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Russian Federation4235 Posts
Well, we've all seen that beautiful experimental data on ensnare for all units and it seems totally non-systematic at the first glance. Marines get a gross speed decrease, whereas ultras get no decrease at all. However, an idea struck me recently on how ensnare might work.
First of all, coding-wise it makes little sense to set a decrease percentage separately for each unit. So, it's highly probable that there is a unified alorithm for all units that's somehow tied to their stats, but gives seemingly random results.
The actual idea is: what if ensnare increases the cooldown of a unit by a fixed percentage, but not the cooldown stated in unit stats, but the delay between attack animations of a unit?
Let's look at two units. First, take ultralisks. If you look at them closely, all of their cooldown time is being taken by their long attack animation - they strike, striking takes time, and they immediately strike again. Therefore, the delay between animations is 0, and, even after ensnare percentage applied, it's still 0, so ultras are effectively immune to ensnare attack speed-wise.
Then, take marines. Their attack animation is short, they attack and they wait for a while. This delay is increased by ensnare, and whoa they get their attack speed reduced. The effect on stimmed marines is really strange, but this may have something to do with the fact that they have a very special cooldown mechanic when stimmed - stimmed rines are the only unit with fractional cooldown (7.5). Cooldown is measured in game ticks, so this is really special, because it's sub-discretisation mode.
IIRC, reavers also have a weird ensnare effect, but that may also happen because they technically don't have an attack - they create a hangar unit much like the carrier's interceptor which performs the attack itself. Carriers are unaffected by ensnare, so it makes sense.
Well, it's just a theory, it's most likely to be wrong, but since I'm somewhat busy at the moment and can't play starcraft on my laptop (it's grapchical adapter handles HoMM V with ease, but can't work with sprite-based games), I would love someone to do the testing.
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i think you're right, i had the same theory.
someone else (maybe smuft?) noticed that cooldown doesn't directly determine # attacks per second, there's something else there -- which i'm guessing is the time it takes for attack animations.
one could probably test both these things out together and come up with a chart of the attack animatoin time
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CA10835 Posts
someone already made a thread on this where they analyzed the effects on ensnare on various units, i think.
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Russian Federation4235 Posts
On July 25 2007 13:44 LosingID8 wrote:
someone already made a thread on this where they analyzed the effects on ensnare on various units, i think. IIRC, the thread only listed experimentally acquired percentages of attack speed decrease. But if that idea had been discussed, sorry.
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Yea, I think you are 100% right. Its somewhat of a programming glitch. Its sorta like how in Streetfighter you have to time certain things to happened within like 2-3 frames to double up moves or cancel the ending animation of previous move. Or stuff like getting up and throwing instantly, For example the Shoryuken doesn't hit until frame 5 on this move so you can time a jump attack to hit or miss just before this frame and its no risk to you. Since every character has different speeds and frame motions on different moves they have to be preformed differently.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?currentpage=2&topic_id=56855
Check these videos I posted there. Very Similar concepts.
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United States12279 Posts
This is something I've not considered before. I never researched the correlation between attack animation frame data and cooldown, nor do I know how. You do bring up an important point, and that is cooldown does not immediately reflect the period of time between damage dealt, but rather the period between the initialization of attack animations. This is an important distinction to make because not all units have the same length of attack animation, and some units have different animations for their initial attack and subsequent attacks. For example, when Photon Cannons attack, first the claw-like tower rises up from the structure and fires, then for subsequent attacks it just stays up and fires as long as other units are in range. The same is true for Marines, and I think Dragoons as well. It's possible that Ensnare adds an amount to the cooldown equal to the amount of time it takes for a Marine to attack the first time, which may account for the drastic fire rate decrease.
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EPT
