EPTUnit Clumping and Why It Matters
First of all, thank you for taking the time to read. Unless you're going to stop right after I've thanked you, which would be a totally jerk move.
For the awesome non-jerks who are still here, I'd like to ramble on a bit about why I think unit clumping should be at the top of the pile of design options Blizzard considers in HotS. If you have access to the Beta forum and think I’ve made worthwhile new points, please feel free to repost!
The Short Version
SC2's unit behaviour is making WoL, HotS - and will make LotV - unnecessarily difficult to balance and, as a game, intolerant of both unit and strategic diversity.
The Long Version
What I Don’t Want.
I absolutely don't want HotS to be like BroodWar. Blizzard have said all along that ‘worse’ unit AI is not on the table, full stop - and I agree. Brood War armies behave like a playground full of concussed toddlers.
However, I think HotS would benefit enormously from being less WoL-like. WoL armies are compact, slippery, amoeba-like collectives conforming to every nook and cranny of the map with liquid ease, and I think the extremity of that behaviour is making Blizzard's role as an innovator and game balancer much harder than it needs to be.
Why ‘Perfect’ Unit Movement Makes Blizzard’s Life Difficult
The principle reasons are:
1. It minimises the influence of the map.
2. It minimises the advantage of a prepared defence
3. It minimises the utility of micro (and no, not because it does the micro for you)
4. It minimises the significance of air units being air units.
Map Influence and the Advantage of a Prepared Defence
In WoL, even maxed armies can negotiate all but the narrowest chokes in seconds. This means that while it’s possible for one deathball to enjoy a positional advantage over another by physically blocking the exit from a choke for an extended period while fire is exchanged, the same is not true when a smaller force attempts to use positional advantage to stop the advance of a larger one. The larger force can push forward much more quickly than the defenders can whittle the leading edge down, unless the choke is extremely narrow. The compactness of the advancing force also serves to minimise the advantage of a pre-prepared concave if the enclosing force is smaller in numbers
To compensate, and to keep the game interesting, Blizzard had to give map-making tools to units instead: the sentry and infestor. But units, which can be used everywhere, are much more difficult to balance than maps, in which each location can be individually tweaked. I could get one sentry and defend my main ramp for a minute - or I could get ten and permanently exclude you from your natural / third while I munch on it. I could get a couple of infestors to delay that marine push at the ramp, or I could get fifteen and spam your entire army while I tech to Broodlords.
The worst casualty in all this is the tank. Tanks simply cannot be made strong enough to do the space-controlling job they did in BW, because the job they did in BW was greatly aided by the way the map affected unit movement. In WoL they lost that situational advantage, but could not be buffed to compensate because such a buff would apply in all situations. Indeed, they had to be substantially nerfed, partly because of smart-firing and partly because of unit clumping. So Terran have ended up with a poor-man’s version of the sentry and infestor to control space, and are forced to play mobile-mech or even more mobile bio to survive.
As long as Blizzard continue to try to fix this problem of space control with unit design, they are going to struggle. Economically preventing the advance of fluid, compact armies requires tight chokes (forcefields), micro-eliminating spells (Fungal), and/or high AoE damage - all of which are more difficult to balance when unit clumping makes the ratio between maximum and minimum effectiveness of a spell so high, eg:
* Clustered units means fungal hits more per shot and can reach more if infestors are massed (army more compact => more units in range => spam more effective)
* Clustered units means forcefield-walls can slice off a bigger chunk of army (more compact army => more units in range of FF) making that tactic more devastating and requiring nerfs elsewhere to compensate.
Micro and Air Units
Air units in Brood War cluster far better relative to ground units than they do in WoL. The relative ease with which they navigate the map - compared to ground units - is also far greater in BW than in WoL.
The diminished ratios of those qualities in SC2 eats into the inherent utility of ‘going air’, utility which was an important part of the balance equation.
In BW, mutas clustered up versus AoE that was tuned for spread out ground units (eg storm) - but that was Ok, because mutas had the mobility to evade those storms and strike elsewhere - a deadly threat to a clumsy, spread out ground army. In WoL, air units have weaker AoE to worry about but far more mobile, compact and deadly ground armies, which screws up the whole dynamic. Once again, units become difficult to balance because air units are missing a key advantage they ought to have over ground armies.
Micro, too, suffers from unit clumping, for the simple reason that there is so little time in which to do it. DPS ramps up so abruptly as tightly packed armies engage that there is barely any time to do anything to affect the outcome - it is this, not unit design, which prevents player skill being a more significant multiplier of unit effectiveness. And when unit control is a weak multiplier, unit imbalance - or the appearance of it - will always loom largest.
What to do about it.
Like I said, I don’t want my units to become stupid or unresponsive or unable to get where I tell them to go. But there are plenty of user mods demonstrating a range of tweaks that result in more spread-out armies, slower choke-traversal and more rewarding micro without being what your average player would call ‘worse’. I think HotS Beta is Blizzard’s chance to explore some of those options and see if it makes the rest of their job easier.
Thanks for reading.
