The way it will be

The advantage of both games is that each separated skill levels very clearly. It was transparent who the better of any two players would be, and very rarely were there “equal matches”. That is the game's appeal – it will identify the best players in a competitive culture, while at the same time providing entertainment and a sense of accomplishment for those average players who are learning to get better.

This is precisely why attention becomes a resource. Anyone expecting the AI to assist them, to play for them, to handle the micromanagement and create efficient formations of units to deal damage with is promptly going to get his ass handed to him. At best, you can expect your marines to continue to run single-file to the enemy base and if you're lucky, the AI will send them all in if they spot an enemy unit. They won't focus fire, take cover, or use abilities.

Thus the game creates pressure – do you intervene in that battle with all your attention, do you queue up some more buildings or units, do you send your reserve force into the enemy base, do you go scouting for his expansions or build one of your own? With a small screen and limited battle AI assistance, your attention is of the utmost importance and that's what the game rewards – how you divide your attention and how efficient you are in dealing with whatever you've decided to focus on.

The units are relatively large and relatively few in number, which means that they are important. Also, it's likely that there will be a fair number of spells/abilities (hopefully not as many as in WC3). This will heighten the importance of paying attention to battles and thus make it risky to focus mostly on production, like you might in C&C or Age of Empires. Proper use of Psi Storms and Yamato Guns in StarCraft made the difference between winning and losing. In WarCraft 3, there were more spells but they generally weren't as powerful, which caused the game to lose some of that balance between micro- and macro-management.

Game balance will continue to be the different-but-equal (not equivalent) style we saw from StarCraft. Blizzard has declined the option of designing a fourth race and chosen to continue with the Zerg, Terrans, and Protoss. They all have vastly different philosophies and styles, with no two units performing in even remotely the same fashion, yet each race has similar capabilities in the end.

There are going to be some re-tread old units (marines, zealots, mutalisks, and zerglings at the least), but generally we expect there to be at least as many new units as old. Certainly the videos show primarily new designs. From the videos we can also confirm what we expected – that balance among units will follow the familiar rock/paper/scissors motif.

This is actually somewhat of a concern at the moment, actually. In vanilla StarCraft, the rock/paper/scissors style was really not that extreme. In some cases it was clear as day: that the Reaver or Siege tank would plow through Zerglings and Marines at a butcher's pace, or that scourges were the best units to take down a Battlecruiser efficiently, but there was a lot of gray area for the most part. Take hydralisks vs marines. It wasn't quite rock vs scissor or rock vs paper, nor was it rock vs rock. It depended on the upgrades available to each and the numbers of each before it was clear in what situations one would counter another. Hydralisks generally had the advantage, but it wasn't overwhelming as with Lurker vs Marine. However, with the Brood War expansion, we saw far more in the way of clear counters. Lurkers were clearly meant to defeat M&Ms (marines and medics). Also, the new air units in Brood War (Valkyrie, Corsair, Devourer) were “air support” units, designed to clearly defeat the old light air units of the enemy but be weak to their stronger air units.