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I have received requests on how to try the model out: Search "Double Harvesting (TeamLiquid)" by ZeromuS as an Extension Mod in HotS Custom Games to try it out. Email your replays of your games on DH to: LegacyEconomyTest@gmail.com might have partnership with a replay website soon as well  In Game Group: Double Harvest |
Canada13410 Posts
Nathanias had a showmatch with Catz And Iaguz playing.
Seems like its gonna take Zs a while to figure out the Z drone timings and how many to make but Catz brought up an interesting perspective. Zs will be greedy with hatches and probably cutting at around 12 workers per base on minerals while expanding and not necessarily hitting 16.
T and P will probably hit 16 cuz they expand so slowly anyway.
But he did say he enjoyed it and that it felt fun to play with so thats a positive! Even if he thinks Mules might need some tweaks in the future, but thats only one handful of games so we will see.
Once the vods are up I can post the link here. :D
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This is so cool this is a thing that is catching on.
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On April 18 2015 16:06 solidbebe wrote:Show nested quote +On April 17 2015 19:12 maartendq wrote:On April 17 2015 16:52 Whitewing wrote:On April 17 2015 16:31 maartendq wrote:On April 17 2015 15:34 Whitewing wrote:On April 17 2015 15:30 WrathofShane wrote:
The fact that he didnt even consider APM negating the bad brood war AI tells me he wasnt a brood war player. As someone who had probably over 1000 games as zerg on brood war, no I dont want to go back to the 1:1 Not really any more APM required than early game worker pairing on good patches, and it's during a time where you have nothing else to do with that APM anyway. With multiple building selection and smart mining, there's not a large APM requirement during the phases where that would even be slightly beneficial. Later on it's not even a gain. Blizzard should not be creating reasons to go click-click-click with your mouse in phases of the game where there is nothing to do. The APM-threshold is already incredibly high in this game, no reason to make it even worse. People wonder why SC2 has lost a lot of its popularity lately but at the same time keep demanding that Blizzard artificially increase the skill floor some more. As a matter of fact, blizzard could do smart things to lower the amount of tedious things one has to do. One idea I've had lately is auto-grouping units that spawn from production buildings, e.g. marines automatically 1, tanks 2, etc. Or moving parts of the observer UI to the player UI: having on-screen indicators what is producing, what is upgrading and when it will be ready. Or god forbid actually enabling players to let units autocreate for as long as they want, so they don't have to return to their production buildings all the time, e.g. right-click the marine-button in the barracks will make the barracks autocreate the unit as long as the player has enough resources. This would allow players to actually focus on their units and their overbearing amount of active abilities. I can't help it, but sometimes I yearn for the simplicity that was WoL back in 2010. This has nothing to do with any of that. By spending early game APM doing these things, you manage to eek out a few minerals more than you would otherwise, and not really that many. For professional players who have nothing better to do, that's fine. For your average player, they won't see any difference at all by doing it, and it won't hurt them in any measurable way not to do it. The amount we're talking about it is around 5-10 minerals total in difference for double harvesting. Maybe 15-20 over the course of a game when applied to multiple bases, max. It's totally negligible. If it is totally negligible it a complete waste of time and money to have people program that into the game in the first place. To me, a high silver-low gold level player (i.e. someone belonging to the largest group of players), there was nothing wrong with HOTS' economy. However, what I did notice is that I usually ended up spending more time looking at my production buildings than at my or my opponent's army, up to the point that 95% of my game time felt like playing a high-speed, real time city building and the other 5% actually fighting my opponent who was doing the same thing I was. If I am playing an RTS, I want to the focus to be on using my army in a strategic fashion, not on optimising my production because below master league the bigger army will usually win. Holding off cheese would be a lot more bearable (not to mention fun) if I didn't have to surrender control over my units every few seconds because I have to order my barracks to make another marine. Some of Starcraft 2's mechanics are downright archaic and outdated, and exist only to make the game difficult for the sake of it. Sure, automising the whole production process would drastically lower the skill ceiling, but would also drastically reduce the skill threshold for new players. MOBA games, to me, seem to be about making smart strategical choices with your hero and its abilities. Starcraft 2 is about being able to click on things faster than your opponent, and in the lower leagues those things tend to be production buildings instead of army units. So quite bluntly, my advice to blizzard would be: stop focussing on redesigning the game's economy and focus on automising the production process so people can spend more time thinking up strategies and outmanoeuvering their opponents. Do this even if you will draw the ire of the top 5% of players. Have you considered that the starcraft games just arent for you? BW was succesful because it WASNT like all the dime a dozen RTS games out there. And now youre in here saying blizzard should cater the game to casuals even if it destroys the pro scene. 
Brood War had far less active abilities and spells than SC2 has, and the really impactful ones (Plague, Dark Swarm, Psi Storm etc) were late game spells. Micomanagement was based around unit positioning and army movement. Maxing out was far less important than actually being able to efficiently use the amount of units you have (harvesting and unit production was a lot slower too, if I recall correctly). I recall having seen one game in which a Protoss player held off a rush by means of one zealot or dragoon and a shield battery. That would be impossible in SC2 because "having more stuff" will most of the time trump "knowing how to use stuff", especially if the game is riddled with anti-micro spells.
Right now Blizzard is artificially making the game more difficult by adding ever more spells and active abilities. I am not saying that Blizzard should cater to casuals, but should maybe update its game for the year 2015, or just go back to the simplicity of 2010 Wings of Liberty. As a sidenote: automated production has been done almost a decade ago in what for many people is one of the best RTS out there: Supreme Commander. Just because you don't have to spend 95% of your game time watching your production buildings doesn't mean the game becomes 'casualised'.
Blizzard should take a cue from other genres. Dark Souls/Demon Souls and Bloodborne have a relatively 'dumbed down' control scheme (two attack modes, blocking, parrying with a shield followed by a riposte, backstabs and evasive rolls); there are no fancy combos like in Street Fighter or Mortal Combat. Regardless, DaS, DeS and BB are known to be the most challenging yet fair games of the past and current generation, because that simplicity gave players an immense amount of control over their character: most deaths are actually your own fault, not the game's. PvP is also said to be immensely fun, but I haven't tried that yet.
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Brood War had far less active abilities and spells than SC2 has, and the really impactful ones (Plague, Dark Swarm, Psi Storm etc) were late game spells.
BW still had a fair number of active spells early-mid game, e.g. Stim-pack, Siege mode, Lurker burrow, Reaver Scarabs. Also a lot of the time players would have to fight the unit AI/pathing (remember Dragoons?).
Micromanagement was based around unit positioning and army movement. Maxing out was far less important than actually being able to efficiently use the amount of units you have (harvesting and unit production was a lot slower too, if I recall correctly).
The proposed changes to economy will encourage strategic expansion and will subsequently provide more intuitive rewards for map control and positioning. To your point, harvesting and unit production are faster in SCII b/c of the new macro mechanics for each race (larvae/mules/chrono/warpgate).
I recall having seen one game in which a Protoss player held off a rush by means of one zealot or dragoon and a shield battery. That would be impossible in SC2 because "having more stuff" will most of the time trump "knowing how to use stuff", especially if the game is riddled with anti-micro spells.
Arguably, you have a similar thing in SCII, it would just be a Zealot and Sentry instead of Dragoon/shield battery. And even in BW macro was still a significant aspect (you could argue that it makes a bigger different at lower levels in SCII).
Right now Blizzard is artificially making the game more difficult by adding ever more spells and active abilities. I am not saying that Blizzard should cater to casuals, but should maybe update its game for the year 2015, or just go back to the simplicity of 2010 Wings of Liberty. As a sidenote: automated production has been done almost a decade ago in what for many people is one of the best RTS out there: Supreme Commander. Just because you don't have to spend 95% of your game time watching your production buildings doesn't mean the game becomes 'casualised'.
Blizzard should take a cue from other genres. Dark Souls/Demon Souls and Bloodborne have a relatively 'dumbed down' control scheme (two attack modes, blocking, parrying with a shield followed by a riposte, backstabs and evasive rolls); there are no fancy combos like in Street Fighter or Mortal Combat. Regardless, DaS, DeS and BB are known to be the most challenging yet fair games of the past and current generation, because that simplicity gave players an immense amount of control over their character: most deaths are actually your own fault, not the game's. PvP is also said to be immensely fun, but I haven't tried that yet.
I don't get the impression that Blizzard is intentionally making the game harder. Sure, changing Hardened Shield to Activated Shield requires more actions, but Hardened Shield itself was a highly binary ability that was extremely limiting in terms of counterplay. Likewise, reducing resources/base may put the game on a faster clock, but it helps limit the infamous 3-hour Avilo-turtle stalemate scenarios. I think they genuinely want to make the game more exciting, but have conflated that with increasing game complexity as opposed to increasing game depth. (To explain what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVL4st0blGU)
Now, I don't think the current roster of added spells/abilities in LotV is altogether bad. I can see certain spells paying off a lot more in depth than they cost in complexity. Certain aspects actually do make the game simpler (e.g. Stalkers no longer herp-derping into Widow Mine range). And I still don't understand why you're so opposed to the proposed economy changes here, which I believe would make gameplay a lot more intuitive and map control/positioning-based. However, I do agree certain gameplay elements could be simplified. I do like the idea of automated production (mostly b/c I've had painful experiences watching people play queuing up 5 marines on one barracks every three minutes). I can see how an automated queue might work, even taking the different races' macro mechanics into consideration.
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On April 19 2015 15:18 maartendq wrote:Show nested quote +On April 18 2015 16:06 solidbebe wrote:On April 17 2015 19:12 maartendq wrote:On April 17 2015 16:52 Whitewing wrote:On April 17 2015 16:31 maartendq wrote:On April 17 2015 15:34 Whitewing wrote:On April 17 2015 15:30 WrathofShane wrote:
The fact that he didnt even consider APM negating the bad brood war AI tells me he wasnt a brood war player. As someone who had probably over 1000 games as zerg on brood war, no I dont want to go back to the 1:1 Not really any more APM required than early game worker pairing on good patches, and it's during a time where you have nothing else to do with that APM anyway. With multiple building selection and smart mining, there's not a large APM requirement during the phases where that would even be slightly beneficial. Later on it's not even a gain. Blizzard should not be creating reasons to go click-click-click with your mouse in phases of the game where there is nothing to do. The APM-threshold is already incredibly high in this game, no reason to make it even worse. People wonder why SC2 has lost a lot of its popularity lately but at the same time keep demanding that Blizzard artificially increase the skill floor some more. As a matter of fact, blizzard could do smart things to lower the amount of tedious things one has to do. One idea I've had lately is auto-grouping units that spawn from production buildings, e.g. marines automatically 1, tanks 2, etc. Or moving parts of the observer UI to the player UI: having on-screen indicators what is producing, what is upgrading and when it will be ready. Or god forbid actually enabling players to let units autocreate for as long as they want, so they don't have to return to their production buildings all the time, e.g. right-click the marine-button in the barracks will make the barracks autocreate the unit as long as the player has enough resources. This would allow players to actually focus on their units and their overbearing amount of active abilities. I can't help it, but sometimes I yearn for the simplicity that was WoL back in 2010. This has nothing to do with any of that. By spending early game APM doing these things, you manage to eek out a few minerals more than you would otherwise, and not really that many. For professional players who have nothing better to do, that's fine. For your average player, they won't see any difference at all by doing it, and it won't hurt them in any measurable way not to do it. The amount we're talking about it is around 5-10 minerals total in difference for double harvesting. Maybe 15-20 over the course of a game when applied to multiple bases, max. It's totally negligible. If it is totally negligible it a complete waste of time and money to have people program that into the game in the first place. To me, a high silver-low gold level player (i.e. someone belonging to the largest group of players), there was nothing wrong with HOTS' economy. However, what I did notice is that I usually ended up spending more time looking at my production buildings than at my or my opponent's army, up to the point that 95% of my game time felt like playing a high-speed, real time city building and the other 5% actually fighting my opponent who was doing the same thing I was. If I am playing an RTS, I want to the focus to be on using my army in a strategic fashion, not on optimising my production because below master league the bigger army will usually win. Holding off cheese would be a lot more bearable (not to mention fun) if I didn't have to surrender control over my units every few seconds because I have to order my barracks to make another marine. Some of Starcraft 2's mechanics are downright archaic and outdated, and exist only to make the game difficult for the sake of it. Sure, automising the whole production process would drastically lower the skill ceiling, but would also drastically reduce the skill threshold for new players. MOBA games, to me, seem to be about making smart strategical choices with your hero and its abilities. Starcraft 2 is about being able to click on things faster than your opponent, and in the lower leagues those things tend to be production buildings instead of army units. So quite bluntly, my advice to blizzard would be: stop focussing on redesigning the game's economy and focus on automising the production process so people can spend more time thinking up strategies and outmanoeuvering their opponents. Do this even if you will draw the ire of the top 5% of players. Have you considered that the starcraft games just arent for you? BW was succesful because it WASNT like all the dime a dozen RTS games out there. And now youre in here saying blizzard should cater the game to casuals even if it destroys the pro scene. Brood War had far less active abilities and spells than SC2 has, and the really impactful ones (Plague, Dark Swarm, Psi Storm etc) were late game spells. Micomanagement was based around unit positioning and army movement. Maxing out was far less important than actually being able to efficiently use the amount of units you have (harvesting and unit production was a lot slower too, if I recall correctly). I recall having seen one game in which a Protoss player held off a rush by means of one zealot or dragoon and a shield battery. That would be impossible in SC2 because "having more stuff" will most of the time trump "knowing how to use stuff", especially if the game is riddled with anti-micro spells. Right now Blizzard is artificially making the game more difficult by adding ever more spells and active abilities. I am not saying that Blizzard should cater to casuals, but should maybe update its game for the year 2015, or just go back to the simplicity of 2010 Wings of Liberty. As a sidenote: automated production has been done almost a decade ago in what for many people is one of the best RTS out there: Supreme Commander. Just because you don't have to spend 95% of your game time watching your production buildings doesn't mean the game becomes 'casualised'. Blizzard should take a cue from other genres. Dark Souls/Demon Souls and Bloodborne have a relatively 'dumbed down' control scheme (two attack modes, blocking, parrying with a shield followed by a riposte, backstabs and evasive rolls); there are no fancy combos like in Street Fighter or Mortal Combat. Regardless, DaS, DeS and BB are known to be the most challenging yet fair games of the past and current generation, because that simplicity gave players an immense amount of control over their character: most deaths are actually your own fault, not the game's. PvP is also said to be immensely fun, but I haven't tried that yet.
This sounds a lot better than what you were saying, and for the most part I agree with you.
Blizzard thinks adding more spells will get people to micro more, even though this is not the kind of micro people want to see and the amount of spells in the game is getting near silly at this point.
Its definitely true that in sc2 having more stuff means you will win nearly every fight. ( unless youre zerg against forcefields). Ive said this a few times already. Losing a battle in sc2 is extremely risky, because you will lose it extremely fast and your army will be obliterated. Now your opponent is at your base within 5 seconds and you're defenseless. The huge risk of moving outside your base is a big contributor to the 200/200 style of play.
The comparison to the souls games is a little shaky, but I guess the takeaway is that even a relatively simple control scheme can create very intricate and deep gameplay. And I agree.
The only thing I do disagree with is that starcraft shouldnt focus at all on production and economy. To me thats just a huge and staple part of the game. But I guess thats just a matter of personal preference.
Im glad you came back and explained your sentiment
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There should be a tournament using this Economy mod. That'd be pretty dope.
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United States4883 Posts
On April 19 2015 19:25 Arkaim wrote:
There should be a tournament using this Economy mod. That'd be pretty dope.
With a little more time and feedback, that's what we're hoping to do ^^
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On April 19 2015 14:11 ZeromuS wrote:
Nathanias had a showmatch with Catz And Iaguz playing.
Seems like its gonna take Zs a while to figure out the Z drone timings and how many to make but Catz brought up an interesting perspective. Zs will be greedy with hatches and probably cutting at around 12 workers per base on minerals while expanding and not necessarily hitting 16.
T and P will probably hit 16 cuz they expand so slowly anyway.
But he did say he enjoyed it and that it felt fun to play with so thats a positive! Even if he thinks Mules might need some tweaks in the future, but thats only one handful of games so we will see.
Once the vods are up I can post the link here. :D
Where are the Vods? I am excited.
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On April 19 2015 22:51 Kranyum wrote:Show nested quote +On April 19 2015 14:11 ZeromuS wrote:
Nathanias had a showmatch with Catz And Iaguz playing.
Seems like its gonna take Zs a while to figure out the Z drone timings and how many to make but Catz brought up an interesting perspective. Zs will be greedy with hatches and probably cutting at around 12 workers per base on minerals while expanding and not necessarily hitting 16.
T and P will probably hit 16 cuz they expand so slowly anyway.
But he did say he enjoyed it and that it felt fun to play with so thats a positive! Even if he thinks Mules might need some tweaks in the future, but thats only one handful of games so we will see.
Once the vods are up I can post the link here. :D Where are the Vods? I am excited.
http://www.twitch.tv/nathanias/v/4147117
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Its really hard to get people to play this mod, is there a channel/group on eu with people to play with?
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Italy12247 Posts
That really also depends on the cost efficiency of the units you use. WoL broodlord/infestor would have likely still remained op as hell for example. This model does give a bit more leeway for balancing the lategame though, which imo is one of its most appealing features.
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Canada13410 Posts
On April 20 2015 01:33 Barrin wrote:Show nested quote +On April 19 2015 23:20 velvex wrote:On April 19 2015 22:51 Kranyum wrote:On April 19 2015 14:11 ZeromuS wrote:
Nathanias had a showmatch with Catz And Iaguz playing.
Seems like its gonna take Zs a while to figure out the Z drone timings and how many to make but Catz brought up an interesting perspective. Zs will be greedy with hatches and probably cutting at around 12 workers per base on minerals while expanding and not necessarily hitting 16.
T and P will probably hit 16 cuz they expand so slowly anyway.
But he did say he enjoyed it and that it felt fun to play with so thats a positive! Even if he thinks Mules might need some tweaks in the future, but thats only one handful of games so we will see.
Once the vods are up I can post the link here. :D Where are the Vods? I am excited. http://www.twitch.tv/nathanias/v/4147117 Right after 48 minute mark: "... I wonder if inefficiently saturating your first 3 bases is enough to just turtle on. ..."
Inefficiently saturating the first 3 bases to have similar to hots income means you end cut 1 or 2 mineral workers per base IF someone even wants to do that. Its not anywhere near as low as 8 or 10 
Slowing down the mid game through overall lower income is up to blizzard we are just trying to be in line with their current design as much as possible. And trying to limit the mid game income to slow down the time to max out involves far more effort in balancing as well. Mineral to gas income ratios would change as the game goes longer with higher gas than minerals. So in terms of trying to change the aspect of SC2 that involves quick to max out income, thats something a little outside our current scope.
I think that would be the kind of thing blizz would need to examine for a very very long time. So in that scenario, if Blizz was to take major changes yearly in the off season like DotA and LoL then that would probably be something they collect data on for the 2017 season throughout the 2016 season for implementation.
I think the double harvest as is would would be something that could potentially happen sooner because it I think needs less testing than lowering the mining curve by a lot because it is so close to current HotS econ overall.
Still, the opened opportunity to expand vs a turtler should help in the long run. Though mech in HotS vs Zerg is brutal regardless of the economy I think haha
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Canada13410 Posts
On April 19 2015 23:37 ionONE wrote:
Its really hard to get people to play this mod, is there a channel/group on eu with people to play with?
The group "double harvest" now exists, its public as well so anyone can join
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Can I ask how the 9min per double harvest works? Do workers just mine 4.5 minerals and do your minerals go up by 4.5 behind the scenes? I was also wondering, let's say that 10m/DH is too much and 8m/DH not enough, are there variables Blizzard can tweak to get the desired income curves? (since 9m/DH might be awkward) Like harvest time or worker speed or so, since Blizzard can supposedly change hardcoded variables outsiders don't have access to.
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Canada13410 Posts
On April 20 2015 02:36 Grumbels wrote:
Can I ask how the 9min per double harvest works? Do workers just mine 4.5 minerals and do your minerals go up by 4.5 behind the scenes? I was also wondering, let's say that 10m/DH is too much and 8m/DH not enough, are there variables Blizzard can tweak to get the desired income curves? (since 9m/DH might be awkward) Like harvest time or worker speed or so, since Blizzard can supposedly change hardcoded variables outsiders don't have access to.
9 isn't possible for us to try.
It would just basket 4.5 each time and return 9 in the model we offer.
Of course, blizzard can find a very elegant solution with time. But that takes a long time. So we are thinking of a "good for proof of concept model" that we like.
In the end the income curve will HAVE to have an early bump if they want to speed up early game. Then they just need to decide how close to HotS they want it to reach on 16 mineral and 24 mineral breakpoints.
The only variables they can tweak without breaking the AI or rewriting it for workers is related to how much workers collect, and how long it takes them to collect those mnerals. That takes a lot of tweaking and lots of small fidgeting which is tough but I think we have something thats solid enough to start testing with then figure out small tweaks later. The goal is proof of concept for now, and if it works well then thats awesome, we can do small tweaks in the long run with blizzard if this was taken on as worth trying by them.
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Oh sorry, I remembered the 9m/dh graph and thought you tried it out.
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On April 19 2015 21:49 SC2John wrote:Show nested quote +On April 19 2015 19:25 Arkaim wrote:
There should be a tournament using this Economy mod. That'd be pretty dope. With a little more time and feedback, that's what we're hoping to do ^^
Well, I guess I need to re-install Starcraft.
If you guys need any help with the Galaxy Editor, pm know. As a custom map maker, I can do pretty much anything with it (like a graphic for workers who have 5 minerals).
On April 19 2015 04:23 SC2John wrote:
If the pro scene gets destroyed, but SC2 becomes a fun game to play, I'm not sure I could argue with it.
But they go hand in hand. The pro scene is a result of SC2 being a fun game to play.
If SC2 is a fun game to play, people will want to play it, learn and watch it and compete in tournaments for money. If it isn't fun, the opposite happens. And for a game to be fun, it has to be balanced.
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It's not just fun to play that makes it competitive. It also needs to have a fair level of competition. That's why the balance is important, not for it to be fun.
The showmatch was interesting. I agree with the caster that the Mules probably just threw the matchup out of balance. I think CatZ may have made some mistakes that upset the balance, such as not abusing the increased income for some clutch static defenses, as well as just other small mistakes. However, we'll see. The long Mech game was the one that worried me. CatZ played that very well, and just simply couldn't touch it. I think that's largely due to Mech being Mech.
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EPT
