EPTI agree. It's also similar to what Demuslim wrote on faceblog.
Simple Macro + too many units = all creativity boiling down to ONE strategy that is save against all harass and can win if you play that style better than your opponent.
TLO on Macro Mechanics - Page 8
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KT_Elwood
700 Posts
I agree. It's also similar to what Demuslim wrote on faceblog. Simple Macro + too many units = all creativity boiling down to ONE strategy that is save against all harass and can win if you play that style better than your opponent. | ||
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AbouSV
Germany1278 Posts
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fx9
117 Posts
Unlike articles from qxc. | ||
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EleanorRIgby
Canada3923 Posts
besides i think removing the macro mechanics gives zerg a clear advantage since so much of zerg apm is spent on queens and inject and without inject they wouldnt have that much to do. | ||
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i_am_Nite
Russian Federation66 Posts
On October 05 2015 20:50 EleanorRIgby wrote: great stuff tlo i pretty much agree with everything although i understand how some lower skilled/slower players might not agree. people have always put too much emphasis on apm, there have been a good number of pros with pretty low apm. there are diamond and even plat players with 200+ apm and then there are top master players with 100-120. besides i think removing the macro mechanics gives zerg a clear advantage since so much of zerg apm is spent on queens and inject and without inject they wouldnt have that much to do. If remove macro boosters - slower players (80-90% of sc2 community) will be able to play game. Lower eco grow and less actions required will give them time to build infrastructure and manage workers/army in early game. And get FUN of it. And faster/skiller players always find things where to spend their apm, multitask, attention. That's why skilled tlo cant win korean tourneys. Because if there no injections ingame - there are still lot of things to do. Mainly sc2 is strategy, not an arcade clicker game. So if u want to scale good player over low skilled - make difference in their decision around macro model. Not just how offen of fast they click with their macro-boosters. How about default townhall-worker model? Invest more money into townhall to increase speed of worker production for longer game or invest just in workers to get faster income early? Or maybe just stop (at optimal number) production of workers and go offensive? And if u fail - u lost money u invest in. It's already more flexible and deep mechanic than injections/mules u cast for nothing. It's just a bit broken with gameending harass and super-eco model with macro boosters. Currently usual win/lose reason in low-leagues (~up to diamond) is one of players lose to game itself. | ||
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i_am_Nite
Russian Federation66 Posts
On October 05 2015 21:50 i_am_Nite wrote: If remove macro boosters - slower players (80-90% of sc2 community) will be able to play game. Lower eco grow and less actions required will give them time to build infrastructure and manage workers/army in early game. And get FUN of it. And faster/skiller players always find things where to spend their apm, multitask, attention. That's why skilled tlo cant win korean tourneys. Because if there no injections ingame - there are still lot of things to do. Even if you are a zerg. Mainly sc2 is strategy, not an arcade clicker game. So if u want to scale good player over low skilled - make difference in their decision around macro model. Not just how offen of fast they click with their macro-boosters. How about default townhall-worker model? Invest more money into townhall to increase speed of worker production for longer game or invest just in workers to get faster income early? Or maybe just stop (at optimal number) production of workers and go offensive? And if u fail - u lost money u invest in. It's already more flexible and deep mechanic than injections/mules u cast for nothing. It's just a bit broken with gameending harass and super-eco model with macro boosters. Currently usual win/lose reason in low-leagues (~up to diamond) is one of players lose to game itself. | ||
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i_am_Nite
Russian Federation66 Posts
On October 05 2015 20:50 EleanorRIgby wrote: great stuff tlo i pretty much agree with everything although i understand how some lower skilled/slower players might not agree. people have always put too much emphasis on apm, there have been a good number of pros with pretty low apm. there are diamond and even plat players with 200+ apm and then there are top master players with 100-120. besides i think removing the macro mechanics gives zerg a clear advantage since so much of zerg apm is spent on queens and inject and without inject they wouldnt have that much to do. If remove macro boosters - slower players (80-90% of sc2 community) will be able to play game. Lower eco grow and less actions required will give them time to build infrastructure and manage workers/army in early game. And get FUN of it. And faster/skiller players always find things where to spend their apm, multitask, attention. That's why skilled tlo cant win korean tourneys. Because if there no injections ingame - there are still lot of things to do. Even if you are a zerg. Mainly sc2 is strategy, not an arcade clicker game. So if u want to scale good player over low skilled - make difference in their decision around macro model. Not just how offen of fast they click with their macro-boosters. How about default townhall-worker model? Invest more money into townhall to increase speed of worker production for longer game or invest just in workers to get faster income early? Or maybe just stop (at optimal number) production of workers and go offensive? And if u fail - u lost money u invest in. It's already more flexible and deep mechanic than injections/mules u cast for nothing. It's just a bit broken with gameending harass and super-eco model with macro boosters. Currently usual win/lose reason in low-leagues (~up to diamond) is one of players lose to game itself. Sorry, i try to edit and i think i miss the button TT | ||
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DaMaze
11 Posts
Lets convert the progamers' logic to playing an instrument: of course it's impressive - and also a tool of skill differentiation - if the player can play his instrument blindfolded, with one hand tied on the back, or is able to tune his strings while playing - BUT IS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MAKING MUSIC!! If a guitar player wants to shine, he shreds some Yngwie Malmsteen instead of noodling Lady in black. The difference compared to SC2: both songs remain music, both are fun to play - though representing completely different universes skillwise - and both still require some sense of musicality to sound well! SC2 should allow casuals to play simpler strategies while still having fun and give the pros tons of opportunities to execute more complex stuff. Macro mechanics are impressive, but useless barriers, which prevent most players from having fun with what should be the core of the game - strategic choice! | ||
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Little-Chimp
Canada948 Posts
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DaMaze
11 Posts
On October 05 2015 22:37 Little-Chimp wrote: Why do people keep saying sc2 is mostly strategy? The optimal strategy in sc2 is usually pretty clear cut, just depends what you can pull off. The mechanics are what make it so great. 'Cos it's called "real time strategy game", not "build learning and proper execution challenge"?  | ||
NonY
8748 Posts
On October 05 2015 22:25 DaMaze wrote: SC2 should allow casuals to play simpler strategies while still having fun and give the pros tons of opportunities to execute more complex stuff. I don't know why you think SC2 doesn't allow that. To continue comparing it to playing a musical instrument, I'd say that musicality is present at any technical proficiency of the instrument just like strategy is present at any technical proficiency of SC2. On October 05 2015 22:37 Little-Chimp wrote: Why do people keep saying sc2 is mostly strategy? The optimal strategy in sc2 is usually pretty clear cut, just depends what you can pull off. The mechanics are what make it so great. The main point of TLO's article is that SC2 isn't mostly about anything. You can make it about whatever you want. The optimal strategy is definitely not often clear. How would you even know? You never know for sure what strategies you aren't aware of until you become aware of them. But the fact is that history has shown many times over and over again that there's always some new discovery to be made that improves a strategy. Whatever we think is perfectly figured out right now remains perfect until it isn't anymore. That's just the way it goes. It is much easier to spot shortcomings in mechanics and they're a more tangible thing to work on and think about for improving. You're kinda more like an engineer working with the laws of science while other people can be scientists and figure out which laws need to be rewritten. The real thing that makes SC2 great is you can think the mechanics are what make it so great while accepting whatever level of strategic knowledge you have, while someone else can do the reverse by just accepting whatever mechanical ability they've passively accrued and focus completely on tinkering on build orders and trying new compositions and strategy overall. | ||
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DaMaze
11 Posts
On October 05 2015 22:54 NonY wrote: I don't know why you think SC2 doesn't allow that. Because even the simplest strategies require very good mechanical execution. In lower leagues the simplest strategy remains "survive the early game"! Just take a look at the early stage - no matter if it's a ling-all in, proxy 3-raxx or a cannon rush: All of these are near impossible to stop without knowing how to react properly IN ADVANCE and without executing the macro mechanics near perfect. There is absolutely no choice while playing, you either learned how to react and execute these steps well or you simply die. I know several casuals who just left SC2 because of cannon- and bunker rushes.On October 05 2015 22:54 NonY wrote: The real thing that makes SC2 great is you can think the mechanics are what make it so great while accepting whatever level of strategic knowledge you have, while someone else can do the reverse by just accepting whatever mechanical ability they've passively accrued and focus completely on tinkering on build orders and trying new compositions and strategy overall. I disagree, because as mentioned above: without proper macro mechanics there is no game to evolve. You just die to early cheese - and especially in lower leagues 80% of the games are early game all ins. Look at gold league ZvZ: even if you scout what's coming, missing 1 or 2 injects or building a few drones too many leads straight into gg. If you wanna play "just the way you like" as TLO proposed, you still need some really well trained mechanical skill to gain that freedom - even in lower leagues. Strategic choice or build orders may help you survive the early game, yes, but if you dare to play safe, you just die some minutes later due to the economic snowball. So this choice is nothing but an illusion imo. | ||
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MrInocence
United States172 Posts
To quote your post, TLO: " The less mistakes pros are making, the more it'll be about producing the perfect unit composition and we'll be back to what made SC2 stale previously." THAT is the problem with Starcraft II. Not the so called 'difficulty' of macro mechanics. The fact that WHAT you build is so much important than HOW you use the units. This was true in HotS and WoL. Then LotV came along and solved this issue by adding active abilities to every single unit and jamming in overly strong harass units, making most games a desperate dropship fly swatting competition, into one final spellcasting clusterf@ck of a battle. The REAL problem is that we as a community asked for simple, intuitive, and responsive move-and-shoot units that could be controlled to great effect. Not the thor. Not the warhound. Not the Colossus. Something like the marine, or the stalker, or even Zealots without a-move charge. That way, positioning and army control could overcome even the most adverse scenarios, leading to exciting back-and-forth gameplay and personality that can be seen through choice of units and control. ------------------------- In summary: TLO says clicks add tension between different choices of how to allocate scarce attention and APM. He says that without this tension caused by high maintenance macro, the game would be stale and revert to unit composition arms races like before. My response: You are right, the tension is interesting. However, even if you take that tension away, the core gameplay should be exciting. You indirectly pointed out the BIGGEST problem in Starcraft II. The core gameplay, if pros did not make mistakes as you said, is hard counter army composition arms racing, and throwing harass units at each other. Which you said yourself is STALE. That's because the REAL problem is piss poor quality unit design for many units. | ||
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NonY
8748 Posts
On October 05 2015 23:14 DaMaze wrote: Because even the simplest strategies require very good mechanical execution. In lower leagues the simplest strategy remains "survive the early game"! Just take a look at the early stage - no matter if it's a ling-all in, proxy 3-raxx or a cannon rush: All of these are near impossible to stop without knowing how to react properly IN ADVANCE and without executing the macro mechanics near perfect. There is absolutely no choice while playing, you either learned how to react and execute these steps well or you simply die. I know several casuals who just left SC2 because of cannon- and bunker rushes.I disagree, because as mentioned above: without proper macro mechanics there is no game to evolve. You just die to early cheese - and especially in lower leagues 80% of the games are early game all ins. Look at gold league ZvZ: even if you scout what's coming, missing 1 or 2 injects or building a few drones too many leads straight into gg. If you wanna play "just the way you like" as TLO proposed, you still need some really well trained mechanical skill to gain that freedom - even in lower leagues. Strategic choice or build orders may help you survive the early game, yes, but if you dare to play safe, you just die some minutes later due to the economic snowball. So this choice is nothing but an illusion imo. --if there isn't enough build variety in a certain skill bracket, shouldn't you be spreading the gospel of TLO in order to inspire people to do different things? --yeah the game takes SOME mechanics. but saying you need really well trained mechanical skill is blowing it out of proportion. again, it's like an instrument or a sport. without natural talent, some training and practice is required. i mean yeah 80%+ of the population in NA/EU is fat nowadays, but are we really gonna say that being able to play soccer requires well trained running abilities? no, a person who doesn't overeat and who gets some exercise everyday could have some fun playing soccer. it's not unreasonable. a similar modest but steady effort at sc2 will also yield results. are we supposed to change the nature of SC2 when someone quits it in less than a week? it's an activity that requires some skills that people aren't born with. most activities are. there's nothing wrong with that. the general population sucks at everything except the few things they've learned or got talent in. i find it really unfair to hold this against SC2. if someone is the type of person to flit from beginner-friendly activity to beginner-friendly activity, then SC2 multiplayer is not for them. enjoy the campaign and move on. --you win 50% of the games you play unless you're at the extreme top or extreme bottom of the ladder. the people doing those builds in bronze are not doing them like pros. if you consistently lose to people doing those builds, you'll start matching against people who can't even do those builds --you never gain complete freedom for the game to be played out the way you want it to be played out. because there's another person in the game. even when you have the knowledge and mechanics to repel every all-in, you can't stop people from doing what strategy they want. you just rack up wins against those people, which is hopefully satisfying enough to not be boring, and queue up again. | ||
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Spyridon
United States997 Posts
I do agree that unit compositions too mean too much, hard counters counter TOO hard. And I agree that it is a good thing that players have to choose where to spend their attention. But I have one major disagreement: I disagree with the conclusion that macro mechanics are the answer. Mechanics such as this should not be what separates "good" macro from "bad" macro. There should be more strategy involved, and making functions take "more clicks" should not be where players spend their attention. In my opinion, RTS's are stuck in the 90's. They are using outdated game design, and because SC2 is so well established as a tournament game, they are scared to change that. In game design, newer iterations should make controls easier, not harder. If you want to do something and it takes 5 clicks, in newer iterations of the game it should NOT take more than 5 clicks, and ideally it should take less. You see this in every genre of game, even the top tournament games/genres. Yes, that will free up clicks. Yes, players will have more "attention" to spend other places. So what should we do then? We should add some new mechanics that contribute to the game strategically! That has been my issue with macro mechanics all along. They are not well designed mechanics! More mechanics in the game are good, but they should be sufficiently rewarding, they should contribute strategically, they should be something that both players want to pay attention to & exploit to their advantage. They should encourage player vs player interaction. These current mechanics do very few, if any of these things... Controls, they should be improved. That is evolution and innovation in game design. And with the extra attention/APM offered, more mechanics that substantially affect the gameplay should be added. Not poorly designed mechanics such as spawn larvae that are a requirement more than an asset. The positives TLO mentioned that the macro mechanics have... Many other game mechanics can offer those same assets, and contribute much more to gameplay, than just making players have to spend their "attention and clicks" there. It should be more than that!! These mechanics don't offer any interesting play/counterplays. Even in TLO's explanation, they are simply just "another place to spend your attention". I honestly believe RTS's popularity is dying out, not because of MOBA's, but because the game design has stagnated. Because of this, I do not see any new RTS's gaining any real popularity until one of them shakes up the genre and breaks the mold. As everyone here knows, a well designed RTS can be amazing. But overall, SC2 is not very innovative compared to SC/BW at all. And most of the updates/changes in game design have not been positive ones over the previous iterations. Economy, unit design, the damage/armor system... all of those things have degraded in the transition of SC1>SC2, and have caused endless problems that still have not been solved after so many years... | ||
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Asamu1
8 Posts
If the game mechanics are too easy, there will less space for innovation and amazing come backs. Few cookie-cutter build orders will dominate. Players will have to follow a mainstream metagame more strictly and the sandbox will shrink significantly. My problem with this statement is that it's already been shown false, and that has been acknowledged by Blizzard in one of the community feedback updates in regards to the pro archon mode tournaments that were held while mm were removed; even in archon mode, pro players were still making both macro and micro mistakes. If you take away macro mechanics, or make macro easier in general, you take away the choice and freedom that players have to differentiate themselves. Ironically micro players, who are often said to benefit the most from LotV, will actually be the ones who suffer the most from that - when everyone can focus on micro, they won't be able to set themselves apart as much anymore. He's overestimating how much APM macro mechanics actually take; it's ~10 on 3 bases, which is almost nothing for a top level player, but matters a lot for the low APM players.Besides, both of these statements were shown to be false when MM were removed, as blizz acknowledged in one of the community updates... That said, he's also a Zerg player, and inject is not comparable to the other macro mechanics. It's comparable to making units, because that's the impact it has; you don't lose a bit of economy or delay a timing by 10s for missing it, you lose larva, which has the same impact as missing a production cycle for Terran or Toss, not missing a mule/chrono. It's also the only thing that makes Zerg look back at their base once in a while, which is why the people who actually know what they are talking about are suggesting removing Mule/Chrono, but keeping inject in some form or other. I wouldn't disagree with his article if he were only referring to Inject, but to generalize the Zerg mechanics to the other races is sort of silly. As Terran/Toss there are other things to force you to look away from a fight and spend APM, and their armies are required to micro more than a Zerg army is in most cases. It's not that his argument is entirely incorrect, but that he's overestimating the impact that the macro mechanics actually have. Protoss already has warp gate, which forces them to look away from the fight, and prevents them from making units without moving the screen like Terran and Zerg can, which explains why they made Chrono automatic rather than keeping it as it was before. Terran and Protoss also have to build significantly more structures than Zerg does, which means more time spent looking at their base for macro. Zerg can do almost everything without looking away from their army, and much of their macro can be done with the minimap (Inject can be done using the minimap, which makes it incredibly easy/quick compared to the other mechanics). The only things Zerg actually have to look away from their army for are spreading creep and making tech structures, and the number of structures they have to make is minimal. | ||
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i_am_Nite
Russian Federation66 Posts
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FabledIntegral
United States9232 Posts
On October 06 2015 02:25 i_am_Nite wrote: hey guys, how about advanced micro-mechanics? When u command "attack", units gain 1 sec buff +50% damage. And it's 1 sec cooldown. So you need to attack-move every 1+ sec, not 0,9 (it's on cd) but ~1 sec. So then u will fight better. Ah? So that's how macro mechanics affect macro. I'm overact obviously, but we can tweak numbers and blizz can implement this. You could also implement the exact opposite, where queuing up units would not cost any resources until the unit is actually built, therefore reducing your macro. We could also quite simply get rid of supply depots, overlords, and pylons. There's a balance. | ||
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crazedrat
272 Posts
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Little-Chimp
Canada948 Posts
On October 05 2015 22:54 NonY wrote: I don't know why you think SC2 doesn't allow that. To continue comparing it to playing a musical instrument, I'd say that musicality is present at any technical proficiency of the instrument just like strategy is present at any technical proficiency of SC2. The main point of TLO's article is that SC2 isn't mostly about anything. You can make it about whatever you want. The optimal strategy is definitely not often clear. How would you even know? You never know for sure what strategies you aren't aware of until you become aware of them. But the fact is that history has shown many times over and over again that there's always some new discovery to be made that improves a strategy. Whatever we think is perfectly figured out right now remains perfect until it isn't anymore. That's just the way it goes. It is much easier to spot shortcomings in mechanics and they're a more tangible thing to work on and think about for improving. You're kinda more like an engineer working with the laws of science while other people can be scientists and figure out which laws need to be rewritten. The real thing that makes SC2 great is you can think the mechanics are what make it so great while accepting whatever level of strategic knowledge you have, while someone else can do the reverse by just accepting whatever mechanical ability they've passively accrued and focus completely on tinkering on build orders and trying new compositions and strategy overall. hmm yeah I suppose I underestimated the strategy component there. It's easy to get stuck in the same strategy for a while sometimes until someone breaks the mold for a large group of people. Nice post | ||
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