Starcraft – Terran vs Zerg builds

Yeah, the best way to scout is to try to keep your initial probe alive for as long as possible. Unfortunately right after your probe dies and your observer gets to your opponent's base there is a crucial time where you don't know what your opponent is doing above their ramp. It's unlikely that your proxy assimilator will be in a good position to see your opponent's tech.

I feel like this is a huge flaw to the game as protoss just have to play blindly. However it's not much better for zerg, they can only suicide an overlord in this early in the game. The overlord dies relatively quickly to marines too so it can be easy to hide one's tech such as in this game between Idra and Silver:

Terrans have the option of using reapers to jump through cliffs, using floating buildings which are either immune to the other races basic unit or have enough life to fly through them, or using a scan, which although it isn't a surefire way of seeing your opponent's tech, it does have a large radius and therefore likely can spot it.

Sucks not knowing whether your opponent is teching or has a mass marine ball :/

One thing protoss can do to even things out though, is to build a pylon in a hidden location far away from both players bases and to hide their tech there.

The three races are actually quite balanced compared to other RTS games.

However, I think that statistics wouldn't be a very good source of information for something like this because of the way leagues are set up. Your placement is based on who you win and lose against. However, Blizzard tries to keep your win ratio at 50% so they match you accordingly against easier or more difficult opponents to try to normalize that ratio. So if there was an overpowered race, the usage statistics and win ratios would remain relatively constant. It would probably only be visible at the very top level of play, but the game was just released a few weeks ago so it's too early to be making conclusions.

As for race usage, Protoss and Terran are effectively tied, but Zerg has less players than the other two races. See http://sc2ranks.com/stats/all/1/all. I suspect the reason for the Zerg underuse is because the Zerg macro mechanics are less intuitive than that of Terran, which players are already familiar with from the single player campaign. Some also say the race is the most difficult to learn and master.

From a non-statistical standpoint, I would say there are some tweaks needed, but overall the game is fairly balanced. For example, Terran's EMP (from ghosts) is a little bit too strong against Protoss because it drains all energy AND removes 100 shield points, yet requires no research to obtain. But you can be fairly certain that a good level of balance will be obtained a few patches down the line.