Starcraft II Beta, part 4

I made the stupid, stupid mistake of going with 'new player' when I started up the game. I'm not entirely sure what it did, but I'm blaming it for the fact that the only AI opponent I can face is a 'very easy' one.

Now, I didn't like playing against opponents in Starcraft because they were too damn hard - always meeting my group of units with a much bigger group of units and slaughtering me.
Now, it seems, Blizzard aimed to make my experiance a little easier. But it seems they missed the 'little easier' target and instead hit the 'easy for grandma' target.

You can beat a Very Easy opponent with only Zerglings, Zealots or Marines (depending on race) and that means base expansion or collecting Vespene gas or actually improving your skills on an enemy AI that can tie it's goddamn shoelaces is completely unnessesary - you know, everything required for multiplayer.

What I have been messing around with recently is the Galaxy Editor, Starcraft II's map editor.
After failing to find where Vista put all the SC II maps, I thought 'Screw it, I'll run before I can walk.'

I was impressed by the fact that Blizzard kept it simple - grid based maps, so terraining isn't a nightmare. The brush could be modified in many different ways, making it feel a little like Photoshop.

But I do have one complaint with the GE, Blizzard - where the bloody hell is everything?

In Warcraft III's editor (i.e. the best editor ever made) you had access to almost everything you needed via the bar on the top of the screen, and you had a big toolbar on the right hand side giving you units, terrain, regions, cameras and doodads.

The Galaxy Editor puts all that on the left hand side and only has a few buttons up the top which don't do a great job of telling you what they're about but the worst thing about the Galaxy Editor is the interface.

Not letting me change what 'Layer' (units, terrain, doodads etc) I'm on through the toolbar itself is not good design, and it means I have to find Layer at the very top of the window to change it. Not that I new what Layer meant when I saw it.

Another thing was there was no 'Click here to change to selection box' button. Just like in Warcraft III it's the space bar, but it didn't tell me that.

In fact, I'm certain the only reason I already sort-of know my way around the difficult interface is because I'm used to messing around with the Warcraft III editor and the Galaxy Editor is similar.

One last complaint - the 'data' screen. Essentially, the Data screen is Units, Upgrades, Stats and a few other random nick-nacks all in one enormous basket. I'd reccomend hitting the button that says 'Display Object List as Tree', otherwise you'll be treated to a massive list of blue and occasionally grey words with no real seperation between them.

Apart from being difficult to navigate by someone who's never used an editor before, the Galaxy Editor is reasonably good. The terrain looks nice and is easy to manipulate and the Data screen is sort of easy to understand, provided you hit that button I mentioned and you can understand what any of the words on the big box to the left means.

So the Galaxy Editor can use some refinement, primarily by making it easier to reach everything instead of making us go out and find it.