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Dustin Browder has been doing it wrong for a long time. Nerfing siege tanks was the first step, and now adding in all of this crazy stuff is the next one.
Replicant? Just take a look at that unit. Not only does it not belong in HOTS, it does not belong in any RTS game. You don't balance a race by allowing them to become the other two races lol...
A lot of the new stuff is also very "noob friendly." Instead of sucking it up, and adding in stuff like dark archon or spider mines, they add a shredder with no friendly fire, and they add a protoss aoe air to air unit that is just another 1a click unit.
And 100% agree about the warhound just being a factory marauder...i don't understand what browder's fixation is on "countering the siege tank." Everything in the game already counters the siege tank, it's like he has a chip on his shoulder from designing cnc "tank games" and doesn't want the tank to be good lol.
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Agreed.
Also, any sc2 fans are always welcome to come over to the dark side and try out BW. The new season should be starting in a few weeks, and if you want to give it a try you will find all sorts of advice on how to appreciate this great game in the BW forum. I promise we won't bite.
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5/5 could not agree more.
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On October 24 2011 01:01 deafhobbit wrote:
Agreed.
Also, any sc2 fans are always welcome to come over to the dark side and try out BW. The new season should be starting in a few weeks, and if you want to give it a try you will find all sorts of advice on how to appreciate this great game in the BW forum. I promise we won't bite.
Real shameless BW promotion there. Can't say I disapprove though. 
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This is the first time I've actually given a 5 star click instead of a "5/5 feel good bump".
You earned it.
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On October 24 2011 01:03 Zergneedsfood wrote:Show nested quote +On October 24 2011 01:01 deafhobbit wrote:
Agreed.
Also, any sc2 fans are always welcome to come over to the dark side and try out BW. The new season should be starting in a few weeks, and if you want to give it a try you will find all sorts of advice on how to appreciate this great game in the BW forum. I promise we won't bite. Real shameless BW promotion there. Can't say I disapprove though.
The reason everyone is so mad about the new units is because they are going to buy the expansion anyway. They wouldn't care if they wouldn't get it.
I'm playing sc2 and it got me watching some BW. The games are definetely more exciting but the plan of most sc2'ers is just to wait it out until blizzard cleans up the mess.
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Yeah I have to agree lol the replicant is just insert-jackie-chan's-face-here. Like you said, simplicity is key and adds so much more to the game than gimmicks. But I guess on the upside they are still trying to cut/add new units and see what works and doesn't hopefully they'll get it right
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On October 24 2011 00:42 AIRwar wrote:
I don't get why everyone is so negative about this... Things are NOT finalized. If you'll remember in WoL beta, Roaches were pretty much free and only cost 1 food. But guess what, the design team weren't idiots, so they fixed it. That's the point of betas.
That's not the point he's making. He's arguing about the types of things the units involve, not specifics of the units.
The units will change a bit, to balance them, but fundamentally the approach taken with the new units is to add gimmicky stuff. That won't change unless they scrap the units and introduce totally new units with a different design philosophy.
Yes, the units will be tweaked to balance them, but unless they are given such an overhaul that they are basically removed from the game and replaced, the basic fundamentals will still be the same, and that's where he's saying the issue lies.
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Canada13392 Posts
Very well written. I really hope some Blizz employees read this and take what you say to heart. When I saw the Oracle and replicator i cringed. Gimmicky units if they ever existed.
Transforming hellion and in transformed mode it has more health or armour or something to make it meatier? why? The hellion is spectacular as it is. Let it be a speedy unit and let it be weak with only 90 HP. If it turns into a firebat to combat its weakeness then thats dumb. Let it have a weakness.
I feel that some units just don't belong as well. The marauder and roach don't make sense for their respective races. Collossus is also a weird unit. It moves not too fast but not too slow has high damage output and a lot of HP. The only thing that helps it be less of a wtf unit is the fact that it can be hit by ground and air.
The marauder and Roach are both super meaty units in races that aren't supposed to have super meaty units. Roach is meaty but takes away from swarm feeling and the marauder is a meaty high DPS vs armoured dealer.
On October 24 2011 00:56 avilo wrote:
Dustin Browder has been doing it wrong for a long time. Nerfing siege tanks was the first step, and now adding in all of this crazy stuff is the next one.
Replicant? Just take a look at that unit. Not only does it not belong in HOTS, it does not belong in any RTS game. You don't balance a race by allowing them to become the other two races lol...
A lot of the new stuff is also very "noob friendly." Instead of sucking it up, and adding in stuff like dark archon or spider mines, they add a shredder with no friendly fire, and they add a protoss aoe air to air unit that is just another 1a click unit.
And 100% agree about the warhound just being a factory marauder...i don't understand what browder's fixation is on "countering the siege tank." Everything in the game already counters the siege tank, it's like he has a chip on his shoulder from designing cnc "tank games" and doesn't want the tank to be good lol.
Agreed. The tank in TvT isn't such a big deal that you need to have something to punch through it. The marauder already does a damn good job at that. Perhaps they are thinking about removing the marauder but didn't want to commit quite yet to this detail at blizzcon?
and the replicant is a bad way to balance things. Lets let protoss have what the other races have ... no. If i wanted a tank i would play terran. If I wanted an infestor I would play Zerg.
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what a brilliant blog, sums up my thoughts perfectly
5/5 for sure, long live BW <3
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Another large problem is that the game was balanced with a certain map pool in mind.
Do you remember the first batch of maps?
Lost Temple, with its stupid abusive cliff?
or that one stupid map that I can't even remember with a rush distance of 4 seconds from nat to nat?
The game was balanced and created with these maps as the guidelines of how matchups would play out.
These small/gimmicky maps led to strong, gimmicky, units and a play that is decentered from macro play fundamentally and a solid game progression (remember TvZ? How the map control shifted with each step in each player's tech until they finally were competing for map presence in the late-mid game?) Even now, close positions is an auto lose in some matchups, or prevents an entire gameplay mindset from being viable.
With these larger maps coming out of GSL, and close positions being removed from most tournaments, Starcraft 2's fundamental game design and balance is changing. As the maps grow larger, Starcraft 2 will need a complete overhaul.
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I agree on the sound design (Brood War was such a stylish game when it came to art direction/sound direction), but not on the units.
I've played Red Alert 2. I loved Red Alert 2. Starcraft 2 is not Red Alert 2. There's nothing wrong with unique units purposefully designed to fill specific rolls. I just don't understand your blog post: you want simplicity but then you bash the simplistic units (read: Marauder, Roach, Stalker). Yeah, they need to be tweaked, but that doesn't mean the entire game fails.
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Am I the only one excited for all the new units?
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I like how you brought up Red Alert 2. Most about what you say is indeed true. Still, even in RA you had your basic units. Allies had GIs, strong, could set up sandbags while Soviet Conscripts were much cheaper. On the other hand, Allies' basic tank unit, the grizzly was cheaper, faster but weaker than the Soviet equivalent of the Rhino. They also had similar AA vehicles, ex IFVs and Flak , and also similar yet slightly different basic defensive structures, pillboxes and sentry guns.
Even in the higher techs, Soviet seemed to be a straight up 'make units and kill you' with Apocalypse tanks, V3 Rocket Launchers and Dreadnaughts (Basically massive ships used for bombardment). On the other hand, Allies did seem to focus more on the 'gimmick' as you pointed out. Rocketeers, Mirage Tanks, Harriers (Basically air harass), mirage and prism tanks, so on and so forth. Still, had your basic units and that was almost always the core you relied on.
In Starcraft 2, you barely even have a core unit set, especially for Protoss. Zealots instead of running up to the enemy and stabbing them in the face go super saiyan and charge with a brilliant shine of light behind them... and then the enemy takes a step back and he's out of breath and can't continue charging. Stalkers? They are basically built to run away. Their very attack looks just wimpy, doesn't do that much damage, and they die very fast. Still, with their blink ability they can run away to fight another day, or at least continue running away. Sentries just forcefield their problems away  . But then almost every other unit, pheonixes, void rays, motherships are also very gimmicky, leaving nothing but the Immortal and Collosus, which both have glaring weaknesses that no other Protoss unit fills. I think this is the reason Blizzard has had a very hard time balancing them (Think of the Void Ray, High Templar and Mothership nerfs) and the players seem to have a hard time coming up with many viable, long term game play solutions. The race was basically designed for DT, Void or mass gateway rushing unfortunately.
For Terran they have the core being barracks units and the medivac. However, even the medivac is a little more gimmicky. Healer and a transport? Seriously who has ever seen that before SC2, healers have always been slow or stationary (EG buildings), basic builder units (Mass SCV repair is a bit gimmicky tho ) or dedicated units like the medic. IMO thors and hellions are also designed for the wrong purposes. An anti light unit doesn't need splash (Look at vultures vs lings LOL so much blood) and a massive, slow moving behemoth of a battlestation really just doesn't have much place in the game. Their one weakness really is getting surrounded, and if you have enough of them then they can't get surrounded (Remember when they didn't have energy bars? Mass thor was ridiculous vs Protoss, as en masse they flat out slaughtered their very counters, void rays and immortals, and nothing else could kill them fast enough).
I think for Zerg they have the smallest quantity of gimmicky units (Zerglings, Roaches, Hydras and mutalisks all lack any 'spell' such as charge, blink or stim), but their gimmicks are the worst. Look at the queen for example, it has led to the entire race relying on a unit, rather than a building, for their primary production abilities. I don't think this has ever happened in any game, period, and it has led to some rather odd playstyles. You see them rely entirely on building either as few combat units as possible for as long as possible, or they cut workers and try to catch their opponent off guard with a massive surge of units. Sure you have this in BW, and every race in every RTS can do the same thing, but the difference is in the speed they can do this. In BW if Zerg wanted a lot of units, they had either quickly build a lot of hatcheries or cut them completely to get a smaller number out faster (1 hatch lurker anyone?). In Starcraft 2, you can't really tell what Zerg wants to do without an amazing sense of intuition or flat out guessing, because no matter what the do they are always going to have 2 bases and 2 queens. Is that roach warren for defense or is he going allin? Well, you have to wait for the units to actually finish building to find out.
[B]On October 24 2011 00:56 avilo wrote:[/B
And 100% agree about the warhound just being a factory marauder...i don't understand what browder's fixation is on "countering the siege tank." Everything in the game already counters the siege tank, it's like he has a chip on his shoulder from designing cnc "tank games" and doesn't want the tank to be good lol.
LOL so true!
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I wholeheartedly agree about the gimmickiness of SC2, although I don't agree with all your proposed solutions. Very well thought-out post, 5/5.
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On October 24 2011 01:33 jeeeeohn wrote:
I agree on the sound design (Brood War was such a stylish game when it came to art direction/sound direction), but not on the units.
I've played Red Alert 2. I loved Red Alert 2. Starcraft 2 is not Red Alert 2. There's nothing wrong with unique units purposefully designed to fill specific rolls. I just don't understand your blog post: you want simplicity but then you bash the simplistic units (read: Marauder, Roach, Stalker). Yeah, they need to be tweaked, but that doesn't mean the entire game fails.
I see what you're saying. I didn't make a distinction between simplistic as in the marine and simplistic as in marauder/roach. Basically, while both units are functionally simplistic, the role the marine fulfills is simple while the role the marauder fulfills isn't.
The marine is a weak, high-dps unit meant to be used en masse as the main army. They build fast, kill fast, die fast. If you watch over them they'll work wonders, but if you leave them unattended they can easily get rolled by speedling/banes or psi-storm or colossi lasers.
The marauder, on the other hand, fulfills too many roles very well. They don't fulfill any specific niche, they're just a good unit to have a bunch of all the time. They can sometimes replace the tank, sometimes replace the marine. If you leave them alone for a few seconds they won't die to banelings or psi storm. They simply allow Terran to be as offensive and defensive as they want with less effort. That's why the marauder isn't considered a "simplistic" unit, because their role isn't simple at all.
Roaches are similar to the marauder. You can mass a ton of them easily and they're pretty good in almost all situations. Roaches are basically the zerg version of the marauder. The mere fact that they're required in so many matchups makes the game less exciting than it potentially can be.
These are, of course, just a rough argument. I think the current balance state of WoL is actually quite admirable and we have definitely seen many fantastic games. But I feel that the general direction Dustin Browder takes in designing Starcraft 2 and the future expansions is flawed.
I too played Red Alert 2. At higher levels the game basically boils down to grizzly/rocketeer/US Paratroop vs rhino/flak and whoever can micro their tanks the best. In the rare game that makes it to late game Allies will transition to mirage/rocketeer. All the 50+ other units have their specific roles, but the main two units fulfill their roles so well you don't actually need to build the other units. That's simplicity done wrong.
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I agree with everything in your post. Very well written. What I don't agree with is the majority's opinion on the Replicant. I am not really a huge informative poster that can make proper arguments about units or strategy but I will say that the replicant imo has a lot of potential if balanced properly. Who knows, it could end up as the scout in sc2, isn't used that much but is still there. Not to mention that the ability is quite nice, as expected of the advanced Protoss race. I agree with everything else though. When WoL was released, it was way more different than I expected it to be. However, I have faith in Blizzard and I think Browder can do wayyyy better. That said, I miss the sounds from BW (Zealot nuff said etc) and other aesthetic stuff present in BW but not in Sc2. Good post bro.
e: yeeeeea...not how I wanted to use my 2k post sigh
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On October 24 2011 01:33 jeeeeohn wrote:
I too played Red Alert 2. At higher levels the game basically boils down to grizzly/rocketeer/US Paratroop vs rhino/flak and whoever can micro their tanks the best. In the rare game that makes it to late game Allies will transition to mirage/rocketeer. All the 50+ other units have their specific roles, but the main two units fulfill their roles so well you don't actually need to build the other units. That's simplicity done wrong.
You mean, like BW's ZvZ?
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Well said, I've been feeling the same way since i stopped watching and playing BW and looking at starcraft 2. Its just how Dustin works though, I think his vast experience in the RTS world, that he's had to work designing units for sooo many RTS games has caused him to become that way though. If only there was some way to make these grievances heard...
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