Suppose both players had "infinite"* APM -- so that SC2 effectively is like a game of chess, where you could micro everything you wanted to in subsecond intervals (minus the extreme boredom and mental exhaustion that this would imply for a normal human being). What would be some of the implications on the game? Some obvious ones I thought of:
- AoE would generally be worthless since you could perfectly split all of your units at all times. Mass zergling could break tank lines and surround colossi deathballs, fungals would never hit more than 1 unit, etc.
- units that don't have much micro potential like zealots, vikings, ultralisks, and battlecruisers would still be a lot better, but not so much compared to worker drills, zerglings, phoenixes, and anything that can stutter step
- Terran bioballs would probably be the strongest "standard" army in the game because you could perpetually stutter step, split, and micro medivac pick-ups on individual marines infinitely. I also thought about the implications for blink stalkers, but we already see what happens there in the form of the blink hack
- 1 phoenix could kill every overlord on the map, so a zerg player wouldn't have much map presence
- Speed warp prism/immortal drops would destroy entire bases (unless it was PvP and the other player had 1 phoenix)
- if a scouting worker got in your base, it will be there almost forever. So a fast wall off would be mandatory just to have some sort of surprise BO
- 200/200 of mutas would probably be invincible, short of some catastrophic error like getting fungaled by a surprise infestor or being between 5 factories the exact moment as 5 thors spawn
- most cheeses would be untenable because of perfect worker drills and scouting every inch of the map being easy; though a proxy 2rax would potentially still work due to stutter step
* I was considering the implications of actually having infinite time compared to something really high like 10k APM; they would include using math to determine exactly how many buildings/units the opponent built based on his harvested resources, hiring a sports psychoanalyst, hiring Garry Kasparov, and hiring a ninja to just go murder the opponent. I'm going to leave those aside for another thread.
you would need maphack as well. You cant see infetors from fog of war, and it highly unlikly to move with all your marines in a split force since they wont do as effective damage.
You would not be able to locate all overlords without maphack. Also, easy to defend vs pheonix with spinecrawlers.
On February 03 2013 18:37 ThePhan2m wrote: you would need maphack as well. You cant see infetors from fog of war, and it highly unlikly to move with all your marines in a split force since they wont do as effective damage.
You would not be able to locate all overlords without maphack. Also, easy to defend vs pheonix with spinecrawlers.
not sure if maphack and 10000 apm help vs infestors.
I think many of your assumptions are wrong, if both players had the same 10,000 apm available then both players would be dropping everywhere, all the time. That 1 phoenix wouldn't kill all the overlords because zerg would just build one unit that counters the phoenix and push it away as fast as the opponent tries to move it in.
The game would ultimately still have the same balance issues it has now, they would just be played out at a much faster pace. You can split ur marines all you like, but you've still got to fight against the speed of the game, if a fungal is cast and you haven't already split, you are still gonna get a huge chunk hit, no matter how well you split... thats part of the problem with fungal.
The scouting worker would get killed or moved out just as easy as it does now, after all BOTH player have the same apm and can control their units just as effectively.
On February 04 2013 01:59 emythrel wrote: I think many of your assumptions are wrong, if both players had the same 10,000 apm available then both players would be dropping everywhere, all the time.
Probably, but I didn't say that wasn't the case.
That 1 phoenix wouldn't kill all the overlords because zerg would just build one unit that counters the phoenix and push it away as fast as the opponent tries to move it in.
Are phoenixes not faster than every single zerg unit?
The game would ultimately still have the same balance issues it has now, they would just be played out at a much faster pace. You can split ur marines all you like, but you've still got to fight against the speed of the game, if a fungal is cast and you haven't already split, you are still gonna get a huge chunk hit, no matter how well you split... thats part of the problem with fungal.
You could individually dodge practically every AoE attack (and pre-split against fungals), so I think the game would be a lot different.
The scouting worker would get killed or moved out just as easy as it does now, after all BOTH player have the same apm and can control their units just as effectively.
I think a scouting worker could evade almost anything if it was micro'd correctly.
I don't think Starcraft is actually the most interesting game for a question like this. Supreme Commander would be much more interesting, as games are much larger and every projectile is simulated, so almost everything can be dodged if microed well enough.
I don't think you can say it would become like chess, because if both players have infinite apm then they're going to be capable of repelling scouts, assuming they can (observers, scan) - and in the latter case with scan it obviously "costs" minerals so I don't think there will be constant scanning. Also observers are a trade-off, since fast high-tech scouting comes at the expense of something else (not a protoss expert), and a few well-placed detectors could repel observers later in the game. Zerg overlords/overseers are not as hard to repel obviously, unless you send in 10 of them which obviously detracts from economy.
So all of this implies there would still be fog of war, and the guesswork that comes with that (what could he be building in his base?). Of course there are generic builds, but in an infinite APM game, if the generic build is slightly disadvantaged to the specific build "opponent X" is going for, then X is going to win. So basically either you choose the ideal build or you lose because a generic build won't cut it at infinite APM (i.e. everything else is equal, so the only remaining factor, build order, will decide the game).
But even if there is fog of war difficulty for all races, its not as bad for some. The effort zerg would need to put in to scout the enemy base is much greater than terran; and I would say what they lose (one, maybe two mules) is negligible in comparison to the resources required to scout an enemy base who has infinite APM with reasonable defenses. I'm not sure about protoss, but I suspect they're somewhere in the middle. So Terran has the greatest advantage here in obtaining the ideal build order.
I guess the other thing to think about is whether infinite APM equates to perfect strategy. Come to think of it I don't think that's true at all. But then again, strategy is highly dependent on scouting, to which Terran once again has the greatest advantage.
So I guess I would predict Terran wins most of the games, protoss next, zerg last (besides all that, it would be so funny to see zerg do anything useful with zerglings against ranged units)
http://www.twitch.tv/thebigonetv/b/326811752 TLO opinion on this topic. According to him there is a ceiling above which extra apm in starcraft becomes simple spamming without adding anything to ability. On the other hand he says there is no limit in useful apm in supreme commander.
EPT
