As the author rightly points out, in its 27 years of existence, commentary around the game has become a domain specific language. Not just Korean or English.
This approach of automated scripting and using AI to understand roughly what was said and then make it coherent is really cool.
yt-dlp -f "bv[height<=720]" <url>
(where <url> is your URL or video ID)That will download up to 720p quality.
It's interesting to note that the original Korean transcription already has many errors, seemingly (and impressively) corrected by LLMs later on. For example, 12 안마당 빌드 (12 courtyard build) is actually 12 앞마당 빌드 (12 frontyard build), which might have been more understandable to BW players. Similarly 투에처리 빌드 (processing-at-two build? makes no sense lol) should have been transcribed 투해처리 빌드 (two-Hatchery build).
Therefore it may also be helpful to directly feed the slang dictionary into Whisper's inference process using contextual biasing. There are lots of ways to do this, but the simplest would be to increase the probability of slang words in the dictionary in the final prediction layer of Whisper by a constant factor. This is fairly easy to implement, for example by using HuggingFace's library: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/internal/generat...
What do the numbers in front of the building mean? 12 Hatcheries seems like… well, 12 seems like a possible but implausible number of hatcheries to build (hypothetically it is possible of course). And 12 spawning pools is obviously not useful. So that makes me think it is the position in the build order list. But, they list other builds, like:
> The second is the 12 Hatch, 12 Pool, 12 Gas
Which doesn’t make a ton of sense in with that parsing. I mean it must not be a straight list. Maybe it is a tree, and 12 is the depth for this building? But that seems late, I can’t think of 11 buildings to build before gas. Maybe they include units too? Or maybe just drones/overlords?
My favorite Brood War slang term is Ee Han Timing [0]: basically when you take a risky build that has to do damage in a small timing window. A ton of exciting Brood War moments come from exploiting tiny timing windows.
I attempted playing a few world cyber game US regional matches and I was always amazed how much faster everyone else was. Then I remember when they live streamed it from Korea and I saw how fast they played and I was blown away. From a strategy point of view, something so basic about the game that I missed was when a blog introduced me to some math for a protoss zealot power up that defeated a zergling in 2 hits rather than 3. That's when I realized this is a chess game and I got hooked.
The numbers indicate the supply you should be at when you build the structure.
so a 12 hatch 12 pool 12 gas means you get to 12 workers and then build those 3 buildings in that order as soon as you have the resources for those.
For zerg the workers actually become the building, so I assume you hit 12, build the hatchery, build another worker, build the spawning pool, build another worker, and then build your gas refinery.
> Very few of members of the foreigner community are fluent in Korean. Foreigner access to Korean BW discourse is a contradicting concept: if you speak Korean fluently, you have no reason to be in the foreigner community, as it only has access to material that is strictly inferior and more limited. For this reason, Korean-speaking members in the foreigner community are exceedingly rare.
I can vouch for this in general - after becoming fluent I've stopped looking up anything related to Korea in English because the quality of information is much worse. I'm sure the same holds for other languages and places.
Then your opponent calls you all sorts of vile names and questions your sexuality, etc.
https://youtu.be/Nm-PXmOELAw?si=Z-RXbdqNzkSF3cqx
my brief search didn't show me any more obscure Korean only strategy videos, so maybe this one is just for the lowly foreigners :(
There are two YouTube channels I wanted to take the opportunity to shout out, the first one does English translations of Korean BW content, and the second one provides commentary on recent tournaments like the ASL with a little bit more depth then Tasteless and Artosis (no hate but to me their commentary is too off topic and they miss basic things about build orders).
"1rax double" is equivalent to "1rax expand" or "1rax CC". They use multi or double to mean expand in the early game. Instead of "cheese" or "all-in" they use "pil-sal-gi" which means ace/joker card or "han-bang" which means an army or attack on few resources.
I am not sure what short-hand they use for barracks, gateway, etc.
In practice this is easier for people to use than actual clock timings, because it's more robust to delays or interference. If you remember "third rax at 30 supply" then even if you're playing a little slow, you will still know roughly when to build that. But if you memorized exact clock timings and now you might be 20+ seconds behind, it's hard to know when you should fit in the new building.
It's not perfect of course, and if you get cheesed and the game goes weird then you'll have to start improvising rather than relying on just supply timings, a lot of times after a cheese where neither side definitely wins, the balance between tech and economy is now very non-standard and you can't rely on conventional rules of thumb anymore.
There’s a huge amount of terms that are difficult to translate (sharding? Hash?). The only real solution is to adopt them to your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over time. But it requires a community that, to some degree, is able to cross the gap between the languages. In this case, learning English.
Talking about software development in Spanish (my native language) is a succession of imported terms from English.
I don’t think there’s a good way of doing that, and I’m interested to see how automatic translations deal with it, because the only way this can work is with a process of mixing both language in a social way and see what terms evolve from that process.
And you need, in the terms the post describes, people that know Korean at least in a non-fluent way. And the game itself, of course.
As you get later into the game people who play more seriously also use the in-game clock, or timing a building placement relative to how complete a different building is to determine building timing. This helps with subtleties like whether you lost your scouting worker or not (-1 supply), if the early game got really weird because you had to build more units to hold some aggression, etc.
It feels kind of sad to admit as a chess player, but "Najdork variation" is one of the funniest typos I've seen.
That’s a really interesting one to me! One thing I’ve noticed is that Koreans do not seem to have the same hangups / negative attitude towards cheese strategies as westerners do!
As a side note, I have gotten into watching a "foreigner" BW channel everyday called ArtosisCasts. The videos are very strategic and high level commentaries on games as they are watched for the first time, with some after-match highlights for especially interesting maneuvers. It has really made me appreciate the depth of the game, as well as explain how I was so bad at it in high school. It has actually made me think a lot about startups, economic optimization, and how you approach the "meta" of any activity you're undertaking.
He asked his partner what strategy he should use, the person responded with "13 gate" (meaning: keep building probes until you have 13, then build your first warpgate). Cella pretended to misunderstand and instead built 13 warpgates, which is a horrible strategy, but they still won the game. They only won because his partner could barely defend him in early game while he was building the warpgates. After surviving early game, it wasn't a fair fight even with a horrible strategy, because it's a professional against "normal" people on the Internet.
I don't think the video exists anymore, Husky famously removed his whole channel with a lot of StarCraft 2 early history, but I found this Reddit thread[2] talking about the game (WeRRa was Cella's team at the time, that's why they call him CellaWeRRa).
[1] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Cella
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dyjk9/cellawerra...
(Some chess corrections, in case the author is reading: the moves at the start of chess games are called openings in English, not openers; there are not distinct white-piece and black-piece openings, although of course an individual player will probably study a given opening from the point of view of one side or the other; their study is considered fundamental all the way up to the highest level, in fact more so as you increase in skill; and the Sicilian variation in question is the Najdorf, not Najdork.)
I think the most common thing is to just use English loanwords without trying to find existing Spanish words that fit the meaning.
As you can guess, I was a Terran main. While my recipe for Protoss friends was plain heavy metal, I took my frustration out on Zerg players. One thing I loved to do was to have two science vessels cast Defensive Matrix and Irradiate on each other, and fly them over enemy drones. People who haven't seen it before got mightily confused by what's going on. Doubly so when they decided to throw a "quick reaction" Mutalisk squad at them, only to watch them all die.
(That was even funnier than calling in a nuclear strike and flying a building over the red blinking dot to hide it. You'd think a random Engineering Bay floating in enemy's main would be a clear giveaway, but people always got so stressed by the "nuclear launch detected" warning that they couldn't connect the dots in time.)
SC:BW was a game like no others.
yt-dlp -x <url>
.. or optionally to convert it to mp3 on the fly: yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 <url>
.. or doing so with also the best audio quality available: yt-dlp -f 'ba' -x --audio-format mp3 <url>
Chatgpt and Claude did an incredible job translating the korean text:
Claude:
Today I'll teach you about the 12 Hatchery build. I'll explain the types of 12 Hatchery builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and the build orders in a simple but detailed way.
Against Protoss, this is the build you use when you want to start with the most economic advantage. Against Terran, there are several builds you can do with 12 Hatchery, so I'll explain some of the most commonly used builds.
The first is the two-hatchery build that starts with 12 Hatchery:
12 Hatchery
11 Spawning Pool
10 Gas
This build uses early gas, and it's often used when you want to quickly transition into a three-hatchery build with three gas bases.
The second build is:
12 Hatchery
12 Pool
12 Gas
This build allows for moderately fast tech tree and moderately fast three-hatchery expansion. This build is commonly known as the "safe three-hatchery" build, and you can think of it as a build that enables both quick Mutalisks and quick third base.