The Balance

Are the races balanced?

Close, and honestly reported. Between equal players no matchup is worse than a few games in a hundred off fair — but "close" is not "identical", and the last full measurement (season 1, on the live map pool) found the wheel turning unevenly. Terran holds the clearest edge against Zerg. Zerg's intended edge over Protoss has flattened to near-even. And the leg that should close the triangle — Protoss over Terran — is currently a coin flip rather than a Protoss edge. Net: Terran is the mildly favoured race right now.

It also breathes with the era. In a young world of rough, unpolished players the races sit almost exactly level; as the whole scene's skill rises, Terran's precision pays back more and its edge over Zerg widens. Expect the lean to grow slowly over seasons rather than jump.

None of this outweighs skill, form, fatigue or preparation, which move a matchup far harder than the race wheel does. It is published because a balance page that only says "yes, balanced" is worth nothing — when a retune lands, this section changes with it.

Maps tilt it further: rush-friendly maps reward aggression and all-in openings, resource-rich maps reward economic play, and complex maps open the back door for raiders. Check a map's battleground page for its live matchup record before you set a lineup.

Which skills matter?

All eight — that's the point of the rebuild. No attribute wins games on its own, and none is dead weight. Six of them pair off, each blunting its rival:

Micro and Macro stand outside the pairs — every race needs both, all game long. But they peak at different hours: micro is sharpest in the opening skirmishes and midgame battles, while macro compounds — the longer the game runs, the heavier a superior economy leans on the scale. Harassment, for what it's worth, is the other late bloomer: raids sting most once there's a big economy to bleed.

What does each race want?

Every skill helps every race — but not equally, and not against every opponent. This is the scouting-report view our analysts will commit to:

The maps are the balance

In the old game this simulates, the units never changed for decades — the maps did the balancing. Shakuras keeps that philosophy: the race chain is tuned across the whole map portfolio, and each individual battleground is allowed to lean. A map is not scenery. It is the third player, and the one you can read in advance.

Every map carries three numbers, 0–100, with fifty neutral in all of them. Rush distance is the loudest: short distances commit armies early, cut the game short, and starve the patient skills — strategy, game sense, macro — of the time they need to pay. Long distances reward exactly those skills and give a defensive player room to reach the game he wants. It is also the attribute that visibly tilts a matchup: Terran-versus-Zerg swings further on rush distance than on anything else in the game, toward Terran as the distance shortens. Field a Zerg on the rushiest ground in the pool and know what you are asking of him.

Resources mostly decides how long the game lasts. A rich map holds a deep economy, so games run long and macro play compounds; a poor map is a knife fight over a small pot — and, counter-intuitively, that is where a great macro player is worth the most, because out-producing someone from a starved base decides games a bottomless map would let both sides survive. The deep-economy maps are also Zerg's country in ZvP — the swarm out-expands Protoss there — while the rushiest grounds hand that same matchup to Protoss instead. One matchup, two poles, chosen by the map.

Complexity is the terrain — chokes, high ground, room to sneak. It rewards the raid-and-read game: harassment for the man doing the sneaking, scouting for the one who has to see it coming, and a raid that lands on broken ground takes a real bite. On truly intricate terrain the Terran machine edges Protoss a touch. It is still the gentlest of the three — a tiebreaker between two otherwise-equal picks, not a reason to reshape a lineup. Spawn count, listed on every profile, is pure character: two spawns or four, the simulation plays the same.

The pool itself is curated and measured. Each season's seven-map league pool is drawn to span the spectrum — rushy grounds, the middle, macro country — so no season's balance belongs to one race by accident, and across the whole portfolio the maps average out to the close race-against-race chain described at the top of this page. The extremes are real and deliberate: a Zerg's ZvP on the deepest macro map and on the rushiest ground are games from different worlds. Every map's live per-matchup record is public on its map page — measured from real games on that battleground, not predicted.

The practical habit, match to match: check rush distance first and ask whether it suits the player you were about to field; let resources tell you whether it is a long game or a short one; let complexity break ties. The fixture page hands you all three, per game, before you pick.

Specialists beat all-rounders

This is the single most useful thing on the page, and it is easy to miss: take two players with the same skill total — one spread evenly, one with a single towering strength and the rest thin — and the specialist usually wins, often comfortably. Not by a nose. By the kind of margin that decides seasons.

So training is not about raising everything a little. It is about choosing what a player is going to be, and committing. A drilled specialist beats a tidy generalist of equal value, and the trainer who spreads a season's work evenly across eight skills has, in effect, spent it on nothing.

Which spike, though, is not a free choice — and the race cards above are the guide. Build the mountain on a Core skill and it pays in every matchup. A Strong one makes a fine second peak. Spike something Situational and you get a player who is superb in one matchup and a passenger in the rest.

That last kind still has its place — a specialist who only answers one question is exactly who you field on the day that question gets asked. It is simply not the player you build a season around. And since the tiers differ by race, the same training plan can make a star of one man and a curiosity of another: check his race's card before committing a season to a direction.

What changed from the old Shakuras?

Veterans of the 2013 world will remember some hard truths that are no longer true:

• The god-stat is dead. In the old game, Strategy decided matches almost by itself — two otherwise identical players, and the better strategist won nearly every time. Strategy is still a fine weapon; it just fights fair now.
• Game Sense woke up. It used to do close to nothing. Now it's the counter-read that blunts enemy timing attacks, spots the moment to strike, and pulls a compromised raid out before it dies.
• Raiding pays for itself now. In the old world, raiders threw ever-bigger squads at the same reward — training harassment made players worse. Even after that was fixed, a raid still cost more army than it destroyed across a long game, so the whole mechanic quietly lost you material. As of launch a caught raiding party loses the skirmish rather than the war, and a better raider genuinely hits harder: raid damage now scales properly with the skill instead of barely noticing it.
• The wheel turns — mostly. The old balance quietly favoured Zerg over Terran and let Protoss bully Terran badly: matchups you would refuse to flip a coin on. Today every matchup is within a few games in a hundred of even. The triangle is not perfectly round yet — see the honest reckoning at the top of this page — but the difference is now measured in a couple of games per hundred rather than tens.
• All-ins are real. Proxy rax, five pool, two-gate: the old engine flirted with them but never actually pulled the trigger. Now a strategist will occasionally bet the game on the opening — and a scout or a well-built defense will make them pay for it.
• Games end. The marathon stalemates that ground on until both bases were mined to bedrock are gone; when a game stops going anywhere, the advantage on the board decides it.
• Upsets are real. The old engine turned any small edge into a near-certainty — the favourite simply won. Today a slightly better player is a favourite, not a prophecy: underdogs take real games, series stay tense, and a big reputation has to be defended every Saturday.

Age, experience and condition — the three clocks

Beyond the eight skills, three slower forces shape every player's results — one runs over a life, one over a career, one over a week. The full rules live in the Players chapter; the balance view:

• Age sets how fast training lands. Teenagers soak up practice at a furious pace — an academy kid improves several times faster than a man in his mid-twenties — and from 18 on, every birthday eases the pace a little, down to a veteran's slow grind. Skills never decay: what a player builds he keeps, so a late-twenties pro is a finished portrait — his growth story is over, and his results ride on what he banked. This mirrors the original game, where the same curve lived (we recovered it from the 2013 records); it is why gem-hunting in the academy, the Junior Starleague and the early pro seasons matter so much. A perfectly-rolled prospect, trained from youth, can peak around 100 overall.
• Experience grows only by playing official games — league, playoffs, the Starleague — a little at a time, more slowly the wiser a player gets, and it caps at 15: roughly a three-to-four-season climb for a regular starter. It is genuinely powerful — an experienced pro beats an equal-skilled rookie far more often than not — but the cap is the promise that the edge is a career phase, not a caste. Veterans all arrive at the same summit, newcomers close the gap fast (the Starleague preliminaries hand every one of your players official games weekly), and a club joining in season three can genuinely catch the founders.
• Condition is the weekly clock. Playing official games costs it — losing costs more — and rest brings it back a few points a day. A rested player at 100 fights at full strength; a worn one fights measurably below it, and the deeper the fatigue, the worse it gets. It also moves inside a match: in long series and KOF all-kill runs, the player who has been on stage all night tires while fresh legs come in — the deeper you ride one ace, the more beatable he becomes. And the toll grows with age: from 20, each year adds a few percent to what every game costs, so veterans fade over long series and heavy weeks while a rested legend still wins the big one. Rotation is a real weapon now. Rest your stars before the Saturdays that matter.

So how should I build my players?

Start from your race's core skills — they pay off in every series. Then look at the calendar: skills pair off, so a rival who stacks one thing is beatable by training its counter. And read the map pool before you commit a lineup; a raider on a complex map or an all-in specialist on a rushy one is worth more than their rating suggests. Beyond that — condition, experience and confidence still decide the days when skill is equal. Rest your aces.

The numbers behind this page stay in the lab. Balance is tuned between seasons; when it shifts, this page shifts with it.