EPT
On June 08 2017 19:26 conTAgi0n wrote:
Auto-mining has become an expectation for modern RTS games, and macro mechanics are an alternative that most gamers are willing to accept. Plus you could make the case that psychologically, forgetting to send workers to mine feels like a mistake, whereas remembering to use a macro mechanic feels like a reward.
Auto-mining has become an expectation for modern RTS games, and macro mechanics are an alternative that most gamers are willing to accept. Plus you could make the case that psychologically, forgetting to send workers to mine feels like a mistake, whereas remembering to use a macro mechanic feels like a reward.
This is the ironic part. Aside from the very early stages of the game, forgetting to send your workers to mining right away (we'll say you're particularly horrible and delay 20s on every worker), it's nowhere near as punishing as forgetting to inject or drop a MULE (though Blizz has made a few changes in LotV to address that).
And I guess that's the whole appeal of SC2. In a lot of ways, you get instant gratification by remembering to do your macro mechanics occasionally or by barely microing one insanely cost-effective unit into a mineral line and killing the entire thing. But the balance sits on a razor's edge because when your opponent does stuff marginally well, they can just outright kill you. There's not a whole lot of in between (see: Rogue making 20 mutas against soO earlier today and the insta-gg).
On June 09 2017 08:08 ninazerg wrote:
btw, this is not an "argument" or "debate" reply. I'm just saying my thoughts.
btw, this is not an "argument" or "debate" reply. I'm just saying my thoughts.
I appreciate it! There's a lot of interesting stuff in this reply, most of which I agree with.
This is only half-true. Maybe you were using hyperbole, but you said "literally no number of marine/medic" and I wasn't sure, because it's not cost-effective to break the ramp with marine/medic, but that doesn't mean it literally can't be done. Besides that, there are many situations where the attacker has an advantage, like if a Zerg is sending guardians to hit SCVs from over a cliff, and the units at the bottom of the cliff can't reach them because they're over water.
This is true all the mirror matches in SC1, and also TvZ. The main difficulty for Zerg in TvZ is defending all of the places that Terran can hit them from.
Maybe a bit hyperbolic. This entire article is really a rant, so there's definitely areas where I may have just overstated facts or made up random and quite possibly incorrect concepts (like "a ball is the perfect shape for damage").
However, in the case of how defender's advantage works in SC1, I fundamentally disagree here. In the case of guardians or drop play having an advantage on aggression, this is mostly just a side effect of high ground advantages and unit design (range). If you consider the same example, but both sides are reinforcing and trading continually—we'll say Terran continues to build wraiths while Zerg reinforces with scourge/overlords—the advantage will eventually go in favor of Terran assuming fairly even trades because of the reinforcement distance. Of course, the game is a lot more complicated than this and 3 wraiths could kill all of the scourge, the guardians, and win the game with good enough micro.
In the case of mirror matchups, I again fundamentally disagree here. While PvP is arguably consistently unstable, defenders can take advantage of building placement to soak up damage, and reavers (arguably the most important unit in early game PvP) reinforce MUCH faster for the defending player. In the later portions of the game, it plays out a bit more like SC2, I will admit to that haha. TvT, you insane. The big point I'm trying to make here is that defensive units like reavers, tanks, lurkers, defilers, etc. do an insane job of warding away much larger armies and/or forcing cost-ineffective trades. In addition to the fact that reinforcement takes real time to move across the map (shoutout to Nydus Canal though), it's much harder for the aggressor to match the defender over a long period of time unless they start with a substantial advantage.
The only reason to 'spread your army out' is because you have a numerical superiority that makes such a thing possible. There are some obvious historical examples of this, but let's stick to video games. If you play a game with a supply cap, then it's not possible to have a huge advantage in numbers unless you cripple your opponent early in the game. It stands to reason, then, that if you cannot outnumber your opponent, you will gain a different kind of advantage. I'm not even sure why SC2 has a supply cap, though. It just feels like they were trying to create a retro game with modern game stuff in it, and it didn't work out. Now the object is to just mass the most powerful or composition-correct series of units until you reach 200, and then you have no choice but to attack. This archetype occurs in SC1 frequently, and is not unique to SC2.
I thought about this some too after posting this blog. It was argued at some point that SC2 should raise the cap to 300 to solve the "three base cap" problem, but now that I'm arguing about it from the point of view of critical mass and army size, it kind of makes sense. If you up the supply enough to actually hit the critical mass for SC2 armies, maybe it becomes a better strategy to split your forces up into two huge armies. And how is that different from splitting up small groups?
It's an interesting avenue of thought to go down, but I don't think it matters anymore since LotV already kind of forces you to split up units anyway.
I don't know how hard it is to scout in SC2, but something about this seems amiss.
On the whole, scouting in SC2 is MUCH easier in the mid to late game, but the economy changes in LotV forced a lot more blind tech decisions in the early game, especially for Zerg players who relied on overlord scouting. Other than that, there's a lot of ultra crisis units like oracles, hellions, adepts, and lings that can decimate a mineral line if you don't have things in the proper position or know their trajectory coming into your base. This is true to some degree with units in BW as well, but I feel like it's generally easier to predict and deflect.
I agree with this, mostly. Units should not pack themselves together like sardines. A ball is the perfect shape for taking ranged AoE damage, I'd say. If the ball is made of ranged units against melee units, then the ball is going to be more efficient theoretically. For dealing damage, ranged units are best when situated in an arc, so all of them can fire onto an incoming enemy from all sides. This is especially important for melee units, so that they can all hit at the same time. If melee units attack in a ball, only the units at the front can attack.
Fair.
