Bringing "Balance" to 3 Player Games of Starcraft

By RockoRobotics, in StarCraft

I often play 3 player games of Starcraft the Board game and I often notice one of two things tend to happen:

1) 2 of the players get locked in a war and the third player prospers from their weakness.

-Or-

2) One player often goes to war with both players and despite being the most aggressive and offensive player, they often leave themselves in a vunerable position because the other two players never really engage in any combat.

In my opinion, I think that a person who manages combat well should be more successful then the players who choose to avoid combat.

Does anyone have any ideas for making Starcraft more friendly to odd numbers of players? Perhaps make the person who destroys the most bases the winner? What about the person who wins the most amount of battles?

To be fair, this is not an issue specific to Starcraft, it's common to see this in many games. I just wanted to see if anyone else had some Starcraft specific ideas.

If you do not play to often with three players, you could try the scenarios from the Broodwar expension.

Notice that:

- in BW already exist game modes called "Survival" and "Galactic Conquest", without gaining CP, they should work really well in such games

- if you wish to play such kind of game shorter, just modify mentioned game modes; e,g, allow players to gather CP, do not remove cards "The End Draws Near", but still exclude Normal and Special Victory

- all existing game modes except those above have victory conditions, which don't include amounts of units you possess / destroyed at the end of / during game, but only points / resources / bases / controled areas.

But a new kind of victory what you suggest sounds interesting. I think that in this mode also other things could be awarded with points, just like in resolving draws in CP / SVC . However, units' costs, attack and health values + other abilities differ a lot, so points for them and other things (like bases, modules, buildings etc.) should be really balanced.

Find 3 more players and play 3v3 :)

Play one of the mods, last man standing.