The Balance — Season 2

Season 2 preview. This page describes the rebuilt engine that arrives with the season 2 changeover — the off-season week that closes season 1, with season 2 opening on Monday 2 November on the new engine. Until then the world plays the season-1 engine, described on the current Balance page; on the day, this page replaces it. A few names are new too: the winner-stays format is now the Winner's League, and the third phase of every league season becomes the teamplay phase (2v2). The season 2 announcements and patch notes carry the rest.

Are the races balanced?

Close, and honestly reported. Between equal players, measured across the full map catalogue, no matchup sits more than a couple of games in a hundred from fair. The one real lean in today's world belongs to the swarm: Zerg shades Terran mildly — and that lean is deliberate, see below. Zerg over Protoss holds as a slim true edge. And Protoss against Terran is an honest coin flip.

The balance breathes with the era, and this is by design. In a young world of rough, unpolished players the swarm forgives mistakes — Zerg leans on Terran. As the whole scene's skill rises, Terran's precision starts to pay back, the lean narrows, and in a mature world it crosses over: the veterans' game belongs a shade to Terran instead. Expect that turn over seasons, not weeks — and expect this page to report it when it comes.

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, and the duels between a skill and its counter come out near even:

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. Micro has one more job that belongs to no pair: it is the skill that executes an all-in on one side and holds it on the other — the players built on Attack and Harassment are the ones who reach for the gamble, but hands decide whether it lands.

What does each race want?

Every skill helps every race — but not equally, and not against every opponent. Our analysts grade a race's kit in four tiers, and the words mean something precise:

• Core — the single best skill in at least one of the race's three matchups. Every race has exactly three Core skills, one per matchup, and no skill is Core twice: there is no one build that wins all three wars.
• Strong — on the podium somewhere without ever being the outright best, and solid wherever it isn't.
• Situational — a matchup specialist: top-shelf in one war, ordinary in the others. Knowing when its day has come is the manager's skill, not the player's.
• Useful — never the star, never wasted. Quiet, steady value in every matchup.

Which skill rules which matchup, and the full pecking order beneath the top — that stays off this page. Your scouts, the map records and your losses will teach you. The cards:

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 matchups, and it tilts the two loudest ones in opposite directions: Terran-versus-Zerg swings toward Terran as the distance shortens, and Zerg-versus-Protoss swings just as hard toward Protoss on the same rushy ground — the swarm wants room. Field a Zerg on the rushiest map in the pool and know what you are asking of him, twice over.

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. The same axis decides where an all-in player belongs: a committed cheeser is strong on rushy ground and a liability on the deep macro maps — most of all a Zerg aggressor against Protoss. Lineups are per map; bench the cheeser on the deep macro maps.

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. Intricate terrain also gives Protoss a little shelter from the swarm. 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, matters in exactly one place: the opening gamble. On a two-spawn map an all-in knows where it is going; on a four-spawn map it has to find its victim first, so the bet is worth a little less. Past the opening, 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 — when they aim

Take two players with the same skill total — one spread evenly, one with a single towering strength and the rest thin. The mountain still wins more often than not. But the blank cheque the old engine wrote to every specialist has been cancelled: the margin now depends on where the mountain stands, and a spike aimed at the wrong skill for the wrong war is just a hill with a view.

So training is still about choosing what a player is going to be — the race cards above are the guide. Build the peak on a Core skill and you get a signature war, the matchup you plan a calendar around. Pair it with a Strong second peak and the player travels. Spike something Situational and you have built an assassin: superb on the one day his question gets asked, ordinary the rest of the week.

Assassins are worth having — a specialist who only answers one question is exactly who you field on the day that question comes up, and the fixture page tells you the map and the opponent in advance. Just know which one you own, and don't build a season around him.

And the even spread is no longer a punchline. It buys consistency across all three wars and it loses less badly to the specialist than it used to — it simply still finishes second to a well-aimed peak of the same total. 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 — and for one race it has become a defining talent.
• 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. Today a caught raiding party loses the skirmish rather than the war, a better raider genuinely hits harder — and for one race the raid is now a signature weapon.
• Every race's training counts the same. It never used to: a point of ability on some races quietly bought fewer wins than on others, mirror against mirror. Measured today, the three races convert skill into results at the same rate. Nobody trains at a discount.
• The wheel turns — with the era. 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 lives within a couple of games in a hundred of fair, and the one lean that remains is designed: a young, rough world shades toward the swarm, a polished veteran world shades toward Terran, and the page you are reading will say so when it turns.
• All-ins are real. Proxy rax, five pool, two-gate: the old engine flirted with them but never actually pulled the trigger. Now the opening is a decision in three parts. Inclination: players built on Attack and Harassment are the ones who reach for it. Judgement: a strategist gambles where the gamble is good — the right map, the right matchup — and keeps his hands in his pockets where it is not. Execution: Micro, the attacker's and the defender's, decides whether it lands, with Defense, Scouting and Game Sense helping the man who has to hold it. Everyone keeps a small chance of rolling the dice, a badly outmatched player rolls more often, and the report names the build. For a well-rounded player it is a fair-to-slightly-losing bet everywhere.
• The draw is fair. The old engine — and season one's — quietly favoured whichever player it seated first, by about two points a game; alternating seats through a series was cancelling it out. The edge is now gone from the engine itself, in every single game.
• 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 it matters most in the middle of the ladder: the higher a player's raw skill climbs, the less the years add, so at the very top talent speaks louder than tenure and a brilliant debutant can genuinely beat a made veteran he outclasses. What experience never does is hurt — at equal experience the better player is always the favourite. 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 a long grinding game costs more than a quick one. A rested player fights at full strength; a worn one fights below it in proportion to how worn he is — diminished, never a write-off, so fielding a tired star in the right spot is a genuine call. Recovery follows a comfort level that declines gently from age eighteen: below yours, you bounce back fast; the last stretch to a true 100 comes slowly — roughly one rest night per year of age past eighteen — so youth resets weekly while an aging campaigner carries a little history into every match day. It also moves inside a match: in long series and Winner's League 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 eighteen, each year adds a few percent to what every game costs. Everything about age turns on the same birthday. Rotation is a real weapon, and a deep bench is what makes it affordable — rest your stars before the Saturdays that matter.

So how should I build my players?

Start from your race's Core skills — between the three of them they cover every war you'll fight, and each is the best thing you can bring to one of them. 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 and experience 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.