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Hello guys.
I listened to the last episode of state of the game and there was this little balance discussion going on between IdrA and Day[9]. IdrA mentioned that at least one of the two following statements has to be true:
-) You are able to scout anything what your opponent is doing
-) You have an all purpose build that is able to fend off everything
In my opinion this makes perfect sense, but neither of those two is the case right now. IdrA already suggested making overlord speed hatch tech with reduced costs, which would satisfy statement one.
But IdrA got me thinking about his second statement; he mentioned that in brood war sunken colonies built faster compared to spine crawlers since you could get a manner creep colony so you were safe against more stuff without needing that perfect scouting.
So this got me thinking. How about an equivalent of the Creep Colony in SC2? A creep colony has following advantages:
-) You don't have to fully commit, since you can pay half-half
-) You can react faster in case you already got a creep colony down
This solves the issue of satisfying one of those two statements in an other way. What do you think?
edit: A simple reduction of the spine crawler build time does not work, because it would ruin ZvZ. Early pool builds would be just too good and a must in that matchup. It also doesn't adress the issue of needing a spore crawler faster against DTs or banshees etc.
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Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique?
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On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique?
They are not meant to spread creep. They are meant to let you react faster. Let's say a spine crawler builds 50 seconds (dunno if thats true), so you could make the creep colony 30 seconds and the morphing to the spine crawler would take 20 seconds then.
Now imagine you don't know what you're up to, so you lay down a creep colony. Then you see marines or whatever coming to your base; 20 seconds is enough to morph it to what you need it for. Same goes with banshees and morphing to spore crawlers.
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On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique?
Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies 
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Canada13389 Posts
On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique?
Perhaps we should think of ways to incorporate creep tumors into the concept of aiding in static defense. Perhaps a drone will create a spine or spore crawler faster if they are built where a creep tumor currently lies?
Its just a suggestion because I agree spine crawlers take a long time to root and move when trying to prepare a defense.
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On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies
I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good.
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Since creep tumors already fulfill the role of the creep colony I think it would be a waste. Especially since you would have to sacrifice a drone to make a building that you may or may not use.
I still don't see how the Spanishiwa build doesn't count as an all purpose defensive build.
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On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good.
Curious as to why you think spines/spores are better in sc2. Could you elaborate other than uproot? Personally I would trade uproot for creep colonies if presented the choice. Sunkens seemed much more durable in bw because in sc2 there are a number of units that absolutely destroy buildings, not to mention these units get massed like crazy. It makes spines not very effective.
Also how come spines dont produce broodlings like all other buildings. I think it would be better if they produce like 3 broodlings when destroyed.
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On May 10 2011 04:55 TreDawg wrote:
Since creep tumors already fulfill the role of the creep colony I think it would be a waste. Especially since you would have to sacrifice a drone to make a building that you may or may not use.
I still don't see how the Spanishiwa build doesn't count as an all purpose defensive build.
If you paid attention to what any top Zerg has said about the Spanishiwa build, youd realize it isn't an end all or solve all to the problems proposed by Idra or anyone else.
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On May 10 2011 04:55 TreDawg wrote:
Since creep tumors already fulfill the role of the creep colony I think it would be a waste. Especially since you would have to sacrifice a drone to make a building that you may or may not use.
I still don't see how the Spanishiwa build doesn't count as an all purpose defensive build.
According to IdrA it loses to greedy builds. I haven't tried it out yet, though.
greedy>safe>aggressive>greedy
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On May 10 2011 04:55 TreDawg wrote:
Since creep tumors already fulfill the role of the creep colony I think it would be a waste. Especially since you would have to sacrifice a drone to make a building that you may or may not use.
I still don't see how the Spanishiwa build doesn't count as an all purpose defensive build.
Its immobile, if the terran/protoss know your doing it they can do 1 rax fe/ 1 gate/fe and there's nothing you can do about it. They can take their third faster then you can on most of the ladder maps. Spanishiwa style is good for lower level play but at high level play there are many glaring weaknesses that good players will exploit. No threat of an all in or pressure = no need too make unnecessary defenses or anything you can do what you want and not have too worry about it.
The person who suggested spine crawlers making faster on creep tumors, that is an awesome idea wish blizzard would do that :D.
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might be a manner creep colony if you build it in another zergs base, but i'd call this one an emergency creep colony
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On May 10 2011 04:56 R0YAL wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good. Curious as to why you think spines/spores are better in sc2. Could you elaborate other than uproot? Personally I would trade uproot for creep colonies if presented the choice. Sunkens seemed much more durable in bw because in sc2 there are a number of units that absolutely destroy buildings, not to mention these units get massed like crazy. It makes spines not very effective.
they take forever to root themselves.
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On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good.
the problem is the build times. They simply take too long to be reactionary.
On May 10 2011 04:55 TreDawg wrote:
I still don't see how the Spanishiwa build doesn't count as an all purpose defensive build.
you cannot use the queens to be aggressive. you force yourself into a very safe defensive position, but if they can almost double fast expand if you do it.
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On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good.
Really don't understand this reasoning. Spores I don't really care about but spines are terrible compared to sunks. They take way too long to make in SC2 and they seem weaker too.
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Russian Federation4295 Posts
Blizzard must add Creep Colony (without upgrades) as better creep generator (hatchery radius).
It can be built from Drone and cost something, like 150-1200 minerals.
Will be good, if zerg will have something, like bigger creep generator.
And we must have Neutral Crawler, that too can uproot and can be upgraded to Spore Crawler or Spine crawler.
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They were in the game at one point and removed. I think they could make sense if they could move and root faster than the spine and spore. Then you could pre-build them and move them around to where they were needed before committing completely to static defense. Maybe in HOTS.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/OUxDQ.jpg) (from here)
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On May 10 2011 04:50 ZeromuS wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Perhaps we should think of ways to incorporate creep tumors into the concept of aiding in static defense. Perhaps a drone will create a spine or spore crawler faster if they are built where a creep tumor currently lies? Its just a suggestion because I agree spine crawlers take a long time to root and move when trying to prepare a defense.
This is a very interesting idea. Or maybe just allow a creep tumor to morph into a Spine Crawler for an increased cost in favor of not losing a drone and a lower build time.
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On May 10 2011 04:55 TreDawg wrote:
Since creep tumors already fulfill the role of the creep colony I think it would be a waste. Especially since you would have to sacrifice a drone to make a building that you may or may not use.
I still don't see how the Spanishiwa build doesn't count as an all purpose defensive build.
Hes talking about creep colonys in Broodwar, which you just built and could then morph it into a Sunken (ground) or Spore (air) defense.
Spanishiwas build maybe defends all kinds of early cheese, but if your opponent is intelligent, he will notice that you cant pressure him with no gas. So he expands/techs and ends up ahead of you.
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One thing about creep colonies - you can't always make them expecting to use them in both situations.
You wouldn't put a creep colony up front thinking to make it into a spore colony. You wouldn't put a sunken at the back of your base (usually anyways). Creep colonies gave you head starts in getting a sunken down against a push, but did cost money up front and may end up not being useful. Is this a possible solution to spines? Have an intermediate phase that costs about half of the spine/spore crawler? Maybe.
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On May 10 2011 04:55 TreDawg wrote:
Since creep tumors already fulfill the role of the creep colony I think it would be a waste. Especially since you would have to sacrifice a drone to make a building that you may or may not use.
I still don't see how the Spanishiwa build doesn't count as an all purpose defensive build.
Did you even play Brood War or read any of the posts above yours?
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A Better Creep Colony Idea:
For 50 Minerals, you can morph an Active Creep Tumor into a Colony, which can be later morphed into a spine/spore for another 50 minerals.
Might have to fine tune the cost a little to 50/75 or 75/75 since zerg isn't losing a drone.
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I think the the core of Idra's argument is that he does not like the fact that there is a *chance* element to the game which is really a fundamental part of the game. With fog of war comes limited information which brings incomplete decision making and chance. No race has perfect scouting, scan can miss the correct area, observer can be detected and shot down, overlord can be shot down? What is the difference?
Idra wants a game with no fog of war where it is a pure mechanics race and there is no chance at all for the "lesser" player to win.
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It isn't exactly like you would build a bunch of creep colonies and then decide to morph them into sunkens or spores. I played zerg in BW, and sunkens built fast enough that you could build 2-3 the moment the terran pushed out. They would push out, you could start morphing the colony, then you could morph the sunken, and the terran (on most maps) would be just arriving at your natural. It was so nice...
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On May 10 2011 05:11 Treemonkeys wrote:
I think the the core of Idra's argument is that he does not like the fact that there is a *chance* element to the game which is really a fundamental part of the game. With fog of war comes limited information which brings incomplete decision making and chance. No race has perfect scouting, scan can miss the correct area, observer can be detected and shot down, overlord can be shot down? What is the difference?
Idra wants a game with no fog of war where it is a pure mechanics race and there is no chance at all for the "lesser" player to win.
What zerg all ins can be hidden as well as the terran and protoss all ins? Zerg has less all ins, they are harder to hide, and they are mostly negated by simple wall offs (maybe 1 to 2 bunkers).
Yes other races have limited information, but they are not punished for it nearly as often as zerg.
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On May 10 2011 04:42 decaf wrote:
1 -> You are able to scout anything what your opponent is doing
[OR]
2 -> You have an all purpose build that is able to fend off everything
I'm sort of confused (and should possibly go listen to the podcast). Neither of these makes sense... and I think they're residual to idrA being a BW Terran.
1) You're never going to be able to scout anything/everything your opponent does. SCVs get killed off, scans are limited; Probes get killed off, obs can be eliminated; Drones/OLs get killed off or chased away... and yeah, Zerg doesn't have another scouting option. But they didn't in BW either, precisely: if we look at it, maybe what Zerg really needs is scourge back. (It would solve the Colossus problem too, lol.)
Of course you should be able to tell generally what your opponent is doing; otherwise it's not a strategy game but a blind counter game. This means tech changes have to be detectable, but I think they usually are (and if not it's due to SC2 having a fairly "compressed" tech tree compared to BW). But if you want to know everything your opponent is doing, play chess.
2) There are all-purpose builds in BW; they're called "safe". I don't play or watch enough SC2 to know if there are "safe" builds in SC2 yet, or what they are. But it's a well-known circle of counters that safe > aggressive > greedy > safe.
Now, specifically addressing the creep colony question: most of the time in modern TvZ, as far as I remember, creep colonies aren't put down until sunkens/spores are needed. It's very rare to see a creep colony dropped and not morphed immediately to a sunken or spore. This goes back to information, of course: timings are known and there's usually time to put down the colony + morph.
SC2 is still where timings are less "fixed" (I suppose it's possible the game as a whole will be less "fixed") - with or without creep colonies, there's more risk all around since it's harder to know exactly when and with what an opponent attacks.
I think.
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On May 10 2011 04:42 decaf wrote:
I listened to the last episode of state of the game and there was this little balance discussion going on between IdrA and Day[9].
Understatement of the century, man
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Let creep tumors evolve into spines or spores (and cut down the build time for spine/spore just by a little bit... 5 or 10 seconds? That would be interesting. It would help satisfy Blizzard's original intent for the Queen to lay down defensive structures (and for it to be a very defensive unit in the process).
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Zerg has base defense in creep tumors now, the speed bonus helps a lot. Also, queens double as base defense too. Given this, there is less of a need for instantly built static defense.
Furthermore, what do you think happens to the game when you give zerg powerful reactive defensive tools? They will drone even more and the game will be even more about how many drones a zerg can get away with. At least now they have to pre-make spine crawlers, so zerg is encouraged to at least get some defenses or units instead of just drones.
And also, if you want spine crawlers to have less root time, just say so and don't hide it behind a silly idea like copying a brood war design unto sc2. Or more generally speaking, ask for the spine crawler to have a lower build time, since that's functionally mostly the same.
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On May 10 2011 05:10 DJams wrote:
A Better Creep Colony Idea:
For 50 Minerals, you can morph an Active Creep Tumor into a Colony, which can be later morphed into a spine/spore for another 50 minerals.
Might have to fine tune the cost a little to 50/75 or 75/75 since zerg isn't losing a drone.
By "active", I assume you mean that you can't use a creep tumor that's already been replicated? Interesting idea
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On May 10 2011 04:55 TreDawg wrote:
Since creep tumors already fulfill the role of the creep colony I think it would be a waste. Especially since you would have to sacrifice a drone to make a building that you may or may not use.
I still don't see how the Spanishiwa build doesn't count as an all purpose defensive build.
Even if there is an all-purpose defensive build (though I think other posters have pointed out deficiencies in Spanishiwa's build as an all-purpose defensive build) that's still not that good, a race should not be forced into one build at the beginning of every build just to have a good shot at staying alive, I think Idra actually mentioned this and I agree scouting is more important to have. (btw I play Toss)
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Here are the problems with "all defensive" and "know all" approaches to SC2.
1) None of the races have a way to certainly determine the opening of their opponent. There is nothing Terran or Protoss can do to scout the same time frame that Zerg has trouble scouting. There must be a GREAT amount of sacrifice and cunning in order to determine the initial intentions of your opponent.
2) None of the races have an "all defensive" build that doesn't put them behind if there isn't a large push. Bunkers, cannons, spine crawlers, defensive production, etc. all set back the builds of the races by a fair amount, aggressively and/or economically.
3) If you give a Zerg too much information to go off of, they will win almost every game. Zerg has the unique ability to capitalize on intel to the highest degree by being able to focus on economy or army so fully that having the ability to gain said intel in such a free manner would break the game.
All these points aren't to say that Zerg currently does not have tools to determine what the opponent is doing early game. There are plenty of ways to scout that don't include peeking into the opponent's base. A large knowledge of expansion and attack timings, as well as suiciding units into the front for army composition can go a VERY long way in how to prepare for an attack, or when to invest in economy. There are also occasions in which Zerg can take advantage of certain turtle moves by being very aggressive. See Nestea vs Anypro.
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Here's what I think about Spine Crawlers. Sure, they take quite a long time to build, and they take forever to root. HOWEVER, you can transfuse them, AND you can actually move them and change their position. To me this ability + creep spreading is an extremely powerful combo. I'm not talking about extreme tactics like all in spine crawler push, but I believe that Spine Crawlers are underused.
edit; also it's important to remember that every race has its strenghts and weaknesses. This is how it is: not every race can have the best scouting, the most cost efficient units, the most mobile units, etc.
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On May 10 2011 05:18 Grumbels wrote:
Zerg has base defense in creep tumors now, the speed bonus helps a lot. Also, queens double as base defense too. Given this, there is less of a need for instantly built static defense.
Furthermore, what do you think happens to the game when you give zerg powerful reactive defensive tools? They will drone even more and the game will be even more about how many drones a zerg can get away with. At least now they have to pre-make spine crawlers, so zerg is encouraged to at least get some defenses or units instead of just drones.
And also, if you want spine crawlers to have less root time, just say so and don't hide it behind a silly idea like copying a brood war design unto sc2. Or more generally speaking, ask for the spine crawler to have a lower build time, since that's functionally mostly the same.
obviously changing zerg static defense would change a lot of balancing, but the point is to make it so zerg can actually react as opposed to guess. The point isn't necessarily to buff zerg. Allowing defense to be reactionary might mean there need to be buffs to the other races' aggressive units, but that is a much better (and more skillful) game dynamic instead of forcing the zergs to have barely any information and just randomly guess: "well, I didn't see anything with the ovie. He's got some marines. Don't know if he's all-ining or expanding. Better throw down 2 spines incase its hellions or I lose."
Then its fast expo and you are behind for no reason other than your defense builds so freakin slow...
or its banshee and your spines are useless and expensive...
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On May 10 2011 05:18 Grumbels wrote:
Zerg has base defense in creep tumors now, the speed bonus helps a lot. Also, queens double as base defense too. Given this, there is less of a need for instantly built static defense.
Creep does not really matter in early game. Queens aren't bad buit they do around 0 damage. And there is a very big need for static defence for zerg. If you see 25 marines leaving terran base after you made a round of drones in early game then your only choice is spines which takes forever to make.
On May 10 2011 05:22 AlBundy wrote:
Here's what I think about Spine Crawlers. Sure, they take quite a long time to build, and they take forever to root. HOWEVER, you can transfuse them, AND you can actually move them and change their position. To me this ability + creep spreading is an extremely powerful combo. I'm not talking about extreme tactics like all in spine crawler push, but I believe that Spine Crawlers are underused.
In early game, where scouting is most important you don't have enough energy for transfuse anyway, position change is also another story.
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On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:
I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good.
jesus, you are missing the point entirely,
either you are trolling, or you are a complete dumbass
either way gtfo
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On May 10 2011 05:22 AlBundy wrote:
Here's what I think about Spine Crawlers. Sure, they take quite a long time to build, and they take forever to root. HOWEVER, you can transfuse them, AND you can actually move them and change their position. To me this ability + creep spreading is an extremely powerful combo. I'm not talking about extreme tactics like all in spine crawler push, but I believe that Spine Crawlers are underused.
Yeah, spines are AWESOME at defending once you get them up - the problem is that they take so long to make
Bonus is that you can move them up, but they take a decent time to root as well.. most Terran and Protoss armies can do quite a bit of damage to the zerg army before the spines get rooted, leaving the spines more vulnerable.
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On May 10 2011 05:18 Grumbels wrote:
Zerg has base defense in creep tumors now, the speed bonus helps a lot. Also, queens double as base defense too. Given this, there is less of a need for instantly built static defense.
Furthermore, what do you think happens to the game when you give zerg powerful reactive defensive tools? They will drone even more and the game will be even more about how many drones a zerg can get away with. At least now they have to pre-make spine crawlers, so zerg is encouraged to at least get some defenses or units instead of just drones.
And also, if you want spine crawlers to have less root time, just say so and don't hide it behind a silly idea like copying a brood war design unto sc2. Or more generally speaking, ask for the spine crawler to have a lower build time, since that's functionally mostly the same.
Sort of - they still have to invest drones into the creep colonies (if that is implemented), and early on, that will still be hit on their econ. Even more so than "reactive" spine crawlers, because if you put down the wrong amount of creep colonies, you've wasted quite a few drones.
But yes, they can drone harder behind it.
Queens aren't the best defense against some of the more common pushes. Zealots rip apart queens, marauders are tickled, stalkers are tickled, bunkers are tickled.
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Oh man the sheer zerg biased statements going on here. FASTER creep spread? Hatchery size? What the fuck really? Already with 3 queens on 2 hatch creep is half the map in 10 minutes. You have sight of it all.
OLs are already everywhere, in every drop path, at every edge of the base poking, now they want them faster, cheaper, and earlier? lol
Really don't understand this reasoning. Spores I don't really care about but spines are terrible compared to sunks. They take way too long to make in SC2 and they seem weaker too.
...Because. They. Move. Doesn't matter how fast they move, they move fast enough that if I did a 16 marine drop in your main you could lift 3 spines, and land them before the marines have killed anything but a queen and some drones.
All these ideas of making tumors turn into spines is ridiculous. So with your mad excess minerals not only can you make a disposable army, you can make an insane amount of static MOVING defense, and not even have to waste a drone to make it.
Why is it ALWAYS zerg players complaining about every, single, thing in the game. Check everything on TL. It's always ZvX help. Pro zergs post Z strats. Mrbitter does Z streams with pros. Find any pro T's posting any strategys? Nope.
Stop complaining.
/rant/
If anything, get rid of sight of creep if you want creep colonies to spread hatch sized creep, and tumors to turn into creep. Else, no one can do anything to zerg. Once I leave my base you already know my entire composition, when I expoed, what tech path I went.
Has anyone ever just seen a speed upgraded Overseer fly through a base? Jesus the thing has turrets! lol
GAH! It's just so irritating. To me, zerg can stop every kind of cheese with 2 units. Queens, and slings. It really seems just that easy to me...
As a terran player, I can say 75% of these changes proposed would make me tear my face off as not only can you out macro me, now you can have faster, stronger, mobile static defense. How funny is that.
I say just give you guys lurkers back. Bane/infestor/lurker. That'd be fun to play against, even if you'd never beat it the micro involved would be SO sick awesome.
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On May 10 2011 05:14 Beef Noodles wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:11 Treemonkeys wrote:
I think the the core of Idra's argument is that he does not like the fact that there is a *chance* element to the game which is really a fundamental part of the game. With fog of war comes limited information which brings incomplete decision making and chance. No race has perfect scouting, scan can miss the correct area, observer can be detected and shot down, overlord can be shot down? What is the difference?
Idra wants a game with no fog of war where it is a pure mechanics race and there is no chance at all for the "lesser" player to win. What zerg all ins can be hidden as well as the terran and protoss all ins? Zerg has less all ins, they are harder to hide, and they are mostly negated by simple wall offs (maybe 1 to 2 bunkers). Yes other races have limited information, but they are not punished for it nearly as often as zerg.
I would argue that toss and terran are punished just as much as zerg is for lack of information just in an indirect or different way. Toss/terran move out, zerg underestimates it or isn't ready for it, zerg loses. Toss/terran move out, toss/terran underestimate zergs ability to defend it, toss/terran lose. It goes both ways.
Things were early scouting are especially important, like 4gate, 2port banshee, fast DT, the game is basically won or lost on information. Can we really say zerg gets punished more in these situaitons? Yes they lose if they are not prepared, they also win if they are. We would really need a ton of statistics on very specific builds to be able to say who is getting punished more often. Even if the opponent does a good just of shutting out all scouting, zerg still knows he "might" be at risks to these things.
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On May 10 2011 04:42 decaf wrote:
IdrA mentioned that at least one of the two following statements has to be true:
-) You are able to scout anything what your opponent is doing
-) You have an all purpose build that is able to fend off everything
In my opinion this makes perfect sense, but neither of those two is the case right now. IdrA already suggested making overlord speed hatch tech with reduced costs, which would satisfy statement one.
I disagree with the core concept of the two statements. Neither T or P have the ability to scout everything their opponent is doing (in the relevant early game all-in timeframe), nor do they have entirely 'safe' builds.
Imperfect information and 'unsafe' builds are part of the game, and part of the fun/excitement. If you truly want one of these statements to be true, there's a whole lot more to change then just zerg.
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+ Show Spoiler +On May 10 2011 05:26 iAmJeffReY wrote:Oh man the sheer zerg biased statements going on here. FASTER creep spread? Hatchery size? What the fuck really? Already with 3 queens on 2 hatch creep is half the map in 10 minutes. You have sight of it all. OLs are already everywhere, in every drop path, at every edge of the base poking, now they want them faster, cheaper, and earlier? lol Show nested quote +Really don't understand this reasoning. Spores I don't really care about but spines are terrible compared to sunks. They take way too long to make in SC2 and they seem weaker too.
...Because. They. Move. Doesn't matter how fast they move, they move fast enough that if I did a 16 marine drop in your main you could lift 3 spines, and land them before the marines have killed anything but a queen and some drones. All these ideas of making tumors turn into spines is ridiculous. So with your mad excess minerals not only can you make a disposable army, you can make an insane amount of static MOVING defense, and not even have to waste a drone to make it. Why is it ALWAYS zerg players complaining about every, single, thing in the game. Check everything on TL. It's always ZvX help. Pro zergs post Z strats. Mrbitter does Z streams with pros. Find any pro T's posting any strategys? Nope. Stop complaining. /rant/ If anything, get rid of sight of creep if you want creep colonies to spread hatch sized creep, and tumors to turn into creep. Else, no one can do anything to zerg. Once I leave my base you already know my entire composition, when I expoed, what tech path I went. Has anyone ever just seen a speed upgraded Overseer fly through a base? Jesus the thing has turrets! lol GAH! It's just so irritating. To me, zerg can stop every kind of cheese with 2 units. Queens, and slings. It really seems just that easy to me... As a terran player, I can say 75% of these changes proposed would make me tear my face off as not only can you out macro me, now you can have faster, stronger, mobile static defense. How funny is that. I say just give you guys lurkers back. Bane/infestor/lurker. That'd be fun to play against, even if you'd never beat it the micro involved would be SO sick awesome.
You understand that topic is about early game scouting, right? Noone cares about your creep spread and overlord positioning in the first 6 minutes in the game. On lair tech zerg scouting is easy but that not what this is about.
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On May 10 2011 05:26 iAmJeffReY wrote:+ Show Spoiler +Oh man the sheer zerg biased statements going on here. FASTER creep spread? Hatchery size? What the fuck really? Already with 3 queens on 2 hatch creep is half the map in 10 minutes. You have sight of it all. OLs are already everywhere, in every drop path, at every edge of the base poking, now they want them faster, cheaper, and earlier? lol Really don't understand this reasoning. Spores I don't really care about but spines are terrible compared to sunks. They take way too long to make in SC2 and they seem weaker too.
...Because. They. Move. Doesn't matter how fast they move, they move fast enough that if I did a 16 marine drop in your main you could lift 3 spines, and land them before the marines have killed anything but a queen and some drones. All these ideas of making tumors turn into spines is ridiculous. So with your mad excess minerals not only can you make a disposable army, you can make an insane amount of static MOVING defense, and not even have to waste a drone to make it. Why is it ALWAYS zerg players complaining about every, single, thing in the game. Check everything on TL. It's always ZvX help. Pro zergs post Z strats. Mrbitter does Z streams with pros. Find any pro T's posting any strategys? Nope. Stop complaining. /rant/ If anything, get rid of sight of creep if you want creep colonies to spread hatch sized creep, and tumors to turn into creep. Else, no one can do anything to zerg. Once I leave my base you already know my entire composition, when I expoed, what tech path I went. Has anyone ever just seen a speed upgraded Overseer fly through a base? Jesus the thing has turrets! lol GAH! It's just so irritating. To me, zerg can stop every kind of cheese with 2 units. Queens, and slings. It really seems just that easy to me... As a terran player, I can say 75% of these changes proposed would make me tear my face off as not only can you out macro me, now you can have faster, stronger, mobile static defense. How funny is that. I say just give you guys lurkers back. Bane/infestor/lurker. That'd be fun to play against, even if you'd never beat it the micro involved would be SO sick awesome.
wait, and zergs are the ones complaining?
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On May 10 2011 05:26 iAmJeffReY wrote:Oh man the sheer zerg biased statements going on here. FASTER creep spread? Hatchery size? What the fuck really? Already with 3 queens on 2 hatch creep is half the map in 10 minutes. You have sight of it all. OLs are already everywhere, in every drop path, at every edge of the base poking, now they want them faster, cheaper, and earlier? lol Show nested quote +Really don't understand this reasoning. Spores I don't really care about but spines are terrible compared to sunks. They take way too long to make in SC2 and they seem weaker too.
...Because. They. Move. Doesn't matter how fast they move, they move fast enough that if I did a 16 marine drop in your main you could lift 3 spines, and land them before the marines have killed anything but a queen and some drones. All these ideas of making tumors turn into spines is ridiculous. So with your mad excess minerals not only can you make a disposable army, you can make an insane amount of static MOVING defense, and not even have to waste a drone to make it. Why is it ALWAYS zerg players complaining about every, single, thing in the game. Check everything on TL. It's always ZvX help. Pro zergs post Z strats. Mrbitter does Z streams with pros. Find any pro T's posting any strategys? Nope. Stop complaining. /rant/ If anything, get rid of sight of creep if you want creep colonies to spread hatch sized creep, and tumors to turn into creep. Else, no one can do anything to zerg. Once I leave my base you already know my entire composition, when I expoed, what tech path I went. Has anyone ever just seen a speed upgraded Overseer fly through a base? Jesus the thing has turrets! lol GAH! It's just so irritating. To me, zerg can stop every kind of cheese with 2 units. Queens, and slings. It really seems just that easy to me... As a terran player, I can say 75% of these changes proposed would make me tear my face off as not only can you out macro me, now you can have faster, stronger, mobile static defense. How funny is that. I say just give you guys lurkers back. Bane/infestor/lurker. That'd be fun to play against, even if you'd never beat it the micro involved would be SO sick awesome.
What level do you play at? How can you say that 3 spines are the counter to a 16 marine drop in the main? How can you say 2 queens definitely cover half the map in creep by 10 minutes? If you are really worried about creep, scan and kill creep tumors when you push. Or go hellion expand for map control and deny creep spread.
Many of your concerns seem unfounded at higher levels. For the record, I'm no pro. Mid-master zerg. I just think it odd for you to call this thread "zerg biased" and then bring up seemingly very biased/incorrect complaints.
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On May 10 2011 05:14 Beef Noodles wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:11 Treemonkeys wrote:
I think the the core of Idra's argument is that he does not like the fact that there is a *chance* element to the game which is really a fundamental part of the game. With fog of war comes limited information which brings incomplete decision making and chance. No race has perfect scouting, scan can miss the correct area, observer can be detected and shot down, overlord can be shot down? What is the difference?
Idra wants a game with no fog of war where it is a pure mechanics race and there is no chance at all for the "lesser" player to win. What zerg all ins can be hidden as well as the terran and protoss all ins? Zerg has less all ins, they are harder to hide, and they are mostly negated by simple wall offs (maybe 1 to 2 bunkers). Yes other races have limited information, but they are not punished for it nearly as often as zerg.
Every Zerg all-in can be as effectively hidden as Protoss and Terran all-in. Are you forgetting that Zerg almost gain complete map control by default within the first 5 minutes of the game? That is a HUGE advantage to denying scouting opportunities in the beginning of the game. Also, there is no big red sign for a Zerg all-in beyond "he's still on one base by 5 minutes" or "that's a lot of X!" Tech buildings for Zerg are merely a tell of what COULD be, but not even close to a sign of what units he has. On the contrary, a scouted factory/starport/rax with any addon or lack thereof is a GIGANTIC tell as to what a Terran is making and will be attacking with.
In short, I could run an SCV or scan your base all day and not know what your army composition is without running directly into your entire army.
And to be frank, you're not being punished by having limited information. You're being punished for not responding correctly for what precious information you have.
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Zerg scouting is actually really fucking good. Between overlord spread and creep spread zerg can have vision of nearly the entire map at times. What is the trade off for this, if not a weakened ability to scout *inside* the opponents base?
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On May 10 2011 05:28 Derez wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:42 decaf wrote:
IdrA mentioned that at least one of the two following statements has to be true:
-) You are able to scout anything what your opponent is doing
-) You have an all purpose build that is able to fend off everything
In my opinion this makes perfect sense, but neither of those two is the case right now. IdrA already suggested making overlord speed hatch tech with reduced costs, which would satisfy statement one.
I disagree with the core concept of the two statements. Neither T or P have the ability to scout everything their opponent is doing (in the relevant early game all-in timeframe), nor do they have entirely 'safe' builds. Imperfect information and 'unsafe' builds are part of the game, and part of the fun/excitement. If you truly want one of these statements to be true, there's a whole lot more to change then just zerg.
Terran's have scan and protoss have hallucination. These allow them to thoroughly scout their opponent at a small cost pretty early in the game. Zerg do not have anything equivalent until later in the game. I think the solution would be to put the overlord speed upgrade on tier 1. It would be about equal to the cost and utility of scan and hallucinations.
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Calgary25979 Posts
On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good.
Heavily, heavily disagree. The armor in BW made them strong against Marines. Spines are largely useless against Marines in SC2. They even die quickly against Zealots. I don't know, maybe it will just become commonplace that if you want to use Spines you NEED to use Spines + multiple Queens? I'm not sure.
Edit: Spines also take seemingly forever to build. I can scout him moving out and I'll be dead by the time he gets to my natural. That didn't really happen in BW.
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On May 10 2011 05:01 Zapdos_Smithh wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good. Really don't understand this reasoning. Spores I don't really care about but spines are terrible compared to sunks. They take way too long to make in SC2 and they seem weaker too.
They seem weaker because of Roaches(16 dmg each),Immortals (50 dmg), Maruaders (24 each plus stim -_-)
In BW units like these with redicouls dps didn't exist. Not to mention Lurkers really bulstered Zerg positions
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On May 10 2011 05:33 Chill wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good. Heavily, heavily disagree. The armor in BW made them strong against Marines. Spines are largely useless against Marines in SC2. They even die quickly against Zealots.
Added to the fact that you could build them when you saw your opponent pushing out which gave you extra room to build drones/units etc.
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On May 10 2011 05:32 Treemonkeys wrote:
Zerg scouting is actually really fucking good. Between overlord spread and creep spread zerg can have vision of nearly the entire map at times. What is the trade off for this, if not a weakened ability to scout *inside* the opponents base?
It's not a "weakened" ability - you have no ability. The overlord isn't seeing anything unless you sacrifice three of them or your opponent put his tech right on the edge where your OL's went in. Having vision of the map is nice, but it doesn't help when your opponent can leave his base and arrive at yours before you have enough defense.
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On May 10 2011 05:28 Treemonkeys wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:14 Beef Noodles wrote:On May 10 2011 05:11 Treemonkeys wrote:
I think the the core of Idra's argument is that he does not like the fact that there is a *chance* element to the game which is really a fundamental part of the game. With fog of war comes limited information which brings incomplete decision making and chance. No race has perfect scouting, scan can miss the correct area, observer can be detected and shot down, overlord can be shot down? What is the difference?
Idra wants a game with no fog of war where it is a pure mechanics race and there is no chance at all for the "lesser" player to win. What zerg all ins can be hidden as well as the terran and protoss all ins? Zerg has less all ins, they are harder to hide, and they are mostly negated by simple wall offs (maybe 1 to 2 bunkers). Yes other races have limited information, but they are not punished for it nearly as often as zerg. I would argue that toss and terran are punished just as much as zerg is for lack of information just in an indirect or different way. Toss/terran move out, zerg underestimates it or isn't ready for it, zerg loses. Toss/terran move out, toss/terran underestimate zergs ability to defend it, toss/terran lose. It goes both ways. Things were early scouting are especially important, like 4gate, 2port banshee, fast DT, the game is basically won or lost on information. Can we really say zerg gets punished more in these situaitons? Yes they lose if they are not prepared, they also win if they are. We would really need a ton of statistics on very specific builds to be able to say who is getting punished more often. Even if the opponent does a good just of shutting out all scouting, zerg still knows he "might" be at risks to these things.
You basically proved the "coin flip" point of this entire thread. 1) Zerg wins if they are prepared. 2) They lose if they are not. 3) They cannot effectively scout.
Add all those up, and thats a coin flip.
Also, toss and terran don't have to do those crazy all-ins. So they get to decide if its a coin-flip. Zerg does not.
Well I guess zerg can decide to make it a coinflip by all-ining as well, but like I said, it is much easier to scout a zerg all in early game. If you are terran, scan the expansion and see if its saturated. If you are toss, hide a probe and sacrifice it to see the drone count.
Not to mention, wall offs, bunkers, sentries actually allow toss/terran normal builds to hold off any early game all ins. Yes it does require great forcefields, and preemptive bunkers, but that is far less investment than zerg
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On May 10 2011 05:33 Chill wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good. Heavily, heavily disagree. The armor in BW made them strong against Marines. Spines are largely useless against Marines in SC2. They even die quickly against Zealots.
Yeah, it's really exponential as well when it comes to spines..
5 marines, and a spine is a terrans worst nightmare
10 marines, and a spine is an annoyance
15 marines and a spine is just another things that dies as you stutter step.
I would love creep colonies as well. Put one behind your minerals, and just leave it there. See phoenix or banshee? spore. See reactor hellions? Spine.
A trade off to make it fair would be to make it so spore colony spines/spores cannot uproot
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Just wanna clear up some misconceptions:
Sunken Colony Build Time: 20 + 20 = 40s
Spine Crawler Build Time: 50s (game seconds) = 36.2s
Sunken Colony Cost: 50 + 75 + 50 =175min
Spine Crawler Cost: 50 + 100 = 150min
Spine builds faster and costs less. imo biggest defensive advantage that sunkens have is that it's harder to go around them. You usually don't build creep colonies and wait for an attack to build sunkens because the 50 extra minerals is not that much compared to the 125 mineral investment in the creep colony.
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On May 10 2011 05:31 aksfjh wrote:
Also, there is no big red sign for a Zerg all-in beyond "he's still on one base by 5 minutes" or "that's a lot of X!" Tech buildings for Zerg are merely a tell of what COULD be, but not even close to a sign of what units he has. On the contrary, a scouted factory/starport/rax with any addon or lack thereof is a GIGANTIC tell as to what a Terran is making and will be attacking with.
This is also a good point. Zerg gets tech so cheaply that simply scouting it isn't all that revealing. For example for the cost of a roach warren (price of one canon) you can force several canons without being serious about using it. Zerg tech can be scouting but there is no way for toss/terran to predict when the next round of larva will be mass units instead of drones, which is another reason why their more constant scouting methods are needed for them. At least with production buildings you can have a good idea of how much is being produced and you can tell if they are in use by looking at them. Zerg tech is much more mysterious and potentially overwhelming.
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Seems like a "creep crawler" could be a pretty cool but not totally necessary addition to the Zerg arsenal. Builds in shorter time than Spine/Spore, can't attack, roots/unroots and moves faster, morphs into Spine or Spore (total build + morph time making it the same as straight-up making the other kind of crawler)... but I think SC2 is fine as it is. Well, maybe Zerg may not be totally fine, but I don't think you need to make it more Brood-War-like to fix them.
I guess in the end I'd still rather see IdrA's overlord speed change suggestion get implemented.
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On May 10 2011 05:32 Treemonkeys wrote:
Zerg scouting is actually really fucking good. Between overlord spread and creep spread zerg can have vision of nearly the entire map at times. What is the trade off for this, if not a weakened ability to scout *inside* the opponents base?
Yea, why would you want to see your inside your opponent's base when you can see the beautiful topography of the map?
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if the creep colony was introduced how long before we would hear bitching that the 50 minerals or whatever the cost is, is too much for possibly no gain. How many weeks after would idra be saying that any cost that doesnt do damage puts you behind?
im a huge idra fan but i dont see the point of the spore colony change for sc2.
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On May 10 2011 05:37 L3gendary wrote:
Just wanna clear up some misconceptions:
Sunken Colony Build Time: 20 + 20 = 40s
Spine Crawler Build Time: 50s (game seconds) = 36.2s
Sunken Colony Cost: 50 + 75 + 50 =175min
Spine Crawler Cost: 50 + 100 = 150min
Spine builds faster and costs less. imo biggest defensive advantage that sunkens have is that it's harder to go around them. You usually don't build creep colonies and wait for an attack to build sunkens because the 50 extra minerals is not that much compared to the 125 mineral investment in the creep colony.
Well, didn't you make some creep colonies preemptively if the walk distance was small, so that you could get at least a couple in time after seeing your opponent leave his base? Because most/all maps in SC2 don't allow for a spine crawler to be built before your opponent arrives.
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Calgary25979 Posts
On May 10 2011 05:37 L3gendary wrote:
Just wanna clear up some misconceptions:
Sunken Colony Build Time: 20 + 20 = 40s
Spine Crawler Build Time: 50s (game seconds) = 36.2s
Sunken Colony Cost: 50 + 75 + 50 =175min
Spine Crawler Cost: 50 + 100 = 150min
Spine builds faster and costs less. imo biggest defensive advantage that sunkens have is that it's harder to go around them. You usually don't build creep colonies and wait for an attack to build sunkens because the 50 extra minerals is not that much compared to the 125 mineral investment in the creep colony.
The thing is even if you post the numbers, I can just tell you how the game feels. In BW if he moved out I would have time to start 4 Creep Colonies and finish them into Sunkens before he got to my natural. I don't know if the maps are smaller, or units more faster or what, but it's not the same.
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On May 10 2011 05:31 aksfjh wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:14 Beef Noodles wrote:On May 10 2011 05:11 Treemonkeys wrote:
I think the the core of Idra's argument is that he does not like the fact that there is a *chance* element to the game which is really a fundamental part of the game. With fog of war comes limited information which brings incomplete decision making and chance. No race has perfect scouting, scan can miss the correct area, observer can be detected and shot down, overlord can be shot down? What is the difference?
Idra wants a game with no fog of war where it is a pure mechanics race and there is no chance at all for the "lesser" player to win. What zerg all ins can be hidden as well as the terran and protoss all ins? Zerg has less all ins, they are harder to hide, and they are mostly negated by simple wall offs (maybe 1 to 2 bunkers). Yes other races have limited information, but they are not punished for it nearly as often as zerg. Every Zerg all-in can be as effectively hidden as Protoss and Terran all-in. Are you forgetting that Zerg almost gain complete map control by default within the first 5 minutes of the game? That is a HUGE advantage to denying scouting opportunities in the beginning of the game. Also, there is no big red sign for a Zerg all-in beyond "he's still on one base by 5 minutes" or "that's a lot of X!" Tech buildings for Zerg are merely a tell of what COULD be, but not even close to a sign of what units he has. On the contrary, a scouted factory/starport/rax with any addon or lack thereof is a GIGANTIC tell as to what a Terran is making and will be attacking with. In short, I could run an SCV or scan your base all day and not know what your army composition is without running directly into your entire army. And to be frank, you're not being punished by having limited information. You're being punished for not responding correctly for what precious information you have.
I'm sorry, but I just cannot agree with you. Maybe it's because I play zerg and understand it, but zergs all ins are depressingly easy to scout. All of them (before the midgame where other methods of scouting become available) rely on cutting drones. Just check drone saturation at the natural.
Also, what zerg all ins are incredibly dangerous? Baneling bust? Bunkers are not a huge investment early game and can be salvaged. Roach ling all in vs toss? Strong on close spots vs a 3 gate expo, but why are tosses 3 gate expoing on close spots? In other positions, it still comes down to how well tosses can forcefield (which is not in the zergs control). Roach burrow? Get two cannons and gateway units. What all ins are you talking about?
I'm also a master level protoss, and I LOVE when zergs all-in. Its super easy to scout (I always hide and sac a probe to check natural saturation). It's also fairly easy to stop without deviating from my build. That's not even close to the case with zerg.
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On May 10 2011 05:40 MonsieurGrimm wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:37 L3gendary wrote:
Just wanna clear up some misconceptions:
Sunken Colony Build Time: 20 + 20 = 40s
Spine Crawler Build Time: 50s (game seconds) = 36.2s
Sunken Colony Cost: 50 + 75 + 50 =175min
Spine Crawler Cost: 50 + 100 = 150min
Spine builds faster and costs less. imo biggest defensive advantage that sunkens have is that it's harder to go around them. You usually don't build creep colonies and wait for an attack to build sunkens because the 50 extra minerals is not that much compared to the 125 mineral investment in the creep colony. Well, didn't you make some creep colonies preemptively if the walk distance was small, so that you could get at least a couple in time after seeing your opponent leave his base? Because most/all maps in SC2 don't allow for a spine crawler to be built before your opponent arrives.
That's a map issue and I think it plays a bigger role in the effectiveness in 1 base terran strategies than does "zerg scouting".
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On May 10 2011 05:33 Chill wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good. Heavily, heavily disagree. The armor in BW made them strong against Marines. Spines are largely useless against Marines in SC2. They even die quickly against Zealots. I don't know, maybe it will just become commonplace that if you want to use Spines you NEED to use Spines + multiple Queens? I'm not sure. Edit: Spines also take seemingly forever to build. I can scout him moving out and I'll be dead by the time he gets to my natural. That didn't really happen in BW.
Spine Crawlers actually appear to have 2 armor according to Liquipedia, the same as Sunkens. Or do you mean something else about the armor? I didn't play Broodwar at all at a competitive level, just watched games and played casually.
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Spines seem okay.. I think it's just that marines have ridiculous dps.
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Russian Federation4295 Posts
I want neutral Crawler, that is upgrade'able to Spore or Spine.
Zergs are most reactionary race, so why their turrets have longest build time?
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On May 10 2011 05:32 InstantKarma wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:28 Derez wrote:On May 10 2011 04:42 decaf wrote:
IdrA mentioned that at least one of the two following statements has to be true:
-) You are able to scout anything what your opponent is doing
-) You have an all purpose build that is able to fend off everything
In my opinion this makes perfect sense, but neither of those two is the case right now. IdrA already suggested making overlord speed hatch tech with reduced costs, which would satisfy statement one.
I disagree with the core concept of the two statements. Neither T or P have the ability to scout everything their opponent is doing (in the relevant early game all-in timeframe), nor do they have entirely 'safe' builds. Imperfect information and 'unsafe' builds are part of the game, and part of the fun/excitement. If you truly want one of these statements to be true, there's a whole lot more to change then just zerg. Terran's have scan and protoss have hallucination. These allow them to thoroughly scout their opponent at a small cost pretty early in the game. Zerg do not have anything equivalent until later in the game. I think the solution would be to put the overlord speed upgrade on tier 1. It would be about equal to the cost and utility of scan and hallucinations.
The lack of knowledge you have of Protoss and Terran disturbs me. A lot is touted about scans and mules being "free" for Terrans when it just plain isn't true. In many cases, a scan early game is taking a HUGE economic hit at the same time. In many cases, Protoss and Zerg hit full base saturation a full minute earlier than Terran, but the mule actually brings the resource collection in-line with the other races as long as both don't stay on one base for too long.
As for Protoss, hallucination will ALWAYS come after warpgate tech, which will mean not a second before 7:00 into the game. By that time, many all-in timings have come and gone, and those that haven't are already knocking on the door. I will admit that I feel Protoss has the best tools with responding to all-ins, but they are still greatly vulnerable to them to the point that you can at least delay their plans significantly with just the threat of doing so.
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According to IdrA it loses to greedy builds. I haven't tried it out yet, though.
greedy>safe>aggressive>greedy
So he wants an all purpose defensive build that doesn't lose to greedy builds, or what?
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would be a wierd mix with creep tumour mechanics interesting idea though Idras concerns are legit
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Calgary25979 Posts
On May 10 2011 05:43 VonBlucher wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:33 Chill wrote:On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good. Heavily, heavily disagree. The armor in BW made them strong against Marines. Spines are largely useless against Marines in SC2. They even die quickly against Zealots. I don't know, maybe it will just become commonplace that if you want to use Spines you NEED to use Spines + multiple Queens? I'm not sure. Edit: Spines also take seemingly forever to build. I can scout him moving out and I'll be dead by the time he gets to my natural. That didn't really happen in BW. Spine Crawlers actually appear to have 2 armor according to Liquipedia, the same as Sunkens. Or do you mean something else about the armor? I didn't play Broodwar at all at a competitive level, just watched games and played casually.
I don't know if units attack faster or what, Spines just die way faster to weak units than Sunkens did.
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On May 10 2011 05:36 MonsieurGrimm wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:32 Treemonkeys wrote:
Zerg scouting is actually really fucking good. Between overlord spread and creep spread zerg can have vision of nearly the entire map at times. What is the trade off for this, if not a weakened ability to scout *inside* the opponents base? It's not a "weakened" ability - you have no ability. The overlord isn't seeing anything unless you sacrifice three of them or your opponent put his tech right on the edge where your OL's went in. Having vision of the map is nice, but it doesn't help when your opponent can leave his base and arrive at yours before you have enough defense.
There is always some ability. On almost every map you can lurk around the edges and spot some buildings and to see what he is doing with his gas and worker count. Between what you can see and can't see you can fill in a lot of blanks to try to make the best decision. No races plays this game where they know they can win no matter what with a safe build, everyone has to take risks, everyone has limited information.
Contrary to popular belief zerg can successfully go all in and cripple or kill a toss/terran and there is not much they can do about it while zerg is holding the xelnage towers and denying any scout that tries to leave the base.
So what if they can scout zerg tech "easily". Are they watching the entire map like zerg is? Are they going to know the second zerg leaves his base like zerg can? Are they going to scan or keep an observer over the larva at all times to see when zerg decides to turn his econ greed build into a huge all in on a dime? No, of course not, they are taking risks like everyone else.
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How about Spine crawlers build a little faster, but to uproot you need the burrow/unburrow upgrade at lair tech? The rooting time stays relatively the same.
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On May 10 2011 05:42 Chill wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:37 L3gendary wrote:
Just wanna clear up some misconceptions:
Sunken Colony Build Time: 20 + 20 = 40s
Spine Crawler Build Time: 50s (game seconds) = 36.2s
Sunken Colony Cost: 50 + 75 + 50 =175min
Spine Crawler Cost: 50 + 100 = 150min
Spine builds faster and costs less. imo biggest defensive advantage that sunkens have is that it's harder to go around them. You usually don't build creep colonies and wait for an attack to build sunkens because the 50 extra minerals is not that much compared to the 125 mineral investment in the creep colony. The thing is even if you post the numbers, I can just tell you how the game feels. In BW if he moved out I would have time to start 4 Creep Colonies and finish them into Sunkens before he got to my natural. I don't know if the maps are smaller, or units more faster or what, but it's not the same.
I really think it's the maps + warpgate mechanic. How many times do you find yourself building panic spines vs marines anyways? It's usually better to just get lings. And helions are ofc much faster than marines.
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On May 10 2011 05:37 L3gendary wrote:
Just wanna clear up some misconceptions:
Sunken Colony Build Time: 20 + 20 = 40s
Spine Crawler Build Time: 50s (game seconds) = 36.2s
Sunken Colony Cost: 50 + 75 + 50 =175min
Spine Crawler Cost: 50 + 100 = 150min
Spine builds faster and costs less. imo biggest defensive advantage that sunkens have is that it's harder to go around them. You usually don't build creep colonies and wait for an attack to build sunkens because the 50 extra minerals is not that much compared to the 125 mineral investment in the creep colony.
The fact that game time in SC2 is faster than normal seconds doesnt just make it so a spine builds in 36.2 seconds, it makes your opponents units reach your base faster aswell, i have absolutely no idea what your point is here?
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On May 10 2011 05:32 Treemonkeys wrote:
Zerg scouting is actually really fucking good. Between overlord spread and creep spread zerg can have vision of nearly the entire map at times. What is the trade off for this, if not a weakened ability to scout *inside* the opponents base?
Have you even read this thread?
Its about EARLY game scouting, which is also when zerg is weak.
Overlord spread is only possible once you got lair and even tho you have creep spread all over the map, you dont have time to react to it. I can have creep at a terrans ramp fWhen he moves out I dont have time to react to it because build time of defensive structures are way too long. And if I DO build lots of lings IN CASE he is going to attack, and he doesnt im far behind, and most times even if you do deal with the push with your lings, you end up behind aswell, overlords are useless aswell pre lair.
so no, zerg scouting is not ''really fucking good''
As idrA stated about LosirA vs Scfou. He knew the push was coming and he made enough lings to deal with it easily, but because he had too many lings he ended up behind anyways.
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On May 10 2011 05:47 Defacer wrote:
How about Spine crawlers build a little faster, but to uproot you need the burrow/unburrow upgrade at lair tech? The rooting time stays relatively the same.
Well I think the only reason why spines build so slow is aggressive spines in ZvZ. If that's not true I have no idea why they couldn't be build at least 10 seconds faster.
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On May 10 2011 05:45 Existor wrote:
I want neutral Crawler, that is upgrade'able to Spore or Spine.
Zergs are most reactionary race, so why their turrets have longest build time?
I think the spine time was balanced for ZvZ. smaller build time would make fast pools just too good and a must
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On May 10 2011 05:46 Chill wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:43 VonBlucher wrote:On May 10 2011 05:33 Chill wrote:On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good. Heavily, heavily disagree. The armor in BW made them strong against Marines. Spines are largely useless against Marines in SC2. They even die quickly against Zealots. I don't know, maybe it will just become commonplace that if you want to use Spines you NEED to use Spines + multiple Queens? I'm not sure. Edit: Spines also take seemingly forever to build. I can scout him moving out and I'll be dead by the time he gets to my natural. That didn't really happen in BW. Spine Crawlers actually appear to have 2 armor according to Liquipedia, the same as Sunkens. Or do you mean something else about the armor? I didn't play Broodwar at all at a competitive level, just watched games and played casually. I don't know if units attack faster or what, Spines just die way faster to weak units than Sunkens did.
No argument here, Spine Crawlers are a joke to marines these days compared to their Brood War counterparts.
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On May 10 2011 05:42 Chill wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:37 L3gendary wrote:
Just wanna clear up some misconceptions:
Sunken Colony Build Time: 20 + 20 = 40s
Spine Crawler Build Time: 50s (game seconds) = 36.2s
Sunken Colony Cost: 50 + 75 + 50 =175min
Spine Crawler Cost: 50 + 100 = 150min
Spine builds faster and costs less. imo biggest defensive advantage that sunkens have is that it's harder to go around them. You usually don't build creep colonies and wait for an attack to build sunkens because the 50 extra minerals is not that much compared to the 125 mineral investment in the creep colony. The thing is even if you post the numbers, I can just tell you how the game feels. In BW if he moved out I would have time to start 4 Creep Colonies and finish them into Sunkens before he got to my natural. I don't know if the maps are smaller, or units more faster or what, but it's not the same.
Pretty sure it was the part where sunkens could two-shot marines.
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On May 10 2011 05:49 Mephyss wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:45 Existor wrote:
I want neutral Crawler, that is upgrade'able to Spore or Spine.
Zergs are most reactionary race, so why their turrets have longest build time? I think the spine time was balanced for ZvZ. smaller build time would make fast pools just too good and a must
Shouldn't balance the game around a mirror matchup until the non-mirrors are balanced, imo.
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On May 10 2011 05:48 RuneZerg wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:37 L3gendary wrote:
Just wanna clear up some misconceptions:
Sunken Colony Build Time: 20 + 20 = 40s
Spine Crawler Build Time: 50s (game seconds) = 36.2s
Sunken Colony Cost: 50 + 75 + 50 =175min
Spine Crawler Cost: 50 + 100 = 150min
Spine builds faster and costs less. imo biggest defensive advantage that sunkens have is that it's harder to go around them. You usually don't build creep colonies and wait for an attack to build sunkens because the 50 extra minerals is not that much compared to the 125 mineral investment in the creep colony. The fact that game time in SC2 is faster than normal seconds doesnt just make it so a spine builds in 36.2 seconds, it makes your opponents units reach your base faster aswell, i have absolutely no idea what your point is here?
No it doesn't...sc2 isn't just a sped up version of bw lol.Only reason the enemy could reach your base faster is because of smaller maps or warp ins...
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Idra's point is focussed on early game overlord scouting, for those that didn't know. What he is essentially saying is that, either zerg should get better early scouting, or be able to defend against every single early cheese without seriously hampering his economy or getting really far behind (such as your opponent taking a 3rd before Z).
Terran and Protoss have safe builds. They just sometimes choose to be extra greedy and not add defence.
For Terran, we have 1 rax expand vs all races. This is safe against everything. Baneling Bust, 4 gate, DT rush, Roach Ling all in, Cloaked Banshee (sort of).
For Protoss, we have 3 gate expand against Z and 2 gate robo against T. For 3 gate expand, the Protoss is safe as long as he/she doesn't skip the forge and builds a wall at his/her natural. The rest is down to good forcefields against a roach ling all in. For 2 gate robo, sentries will be able to defend anything below the ramp and an observer will be out in time to fend off cloaked banshee and see Terran's tech/expo timing and production.
Zerg has safe openers. Speedling expand vs Protoss and 15 hatch vs Terran are both fine depending on map and positions. But the problem now is that zerg cannot scout anymore. This is similar to both Protoss and Terran (forgetting scan), who have limited scouting after first worker is picked off. However, Zerg has the trouble of requiring different tech and unit producing for different types of pressure, leading to the "coin flip" scenario IdrA likes to talk about.
Cloaked Banshee requires Lair/ evo and spore, + additional queens. Hellions require roach/ling + crawler. Mass marine requires banelings (roaches suck vs TLO 6 rax marine all in). At the same time, Terran can be doing completely standard marine tank, double expanding in base, or something very cheesy like Thor all in. It is difficult for Zerg to know what is coming.
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Why not just reduce spine crawler build time by 10 seconds...
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On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique?
Let's rename them Chill Colonies.
They will just chill, which is pretty unique in my opinion.
It's a good idea, but the thing is that it will never exist, blizzard will not change that.
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Bunkers take 40 seconds to build
Cannons take 40 second to build
Spine Crawlers take 50 seconds to build
The only thing that needs to changed is Spines Crawlers to be in line with every other static defence option. Spines taking longer than Cannons which can built in your opponents fucking base is a joke.
This is a thing in SC2 that has annoyed and confused me since day one.
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On May 10 2011 05:53 L3gendary wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:48 RuneZerg wrote:On May 10 2011 05:37 L3gendary wrote:
Just wanna clear up some misconceptions:
Sunken Colony Build Time: 20 + 20 = 40s
Spine Crawler Build Time: 50s (game seconds) = 36.2s
Sunken Colony Cost: 50 + 75 + 50 =175min
Spine Crawler Cost: 50 + 100 = 150min
Spine builds faster and costs less. imo biggest defensive advantage that sunkens have is that it's harder to go around them. You usually don't build creep colonies and wait for an attack to build sunkens because the 50 extra minerals is not that much compared to the 125 mineral investment in the creep colony. The fact that game time in SC2 is faster than normal seconds doesnt just make it so a spine builds in 36.2 seconds, it makes your opponents units reach your base faster aswell, i have absolutely no idea what your point is here? No it doesn't...sc2 isn't just a sped up version of bw lol.Only reason the enemy could reach your base faster is because of smaller maps or warp ins...
So... when the game is playing at faster speed it only affects buildings not units? im not following
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On May 10 2011 05:32 InstantKarma wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:28 Derez wrote:On May 10 2011 04:42 decaf wrote:
IdrA mentioned that at least one of the two following statements has to be true:
-) You are able to scout anything what your opponent is doing
-) You have an all purpose build that is able to fend off everything
In my opinion this makes perfect sense, but neither of those two is the case right now. IdrA already suggested making overlord speed hatch tech with reduced costs, which would satisfy statement one.
I disagree with the core concept of the two statements. Neither T or P have the ability to scout everything their opponent is doing (in the relevant early game all-in timeframe), nor do they have entirely 'safe' builds. Imperfect information and 'unsafe' builds are part of the game, and part of the fun/excitement. If you truly want one of these statements to be true, there's a whole lot more to change then just zerg. Terran's have scan and protoss have hallucination. These allow them to thoroughly scout their opponent at a small cost pretty early in the game. Zerg do not have anything equivalent until later in the game. I think the solution would be to put the overlord speed upgrade on tier 1. It would be about equal to the cost and utility of scan and hallucinations.
Scan's are limited, and very expensive, especially early game (the earliest you'll see a scan in a normal game would be around 6:30?), and there is no guarantee you see what you want to see (especially in TvT and TvP, but even in TvZ it's very possible to hide buildings from scans fairly effectively). Scan's do not give you full information, and they shouldn't.
As for hallucinations: As far as I know , hallucinations finish at the earliest around the 7:30 min mark? This is already fairly late to spot certain all-ins, not to mention that hallucination is only viable in a few select builds (3 gate expo, which has been proven by now to be not that safe at all, even with 'full information' from hallu).
Honestly, the difference between the different races isn't as big as people make it out to be. Some builds just rely on being not scoutable, because otherwise they wouldn't be viable.
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OK but let Protoss scout early game without dying ASAP to lings on creep.
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On May 10 2011 04:49 decaf wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? They are not meant to spread creep. They are meant to let you react faster. Let's say a spine crawler builds 50 seconds (dunno if thats true), so you could make the creep colony 30 seconds and the morphing to the spine crawler would take 20 seconds then. Now imagine you don't know what you're up to, so you lay down a creep colony. Then you see marines or whatever coming to your base; 20 seconds is enough to morph it to what you need it for. Same goes with banshees and morphing to spore crawlers.
or just make spines build faster so you don't have to build them a minute before the push actually comes
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On May 10 2011 05:58 ReiKo wrote:
OK but let Protoss scout early game without dying ASAP to lings on creep.
Protoss at least can defend much easier. FFs defend vs. pretty much everything while zerg lack of defence and wall can be easily abused.
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I will adress the spine build time reduction in the OP, since many people bring it up.
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On May 10 2011 05:51 MonsieurGrimm wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:49 Mephyss wrote:On May 10 2011 05:45 Existor wrote:
I want neutral Crawler, that is upgrade'able to Spore or Spine.
Zergs are most reactionary race, so why their turrets have longest build time? I think the spine time was balanced for ZvZ. smaller build time would make fast pools just too good and a must Shouldn't balance the game around a mirror matchup until the non-mirrors are balanced, imo.
Not at the cost of breaking the mirror. With Faster Crawler builtime a 7 pool+ 2 drones pulled off ZvZ would be the norm(well, maybe not but one can't tell how the game would have evolved.)
And please don't pretend that ZvP and ZvT are nowhere near broken, especially since stats show that things are not as unbalanced as people think.idra has 80% winrate in NA FFS! If he is so lucky with coinflipping he should go to Vegas and take down the house.
As for the topic at hand, statistically the crawler and the colony are similar.I actually think that the burrowing time for the crawlers is a little too long, and with how slow they move off creep its not like a shorter time will make them broken on the mirror. That way you can build the crawlers out of harms way reactively and move them to the front.
Just my 2 cents. Balance discussions and what if and shoud've s are not really my favourite topic
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On May 10 2011 06:01 windsupernova wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:51 MonsieurGrimm wrote:On May 10 2011 05:49 Mephyss wrote:On May 10 2011 05:45 Existor wrote:
I want neutral Crawler, that is upgrade'able to Spore or Spine.
Zergs are most reactionary race, so why their turrets have longest build time? I think the spine time was balanced for ZvZ. smaller build time would make fast pools just too good and a must Shouldn't balance the game around a mirror matchup until the non-mirrors are balanced, imo. Not at the cost of breaking the mirror. With Faster Crawler builtime a 7 pool+ 2 drones pulled off ZvZ would be the norm(well, maybe not but one can't tell how the game would have evolved.)
I would gladly have ZvZ degenerate into 6pool wars if it meant that spine crawlers built faster. It's not possible to break a mirror matchup, one top strategy will always emerge. The worst thing that can happen is that it's not fun to play or watch.
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On May 10 2011 05:56 RuneZerg wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:53 L3gendary wrote:On May 10 2011 05:48 RuneZerg wrote:On May 10 2011 05:37 L3gendary wrote:
Just wanna clear up some misconceptions:
Sunken Colony Build Time: 20 + 20 = 40s
Spine Crawler Build Time: 50s (game seconds) = 36.2s
Sunken Colony Cost: 50 + 75 + 50 =175min
Spine Crawler Cost: 50 + 100 = 150min
Spine builds faster and costs less. imo biggest defensive advantage that sunkens have is that it's harder to go around them. You usually don't build creep colonies and wait for an attack to build sunkens because the 50 extra minerals is not that much compared to the 125 mineral investment in the creep colony. The fact that game time in SC2 is faster than normal seconds doesnt just make it so a spine builds in 36.2 seconds, it makes your opponents units reach your base faster aswell, i have absolutely no idea what your point is here? No it doesn't...sc2 isn't just a sped up version of bw lol.Only reason the enemy could reach your base faster is because of smaller maps or warp ins... So... when the game is playing at faster speed it only affects buildings not units? im not following
We're comparing bw to sc2, not sc2 at different speeds..
You have to understand that the "fastest" (real-time) setting in bw is comparable to the "faster" setting in starcraft 2. Blizzard, for whatever reason, decided to post all time stats (build times, speed etc) under the "normal" (real-time) speed instead of "faster". Marines in bw move just about as fast under the "fastest" setting as do marines in sc2 under the "faster" setting.
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Please someone who plays all three races explain this to me!
I will be as unbiased as I possibly can (read: still a little zerg biased).
I only play at master level zerg/toss but it's just so clear to me that toss have to worry about maybe 2-3 things early game (all of which are easily scoutable if you know what you are looking for)
Zerg have to worry about 5-6 things (but with zergs terrible scouting you can normally narrow it down to 2-3 each game). But that is still 2-3. You often have to react differently, so it forces zerg to guess.
We are not calling zerg UP. We are calling zerg a race of coin flippers. If toss/terran is all-ining or being highly aggressive, and we (zergs) guess correct, toss/terran is often screwed. But that isn't good game design. We don't care if zergs are winning or losing, the point is we are guessing! That's stupid.
My question to this thread: why would it be a bad thing to allow fast spine/spore build time so that zergs could be REACTIONARY instead of preemptively have to guess if they need defense? I'm completely fine for buffing protoss/terran offensive units *IF* the spine buff makes zerg defense too strong. It isn't about strong or not strong, its about eliminating guessing.
Please someone explain to me why that would be a bad thing?
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On May 10 2011 06:08 Beef Noodles wrote:Please someone who plays all three races explain this to me!I will be as unbiased as I possibly can (read: still a little zerg biased). I only play at master level zerg/toss but it's just so clear to me that toss have to worry about maybe 2-3 things early game (all of which are easily scoutable if you know what you are looking for) Zerg have to worry about 5-6 things (but with zergs terrible scouting you can normally narrow it down to 2-3 each game). But that is still 2-3. You often have to react differently, so it forces zerg to guess. We are not calling zerg UP. We are calling zerg a race of coin flippers. If toss/terran is all-ining or being highly aggressive, and we (zergs) guess correct, toss/terran is often screwed. But that isn't good game design. We don't care if zergs are winning or losing, the point is we are guessing! That's stupid. My question to this thread: why would it be a bad thing to allow fast spine/spore build time so that zergs could be REACTIONARY instead of preemptively have to guess if they need defense? I'm completely fine for buffing protoss/terran offensive units *IF* the spine buff makes zerg defense too strong. It isn't about strong or not strong, its about eliminating guessing. Please someone explain to me why that would be a bad thing?
couldnt agree more, no need to make Zergs better at defending, just let them actually know whats coming and as many people have said in this thread already, you can defend as long as you know whats coming
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The about of misinformation of this thread kind of disturbs me. Yes it is true that toss/terran scouting isn't significantly better than zergs in terms of getting into a base, but the difference is that they actually have builds that are safe to everything except for things they can obviously scout. Between wall ins and force fields, marines and stalkers and sentries, a terran and protoss can be safe against anything as long as they play conservatively. They do not need to do a significant amount of scouting.
This is not the case for zerg. There is no buffer for zerg (FFs or wallins and repairing scvs with bunkers, floating a CC out). Zergs also lack a unit like the marine or stalker that is pretty all around. Zerg requires difference responses to different attacks, and not knowing what is coming will get you killed. This is not the case for protoss and terran.
That is the essential crux of the issue when it comes to scouting. Zerg actually need the scouting because they don't have safe builds.
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I think the reason Spines build slower than other defensive structures for the other races is for 2 main reasons one they can move and ZvZ would change alot if a protoss player builds a cannon to fend off an early attack then expands beyond it then it is a useless 150 minerals.
As for the idea of creep colonies i think it could work if both Spines and spores stared out as a single building with no purose other than to morph into either a spine or spore and the abbility to move.
Correct me if i am wrong but spines cost 100 minerals so say a colony costs 75 to build outright and takes 20-25 seconds to build then for another 75 minerals you then make either a spine or spore from that colony and have a 20 -30 second morph time on it?. I cant see this having a massive impact on the game as zerg will still be able to get their defence down if they want too but it is adaptable and reactionary with a lower initial mineral sink into a possibly useless structure. Then when a zerg scouts a push or a techlab on a starport they can quickly morph and reposition but have to pay a higher price for this benefit. What this would change in the game besides the early game im not sure but it shouldnt be game breaking.
Oh and about marine DPS its fine as it is and if it were any lower they would be next to useless with banelings, new fungal and +1 armor zealots in the game already a pain for marines as is.
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On May 10 2011 04:56 ch33psh33p wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:55 TreDawg wrote:
Since creep tumors already fulfill the role of the creep colony I think it would be a waste. Especially since you would have to sacrifice a drone to make a building that you may or may not use.
I still don't see how the Spanishiwa build doesn't count as an all purpose defensive build. If you paid attention to what any top Zerg has said about the Spanishiwa build, youd realize it isn't an end all or solve all to the problems proposed by Idra or anyone else.
I think the only real problem with the "Spanishiwa opening" is that people try and use it too generally.
In ZvZ, it can be bad unless you keep tabs on your opponent. There is a lot of things that should trigger an early gas, and you will be hurting otherwise.
In ZvP, I would say it's generally terrible. I much prefer a 14 Pool>15 hatch with a late gas. This gives you more options on punishing Protoss for FE himself. Ling speed isn't really needed in the early portions of this MU, so I like that part, but taking such an early expo yourself leaves you completely open to cannon rushes.
In ZvT, I used to hate it, but have recently given it a 2nd look, and think it is actually rather clever for that MU.
You end up with a Lair and 50 drones by the 8 minute mark. This is setting a very hard economic pace for Terran to keep up with. Not to mention that the extra queens help with the oh-so-critical creep spread and give you extra defenses against banshees. Early aggression can be kind of annoying to deal with, but proper creep spread, 3-4 spine crawlers, and a Roach Warren is all you need to be completely secure until your bling nest/spire/infestation pit is done. It's actually quite clever in ZvT.
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I like the idea of a 30 second build Colony for 50 minerals and then you can transform it in 20 seconds to either a Spore or Spine, for 25/50 minerals respectively. That way, it wouldn't make zerg completely immune to rush. (And they still would invest minerals in something they might not need), but it would be really helpful vs the variety of all ins faced.
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I'm solidly in the "let zerg make overseers at hatch tech" camp. Then instead of getting zspeed you could opt for a OS to see whats going on. Give them their spells at lair tech and you'd see more corrupt or whatever that spell is called because your OS would have saved up energy.
This requires the zerg to make a heavy sacrifice in the same way as T (scan) or P (wasted robo time).
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On May 10 2011 06:19 1Eris1 wrote:
I like the idea of a 30 second build Colony for 50 minerals and then you can transform it in 20 seconds to either a Spore or Spine, for 25/50 minerals respectively. That way, it wouldn't make zerg completely immune to rush. (And they still would invest minerals in something they might not need), but it would be really helpful vs the variety of all ins faced.
Yeah I like this as well. You wouldn't need to make a ton of them, just a few that you can morph to buy time for your other defenses (additional colonies into crawlers, units)
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On May 10 2011 06:20 Dental Floss wrote:
I'm solidly in the "let zerg make overseers at hatch tech" camp. Then instead of getting zspeed you could opt for a OS to see whats going on. Give them their spells at lair tech and you'd see more corrupt or whatever that spell is called because your OS would have saved up energy.
This requires the zerg to make a heavy sacrifice in the same way as T (scan) or P (wasted robo time).
Yeah I guess that would fix it too. I personally think a reactionary spine fix is better (except it would make zvz kinda suck lol). The spine fix would make the game more dramatic and cool as players rushed to attack and rushed to get defense up. As opposed to just cool scouting and already being ready >.<
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On May 10 2011 05:18 Grumbels wrote:
Zerg has base defense in creep tumors now, the speed bonus helps a lot. Also, queens double as base defense too. Given this, there is less of a need for instantly built static defense.
Furthermore, what do you think happens to the game when you give zerg powerful reactive defensive tools? They will drone even more and the game will be even more about how many drones a zerg can get away with. At least now they have to pre-make spine crawlers, so zerg is encouraged to at least get some defenses or units instead of just drones.
And also, if you want spine crawlers to have less root time, just say so and don't hide it behind a silly idea like copying a brood war design unto sc2. Or more generally speaking, ask for the spine crawler to have a lower build time, since that's functionally mostly the same.
Zerg should not have to blindly make spine crawlers or static defense because they're scouting can't find out what build the toss/terran is doing. The whole point of the OP is that Zerg can split up the build time by making creep colonies, and then morphing them so spines when he sees the Toss/Terran push out.
Watch SC1 TvZ. In almost every pro match I see, the Terran moves out with his first group of M&M's. This forces the Zerg to make 1-3 sunken colonies and possibly even some zerglings. I don't understand how the same logic couldn't apply to SC2 in this case. If you're so worried about the Zerg making no defenses/drones, then push out with some units and force the Zerg to make zerglings and spines. Your statement about how Zergs can just make drones if they have a reactionary defense is just blatantly false.
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It would actually be quite effective because you could choose either spores or spines as well as uproot them and put them where you want, so it would be more efficient than BW because you don't have to choose their placement before you choose which one to get.
But still, if you get a creep colony blindly in BW, why not get Spines blindly in SC2? Sure, you don't get to get it partially built before choosing spine or spore, but having spores at your front isn't entirely useful except for detection, so in BW I don't see how that was a huge advantage unless they were rushing DTs.
But I do think the morphing like BW was better. I think combined with the ability to root/uproot defensive structures (and perhaps a drop in spine root time as well), it would make a stronger reaction-based defense for Zerg, allowing them to get just what they need when they need it rather than just turtling up in a more Terran fashion. Very Zerglike, it rewards the type of skills that make Zerg players successful already.
I think it would be pretty good without being too OP... It would save a few minerals for a time but you'd still lose the drone and some minerals, I don't think it would be OP, but I think it would help Zerg be a little more flexible defensively.
Still, proxy Spines in ZvZ or something like that might become too strong, even though it adds to the same amount of time, you won't have to wait for all the money in order to begin making it, and then the remainder of the money you can save up while it's building. Not entirely sure if that would affect it, it might not if it's more of the pool time that players wait for rather than minerals. I haven't played enough ZvZs, I'm not really familiar with it.
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On May 10 2011 06:14 dave333 wrote:
The about of misinformation of this thread kind of disturbs me. Yes it is true that toss/terran scouting isn't significantly better than zergs in terms of getting into a base, but the difference is that they actually have builds that are safe to everything except for things they can obviously scout. Between wall ins and force fields, marines and stalkers and sentries, a terran and protoss can be safe against anything as long as they play conservatively. They do not need to do a significant amount of scouting.
This is not the case for zerg. There is no buffer for zerg (FFs or wallins and repairing scvs with bunkers, floating a CC out). Zergs also lack a unit like the marine or stalker that is pretty all around. Zerg requires difference responses to different attacks, and not knowing what is coming will get you killed. This is not the case for protoss and terran.
That is the essential crux of the issue when it comes to scouting. Zerg actually need the scouting because they don't have safe builds.
The sad thing is, no matter how many times this is said, there will always be idiots that say things like "QQ MOAR, Toss Scouting just as bad" or "MAEK MORE QUENZ, DEY R RLY GUD 4 150 MINERALS" while ignoring their piss poor damage and near zero offensive usefulness.
The issues with Zerg early game have more to do with Blizzard's retarded idea to give all the races production boosts that are available at tier 1 while simultaneously removing Zerg's cost effective Zerglings and tier 1 Anti Air.
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So what if it were like this?
Spore crawlers cost 75 minerals and take 30 seconds to build.
Spine crawlers cost 100 minerals and take 50 seconds to build.
They could give Spore crawlers the ability to morph into a Spine Crawler for 25 minerals. It would take 20 seconds.
And just for the hell of it, spine crawlers could morph into spore crawlers too, for the same price.
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idrA and day9 agreed there should be no all purpose build. idrA said that would also be bad game design.
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On the scouting issue atleast against terran as soon as zerglings are finished and speed done zerg controlls the map period (unless terran opens BF hellions and that impacts other things and roaches and well placed queens nullify them) so those speedlings should be able to intercept any SCV or probe if your dilligent searching for them, The number of times Ive left an SCV behind the nat after a pool first opening and not had it die while i watch the nat build is quite high.. Now i have been in the position where i have scanned and seen EVERY tech building zerg has clumped up in one nice scan sized ball and in other times seen a spawning pool and thats it at a similar point in the game so scan is not perfect and denying atleast a terran some scouting is not that difficult if your paying attention and searching the back of your mineral line as for being reactionary see my above post.
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On May 10 2011 06:23 Gfire wrote:
It would actually be quite effective because you could choose either spores or spines as well as uproot them and put them where you want, so it would be more efficient than BW because you don't have to choose their placement before you choose which one to get.
But still, if you get a creep colony blindly in BW, why not get Spines blindly in SC2? Sure, you don't get to get it partially built before choosing spine or spore, but having spores at your front isn't entirely useful except for detection, so in BW I don't see how that was a huge advantage unless they were rushing DTs.
But I do think the morphing like BW was better. I think combined with the ability to root/uproot defensive structures (and perhaps a drop in spine root time as well), it would make a stronger reaction-based defense for Zerg, allowing them to get just what they need when they need it rather than just turtling up in a more Terran fashion. Very Zerglike, it rewards the type of skills that make Zerg players successful already.
I think it would be pretty good without being too OP... It would save a few minerals for a time but you'd still lose the drone and some minerals, I don't think it would be OP, but I think it would help Zerg be a little more flexible defensively.
Still, proxy Spines in ZvZ or something like that might become too strong, even though it adds to the same amount of time, you won't have to wait for all the money in order to begin making it, and then the remainder of the money you can save up while it's building. Not entirely sure if that would affect it, it might not if it's more of the pool time that players wait for rather than minerals. I haven't played enough ZvZs, I'm not really familiar with it.
2-3 drones will stop a spine from completing as long as you get them on it reasonably fast and protect them, I don't see how two-tiered construction would change that except that the spine could start slightly sooner so you would need to pull drones slightly sooner.
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On May 10 2011 06:25 Drazzyo wrote:
idrA and day9 agreed there should be no all purpose build. idrA said that would also be bad game design.
it is not an all purpose build. you will still end up behind if the opponent chooses to play economically and you built that creep colony and you still have to scout regardless of the fact if it's now a creep colony first or not.
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On May 10 2011 06:25 Drazzyo wrote:
idrA and day9 agreed there should be no all purpose build. idrA said that would also be bad game design.
That isn't really what the thread is about, past the first few pages. It's turned into more of a debate on reactionary defense vs better scouting.
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On May 10 2011 05:57 Derez wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:32 InstantKarma wrote:On May 10 2011 05:28 Derez wrote:On May 10 2011 04:42 decaf wrote:
IdrA mentioned that at least one of the two following statements has to be true:
-) You are able to scout anything what your opponent is doing
-) You have an all purpose build that is able to fend off everything
In my opinion this makes perfect sense, but neither of those two is the case right now. IdrA already suggested making overlord speed hatch tech with reduced costs, which would satisfy statement one.
I disagree with the core concept of the two statements. Neither T or P have the ability to scout everything their opponent is doing (in the relevant early game all-in timeframe), nor do they have entirely 'safe' builds. Imperfect information and 'unsafe' builds are part of the game, and part of the fun/excitement. If you truly want one of these statements to be true, there's a whole lot more to change then just zerg. Terran's have scan and protoss have hallucination. These allow them to thoroughly scout their opponent at a small cost pretty early in the game. Zerg do not have anything equivalent until later in the game. I think the solution would be to put the overlord speed upgrade on tier 1. It would be about equal to the cost and utility of scan and hallucinations. Scan's are limited, and very expensive, especially early game (the earliest you'll see a scan in a normal game would be around 6:30?), and there is no guarantee you see what you want to see (especially in TvT and TvP, but even in TvZ it's very possible to hide buildings from scans fairly effectively). Scan's do not give you full information, and they shouldn't. As for hallucinations: As far as I know , hallucinations finish at the earliest around the 7:30 min mark? This is already fairly late to spot certain all-ins, not to mention that hallucination is only viable in a few select builds (3 gate expo, which has been proven by now to be not that safe at all, even with 'full information' from hallu). Honestly, the difference between the different races isn't as big as people make it out to be. Some builds just rely on being not scoutable, because otherwise they wouldn't be viable.
Scan's can't see everything but they always can gather enough info to clue in a terran onto all-ins. The number of drones on the mineral line or the number on the gas are a big give away. Also, earlier zerg all-ins require the zerg to stay on one-base. If a zerg stays on one-base for longer than usual it is 99% chance of an all-in. This makes it much easier for terran and protoss to scout early zerg all-ins so it is okay for the hallucination or scan to come later. Zerg is vulnerable to a wide range of economical and aggressive builds early in the game that they cannot scout.
Zerg's are left blind guessing which is bad for the game. I think putting the overlord speed upgrade on tier 1 would be a good solution.
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Does anyone else think it would help if spawn crawlers spawned broodlings upon death? Also, similar to terran building upgrades, how useful would an upgrade to increase broodling duration be? Would it make brood lords overpowered?
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On May 10 2011 06:25 Drazzyo wrote:
idrA and day9 agreed there should be no all purpose build. idrA said that would also be bad game design.
Its not about an all purpose build as there will never be one, it just increases you early game defense with less sacrifice and more versatility than you can atm were it is impossible as pretty much no map has 50 second rush distance.
I would love to have a "creep crawler" to have an easier time vs cheese. I would be happy if they just made into the standard 40 seconds instead of the stupid 50 seconds.
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On May 10 2011 06:33 atarianimo wrote:
Does anyone else think it would help if spawn crawlers spawned broodlings upon death? Also, similar to terran building upgrades, how useful would an upgrade to increase broodling duration be? Would it make brood lords overpowered?
that's cool when spine crawlers are done building but we're not worried about how strong they are, we're worried about how difficult they are to get in time to defend a push.
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On May 10 2011 06:08 Beef Noodles wrote:Please someone who plays all three races explain this to me!I will be as unbiased as I possibly can (read: still a little zerg biased). I only play at master level zerg/toss but it's just so clear to me that toss have to worry about maybe 2-3 things early game (all of which are easily scoutable if you know what you are looking for) Zerg have to worry about 5-6 things (but with zergs terrible scouting you can normally narrow it down to 2-3 each game). But that is still 2-3. You often have to react differently, so it forces zerg to guess. We are not calling zerg UP. We are calling zerg a race of coin flippers. If toss/terran is all-ining or being highly aggressive, and we (zergs) guess correct, toss/terran is often screwed. But that isn't good game design. We don't care if zergs are winning or losing, the point is we are guessing! That's stupid. My question to this thread: why would it be a bad thing to allow fast spine/spore build time so that zergs could be REACTIONARY instead of preemptively have to guess if they need defense? I'm completely fine for buffing protoss/terran offensive units *IF* the spine buff makes zerg defense too strong. It isn't about strong or not strong, its about eliminating guessing. Please someone explain to me why that would be a bad thing?
Because it's not "guessing." Believe it or not, there are tells in the Protoss' play that you are not personally able to see. It may require scouting the workers in his natural with a sneaky overlord, running 5 lings into his wall to see what he kills you with, or simply sitting outside his base with a ling. Even then, though, there is a good deal of educated guessing in what he is doing. Every other race must deal with the same thing.
Even being a "reactionary" race shouldn't entitle you to win a game, or even just gain a large advantage, just by memorizing a response flow chart. It's not like SC2 is like BW in the sense that 90% of winning is in the execution. In SC2, execution is so easy that it has to be radically adjusted every 1-2 months.
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Calgary25979 Posts
Has anyone brought up how this was different in BW? Were allins weaker? Did they come later? Did people just resign themselves to playing "standard"? Were builds solid enough to absorb all-ins?
Because Zergs in BW were dealing with the exact same problems and still did fine.
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I think they could do some cool stuff with two creation schemes for creep colonies. Specifically, a zerg can either build one straight from an unused creep tumor but the resulting creep colony is immobile, or you can build one with a drone that is mobile and can also be used to spread creep wherever it is planted.
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Great thread/discussion. I feel like it would be better game design to allow Zergs better early-game scouting instead of faster crawlers.
Liked IdrA's idea of Overlord Speed on Hatchery tech, but 100/100 may be too prohibitive at that point in the game.
I shouldn't have to send in 2 Overlords from different angles to MAYBE see what my opponent is up to, and whether or not I do get valuable scouting information I'll still lose both Overlords.
When I played Random I always lol'd at Zerg players when I'd show up with my Marauder/Hellion timing and they'd have Spores in their mineral lines because I'd denied that Overlord.
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On May 10 2011 05:49 Vetrocide wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:32 Treemonkeys wrote:
Zerg scouting is actually really fucking good. Between overlord spread and creep spread zerg can have vision of nearly the entire map at times. What is the trade off for this, if not a weakened ability to scout *inside* the opponents base? Have you even read this thread? Its about EARLY game scouting, which is also when zerg is weak. Overlord spread is only possible once you got lair and even tho you have creep spread all over the map, you dont have time to react to it. I can have creep at a terrans ramp fWhen he moves out I dont have time to react to it because build time of defensive structures are way too long. And if I DO build lots of lings IN CASE he is going to attack, and he doesnt im far behind, and most times even if you do deal with the push with your lings, you end up behind aswell, overlords are useless aswell pre lair. so no, zerg scouting is not ''really fucking good'' As idrA stated about LosirA vs Scfou. He knew the push was coming and he made enough lings to deal with it easily, but because he had too many lings he ended up behind anyways.
Well you have to trade off some things for others, I don't think they could change the overlord without making it too powerful late game. Zerg speedlings are also really good early game scouts, making it easy to control the towers, constantly check the ramp, and deny scouting. There are also ways to make use of "too many lings", it is not so cut and dry and figured out like some people think.
When you add up zerg early game scouting options I think it is quite adequate:
Float overlords on edges of base to check gas and buildings.
Keep speedlings outside of ramp to know the instant opponent tries to move out or expo.
Poke speedlings up ramp to spot as much tech and unit composition as possible.
Steal gas to reduce the amount of options to worry about or prepare for.
Sac an overlord or two around the 5:30 mark for a potential gold mine of information and enough time to react to it.
This is really not enough? "It's not like BW" Yes, but zerg can still win. How is this unfair for zerg? What pushes are we talking about that are too difficult to scout? 4 gate nexus cancel?
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On May 10 2011 06:39 aksfjh wrote:
Even being a "reactionary" race shouldn't entitle you to win a game, or even just gain a large advantage, just by memorizing a response flow chart. It's not like SC2 is like BW in the sense that 90% of winning is in the execution. In SC2, execution is so easy that it has to be radically adjusted every 1-2 months.
You realize that if a zerg builds creep colonies proactively in order to be able to morph them reactively if need be, he's putting himself at a disadvantage against a greedy player? The idea behind these changes is to reduce the disadvantage you get from playing safe, right now "safe" is making 2-3 spines blind which is a ridiculous disadvantage against a player who doesn't attack them.
On May 10 2011 06:40 Chill wrote:
Has anyone brought up how this was different in BW? Were allins weaker? Did they come later? Did people just resign themselves to playing "standard"? Were builds solid enough to absorb all-ins?
Because Zergs in BW were dealing with the exact same problems and still did fine.
Actually, yes. All-in's in BW were weaker, because in SC2 they're accelerated and strengthened by Mules, Chrono, Larva Inject, Reactors and the shorter rush distance (don't quote me on the last one). It's something IdrA brought up on SotG, I believe, the idea that the aggression is stronger, but the scouting and reactivity for all three races are (arguably) weaker, or at least not scaled to match with the improved aggression.
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i prefer the idea of pre-nerf (used to be 50/50) overlord speed at hatch tech honestly.
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On May 10 2011 06:39 aksfjh wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 06:08 Beef Noodles wrote:Please someone who plays all three races explain this to me!I will be as unbiased as I possibly can (read: still a little zerg biased). I only play at master level zerg/toss but it's just so clear to me that toss have to worry about maybe 2-3 things early game (all of which are easily scoutable if you know what you are looking for) Zerg have to worry about 5-6 things (but with zergs terrible scouting you can normally narrow it down to 2-3 each game). But that is still 2-3. You often have to react differently, so it forces zerg to guess. We are not calling zerg UP. We are calling zerg a race of coin flippers. If toss/terran is all-ining or being highly aggressive, and we (zergs) guess correct, toss/terran is often screwed. But that isn't good game design. We don't care if zergs are winning or losing, the point is we are guessing! That's stupid. My question to this thread: why would it be a bad thing to allow fast spine/spore build time so that zergs could be REACTIONARY instead of preemptively have to guess if they need defense? I'm completely fine for buffing protoss/terran offensive units *IF* the spine buff makes zerg defense too strong. It isn't about strong or not strong, its about eliminating guessing. Please someone explain to me why that would be a bad thing? Because it's not "guessing." Believe it or not, there are tells in the Protoss' play that you are not personally able to see. It may require scouting the workers in his natural with a sneaky overlord, running 5 lings into his wall to see what he kills you with, or simply sitting outside his base with a ling. Even then, though, there is a good deal of educated guessing in what he is doing. Every other race must deal with the same thing. Even being a "reactionary" race shouldn't entitle you to win a game, or even just gain a large advantage, just by memorizing a response flow chart. It's not like SC2 is like BW in the sense that 90% of winning is in the execution. In SC2, execution is so easy that it has to be radically adjusted every 1-2 months.
First of all, if the player is aware and he snipes your overlord (which is 80% of the time in my case), you're out of of luck. And yes, while you might be able to tell the build they are doing by sacking lings in, this won't tell you a lot of things. Secondly, Zerg are much more vulnerable to all-ins than Toss and Terran are. This is the problem. If you're Toss and Terran you at least have some measure of defense because you can wall off, whereas Zergs can't wall off and they need an early expansion to keep up economically. I don't even get where you get the idea that having a faster reactionary defense would "win us the game".
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If a build time reduction of Spine Crawlers would "break" ZvZ, couldn't Blizz simply change it so that you cannot build on enemy creep unless your own creep overlaps? This would alleviate the early pool + spine builds that people seem to be scared of.
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On May 10 2011 06:39 aksfjh wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 06:08 Beef Noodles wrote:Please someone who plays all three races explain this to me!I will be as unbiased as I possibly can (read: still a little zerg biased). I only play at master level zerg/toss but it's just so clear to me that toss have to worry about maybe 2-3 things early game (all of which are easily scoutable if you know what you are looking for) Zerg have to worry about 5-6 things (but with zergs terrible scouting you can normally narrow it down to 2-3 each game). But that is still 2-3. You often have to react differently, so it forces zerg to guess. We are not calling zerg UP. We are calling zerg a race of coin flippers. If toss/terran is all-ining or being highly aggressive, and we (zergs) guess correct, toss/terran is often screwed. But that isn't good game design. We don't care if zergs are winning or losing, the point is we are guessing! That's stupid. My question to this thread: why would it be a bad thing to allow fast spine/spore build time so that zergs could be REACTIONARY instead of preemptively have to guess if they need defense? I'm completely fine for buffing protoss/terran offensive units *IF* the spine buff makes zerg defense too strong. It isn't about strong or not strong, its about eliminating guessing. Please someone explain to me why that would be a bad thing? Because it's not "guessing." Believe it or not, there are tells in the Protoss' play that you are not personally able to see. It may require scouting the workers in his natural with a sneaky overlord, running 5 lings into his wall to see what he kills you with, or simply sitting outside his base with a ling. Even then, though, there is a good deal of educated guessing in what he is doing. Every other race must deal with the same thing. Even being a "reactionary" race shouldn't entitle you to win a game, or even just gain a large advantage, just by memorizing a response flow chart. It's not like SC2 is like BW in the sense that 90% of winning is in the execution. In SC2, execution is so easy that it has to be radically adjusted every 1-2 months.
Of course there is information you can gain from observing. The point is, that if your opponent is competent, you will not be able to completely narrow down the options no matter how good you are. IdrA says this, nestea says this, sheth says this. They know how to use limited information. If you could narrow it down to 2 options, and they both had the same response, that would be fine. But the truth is, toss and terran have tons of all-ins (many of which look the same from a zerg limited scouting perspective) and they all have different responses. There is no way to prepare for them all and not be significantly behind.
That is exactly what we are arguing. Faster defense build times wouldnt negate all all-ins, but it would make them less strong. All-ins are soooo strong in SC2. People have been saying this for a long time now. It just gets so boring watching zerg get all ined, play very well, and just get caught off guard and lose (even if they tried to scout). In BW, allins were cool because a lot of them were REALLY hard to pull off.
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On May 10 2011 06:43 Treemonkeys wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:49 Vetrocide wrote:On May 10 2011 05:32 Treemonkeys wrote:
Zerg scouting is actually really fucking good. Between overlord spread and creep spread zerg can have vision of nearly the entire map at times. What is the trade off for this, if not a weakened ability to scout *inside* the opponents base? Have you even read this thread? Its about EARLY game scouting, which is also when zerg is weak. Overlord spread is only possible once you got lair and even tho you have creep spread all over the map, you dont have time to react to it. I can have creep at a terrans ramp fWhen he moves out I dont have time to react to it because build time of defensive structures are way too long. And if I DO build lots of lings IN CASE he is going to attack, and he doesnt im far behind, and most times even if you do deal with the push with your lings, you end up behind aswell, overlords are useless aswell pre lair. so no, zerg scouting is not ''really fucking good'' As idrA stated about LosirA vs Scfou. He knew the push was coming and he made enough lings to deal with it easily, but because he had too many lings he ended up behind anyways. Well you have to trade off some things for others, I don't think they could change the overlord without making it too powerful late game. Zerg speedlings are also really good early game scouts, making it easy to control the towers, constantly check the ramp, and deny scouting. There are also ways to make use of "too many lings", it is not so cut and dry and figured out like some people think. When you add up zerg early game scouting options I think it is quite adequate: Float overlords on edges of base to check gas and buildings. Keep speedlings outside of ramp to know the instant opponent tries to move out or expo. Poke speedlings up ramp to spot as much tech and unit composition as possible. Steal gas to reduce the amount of options to worry about or prepare for. Sac an overlord or two around the 5:30 mark for a potential gold mine of information and enough time to react to it. This is really not enough? "It's not like BW" Yes, but zerg can still win. How is this unfair for zerg? What pushes are we talking about that are too difficult to scout? 4 gate nexus cancel?
Sacking overlords RARELY works. It only works if the Toss/Terran is not paying attention.
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On May 10 2011 06:40 Chill wrote:
Has anyone brought up how this was different in BW? Were allins weaker? Did they come later? Did people just resign themselves to playing "standard"? Were builds solid enough to absorb all-ins?
Because Zergs in BW were dealing with the exact same problems and still did fine.
Sunkens were much stronger than Spine Crawlers, that much is definitely true. Mostly because units like the Marauder which can vaporize buildings didn't exist. Also the ability to put up a relatively cheap Creep Colony and only morph it into a Sunken if you needed to gave an added bit of flexibility that uproot just doesn't provide.
On the flip-side I think with more time to develop the game (like what BW has had) that all-ins will be figured out and have a specific response in specific situations. The game is too young for that to be the case in SC2.
I think a good example of that is ZvZ is one of the only matchups/situations where I'm starting to see that level of refinement from tip-top level players. I.E. running a speedling in at the right time to see exactly what your opponent is spending his injects on: Drones or Lings. This lets you squeeze out an additional round of Drones or prepare yourself for an incoming all-in instead of it being a coinflip.
It will take a while for this type of scouting and game knowledge to be prevalent though.
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I feel like the overseer on hatch tier would be a fair and simple way to address the Zerg scouting difficulties without shaking things up too much. But allowing them to use corruption that fast wouldn't be good, the early game is too delicate to allow Zerg to be able to start blocking your production buildings. So maybe the overseer could be hatch tech, and it'd gain the corruption ability upon upgrade to lair at no added cost?
I think that'd make all-ins far less powerful (though I'd argue they've gotten significantly weaker in the past little while already). The trouble is that if Toss/Terran can't EVER hold the sword of Damocles over Zerg's head, well, Zerg is the strongest macro race. That's the strange thing about Zerg...it's both incredibly fragile and powerful, and one wrong move in balancing the race will lead to either total Zerg domination or extinction. Radically improving Zerg's weak static defenses might end up breaking the game, whereas I think the overseer change is small enough that it wouldn't be too bad for Toss and Terran but would really help struggling Zergs.
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On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good.
This kinda defeats the purpose of the thread, the point isn't what is better (spines/spores, sunkens,spores) it's the flexibility that creep colonies gave zerg, so they didn't have to commit to building defensive structures that they may or may not have needed. Besides, you had no motivation to spread creep in BW.
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On May 10 2011 06:25 Drazzyo wrote:
idrA and day9 agreed there should be no all purpose build. idrA said that would also be bad game design.
lol
Marine/Tank TvZ anyone?
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On May 10 2011 06:40 Chill wrote:
Has anyone brought up how this was different in BW? Were allins weaker? Did they come later? Did people just resign themselves to playing "standard"? Were builds solid enough to absorb all-ins?
Because Zergs in BW were dealing with the exact same problems and still did fine.
I think it was a combination of the game being slower (more time to scout), the all-ins being slightly weaker, the all-ins being much less varied, and the fact that defenders advantage was much stronger in BW (there wasn't warp in, and units in general took longer to traverse the map).
I think this last one is the most important, because in BW the stupidest/easiest all-ins to execute were proxies.
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Calgary25979 Posts
On May 10 2011 06:49 Jermstuddog wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 06:25 Drazzyo wrote:
idrA and day9 agreed there should be no all purpose build. idrA said that would also be bad game design. lol Marine/Tank TvZ anyone?
Marine/Tank is a unit composition. The post you've quoted is explaining that there should not be one build order that is equal or stronger against every other build order.
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The creep colony I think would not solve the problem of spine crawlers not building fast enough. I just think that having the choice between the spine and the spore crawler wouldn't change much. If you are talking about halving the investment that might have an effect but I just don't think it would do enough. The main target area in my mind has to be scouting because responsive defenses just seems to bring a lot more baggage with them. For instance, if you make the static defense more responsive it would have to be responsive to each scenario yet not too good that zerg could never die. Scouting on the other hand while it could also be overpowered has a lot more room for error in the way players can respond with the use of mind games so it is easier to alter.
I like the idea of zergs having to pay for early scouting but there is definitely a balance to be struck. I wonder if anything could be done to the overseer as well.
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On May 10 2011 06:14 dave333 wrote:
The about of misinformation of this thread kind of disturbs me. Yes it is true that toss/terran scouting isn't significantly better than zergs in terms of getting into a base, but the difference is that they actually have builds that are safe to everything except for things they can obviously scout. Between wall ins and force fields, marines and stalkers and sentries, a terran and protoss can be safe against anything as long as they play conservatively. They do not need to do a significant amount of scouting.
This is not the case for zerg. There is no buffer for zerg (FFs or wallins and repairing scvs with bunkers, floating a CC out). Zergs also lack a unit like the marine or stalker that is pretty all around. Zerg requires difference responses to different attacks, and not knowing what is coming will get you killed. This is not the case for protoss and terran.
That is the essential crux of the issue when it comes to scouting. Zerg actually need the scouting because they don't have safe builds.
Ah, but here's the problem with playing "conservatively." If a Terran or Protoss play's completely conservatively against a Zerg, they lose the battle of economies. It's kind of the same trade off Zerg takes with something like the crap Spanishiwa pulls. The minute Zerg spots stationary defense going up or something similar, it's a huge neon sign that says "MAKE 14 DRONES!!!" If P or T keeps with the turtle, they just start slipping further behind.
As for the crap about "they don't need to do a significant amount of scouting." In my TvZ, I spend the first 6 minutes of the game constantly poking and prodding the Zerg, not only to apply pressure, but to also understand what it is the Zerg is doing. I lose up to 300 minerals at times doing this, but I know by the time I've lost all that what kind of game I'm getting into. Before I did this, I lost a LOT of TvZs because I didn't know what the Zerg was doing. If you're telling me that 300 minerals worth of overlords, lings, and/or drones isn't enough to give you a good enough idea what the hell P or T is doing, then I can't help you and no amount of buffing to Zerg scouting is going to help you.
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I've suggested having creep colonies ever since the beginning of beta. It was the only way to react properly (and efficiently) to early M&M pushes in BW. Having 3 pre-made creep colonies was a nice in-the-middle investment that was fair to both sides. I honestly don't know why Blizzard removed them in the first place.
I can't tell you how many games in BW where I see the Terran move out with M&M and I had my creep colonies morph into sunkens just in time + some zerglings. Now not only did they not have the in-the-middle cost removed, they also made marauders which just rapes spines too. This makes these early pushes that much harder to hold.
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Guys I think we're all forgetting something.
SCII Spines do 20(+5) damage per shot.
SCBW Sunkens do 40 damage per shot.
They both have roughly the same attack rate.
Maybe that's what makes a difference?
Pre-laid Creep Colonies are also a much better reactionary defense than the Spine Crawler, which takes almost a full minute to build.
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Sc2 macro (mules, queen, chrono) is really too strong from 1 base, you can produce way too many units just from 1 base, it's scary sometimes. add to that you have to respond perfectly to the unit mix because of the hard counter system.
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Netherlands45349 Posts
On May 10 2011 06:59 Tracedragon wrote:
Guys I think we're all forgetting something.
SCII Spines do 20(+5) damage per shot.
SCBW Sunkens do 40 damage per shot.
They both have roughly the same attack rate.
Maybe that's what makes a difference?
Pre-laid Creep Colonies are also a much better reactionary defense than the Spine Crawler, which takes almost a full minute to build.
Sunkens do 40 explosive damage, marines are small units, so it only deals 50% of the damage, which results in 20 damage.
Spines do 40 damage against armored, the equivalent of large units in SCII.
The damage system is still different though, but it has more to do with the fact that Rines are much stronger(more hp, etc) but that is for another time.
They are still not nearly the same, but what you said about damage is wrong.
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If either point is made to be true, then it's a sad day for sc2.
Basically you want to never lose to a player taking a risk. Risks exist in the majority of competitive sports, they make it exciting.
A player taking a risk is putting himself into a win/loss situation, that he didn't need to be in. It's a gamble, its exciting when it pays off, or when it doesn't.
If you want to have a game of no risk, I suggest you don't play any sport involving a ball for the rest of your life.
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On May 10 2011 06:55 aksfjh wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 06:14 dave333 wrote:
The about of misinformation of this thread kind of disturbs me. Yes it is true that toss/terran scouting isn't significantly better than zergs in terms of getting into a base, but the difference is that they actually have builds that are safe to everything except for things they can obviously scout. Between wall ins and force fields, marines and stalkers and sentries, a terran and protoss can be safe against anything as long as they play conservatively. They do not need to do a significant amount of scouting.
This is not the case for zerg. There is no buffer for zerg (FFs or wallins and repairing scvs with bunkers, floating a CC out). Zergs also lack a unit like the marine or stalker that is pretty all around. Zerg requires difference responses to different attacks, and not knowing what is coming will get you killed. This is not the case for protoss and terran.
That is the essential crux of the issue when it comes to scouting. Zerg actually need the scouting because they don't have safe builds. Ah, but here's the problem with playing "conservatively." If a Terran or Protoss play's completely conservatively against a Zerg, they lose the battle of economies. It's kind of the same trade off Zerg takes with something like the crap Spanishiwa pulls. The minute Zerg spots stationary defense going up or something similar, it's a huge neon sign that says "MAKE 14 DRONES!!!" If P or T keeps with the turtle, they just start slipping further behind. As for the crap about "they don't need to do a significant amount of scouting." In my TvZ, I spend the first 6 minutes of the game constantly poking and prodding the Zerg, not only to apply pressure, but to also understand what it is the Zerg is doing. I lose up to 300 minerals at times doing this, but I know by the time I've lost all that what kind of game I'm getting into. Before I did this, I lost a LOT of TvZs because I didn't know what the Zerg was doing. If you're telling me that 300 minerals worth of overlords, lings, and/or drones isn't enough to give you a good enough idea what the hell P or T is doing, then I can't help you and no amount of buffing to Zerg scouting is going to help you.
Sending slow overlords in rarely works. Please understand this. If Terran walls in, the amount of scouting that I can do as a Zerg is minimal UNLESS the player isn't paying attention and accidentally allows an overlord in.
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On May 10 2011 06:59 Tracedragon wrote:
Guys I think we're all forgetting something.
SCII Spines do 20(+5) damage per shot.
SCBW Sunkens do 40 damage per shot.
They both have roughly the same attack rate.
Maybe that's what makes a difference?
Pre-laid Creep Colonies are also a much better reactionary defense than the Spine Crawler, which takes almost a full minute to build.
While yes maybe the damage was a major difference, comparing stats isn't helpful. The games' stats scale vary differently. It's more about the feel. In BW you knew you could start making defense when the terran pushed out. In SC2 you have to make the defense before hand, so you have to guess "hmm he'll probably move out sometime soon."
Makes for kind of stupid ways of getting behind in ZvT/ZvP
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On May 10 2011 07:00 Samhax wrote:
Sc2 macro (mules, queen, chrono) is really too strong from 1 base, you can produce way too many units just from, 1 base it's scary sometimes. add to that you have to respond perfectly to the unit mix because of the hard counter system.
Not to mention that your units don't clump up as much which is very very beneficial in rushing vs spines and zerglings.
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On May 10 2011 07:01 Trusty wrote:
If either point is made to be true, then it's a sad day for sc2.
Basically you want to never lose to a player taking a risk. Risks exist in the majority of competitive sports, they make it exciting.
A player taking a risk is putting himself into a win/loss situation, that he didn't need to be in. It's a gamble, its exciting when it pays off, or when it doesn't.
If you want to have a game of no risk, I don't suggest you play any sport involving a ball for the rest of your life.
This is a gross oversimplification. I suggest you read the OP next time. The point of the OP is that Zerg needs scouting to be able to detect WHICH all-in the Terran is doing and be able to react accordingly. Otherwise it's just a coinflip for Zerg where they have to guess right or they die. This is not a question of playing "with no risk".
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On May 10 2011 04:50 ZeromuS wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Perhaps we should think of ways to incorporate creep tumors into the concept of aiding in static defense. Perhaps a drone will create a spine or spore crawler faster if they are built where a creep tumor currently lies? Its just a suggestion because I agree spine crawlers take a long time to root and move when trying to prepare a defense.
i really like that idea, if a spine crawler is built on top of a creep tumor it has half built time or something unique like that. It would add a solution but not really add any obvious problems
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On May 10 2011 06:46 Beef Noodles wrote:
That is exactly what we are arguing. Faster defense build times wouldnt negate all all-ins, but it would make them less strong. All-ins are soooo strong in SC2. People have been saying this for a long time now. It just gets so boring watching zerg get all ined, play very well, and just get caught off guard and lose (even if they tried to scout). In BW, allins were cool because a lot of them were REALLY hard to pull off.
Going to truncate the quote a bit before we get some sort of weird tur-duc-ken of quotes going on.
This is where we reach an end-pass. I believe having faster construction time on defenses would necessarily give Zerg too much breathing room to take economic advantage. While I will concede that Protoss has a fairly easy time abusing Zerg, decreasing building time on a core defense would ruin what many consider to be one of the most balanced and understood matchups right now (TvZ). It's already delicate with the balance of hatch-gas-pool orders and marine pressure. Throw in a fast(er) defense for Zerg and then Zerg is able to abuse Terran economically and aggressively a LOT easier.
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hehe in bw there was the double raks medic marine push which was almost unstoppable for the zerg unless they had sunkens. its kinda the exact same thing we have in sc2 only that the terran push is weaker because no medics and that the zerg is able to have way more larva.
PS: the zerg always died if they were greedy and didn't have the spines up in time. (building creep colos was a standard )
So lets talk about this can hold everything a zerg can build a hatch near the ramp and put up spines there. This is a can hold everything early game, just like all the other races can. or putting some spines at the natural if they protect the ramp as well as the natural its also can hold everything. And its not much different then any other wallin.
Oh and also it doesn't work as black and white as it is stated in the op.
Every race in sc2 isn't able to hold everything (you can't hold pure eco production if you save yourself against any possible threat, zergs should know this the best)
every race isn't able to scout everything the opponent is doing for free.
But for that one race got map control on default, the other two can block pathways without hindering themselfs later on.
So as some people said its just like bw.
For the creep colo. It would switch the balance of defense structures. So to make up for this, turrets would be enabled to be scrapable or cost reduced to 75. and protoss pylon fields would reduce the time shields start to regenerate by 25%.
Or they would remove the moving ability of the spines and spores. For me i prefer building 2 spines and moving them later on to fight against drops, rather then have them sit in no where land unti the huge terran force will just destroy them within seconds.
So i guess its quiet strange to say 2 things have to be true but they aren't for any race present ^.^ well for terrans maybe. (they can build a proxy raks to scout ^^ and that thing is sturdy enough to survive, yeah we are so op <3)
PS: i really hope that turrets will get a buff soon either in form of a price reduction or scrabable  the bunker nerf is only a step in that direction tehehe
PPS: please stop suggestion early game buffs in any way to the zerg, they can fast expand by default on the smallest maps and still have map control unless some hellion reaper builds from the terran. Thats damn strong.
more pses: spine crawlers were changed alot in the beta, don't expect changes on the strongest defense structure ingame not including the planetary fortress
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On May 10 2011 07:13 aksfjh wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 06:46 Beef Noodles wrote:
That is exactly what we are arguing. Faster defense build times wouldnt negate all all-ins, but it would make them less strong. All-ins are soooo strong in SC2. People have been saying this for a long time now. It just gets so boring watching zerg get all ined, play very well, and just get caught off guard and lose (even if they tried to scout). In BW, allins were cool because a lot of them were REALLY hard to pull off. Going to truncate the quote a bit before we get some sort of weird tur-duc-ken of quotes going on. This is where we reach an end-pass. I believe having faster construction time on defenses would necessarily give Zerg too much breathing room to take economic advantage. While I will concede that Protoss has a fairly easy time abusing Zerg, decreasing building time on a core defense would ruin what many consider to be one of the most balanced and understood matchups right now (TvZ). It's already delicate with the balance of hatch-gas-pool orders and marine pressure. Throw in a fast(er) defense for Zerg and then Zerg is able to abuse Terran economically and aggressively a LOT easier.
That's why I said in earlier posts that you can buff protoss/terran aggressive options *IF* the defense buff makes zerg defense too powerful. The problem is not that zergs are losing, the problem is that they are forced to guess what their opponents are doing and guess when to make defense.
Don't be afraid to address a game design flaw because you are afraid it will break balance. Design the game correctly (meaning without huge amounts of guessing), then balance it.
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Calgary25979 Posts
On May 10 2011 06:59 Tracedragon wrote:
Guys I think we're all forgetting something.
SCII Spines do 20(+5) damage per shot.
SCBW Sunkens do 40 damage per shot.
They both have roughly the same attack rate.
Maybe that's what makes a difference?
Pre-laid Creep Colonies are also a much better reactionary defense than the Spine Crawler, which takes almost a full minute to build.
BW Sunken Colonies also are explosive, meaning they're basically 20(+20). Most low tier rushing units were light anyways, meaning they took 20 damage.
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Beef Noodles, right now we're at a point where "design flaws" aren't easily fixed with a patch. Changing the dynamic of early Zerg to fix primarily 1 matchup (mainly ZvP) only to probably break an additional 2 (TvP, TvZ) in the process is not good developing. That's the equivalent to taking a hammer into heart surgery.
Like I said in another topic, I do have problems with the way Zerg is designed. I just think the proper avenue to discuss radical changes is closer to HotS than 1.3.X. I'd much rather see a topic like this evolve (lolpun) into a discussion of how to make the most of the situation and reacting correctly with limited information.
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On May 10 2011 05:30 Beef Noodles wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:26 iAmJeffReY wrote:Oh man the sheer zerg biased statements going on here. FASTER creep spread? Hatchery size? What the fuck really? Already with 3 queens on 2 hatch creep is half the map in 10 minutes. You have sight of it all. OLs are already everywhere, in every drop path, at every edge of the base poking, now they want them faster, cheaper, and earlier? lol Really don't understand this reasoning. Spores I don't really care about but spines are terrible compared to sunks. They take way too long to make in SC2 and they seem weaker too.
...Because. They. Move. Doesn't matter how fast they move, they move fast enough that if I did a 16 marine drop in your main you could lift 3 spines, and land them before the marines have killed anything but a queen and some drones. All these ideas of making tumors turn into spines is ridiculous. So with your mad excess minerals not only can you make a disposable army, you can make an insane amount of static MOVING defense, and not even have to waste a drone to make it. Why is it ALWAYS zerg players complaining about every, single, thing in the game. Check everything on TL. It's always ZvX help. Pro zergs post Z strats. Mrbitter does Z streams with pros. Find any pro T's posting any strategys? Nope. Stop complaining. /rant/ If anything, get rid of sight of creep if you want creep colonies to spread hatch sized creep, and tumors to turn into creep. Else, no one can do anything to zerg. Once I leave my base you already know my entire composition, when I expoed, what tech path I went. Has anyone ever just seen a speed upgraded Overseer fly through a base? Jesus the thing has turrets! lol GAH! It's just so irritating. To me, zerg can stop every kind of cheese with 2 units. Queens, and slings. It really seems just that easy to me... As a terran player, I can say 75% of these changes proposed would make me tear my face off as not only can you out macro me, now you can have faster, stronger, mobile static defense. How funny is that. I say just give you guys lurkers back. Bane/infestor/lurker. That'd be fun to play against, even if you'd never beat it the micro involved would be SO sick awesome. What level do you play at? How can you say that 3 spines are the counter to a 16 marine drop in the main? How can you say 2 queens definitely cover half the map in creep by 10 minutes? If you are really worried about creep, scan and kill creep tumors when you push. Or go hellion expand for map control and deny creep spread. Many of your concerns seem unfounded at higher levels. For the record, I'm no pro. Mid-master zerg. I just think it odd for you to call this thread "zerg biased" and then bring up seemingly very biased/incorrect complaints.
Uhm, 860 NA / 700 EU masters both, under 120 games b/w both names.
3 spines give you time to get the slings into the area. Sometimes I don't feel like spelling every detail out. Giving zerg early OL speed, back to topic, would rape any kind of risky play vs Z. Therefore, you'd have to macro the Z out, which in and of itself, is hard enough.
Bunkers take 40 seconds to build
Cannons take 40 second to build
Spine Crawlers take 50 seconds to build
Bunkers don't move. Cannons don't move. Spines....move. And kinda fast enough to stop an 8 marine 3 hellion 1 medic elevator vs the ice fisher, if they react right and pick up the spines and run em into the main.
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i still think larger, more well-designed maps would give us a better look at how the races perform. if we are constantly given tiny maps to ladder and form opinions on (with xelnaga towers and rocks everywhere) it skews our views entirely.
i'm still waiting for a map without xelnaga towers. the idea that controlling such a small space gives you access to so much intel removes a large part of threat from the game.
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On May 10 2011 07:58 mahnini wrote:
i still think larger, more well-designed maps would give us a better look at how the races perform. if we are constantly given tiny maps to ladder and form opinions on (with xelnaga towers and rocks everywhere) it skews our views entirely.
i'm still waiting for a map without xelnaga towers. the idea that controlling such a small space gives you access to so much intel removes a large part of threat from the game.
Sorry as a Zerg, i looooooooooove xelnaga towers, i can't play without them now, i'm too used to it...
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One thing i don't understand though, is why its so important for it to be able to morph on moments notice. you still lose a drone and all the mining time if you have the colony just sitting there, and the cost are basically the same. A creep colony >>> sunken still took a long time to complete in bw from start to finish.
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if Zerg could scout everything all the time and there was no way to denie zerg Scouting. Zerg would have the highest most consistent win ratio out there. Zerg is on the upswing mark my words the EZ Mode econmic play clashes with the EZ mode micromanagment from protoss and Eco > All
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On May 10 2011 07:58 mahnini wrote:
i still think larger, more well-designed maps would give us a better look at how the races perform. if we are constantly given tiny maps to ladder and form opinions on (with xelnaga towers and rocks everywhere) it skews our views entirely.
i'm still waiting for a map without xelnaga towers. the idea that controlling such a small space gives you access to so much intel removes a large part of threat from the game.
With the exception of close spawn 4 player maps, a great deal of these "tiny" maps are gone. I'm not really sure what the point is with xel'naga towers. In most cases, they give players with the ability to take map control an easier job taking map control.
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i'm actually all for creep colony. this would improve zerg's reaction-based-play as they could save a few cents here and there for later.
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On May 10 2011 04:42 decaf wrote:
A simple reduction of the spine crawler build time does not work, because it would ruin ZvZ. Early pool builds would be just too good and a must in that matchup. It also doesn't adress the issue of needing a spore crawler faster against DTs or banshees etc.
I don't think that a reduced Spine Crawler build time would necessarily ruin ZvZ, or at least adding the Creep Colony would be ruining it in the same way. But in my opinion both would not. What if early pool build where the best option to start the game? People would adapt, at best we would have action right from the start, whorst case you have to take a risk.
Still don't understand why Blizzard doesn't go crazy with the PTR Server and try all this stuff out...
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I've heard some people suggest it before: make overlord speed a hatchery tech upgrade instead of lair. Faster spines might be too exploitable, especially with the kind of thing that Nestea just did in GSL. Spines are ok as they are, the only problem is not being able to scout their all-in in time to know whether or not you need them on some maps. The faster overlord speed would allow for the scouting, and might not be overpowered.
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United States7483 Posts
Don't worry about it guys, in HotS, you can just steal the bunker from the 2 rax-ing terran.
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Idra is 100% wrong. Zergs need to prepare for multiple openings because if they know 100% what the other player is doing they are at a MASSIVE advantage.
The other races also have the exact same disadvantage. Protoss CANNOT scout until they get hallucination or observers. Terran has to rely on scans which will never see the exact army composition, they don't see what they need to half the time, and it hurts their economy (Which is much weaker than Zerg and Toss without mules).
People who think this is a zerg only problem are ridiculous. Toss won't know if Zerg is doing a roach/ling all in until it's at their doorstep. Terran won't know unless they get lucky.
Also, neither race can hold a Xel Naga tower from zerg early in the game.
Ability to scout early game: Terran > Zerg >>>>>>>>> Protoss
Seriously, Toss have it so much worse than Terran or Zerg ever will.
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On May 10 2011 09:17 Whitewing wrote:
Don't worry about it guys, in HotS, you can just steal the bunker from the 2 rax-ing terran.
pretty sure that's SP only
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On May 10 2011 08:13 aksfjh wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 07:58 mahnini wrote:
i still think larger, more well-designed maps would give us a better look at how the races perform. if we are constantly given tiny maps to ladder and form opinions on (with xelnaga towers and rocks everywhere) it skews our views entirely.
i'm still waiting for a map without xelnaga towers. the idea that controlling such a small space gives you access to so much intel removes a large part of threat from the game. With the exception of close spawn 4 player maps, a great deal of these "tiny" maps are gone. I'm not really sure what the point is with xel'naga towers. In most cases, they give players with the ability to take map control an easier job taking map control.
Well, map balance is not just about rush distances. I made a thread a while ago in that I feel that not many experimentation is going on with the maps(and really, while Blizzard can experiment this is more something the community should do) as he said the concept of Xel Naga Towers and many many features are not being played around with too much.
And I do feel that in many maps the Xel Naga towers give too much vision.
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For the love of whoever(Dunno maybe Hot_bids love):
Really the point of Idra was that zerg don´t have a safe build. As was already said greedy>safe>aggressive>greedy.
But Zerg can´t do a safe build against an aggressive one. They have to do an aggressive build also(building a metric frickton of units). And at that point the T/P can go back to a safe build(wall-in, bunker, Sentries) rendering the units that were build by zerg useless.
Defending for Zerg is really hard because Spines can´t be made reactionary and later on they lack lurkers to hold chokepoints. Building lurkers freed up larva tto make drones and lurker expand was kinda like siege tank expand.
The replacement for that are banelings and roaches which both don´t do very well in defense until you get burrow. The other option, spines, take too long to build to be of any use either.
Take for example the 7 rax allin, which pretty much looks like a 2 rax pressure into expand until you see him having more than 8 marines.
You want 1 or 2 spines vs 2 rax pressure and 5+ against a 7rax.
In this example, what Idra asks for is either a way to find the 5 dirty hidden raxes in T´s main without crippling himself or a way to defend it after he sees the marines coming down the ramp.
Right now the only option is to make a lot of units anyway, which will put him behind a 2rax expand(making the fast expand useless).
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If they reduce the build time of a spine-crawler it wouldn't have to ruin ZvZ. You just increase the vision of a hatchery by 1 hex to make them worse as proxy buildings.
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On May 10 2011 09:57 Dental Floss wrote:
If they reduce the build time of a spine-crawler it wouldn't have to ruin ZvZ. You just increase the vision of a hatchery by 1 hex to make them worse as proxy buildings.
It's not the vision which makes the difference, most good players (read: players who have lost to spine rushes) will check the boundaries of their base if they're suspicious.
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On May 10 2011 04:55 TreDawg wrote:
Since creep tumors already fulfill the role of the creep colony I think it would be a waste. Especially since you would have to sacrifice a drone to make a building that you may or may not use.
I still don't see how the Spanishiwa build doesn't count as an all purpose defensive build.
cuz it's so defensive that you'll loose to a strong macrogame of your opponent...
It's also unable to apply pressure and without speedlings, scouting and map-presence is almost zero....
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You could have a creep colony morph into some other type of creep colony that heals nearby Zerg units 2x as they normally would get healed passively.
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I'd like it if Spine Crawlers' burrow/unburrow time was frontloaded. Where now it takes 12 seconds to burrow, but unburrows instantly, I'd like it if it took 10 seconds to unburrow, and 2 seconds to burrow (or any suitable variation). This way you'd be able to reposition spine crawlers for specific threats by either unburrowing them in time or having them unburrowed pre-emptively, AND it wouldn't screw up ZvZ because there would be either the current 50 second build time, or a hatch-cancel spine crawler, which is both a heavy investment and -still- allows the defending zerg a 60 second defenders advantage.
It also wouldn't allow Zerg to just have spine crawlers chasing armies around on creep. Like siege tanks, they'd be vulnerable both going into and getting out of their attacking stance, rather than just sided on one and not the other.
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On May 10 2011 10:20 Staboteur wrote:
I'd like it if Spine Crawlers' burrow/unburrow time was frontloaded. Where now it takes 12 seconds to burrow, but unburrows instantly, I'd like it if it took 10 seconds to unburrow, and 2 seconds to burrow (or any suitable variation). This way you'd be able to reposition spine crawlers for specific threats by either unburrowing them in time or having them unburrowed pre-emptively, AND it wouldn't screw up ZvZ because there would be either the current 50 second build time, or a hatch-cancel spine crawler, which is both a heavy investment and -still- allows the defending zerg a 60 second defenders advantage.
It also wouldn't allow Zerg to just have spine crawlers chasing armies around on creep. Like siege tanks, they'd be vulnerable both going into and getting out of their attacking stance, rather than just sided on one and not the other.
In that case, I'd always keep them uprooted hidden somewhere, and when a push comes to my natural, I'd move them there and plant them while attacking with units. That would be terrifying for an opponent. People would always keep them un-planted and plat them whenever they need to. It won't work like that. Static defense is supposed to be static. This is too much of a stretch away from that.
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Why are we trying to be so tricky about this? Just reduce the build time of a Spine Crawler...simple. As of right now it takes the longest to build out of all static defenses.
Missile Turret: 25sec
Bunker: 35sec
Photon Cannon: 40sec
Spine/Spore Crawler: 50secs!.....why?
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Probably already been mentioned, but ZvZ has to be considered when you're advocating any changes to Spine Crawler's build or root time.
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In my opinion this makes perfect sense, but neither of those two is the case right now.
Oh yeah, and I forget to mention just because either extreme isn't possible, does not mean there isn't a middle ground that is "fair".
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On May 10 2011 05:46 Chill wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:43 VonBlucher wrote:On May 10 2011 05:33 Chill wrote:On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good. Heavily, heavily disagree. The armor in BW made them strong against Marines. Spines are largely useless against Marines in SC2. They even die quickly against Zealots. I don't know, maybe it will just become commonplace that if you want to use Spines you NEED to use Spines + multiple Queens? I'm not sure. Edit: Spines also take seemingly forever to build. I can scout him moving out and I'll be dead by the time he gets to my natural. That didn't really happen in BW. Spine Crawlers actually appear to have 2 armor according to Liquipedia, the same as Sunkens. Or do you mean something else about the armor? I didn't play Broodwar at all at a competitive level, just watched games and played casually. I don't know if units attack faster or what, Spines just die way faster to weak units than Sunkens did.
This is probably due to:
The higher dps units (marauder, immortal, roach) didn't exist in BW
Poorer pathing in BW, meaning that fewer marines will be firing at a sunken in BW than marines firing at a spine in SC2, this difference is further amplified with stim
Sunkens do 40 explosive damage (so 20 to marines), while spines are situationally weaker, dealing only 25 (+5 armored) damage. Marines in SC2 are beefier than BW marines, BW marines die to 2 sunken hits while SC2 shield marines take 3
The existence of lurkers means that you can't just charge in with marines to break a sunken line
SC2 marines have base range of 5, while BW marines have base range of 4 with 150/150 research required to get 5 range, this complements the pathing issue as well
I think the biggest issue out of the above is the smarter pathing, allowing the smaller, more compact marines to have more firepower on a spine.
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One might be able to make them just a "crawler" instead of a colony. Just saying 
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From what I read from the topic:
1) Zerg need a scouting unit that can run in and out of the enemy's base without dying, and the only way to deny scouting is to really position a bunch of unit to kill it off from very beginning, or having stim marines at 6,7 minutes. And btw, while we are at it, why don't we send 2,3 of them in at the same time, since its speed is fast anyway. And who need zergling to poke at the door to scout, that's so risky, just poke an overlord there, it can fly anyway.
2) Zerg need the colony so that it doesn't need to fully commit to defend the base while doing risky greedy build. And by the way, don't take its ability to unroot, or zerg will complain that they have to put their defensive structure at no man land.
On the topic though
1) imo, dividing overlord speed into 2 level, hatchery tier allows only +0.5speed, and lair tier allows another +1 speed would be nice.
2) If Blizzard were to buff Zerg's static defense, what do you suggest to nerf to balance out, because I'm sure we are all agree that Zerg with healthy economy is gg for other race. Personally I can't see what can be nerfed, Maybe taking out the queen's attack ability? sounds silly, but isn't that what people want? A similar defensive structure like BW? Although I'm not sure because air aggression in SC2 early game is way more difficult to deal with compared to BW.
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On May 10 2011 11:27 canikizu wrote:
2) If Blizzard were to buff Zerg's static defense, what do you suggest to nerf to balance out, because I'm sure we are all agree that Zerg with healthy economy is gg for other race. Personally I can't see what can be nerfed, Maybe taking out the queen's attack ability? sounds silly, but isn't that what people want? A similar defensive structure like BW? Although I'm not sure because air aggression in SC2 early game is way more difficult to deal with compared to BW.
Well, if spines were to build faster it wouldn't mean that they hurt your economy any less. You either need a LOT of spines to defend an allin, or some units to support the spines, so you still wouldn't be able to drone hard while defending.
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If you want to be able to spend a few resources to get a step up on your defence, why not 4-5 roaches rather than 2-3 'half spine crawlers' ?
It's only a few more larva, doesn't cost many resources, and has a similar effect - once you see the push coming you build on it, if no push comes you leave them.
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Zerg you could scout with scourge and often you would throw down a few creep colonies without morphing them.
In SC2 you can't do either, nor is there an equivalent.
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On May 10 2011 11:35 Clerseri wrote:
If you want to be able to spend a few resources to get a step up on your defence, why not 4-5 roaches rather than 2-3 'half spine crawlers' ?
It's only a few more larva, doesn't cost many resources, and has a similar effect - once you see the push coming you build on it, if no push comes you leave them.
roaches die fast when outnumbered and dont do much damage thing about spines is they have a lot of health and armor even if their dps isnt thaaaaat great.
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On May 10 2011 06:44 MonsieurGrimm wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 06:40 Chill wrote:
Has anyone brought up how this was different in BW? Were allins weaker? Did they come later? Did people just resign themselves to playing "standard"? Were builds solid enough to absorb all-ins?
Because Zergs in BW were dealing with the exact same problems and still did fine. Actually, yes. All-in's in BW were weaker, because in SC2 they're accelerated and strengthened by Mules, Chrono, Larva Inject, Reactors and the shorter rush distance (don't quote me on the last one). It's something IdrA brought up on SotG, I believe, the idea that the aggression is stronger, but the scouting and reactivity for all three races are (arguably) weaker, or at least not scaled to match with the improved aggression.
Don't forget that they didn't have so many unit compositions. I don't know the intricacies of BW, but I think Tyler brought it up on SotG that BW didn't have as many compositions because it was usually either Bio or Mech, no crazy mixes like you can do in SC2.
Also, I would just like to clear this up to people who think this is a big Zerg QQ party. IdrA has said that Protoss and Terran need earlier options. (He suggested Obs at Cyber Core/Hallucination cheaper and MULES/Scans going to 25 energy with adjustments) It is just that Zerg cannot wall off and are generally the defensive race, so that is why we are the first to complain, but I think Protoss and Terran have scouting problems too.
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On May 10 2011 04:56 R0YAL wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good. Curious as to why you think spines/spores are better in sc2. Could you elaborate other than uproot? Personally I would trade uproot for creep colonies if presented the choice. Sunkens seemed much more durable in bw because in sc2 there are a number of units that absolutely destroy buildings, not to mention these units get massed like crazy. It makes spines not very effective. Also how come spines dont produce broodlings like all other buildings. I think it would be better if they produce like 3 broodlings when destroyed.
You touched on exactly why spines are worse than sunkens. Because there are more "building killing" units in SC2 than SC1. The solution to this is to make spines have more HP or armor, not to give zergs creep colonies. Lowering the burrow time to 9 seconds would help alot as well.
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On May 10 2011 13:56 crimsonsentinel wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 04:56 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good. Curious as to why you think spines/spores are better in sc2. Could you elaborate other than uproot? Personally I would trade uproot for creep colonies if presented the choice. Sunkens seemed much more durable in bw because in sc2 there are a number of units that absolutely destroy buildings, not to mention these units get massed like crazy. It makes spines not very effective. Also how come spines dont produce broodlings like all other buildings. I think it would be better if they produce like 3 broodlings when destroyed. You touched on exactly why spines are worse than sunkens. Because there are more "building killing" units in SC2 than SC1. The solution to this is to make spines have more HP or armor, not to give zergs creep colonies. Lowering the burrow time to 9 seconds would help alot as well.
I know, I was asking why he thought spines were better than sunkens. Or are you agreeing with me?
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On May 10 2011 06:23 RJGooner wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 05:18 Grumbels wrote:
Zerg has base defense in creep tumors now, the speed bonus helps a lot. Also, queens double as base defense too. Given this, there is less of a need for instantly built static defense.
Furthermore, what do you think happens to the game when you give zerg powerful reactive defensive tools? They will drone even more and the game will be even more about how many drones a zerg can get away with. At least now they have to pre-make spine crawlers, so zerg is encouraged to at least get some defenses or units instead of just drones.
And also, if you want spine crawlers to have less root time, just say so and don't hide it behind a silly idea like copying a brood war design unto sc2. Or more generally speaking, ask for the spine crawler to have a lower build time, since that's functionally mostly the same. Zerg should not have to blindly make spine crawlers or static defense because they're scouting can't find out what build the toss/terran is doing. The whole point of the OP is that Zerg can split up the build time by making creep colonies, and then morphing them so spines when he sees the Toss/Terran push out. Watch SC1 TvZ. In almost every pro match I see, the Terran moves out with his first group of M&M's. This forces the Zerg to make 1-3 sunken colonies and possibly even some zerglings. I don't understand how the same logic couldn't apply to SC2 in this case. If you're so worried about the Zerg making no defenses/drones, then push out with some units and force the Zerg to make zerglings and spines. Your statement about how Zergs can just make drones if they have a reactionary defense is just blatantly false.
So annoying when people attribute a strawman position to me and then make fun of me. I didn't actually say that. The point is that the larva mechanic is potentially broken, since at any point when they're not pressured, a zerg can make purely drones. The game, then, has to be either balanced around letting the zerg have more economy (which it partly is), or there need to be ways to slow it down.
Suppose you could build spine crawlers in time for an attack. If the opponent moves out, you get a lot of them, and if it's a fake attack you cancel them at low cost, if it's a real attack you win because you can put all your economy into defense suddenly. The game would revolve purely around these attacks that are so hard to balance.
So, the idea is that super fast and super powerful spine crawlers are bad for the game, not that they let zergs drone up forever.
I know the match-up didn't degenerate in brood war, but I think zerg had less larva to work with then. (I might be mistaken)
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I think that a solution to this problem would be replacing spore and spine crawlers with a generic 'crawler', which has a shorter build time. This crawler can't do anything, but costs only 50 minerals (100 if the drone is included).
Then, this crawler can be morphed into a spore or spine crawler for 25 or 50 minerals repectively.
The build time of the old spine crawler would be the same as the build time for the generic crawler, combined with the morph to a spine crawler.
This would allow for a similar mechanic to the creep colony in BW, since their main purpose in these situations was for defence, not creep spread.
It also lessens the upfront costs for zergs who choose to invest in static defence, and means they need less time to prepare their defence if they scout an attack coming.
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...Because. They. Move. Doesn't matter how fast they move, they move fast enough that if I did a 16 marine drop in your main you could lift 3 spines, and land them before the marines have killed anything but a queen and some drones.
with 16 marines, you could kill all 3 Spines in that time.
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On May 10 2011 09:55 Mataza wrote:
For the love of whoever(Dunno maybe Hot_bids love):
Really the point of Idra was that zerg don´t have a safe build. As was already said greedy>safe>aggressive>greedy.
But Zerg can´t do a safe build against an aggressive one. They have to do an aggressive build also(building a metric frickton of units). And at that point the T/P can go back to a safe build(wall-in, bunker, Sentries) rendering the units that were build by zerg useless.
Defending for Zerg is really hard because Spines can´t be made reactionary and later on they lack lurkers to hold chokepoints. Building lurkers freed up larva tto make drones and lurker expand was kinda like siege tank expand.
The replacement for that are banelings and roaches which both don´t do very well in defense until you get burrow. The other option, spines, take too long to build to be of any use either.
Take for example the 7 rax allin, which pretty much looks like a 2 rax pressure into expand until you see him having more than 8 marines.
You want 1 or 2 spines vs 2 rax pressure and 5+ against a 7rax.
In this example, what Idra asks for is either a way to find the 5 dirty hidden raxes in T´s main without crippling himself or a way to defend it after he sees the marines coming down the ramp.
Right now the only option is to make a lot of units anyway, which will put him behind a 2rax expand(making the fast expand useless).
You're touching on something very interesting.
Since Zerg don't really got a safe build (spines are not reactionary) you have to guess. You can either build spines preemptively or you make a ton of units, which in most cases is the better solution. You have to commit heavily to those units to fend off his aggressive attack. So you're fighting fire with fire. The truth of the reality is though, that a terran or protoss will be able to back off at any time leaving you behind with a shit ton of units that will be fended off by his transition into a safe build (wall, bunker etc.), because safe beats aggressive and aggressive is the only response for zerg against aggressive styles. If you chose to build those spines preemptively you will play a safer style. However, spines cannot attack and thus T or P will be free to play very greedily for quite some time and greedy beats safe in the long run.
I think this discussion points out some of the fundamental design flaws in this game. Zerg needs something to make up for the lack of scouting abilities. This something could be creep colonies allowing you to be more reactionary and you don't have to fully commit to it, since you only have to pay for the spine when you need it.
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United Kingdom12022 Posts
I kind of like that you can't just use Sunkens to defend and you actually have to use units (same goes for bunkers and cannons). In Broodwar I found it so annoying that I could try and counter attack the zerg but I'd lose the majority of my units to his wall of like 12 sunkens he built since he was up to 3 base and could afford it while his units just went past my front and killed me.
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They should simply lower Spine build time to like 35-40 sec, fast enough so you can build them reactively.
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The problem is that if you give Zerg too much safety in the early game then they will get such a strong econemy that they will be able to roll the other races eventually unless other changes are put in place. Better early game scouting for zerg would have a simmilar impact as if the zerg can see exactly what a terran or protoss is doing then they will be able to prapare for any early push and come out ahead and were in the same situation where the game is favoring the zerg possibly too much.
I really do feel the answer is in changing the way Zerg build their defensive structures similar to how myself and others have suggested where spine and spore's are 2phase buildings where you are able to build something at a reduced cost and time with the option of morphing into a spine or spore as you require (only one way though). This aswell has the option to balance the structure around ZvZ as the stage 1 building can have relitively low health so in ZvZ they arent too strong and can be delt with via drones but still giving Zerg reactionary defensive structures and still be vulnerable to eary preasure.
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It would be awesome (yet broken at the same time) if queens could speed up the building of structures by transfusing it. Maybe limit this mechanic to spines/spores only.
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On May 10 2011 14:08 R0YAL wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 13:56 crimsonsentinel wrote:On May 10 2011 04:56 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good. Curious as to why you think spines/spores are better in sc2. Could you elaborate other than uproot? Personally I would trade uproot for creep colonies if presented the choice. Sunkens seemed much more durable in bw because in sc2 there are a number of units that absolutely destroy buildings, not to mention these units get massed like crazy. It makes spines not very effective. Also how come spines dont produce broodlings like all other buildings. I think it would be better if they produce like 3 broodlings when destroyed. You touched on exactly why spines are worse than sunkens. Because there are more "building killing" units in SC2 than SC1. The solution to this is to make spines have more HP or armor, not to give zergs creep colonies. Lowering the burrow time to 9 seconds would help alot as well. I know, I was asking why he thought spines were better than sunkens. Or are you agreeing with me?
Because Spines are better than Sunkens. They only seem worse because of other units. Or, to put it another way, if you put Sunkens in SC2, Zerg would have worse defense.
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On May 10 2011 20:10 NicolBolas wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 14:08 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 13:56 crimsonsentinel wrote:On May 10 2011 04:56 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:51 MangoTango wrote:On May 10 2011 04:49 R0YAL wrote:On May 10 2011 04:45 MangoTango wrote:
Creep tumors already took over the role of spreading creep. What would Creep Colonies do that's unique? Creep colonies morphed into either a sunken colony or spore colony. It made it so that you could throw down a few creep colonies and quickly morph them into sunkens when desired. It makes Zerg much more flexible, I miss my creep colonies I played Zerg in BW, thanks. Spine/Spores are better in SC2 than 1, and the ability to move them around is already really good. Curious as to why you think spines/spores are better in sc2. Could you elaborate other than uproot? Personally I would trade uproot for creep colonies if presented the choice. Sunkens seemed much more durable in bw because in sc2 there are a number of units that absolutely destroy buildings, not to mention these units get massed like crazy. It makes spines not very effective. Also how come spines dont produce broodlings like all other buildings. I think it would be better if they produce like 3 broodlings when destroyed. Sunkens aren't completely worse. They do a whopping 40 damage to large units and protoss shields, making them somewhat better against the units that ravage spines. You touched on exactly why spines are worse than sunkens. Because there are more "building killing" units in SC2 than SC1. The solution to this is to make spines have more HP or armor, not to give zergs creep colonies. Lowering the burrow time to 9 seconds would help alot as well. I know, I was asking why he thought spines were better than sunkens. Or are you agreeing with me? Because Spines are better than Sunkens. They only seem worse because of other units. Or, to put it another way, if you put Sunkens in SC2, Zerg would have worse defense.
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On May 10 2011 19:25 Tobberoth wrote:
They should simply lower Spine build time to like 35-40 sec, fast enough so you can build them reactively.
If you do this you open a pandora's box in ZvZ where defending ling spinecrawler allin becomes impossible if you try to go economy (14 pool).
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The build time, root time and DPS of the spine crawler is fine imo. Just have to react and scout better. Spines are already the most versitile static D due to the fact they can be moved, and don't require any other buildings to make.
Just scout better
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On May 10 2011 21:20 ffadicted wrote:
The build time, root time and DPS of the spine crawler is fine imo. Just have to react and scout better. Spines are already the most versitile static D due to the fact they can be moved, and don't require any other buildings to make.
Just scout better
Dude, the whole point of the thread is that, on almost every map, you scout a push, you put down spines, the push in here before the spines are finish.
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On May 10 2011 21:09 -Archangel- wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 19:25 Tobberoth wrote:
They should simply lower Spine build time to like 35-40 sec, fast enough so you can build them reactively. If you do this you open a pandora's box in ZvZ where defending ling spinecrawler allin becomes impossible if you try to go economy (14 pool).
That's not much of a problem, let alone a pandora's box. It just means the average pool timing would have to drop a little and 12 or 13 pool is the new version of going economy, and maybe 11 pool becomes a new standard opener. Spine build time being lowered would change ZvZ, but it won't lead to an unstoppable 7 pool build.
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creepy crawlers!
edit:
that can morph to spine and spore
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On May 10 2011 21:26 NovaTheFeared wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 21:09 -Archangel- wrote:On May 10 2011 19:25 Tobberoth wrote:
They should simply lower Spine build time to like 35-40 sec, fast enough so you can build them reactively. If you do this you open a pandora's box in ZvZ where defending ling spinecrawler allin becomes impossible if you try to go economy (14 pool). That's not much of a problem, let alone a pandora's box. It just means the average pool timing would have to drop a little and 12 or 13 pool is the new version of going economy, and maybe 11 pool becomes a new standard opener. Spine build time being lowered would change ZvZ, but it won't lead to an unstoppable 7 pool build.
It does however completely eliminate the possibility of 15 hatch, which has become semi-standard in ZvZ.
If you thought the baneling wars were bad right now, wait until nobody can feasibly expand without having gone through them.
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On May 10 2011 21:26 NovaTheFeared wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 21:09 -Archangel- wrote:On May 10 2011 19:25 Tobberoth wrote:
They should simply lower Spine build time to like 35-40 sec, fast enough so you can build them reactively. If you do this you open a pandora's box in ZvZ where defending ling spinecrawler allin becomes impossible if you try to go economy (14 pool). That's not much of a problem, let alone a pandora's box. It just means the average pool timing would have to drop a little and 12 or 13 pool is the new version of going economy, and maybe 11 pool becomes a new standard opener. Spine build time being lowered would change ZvZ, but it won't lead to an unstoppable 7 pool build.
The followup question is, would you really want a matchup where you have to 12pool every game or else youre dead? That would make ZvZ even more early game-gimmicky than it is tbh
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On May 10 2011 21:09 -Archangel- wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 19:25 Tobberoth wrote:
They should simply lower Spine build time to like 35-40 sec, fast enough so you can build them reactively. If you do this you open a pandora's box in ZvZ where defending ling spinecrawler allin becomes impossible if you try to go economy (14 pool).
I disagree. The point is to make the spine build fast enough to be done when a push arrives, it will still be too slow offensively and should be quite easy to block by pulling drones.
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Yet another clunky solution that's trying to work around the fact that BW hydras would fix the race.
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On May 10 2011 21:38 Tobberoth wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 21:09 -Archangel- wrote:On May 10 2011 19:25 Tobberoth wrote:
They should simply lower Spine build time to like 35-40 sec, fast enough so you can build them reactively. If you do this you open a pandora's box in ZvZ where defending ling spinecrawler allin becomes impossible if you try to go economy (14 pool). I disagree. The point is to make the spine build fast enough to be done when a push arrives, it will still be too slow offensively and should be quite easy to block by pulling drones.
My 7-pool spine rush is already brutal enough to the point where I can beat 14 pools about 1/2 the time, and this is the build that is supposed to dominate me. Cutting 10-15 seconds off the time would guarantee that you HAVE to go pool before overlord if you want to defend.
ZvZ would become the new PvP.
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On May 10 2011 21:40 Sueco wrote:
Yet another clunky solution that's trying to work around the fact that BW hydras would fix the race.
Lol, how would BW-hydras fix it?
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On May 10 2011 21:25 Noocta wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 21:20 ffadicted wrote:
The build time, root time and DPS of the spine crawler is fine imo. Just have to react and scout better. Spines are already the most versitile static D due to the fact they can be moved, and don't require any other buildings to make.
Just scout better Dude, the whole point of the thread is that, on almost every map, you scout a push, you put down spines, the push in here before the spines are finish.
And I'm arguing that's not needed lol It would be stupid if zerg can just do whatever they want economically, then put down a handful of spines whenever the other guy moves out and hold everything. Try playing safer instead of greedy maybe and you'll see that zerg is very good at holding early game pushes due to spawn larva. At least you don't have to build a forge to get out static defense.
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On May 10 2011 11:27 canikizu wrote:
From what I read from the topic:
1) Zerg need a scouting unit that can run in and out of the enemy's base without dying, and the only way to deny scouting is to really position a bunch of unit to kill it off from very beginning, or having stim marines at 6,7 minutes. And btw, while we are at it, why don't we send 2,3 of them in at the same time, since its speed is fast anyway. And who need zergling to poke at the door to scout, that's so risky, just poke an overlord there, it can fly anyway.
2) Zerg need the colony so that it doesn't need to fully commit to defend the base while doing risky greedy build. And by the way, don't take its ability to unroot, or zerg will complain that they have to put their defensive structure at no man land.
On the topic though
1) imo, dividing overlord speed into 2 level, hatchery tier allows only +0.5speed, and lair tier allows another +1 speed would be nice.
2) If Blizzard were to buff Zerg's static defense, what do you suggest to nerf to balance out, because I'm sure we are all agree that Zerg with healthy economy is gg for other race. Personally I can't see what can be nerfed, Maybe taking out the queen's attack ability? sounds silly, but isn't that what people want? A similar defensive structure like BW? Although I'm not sure because air aggression in SC2 early game is way more difficult to deal with compared to BW.
1) I don't understand that point at all, maybe clarify what you mean by this and maybe leave out the sarcasm?
2) Atm., Zerg has no ability to scout what the Terran is doing if the Terran just has a wall-in and 1-2 Marines where Ovi's could fly in. Besides that, Terran can build their CC and even the OCC inside their base, making it impossible to even know the most basic thing - is he going for an economic or aggressive/tech-oriented playstyle. So if you are not able to know what the Terran is doing, the only way to have a safe build, is to react when they move out (this is what Speedlings in front of their base are for). This is currently almost impossible, cuz spine-crawlers build WAY too slow and preemptively putting up spine-crawlers or saving tons of Larva and banking Minerals, putting up Spores just to be safe against Banshees etc. is just not economical.
Zerg basically has to gamble in TvZ to a very large degree, which is just not a good state of TvZ and is not the case, at least not this severe, for any other race in any other MU.
And no, I do not at all agree that a healthy Zerg-Economy is GG for the other races, they just have to play defensively and max out or do a very strong timing-attack. But that's something that has nothing to do with this discussion!
We are discussing about a fundamental design-flaw that makes TvZ a much too volatile MU for Zerg, whereas the discussion about Zerg with a good Economy being too strong (even if it was true, which it isn't) is a balance-related discussion.
So Terrans or other People fearing that Zerg might just get too strong in TvZ if sth. was changed about early-game scouting, shouldn't forget that other stuff can be balanced afterwards, but it's just too important for the game that TvZ isn't such a gamble for Zerg!
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The problem is in ZvT is that T is getting smarter. Its nearly impossible to scout properly unless your willing to sac at least 2 overlords which is not cheap. Plus, many T are hiding their units in the middle of their base and use marines to patrol the edges.
As Z you have prepare for everything that might come out. Tank pushes, blue flame hellions, banshees. Since you are trying to prepare for everything, you can't crush any one of them so regardless of what they do they will still do some damage.
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I'm sorry I just notice.
Discussion threads like this are great and supposedly productive.As much as I'd love to discuss also, I was lead to believe that TL no longer deals with this kind of threads, particularly suggesting new game mechanics/units/etc as they should be brought up to Blizzard. In fact I remember a few specific threads that were closed specifically for reasons like "TL is not Blizzard" or "Sorry TL does not do suggestion threads anymore." If only I could find them. Im surprised this one reached 11 pages.
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It is because of chronoboost/warp-in, MULES and spawn larvae that make all in much easier to maintain. However, the ability to scout was still the same, making all in harder to stop
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On May 10 2011 21:53 ffadicted wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2011 21:25 Noocta wrote:On May 10 2011 21:20 ffadicted wrote:
The build time, root time and DPS of the spine crawler is fine imo. Just have to react and scout better. Spines are already the most versitile static D due to the fact they can be moved, and don't require any other buildings to make.
Just scout better Dude, the whole point of the thread is that, on almost every map, you scout a push, you put down spines, the push in here before the spines are finish. And I'm arguing that's not needed lol It would be stupid if zerg can just do whatever they want economically, then put down a handful of spines whenever the other guy moves out and hold everything. Try playing safer instead of greedy maybe and you'll see that zerg is very good at holding early game pushes due to spawn larva. At least you don't have to build a forge to get out static defense.
You, toss players, make it sound like if you let zerg players make their economy unpunished then zerg will get free win. But the answer is they just won't be at a disadvantage.
And btw how can you play "safer" with zerg? If terran goes for 7 rax all-in then 10 lings won't help here, 2 spines won't help either on most maps. Or by "safe" build you mean 4 queens, baneling nest, roach warren and 4 spines early game?
On May 10 2011 21:20 ffadicted wrote:
The build time, root time and DPS of the spine crawler is fine imo. Just have to react and scout better. Spines are already the most versitile static D due to the fact they can be moved, and don't require any other buildings to make.
Just scout better
On certain maps, like Xel naga not only your spines won't be ready but they won't cover anything usually, or you need 5 of them. And how can you scout fake 3 gate expand into 5 gate allin? I suggest you try to play some games as zerg so you see how things work.
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Why every zerg cares so much about idra and his balance thoughts dont get me wrong he is good.
In my eyes idra ideal zerg is that the can drone up to 80 without making units.
i don t think the game is perfectly balanced and there are some issues but for every race and in my eyes idra is very one side (could be because he just knows zerg very very well)
but the problem with idras balance thought in my eyes is he is so emotional and wont give a player any credit if he loses to another race. He would simply say he i know i am the better player but yeah he plays an imba race or an unbeatable strate or what so ever. i can t take idra seriously anymore when it comes to balancing.
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United States17042 Posts
"how I would change the game thread" is not allowed in sc2 general, and sc2 strategy it needs a ton of evidence and replays stuff.
Not indicating agreement or disagreement, but the thread quality is degrading into bw vs sc2 and balance, therefore closed.
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EPT
