Multiple Building Selection in Starcraft 2

Multiple Building Selection (or MBS) is a rather simple UI feature that exists in almost every recent RTS game. In many old RTSes, the player can only select one building at a time – so, in a game with a lot of production buildings, the player must either devote all his hotkeys to building selection (leaving none for his army) or all his time to jumping back to his base and quickly selecting his buildings and tapping unit production hotkeys. At high levels of play in Starcraft, most players play a careful balancing game with time – at some points during large battles, one must jump back to their base and produce units, or else one will fall behind in army production and simply be overwhelmed, no matter how well one can dance his units. However, one must also pay attention to micromanagement of his units during crucial battles, or else the opponent will be able to skirt around his army and decimate a much larger force with several well-managed units. This conflict – how much time one can spend on macromanagement and how much time one can spend on micromanagement without falling behind in one or the other – is the fundamental principle of modern competitive Starcraft. Because it is physically impossible to accomplish both perfectly, i.e. to macro with 100% efficiency and micro your army quickly and cleverly at the same time, players are constantly striving to improve at both and find a balance between the two that allows them to gain an edge.

Because this balance is a delicate and crucial one, MBS is pretty controversial in any serious discussion about competitive Starcraft and its sequel. The ultimate question is: will MBS affect this balance so much that competitive Starcraft 2 will suffer, or is it ultimately a largely inconsequential change that will really only show a significant effect in low-level play?

Streamlining the UI is not Always Good.

When discussing MBS, a lot of different arguments get tossed around. Some people say that MBS is simply streamlines the UI, and therefore allows the game to be more accessible and less frustrating. These people usually go on to say that the UI is really just an artificial barrier between what we want to happen and what we can tell a computer to do using a keyboard.






Firstly, making the UI easier is not always good by any means. Part of any game is the way we interact with it, and what commands it will understand. It’s quite obvious that changing the UI in an FPS will affect how people play that FPS – if Counter-Strike had an auto-aim feature that always got headshots, it would clearly be a different game. Moreover, adding an auto-aim feature is clearly a UI change – the mouse is simply the tool we use to aim, as the keyboard is the tool we use to select buildings, and just like we would always like to select all our buildings in an RTS, we would also always like to get headshots in Counter-Strike. Take, for a more concrete example, the Decursive controversy in World of Warcraft. Decursive was a simply UI modification that allowed the Priest to quickly and efficiently de-curse allies during a hectic encounter. Because the ability to remove curses was crucial, this UI mod changed Priest gameplay significantly, and made raid instances much easier. Decursive didn’t just make the game easier for new players; it changed World of Warcraft’s gameplay on a fundamental level, and made it a good deal easier to play.

Starcraft is an RTS!

Some people say: well, yes, changing the UI will affect Starcraft 2’s gameplay. But Starcraft 2 is an RTS, not an FPS, so strategy should be the thing that determines who wins and who loses, not how many times you can click every minute!

Well, no. Yes, RTS has the word strategy in it, but there is one key difference between a TBS and an RTS: an RTS is real-time. In a turn-based game like Civilization and Dominions, streamlining the UI is almost uniformly welcome, as those games truly are meant to be about strategy and very little else. However, an RTS is about clicking speed, in the same way that an FPS is about how well you can aim; that’s what makes Starcraft different from Civilization. In both RTSes and FPSes, strategy and tactics are important, but so is one’s ability to move the mouse, and moving the mouse is an important and interesting skill. Guitar Hero is a game purely about skill, there is no strategy, yet Guitar Hero is interesting and difficult to learn and master, not simply an object of rote memorization. The same is true with DDR, Beatmania, or even the act of playing a song on the guitar. All of those things are skills, in the same way that being able to use the mouse quickly and efficiently is a skill, yet none of them are trivial or any less impressive for being “just a skill.”





Starcraft is an RTS, not a TBS. It is truly difficult and interesting to gain APM (actions per minute) and increase one’s speed, and that has, as a whole, helped the conflict between micromanagement and macromanagement shape Starcraft as a competitive game. Clearly, strategy matters – but it’s not the only thing that matters, nor should it be.

Depth in Competitive Starcraft and Starcraft 2

So far, two things have been established. One, streamlining the UI does affect the gameplay of an RTS. Two, the skill of managing the UI and one’s ability to use the mouse is an important thing that has helped to shape the unprecedented success of competitive Starcraft. Therefore, the issue of MBS must be taken into consideration – does it actually trivialize the skill of APM and the divide in attention, or does it simply redirect its focus? One of the skills that Starcraft’s current pro scene rests on is the division of attention between micromanagement and macromanagement. However, the fact that the division is between micromanagement and macromanagement is less important than the simple fact that there is a division at all. There is a basic idea that drives competitive Starcraft forward: in order to play perfectly, a player should really be doing five separate actions at once – however, that is physically impossible, so the player is always trying to react more quickly and weigh the tasks so he spends less time on tasks that are less important. In this way, competitive Starcraft has evolved from its early micromanagement-heavy stages, through its middle macromangement-heavy stages, and now to its current state, in which the two are weighed somewhat equally.

However, it’s not really important that the division is between macromanagement and micromanagement. What’s important is that there are always several actions which the player wants to do at once, but he can only focus on one. These decisions, as long as they are interesting and important, could be all about micromanagement or all about macromanagement.

In recent demos of Starcraft 2, Teamliquid.net fielded two good players, who, although nowhere near pro-level, reported to be able to macromanage almost perfectly in Starcraft 2, i.e. there was never a time when they wanted to build units and had the money but weren’t able to because of micromanagement in a large battle or paying attention to the timing of an expansion, and they attributed this largely to MBS. During these debates over MBS, many people tend to use Warcraft 3 as an example of a game with trivialized macromangement that still worked on a competitive level. However, Starcraft 2 is shaping up to be more like Starcraft and less like Warcraft 3. Competitive Warcraft 3 is interesting because the decisions in micromanagement are interesting, because there are so few units and every one of them counts. However, in Starcraft (and therefore probably Starcraft 2) units are more expendable, are produced more quickly, and die more quickly – therefore, micromanagement is less crucial than it is in Warcraft 3. Will the micromanagement decisions in Starcraft 2 really be interesting enough to balance out the relative removal of macromanagement through MBS? It’s hard to say without a physical copy of the game, but if Starcraft 2 wants to be anywhere near as deep (and, therefore, as competitively successful) as its predecessor, it’s going to have to make up lost ground. MBS can only narrow the focus of the game; it can only remove important decisions and conflicts, and Starcraft 2 is going to have to struggle to find a conflict in attention and interests as important as the one that gave Starcraft such incredible depth.