How StarCraft II will change your views on the RTS genre

The reason we're here in Blizzard's HQ is to see the official unveiling of the Zerg. If you're a) a StarCraft fan, or b) consume game news daily, you probably knew about this before we did - a prior unveiling in Korea and time-zones meant the info andnew trailerhad already hit the web before we even got there. But what the Internet already had couldn't compare with the opportunity to sit down with the game for two days straight.

In brief the Zerg make up the third race of warring factions in the StarCraft game world. Broadly speaking they are the animalistic, insectoidal organic beings of the game, opposed to the robotic, mech/human getup of the Terran and the more traditional Star Trek alien wares of the Protoss. These three groups hate each other and you get to choose who to side with and lead into battle. Even more briefly, StarCraft's gameplay is thus: collect resources, build things and then fight - really frigging fast. (For more info on previous StarCraft II announcements clickhere.)

The Zerg are fundamentally different to other races in the way you approach building units, structures and foot soldiers. The foundation of their race is a Hatchery, a kind of termite’s nest that spawns a writhing larva every thirty seconds. These larvas are the basis of everything in the Zerg hierarchy. As well as morphing them into Zerg units, they can mutate themselves into the various structures you need to grow your army. One path you could take, for example, is to create an army of Roaches.

Here's how it would work:

1. Start collecting minerals and vespene gas. These are the two essential resources and the 'currency' of StarCraft II.

2. As soon as you have enough resources, send one of your Drones (the Zerg worker unit) to morph into a Spawning Pool. This is a necessary step to create a Roach Den which is where your Roach army will hatch from.

3. Create your Roach Den.

4. Now, each time your Hatchery spits out new larvae, you can choose to grow it into a Roach.

5. As you continue to collect minerals clicking on the Roach Den will offer you the chance to upgrade the level of your Roaches making them change visually and increasing their attack power and their ability to absorb damage.

6. Roaches kick ass.

The strategic advantage of the Zerg is the immediacy that their style of evolution brings. Take Terran for example. In order to create their base units, the Marines, you need to put time and resources into creating a Barracks and then wait for the foot soldiers to emerge one by one. However the Zerg hatchery is also the 'barracks', removing that additional ‘build’ step from the process.

A particularly effective tactic this allows for is to first create a Spawning Pool and then begin building Zerglings, a slightly less powerful version of the Roach. The speed with which these can be amassed is often enough to totally overwhelm any opposition playing as Protoss and Terran, who will probably still be fiddling around with more or less defenceless Drones.