Woah! Sweet writeup. If the early injection is too powerful then have you considered maybe blizzard making it upgradable or maybe changing the way it works? Either that or someone has to come up with builds from P and T that can counter it :/. Pretty damn interesting man, cant wait to play it!!

fanatacist

10319 Posts

September 03 2009 00:24 GMT

#42

On September 03 2009 09:20 Kazius wrote:
These things will get sorted out sooner or later - that's what betas are for!

Anyways, did you guys try proxy rax/gate builds in order to snipe the queen early on?

Proxy pylon is ridiculously powerful with warpgates in both PvT and PvP, did not try it on Z.

Kennigit

Canada19447 Posts

September 03 2009 00:28 GMT

#43

To add to this, i didn't play nearly as much as hotbid, zatic chill and intrigue but when i played hotbid's zerg it was ridiculous. In one game I tried expanding with T at what i felt was a safe timing based on the amount of maurader/marine that i had...hotbid flew some mutas in and they died pretty easily to turrets/marine...i thought i was safe, i even had a bunker sitting in front of my nat CC when all of a sudden 100 hydra's appeared and completely raped me. I remember typing "what the fuck is this shit" before leaving.

It's not that big a deal because obviously the numbers can be tweaked to balance it. What i found more interesting is everyone saying zerg is weak and then that Gamereplays article suggesting that Zerg is the defensive race...what? It's the complete opposite, T and P are completely in the dark and i had no idea how to react because i simply didn't know what zerg was doing.

InToTheWannaB

United States4770 Posts

September 03 2009 00:29 GMT

#44

well the good news is it seems simple to fix. What if blizzard just makes it spawn say 2-3 extra larva rather then 4. Then your basicly working off 2 hatch again right?

wok

United States504 Posts

September 03 2009 00:29 GMT

#45

Wasn't mentioned so...
disruptor impenetrable walls should make zerglings instantly useless on a FE... then tech straight to stalkers.
Of course I wasn't there, but based on the battle reports, that was the strategy.

XXehh

Canada122 Posts

September 03 2009 00:36 GMT

#46

It seems so obvious that the overpowering of the queen is because you get her so early, wouldn't a 50-100 gas cost force a later queen and balance (at least a bit) this?

Hapahauli

United States9305 Posts

September 03 2009 00:37 GMT

#47

It seems like a lot of the problems arise from the queen being such an early game unit. It can be made from a spawning pool for crying out loud. Moving it back to lair tech would probably fix the issues of T and P being blind in the early game (delay the rush), and encourage the zerg to tech.

DragoonPK

3259 Posts

September 03 2009 00:39 GMT

#48

TL Staff is so awesome, already identifying crucial things by playing the game for 2 days ^^! Now thats why TL is the best community EVER EVER!

Xiphos

Canada7507 Posts

September 03 2009 00:40 GMT

#49

Thanks for this writeup! Personally, I think having 3 Larvaes pops out will be just fine but even that would be imba. I think the Queens should atleast get SOME gas before its reproduction or have it ability researched.

prOxi.Beater

Denmark626 Posts

September 03 2009 00:45 GMT

#50

Exciting article. The zerg macro mechanic is really interesting since it's very different from that of the terran and protoss. Terran and protoss both receive a boost to their mining, meaning they should theoretically have more money than the zerg to work with, whereas zerg saves a ton of money on extra hatcheries.

The real trick for Blizzard here is to make make T/P's added income and zerg's money savers cancel each other out. Currently it sounds like zerg is saving way too much money and gaining way too much production for virtually nothing. T/P has to spend a lot of time and money building up production facilities whereas the zerg simply has this added production for the cost of 2 supply and 150 minerals.

I'm sure Blizzard kind of overpowered inject larva on purpose to see how people were going to abuse it (I think I remember reading somewhere that the ability originally spawned 3 larva) and will correct it in due time

Wr3k

Canada2533 Posts

September 03 2009 00:47 GMT

#51

I'm sure blizzard will become aware when beta hits. Hopefully this gets nicely balanced.

Archerofaiur

United States4101 Posts

September 03 2009 00:49 GMT

#52

Is it possible that Spawn Larva is supposed to be this powerful. From what ive heard the Obelisk can pretty much give protoss all the minerals they want. So you basically have unlimited unit production versus unlimited minerals.

Did the Protoss players you were playing against have an abundance of minerals? Were they using Proton Charge regularly? Or is Spawn Larva really that much better then Proton Charge?

Plexa

Aotearoa39261 Posts

September 03 2009 00:49 GMT

#53

I love how this article completely contrasts with the view point of gamereplays

iSiN

United States1075 Posts

September 03 2009 00:50 GMT

#54

I kind of had the same feeling as hot_bid when it comes to the queen. Maybe if they made her more frail or require a lair it would balance everything out. I don't really thing inject was TOO over powered but it definitely didn't seem like a T1 ability.

Possibly have a different macro option (that costs energy) for her (to keep up with P and T not over take them) and make the injection trainable at lair as to preserve the early defensive capabilities.

Sayer

United States403 Posts

September 03 2009 00:55 GMT

#55

Wow.. just wow... Best news Ive read as of late, after reading all the negative stuff about zerg, especially reading gamereplay.org's review right before this one.

I know it was just 2 days of experiment, everything will be balanced by the game is on the market, but it just feels really really good and resfreshing to hear some awesome stuff about zerg for the first time.

Thank you so much for this Hot_Bid!!

Shikyo

Finland33997 Posts

September 03 2009 00:55 GMT

#56

Watch Blizzard still think the Zerg is underpowered and make their units stronger and release beta and go O_o when suddenly 99% of the games are ZvZ.

yh93kim

Korea (South)62 Posts

September 03 2009 00:57 GMT

#57

If Blizzard was informed of this, SC2 will be delayed until 2012.

SilverskY

Korea (South)3086 Posts

September 03 2009 00:58 GMT

#58

lmfao, by the sounds of it, Zerg sounds ridiculously strong...

zeppelin

United States565 Posts

September 03 2009 00:58 GMT

#59

On September 03 2009 09:49 Archerofaiur wrote:
Is it possible that Spawn Larva is supposed to be this powerful. From what ive heard the Obelisk can pretty much give protoss all the minerals they want. So you basically have unlimited unit production versus unlimited minerals.

Did the Protoss players you were playing against have an abundance of minerals? Were they using Proton Charge regularly? Or is Spawn Larva really that much better then Proton Charge?

I didn't get to play with them but in my games i was using proton charge regularly the entire game and constantly had a mineral/gas imbalance. You simply don't get enough gas to tech any faster and against that many extra zerg units, 20% more zealots/cannons aren't going to matter.

fanatacist

10319 Posts

September 03 2009 01:00 GMT

#60

On September 03 2009 09:57 yh93kim wrote:
If Blizzard was informed of this, SC2 will be delayed until 2012.

It's a big problem with many viable solutions. Just to illustrate the things they could do:

1. Increase the mana cost.
2. Increase the length of the spell.
3. Make queens cost more (minerals, or maybe make them cost gas).
4. Put queens higher up the tech tree.
5. Make their spell researchable for gas.
6. Some other alternative, like producing a queen will make that hatchery not have any larva until the queen is produced, for example.

And you can obviously use any combination of the above to balance it. It's just a question of what path they choose and how well they playtest it.