EPTBoring is the opposite of what is fun.
Fun has a plenty of definitions and I know none of them, but I understand where the fun comes from:
1. Thrilling uncertainty of exploration.
“...where his army at, where his army at, where his army at, GOT IT, oh no the drop at my base...”
“Absolutely HAVE to check every single treasure box in the room and to read every single property and unlock and trait in Civilization before putting one point into something” in a tutorial where you technically can’t lose.
2. Fiddling with a toy - physicality of units.
Feels amazing to flawlessly split your marines, to pick up thors with boosted medevacs or place meaningful forcefield constructing a minecraft wall around the damn roaches.
Feels great enough to spend your time in single player mode practicing your Street Fighter combos only to fail miserably later on in an actual match because you are so anxious you keep forgetting placing your 3 & 4 gas at specific point in the game. It’s a ton of fun just running off cliffs driving a car in GTA or mindlessly jumping around THE tree in the Stormwind.
3. Surprises - the opposite of knowing and expecting.
“Oh my lord, that mine killed like 12 banes in one hit instead of 1 zergling this time!“ Once an underdog advances to the finals. Anticipation of opening a chest in valve games. Getting epic loot drop suddenly. Sometimes I confuse this one with the first point due to how closely related they are.
4. Intensity / relief.
“Ho-O-o-O-oly cow that was so intense! I can’t believe that JUST TOTALLY HAPPENED, Tasteless, absolutely INSANE execution by both players!”; “OH MY GOD I WON THIS GAME, I CAN’T UNDERSTAND HAHAHA NO WAY I WON THIS! THIS GUY IS A DUMBASS HOOOOLY SHI~~~”.
And alike.
It might be any sort of clutch play or event: TI3 finals, MVP vs Squirtle, Maru vs Life.
5. Learning to be better - feeling of one's own improvement
Watch this best ever game design talk to understand the concept.
Tl;dr: being good feels amazing even if you are better than 1 person out of 10: you see your own progress, you see where you used to be and you see the goal and the direction to improve towards. But being good at something requires not a shallow task to start with, otherwise you can't distinguish the skill.
As you can see, Swarmhost has practically none of these.
Of course the list is incomplete and you might want to add bullet points such as TALKING TO THE PEOPLE YOU ENJOY TALKING TO, but guess what: Swarmhosts don’t provide this one either. With the aforementioned points any person can understand why this unit is not likable simply by its design: by its purpose this unit serves and especially how the unit works in the ecosystem as a whole.
Tidy explanations of each:
1) You know what to expect from 20 swarmhost and it’s not a lot of fun
2) There is no micro at all from both sides in fighting locusts which is not fun and you also know it beforehand
3) How much damage this wave of locusts is going to do is the only question and any answer is still not a lot of fun as you can imagine
4) Are you kidding me
If TvT is a map control battle and TvP is trying to play arkanoid, TvZ is battle of economy control.
Hint: there is no economy in free units.
I do realize that you have to build up those expensive ravens from those expensive starports one at a time and you need an outstanding economy to back it all up, but unlike Terran, Zerg's T3 unit production is cheaper and faster and its economy is superior by design of the race: which is great - it’s completely fine and I’m not here to talk about balance, but it’s an important note to leave here to be aware of.
Zerg production is relatively worse than T/P for T1 units, because it's more larva intensive at this stage of a game and you want to make drones.
However, due to the fact the same exact mechanic persists through out the game, once it reaches T3/Hive point it becomes drastically more efficient than placing 10 Startports or 10 robotics. As a plus Zerg has 4+ hatcheries filled up with larva and already fully saturated bases with drones meaning you can focus solely on army production.
The things you have to accomplish along the way towards any unbeatable army are:
1) Establishing being safe at all points in the game
2) Acquiring the tech / production facilities to produce from
3) Having the resources to spend
These are weaknesses of Protoss PvT, Zerg T3 in general and Terran Mech army.
The way it's balanced is by its environment, in other words - by map design and most importantly by economy as the backbone of ANY type of strategy game.
You have to transition into these things - it should take time and involve risks: too greedy? Dead. Too safe? Overwhelmed by opponent’s economy superiority. And is dead.
These kinds of composition have to be:
a) Weak early on - that’s why you don’t start with 1 gate into psy-storm
b) Exploitable in the mid-game - having to deal with a superior economy of the opponent, entanglement with positioning your scarce amount of units just right
c) And you still might take a sloppy engagement and lose absolutely everything because you got caught unsieged or ate EMPs into sentries and storms.
As you see, none of these are concerns of Swarmhosts either. You scout mech with an overseer, you snap your fingers “a-ha!” and instantly transition into swarmhosts and “static defense”.
Static defense. Sigh.
Ok, listen. From a design standpoint:
1) Siege Tank is a great defensive unit. Best designed unit ever.
2) Force Field is a great defensive ability. Works delightfully, looks sick, sounds satisfying, feels wonderfully, is not binary - amazing!
3) 2000 spines is a retarded defensive option. Being able to amass amazingly cost-efficient time-winning defense jungle of tentacles without considering supply, gas, or even energy is at least worse by its design than a siege tank or force field.
Only after this point you start “building up” things like mass vipers. The other player don’t even have to scout with his screen-wide undeniable scan because he already expects this kind of response. Otherwise he wins.
There is a fine line between “Mech is bullshit - Blizzard what a fail” and “Swarmhost is bullshit - Blizzard what a fail” solely depending on the success of this pre-hive mech 2-2 push. And even this push is kind of me_h from the entertainment standpoint.
TvZ as a match-up has this unique opportunity to be simultaneously the best and the worst match-up to watch:
1) Bio Terran fighting ling-bane-muta where each player sweats so intensely you have to substitute your bucket after a game onto a washbowl to keep going, I mean, seriously have you seen Maru vs Life action recently?
2) Mech Terran fighting Swarmhosts. Nothing to add here.
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What can be addressed in order to solve this problem: hey, do you understand what the actual problem is?
Let’s think about it, imagine this happens:
http://gfycat.com/SpotlessNextBustard aka the best gif ever made by humanity
Please do not: it’s tough to appeal to one’s logic if that person is drown in his emotions. We are trying to literally save Digital Sports right here no less.
Obviously Zerg is going to have difficulties playing against mech.
But wait a second, I’m am a human being with somewhat working frontal lobe and because I have a clue of
a) how TvP works
b) how TvT (mech vs bio) works
c) how TvZ (mech) works in BroodWar
d) how TvP works in Broodwar
and I see this correlation: one of the players has a superior map control and thus economy, way better mid-game and obviously worse late-game in a head to head engagement.
His gameplan is basically to exploit the immobility and weaknesses of the other deathballing defensive player and this continues up until to a certain tipping point when everything rapidly falls apart for the one player or the another.
This type of gameplay exists because players don’t have 100% vision to always be perfectly in position and don’t have the most correct unit composition all the time.
Unless this player is a maphacker.
Take a look at this Day[9]’s talk that is 5 years old and is still as relevant as it was
If you prefer to read instead of listening to, you can find it already transcripted right there, the very first one.
The reason it's relevant: because it is about an RTS gameplay in asymmetric design as a concept in gerenal. Design. Concept.
In before some of you smartasses are going to jump to any conclusions:
1) Check out this one
2) And this one as well
3) And I don’t have to remind you the cause and the atrocious consequence of Ghost’s Snipeshot nerf.
Today, as expected, Zerg can’t brute force a Terran’s mech front line with 200 supply of whatever the hell this Zerg has produced, because tanks are unsurprisingly freaking good at defending.
But in ZvT drops are never used. Think about it: Terran always drops Protoss or other Mech Terran to snipe at least something. To force turrets, to force repositioning, to kill a unit, to expose him to further attacks. Protoss sends 10 zealots using warp prisms inside Terran’s production and mineral lines to disrupt his everything in the same exact fashion.
Thors scarcely do any damage to Overlords (armored) and mech overall adds Vikings only to face Vipers or Broodlords, which is usually after the pre-hive push, because Terran pumps out banshees from that one Starport he has.
Zerg can definitely be maxed out with roaches / hydra / banes / lings twice by this time just to load every unit he possess and drop onto Terran’s main base / 3rd - basically TvP.
As a huge bonus: if Zerg snipes off some addons while spilling out creep: this essentially stales Terran’s production no less than Contaminate or just flat-out sniping a factory itself does.
As the final bit you might want to perform an interception in a TvT-like fashion: drop on top of the Terran army as it marches towards your base or force him to siege several times on the way prolonging the game even further, although more than enough for the Vipers to appear on the battlefield to finally being able to supplement your whatever army you still might be torturing by suiciding it relentlessly, and OHHH NO at this exact moment your phone rings.
But you don’t feel threatened anymore, it’s all gone. Like magic.
You pick up your phone and the person asks you with his voice trembling from anxiety:
“What happened? I heard your blue-switches from the place I work at as loud as I were at home”
"+ Show Spoiler +
![[image loading]](http://www.saatchisynergize.co.za/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/i-won.jpg)
“...Mech is so shit - Blizzard what a fail”
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Whatever, let’s say this doesn't work at all and start actually tweaking stuff.
Some ideas and short explanations:
1) PDD is now a ground based structure (alike auto-turrets)
This means
a) Terran can’t stack these things in one point
b) Difficult to use nearby his own structures like PPDing his entire Main base
c) Tough to use along with another couple of 150 auto-turrets nearby - because they require space as well
d) Harder to use in an actual combat situation especially with beefy mech or planetary fortresses underneath.
Problems: affects TvT. To be honest I feel like that would be for the better, because lings, tanks and other melee units will be able to pick off it even while it has full energy.
2) PDD is now a ground based structure, but a beacon
Same as the previous one, the difference is PDD now is being tall enough to air units to attack it. Think about Colossus.
3) PDD explodes once it’s energy is depleted
Why not, makes total sense. Buffs EMP to the point ghosts being a factor in late-game TvT
4) PDD does require an auto-turret to be mounted on, cost reduced
Harder to use in an emergency, ground units might kill off the turret destroying the mounted PDD with it. I’m just brainstorming so whatever.
5) Corruptor 20% damage amplify up to 30%
This weakens the already low amount of Thors the Terran has in his army.
Less Thors = greater threat of mutas sniping off the Thors, even while they are at home. Once Thors are dead mutas destroy everything else, or at least delaying Terran enough to get Vipers / Broods.
More Thors = less tanks = easier defending using ground units.
Problems: affects ZvP, might have 0 impact on the actual problem due to muta being paper against Thors.
6) Vipers take slightly less time to be built
7) Viper’s ability Consume is slightly more time efficient (faster draining)
Essentially rubber-banding to make Vipers being online and ready to participate in a fight sooner.
This type of changes is usually a no-no, but not to be overlooked.
See: bunker build time.
Now if we want to keep the swarmhosts in the game, let’s deconstruct the design of the unit and how it correlates within the system of the game.
Swarmhost is literally the Siege Tank of Zerg.
Think about it: you Burrow(Siege) the unit and it shoots a rather rare(25s) and slow projectile(2 Locusts), while the actual attack range is being ~50 instead of 13.
I like to envision what swarmhosts practically do as these waves:
![[image loading]](http://compassblogs.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/4571657460_73aafc3069_o-300x199.jpg)
These properties mean by being defensive Zerg simultaneously is being offensive.
Which is in fact an atrocious design flaw, due to the environment, the system this unit in. Consider these:
1) The range of ~50-70 (25 seconds of movement at speed 2 off creep, speed 3 on creep)
2) The ease of repositioning of this thing: siege AND unsiege each require 4 seconds of game time, burrow / unburrow takes way less time (1).
3) The speed 2.925 (on) and 2.25 (off) creep makes Swarmhosts completely safe if you consider previous points
4) Zerg static anti-ground and anti-air defenses (Spine / Spore Crawlers) don’t require supply and hence can be spammed to the ridiculous amounts keeping the Swarmhosts as comfortable as a freshly made bed.
There is nothing wrong with the "defensiveness" of something, in fact, it's actually for the better - a solid defense provides superior offense capabilities: you can defend higher amount of bases or points more efficiently meaning you can go for even more things to contest and take bigger risks (hint: siege tank).
But this has to have some substantial drawbacks as, for instances, aforementioned immobility, difficulty of transitioning due to limited production, expensiveness and all in all - just more risks.
If you want to introduce a point of no return in a match-up you might want to consider including some sort of Science Victory into your game - once you reach 50 SWH and 150 Crawlers, the game abruptly ends saving time of every person involved and this wild notification pops up:
“Congratulations, you have won by Technological Advancement. The Almighty Zerg prevails on the fields of Tarsonis from this point and further on into the deeps of time.”
Because no one is going to attack the Planet that already has 50 SHWs on it: at the start you at least have a fair play.
To win in a war you have to outlast your opponents, not to kill them: acquire more resources and defend that. Get the upper hand and maintain it. By the end of the match your 20% advantage might well become drastic enough to collect a win once resources become scarce.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/64514-competitive-gaming-article-by-day
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If Swarmhost is indeed going to stay, changes should address these issues or at the very least leaning towards those directions.
If you were to ask my personal opinion I would without hesitation tell you:
1) Unburrow speed up to 3-5 seconds: harder repositioning and retreating if got caught. Burrowing (down) speed should be unaffected.
2) The range of locusts propagation from the initial spawn position is reduces drastically
The second one solves the problem of Zerg sitting behind his mineral line at the main and picking off Terran / Protoss structures on the other side of the map. It is still a great defensive unit, but to use it offensively you have to burrow it closer to a desired target exposing to a higher risk.
What can be addressed:
1) Endure locusts upgrade removed, nerfed or reworked
2) Speed of locusts off / on creep
3) Locust spawning mechanic reworked: initially a swarmhost spawns a “peaceful” Locust that lives 10 seconds. Upon a contact with an enemy, or more specifically once this “peaceful” shoots once, it forms into an actual “fierce” Locust and gets +10 seconds of life to participate in a fight. Which I like the most.
by etofok
In conclusion: cheers, love you all.
Starcraft is gloriously designed game as a whole and I’m looking forward to the following patch.
p.s. holy damn this title is atrocious I used that as a filler. I can't rename it for some reason.
edits: grammar, clarity, some updates.
