if you want to be more lore-accurate) is a less plentiful resource than Minerals, and is used in “special” construction. This is typically used in buildings to create add-ons to buildings for different intended effects, or in specific types of units. Like minerals, gas is also collected by worker units. They take the appearance of geysers sprung from the ground, called “Vespene Geysers” in-game.

Energy is a building-specific or unit-specific resource which is used to activate abilities those buildings or units may have. Energy has no physical representation (other than its purple UI bar), and replenishes over time.

In any given match, the Economy represents the total measure of resource collection against the aggregate use of those resources. This means that a strong economy should regularly have a collection rate that eclipses that of their resource usage at any given time.

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Buildings:

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Luckily, the Liquipedia article on this subject gives us a good rundown of the builing types.

Townhalls, otherwise known as “main buildings” or “bases”, are the most important building in the game, and it is both where worker units are produced AND where those worker units bring resources they’ve gathered.

Gas Buildings are built on top of Vespene Geysers in order to be able to mine Vespene Gas from them; gas cannot be harvested otherwise.

Supply Buildings are buildings that serve to increase the amount of units a player can field at one time until the maxium of 200 supply is reached. Technically, Zerg is different in this capacity, as they produce units called “Overlords” (shown above) that provide supply, rather than using buildings like the other two races.

Static Defense is as it sounds: buildings made to occupy a single position and stay there to defend anything in in that area.

Production Buildings are responsible for producing units of various types, other than the worker units produced by the bases.

Upgrade Buildings are responsible for upgrading attack and armor of the race’s ground and air forces.

Technology-Only Buildings are buildings that unlock new units or other buildings, without offering production of any type.

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