I have never been a competitive person. When I play games, including sports, my main purpose is to have fun, not to win. That has always put me at a disadvantage when playing games against more competitive personalities. But I don’t care. Especially in those anonymous online games, I love coming up with weird things I can do to mess with other people, or just create a comical situation in the game. Games are supposed to be fun.
Back in the late 90’s when I was in college, I started a Starcraft clan. We called ourselves the Metal Militia, after an early Metallica song. We had over 50 members. One of the best features of the group was that we had one of the best clan websites out there. On the site, there were rosters, rules, calendars, map downloads, strategy guides, and more. This article from the original clan website might still be useful today. The concepts are general enough to apply to Starcraft, Starcraft II, or even other games.
This is some of the fun stuff I do in Starcraft games after I get bored. Some of them are more fun against computer opponents because they are stupid. Others are fun to do to totally throw off and confuse human opponents. Remember, Starcraft is a game, and games are for fun, not competition!
Cloning Workers
Hallucinate enemy workers while they are mining minerals. The enemy workers stop working to attack the hallucinations.
UFOs
Hallucinate dropships and randomly send them to enemy bases. Build up a massive force of hallucinated dropships to freak out your opponent. Occasionally mix in some real drops!
Restricted Mineral Patches
Burrow zerglings at expansion resource patches. Make sure you burrow them on the spot where enemies would typically build their command centers. Newbies may not understand what’s going on when they can’t build close to the mineral patch!
Pacifist Protoss
Only make cannons and drones throughout the game. Expand all over the place and build cannons everywhere with surplus minerals. It won’t win you any games but it can be fun. If you start getting too many minerals, then you can build up an army fast and attack (build like ten gateways).
Robin Hood and His Merry Men
Put a marine behind every tree and make sure they hold the position. It can be very fun on maps with lots of trees, like Sherwood Forest. You can destroy entire expansions with a handful of marines hiding behind trees.
Call the Wild
Build lots of Dark Archons and mind control as many critters as you can. Then make your critters patrol the entrance to your base!
Creeping Death
Build sunken colonies and spore colonies throughout the map. Try to cover the entire map with Zerg creep.
Patton’s Push
Keep building tanks til you reach your supply limit, then send them all into your opponents base at once. Don’t siege them, because that spoils the fun and slows you down.
Million Man March
Make as many of the same unit as possible and flood them into your opponents base. I like using zerglings because you can make up to 400 of them in a game!
Fun With File Saving
During a game with human players, save the game with creative filenames. Try saving as “Private Ryan”, “Myself from the Zerg”, or “Virus to Hard Disk”. Be creative. All the players in the game will see messages pop up on their screens like “Saving Virus to Hard Disk”.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
Only build workers throughout the game and mine as fast as you can at as many mineral patches as you can. When you want some action, try sending 50 workers to your opponents base to steal gas and minerals. Maybe you can even park a command center inside an enemy base and use 50 workers to mine, attack, and repair your center as it gets attacked.
Follow the Leader
At the beginning of games against the computer, send a worker to a computer base, attack one of their workers once, then run away. The computer doesn’t know better and it’ll send all of the computer workers to follow your worker that attacked them. Lead the computer workers all over the map. It’s fun.
Safety Chain
Make lots of science vessels (or any flying unit for that matter) and make them follow each other in a chain. Then send out your chain all over the map.
Nuclear Testing
Build about ten nuclear silos on any money map, then sprinkle the map with nukes. Be wasteful and unpredictable with your nukes. Nuke spots for no reason sometimes. Make your opponent think you’re psycho. Maybe you can even get your teammate to say “Stop!” to make the enemy believe that you’ve turned on your teammate. Just keep it clean and don’t actually nuke your teammate!
Regrettably I haven’t played Starcraft for many years, but always think of how fun it was playing and building friendships on that game. This article brings back a lot of memories. Every six months or so for the past two or three years I’ve been submitting a Google search to try and find Mm’s old forums or websites in attempt to reconnect with some of the guys. Finally the other day one of my searches lead to these articles. I have always stayed in contact with a few members via Facebook. Maybe some of the other old members are also searching and may find this in a similar way. -mmd
StarCraft left me with similar memories. I was in “the other Metal Militia clan.” I formed it when I was a freshman in college, 1998-ish. I think I handed off leadership of the clan and stopped playing around 2000, when I moved to work an internship. The clan fell apart soon after, but I maintained contact with a few of the members for years afterward. Some former members told me how much of a great influence the clan had on their lives. You never know what small gestures you do every day will have a big impact on the lives of others.
I hope you find your old buddies, JC. Have a happy new year.
I was able to install my old SC 1998 Classic and have begun playing again with my same old name. make-my-day[Mm]. If you ever play the classic one feel free to add me.
Random I was in the same clan as you make my day [mm] crazy!!! My daughter now plays pc games and I was telling her all about my days gaming on Starcraft. I googled and came across this.