Starcraft – How to run Battle Simulator

Sounds to me like your video card is outputting a signal/resolution not supported by your monitor. Assuming it's only losing the signal when you launch game, try tweaking the resolution manually:

in Documents/Starcraft II/Variables.txt

add...

width=1024
height=768

or whatever settings that you want to try.

Also, here are some other settings you can try tweaking in that file and see if you can gain some more performance:

foliagedensity (Default 0.750000)

It shows how dense the different foliage elements like grass, leaves will appear. You can decrease the value to something that fit your needs and also increase the performance of the game.

parallaxshadow (Default 1)

Parallax Shadows give depth to game textures and geometry at the expense of CPU/GPU performance. Switching it off by giving it ’0′ value may increase performance of the game.

particlelod (Default 3) particleobjects (Default 1.000000) particleterrain (Default 1.000000)

These three commands govern the quality of the particles in game. Lower the values to get performance boast.

shadowmapsize (Default 2048)

How shodows will be rendered in game, lowering this value to 1024/512 will increase the performance of the game and also take off some load on GPU and Ram.

TerrainTextureHiResCacheSize (Default 24) TerrainTextureLowResCacheSize (Default 50)

These two variables control the amount of memory the game uses to cache and stream textures high and low resolution textures separately.

TerrainTextureSize (Default 1024)

This is the memory of your graphic card, memory available at the disposal for the game to utilize.

transparentshadows (Default 1)

This is an eye candy tweak, if enabled it will give shadows a transparent touch enhancing colors in the process. Its OK to change the value to ’0′, its not something you need really. Infact, its an effect you will hardly notice while playing the game.

watercaustics (Default 1)

It makes the water look real, waves effects and splashes on the surface of water. Not required if you have low end GPU. Set this value to ’0′ to turn it off.

waterreflection (Default 1)

This variable enabled the reflection on the surface of water. Again, not required for people on low end graphic cards.

waterrendertargetsize (Default 1024)

How the game will render everything water, lower the value to boast performance.

Source: http://segmentnext.com/2010/08/07/starcraft-2-graphics-performance-tweak-guide/

So there are only three factors which influence Muta vs Muta battles. They are, in order of importance:

1. Army Size
2. Keeping Wounded Muta Alive
3. Focus Firing

A lot of people will try to tell you that the Bounce is important, but Bounce has a Range of 3 (identical to the Muta itself) so once you get above 8-10 Mutalisks, reducing bounce damage is not practical.

Army Size is the most important part of any Mutalisk on Mutalisk contest, but not just having more than your opponent. At about 14 Mutalisk, they gain the ability to one shot opposing Mutalisks. Above this point, having all your Mutas target a single target actually results in a loss of damage. Unlike the Siege Tank, Mutalisk damage is carried by a projectile, so if the target dies before it hits, the projectile does not re-target. Thus if you have more than 14 Mutalisks, the best thing you can do is split them into groups of 14 and micro them independently.

As army size is important, keeping your Mutalisks alive is almost as important. This means backing out Mutalisks who have low hit point values. Because of the nature of the Glaive Worm bounce, this means you're going to have to pull wounded Muta back prior to getting low health (think about half). Ideally you want your opponents Mutalisks to follow this unit, as Mutalisks have to decelerate on attacking. This means chasing Mutalisks will never catch up, and become easier prey. If they don't chase then you need that Muta to almost immediately get back into the fray (the technique for this I'll describe in a second).

Focus Firing is usually a well understood concept by most players, but how it applies to Mutalisks is often unique. Ideally you want to Attack the nearest opposing Muta and then shift target his remaining Mutalisks from closest to furthest. However, Mutalisks are very quick and have the useful property that they bunch up very tightly when micro'd. You'll want to use this to your advantage to prevent your opponent from focus firing your Muta down. As Mutalisks attack they will spread out a little, so you'll have to use the time in between attacks (yeah the 1.5 game seconds), to tighten them back up. This will usually require more than one action. Make sure to hit Hold Position in between movements. While this won't function as advertised, it will make sure your Muta don't waiting to fire while moving. Finally, as mentioned before don't allow you focus-firing Muta to chase after an opposing Mutalisk as this will leave you open to assault.

While Muta on Muta micro may sound intense, the period for which it matters is usually very small. As the most important aspect is army size, you should gain a slight advantage through better micro early on, which will quickly snowball. If you find yourself behind at some point, do not remain and fight, but rather quickly exit.