SC2 could be so much more - design and balance - Page 5

On November 04 2015 04:30 Mjolnir wrote:
I have no issues with multi-building select, or being able to select your entire army and group it on one hotkey.

I do have issues with some of the unit design. It's blasphemous to say on this site but some units are straight up OP to the point where they dominate the strats used by that race. I won't mention them so as not to get a ban-hammer-beat-down but the balance in the game feels off. I'm not even talking about race-specific win-rates, I'm talking about balance with regard to unit parity.

Ah well, there's always the next Warcraft RTS.

On November 04 2015 04:52 KrOeastbound wrote:


Yeah because Warcraft was always a fantastically balanced RTS series :p

On November 04 2015 04:57 Mjolnir wrote:


I didn't say it was balanced but it would be a nice change after 5 years of SC2.

On November 04 2015 02:44 NewSunshine wrote:

What about Viper's response makes no sense? You came into the thread and wasted no time stirring the shit and blowing smoke up your own arse, and he explained why your post isn't needed. So did I. This is a discussion about general design and where Blizzard failed in those areas of design, to further our understanding of the game in a substantial way. Arguing about specific solutions to a problem is a bridge this discussion doesn't intend to cross - because to truly solve a problem you must first identify the exact parameters of the problem. It's all about analyzing the design of the game and what makes it feel like it's becoming less fun to play. You can strip away all of the suggested changes in the OP and it still stands as a strong analysis of SC2's weak points, as a piece of design. You're barking up the wrong tree.

On November 03 2015 09:49 Hider wrote:When you make a unit slower it doesn't automatically become a positional unit. No it just becomes even more deathballish. To actually make it a proper positional unit it would need to be balanced around less than 0.75 movement speed.

I also find your specific Colossus attack suggestion to be too complicated. I don't think people will enjoy having more "complicated" micro. Just let the Colossus be a simple unit that you can pull back if target fired.

Interesting micro is when you reward movement. Target firing a forcefield is not movement and almost noone is gonna find that enjoyable. Forcefield isn't fun and never will be regardless of how you attempt to add countermicro.

Too an extent true, yet still a bit unnuanced. Smart cast means abilities needs to scale worse while being good in low numbers. That's actually easily doable.

Slightly unnuanced again. The issue with super mobility only comes if it doesn't have a strong counter. Mass blink stalkers was a problem vs zerg because they had no hardcounter to the stalker. Terran on the other hand did in the Maurauder. So the point is that you can actually make the Adept quite strong vs certain units (light) as long as the enemy have obvious tier 1 counter tools.

You should only opt for ability redesign that makes them feel more powerful if you make them "harder" to use as well. In your suggestion this will just be another ability spam protoss have to perform.

The proper fix here is to reduce Medivac healing rate while adding more mobility to the Immortal (so it can defend drops better) and make sure that protoss production matches that of terran/zerg slightly better. On top of that, medivac speed boost could also be reduced to 50% and suddenly an overpowered PO won't feel neccasary anymore.

And the outcome would also be terrible gameplay, lots of "hit that storm or die" situations.

but blizzard actually already increased neural back to 9range in LotV.

I think blizzard is hitting their design goals with that and I believe if they just made hightech more fun than Colossus or Skytoss turtling people wouldn't complain

And not just in few cases, but across the board when just change up half of the zerg race.

And yes, that means you should allow people to have the most basic army moving skills of a progamer.

You can easily make the game harder in other ways that are much less interfering with the most basics that everyone wants to enjoy

On November 04 2015 06:12 Hider wrote:
Let's look at the actual course of events.

1. OP writes 31K words (yes that many) containing an analysis of the design flaws of Blizzard and some design suggestions

2. Everyone else goes OMG BLIZZARD YOU SUCK I AGREE WITH YOU circkle mode (you are the worst one here). No actual design-realated discussions are being had in this proces. It's just venting.

On November 04 2015 06:12 Hider wrote:
3. I discuss some of the flaws of OPs suggestions from a design perspective. E.g. OP wants to promote less movement based micro and more "click-micro", he also doesn't take into account that you can make abilites scale worse and that slower units doesn't become more positional but just more detahballish.

On November 04 2015 06:12 Hider wrote:
4. Red Vipers mentions how we should not discuss suggestions. Only design. That obviously doens't make sense because I am the only one who discusses design and everyone else are circlejerking.

On November 04 2015 06:12 Hider wrote:
6. You respond how we should not discuss +5 second bunker BT. Seriously how on earth did you come up with example. I am discussing design related topics. You are not just. You are just story-telling and whining over Blizzard. That's less productive than discussing suggestions even though they are never going to be implemented.

If anything; i believe you are being disrespectful to OP: He is basically writing a master's thesis lenght document and all you do is use it to vent. Nooone is even asking into some of the specifics he says. Why not just open a new thread and call it "I WANT TO VENT-THREAD". That would make more sense for what is occuring now.

A dicussion takes place in what OP is saying and almost noone (besides one guy who talked about MBS) are doing that.

On November 04 2015 06:29 Nazara wrote:
Those situations were the most epic moments of Brood War - and it is missing in SC2. I never said I wanted to increase amount of spellcasters or abilities - a lot of them could be changed to passive abilities - see my suggestion for Void Ray.

I think blizzard is hitting their design goals with that and I believe if they just made hightech more fun than Colossus or Skytoss turtling people wouldn't complain

And not just in few cases, but across the board when just change up half of the zerg race.

And yes, that means you should allow people to have the most basic army moving skills of a progamer.

You can easily make the game harder in other ways that are much less interfering with the most basics that everyone wants to enjoy

On November 04 2015 05:19 Big J wrote:
So I'm writing this while reading and skimming through the OP. A lot of the things have been said before and I'm not going to go point by point on everything, but here are a few bulletpoints.

• Overkill is mostly in the game, prominently it is missing from the siege tank and marine but many other units, in particular units like stalkers, adepts or roaches suffer severely from it and it is amongst
  
• Smartcast is good, it makes spells more accesible to everyone. We hear nothing but complains about the amount of abilities that you have to manually click here and there and you want to inherently increase this by a huge amount. I disagree with this sentiment. And the outcome would also be terrible gameplay, lots of "hit that storm or die" situations. Especially if you don't implement that with a control group limit at the same time, because then outmaneuvering those few spells would be just so easy, while being so demanding, that the a storm needed to do 200damage if it couldn't be spammed.
  
• You suggest Neural to be tried at 8range from 7, but blizzard actually already increased neural back to 9range in LotV. In general I don't like the infestor suggestions.
  
• Warpgate and early bandaids make Protoss just different from what you and many (partly including me) want it to be. That is they are a race that is forced to tech high very fast while sitting tight early. I think blizzard is hitting their design goals with that and I believe if they just made hightech more fun than Colossus or Skytoss turtling people wouldn't complain. Units like disruptors have the potential to fix this, though I think the effort isn't big enough because most Protoss hightier units are too irreplaceable by their own design.
  
• Pathing is a very interesting discussion, but I'm afraid it influences too much of the game to really alter it at this point. An RTS game has to be built around it's clumping/pathing/formation options, if you alter that too much you have to go all the way back to the drawing board with stats and unit massing dynamics.
  Furthermore I gotta say that SC2 pathing - in comparison to many, especially older RTS games - gets the most important things right, which is that units take efficient paths without horrible bandaids and that they don't scatter completely or get stuck at corners and stuff. There are however quite some things that can be thrown into the discussion, from too efficient movement (damage density of singlefire units) over not efficient enough movement (units standing too close to each other suffering too much AoE when unmicroed) to the general question of whether to keep formations or clump or scatter at target locations. A lot of that is once again a question of which tools you add to the game to handle what the pathing does.
  
• Many of your ideas go way over board and just have no place in SC2. You basically just introduce "new" units with an old name and skin in many cases. And not just in few cases, but across the board when just change up half of the zerg race.
  
• Hydralisks are not good vs lings, they are really terrible against them. Also you just missinterprete the role of the hydralisk as that of the roach with antiair. You want a gas-cheaper hydralisk to include more gasheavy units in your compositions, but as a matter of fact when you go for a roach/hydra composition the hydralisk takes the role itself, being the more scarce "zerg-colossus" type of dps unit behind the meatshield. (in a much better way than the colossus because the hydralisk can be killed without the zerg just losing and has more distinct counters in the form of micro be it splash or focusfire)
  
• I agree on the thing with Gateway units and terrain-ignoring factors pretty much completely. It is disheartening to play against Protoss when they can move their whole stalkerarmy up a cliff, tunnel through and into my army and close gaps in a heartbeat. So much micro and positioning is lost when you can't block close a ramp against adepts with queens, or your tank is just a target for blink.
  
• Disagree completely with scouting. It's a number one reason why RTS games are not keeping up.
  1) new players are way too scared. If you ever watch a new player play, he will sit in his base, build canons for 10mins, make an expansion, try to make an army and then attack at 20mins. That people then turn their back and consider SC2 as boring (too much time needs to be spent preparing) and stressful (never know where the opponent is) is only logical.
  2) The burden should always be on the player that wants to "make the play". It should be hard to to hide your strategy. That's what we call defenders advantage. MobA's achieve that in a spectacularily easy way: They give you vision of most of the map. It's rather simple to track opponent's not being where they should be due to tower and creep vision. This leads to very stable gameplay in which surprise tactics are considered great highlights that require high amounts of skill (coordination, tempo) instead cheap cheeses that require high amounts of skill to stop ("oh, I didn't find Waldo").
  Imo future RTS games should consider inverting fog of war for that, i.e. the map is revealed and you building structures (or similar mechanics to creep spread) is what creates fog of war around your bases and on the map.
  
• unlimited selection is great and a massive improvement to the enjoyability of Starcraft and RTS games in general. Even in 1999 or 2000 when I first got my hands on Starcraft my first big relief was that I could select more units than in WC2. Not all of them, but at least more.
  
• Many of your arguments are the typical broodwar-fan arguments that are only about creating a hard game. Not about a fun game. I think this line of thought suffers from a distinct lack of imagination. You can easily make the game harder in other ways that are much less interfering with the most basics that everyone wants to enjoy. And yes, that means you should allow people to have the most basic army moving skills of a progamer. Because that's so core to the game that you gotta ask yourself why you play a game that is said to be all about big armies when you have to spend hours, days, weeks just that this big army actually starts making sense.
  

Sure I haven't covered everything

On November 04 2015 06:29 Nazara wrote:
No, just no. Please, this is the anti-thesis of what makes competitive games fun - the joy of improving yourself. Nobody applauded when Blizzard said "oh, we also tested auto-building/auto-unit training". Make the game to easy, and there will be no pros - they won't have enough room to shine, and mere GM players will take games off them on regular basis. No one wants that.

On November 03 2015 18:22 Hider wrote:


In that regard, OP's 10K words are also pointless because nothing of it is gonna happen, but you can still have a discussion. My little vent had nothing to do with discussion suggestions or not. Instead, my point is the ridiculous circlejerk where people hate X and then they see Y that is the opposite of X, and love every single thing about Y.

Since noone actually seemed to comment on the specifics, it semes that I am the only one who actuall critically read what he wrote.

But ofc I overall agree with his philsophy that LOTV could have been so much more. But rewarding more clicks for the sake of clicks is not turning LOTV into a better game.



All the "great" stuff came from BW from BW numbers, design and balance. In terms of new innovative stuff, what is "succesful" about Starbow?

Mods don't work; partly because the arcade is bad, but also because the designers of the mod aren't competent + cannot work full time on it.

On November 04 2015 08:36 Lexender wrote:


Not really, since StarBow came the number 1 problem is and has always been the fact that there is no ladder, it doesn't matter if there is thousands playing if finding a game with some one of similar skill didn't take more time than playing the game itself.

On November 04 2015 11:07 opisska wrote:
All these threads are so misguided from the start. How many times do you need to be reminded that if you "remove" all the UI simplifications (that is, add UI barriers), nobody except for a couple hardcores will play the game? It does not matter at all that it would be "better" in some obscenely sublime way, because it would be a complete flop. What is the point of a perfect competitive game that is played by a hundred of players?

You have all the space in the arcade for stuff like this, but please, for the love of what is holy to your favourite SC race, if you want to discuss the direction of the "real" SC2, you just need to be realistic. Otherwise is just empty nonsense.

On November 04 2015 11:07 opisska wrote:
All these threads are so misguided from the start. How many times do you need to be reminded that if you "remove" all the UI simplifications (that is, add UI barriers), nobody except for a couple hardcores will play the game? It does not matter at all that it would be "better" in some obscenely sublime way, because it would be a complete flop. What is the point of a perfect competitive game that is played by a hundred of players?

You have all the space in the arcade for stuff like this, but please, for the love of what is holy to your favourite SC race, if you want to discuss the direction of the "real" SC2, you just need to be realistic. Otherwise is just empty nonsense.