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Wow, this is a very nice OP, and a very detailed analysis.
Hopefully the right people will read this and make something happen so finally PvZ and PvT will become enjoyable to watch again. Who knows, I might even start actually playing the game again.
Lately, PvP just seemed to be the only protoss matchup worth following, with players starting on even terms and and being able to actually punish equally skilled opponents for being greedy or aggressive. The other matchups look more like protoss getting trolled, with cheese builds like 6pool, 4 hatch or 1-1-1 becoming rather safe options to go. No Risk, High Reward, Problem?
And then you read forums and usually find a bunch of people arguing that its not bad game design/balance but the demographics, with terrans being just better gamers overall, thats where the results come from. Or even that all races are doing equally well right now. Alright.
Shield battery might be a nice idea, at this point it can't get much worse for protoss anyways. (Oh wait, MC, Alicia, Genius, Tester, Puzzle, Hongun, Nani and Huk are just bad and need to get their shit together, I forgot, lol)
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On September 09 2011 00:35 ShatterZer0 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 00:28 KevinIX wrote:
I don't understand why you think an even protoss army is weaker than an even terran or zerg army. I find this to be untrue. It's not that Toss doesn't have a defenders advantage. We have it even when attacking.
Gateway units are NOT weak. Especially upgraded gateway units with charge and blink. When supported with forcefields and good positioning, I think the Protoss Gateway composition is better than Zerg of equal tech, and only slightly worse than the Terran Bioball.
4 gate is balanced not by making Gateway units weaker, but giving other races strong defensive capabilities. Creep, spines, and larva inject are powerful defensive advantages that zergs have. Same with bunkers and repairs for Terran. Blizzard has openly stated on multiple occasions that Gateways units are SUPPOSED to be more mechanically inefficient for cost than their Terran and Zerg counter parts because of the innate mobility that the warp in mechanic has given them.... which is why equal supply armies of purely hatch tech/barracks tech/cyber tech armies should always coincide with a non-protoss victory... if it did, then Protoss really WOULD be imbalanced...
Have they? Can you link that to me? It'd be interesting if this were actually the case...
On September 09 2011 00:37 Markwerf wrote:
In short though, Protoss also has a attacking disadvantage because the opponent still gets relatively shorter rally times and does have time to respond. You still have to move out of your base as Protoss so the faster reinforcement doesnt matter at all for how much time the opponent has to respond. The respond time is only dependant on the time it takes for a unit to walk between the bases..
Protoss warp is mechanic is a great invention imo and really makes the races even more unique then they were in sc1. There really is no problem as a result of the warp-ins.
I think you understand attacking/defenders advantage wrong. Every race has to deal with the "attacking disadvantage" that you are talking about (the idea that when you attack, the defender gets units to reinforce sooner) so that is a moot point. But when every race attacks, Terran/Zerg can not reinforce as quickly as Protoss which nullifies an essential part of defenders advantage.
You are right in that when the Protoss moves out, that response time is the same as other races, however, the main issue is the reinforce time which is instant. No other race can do that (unless they proxy their production facilities) without basically losing the game instantly if their rush fails.
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On September 08 2011 22:53 windsupernova wrote:
I thought we were all over the ¨I want to design the game¨ phase.
It seems not. Warpgate didn´t break protoss, just a few months ago Protoss were doign well, it may have been the WG nerf or the Metagame changing but can we stop blaming game design just because a race is having a hard time atm?
Every single time that a race is having a hard time, everybody claims that it was badly designed, broken, that it needs to be redesigned(and all the redesigns are just hey lets copy paste BW!).
Even with no warpgates Zealots and Dragoons would be ¨bad¨ in SC2, due to the new units the other races have, the improved controls. Warpgate is a really interesting and Novel concept, yeah its different but I have always been on the side of developers trying new things instead of being hindered by tradition.
Its not like its unreasonable that the game would feel imbalanced, the best testing is the playtesting. I am sure that for the expansions new units and abilities will be added to fill the holes in each races arsenal(like what happened from SC1 to BW).
Hey, but I guess its easier to say the game is broken and scream bad design everytime a race is in trouble. Although, with the new engine and units I can see how the Shield battery would be better in SC2 than it ever was in BW.
People have been calling the warp-in mechanic poorly designed for a long time. When Protoss was doing well, it was called boring and bad for spectators and imbalanced. And now, as Protoss edges towards extinction in Code S, it's being blamed for the overall fragility of the race. There was never a period when the mechanic wasn't being implicated for something, so your premise that it's only just now coming under scrutiny because of Protoss's recent lack of success is false. And it was an "interesting and novel concept" back in 2007. Now that we've had a year to observe its actual impact on gameplay, it's no longer novel and, arguably, not very interesting. Not in its current implementation.
You acknowledge that SC2 is a work in progress, with patches and expansions on the way, so I don't really see what your issue is with design theorizing. It's interesting to think about and discuss these things, so at worst it's harmless fun.
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1) Increase warp-in cooldown. Keep gateway build times the same
2) Adjust protoss gateway to be stronger so as to off-set the loss of units due to lost offensive warp-in capabilities, and to make gateway units stronger defensive units.
Problem, this would be really hard to test over the course of a PTR. Would probably have to be tested over the course of HotS beta. Still, the idea of gateway being the defensive unit producing structure and the warpgate being the offensive unit producing structure adds a palpable defenders advantage because the defender, if using gateways, will be able to get units out faster than the attacker. Imagine gateway --> warpgate and the opposite as the "bunker build time" or the "spinecrawler build time". Adjust it so that gateway builds <warpgate to gateway time> faster, so that scouting can be rewarded, as the first warp-in will coincide with the change to gateway, and then each warp-in cycle thereafter will fall behind the defender's superior production.
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I dunno, there just is no trade off to warp gate. You make units faster out of it, AND you can warp in at a pylon. I think they should make it so that normal gateways produce units faster than warpgates so that it isnt turned into "well warpgate is something I NEED to get."
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Making gateways as requirement for cannons can be great but cost of each cannon should be increased (175-200) to avoid cannon+GW unit rush.
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Warp-in is one of the most poorly designed mechanics in the game. There are very few reasons for the gateway (not warpgate) to exist as it is now. The only reason they're in the game right now is to keep protoss from being too strong in the early game.
The soloution to this is making converting gateways to warpgates cost minerals. They should also have a longer cooldown than gateways to make gateways usable and viable. If you do this and buff protoss warpgate units a bit, i think it will be pretty balanced.
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The thing is, the game already accounts for this. It's been repeatedly acknowledged that gateway units are inefficient for their cost in the early game compared to their T/Z counterparts because of the warp-in mechanic. That's exactly why Sentries exist. If you were to adjust the build speed and mechanics of warp gate tech, and rebalance the gateway tech units around it, Force Field would have to be nerfed into the ground (or even possibly removed), as you couldn't have stronger units *and* all the other defender's advantage points *AND* the ability to control the fight with force fields.
...Actually I'm kinda for this. Force Field was always a terrible mechanic as well.
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The point the OP is making is that Protoss is balanced under the assumption that they will be warping in offensively in every possible situation which means that they're made to be 'on par' power-wise with T/Z under those conditions.
In reality you aren't doing that in every situation and it also means that when fighting at your own base the conditions are not different than if you were fighting at any other spot on the map where you had a pylon other than your sim city.
I don't think that this is a very hard concept to understand. Warpgate is a really poor mechanic that shouldn't have made it out of F&F beta and now it may be too entrenched to ever remove. It's a problem.
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What if Cannons would be unlocked by the Cyber Core instead of the Forge (or alternatively to the Forge)? You would have good, viable 1-Gate expands against both T and Z and it may even lead to PvP expand builds. If the cannons were only unlockable through the Core it would be even possible to buff them slightly if necessary, since cannon rushing isn't a problem anymore. On the other hand, cannons still being also unlocked by the Forge would allow Forge FE to live on.
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They should make the warpgate a twilight council upgrade and tweak the gateway to replace the warpgates. Warpgates no longer reduce build times, they just let you warp in at far distances. The whole warp in anywhere + reduced build time is ridiculous, that's why warpgates were nerfed.
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Blizzard is so silly. All they have to do is give warp gates a trade-off. Make it so that they actually take longer to produce a unit with. That way, you only use them if you are being offensive. Otherwise you switch to regular gateways.
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Old knowledge.. Im pretty sure one would find similar topics in beta.
If Blizzard isnt going to redesign Warpgates with HotS they screwed up.
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Well, now that I think about it, perhaps the warp time should increase based on the distance the warp is from the nearest nexus. That way the advantage strictly remains to defending a base and toss would not be inclined to proxy all of their gateways as the gateways would be able to defend themselves very easily.
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On September 09 2011 00:04 Deltablazy wrote:
Good read, I liked it.
As a defensive Terran from BW, I always liked defenders advantage, and was always pissed at warp in mechanic for nullifying defenders advantage. I always thought that removing warp in and buffing gateway units to be on par with their BW counterparts would make the game more balanced for all races, on a defender's advantage point of vue. And I still do.
Sadly, it's too late for such changes because if warp in mechanic were to be changed in a later expansion, it would create a different game. Already that there will be 3 different ladders for sc2, so the sc2 community will be divided. But if the core mechanics of races were to be changed, it would be another WC3 vs FT.
And that wouldn't be bad because Wc3 RoC was imbalanced as hell. Frozen Throne made the game WAY better as did BW with Classic Starcraft . Sometimes you gotta do drastic changes for the better overall.
Warpgate is just a stupid mechanic in my mind , way too important and hard to balance . Its too easy to abuse if its units are too good but on the other hand Protoss completely relies on Units made from Gateways.
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On September 09 2011 01:28 s3rp wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 00:04 Deltablazy wrote:
Good read, I liked it.
As a defensive Terran from BW, I always liked defenders advantage, and was always pissed at warp in mechanic for nullifying defenders advantage. I always thought that removing warp in and buffing gateway units to be on par with their BW counterparts would make the game more balanced for all races, on a defender's advantage point of vue. And I still do.
Sadly, it's too late for such changes because if warp in mechanic were to be changed in a later expansion, it would create a different game. Already that there will be 3 different ladders for sc2, so the sc2 community will be divided. But if the core mechanics of races were to be changed, it would be another WC3 vs FT. And that wouldn't be bad because Wc3 RoC was imbalanced as hell. Frozen Throne made the game WAY better same as BW did with Classic Starcraft. Sometimes you gotta do drastic changes for the better overall.
Yeah Mutas were so gay in SC -_-. Stim, but no medics T_T. Mass cannons to stop Muta back stabs.
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United States918 Posts
Nice OP. I think it would be fascinating to see something like a shield battery added in the future. Although, would proxy shield battery strategies be problematic I wonder?
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OP already suggested a perfect solution to this problem - bring back the Shield Battery, strengthen gateway units, and weaken high-tech units (eg. Immortal obviously since Immortal with proxy Shield Battery means imba)
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On September 09 2011 01:00 shockaslim wrote:
I dunno, there just is no trade off to warp gate. You make units faster out of it, AND you can warp in at a pylon. I think they should make it so that normal gateways produce units faster than warpgates so that it isnt turned into "well warpgate is something I NEED to get."
+1 to this.
This is actually how I expected it to be when I was first told about the warpgate mechanic. That would lead to interesting decisions being made and reduce how much warpgate negates the defender's reinforcement advantage.
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United States7483 Posts
On September 09 2011 01:44 IronDoc wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 01:00 shockaslim wrote:
I dunno, there just is no trade off to warp gate. You make units faster out of it, AND you can warp in at a pylon. I think they should make it so that normal gateways produce units faster than warpgates so that it isnt turned into "well warpgate is something I NEED to get." +1 to this. This is actually how I expected it to be when I was first told about the warpgate mechanic. That would lead to interesting decisions being made and reduce how much warpgate negates the defender's reinforcement advantage.
The trade off to warp gate is that gateway units suck because it exists. But yes, blizzard wants every protoss to get warp gate no matter what.
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EPT
