Starcraft 2 Guide

There are a lot of guides out there now for Starcraft 2. Because it is a brand new Real Time Strategy game, many people are having trouble competing online. They don’t know what units to build, how many or in what order, and they get consistently slaughtered by people who have been playing Real Time Strategy games for years.

Well, after reviewing several of the guides out there, I will give you the skinny on the pros and cons of each and recommend which one you should spend your money on. In order to really enjoy the game, it helps to have someone more experienced explain what you should be doing and why, and the only way to get that outside of buying a guide is to know someone who is very good at the game and is willing to give you lessons.

Shokz Guide – I was very suspicious of Shokz guide because he claimed to have a complete campaign guide included before the campaign was even available. This guide came out in the beta before anyone outside of Blizzard Entertainment had ever played the campaign.

Shokz guide is really flashy and has fancy video links and a forum in the members area. The guide does a good job teaching specific build orders for Terran, Zerg, and Protoss, but it doesn’t really explain WHY you should be doing the things you’re doing. This would be like in school if your math teacher taught you that 20 divided by 10 was 2, but never taught you how to divide. I think in order for new players to really get better, they’re going to need to know the WHY behind what they’re doing.

T-Dub’s guide had good graphics and is organized very well, but let’s just say that whoever he paid to write it really had no idea what they were talking about. Yes, they watched HD Starcraft and HuskyStarcraft videos and talked about a few good strategies, but one of the strategies in the guide is, get this: “Build a Mothership, 8-9 Colossus and 4-5 Sentries. When the enemy attacks, use the Vortex ability on their army then surround it with Force Fields. When the enemy units come out of the Vortex, have your Colossus positioned around them in a circle and insta-kill their entire army.”

If you’re a new player, this is a TERRIBLE strategy. Do you realize how much gas is required to make that many Colossus, then also tech up to a Mothership? Oh, and Sentries are 100 gas each, too. By then your opponent could have 10 Battlecruisers, which your Colossus can’t even hit.

Also, some of the links to videos in T-Dub’s guide actually link to videos that are only available to people who have purchased Shokz’ Guide.  Not very smooth there, T-Dub.

Gavin Garrett’s Guide, a.k.a. The Ultimate Starcraft 2 Guide, may not be as sexy as those others, but the information in this guide is priceless. I don’t know about you, but when I buy a game guide, I want it to teach me how to get better at the game, not impress me with fancy graphics and videos and have a bunch of filler crap in them.

Gavin’s guide only has strategies that work, but on top of that, it teaches you WHY you should be doing the things you are doing, so that with study and practice, you will know how to adapt to the unpredictable situations you’ll see when playing against real people.

Other guides are paint-by-numbers systems that tell you what counters what, what all the hotkeys are and different build orders. Gavin’s guide does all of that but with theory and expertise behind it so eventually you won’t need the numbers to paint anymore and you’ll even start painting your own original pictures.

For more information about Gavin’s Guide here.