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Sorry if this has been posted before; lately I've been thinking a lot about the basic macro mechanics of all three races; the macro of zerg (puking queens) is extremely strong but also requires a high amount of skill to not screw it up in midgame; the macro of protoss is also very good - chronoboosting can be used in a very flexible way, either to boost your economy, getting certain units really quickly or getting techs early; also it's not "that" big of a deal if somebody "forgets" chrono-boosting once in a while because you can always spam it on multiple buildings; nevertheless you will be behind economically since boosts don't "stack" - spamming it multiple times on the nexus won't result in insta-spammed probes; so if you screw it up early you can't recover from the economical disadvantage; this is perfectly fine, errors should lead to severe results
then I realized that managing mules is not only the easiest macro mechanics but is also very "forgiving" if you make mistakes; not sending a mule once in a while? no big deal, just spam multiple mules at once; if you take a high-yield expo saved up mules (intentionally or not) can give the terran a crazy economy-boost; nevertheless I do NOT think that mules are in general overpowered, mine too fast or whatever; they were carefully balanced to the macro-mechanics of the other races; but I still think there is no reason why a player who completely sucks at using them should only suffer from minor consequences;
therefore the idea popped into my head to create this poll - should calling down mules have a cooldown (like 5-10 seconds) to punish a player who saves up energy? simply put, to add a mechanics that seperates mediocre terran players from good ones better? no really good terran player would forget to call down mules anyway, so on pro-level: no harm done; again, it's not about "nerfing" the general effectiveness of the terran macro, but making it harder for mediocre players
Poll: Do mules need a cooldown?yes, terran macro is too easy (57) 71% no, mules are fine (23) 29% 80 total votes Your vote: Do mules need a cooldown? (Vote): yes, terran macro is too easy
(Vote): no, mules are fine
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I think in a few months we'll smile at those times when you could grab a 5th expansion, summon instantly 20 mules and get a insane amount of minerals before the opponent had the time to push it 
EDIT: the poll is kinda worthless... it will be 66% "go nerf it" and 33% "nah it's fine, it's even the hardest"
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I think its fine as is, since if you don't summon mules as early as possible you wont get the mineral as early as possible. And its not like BAM you get free mineral right away its over time (and its just mining faster not free mineral) and those mules can get snipe before the timer run out.
-On another note if it is for balancing to make it more unforgiving then chrono boost should also have a cool down so you can't spam it.
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I think late game Terran macro is the most difficult to be honest...Though it may be easy early game.
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On August 19 2010 17:21 CheAse wrote:
I think late game Terran macro is the most difficult to be honest...Though it may be easy early game.
? it's the same difficulty throughout
zerg's macro is the one that's more difficult the more bases you get
kinda same with protoss (because CB doesn't stack)
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I think MULE needs a nerf somehow, but I don't think a cooldown like this is the answer simply because a 5-10 second cooldown for an ability is not something you find in Starcraft (it's more of a Warcraft thing)
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This is a tough question to answer, at least from a P point of view.
Chronoboost doesn't "stack" like mules do, and so is far less forgiving in that it is harder to dump 100 energy and get full use out of chronos than it is to dump 100 energy of mules and get full use of it.
However, Chrono and MULE both clearly fall into a category of "get more stuff in X time" mechanics (hell, so does larva injection). Since MULE accomplishes this by increasing mineral intake, if it didn't stack, it would essentially become a passive bonus to Terran mineral gathering for most good players - you'd probably see every Terran player basically saving a scan's worth of energy at all times and then spamming mules every 25 energy.
I like the way Chrono can be saved and used to suddenly pump out a metric fuckton of units, or tech switch really really fast, and I'd worry that making mules non-stackable would take that kind of use away from Terran.
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just increase energy cost of mule to 75
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On August 19 2010 19:55 kzn wrote:
This is a tough question to answer, at least from a P point of view.
Chronoboost doesn't "stack" like mules do, and so is far less forgiving in that it is harder to dump 100 energy and get full use out of chronos than it is to dump 100 energy of mules and get full use of it.
However, Chrono and MULE both clearly fall into a category of "get more stuff in X time" mechanics (hell, so does larva injection). Since MULE accomplishes this by increasing mineral intake, if it didn't stack, it would essentially become a passive bonus to Terran mineral gathering for most good players - you'd probably see every Terran player basically saving a scan's worth of energy at all times and then spamming mules every 25 energy.
I like the way Chrono can be saved and used to suddenly pump out a metric fuckton of units, or tech switch really really fast, and I'd worry that making mules non-stackable would take that kind of use away from Terran.
lol you said metric fuckton
srsly though idk if this is THE change that would "fix" terran but something, ANYTHING, from blizz would be nice
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I definitely think it needs some cooldown... maybe not so huge you can only have one out at a time, but as is, it just encourages base trading. I know in beta I won quite a few games because I had enough orbital commands at full energy, that even though I had no scvs, it didn't really matter.
I had one game where I was even with the Terran for a long time against his super heavy maurder build (just came out ahead with a few void rays). I started warping in and killing units in his natural with a warp prism, but then he took a gold expansion and dropped 8 mules on it, and suddenly my income is like half of his. This is despite the fact that I had killed an orbital command and a cc like 5 minutes earlier. Meanwhile, the reason he ever got back in the game in the first place is I had to take a relatively exposed expansion, which was very hard for me to defend, and I didn't have the luxury of dropping down temporary probes that turbo mine.
Pretty frustrating to feel like I was ahead the whole game, then lose in a violent swing of mass mules on a gold expansion, that I couldn't do anything about in a reasonable amount of time even though I scouted it.
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increase cost to 50 energy
or
add 1 supply cost to each mule.
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On August 20 2010 00:07 yongming wrote:
increase cost to 50 energy
or
add 1 supply cost to each mule.
Calldown: MULE is already 50 energy. I think the supply cost wouldn't do much anyway since no player should ever be supply blocked.
A cooldown of 2 minutes would be optimal in my opinion. It would still make the MULE useful while adding some energy tension to the Orbital Command (I don't use MULE very much, maybe once as soon as my Orbital Command completes but then I switch to either Scan or Extra Supplies)
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EPT
