Levelling the Playing Field

Falling

Canada11218 Posts

November 03 2012 16:53 GMT

Or else: Flattening the Terrain

Not sure if I've learned from my last Omnibus Blog on A-moving units by design. I have tried to aim for shorter this time. Although if you were off-put the first time, I do have a tldr version (to shamelessly plug it.)

I'd like to make the case that taking advantage of map features is partially what makes RTS games interesting. Especially in the RTS franchise, we don't have cover fire and bunch of other things modern RTS's have. But seizing tactical or strategic advantages makes the game more interesting and less like a deathball. A boring game is an entirely flat map with no features and it turns into army chasing army.

That is limitless movement, limits decision making and leads to deathball. Restricted movement (within reason), allows for more creative decisions, leads to more positional games and move away from deathball.

I do want to be careful here because people are used to all or nothing arguments. BW has all the micro. SC2 has no micro, etc, etc. So I'm not arguing that SC2 has no map features or that the map is completely flat. Rather, SC2 has minimized and muted the importance of terrain and this leads to less positional game.

I of course am once again treading above my station (I only meddle in very amateur BW map-making). But when one of our per-eminent SC2 map-makers made an exit post, I was interested to see that many of his thoughts were similar to my own.
+ Show Spoiler +

Superouman

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/6713481997?page=1#0
Hello everyone, I posted yesterday a blog on teamliquid.net about my retirement:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=371545

Many people wanted to know the reasons of my lack of interest in this game, I post them here so the ones who are mainly concerned can read them. I reduced my subjective opinion as much as possible.

- A-move units with zero micro needed to do a lot of damage: colossus

- Units that forces a very specific counter otherwise you have high chances to lose: colossus->viking/corruptor

- Units push themselves, even enemy units, this causes to never be sure if your unit wall is ling proof

- Moving units have a smaller footprint than a static one moving ball armies are even smaller.

- The perfect pathing combined with unlimited selection, i think they must do unlimited selection with worse pathing to make more space between units OR perfect pathing with limited selection.

- Inability to move units between 2*2 buildings and bunkers. Supply depots wouldn't be needed at the bottom of main ramp.

- The spammable low tech anti-micro skills: forcefield and fungal , you can't counter them once you get caught. With brood war statis, you can save the units and about lockdown, it's hard to pull off and it's on only one unit.

- Smartcast, if there was no smartcast, spells could be much stronger because you would have to select spellcasters one by one. This could create comeback situations.

- Comebacks are only very rarely possible.

- The high number of workers needed per base, this causes to not need many bases spread out on the map. The high income rate is a big factor as well of not taking more than 3 bases.

- No highground advantage, the one in sc2 is only present in early game and is an illusion in the rest of the game. It causes terrain to not have much meaning.

- The big range of units compared to their radius, the consequence is too many units shoot at the same time and thus the dps rate of the army is huge.

- The dps rate causes players to not micro a lot

- There is no multiples battles occuring at the same time, and no, harass and drops are a different thing. The high dps rate causes that as well.

- Protoss early/mid game is balanced around the forcefield and forces them to take a very very close third base, you can't have too many paths leading to it otherwise a protoss can't forcefield everything.

- You can't place a lot of chokes in the middle of a map otherwise forcefields break everything (cloud kingdom is borderline on this subject)

- Every 4 players map with reflection symmetry must have close positions disabled because natural to natural distance is too short, it takes away a lot of diversity

- Units move too fast

- Tiny area control available, only tanks and swarm hosts can do it. Creep does it too but not very much.

- The only choke control unit/spell is the forcefield

- The terrain editor is extremely rigid, especially for ramps.

- The big size of expands, the resource gathering building having a 5*5 footprint

- Forcing 8 minerals, 2 gas expands

This list isn't complete, this is what i remember at this moment.

Blizzard has tried to add a few map features to add strategic options, but I'd suggest that so far they have been rather lack-luster.

New Map Features

Watch Tower
[image loading]

I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but they've never really panned out to be a major feature to fight over. It's usually held by a couple units or else the entire army is camped around it. But it seems rare to see a battle initiated over the control of the watchtower. They're useful, but they don't seem significant enough to fight for control over it (beyond a couple unit duels every now and then.)

Rocks
[image loading]

Rock. Rocks, rocks, rock, rocks. Everywhere there are rocks. I don't know what more to say except they are mostly used to slow down expansions. There's no real decision making behind Rocks blocking expansions except they are in the way and they must be destroyed. More a nuisance than anything else.
Collapsible rocks- we'll see how that pans out. I'm not going to make any judgement on it yet.

High Ground

One of the biggest issues is simply the almost non-existent High Ground Advantage. Or the advantage that does exist is either/or. You have either have vision and can fire up or you don't. In contrast, in BW units on the lower ground had a miss-chance. Now some people hate any sort of randomness with a passion. I personally like miss-chance, but if you are one of those people then perhaps substitute x% damage reduction for shooting up.
[image loading]

Blue- unhindered shots
Red- Shots reduced effectiveness.

Why this matters:
It's simply is not near as worth it to guard bases and positions with smaller forces. This is because as soon as the attacker has vision, the attacker can make an even trade (just assume mirror match-up to limit the variables), unit for unit. Not only that, but if the attacker commits enough, there becomes a critical mass where the attacker can destroy the smaller defending force without suffering much damage. It then would've been more worth it for the defender to keep their main army strong and not have committed those defending forces.

If there is either miss-chance or damage reduction, then holding high ground becomes a very cost-effective way of using your units. This creates a greater incentive to split up and hold because you are usually guaranteed to put up a decent fight due to High Ground Advantage. The attacker must commit more more forces than the defender has committed to guarantee a victory. In other words, there is far more incentive to take and hold specific map features rather than simply chasing armies around. This increases positional control on the map.

Without it, the map feels far more featureless. (High/low has very little difference.)

This applies to more than just attacking your opponent's base. Beyond fighting over chokes (or creating terrain with FF's) there are also very large ramps in the middle of the map. Heartbreak Ridge is a good example.

Heartbreak Ridge
[image loading]

Red- ridges to hold position against pursuing forces.

The large ramps provide a great place to stop your retreating dragoons because your opponent would be hesitant to push into forces on the high ground. This is simply due to miss-chance (or damage reduction.) The ramps are super open with no chokes in sight and yet it becomes a great map feature.

Yes there is some value currently to positioning forces on the ridge (Vision.) But once you have vision, the units will trade evenly high ground to low ground as they would if the ground were flat.

Incidentally, shooting into trees and a couple other Doodads also gave miss-chances, but I'm not sure this was heavily used in pro-maps.

Ramps: Chokes Either/Or

Getting up ramps is far easier in SC2, which makes holding positions on the map more difficult. Unless you have sentries, in which it case it's on/off access with FF. Either you can and it's easy. Or you can't and it's impossible.

This is closely related to High Ground Advantage. Yet another reason that gave great defender's advantage and therefore pushed the game to be more positional is that it was much harder to push up or down ramps with your units. This meant that a smaller force could hold the top of a small ramp, pummel the larger force (because of miss-chance) and it was harder for the attacker to get all their units to bear.

This was primarily due to unit AI Units blocked rather than push up against each other and then throw in some buggy ai in the mix and ramps were hard to break which allowed for comebacks, tech switches and positional strategy. Obviously replicating the buggy AI is not an ideal solution. But I wonder if making units travel slower when going up small ramps would be a workable solution?

It simply allows the defender a few extra shots before the attacker can get all their units up the ramp. This puts a greater premium on being able to hold expansions with small numbers of troops on top of ramps. This in turn, pushes the battles from simply chasing armies around.

Unit Blocking

The new unit AI flows around each other, and pushes and shoves in order to get to the spot that you ordered. That may be fine for allied units, but it is un-acceptable that enemy units can also push your units around. Specifically in regards to zerglings pushing probes back. SC is a very precise game and clutch holds using a handful of units and a bunch of workers is part of what makes a game exciting. Enemy units not pushing your units allow for a more positional game and for more precise builds.

Once the workers (and other units) properly hold the line against enemy units, you could even re-add the old Worker Drill to bust up ramps. (Last blog has a video on this.)

(As a side-note, the Sentry really seems to be the only current solution for Protoss to survive early game and many maps seem to be balanced around this fact. Slowing down units travel time up narrow ramps and fixing the pushing problem could at least partially move away from having to balance maps around Sentries and Protoss's ability to take and hold their 3rd.)

Cliff-Walking

When Blizzard first mentioned the cliff-walking Reapers, Stalkers, and Collosus, I was totally on board. Cool feature I thought. Cliffs are such a big deal in BW. Wouldn't it be neat if there were units that could climb those cliffs? I totally get that line of reasoning.

But I am now convinced this is a terrible mistake. Cliffs were a big deal in BW and cliff-walking negates their effectiveness, thereby negatively effecting the sort of positional gameplay that was so interesting in SC. Terrain advantage becomes muted and minimized.

I am now convinced that making this feature so prevalent, has in turn made the maps and games feel featureless. The ability is basically the ability to ignore terrain. I'd suggest this is the main reason the Reaper could never find that sweet spot and instead got nerfed into obscurity. The power to ignore terrain consistently, easily, and in the early game pushes away from more positional games (you can just go over the terrain.) It too heavily impacted both greedy builds and tech builds for too little investment. (Compared to any sort of drop harass.)

High ground with low ground immediately underneath used to be a great advantage because the cliff was actually a wall that you could fire down from. Now it's an enormous vulnerability that every map must take account for. (Need a lot of impassable terrain to limit the approaches of all the units that can ignore the terrain barrier.)

Fighting Spirit-*
[image loading]

Red- vulnerable to ground army
Blue- Can fire from high ground down. Attacker can fire back, but can't cliff prevents close engagement.
Yellow/Green- impassable terrain to all

* Now granted there are a wide variety of BW maps and they don't all have these extensive ridges. But map variety is a side benefit.

All that that blue creates an ideal set-up where the attacker can only push so far in and then is forced to go around to the ramp and try to force their way up. That or try drop harass or giant drops. In the meantime, the attacking army is funneled into an area with defenders attacking the entire time. (An especially big issue with melee units.) When you add the high ground advantage from before, this becomes a potent combo to halt the attacker and give you time to build up a counter-attack. (Come-back potential.) If there were stalkers on this map, one observer and they quickly hop into the base and start killing stuff. They can easily ignore the terrain.

Daybreak

Red- vulnerable to ground army
Blue- note that what would've been blue is now red. Open ridges with low ground are as much another vulnerability. Instead we have a lot of terrain impassable to all. (Presumably so cliff-walkers can't endlessly abuse differing heights from absolutely everywhere.**)
Yellow/Green- impassable terrain to all

**Could be other reasons, I'm no SC2 map-maker so I'm a little hesitant to get too far into reasons why. On a tangent, I wonder how much (read too large) FF's dictate how maps are created.

This literally levels the playing field. Terrain does not matter near so much for Collosus especially. This is compounded by the Collosus' ability to ignore unit collision and walk right over anything. People talk about good Collosus positioning and while that's true, much of it is dumbed down because the Collosus can go pretty much anywhere. I talked at length about the problem of the Collosus in my last blog. But one thing I glossed over is this mobility issue.

A pattern I see in interesting late game damage dealers is they are very powerful in burst damage, their rate of fire is quite slow or else limited by how fast you can click them. Furthermore, they are restricted by speed. This applies to almost every ground, late game damage dealer. Except the Collosus who in fact goes where it pleases regardless of the map and at fairly high speeds.

Basically, positions on the map don't matter so much when you can just ignore position. Then it's just army chasing on a flat map.

Air Units

This isn't as big an issue as I'd thought it would be when I had the idea to write. Blizzard wanted to make air more important than it was in BW. I initially thought this was a good idea as I also thought it was irritating that many air units were not consistently used.

I no longer think that a bigger role for Air is a good thing simply because there is no terrain in the air. If an RTS must finish in the air, it will most likely turn into big Air to Air mob clusters. But there's nothing to maneuver around.

Blue- Air to Air battles don't really make a difference where on the map they are. It's all the same.
Red- Air to Ground- Terrain is everything. (Cliff abuse.)

Three Points of Clarification
1) Air to Ground is very interesting and is just is much positional. Cliffs are the air units best defence and the battle lines are drawn by dodging in and out and abusing the cliffs to get away. Asymmetrical air attacks can be quite good. Just so long as they other side can mount a reasonable AA ground force and doesn't just have their position over-run by as sudden switch to air.

2) Scourge actually create the same sort of terrain dynamic. It forces the attack-retreat for the air units or else be annihilated. There was also a bit of juking that air units could do to avoid scourge impact (at least for awhile.) I'm sure an entire blog could be devoted to analyzing the impact scourge had on air play, but I'll just skim by.

3) Moving Shot and Patrol Micro makes everything better. Air to Air can be interesting when the rapid response comes into play.

The reason this isn't such an issue is in the end is because Air isn't near as important as Blizzard had wanted it. Voidrays are hardly made and Carriers disappeared for long periods of time. Vikings and Corrupters are boring, but you can't over-run positions with them because they can't shoot down. However, the control on most air units remains sub-par. (The issue of delayed attack between moving/ sluggish unit handling.) There is of course Infestor-Broodlord, but that's a can of worms I'm not going to touch here.

Warp-Gates

Warp-Gates. Cool in theory. In practice it actually collapses the map on itself. By that I mean, reinforcing lines are extremely important in a more positional game. You are pushed back towards your base. This is bad, but then your reinforcement line just got shorter so you can shore up your forward defences faster than the attacker. This means holding positions on the map actually matter because units take time to travel to the front-line.

Distance is a crucial factor in a map actually being a map and not just a flat terrain arena to duke it out. Warp-gates collapse the distance and can instantly reinforce a pushed line no matter how far into the enemy base they are. Just so long as a pylon (cheaper than ever with the rate of income in SC2) or a warp-gate.

Proxy rushes actually risk something. You try and shorten the distance to your enemy, but risk losing valuable tech and production facilities. It's a huge risk, but the pay-off can be quite exciting.

Portable Gateways- skip everything inbetween

Pylons are basically traveling Gateways. Late game 20 of them (or more) can be parked at someone's doorstep. The ultimate proxy base. It has all the benefits and none of the risk. Distance does not matter. The terrain in between does not matter. You can successfully ignore all the terrain and reinforce right with your main army. This problem is compounded because warp-gates are front-loaded. Insta-reinforcements in the enemies base while they have to wait for their production cycle is complete. At 200/200, the Protoss basically has X number of additional forces where X is the number of warp-gates. There is a balancing cost to this crazy distance-negating advantage.

Besides of which, the Protoss already have early game recall and late-game recall. (Although having it stuck on one Hero Unit limits its use- especially on the late-game Super slow Unit.)

Caution: Balance on Movement Restriction

Although this is heavily emphasizes how to make holding positions on the map more strong, it is possible to swing to far the other direction. I once tried to create BW style maps for AoE II with one gap into the base, but it made for very boring, defensive play.

Good drop harass units are essential for the mid-game. And late-game it is necessary for there to be methods to get over or through strong defences. In BW, late game, the Arbiter comes out that is both able to give the ground army protective cloak until the melee can close the gap to engage the positionally situated tanks. But the recall could jump the army into the enemy base- in the late game. Similarily, Zerg has the defiler to give protective cover for their melee (Dark Swarm) to close the gap. And big Doom Drops with Overlords that are able to get over enemy lines. Terran's tanks are strong enough to bust through most lines, but big drop ship play can do the same trick.

Similarily in the late game, siege air can come out. (Although Guardians generally fell out of favour.) The main difference though, is it's the late game that units come out that really get the armies over defensive lines. It's also pretty limited compared to the Collosus native ability to climb cliffs immediately upon being created. Timing is everything. And being able to easily ignore terrain early to mid-game, negatively impacts positional play.

What can be Reasonably Changed.

Miss-chance/ Damage Reduction could be implemented across the board without too much effort. Yes it would impact the matches, but it ought to impact everyone equally.

Similarly, slowing units progress up ramps could be implemented without damaging too much the current match-ups.

Fixing enemy units pushing your own can and should be fixed even if zergling runbys are harder to do. (You can always balance it out.) This game relies on precision and enemy units bumping around yours is not at all precise.

Air Units- no change required really. Except to add freaking moving shot micro to everything. It really bothers me that we're ignoring our RTS Unit Control Revolution. (Basically what my last blog was about.)

Warp-Gate. Yeah. They're here to stay as damaging as I think they are. Our best shot is if warp-gates took longer to send out units then Gateways. Yeah, it's an old suggestion, but it's the best compromise that I've seen proposed.

Cliff-walking. I'm not sure what is reasonable. I'd like to see a complete overhaul of the Collosus (previous blog had a video describing further problems.) But getting rid of it's cliffwalk would be a start. Stalkers... dunno. If they had blink, but couldn't jump up cliffs? I'm sure they could use a damage buff. And if that were in addition to getting rid of the attack delay between moving. Not likely, but the Collosus is bad and has been bad since the previous Beta.

Conclusion

I guess I'm not really breaking any new ground here. I'm mostly restating what has been argued before by others. However, I think the sum of the parts is far worse when they've all been combined into one game. On their own, each one is irritating, but perhaps not game-breakingly bad. Put them all together and we have a game that on the whole levels the playing field, flattens the terrain and basically minimizes the importance of positional control of specific areas of the map. Army chasing becomes more important than holding multiple positions with smaller forces.

When people complain about almost any match-up with Protoss being extremely boring... is it any wonder? Granted this is only a partial explanation. But it's interesting to note that of all of the races, Protoss is the one that ignores terrain the most. A large bulk of the army can leap up cliffs, no problem. The ones that can't cliff walk, can be warped in on the cliff anyways (with warp-prisms.) The Protoss also have the one unit that can also ignore unit collision and furthermore can simply ignore map distances when reinforcing. Protoss is the races that most consistently ignores the terrain on the map (and subsequently throws up it's own map features in the form of FF's.) I wonder to what extent makes the Protoss army itself feel featureless by comparison.

I think High Ground, Ramps, and Unit Blocking are the most reasonable to change because we aren't getting rid of anything new. We're just attempting to see if it makes any difference on rewarding players take and cost-effectively hold positions on the map with smaller groups of units. Warp-Gate (and probably Cliff Walking) change is a pipe-dream, but I think they are also very big contributing factors. I'm generally fine with the current prevalence of air. More emphasis on Air could downplay the usefulness of terrain. Far more important is to add better attack-retreat micro on air units to make them more interesting.

Post-Script
+ Show Spoiler +

Some other Map Features (That got left behind)

1) Mineral Sliding and Worker Drone

2) Buildings as Defensive structures

Of course they are used for this purpose already. But dropping armoured bonus against buildings would certainly help. (Old as Beta critique.) But it's kinda funny how the supply depots were given that raise/lower ability and yet they are rarely used for that because depots are comparably much weaker.

Tougher buildings means it's easier to block off the tops of ramp. When combined with some of the high ground advantages mentioned in the main blog, then positional play would become much more powerful.

In addition, it wold be nice if there was at least the possibility of placing buildings far enough apart that for instance marines could get through, but zealots could not. Originally in BW this was due to differing measurements on how close buildings could be placed. This created situations where some units could get through and others could not. Not having to memorize specific ways of walling makes SC2 more accessible and we'll probably never go back the old system.

[image loading]

Blue- path of Marine
Red- path of Zealot

This very simple set-up (and others like it) can make for very powerful in-base defences in the early game.

What would be ideal is if we had the current system that makes it easy to block off paths. Then if there was also a way to place buildings slightly further away to get these sorts defensive set-ups... don't know if we can have our cake and eat it too, but it would be pretty awesome.

3) Stacked Temples: AKA What Rocks Should've Been
It seems to me Blizzard saw some of the BW maps with stacked temples and developed their Rock idea from there. However, the use of rocks have never matched what stacked Temples did.

Example: Neo-Medusa. (Electric Circuit is a modern example.)
[image loading]

Note the red arrow on the mini-map and the minerals in front of the Temples.

i) Rocks are not stacked. There's something like 10 stacked temples which you need to target down individually, but mostly it's a big waste of time to do so. Instead, a unit that does splash damage (Archon, Siege Tank, or Lurker) targets the temple and damages the rest through splash. This is important because this keeps the path closed until at least the mid-game. It also give the defender time to prepare a defence behind it. The tech requirement of splash is really important for back door blocking.

ii) There is a very long, winding path on the high ground before finally getting into the main. It's extremely important that when the stacked Temples go down, it doesn't lead straight into the Main. Blistering Sands is the perfect example when Blizzard was still trying to use Rocks for things other than blocking expansions. The backdoor went straight into Main leading to extremely short, hyper-aggressive games. The long path is further compounded by BW units not flowing like water down the corridor.

iii) There is a little micro trick with the mineral patches, where you can slide individual units though the Temples and onto the high-ground. It's very easy to mine out the patch, so it's not a limitless trick. Furthermore, it's hard to do so it doesn't happen every game, but it's exciting when it happens.

iv) The Temples were rarely used to slow down expansions.
It's not so much that Rocks should never block expansions. Just they seem to be used that way in every map.

In short, there seems to be a lot more very cool stuff that was done BW maps (see Troy) that really have no replacement in SC2 maps.

Zanno

United States1484 Posts

November 03 2012 17:17 GMT

most of what you wrote is highly agreeable, except this

i would recommend you play a TvT. a siege tank line on top of a watch tower is incredibly cost ineffective to break without complete air dominance backed by a few banshees. this speaks more to the lack of positional units in sc2 than it does to anything else.

in the other matchups they are less useful outside of in theory an early warning that an attack is imminent but in practice just forces players to take longer attack routes if they are expecting an even fight

for example on daybreak, at lower levels of play, if you are able to siege up on the opponent's watch tower uncontested, you tend to win the game outright on this single maneuver alone, as you can force their 4th base into a location that's very difficult to defend, and they cannot get a 5th until they deal with you. at higher levels people are much better at breaking contains but it is still very important to do, i can think of numerous TvTs in which comebacks have been staged purely on the player in the lead having to fall back from the watchtower to deal with some harass and the losing player suddenly rolling up and taking it uncontested.

**Could be other reasons, I'm no SC2 map-maker so I'm a little hesitant to get too far into reasons why. On a tangent, I wonder how much (read too large) FF's dictate how maps are created.

the reason for such narrow cliff walkable areas is mainly due to a combination of blink/obs all in and various high ground warp in attacks, which i suppose is basically cliffwalking that requires vision

as you correctly point out there's a much greater base defense advantage in bw and this map feature is one of the few ways you can strengthen it

Falling

Canada11218 Posts

November 03 2012 17:30 GMT

Hm, that's true. But I suspect tank based armies are one of the few army compositions that can make very good use of watch towers. (Range greater than sight.) So rather than having a floating building or air scout for you. Watch Towers can give you vision. I can see how Watchtowers would be important in TvT.

It's just generally they didn't seem near as big a deal to fight over as they sounded they would be originally.

Zergneedsfood

United States10671 Posts

November 03 2012 17:38 GMT

At least destructible objects in BW had actual canon applications and made sense.

Sawamura

Malaysia7602 Posts

November 03 2012 17:44 GMT

Far more important is to add better attack-retreat micro on air units to make them more interesting

Really would like to see this in sc2 ....

Antylamon

United States1981 Posts

November 03 2012 18:17 GMT

I just had an idea... how about making Pylons upgradable? Kind of like the Dark Pylon or whatever in WoL alpha, except it allows you to warp in units there. With a cost of some minerals and some gas (perhaps 100/100), then you can warp in as many units as you want there. Or Gateways could be buffed so that unit build time is equal to that of Warpgate cooldown and nerf Warpgate so units cost more when built there.

Falling

Canada11218 Posts

November 03 2012 18:45 GMT

Or maybe just move Warp-Gate to being an end-game technology. I'm not sure why this MUST be early game tech. Collapsing map distances is such a powerful ability- very much in line with something a person would get late-game.

HotS would actually be an ideal time to move it late game because we now have the Mothership Core with recall back. It could make for interesting tech builds to get earlier warp-gates if the tech was buried far enough up the tech tree.

EatThePath

United States3943 Posts

November 03 2012 19:43 GMT

Very nice post, Falling. Like many of this kind of post it explicates some nice insights that people might not have articulated for themselves. You've done a model job of that, so good work there.

Basically you have two points:
1.) Ease of mobility diminishes the importance of terrain (at all) and disincentivizes positional play. The name for this is "deathball syndrome" but you managed to avoid having to say that. ^^
2.) High ground offers no real benefit. This is sort of a sub-topic of point #1.

What I really want to see from this line of discussion is an undeniably easy and effective plan to change these things. You approach this but it's not the main focus of the post. You touch on all sorts of things that create problems and things you could change to fix it. I'd really like to build consensus within the community (especially among knowledgeable, intelligent players, pros, mapmakers, tournament organizers, etc.) about what the changes should be and in what order of priority.

For example, personally I find the fluid clumping mobility of ground units to be the biggest root cause of these problems. Everything else is just a contributor. But is that something that would actually be changed? Not sure, so I hesitate to focus on it. Easy things to change include high ground miss chance advantage and warp gates not being easy to get nor "strictly better" than gateways. The former has much less change to ruin balance than does the latter. So I see why you open with it. If rocks were stacked, zerg would be SOL since their splash is a suicide unit. And other things such as this have idiosyncrasies due to multiple aspects of SC2 that mean they aren't a problem you can point to, just something that should be considered in map development, metagame/balance adjustments, and consideration of other "self-contained" problems you can "fix". Another example is the cliff-ignoring mobility of blink stalkers and terran bio with the obligatory medivacs. There's just no way to change these things without redesigning the game, so I think we have to take our losses and focus on what we can do to improve the basics.

Does this make sense? Is it something that we should push for in HotS? Is it plausible that "we" could ever be a unified and single-minded front from the community?

Falling

Canada11218 Posts

November 03 2012 20:00 GMT

Well the first 3 issues are probably the easiest to get behind. Do we actually see game improvement when these elements are missing? I can't think of any. Although I would be interested to hear what people think about slow movement up ramps. It may sound good on paper, but in practice it may actually not be that great. But it seemed like an easy way to mimic the difficulty of getting ramps without screwing with unit AI. Getting rid of bonus armour damage to buildings would also help hold ramps. (Old as Beta critique.)

Warp-Gate and Cliff-walking would be the most difficult because Blizzard has already demonstrated a lot of reticence to making any sort of change with those.

Changes to attack-retreat micro for air units. There's been very little push-back. Just a complete lack of understanding of what we mean by moving shot. Exhibit A: Phoenix change.

ArvickHero

10387 Posts

November 03 2012 20:01 GMT

#10

afaik neutral buildings were actually used to block expos before, like on Arkanoid or Desert Fox. But then again, those were also semi-island/island maps and were used primarily to give Zerg an much needed advantage.

I also remember advocating against every building creating a perfect wall early on in SC2, since simcitying was such an awesome aspect of BW. It got shot down pretty badly lol

enjoyed reading this, I really like your blogs

Falling

Canada11218 Posts

November 03 2012 20:03 GMT

#11

Oh, well I guess there were also the 8 mineral patches on Python that could be mined out so Terran's can't float a fast CC there and have an invulnerable fast expansion in the early game. I'm actually going to change that from the absolute because the main point is the prevalence of rock blocks, not that it should never, ever be used to block expansions.

EatThePath

United States3943 Posts

November 03 2012 20:14 GMT

#12

On November 04 2012 05:00 Falling wrote:
Well the first 3 issues are probably the easiest to get behind. Do we actually see game improvement when these elements are missing? I can't think of any. Although I would be interested to hear what people think about slow movement up ramps. It may sound good on paper, but in practice it may actually not be that great. But it seemed like an easy way to mimic the difficulty of getting ramps without screwing with unit AI. Getting rid of bonus armour damage to buildings would also help hold ramps. (Old as Beta critique.)

Warp-Gate and Cliff-walking would be the most difficult because Blizzard has already demonstrated a lot of reticence to making any sort of change with those.

Changes to attack-retreat micro for air units. There's been very little push-back. Just a complete lack of understanding of what we mean by moving shot. Exhibit A: Phoenix change.

Is your intention with ramps to make the main ramp harder to break through? Or ramps in general as chokepoints throughout the map?

Falling

Canada11218 Posts

November 03 2012 20:30 GMT

#13

Just ramps that lead to expansions. The narrow ones. I would think big ramps around the map would be left alone. The high ground advantage of either miss chance or damage reduction should be sufficient to make them more of a feature. This might lead to the "unintuitive" charge however. As it is any ramp or choke in SC2 is dangerous not because it's hard to get up, but because you get stopped entirely from getting up. FF's, Fungals, (and now we have another slow on the Oracle.)

@Arvick
Admittedly, in 2010 chance are I would've been on the other side arguing for tight walls all the time. There was a low basement in needing to memorize how building could be joined together to make a tight wall. But from there, you could climb three to four stories. I feel now, we filled in the basement, but also pulled down the top floors and all we're left with is the ground floor. The ideal would be if we can keep the ground floor and add the former options of the upper stories. But I might support digging up the basement a little to get those top stories back.

SOB_Maj_Brian

United States522 Posts

November 03 2012 21:18 GMT

#14

What would you think of a speed boost for units travelling down a ramp (or a range bonus?) and a speed drop for units travelling up a ramp? This could give people an incentive to hold high ground.

ArvickHero

10387 Posts

November 03 2012 21:28 GMT

#15

I'm all for digging up a basement for upper floors lol, I didn't really have a problem w/ the basement to begin with

IntoTheEmo

Singapore1169 Posts

November 03 2012 22:26 GMT

#16

Yeah I never liked the Warp Gate design from the very beginning. Balanced or not they are still too gameplay altering. Appreciate the way you always seem to be able to put the point across very well.

I guess Lurkers over Swarm Hosts wouldn't be that big of a deal with the current high ground mechanic huh, since you can't use them to defend ramps as well as you could before.

Wonder how many BW maps could Colossi destroy with cliff walking. I can imagine how Pathfinder would work out lol.

Sweet bonus tidbits about the stacked temples at the end there. Watching Jaedong block Fantasy's vulture with 2 lings and a drone after that temple walk live gave me huge chills.

Aerisky

United States12128 Posts

November 03 2012 22:49 GMT

#17

Well-put again! I think the points you bring up are great yet again. All of these factors and more definitely seem to combine together to make the game less interesting. The excitement etc is just not there. Removing warp gate tech, for instance, I'd also be okay with, but for some reason the developers seem like they'd simply be too lazy to replace put in the balance changes required after taking that power away. I dunno....big changes are needed and while they are doing lots of things in an attempt to make the game better, it still feels like there are certain things fundamentally flawed with the game. The attitude blizzard or whatever seems to exhibit doesn't seem passionate or willful enough to implement changes on this scale that would force a major shift in the game. And indeed, it's what truly needs to happen, but a change on this level... I dunno

red4ce

United States7313 Posts

November 04 2012 00:53 GMT

#18

Warpgates, rocks, high ground advantage, etc have been talked about to death. I'm more interested in discussing your post-script than the main body of your blog.

1) Mineral sliding is one of those things that the non-BW crowd dismisses as buggy and truthfully it was because even the pros sometimes failed on their 1st or 2nd attempt. Nevertheless it was extremely beneficial for creating more map/strategic variety. IMO it would be quite simple to re-introduce this feature into SC2 in a less convoluted way. All Blizzard needs to do is make a new type of terrain where only one unit can pass through at a time and requires <X> seconds to do so. This terrain can be negated in the mid/late game by putting it next to collapsable rocks. Of course the major problem implementing this is that it would be a hugely protoss favored thanks to warpgate. A probe can put a pylon on one side of the 'mineral patch' and warp in an army on the other side.

2) I don't particularly care for beefier buildings. Prior to the current trend of 3-4 base turtle into 200/200 deathball+remax we used to see lots of game where timing attacks were built around sniping key tech structures (still do, esp against zergs going greater spire, but not as much anymore). If buildings were made tougher we'd see much less of that style of play, which I find quite fun to watch. Now if we were to limit the building buffs to just supply depots, evo chambers and gateways (the most common buildings used for walloffs) then I'd say yes to that.

As far as variable wall gaps, I would absolutely love to see that. My only beef with BW walling off was that one side of a building could wall off while another side of the same building couldn't, as this creates a positional imbalance. I don't see any problem with having to memorize how wall offs work any more than having to memorize build orders or unit counters. You can make it noob friendly by putting a colored line similar to the ones in your picture that shows how large the gap is.

3) Another great feature but sadly this is one I cannot see being worked into SC2 feasibly. As you noted in your post the temples required splash damage to take down in an efficient manner, and in BW this was fine because each race had a midgame splash unit. Zerg in SC2 does not since the lurker is gone. All they have is the baneling and I feel like it would be impossible to balance a cheap but gas requiring tier-1 suicide unit in a way that makes temples a race-neutral feature without completely upsetting the balance of the rest of the game. It's for this same reason I don't think we'll ever see what was IMO the greatest map gimmick in BW history: Triathlon's cloaked lurker egg wall.

Falling

Canada11218 Posts

November 04 2012 01:26 GMT

#19

Yeah warp-gate screws up a lot of things.

I think beefier buildings would probably correspond best with a decrease in mineral accumulation. The 200/200 max by 12 minutes speaks to a wider problem that exists in SC2. Being able to snipe tech structures extremely fast becomes much more important because the remax is too easy (with macro mechanics.) If money came in slower (and needed more expansions) and armies were harder to max out, then beefier would be better. Smaller groups of units would be more important and it's more important that buildings are not as easy to snipe so that the fewer units can get back in time to defend.

So yeah, without a change economics, your suggestion could be a good compromise. I think you could buff pylons though. The reason you don't see pylons as walls (unlike in BW) is precisely because the don't last comparitevely as long. (Even Depot walls is a shaky thing and you see as many walls with barracks etc.)

re: Zerg splash.
All the more reason to get Lurkers back

But Lurkers will never work due to Marauders, Roaches, and Immortals. The units just keep coming and snipe anything that has restricted movement. So instead you need units that throw crap in the way so they can't get through. Or halt their movement. Probably one of the reasons we see more and more things like FF, Fungal, and now that slow ability on the Oracle. They just keep coming.

red4ce

United States7313 Posts

November 04 2012 02:25 GMT

#20

On November 04 2012 10:26 Falling wrote:
Yeah warp-gate screws up a lot of things.

I think beefier buildings would probably correspond best with a decrease in mineral accumulation. The 200/200 max by 12 minutes speaks to a wider problem that exists in SC2. Being able to snipe tech structures extremely fast becomes much more important because the remax is too easy (with macro mechanics.) If money came in slower (and needed more expansions) and armies were harder to max out, then beefier would be better. Smaller groups of units would be more important and it's more important that buildings are not as easy to snipe so that the fewer units can get back in time to defend.

So yeah, without a change economics, your suggestion could be a good compromise. I think you could buff pylons though. The reason you don't see pylons as walls (unlike in BW) is precisely because the don't last comparitevely as long. (Even Depot walls is a shaky thing and you see as many walls with barracks etc.)

re: Zerg splash.
All the more reason to get Lurkers back

I think the reason pylons can't be buffed more is the fear of cannon rushes being OP. Maybe if protoss was given a tier 2 shield or hp upgrade for buildings kinda like what humans had in TFT it could work.

IMO lurkers can work if they are given a speed buff. Most discussion about the lurker focuses on its burrow and shoot mechanic, but a lot of people overlook how damn fast the lurker was for its size. In BW even without buffer units as long as you're paying attention and react properly you can unburrow, retreat and reburrow your lurkers to slow down the enemy push while only losing 1-2 lurkers each time. Yes the new SC2 units and abilities will prevent lurkers from forming the backbone of the zerg army like it did in BW but it's hardly an unworkable situation.

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