15 Years of StarCraft II Balance Changes Visualized Interactively
Hi HN! "Never perfect. Perfection goal that changes. Never stops moving. Can chase, cannot catch." - Abathur (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw_GN3v-0Ls) StarCraft 2 is one of the most balanced games ever - thanks to Blizzard’s pursuit of perfection. It has been over 15 years since the release of Wings of Liberty and over 10 years since the last installment, Legacy of the Void. Yet, balance updates continue to appear, changing how the game plays. Thanks to that, StarCraft is still alive and well! I decided to create an interactive visualization of all balance changes, both by…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN! "Never perfect. Perfection goal that changes. Never stops moving. Can chase, cannot catch." - Abathur (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw_GN3v-0Ls) StarCraft 2 is one of the most balanced games ever - thanks to Blizzard’s pursuit of perfection. It has been over 15 years since the release of Wings of Liberty and over 10 years since the last installment, Legacy of the Void. Yet, balance updates continue to appear, changing how the game plays. Thanks to that, StarCraft is still alive and well! I decided to create an interactive visualization of all balance changes, both by patch and by unit, with smooth transitions. I had this idea quite a few years ago, yet LLMs made it possible - otherwise, I wouldn't have had the time to code or to collect all changes from hundreds of patches (not all have balance updates). It took way more time than expected - both dealing with parsing data and dealing with D3.js transitions. Pretty much pure vibe coding with Claude Code and Opus 4.5 - while constantly using Playwright skills and consulting Gemini 3 Pro (https://github.com/stared/gemini-claude-skills). While Opus 4.5 was much better at executing, it was often essential to use Gemini to get insights, to get cleaner code, or to inspect screenshots. The difference in quality was huge. Still, it was tricky, as LLMs do not know D3.js nearly as well as React. The D3.js transition part is a thing that sometimes I think would be better to do manually, and only use LLMs for details. But it was also a lesson. Enjoy! Source code is here: https://github.com/stared/sc2-balance-timeline
Does the same job
all alternatives →
- HVHTML5 version of StarCraft2015 · github.com · ▲320
- POProof-of-concept HTML5 version of Starcraft 22015 · github.com · ▲58
- MPmulti-perspective StarCraft 2 web replays2012 · ggreplayz.com · ▲86
- CACan a person's chess mind outlive them? An attempt with 41 mastersApr 2026 · playchessgate.com · ▲5
Two years ago I sat down to build a chess engine for my kids' Christmas present. Wanted it to play badly enough to be beatable but not randomly bad: different styles so they could choose what to face. While building those styles I noticed the choices started looking like actual historical players' tendencies. Went looking. Turns out: given enough games from one person, you can extract enough of their decision pattern to reproduce it. Two years later, 41 players, ~3,000 games each. Tal sacrifices unsoundly. Morphy attacks like it's 1850. Capablanca grinds endgames. Same engine underneath,…
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