How to Win 1 vs 6 in Brood War
This may be titled as if this is a strategy guide. But that was clickbait. This is a horror story.
The year was 2000. We were all thirteen or so, still full of excitement over the sheer fact that our telephone lines could link up eight people for battle. We were chatty, both in the lobbies and throughout the game. The internet was a beautiful place. Anything was possible—even getting an account with a hundred wins and not a single loss. We had seen the guys who attempted this feat; we knew so by the way they forced a disconnect when they were close to taking a loss—because back then, even Blizzard was so naive think gamers wouldn’t abuse the disconnect function.
And how did some of us go about winning game after game without any trouble? You know it: 7 vs 1 Comp Stomp! Games that lasted less than five minutes—a quick and clean win to add to the record, then run it again. It may sound boring, but we were on a task to optimize these runs. We switched from comp stomping on Big Game Hunters to a 96x96 micro map, where the map was crunched in by a border, and everyone had a stacked mineral patch, so they could have just a bit of room to build a few buildings in their cubicle-sized base. Games lasted just a couple of minutes this way.
When that got boring, people started to unally right before the game ended. That’s where things got interesting. And that’s where this story begins, with what seemed like just another comp stomp on a micro map. The computer was taken down by a couple of Zergs who four-pooled. The familiar words appeared on screen: Computer 1 was Defeated. And then the moment of tension… Would we see a victory screen or would the mystery plot begin?
The game persisted. Someone had unchecked that ‘Allied Victory’ box. Someone amongst us was a backstabber.
Figuring out the who of this was almost a futile effort. Sure, computer geniuses later solved this with a simple program that could alert them when someone unallied. But this was the year 2000, my dudes. We were nowhere near this technology yet. We had to solve this mystery the old fashioned way: with wild accusations and random outbursts of attacks. Anyone who dared to lag and cause the ‘Waiting for Players’ screen to pop up for even a second was done for. Throw out too many accusations and soon three or four people would have enough grudge to kill you. No one was enough of your friend to try to save you. If we were smart and stayed calm, then in many ways, this was a waiting game, to see who would leave and take a loss rather than stick it out.
One thing that certainly could never happen was one lone backstabber killing all six of us. So if we just stuck it out and kept building up, without tearing each other down too much, the logic of staying unallied would only yield a waste of time. It may have seemed like a stupid game, but that’s life sometimes. For us, the reward of defeating a backstabber in an arms race and psychological warfare was our jam.
We went through all those motions. Then something very peculiar about this map came to light—something we should have realized from the moment we loaded in…
None of the bases had gas.
All seven of us were mining minerals only—stuck on tier-one tech. Not an issue when we were just trying to run over a computer with Zerglings, Marines, and Zealots. But with a backstabber amongst us, any oddity about the map was a massive red flag.
We searched the map all around. Was there really no gas anywhere?
Oh, yes there was. On the border area, which normally was barren, there was a set of mineral patches and two geysers. And the Yellow Terran, the game host, was already flying his Command Center, Barracks, and Engineering Bay there.
Well, we had our backstabber. But what could be done? We were trapped in by a moat. The only way to get to him was to fly out. And the only way to fly was to either have Terran buildings or gas. Half of us had neither. He now had both.
A couple of us playing Terran made an attempt to get there, but the backstabber was already on the sacred ground, building turrets to make us fly in at a distance, pumping out Marines from two Barracks, soon to be a third. We had a tiny hope of landing our four Barracks and squeezing out just enough Marines to overtake him. But we were too late. The backstabber was up to a pack of eight. The Barracks were burning into the red, and any lone Marine that popped out died before getting off his second burst.
By the way, the backstabber had a Factory on the way. Once he was a bit more fortified, he’d be able to easily shoot down the other five Barracks we were building. The sacred ground was firmly his. We had to relent.
Those of you who know the tech trees in Brood War (and that better be all of you) know that from that moment, the game’s diagnosis was in. One smart guy amongst us accepted his fate and fled the game. The rest of us held onto our denial. Defeat was still plenty far away. There had to be some way to outsmart him, right? It just seemed impossible that he could kill all five of us who remained…
But this map was engineered to let him do exactly that. Once his tanks gained Siege Mode, he placed them on the edge of the border and they had just enough range to shoot down our workers—not that we could do much with them anyways. All we could do was mine minerals and build static defense, Cannons, Turrets, or Spore Colonies, which could never win for us, but they would delay the inevitable. Maybe—just maybe—the guy would get tired of whittling us down and he’d bail.
Ah, of course that was hopeless. Who wouldn’t enjoy the process of using superior units to whittle down a bunch of caged nooblets? We were bound to run out of whatever money we had saved up, as we tucked all our units in, as far away from the tanks as possible, giving up the space for him to shuttle units to our ground and push in. We could type all the messages enflamed with rage, any appeal to reason known to man—that he was a coward, a trickster, probably a scummy hacker. But he just pressed on, laying waste to the bloody Marines, mowing down the decrying Zerglings, evaporating the Zealots. It was a horror that has left us with so much post-traumatic stress that anytime one of us sees a patch of minerals without gas we have flashbacks to that day.
gg?
Who could really hate him for staying silent and pressing on? He, and whatever twisted mind had spawned this map, were also kind of geniuses. And every one of us were going to go off and host our own version of this map, for six new unsuspecting nooblets. He had opened our minds to something we didn’t know was possible in this game. That one can indeed turn on six unsuspecting teammates and kill them all.