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Just a blog of my random thoughts. I have not followed the StarCraft 2 scene, so I'm not very sure of its state currently. I did follow somewhat the brood war scene though. Right now I'm a major follower of the dota 2 scene 
Anyway everyone raves about how brood war is the most balanced RTS game around. I think this is somewhat true, as there's no distinct advantage that any race has over the other. Many have credited blizzard for somehow finding the perfect balance for the game. From my understanding, they are however struggling to replicate this balance success onto StarCraft 2.
My thoughts though are whether blizzard should be credited with the balancing of brood war. In my opinion, the credit should go to mapmakers instead.
Weren't mapmakers the ones who designed every new map with certain formulas. For example they ensured that terrans would be able to wall in, protoss too for their FE. Each base had fixed number of mineral fields. The distance, type, and location of expansions contributed to the feasibility of taking that said expansion. The cliffs available for muta harassments.
I would say that brood war was never truly balanced to begin with. It was the good maps that made the game balance. Badly designed maps like Battle Royale showed how advantageous it is to play certain race over another. Meanwhile we see tau cross having a near 50% wr for all races. Most other competitive maps also do not particularly side with any race, and matchups are at most like 40-60.
So I guess my point is that for StarCraft 2 maybe blizzard should stop tweaking with unit functions, costs and damage etc every now and then, hoping to magically find a balance. Perhaps the focus should be on mapmaking. Accept that there going to be imbalances racially because of the different types of units. But use map design to try balance the game instead.
  
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The reason Brood war was so balanced is because there is a lot less unit clumping involved due to the movement engine, therefore deathballs and AOE are nowhere near as effective, so more multitasking and lots of smaller fights around the map would happen. It is also a lot more difficult to max supply in BW since macro is a lot more demanding.
Balancing using maps may balance win rates, but it does not mean the games themselves are balanced.
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Get rid of "Multiple Unit Selection" and you'll have a much more balanced game, in my opinion.
It doesn't even have to be "only" 12 units in a group. Make it 24 or something, and it will still lead to much better late game fights.
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Map design as is, in sc2 already is very restricted, due to forcefields.
Also, Mutastacking rebalanced TvZ after Blizz stopped patching BW. An undocumented behaviour in the engine, did they forsee this? Doubtful. Point is, sc2's engine feels more clean in regards to predicting units behaviour and I don't think Blizz is willing to bet on having enough oversights in it to give players the chance to balance it out.
So no, blizz should do as much for balance as possible and design wise open up more possibilities for mapmakers, so they get the chance to balance it once Blizz abandons sc2.
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TLADT24920 Posts
Many have credited blizzard for somehow finding the perfect balance for the game.
I don't think that's the case. At least, from my understanding, a lot of people believe that it was maps that balanced the game since as you said, a lot of BW tricks were found by chance (think muta stacking for ex). I think what Blizzard can be credited with is making a game that has well-designed units with the potential for lots of micro and a really high skill-ceiling.
Take mech in TvZ: vultures, tanks and goliath fit well together. You get the strong ground, good AA with lots of micro potential and vultures for both harass and making sure units aren't closing in on the tanks so that they can still attack. You see the same idea at work if you look at other armies and unit compositions.
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Fair enough. Consider my blog post and opinion to be fairly uninformed
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United States4883 Posts
I think this thread is a perfect example of what's wrong with SC2 compared to BW: a lot of things.
There have been multiple attempts to explain the shortcomings of SC2, and all of them have claimed that if we fix this one thing, SC2 will somehow miraculously heal and become a balanced, dynamic game. However, I think the biggest thing we're realizing, especially coming into LotV, is that those are all problems. High ground advantage (no miss %), economy model, damage point issues ("Depth of Micro" by LaLush), unit pathing, "unlimited" selection/simplified mechanics, hyper-development of economy and tech, core design problems (FF/warpgate), lack of real space control, and more. These are all serious flaws with SC2 that Blizzard has either neglected to address or openly stated that they think their focus on unit design is a better direction.
I have stated this in several threads, and I'll state it here: number tweaking will not fix any of the problems unless they dynamically change the role of the unit (and even then, this is only one aspect (redundancy) that is getting fixed). Everything else is a design flaw which can be bandaided and hidden for short periods of time by resettling the meta, but only major design changes will actually affect the game in a long-term, positive way.
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I don't think balance is a big problem of SC2 at all.
I didn't follow broodwar, but from the one or two instances on numbers for broodwar that I have seen, SC2 in the last months has been probably even better balanced than broodwar. That's really not the problem of SC2. John above gives a nice list of problems that many people feel like are "fundamentally" bad for the enjoyment of the game. (this is obviously theorycraft, but I think many of the issues are spot on when trying to create "a better game")
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as a spectator i dont care one bit if sc2 is completely super balanced anyway, the reason i still watch broodwar is not beacuse its perfect balance its beacuse all the matchups are very dynamic and fun to watch. Sc2 need to somehow miracly make all matchups much more dynamic and interesting which i dont see happening.
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Balance is overrated. Make a fun game first.
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United States10498 Posts
On May 05 2015 01:28 Big J wrote:
I don't think balance is a big problem of SC2 at all.
I didn't follow broodwar, but from the one or two instances on numbers for broodwar that I have seen, SC2 in the last months has been probably even better balanced than broodwar. That's really not the problem of SC2. John above gives a nice list of problems that many people feel like are "fundamentally" bad for the enjoyment of the game. (this is obviously theorycraft, but I think many of the issues are spot on when trying to create "a better game")
more balanced than broodwar? you mean current sc2 mech???
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EPT
