The Protoss are telepaths imbued with an energetic essence, and are best understood as high-tech elves. The Terrans, with their Marines and Battlecruisers, are most familiar to us, for we are their ancestors. Each civilization has its strengths and weaknesses, its preferred strategies and tactics, and its own unique blend of technology and society.
Three civilizations - called Terran, Protoss, and Zerg - compete for galactic domination, if not mere survival. In the StarCraft universe, the distant Koprulu sector of the Milky Way teems with life and strife. It is played exclusively on the personal computer and is not available for consoles. All told, the franchise sold millions of copies, saw tens of millions of downloads, and generated an ecosystem of novels, artwork, e-sports leagues, tournaments, and cash prizes that persists to this day.
Starcraft 2 terrans strategy series#
It spawned a series of follow-on expansions and a sequel, StarCraft II, released in three installments from 2010 to 2015. Developed by Blizzard Entertainment and released in 1998, this real-time strategy game went global. They were also more thrilling, at least in the moment, than turn-based strategy games like Civilization. These required more thought - arguably more malice aforethought - than the first-person shooters ( Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake, GoldenEy e) that garnered periodic bursts of outrage from concerned parents. Among a certain subset, real-time strategy games ( Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, Dune 2) were the pinnacle. Millennials grew up playing computer games designed by Gen Xers and Boomers. If we really want to equip ourselves for competition with other great powers (an imperfect framework to understand twenty-first-century geopolitics but probably the least imperfect of all the contenders), then the type of game to play is “real-time strategy,” and the name of the game is StarCraft. In this light-hearted vein, let’s discard conventional games as the relics of the past that they are. Note the allusion, intentional or not, to gameplay. Washington’s casual invocation of the rules-based international order has become so constant a refrain that it borders on the meaningless. The time to have fun brainstorming through wargaming is when we’re not at war. However weighty the subject, it’s important not to take these things too seriously. Military operations in Southeast Asia, the Balkans, and the Middle East were all justified on the basis of domino theory, while the Soviet empire collapsed like a house of cards. Strategists imagine themselves playing 3D chess and accuse their political opponents of playing checkers. Perhaps most frequently, strategic metaphors relate to games. And, of course, don’t forget Winston Churchill’s routinely mis-quoted description of the snout and belly of the European crocodile.
Sometimes it is physical: the Syrian civil war is a vortex that sucks, in more ways than one. Sometimes it is biological: the spider web of terrorism, the lily pads of counterterrorism. Sometimes it is architectural: Iran and Saudi Arabia were President Nixon’s “twin pillars” of stability in the Middle East, while that region was one of three pillars of British imperial strategy after World War II.
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