Starcraft – How to permanently disable all achievements and related messages

When you play online you don't have much control over the map you will play. You can veto some maps off but in the end, it doesn't really matter whether the map is really played a lot or not, just your personal preferences.

In tournament, a popular map choosing technique is that the first map is decided either randomly, or every 1v1 starts on the same map. In Starcraft 1 Lost Temple has been chosen like this a lot in the early days (later on, it has been judge a little imbalanced because blocking the ramp gave the terran players a slight advantage).

After the first map, either the winning (rarely) or the losing (much more often) player would decide which map is to be the next. I'd say that most of the time, a 4 players map for a 1v1 is prefered since it gives each player much more territory to expand. Sometimes, they will choose "Steppes of War" in a "I want to rush you" fashion since it is the map where the spawning spots are the closest of the whole map pool.

So, on Battle.net, the maps are random so personal preferences don't impact the game much. Some maps are better for some races or some strategies (large choke points = harder to block = easier to rush).

At first, the credits available to you in the single player campaign is limited to that from missions alone. However, once you've fully maxed out either the zerg or protoss research trees, you gain the ability to trade any future research points into 10k worth of credits.

There have been mentions of a glitch with the way the game handles this: if you replay a mission you've already beaten and acquire protoss / zerg research points within that mission, it is possible to get the Moebius foundation to "purchase research samples" from you, even though you failed to increase your net points (you already got them once). In this way, you can accrue as many credits as you need, and can buy all the armory upgrades in a single playthrough.

Update: This method has since been patched.

As of now, the best way to earn the armory achievements is to play the campaign multiple times, selecting different upgrades on each playthrough, as achievements are shared across all campaigns.