Do you like numbers? I do. Every game I always check for the magic numbers, like trying to land a nuke at 13 minutes 37, getting exactly 10 kills on every siege tank, and if I gotta wait 20 seconds for that single marine which just got queued up in my barracks, so that I can drop 32 marines in a base, instead of 31 marines, my dropships have to wait! The boat doesnt leave with empty seats!
This works against me every now and then though. Because I like a certain neatness in my base, and I tend to get everything rounded off perfectly, I miss a lot of critical moments. Lately, in a terran vs terran, I was having a nice battle in the centre of shattered temple, and I wanted to drop his main mineral line with a few units to distract him for 20 seconds so I could move up my siege tanks easier.
My checklist went as follows: Stim is finished... Check... Medivac... Check... My vikings are in a good position so my dropship wont get killed by a few rogue scout vikings... Check... +1 weapon upgrades done in 10 seconds... Check... 8 marines..... What I only have 6 marines? Cancel those 2 ghosts I started, and make 2 more marines!... CHECK!!!
What could go wrong!
My 8 marines were finally done, and I loaded them up in the medivac, 20 seconds late, but whatever. The best parties are the crowded ones! Everything went very well, the dropship flew in the proper direction. It was going to unload in 10 seconds, I'd kill a few marines and a supply depod, his stuff would be distracted, his vikings would intercept my medivac. Cunning as I am however, I would go intercept his vikings with my vikings, maybe the 8 marines could assist in killing his vikings, I would nuke his siege tank line just out of range of his tanks, and with his air weakened, and his stuff unsieged, I could just go push up.
10 seconds before my drop lands.... YOUR WORKERS ARE UNDER ATTACK! A heathen enemy dropship got through my airspace! And it dropped... 5 marines?
I was so confused, cuz it dropped only 5 marines? Don't medivacs only have fuel for 8 marines? How can it fly with 5 people looking out of the windows! Surely it's aerial stabilizers don't work that good? I almost expected his medivac to just topple over in a 180 degrees vertical flip in, with the uneven distribution of weight and all. Sure they can carry thors, but can it remain balanced if 4 guys with guns are sitting on 1 side of the ship, while 1 marine called Dave sits lonely on the other side of the ship? And otherwise, in his lonelyness, the wouldn't Dave obviously try to either have sex with the handsome pilot, or just go haywire and start shooting his "buddies no more"? Really! That's what I expect in a game!
I just couldnt grasp it... fine I just retreated a few units to deal with the threat, and suddenly another medivac slipped through with... 6 units in it? Killing my expansion... I just forgot about my whole plan! What happened eventually was that my vikings flew over his army, all of them died, but I killed the drops in my bases. While he was trying to chase my vikings, his marines accidentially ran into my siege tank line, and they all died. I still tried to nuke his tanks, he unsieged, I moved forward, banshees killed all of my stuff, found out that I didnt have enough ghosts cuz I cancelled mine, so I couldnt emp his banshees. My new vikings and 2 scans dealt with the threat however. In the end, my entire grand scheme plans resulted in an ugly gutter brawl, a lot of stuff died on both sides, but I was victorious in the end, with a smashing 3 marines left.
Or was it 3 marines? No, it was 11 marines and a medivac! My marines and medivac were just sitting there in the corner of his base, smoking a frigging cigarette and being very happy that they conquered a patch of grass! The second that I saw those marines, I stimmed them and ran into his main base, started shooting a supply depod, and he gg'ed out. Finally the victory screen!
What I saw there however irked me even more than cargo hold balance issues in medivacs. The units killed and units produced tab. Units killed: 299... Why couldnt it have been 300! This was simply madness. 300, and I would have felt like a spartan in a choke. I would have felt like I defeated a million units. It would have been for me like getting a puppy for christmas! You hear it bark, you call it, it runs to you, and you hold it in your arms. You knew for 4 months that you were going to get a puppy, so you named it already. The most epic name you could think of, your puppy is called Leonidus! You were going to teach it starcraft, tape wings to it's back and it could be your zergling, it was going to bark everytime you went below 150 apm, cry everytime a colossus kills your marine ball, be excited everytime it hears "nuclear launch detected"... The perfect puppy!
But no, 299 unit kills was as unsatisfying as holding the puppy in your arms for 2 seconds, and finding out you got an allergy for dogs.
Luckily this metaphor is fictional, and I'm definately gonna get a puppy now! 300 kills is going to happen, but I think I have to let go of the numbers sometimes
On June 16 2011 21:05 Crawler wrote: In 300 they sent the blind one back so didn't 299 die? Or actually I dont remember if he was blind but I think they did send 1 man back.
On June 16 2011 21:05 Crawler wrote: In 300 they sent the blind one back so didn't 299 die? Or actually I dont remember if he was blind but I think they did send 1 man back.
He lost eyesight in one eye. God was gracious enough to bless him with two. In addition it wasn't just him who left quite a few other Spartans left as well. Only a handful stayed.
HAHAHAHA. Yeah. I love puppies. Those numbers don't mean anything only the victory screen does. This mentality will hurt you if you want to be great. But it sounds like so much fun anyways. Fat dave fucked up your plans big time. The fact that hes fat is probably why he didn't lay the pilot of the drop ship and cause them to be late to the party.
Thanks for the feedback everyone :D I'll write more in the near future ^^
For the answer on how 5 marines can sit in a medivac, I e-mailed the marine medivac academy. Here's their reply:
Dear mister Meborg
As a valued customer, we are very happy to answer your question. We cannot give away too many details for we noticed that your heart is not exclusively to the terran dominion, but also to the random camp. After appealing to the board of directors, however, we concluded that zerg and protoss have no reliable way to duplicate our technological superiority, so we decided to give an answer.
Medivac balance issues can be solved in two very simple ways. First of all, we never allow marines to sit next to each other, but only in a line behind each other. They all have to sit very still, for any movement can upset our Circular Levitational Orbit Wonder Nucleus Systems, our CLOWNS.
As balance is still an issue with uneven spacing we solved this problem by hiring a few clowns on small bicycles. These clowns are very good at tightrope walking, so they're constantly adjusting balance by cycling around the medivac on tightropes. This is also the reason why thors have to hang underneath the medivacs. If they're inside the cargohold, they take up so much space that they block the tightrope CLOWNS system. In the past this was solved by not having thors, but since we're in the future now this was no longer an option. Therefore we have several claws beneath the medivac now, which can grasp thors and units. We are also very proud that we actually managed to install 9 of these claws, instead of 8. We bolted medics to the 9th claw, so they no longer have to walk around while healing.
The biggest flaw in this technology are the protoss high templars. These elusive protoss academians have studied our ways in the future and the past alike. Because these beings are so clairvoyant, they developed and are developing a technique (We do not understand protoss space-time relation and dimensional warp theorem) to counter our medivac system before and after they are existing. Because of their secret feedback technique, however, they can very specifically target the medic which hangs underneath the 9th claw.
Feedback targets the medics very specifically. As everyone knows that energy and mass are related, we have the medics eat a lot all the time, to give them energy (and mass). However, when they are targeted by feedback, they feed backwards! This means they stop feeding backwards in time, but the clowns do not understand this. The time-space-weight discrepancy happens instantaniously, and our clowns simply cannot react in time! The sudden balance issues confuse our clowns, so they fall down the tightropes, destabilizing the medivac. And we all know: Lack of balance results in instant explosions!
We're training them at secret laboratories by trying to balance hybrid zerg-protoss units around, but a rebel called Jim Raynor destroyed one of these facilities, and set back our clown training for decades. Our clowns cried a lot.
Thank you for your concerns however, and feel free to ask us questions related to the terran dominion!
Yours truly,
Sara Jerrycan, Head of customer service of the Marine Medivac Academy
EPT
