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[SC2B] Missing the Point
March 16th, 2010 04:21 GMT
Everyone agrees that something needs to be done about the lack of a higher ground advantage. What people do not agree about is what exactly needs to be done, and how Blizzard can go about adding positional depth to Starcraft 2. The purpose for me in this article is to clear up some of the confusion regarding randomness in Starcraft and Starcraft 2, hopefully leading to more constructive discussions.
Note: All the examples used will be in Starcraft 1 terms. This is because I am more comfortable with these terms, and most of you have more experience with the units and ideas in Starcraft 1, making the examples easier to understand. However, these examples should be just as applicable to Starcraft 2.
The Issue
Why should there be a higher ground advantage? Without higher ground advantage, the player with the bigger army will almost always win the battle, as there are very few tactical opportunities for the player with the smaller army. What this means is that unit production can never be compromised in favor of other goals like teching or expanding. While teching and expanding does occur in Starcraft 2 right now, it is only viable when it has no significant impact on unit production. This leads to a very linear game development, where both players need to mass armies in order to stay in the game. By giving the defender a higher ground advantage, the defender can choose to forgo unit production in order to get an extra expansion or to get faster tech.
A second reason why there should be a higher ground advantage has to do with tactics. With higher ground advantage, a smaller army can outmaneuver and defeat a much larger army with superior combat tactics that utilizes the higher ground advantage. It also provides the losing player in a battle with a position to retreat to, which makes it less likely that games will be decided by the first big battle. Finally, it prevents the game from turning into a macro competition where large armies clash in the middle of the map to decide each match. When a battle can be decided by who holds the higher ground, tactics such as positioning and deciding when to attack become more important and players have more tactical options available to them.
 Position is should be everything.
The Suggestion
If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me
- Macbeth, Act I - Scene III
The suggestion being examined is straightforward. When units attack from lower ground to higher ground, they should have a certain chance to miss. What this chance should be is up for discussion, but I feel that, combined with the current sight mechanic where lower ground units cannot attack higher ground units without vision of the high ground, a 25% miss chance would be a sufficient higher ground advantage.
The Misconceptions
The following is a list of misconceptions people hold regarding the miss-dynamic:
1. It is the same as damage reduction, just worse.
2. You can miss ten shots in a row.
3. A bit of bad luck will cost you the game.
4. Having a game that is not perfectly predictable is bad.
5. Professional players would prefer no miss chance.
6. It makes the game random.
Some of you have all these misconceptions, while others have only a few. In the end, they are all almost entirely wrong.
It is the same as damage reduction, just worse.
Whether the miss-dynamic is better or worse than damage reduction remains to be seen. However, it is definitely not the same as damage reduction, even on average. Here is a scenario which was given in a previous news post which illustrates how they differ.
Miss Chance and Damage Reduction A tank does 35 damage a shot, marines have 40hp. Normal: Two shots kill a marine. 50% miss: Four shots kill a marine (on average). 50% less damage: Three shots kill a marine (17.5 * 3 = 52.5). 33% miss: Three shots kill a marine (on average). 33% less damage: Two shots kill a marine (23 * 2 = 46).
Because units do more damage than is needed, damage reduction can have little to no impact on the number of shots required to kill a unit. On the other hand, with the miss-dynamic, the number of shots required to kill a unit increases proportionately with the chance to miss. This makes it easier to balance the miss-dynamic than the damage-reduction dynamic.
You can miss ten shots in a row.
If the miss chance of a single shot is 25%, then the chances of missing 10 shots in a row is roughly 0.0001%, or one in a million. To put this into context, if you buy fifteen lottery tickets, you have a better chance of winning the lottery than missing 10 shots in a row. The odds start looking a bit better at five shots in a row, which has a roughly one in a thousand chance of occurring. So it is conceivable that, over the course of a few games, you will at some point have five dragoons attacking who all miss the same shot. Will five dragoons missing the same shot be game changing? Probably not, as we will see in the next misconception.
A bit of bad luck will cost you the game.
You are fighting the most important fight of the game, you miss a few shots, and suddenly your entire army is destroyed and you lose the game. This is everybody's biggest fear, leading to one of the most pervasive misconceptions, that a bit of bad luck can determine a game. It seems logical too: In Starcraft, small things can be very important, so surely missing multiple shots in a row (or hitting them) can have a game changing impact?
Let's take a look at a poker analogy. In poker it often occurs that one player holds the best hand, but that there is a small chance that the other player can make a winning hand on the final card. When the leading player is all-in, a bad card can knock him out of a tournament or lose him a lot of money. This is the kind of unpredictability that most Starcraft players want to avoid. The difference between these two situations, however, is that Starcraft players are never "all-in." In a battle between 12 dragoons and 6 siege tanks, a minimum of 120 shots will need to be fired to kill all the units. That means that each shot carries very little weight on its own. It is like a poker player that loses 1% of his stack to a bad beat. It's annoying, but not game changing, and if the player plays 100 hands, chances are he will make the money back up.
A second important factor is that a player can cut his losses in Starcraft. In poker, things often go wrong on the last card, and a player loses everything. Starcraft does not work this way. If Player A misses five shots in a row, then he has the opportunity to cut his losses and run (hopefully to high ground). If the battle turns against a player, he can always retreat, minimizing his losses. So the effects of bad luck, which are small to begin with, can be further minimized by retreating.
People have pointed out that retreating is more difficult in SC2. However, retreating from an army that is on a different level is unlikely to be a problem as there are chokes and ledges for the attacker to contend with.
Does this mean that bad luck is unlikely to ever cost a game? No. There is one type of game where luck can have an impact; a situation where a single unnecessary death can decide a game: Cheese. When going for a Dragoon break against Terran, getting a lucky few hits onto the higher ground can destroy a tank unexpectedly, while missing a few shots can end the cheese and leave the attacker at a large disadvantage. The question is, is it a bad thing that there is an element of luck involved in cheesing? The answer is an easy no: without luck, cheese would not be possible. If cheese could be predicted perfectly, it would either always work or not work at all, making it either game-ruining or useless. Unpredictability is both the strength and the weakness of cheese, and having a lucky shot hit, or an unlucky shot miss, is what cheese is all about.
Having a game that is not perfectly predictable is bad.
Bad for who or what? It is definitely not bad for the spectators. Few things in Starcraft are more epic than watching a mine dissolve in a puddle of blue goo, or seeing a scarab come so close to obliterating a stream of peons before harmlessly fizzling out. Unpredictability makes professional gaming more exciting for another reason too: If games were decided purely on skill, Flash and Jaedong would be expected to win all their games and there would be no enjoyment in watching them play. However, when there is a bit of unpredictability, then upsets can happen, making the games more exciting to watch for everyone.
 Will it? Won't it? The Broodwar Protoss user's eternal dilemma.
Unpredictability in battles is definitely not bad for the depth of the game either. The more unpredictable a battle is, the more decisions a player needs to make. When there is a fixed damage reduction, the only decision players need to make is "Will I win this battle if I attack now?" to which the answer will be either yes or no. If there is an unpredictable element, the player needs to constantly answer the following questions "Am I winning the battle?" "Are my chances to win good enough to persevere?" "Should I retreat, or wait a bit before retreating?". Even the question of whether to attack or not is more complex "I should win the battle, but is it worth taking the risk now?" or, "I probably won't win this battle, but is gambling in the hopes of getting lucky my best chance at winning the game?." As such, unpredictability (in moderation) in battles is not bad for the depth of the game.
The only thing that unpredictability could harm is the players themselves, which leads us to the fifth misconception...
Professional players would prefer no miss chance.
The idea here is that no professional player would like to have unpredictability in their chosen career. Unfortunately, almost every sport in the world has unpredictability included, from a strong wind on a day of golf to the deflected goal in soccer. All sports have unpredictable factors included, and they are simply part of the job description. In fact, the ability to cope with unpredictable factors is often what distinguishes champions from average players. This point is supported by the fact that many of the best Starcraft players have stated that they would prefer the miss-rate mechanic over a damage-reduction mechanic.
It makes the game random.
All of the previous misconceptions can be condensed into one belief: Adding a miss-chance will make the game random. However, as I have shown here, these misconceptions are just that: Misconceptions.
Adding a 25% miss-rate will not turn SC2 into a coin-flip. The chances of game-changing random things happening are minute due to the size of the sample. When game-changing things do happen, they are a good thing, because they allow cheese to be viable. When non-critical cases of misfortune occur, they are also a good thing, because they reward players who are better at reading the game, making quick choices, and playing intelligently. The cost of these non-critical cases of misfortune is also relatively low.
In the end, the game would be anything but random. The higher ground mechanic would have a small impact on the predictability of the game, the amount of unpredictability it adds will be small, and the lack of predictability can be controlled by the players.
The Pros and Cons
The advantages of having a miss-dynamic have already been mentioned, but they can be summarized as:
1. All higher ground advantages
2. Greater game-depth
3. More exciting
4. Allow cheese
5. Easier to balance
The disadvantages have also been mentioned and they are:
1. More difficult to make decisions
2. Less predictable
3. Allow cheese
The disadvantages are primarily disadvantages on a lower level. Difficulty to make decisions can lead to indecisiveness in low level games. Allowing cheese can lead to "SC2 is all about cheesing!!!" blogs. Having the game be less predictable can lead to players losing the game because they fail to adjust their strategy during the battle. However, for the exact reason these disadvantages have a detrimental effect on lower levels, they have a positive effect on the higher levels.
The Alternatives
As the point of this article is to encourage informed discussion, the alternatives should be examined briefly. To me, there seem to be three viable alternatives: damage reduction, range reduction, and attack-speed reduction.
Damage reduction
The most common alternative is a direct damage reduction. The advantage of damage reduction is that it takes the probabilities out of the equation and simplifies the game slightly. The disadvantage of damage reduction is that it is harder to balance, and it decreases the depth of the game a bit.
The biggest problem with damage reduction is definitely the balancing. With a direct damage reduction, certain units will remain almost fully efficient against higher ground, while others will feel the full force of a 25% damage reduction. It could even be impossible to balance, depending on how the armor is calculated. If the armor reduction is effected after the higher-ground reduction, then armor upgrades will be imbalanced in defensive positions.
Range reduction
This is the alternative I like the least. It is exactly as unpredictable as the current sight mechanic: In certain situations the range reduction will nullify an entire attack while in other situations it will have no effect. For example, Dragoons attacking marines on higher ground will have no effect. The dragoons will still be able to hit the marines, even with their range decreased. On the other hand, dragoons attacking a tank on higher ground will be completely unable to overcome the two range difference, stopping the attack in its tracks.
The advantage of range reduction is that no scaling takes place, it will give players more opportunities to micro their units, and it would lead to interesting higher ground battles. The disadvantage is that it would either be incredibly strong, or incredibly weak, depending on the situation and the units.
Speed reduction
The most interesting alternative is an attack speed reduction. The advantage of an attack speed reduction is that the damage done decreases proportionately with the size of the speed reduction, making it easier to balance. If units take twice as long to shoot, the enemy unit will take twice as long to die. Other than the better scaling, its advantages are very similar to those of damage reduction: It takes probabilities out of the game and leads to certain decisions being easier to make.
There are two disadvantages with speed reduction, one old and one new: The first disadvantage is that, just like any non-miss system, it lowers the game depth a bit. The other disadvantage is that it is less logical to the average gamer than a damage reduction or miss-chance is. This might be because we are not used to the concept, but the idea that marines will suddenly start attacking more slowly when the enemy units get to higher ground seems strange to me. It makes the solution feel artificial, like a solution to a problem rather than a natural part of the game.
The Discussion
From the beginning of the article, the point was not to prescribe a solution, but to allow you to come to an informed decision on your own. All four options can be implemented, and all four would be an improvement to an already good game. The question is, which option will be the biggest improvement?
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Osaka27139 Posts
Nice job Daigomi. I love the way the problem is laid out, and the way the various solutions are presented. I think it is obvious by playing the beta that simply having vision is not a good enough advantage for the high ground / low ground. Something else has to come into play in order for the features of the map to have more impact. Without it, map design is less important, and maps are one reason BW lasted as long as it has.
Here is another post from this thread on the same issue that I agree with.
On March 05 2010 02:53 DJEtterStyle wrote:
I'd take things a step further. The high ground mechanic needs to be changed -- absolutely, and for me to agree so strongly with InControl is a bit jarring -- but in general, SC2 lacks the all-important defender's advantage you see in pretty much all strategy games. Static defense is too weak, buildings fall too quickly, unit AI and bunching are so good that choke points and ramps have little tactical significance, and too few units have abilities that reward a defensive posture, with the most obvious example being the siege tank. Lurkers and spider mines, reavers and high templar added a major tactical element to SC1 because of their distinct lack of mobility.
We're seeing Starcraft 2 reduced to a lot of one-base play because it only takes the most minute of opportunities to win a game. A meaningful defender's advantage would open up a wealth of new, viable openings and make the game vastly more competitive and fun.
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If range reduction is implemented, wouldn't the dragoons take extra hits while closing in on the high ground? If they had more range than marines, then they would take less hits closing in on the marines to hit them.
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Well said. I hope this is printed out and put on the walls of wherever it is Blizzard discusses balance issues and gameplay development because this puts the issue into focus very well.
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I like your entire article a lot and agree with all of it. So I don't need to quote parts of it and respond =P
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I think the attack speed reduction could be explained logically. A marine trying to hit a target on a cliff has to "aim" a bit longer (hence the reduction in speed).
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Awesome article, very well spoken. Personally, I think the percent miss chance is the way to go, it adds a strategic element that makes sense in the context of the game as well as adding excitement. Also, it just makes more sense than any of the other options.
That said, any of these fixes would be better than the current implementation.
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Great analysis. "Randomness" doesn't hurt a game as long as the probability distributions are made transparent to all players. If probabilistic information increases the number of intelligent decisions that must be made, it's a good dynamic.
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United States4795 Posts
This is really amazing. I can contribute my thoughts but I doubt it will be heard.
Giving a 25% chance to miss with a high ground advantage, to me, does not make the game random at all. Getting the high ground advantage isn't a matter of "oh now lets throw things COMPETELY OUT OF WHACK WITH MY HIGH GROUND ADVANTAGE." Getting a high ground advantage is like playing a risk, and you can be rewarded for taking that risk.
The 25% chance may be a bit random, but I feel the decision making implemented is now overcomes any randomness that is inherent within that miss percentage.
I hope that makes sense...basically:
The decision making and meta-game possibilities with a 25% miss chance completely compensates for any hint of randomness that may occur in the game.
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Honestly I do think that there should be a high ground advantage. It makes the game much more exciting as the person with the bigger army is not always going to win. As for making the game random and having bad luck, that really depends on the mapmaker.
A mapmaker can choose where he wants to put high grounds and a good one will make sure its balanced for everyone.
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Originally I favored damage reduction but after I thought about it I came to the conclusion that some units would suffer basically no penalty. After that I came to prefer the decreased attack rate option. Now, however, I think I'm more in favor of a % mischance.
Either way I'm pessimistic and I don't think Blizzard is going to implement anything.
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United States4795 Posts
On March 16 2010 13:57 G3nXsiS wrote:
Honestly I do think that there should be a high ground advantage. It makes the game much more exciting as the person with the bigger army is not always going to win. As for making the game random and having bad luck, that really depends on the mapmaker.
A mapmaker can choose where he wants to put high grounds and a good one will make sure its balanced for everyone.
Technically there is a "high ground advantage," because you need vision to see up a cliff in order to attack units. The units on a cliff can see down, but the units below a cliff cannot see up. If you get vision, you get a 100% hit chance against the units on the cliff.
I think the argument is not about a high ground advantage, but about a miss chance and randomness factor that should be reimplemented with a high ground advantage. The exchange is that you don't need vision to fire up a cliff.
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I like randomness. Not LOTS of random, but a little bit of random. It makes things a lot more interesting. There's no point in watching a game where you automatically know who's going to win and who's going to lose, no matter what.
StarCraft 1 had a great high ground advantage. I've hated SC2's high ground line of sight bullshit right from the start.
I don't think SC2 is a terrible game, but I also don't think a simple high ground mechanic would be enough to fix it. It would be a step in the right direction. They would change a lot of the game to reflect the change. I would also like to see other small random glitchy things. Not like "bring vulturez back!!!1" but something new altogether.
I hope somebody posts something like this on the Blizz boards.
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Even though SC2 seems pretty damn cool, I have to admit that this is a pretty solid argument, and that Blizzard should think twice about screwing up the potential it has.
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The assumption that a universal ground mechanic change has an equal impact on all units is wrong. The whole game balance would shift. I think the game is too far in development at this point where making this change is just unrealistic.
I duno. I can see what the article is saying, but I view this less as problems and more as just differences from the original game. I can definitely see the value of more strategic positioning, teching, etc. But that happens at the sacrifice of a fast paced, gorilla warfare style of play.
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On March 16 2010 14:01 shindigs wrote:
Technically there is a "high ground advantage," because you need vision to see up a cliff in order to attack units. The units on a cliff can see down, but the units below a cliff cannot see up. If you get vision, you get a 100% hit chance against the units on the cliff.
This becomes progressively less of an issue the further into the game you go. Also the current system makes wide ramp high ground "plateaus" tactically worthless. Currently the high ground is just a mix of a choke-point (small ramp) with LOS blockers (high grass).
It takes a lot of tactical depth out of the game.
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There's some problems with your analysis of the whole miss chance mechanic. Namely, you don't mention the law of large numbers. What this means in a nutshell:
If you have, say, 10 hydras shooting into higher ground (with miss chance), it's extremely unlikely that their overall damage will deviate significantly from the average, so their damage output is almost as predictable as the one you'd get with damage reduction, cooldown increase, or other kinds of deterministic penalties.
If you have two vultures shooting into higher ground fighting against one vulture and two marines... suddenly, luck does play a large role in the outcome. Maybe the two vultures will hit their initial attacks and kill a marine right away (25% chance). Chances are that they won't kill the marine in one volley (75% chance). But maybe they won't kill the marine in two volleys either (31.25% chance). On average, they'll kill the marine in 2 volleys- but there's a pretty huge gameplay difference between killing the marine in one volley vs. killing it in 3+ volleys, and yet all of those outcomes have pretty significant chances of occurrence.
In these cases in which the law of large numbers doesn't apply, the variance of the damage output per volley (with miss chance) WILL be large, and CAN significantly affect the outcome of the game.
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On March 16 2010 13:21 Daigomi wrote:
Without higher ground advantage, the player with the bigger army will almost always win the battle, as there are very few tactical opportunities for the player with the smaller army. What this means is that unit production can never be compromised in favor of other goals like teching or expanding. While teching and expanding does occur in Starcraft 2 right now, it is only viable when it has no significant impact on unit production. This leads to a very linear game development, where both players need to mass armies in order to stay in the game. By giving the defender a higher ground advantage, the defender can choose to forgo unit production in order to get an extra expansion or to get faster tech.
Wouldn't that mean that this applies in Brood War maps that don't include high ground, like Judgment Day, or those that don't have any high ground between players, like Medusa? To speak nothing of maps with the starting locations on low ground like Byzantium?
Not that I disagree overall, but I really don't think Reaver Scarabs are a good example. There's nothing I find more annoying (when watching, I don't have the skills for it to matter when I'm playing) than seeing some Protoss player succeed in flying in a Reaver into an underdefended base and having it deal no damage because Scarabs are idiotic.
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Thank God. I don't necessarily think miss % allows cheese to succeed or fail, but other than that I totally agree. Starcraft is a deeper game with miss percentages
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I completely agree that something needs to be done regarding high ground advantages.
One of the great things about SC1 was the ability to take a small group of units and some clever use of high ground/micro and decimate armies 3/4 times the size due to the game mechanics. However, now in SC2 you have a lot less micro currently available to an average player as well as no high ground mechanics, which ends up resulting in simply put - "the biggest army wins".
On the bright side, theres still a lot of time 'till release and a lot of changes to be made!
edit: considered this afterwards, but also considering that static defense in SC2 is weaker than it was in SC1 it's a lot harder to survive against those initial pushes.
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Excellent post, I really am rooting for a 25% miss rate and a general buff to the defender's atv.
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Maybe the sight radius of air units could be slightly lowered to help cliffs keep their value in the later game. Sort of a strange solution but ...
I just dont think its possible to change such a basic mechanic and throw the entire balance of the game off, considering it's like 3 months from release.
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First sentence, catchphrase.
"Everyone agrees that something needs to be done about the lack of a higher ground advantage.."
I don't understand how manifesto can love the way the problem is laid out, I myself just quit reading right here.
So apparently no one can see what is wrong with this sentence ? Nobody ?
This is just an inaccurate assertion, probably written after your whole analysis, and solely meant to refute any disagreement on the issue, it is no better than discrediting it by saying "everyone who disagrees that something needs to be done about about the lack of a higher ground advantage is an idiot".
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I loved the article, but I think your analysis of the range reduction is completely wrong.
Marines v. dragoons; dragoons having slightly longer range is a very defining attribute of the matchup between those two kinds of units. So to say that there is "no effect" from a range reduction is bogus because even though the range might be the same, you have just completely changed the dynamics of that matchup.
Your other example of tanks versus goons is also wrong. In SC 1 it was already possible to place your tanks such that goons can't hit them while on the ground but still hit the goons. The range reduction in that case would matter very little.
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On March 16 2010 14:20 Fanatic-Templar wrote:Show nested quote +On March 16 2010 13:21 Daigomi wrote:
Without higher ground advantage, the player with the bigger army will almost always win the battle, as there are very few tactical opportunities for the player with the smaller army. What this means is that unit production can never be compromised in favor of other goals like teching or expanding. While teching and expanding does occur in Starcraft 2 right now, it is only viable when it has no significant impact on unit production. This leads to a very linear game development, where both players need to mass armies in order to stay in the game. By giving the defender a higher ground advantage, the defender can choose to forgo unit production in order to get an extra expansion or to get faster tech. Wouldn't that mean that this applies in Brood War maps that don't include high ground, like Judgment Day, or those that don't have any high ground between players, like Medusa? To speak nothing of maps with the starting locations on low ground like Byzantium? Not that I disagree overall, but I really don't think Reaver Scarabs are a good example. There's nothing I find more annoying (when watching, I don't have the skills for it to matter when I'm playing) than seeing some Protoss player succeed in flying in a Reaver into an underdefended base and having it deal no damage because Scarabs are idiotic.
Large armies would still suffer a large disadvantage attempting to attack a higher ground force; clearly, though, a large force would still defeat a small one from a low ground position. However the primary purpose here seems to be to provide players with early game options, when large numbers don't exist. Also, the strategical determination for the attacker is less exacting than you make it sound. And there are no attacks like the sc reaver's in sc2, so that's not a concern.
I do have a suggestion to add to this. Since you brought up the importance of this dynamic for map makers, I think that sc2, with its several terrain levels, would benefit from an increased miss-rate when attacking units that are more than 1 level below their enemy. Perhaps an additional 12.5% per level, added on to the initial 25%
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To be fair, the cliff is not the same thing as a choke with grass. Generally you can't stand on both sides of a choke, but you can stand on both sides of a cliff. WIth grass both sides can't see through, different with a cliff. Once you reach air, the cliffs do become significantly less important. But they still help with positions, just not damage reduction. I do expect we will discover ways to capitalize on the current 100percent miss mechanic. And I don't disfavor the fast paced combat I see in the game, which comes directly from the 100percent hit with vision mechanic. I don't see any difficulty in teching in the games I've watched, and by the time you've reached air and rendered the mechanic useless, you're pretty much done teching. All in all I think we're being a bit too nostalgic.
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MURICA15980 Posts
Great write up. Really clear and gives each option a fair analysis.
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Osaka27139 Posts
On March 16 2010 14:36 TeWy wrote:
First sentence, catchphrase.
"Everyone agrees that something needs to be done about the lack of a higher ground advantage.."
I don't understand how manifesto can love the way the problem is laid out, I myself just quit reading right here.
So apparently no one can see what is wrong with this sentence ? Nobody ?
This is just an inaccurate assertion, probably written after your whole analysis, and solely meant to refute any disagreement on the issue, it is no better than discrediting it by saying "everyone who disagrees that something needs to be done about about the lack of a higher ground advantage is an idiot".
Maybe I loved the way things were laid out because I continued reading after the first sentence. It does seem, with the numerous other discussions that have taken place on this issue on the forums, that there is a desire for change. The question of what change is what this article addresses.
If you disagree, and feel like everything is fine, perhaps you should write something to that effect so that people can understand your point of view.
Nobody called anyone an idiot. It seems like you wrote that sentence after writing your post in order to martyr yourself and create an unfair perception of the entire news post.
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there is a higher ground advantage
They must come up the ramp or get sight.
Also I don't see this being a huge deal
TvT and on many ramp maps you get a huge advantage from having high ground, also the ramp itself creates a perfect funnel
This article is too one sided in favor of higher ground advantage.
ALso it is perfectly safe for instance with terran to Fast expand OR tech against Zerg or protoss, if you want I will be happy to play anyone on US servers and show you how. People are noob atm and this article is way too one sided, first saying without a doubt there is something wrong with current high ground is wrong, also postulating that the larger army wins is wrong.
Please dude I would love to play some games with the OP or some believer of this stuff.
High ground is huge, and the ramp itself is the perfect defensive position
You can wall it with 2 pylons/supply depots/sunken colonies. Just because 99.9% of sc2 players suck, especially on US servers is no reason to say ramps/highground is meaningless and unit production is everything.
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On March 16 2010 14:52 dacthehork wrote:
there is a higher ground advantage
They must come up the ramp or get sight.
Also I don't see this being a huge deal
TvT and on many ramp maps you get a huge advantage from having high ground, also the ramp itself creates a perfect funnel
This article is too one sided in favor of higher ground advantage.
ALso it is perfectly safe for instance with terran to Fast expand OR tech against Zerg or protoss, if you want I will be happy to play anyone on US servers and show you how. People are noob atm and this article is way too one sided, first saying without a doubt there is something wrong with current high ground is wrong, also postulating that the larger army wins is wrong.
Please dude I would love to play some games with the OP or some believer of this stuff.
High ground is huge, and the ramp itself is the perfect defensive position
You can wall it with 2 pylons/supply depots/sunken colonies. Just because 99.9% of sc2 players suck, especially on US servers is no reason to say ramps/highground is meaningless and unit production is everything.
The high ground advantage as it is is either 0% or 100%. With the 100% only coming in earlier parts of the game where vision is harder to get. It also only provides the advantage for small chokes. A wide ramp that we see adding interesting terrain and positional advantages to many maps would be near useless in SC2 so there's less ways to make maps interesting in that way.
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The ramp is an "okay" advantage early game. But honestly you'd get the same advantage from any old choke that you get from a ramp. If there is one single tall or flying unit, they are essentially equivalent. Also there are no wide area hills or valleys that there used to be in brood war where it was good to position your troops in these places while you macro. As it stands now, there's no way to really fortify a position at all, so containment is rarely a goal anymore and that is a shame.
I strongly disagree with the miss chance. It strongly penalizes riding the wire. A 50% miss chance in bw resulted in too many missed shots. You were never really sure who was going to win a tank battle.
Just because 25% is less likely to occur doesn't make it any better. Sometimes the ghost or templar needs to die right now, and if luck decides his survival you'll end up paying the price when your entire army is stormed/emped. Things like that cost people games.
The other alternatives are much better in my opinion, even the range one due to the units that are currently in the game. With a range advantage you could pull your units back from the cliff a bit and engage them piecemeal.
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How would you feel about a 10% damage reduction AND 20% miss. It gives high ground a bit more comfort and some surprises can still occur. I'd like to see the math when units of similar strength and damage battle across a cliff. Great analysis though definitely food for thought. How bout a +2 sight range for high ground as well?
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Higher ground can be both a tactical and strategic advantage. It seems to me that it fits well in a strategy game.
OP, excellent post.
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I think a possible reason why Blizzard may be so hesitant in implementing the miss-chance mechanism is because they don't want the game to end up glitching the miss chance the way it did in BW. The supposed 25-33% miss chance turned into a whopping 45-55% miss chance.
That said, I still feel that miss chance is probably the most interesting way to solve this issue.
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On March 16 2010 14:22 Vasoline73 wrote:
Thank God. I don't necessarily think miss % allows cheese to succeed or fail, but other than that I totally agree. Starcraft is a deeper game with miss percentages
Yes, I really think the correlation between cheese and the high ground miss mechanic was very far-fetched, as cheese is basically dependent purely upon build orders, with minor things like high ground coming into play in specific scenarios.
As for the rest 100% agreed, they really need to not even dig deep into their blizzard bag of tricks, they have a 12 year old working model of what works - Brood War. All they have to do is simply go by their own design philosophies, and work in the high ground miss-mechanic from Brood war.
They lose nothing from implementing it during beta, and gain everything. His article is basically spot on about everyone's misconceptions about the game turning into a "random game" with "too much luck." Good read. Now...Blizzard read it please lmao 
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im just not sure if blizzard cares to add in a better high ground advantage. they announced it like 2 years ago and everyone bitched then, but obviously they still havent done anything about it. I feel like it will be the same as chat channels and LAN -_-
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On March 16 2010 14:52 dacthehork wrote:
there is a higher ground advantage
They must come up the ramp or get sight.
Also I don't see this being a huge deal
TvT and on many ramp maps you get a huge advantage from having high ground, also the ramp itself creates a perfect funnel
This article is too one sided in favor of higher ground advantage.
ALso it is perfectly safe for instance with terran to Fast expand OR tech against Zerg or protoss, if you want I will be happy to play anyone on US servers and show you how. People are noob atm and this article is way too one sided, first saying without a doubt there is something wrong with current high ground is wrong, also postulating that the larger army wins is wrong.
Please dude I would love to play some games with the OP or some believer of this stuff.
High ground is huge, and the ramp itself is the perfect defensive position
You can wall it with 2 pylons/supply depots/sunken colonies. Just because 99.9% of sc2 players suck, especially on US servers is no reason to say ramps/highground is meaningless and unit production is everything.
I am pretty sure every top player and good observer would disagree with you that there is nothing wrong with the current high ground. And no one gives a shit about you playing the OP.
And I am also pretty sure that 99.9% of SC2 players do not suck. A lot are bad, but there are quite a few that have figured out the game, and from your post it seems you certainly are not one of em.
edit: and in case you did not read the entire article, daigomi goes through other design solutions other than just the high ground miss mechanic. dunno why you are saying it is a biased article.
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After reading the OP, I wrote a long post about this on Battle.net boards: http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=23766799262&postId=237646712854&sid=3000#0
Basically, I am arguing that non-random misses may be a good solution to the issue and describe the various features that could be used to make it work. Some of the features have the added benefit of enabling skilled players to by-pass the system through micro (depending on the number of units, of course) and thus increasing the differentiation between good and mediocre players.
This is the repost:
Although I personally am used to random effects from PnP RPGs, I know that many people dislike chance in games and in any case Starcraft has not traditionally been designed around chance-based mechanics, for example, the units don't normally miss. Hence, (re-)introducing randomness into Starcraft 2 mechanics might not be the way to go.
It had occured to me, though, that misses could simply be made non-random. That means, a 25% miss chance would simply be translated into every fourth shot misses - not randomly/on average, but every time. There are many ways to implement this with various implications for the game. I will go over some of the possible features of a non-random miss system below, though I don't have the time to go into the various implications of each in detail . I will use 25% miss chance as the basis, but the same principles could, of course, be applied to other miss chance percentages.
Level of Tracking/Accounting for the Calculation:
1) Per Unit
- Every fourth shot of every unit (and possibly every shooting building) misses. Hence, shots by other units don't count for the purposes of whether unit X hits or misses - only shots by unit X count for that purpose.
2) Per Player
- Every fourth shot misses, but the calculation is not done per unit, but per all units (and possibly also buildings that shoot, such as cannons) of the player (or possibly the team).
3) Per Game
- Every fourth shot misses, but the calculation is neither done per unit nor per player, but per all units of all players.
Starting Point of the Calculation:
If miss chance of 25% is being translated into the non-random system, every fourth shot will miss, but it must still be decided where to begin counting. There could be a system where the first three shots hit, fourth misses, next three hit and so on, but the starting point could also be different. For example, the first shot could hit, the second could miss and then we could enter the pattern of next three shots hit, next shot misses, next three hit and so on. (The second shot was used just as an example of a starting point - we could have the first or third shot be the miss and the start of the calculation). Note that this is more important in case the Per Engagement or Per Unit Levels of Accounting are used than if any of the other two have been selected instead.
Included and Excluded Shots:
1) High Ground Only
- Only those shots against the high ground count in the tracking system.
2) All Shots
- All shots are tracked for the purposes of the calculation.
Reset Points: (mostly applicable in per-unit tracking/accounting systems)
1) No Reset Point
- The ticker (whether it be per unit, player or game) goes 1-1-1-0-1-1-1-0-1-1-1-0... without the possibility of resetting it.
2) Engagement End Reset Point
- The ticker runs so long as the lower ground unit engages (shoots at) another and resets when it does something else.
3) Click Reset Point (similar to and can even be combined with engagement end reset point - both could reset)
- Some click (perhaps the a directed/targetted attack click) can reset the ticker. So the ticker naturally runs 1-1-1-0-1-1-1-0-1-1-1-0... but if the player directs/target attacts the high ground unit by clicking on it after each shot the ticker resets, so it could go 1-1-1-0-1-1-(click)-1-1-(click)-1-1-1-0...
Non-random misses could work as a high ground advantage without introducing chance into game mechanics of Starcraft. As you can see from the above, the exact combination of features for the non-random system can make a difference. Indeed, using some of the systems could allow skilled players to work around non-random misses through intense micro-management of the units (depending on the features implemented less skilled players could perhaps also do so with only a few units and some micromanagement). This is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, adding the possibility of high-level micromanagement at top skill levels would probably be a benefit for the game.
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That would take a hell of a lot of excitement out of the game if you knew what was going to happen. And that would already be too close to the current beta way of high ground, considering you have guaranteed hits.
It would still result in needing a bigger army than the other guy for the most part, as well as in the decision making process like daigomi described, in your solution there would only be a "yes or no" answer of to attack or not like their currently is.
You either have enuff to kill him, or you do not. And you can easily tell that with the way you described. So It is no where near as good as a random miss chance.
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On March 16 2010 14:36 TeWy wrote:
First sentence, catchphrase.
"Everyone agrees that something needs to be done about the lack of a higher ground advantage.."
I don't understand how manifesto can love the way the problem is laid out, I myself just quit reading right here.
So apparently no one can see what is wrong with this sentence ? Nobody ?
This is just an inaccurate assertion, probably written after your whole analysis, and solely meant to refute any disagreement on the issue, it is no better than discrediting it by saying "everyone who disagrees that something needs to be done about about the lack of a higher ground advantage is an idiot".
Definetly agreed. Yes there are good arguments in the Article about random chance but universal agreement is NOT a foregone conclusion.
Blizzard made a conscious desicion NOT to include a RNG, (almost, there is still random starting position) all random chances are "playergenerated".
The current system greatly benefits air superiority. High ground forces the low ground player to forfeit his Air units most valuable asset: Mobility, they have to be in sight range.
It also has the nice sideffect that Terrain doesn´t affect air units directly outside the above example.
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United States7166 Posts
On March 16 2010 13:26 Manifesto7 wrote:Nice job Daigomi. I love the way the problem is laid out, and the way the various solutions are presented. I think it is obvious by playing the beta that simply having vision is not a good enough advantage for the high ground / low ground. Something else has to come into play in order for the features of the map to have more impact. Without it, map design is less important, and maps are one reason BW lasted as long as it has. Here is another post from this thread on the same issue that I agree with. Show nested quote +On March 05 2010 02:53 DJEtterStyle wrote:
I'd take things a step further. The high ground mechanic needs to be changed -- absolutely, and for me to agree so strongly with InControl is a bit jarring -- but in general, SC2 lacks the all-important defender's advantage you see in pretty much all strategy games. Static defense is too weak, buildings fall too quickly, unit AI and bunching are so good that choke points and ramps have little tactical significance, and too few units have abilities that reward a defensive posture, with the most obvious example being the siege tank. Lurkers and spider mines, reavers and high templar added a major tactical element to SC1 because of their distinct lack of mobility.
We're seeing Starcraft 2 reduced to a lot of one-base play because it only takes the most minute of opportunities to win a game. A meaningful defender's advantage would open up a wealth of new, viable openings and make the game vastly more competitive and fun.
i'm very happy to see this article, it was also very well done. i'm hoping Blizzard seriously considers this issue and understands the significance of it
i have to also agree completely with DJEtterStyle's point here. in fact this point probably deserves its own article, because right now it feels positional tactics and strategy, in particular defensive ones, is a bit lacking and plays such an important role in strategy, tactics, importance of map control, and the excellent dynamics that made BW such an excellent game
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You make a few good points, particularly in illustrating the difference between miss chance and damage reduction, but I still feel that several of your arguments are invalid or beside the points that you are trying to make. This is mainly a reply to those particular arguments, rather than my opinion on whether or not there should be a miss chance in Starcraft 2. So I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, it's just my opinion that your claims doesn't follow from the arguments you make.
In regards to "a bit of bad luck will cost you the game", you say that a Starcraft player is never all-in, in the same sense as a poker player can be. That may be true, but that doesn't mean that being unlucky in a battle that is partly randomized could not be game decisive. Sure enough, you may not lose immediately just because a few more dragoons than expected missed their targets, and you are right when you say that the more units that are fighting, the less the variation becomes (you will almost never miss 10 out of 10 shots). Yet you say, and I think we all agree, that small things in Starcraft can have a huge impact on the game, but you don't really explain why this is not important when it comes to the miss-chance. Is it not conceivable that, for example, a few more shots than expected hits a high-templar one second too soon (maybe 9 out of 10 times it would have enough time to cast storm, but this particular time, it dies despite the high-ground advantage), and the game decisive battle is turned around completely? Wouldn't that be a bit of bad luck that costs you the game?
I agree that it would be necessary to wager the probabilities against each other, much like you would calculate pot odds in poker, but that is beyond the particular point of the argument of whether or not luck would (or could) become an important factor in the game.
In terms of predictability I also think you tend to exaggerate the importance of the miss-chance. While you are right, perhaps, that a game that is completely predictable is uninteresting, there are many factors that contribute to a game being unpredictable. A game that is decided purely by skill does not have to be predictable, and the fact that neither Flash nor Jaedong win all their games doesn't imply that Starcraft involves some elements of random luck (Starcraft does involve luck, but it's not a consequence of the best players not always winning). Take chess, for instance. It is widely recognized as a game that consists of pure skill, yet the outcome, especially between evenly matched players is rarely (if ever) completely predictable.
A game that is completely predictable would probably not be very interesting, so far we agree. I would interpret predictability in this case as the lack of random elements. If there are random elements, the players would sometimes be forced into making "bets" on the battles, which, sans randomness, would otherwise be unnecessary. When somebody say that the lack of perfect predictability is bad, I guess what they mean is that they would prefer such gambling situations to be minimized. Whether or not a "gambling element" is preferable or not is not crystal clear to me - I can see advantages and disadvantages either way. I do think the question is more complex than you portray it, however - your arguments in that regard seems quite irrelevant.
One more thing in regards to gambling - even if all random elements such as miss chances and scarab duds etc. are removed, there would still be "gambling" involved, such as trying to deceive or outsmart the opponent with various strategies. Making a hidden expansion can be viewed as a gamble, in that if the opponent scouts it quick enough, you are at a disadvantage, and otherwise you gain an advantage. Whether or not your opponent scouts is partly beyond your control, and so it's a random element from the perspective of one fixed player.
Finally, you also make it sound as if cheese would only be possible if there is a miss chance. But it seems to me like most cheese builds are not depending on lucky shots on units on high ground to succeed. Take a 4 or 5 pool build, for example, or a bunker rush. Whether such a cheese build is successful is usually determined by early scouting, the opponents build order, and micro, rather than random elements such as the high ground miss chance.
You convinced me that it's easier to balance miss chance, as opposed to the alternatives you propose, and if there is no other means of getting some kind of high ground advantage, I agree with the first point of your list of pros as well. The others, though, I don't quite see how they follow from your article.
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Excellent read. Very true though. It would a more realistic feel to the game. It would be like an actual war with the miss chance (or atleast moreso). As for the professional players not accepting this rule, i think majority rules should apply here. There are more SC2 players than there are professionals.
The high-grounds were made in SC2 to make the game more 3D. Now, they should be used to make the gameplay more three dimensional as well.
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I think the difference between miss chance and damage reduction can be explained with one mechanic: overkill.
Miss chance does not affect a unit's tendency to overkill, whereas damage reduction reduces overkill, making heavy-hitting units more effective by reducing the damage they "waste" on overkilling targets. So miss chance affects all units equally, whereas damage reduction does not. Damage reduction would then act at both a balance shift as well as a tactical mechanic, when all we want from high ground positioning is a tactical mechanic.
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I disagree with the second con of Speed Reduction.
The other disadvantage is that it is less logical to the average gamer than a damage reduction or miss-chance is. This might be because we are not used to the concept, but the idea that marines will suddenly start attacking more slowly when the enemy units get to higher ground seems strange to me. It makes the solution feel artificial, like a solution to a problem rather than a natural part of the game.
I think in real life to hit someone with a positional advantage over you would require more focus, so I think to an extent speed reduction does make sense, however I still agree that miss percentage is the correct way to go.
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Well written article, the only part i disagree with is your predictability header.
To me, a game is great if the player that plays better wins every game. Now this does not mean that the better player will win every game, but that the unpredictability lies in the players ability to perform in the given game. Instead off on a scarab going off or dudding.(not saying that the scarabs and such don't give amazing game play, but i wouldn't say it's required for an amazing game)
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I haven't played SC2, so I'll use SC1 units.
The suggestion being examined is straightforward. When units attack from lower ground to higher ground, they should have a certain chance to miss. What this chance should be is up for discussion, but I feel that, combined with the current sight mechanic where lower ground units cannot attack higher ground units without vision of the high ground, a 25% miss chance would be a sufficient higher ground advantage.
So does this mean that when there's 2 vultures on high ground versus 2 hydras on low ground (all on hold position) the vultures will hit the hydras while these won't be able to attack back? And if an Overlord comes into play, and flies into high grownd, the hydras would make complete damage against the vultures?
My point is this, if the higher ground advantage is applied in SC2 by the factor visibility or by the actual difference in ground altitude. If it's determined by visibility, a scan or a flying unit would completely deny any altitude difference just as if both armies were battling at same ground level; while if its actually determined by the altitude the %miss would still apply when the overlord grants them vision (the OL having reached higher ground while hydras are still on lower ground), this is how it would work in SC1 I think, mixing both visibility and higher ground factors.
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There is no way to completely balance the disadvantage of shooting uphill.
Lets say they go with -50% dmg shooting uphill:
Thor 90 dmg attack vs hydralisk 90 hp.
On level ground thor kills hydra in 1 attack.
Shooting uphill thor would only do 45 dmg. So thor shoots hydra, hydra goes down to 45 hp, but before thor can shoot again hydra has regen'd 1 hp and is now at 46 hp, thor shoots again hydra at 1 hp, now thor needs a 3rd shot to kill the hydra, thus meaning a simple 50% dmg reduction is taking the thor 3x as many shots as normal.
On the other hand lets do thor vs zergling.
Level ground thor kills zergling in 1 attack. Shooting uphill thor's dmg is reduced to 45, thor still only takes 1 attack to kill, thus leaving no advantage/disadvantage for either team.
Basically what I'm saying is that certain unit matchups are favored over others, thor gets completely screwed attacking hydras with a 50% dmg loss. On level ground thor kills both hydras and zerglings in 1 hit. But lowering his dmg 50% makes him take 3 shots to kill hydras, and still only 1 shot to kill zerglings.
With 50% miss rate:
Thor can still kill hydralisk on his first shot (no advantage/disadvantage for either team).
He could even miss 10 times in a row then kill hydra on his 11th attack, or he could just as easily klll 10 hydralisks in his first 10 attacks. The odds of him missing 10 shots in a row is the same as him hitting 10 shots in a row.
While there can still be no advantage/disadvantage, odds are the attacker will be at a disadvantage but with good luck.. can still kill just as fast as on level ground.
With shorter range attacking uphill:
There can be disadvantage or no disadvantage at all.
disadvantage: High ground has tank, low ground as a marine. Marine has to spend more time moving to the cliff to be able to shoot the tank, that's if he can even still have enough range to reach the tank.
no disadvantage:: High ground has melee or short ranged units. Low ground has siege tanks, even with reduced range the siege tanks can still attack the high ground without being touched.
Speed reduction:
I'm not really a fan of this, I think it'd be really hard to even attempt to put in the game. As there would probably be some kind of bug that players would figure out by switching from attacking high ground and level ground units to mess with the units attack speed. I also don't see why it would make sense for units to attack slower uphill. Units attack slower will just be less entertaining for the viewers, especially when they already are slow attack units by default. And what would you apply the speed reduction to? The cooldown (the time after you attack and before you can attack again) or the cast time. If it's the cooldown then you could attack then run away so that you are out of range of being shot, then go back into range when cooldown is over thus defeating the purpose of it. Think of dragoon micro, where you attack then run away then attack again, in this case you'd just run twice as far due to longer cooldown.
I personally would go for miss rate. Make it around 75% hit, 25% miss. This means that while at a disadvantage you could still break his ramp if and only if you had the superior force. Having a miss rate too high deters the low ground player from attacking and thus spending more time traveling around the map to find a different location to attack. This from the viewers point of view is bad for the game. People want to see players attack each other not running around the map all day. At the end of the day the viewers are a huge part of the success of e-sports or just sports in general. Without the fans watching there will be little to no tourneys and little to no prize money.
75% hit, 25% miss still gives you a pretty good advantage. Remember YOU won't always be the person on the high ground, you will be attacking from low ground a lot as well. High ground should help you win small battles here and there, but it shouldn't be the only reason you win/lose games.
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Nice read. An important thing to add is that Blizzard already has a method of reducing the likelihood of luck in the most extreme of cases (i.e. missing or hitting up a cliff 10 times in a row) through the use of Pseudo Random Distribution which is built into the Warcraft 3 engine. The general idea is that the miss chance would start at some value below the expected miss chance, and the chance would slowly increase with each hit until a miss occurs, at which point the number would reset.
Anyways this thread is worth a read.
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90% of all games which have a highground have some advantage system implimented to increase the statistics of the high ground player the win providing they have the required unit build ect.
High ground is a spot of elevated terrain which can be useful in military tactics. Fighting from an elevated position is easier for a number of reasons. Soldiers will tire more quickly when fighting uphill, will move more slowly, and if fighting in formation will have little ability to see beyond the soldiers in front of them. Likewise, soldiers fighting on the hill won't get tired as quickly, will move faster, and will be able to see farther when in formation, aiding them in making smart tactical maneuvers. Furthermore, soldiers who are elevated above their enemies can get greater range out of low-speed projectiles like rocks and javelins. Likewise, rocks and javelins will have less range when thrown uphill.
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i couldnt believe this wasnt in the game already. sc1 had it and it made sense, with the new ai its way easier to get up chokes and cliffs. i mean it really does make sense to me
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I think the %miss option is by far the best choice. It just seem to make more sense that some units can dodge a full attack instead of percent reduction, which just means one army inflicts exactly X% less damage, and makes battles more interesting.
Also, I think what most people do not know is that game designers have the ability to skew percentages. For example, many games that involve luck will have it so that if there is a 20% miss rate, if a unit misses the first attack, the second attack is actually less likely to miss, and so on until finally there is an attack where the attacking unit is 100% guaranteed to hit even from low ground. See Sirlin's summary of Sid Meier's discussion at GDIC 2010 here:
http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2010/3/12/gdc-2010-day-2.html
Sid Meier talks about scaling the luck factor so that the luck behaves a lot more like it "should" behave rather than being entirely luck.
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The chance to hit should be calculated in real time, equivalent to the exposure percentage of the target's hitbox.
Marines shooting from a cliff exposing 25% of their bodies (also meaning that they're visible and no spotter is required) would only be hit 25% of the time as compared to 100% exposed marines. Explosive or ricocheting projectiles can increase those chances by some factor unknown to me.
No unit should be able to shoot through walls or the ground.
That means even units on the high ground would have to get close to the cliff to shoot below, unless they have grenade projectiles of sorts, but then so can the units from below shoot targets above with sight. Depending on how these projectiles move and how "hard" it is to throw a grenade from below, chances can be <100% by a factor I do not want to think of.
There should also be a chance to hit marines inside bunkers in this sense, since it shouldn't be impossible, only "really hard".
Uniform chances are the dumb way of approximating uncertainty, theres a hundred more clever and realistic ways to give the high ground a defensive advantage, ways that go beyond what I tried to demonstrate and are certainly possible if blizzard even bothers.
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I think the author has a severe misconception on how likely it is to win the lottery, unless most lotteries have like a million percent increase in chance of winning compared to the super lotto in the United States, which is the lottery most commonly referenced.
If you bought 15 lottery tickets and the chances to win were greater than 1/1,000,000 then I assure you people would be buying lottery tickets like crazy simply because the odds would actually be in your favor...
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This post isn't spammed across bnet forums why?
Seriously, more valid input needs to be fed to blizzard forums instead of people complaining about how races are OP.
Great post, this nailed the issue on the head.
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Osaka27139 Posts
Odds of winning the lottery...
it follows that each pick of six numbers has a probability of 1/13,983,816 = 0.00000007151. This is roughly the same probability as obtaining 24 heads in succession when flipping a fair coin!
... worse than missing 10 shots in a row.
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On March 16 2010 16:42 Manifesto7 wrote:Odds of winning the lottery... Show nested quote + it follows that each pick of six numbers has a probability of 1/13,983,816 = 0.00000007151. This is roughly the same probability as obtaining 24 heads in succession when flipping a fair coin! ... worse than missing 10 shots in a row.
Exactly... compare it to
"To put this into context, if you buy fifteen lottery tickets, you have a better chance of winning the lottery than missing 10 shots in a row"
You don't have a better chance at winning the lottery. You still have a better chance at missing 10 shots in a row.
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The problem of a fixed miss chance is it not only advantage high ground, it also advantages less costly units that you can mass vs bigger more powerful unit, because the chance of getting fucked by the RNG is higher if you have less units(even more if they fire slowly). In the end, over a thousand shots, they will even out, but probabilities work in such way that you can get bad streaks; not necessarily missing every shot, but missing 50% of the shots on one fight instead of 25% would make a big difference and is very possible if you only have 7-8big units shooting every second/second and a half.
Could use a system that scales the miss% based on cost and/or attack speed so tanks for example are less likely to fail shooting at a high ground over a small sample than marines(who shoot faster, and cost like 1/4 of the price so theorically you'd have 4marines for each tank). Not a big difference, but for example, if marines had 25% to miss, tanks would only have 20%(or 15 or whatever).
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The only "problem" with a chance to miss is that it's nearly impossible to make this visually intuitive.
Unless you want a big "MISS!" to pop over unit's heads like some old RPG, you will simply see a unit shooting "normally", but not killing anything like normal. This confused me while I played SC1 in single player mode.
My suggestion? Cause the projectiles to actually fire off-course slightly when the miss, creating a visual representation that spectators and players will have a better chance understanding.
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On March 16 2010 17:57 Wolfpox wrote:
The only "problem" with a chance to miss is that it's nearly impossible to make this visually intuitive.
Unless you want a big "MISS!" to pop over unit's heads like some old RPG, you will simply see a unit shooting "normally", but not killing anything like normal. This confused me while I played SC1 in single player mode.
My suggestion? Cause the projectiles to actually fire off-course slightly when the miss, creating a visual representation that spectators and players will have a better chance understanding.
They do? You can see where the projectile lands by a tank/marine/hydra, and if it's a dragoon you actually see it miss like what you're saying...?
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haha, very smart title
Miss chance is definitely the best thing to do, why remove something that worked perfectly.
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iNcontroL
USA29055 Posts
This article looks strangely familiar...
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On March 16 2010 13:21 Daigomi wrote:Having a game that is not perfectly predictable is bad.Bad for who or what? It is definitely not bad for the spectators. Few things in Starcraft are more epic than watching a mine dissolve in a puddle of blue goo, or seeing a scarab come so close to obliterating a stream of peons before harmlessly fizzling out. Unpredictability makes professional gaming more exciting for another reason too: If games were decided purely on skill, Flash and Jaedong would be expected to win all their games and there would be no enjoyment in watching them play. However, when there is a bit of unpredictability, then upsets can happen, making the games more exciting to watch for everyone. <img class="imgborder" src="http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/riptide/sc2b/sc2b_missingthepoint_scarab.jpg" />
<em>Will it? Won't it? The Broodwar Protoss user's eternal dilemma.</em>
Okay, correct me if I'm wrong but, you are suggesting that Blizzard make games more unpredictable so that games can be more 'wet and wild' and enjoyable for spectators? I'll agree that unpredictability is good for spectators, but I don't agree that you should be putting the spectators over the players of the game.
Sure, it's exciting for spectators to watch a Scarab's inferior AI skip around someone's probe line, but it isn't fun, especially for the Reaver holder, not knowing if the Scarab will do what it's INTENDED to do in the first place.
Should the Scarab have that sort of random chance and just have better AI?
We could make every unit have 1% unreliability of not doing what it's supposed to be doing. Both players have it so it shouldn't change the outcome of the game that much. It's more fun for spectators to watch, yes. It won't turn the tides of the game, yes. Should it be implemented into the game? Of course not!
The results should be in the player's control and the more of these random factors you add the less the player is in actual control of the game, even if only a small percentage.
I've seen so many complaints about Warcraft % chance to hit and Starcraft start locations it's laughable.
Players should be awarded or penalized by some random factor. They should both have the same opportunities, but their CHOICES is what affects the results. It is especially important when players are of equal skill level.
On March 16 2010 13:21 Daigomi wrote:
Professional players would prefer no miss chance.
The idea here is that no professional player would like to have unpredictability in their chosen career. Unfortunately, almost every sport in the world has unpredictability included, from a strong wind on a day of golf to the deflected goal in soccer. All sports have unpredictable factors included, and they are simply part of the job description. In fact, the ability to cope with unpredictable factors is often what distinguishes champions from average players. This point is supported by the fact that many of the best Starcraft players have stated that they would prefer the miss-rate mechanic over a damage-reduction mechanic.
Just because unpredictability is there, doesn't mean we shouldn't try to keep it to a minimum. We should level the playing field as much as possible.
If you were playing a game of golf and your opponent had zero wind on his shot, and right when you step up you have a short burst of strong wind, you'd have to be an idiot to play at that point, none the less be FORCED to play on a different circumstance than your opponent. It's only rational to wait until you have the same chances (or better) as your opponent.
The more you affect the winning result with randomness / chance / luck / even with a small percent, is exactly how much the player isn't in control of the outcome.
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A limited amount of unpredictability is always fun to experience.
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"The more you affect the winning result with randomness / chance / luck / even with a small percent, is exactly how much the player isn't in control of the outcome."
While I agree with what you have said here my good admiral it would be obvious that despite the shortcomings of this mechanic, it is still useful because it discourages a low to high ground attack, which DOES make the game more interesting, it would be good if blizzard could implement a different way to make it so. However it should be noted especially here that much of the game is/ was made around a miss mechanic in sc1. Certain tech of each race could deal with the problem of high ground, making the game more interesting and versatile, carriers for protoss siege tanks for terran and guardians/Mutarapes for zerg, if the game doesn't have a miss mechanic then position means NOTHING and we all might as well play on fastest.
Also disagree on the misconceptions there, I don't know what math you pulled out of your ass for this one but 25% miss chance is based on uh CHANCE so that would mean its unpredictable not like 1 scout=stove scout=cooking=women=money=math=starcraft=1 in a million miss chance
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Wow. Very good (and clear and understandable) post. I enjoyed reading every second of it.
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removing the sc1 style high ground advantage was one of blizzards most stupid ideas ever, along with (not sc)+ Show Spoiler +making naxx the entry instance in wotlk
I hope something gets done about it
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Russian Federation1612 Posts
Totally agree with author. SC1 mechanic is the best
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I agree completely with the article. I am still slightly in favour of damage reduction over miss chance, but it has nothing to do with randomness, but because it may make the choice of attack or armour upgrade more interesting. I don't think much depth would be added by having miss chance over damage reduction because of the number of shots fired upwards will be pretty high, even in small battles.
But the important message of this article is that the game needs to have more tactical depth so that small armies can hold off big armies if used right. I think that needs to be made clear, because the news post and comments make it seem like the community is divided on this when really we all agree on the same basic idea. We're just squabbling about whether Obi wan should always cut off Anakin's legs or if he should do it 99.9% of the time. At the moment he only does it 50% of the time.
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I'm definitely for reviving the exact mechanics from SC1. So when you're attacked by an enemy unit on higher ground, it is revealed for a while, and ranged units have a 30% chance to miss when targeting enemy units on high ground.
Some rules work well as they are and changing them just because something must be changed is stupid. I don't think any other alternatives would lead to the longed for result.
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It's hard to disagree with this. There's literally no good argument against it.
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I have to disagree with the op on a point.
You can miss ten shots in a row.
If the miss chance of a single shot is 25%, then the chances of missing 10 shots in a row is roughly 0.0001%, or one in a million. To put this into context, if you buy fifteen lottery tickets, you have a better chance of winning the lottery than missing 10 shots in a row. The odds start looking a bit better at five shots in a row, which has a roughly one in a thousand chance of occurring. So it is conceivable that, over the course of a few games, you will at some point have five dragoons attacking who all miss the same shot. Will five dragoons missing the same shot be game changing? Probably not, as we will see in the next misconception.
this simply does not make sense. Winning the lottery has a worst % but it happens! You can't discuss the point "you can miss 10 times in a row" with "it has little chance" because if you make a 25% of missing you can actually miss 10 time in a row-.-
My alternative:
Remove damage type bonus if you are attacking an enemy on higher ground. These would mean that some natural counters (eg immortals->roach) have to be played more carefully.
Another example could be a colossous escaping from enemy on a higher ground to remove bonus damage.
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Interesting, I wasn't really sold on this idea at all before this article, and probably because I didn't quite understand the problem. I don't agree with everything you said, but overall I will definitely keep this in mind when watching replays in the future.
I think the most interesting part was how it affects the teching-aspect. I kind of like the fast-paced games of Sc2, but I feel that in the long run people will probably get bored with it. :/
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Netherlands19130 Posts
Excellent article. Thanks!
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On March 16 2010 20:27 LuDwig- wrote:I have to disagree with the op on a point. Show nested quote +You can miss ten shots in a row.
If the miss chance of a single shot is 25%, then the chances of missing 10 shots in a row is roughly 0.0001%, or one in a million. To put this into context, if you buy fifteen lottery tickets, you have a better chance of winning the lottery than missing 10 shots in a row. The odds start looking a bit better at five shots in a row, which has a roughly one in a thousand chance of occurring. So it is conceivable that, over the course of a few games, you will at some point have five dragoons attacking who all miss the same shot. Will five dragoons missing the same shot be game changing? Probably not, as we will see in the next misconception. this simply does not make sense. Winning the lottery has a worst % but it happens! You can't discuss the point "you can miss 10 times in a row" with "it has little chance" because if you make a 25% of missing you can actually miss 10 time in a row-.- My alternative: Remove damage type bonus if you are attacking an enemy on higher ground. These would mean that some natural counters (eg immortals->roach) have to be played more carefully. Another example could be a colossous escaping from enemy on a higher ground to remove bonus damage.
come on wtf
"Yeah lets not implement this because X has a one in a million chance to happen
are you freakin serious?
How does anything he write there not make sense? Yes its possible, he doesnt say its not, he just says that its an invalid argument because you shouldnt care about it since it has a one in a million chance of happening
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Speed reduction also isn't the same as miss chance on average, because of the first shot advantage. With miss chance you'll kill less enemies and reduce their damage output by a lower amount in your first volley, while with attack speed reduction units with slower but more powerful attacks will be better than units with weaker and faster attacks(and if you add an aditional delay of 50% of normal attack time before the first shot, the advantage will just change sides and the whole thing will feel even more akward).
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To me this article seemed full of holes, bias and exaggerations =[
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In the way the replays work (the game is re-played with player's inputs), is really viable to have randomness in the game? (I don't know much about programming).
I don't really like the idea of %miss. I prefer +1 range for the higher ground's units, for example.
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Osaka27139 Posts
On March 16 2010 21:24 no_re wrote:
To me this article seemed full of holes, bias and exaggerations =[
Which... you don't care to point out?
Other than the silly lottery analogy (which people are missing the forest for the trees on) I don't see where the bias is. None the people who have complained about stating so strongly that there is a problem have presented evidence that there is no problem.
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I'd go with a range reduction of 1 matrix when shooting uphill, as it's something both sides can try to micro their way around. Even if the player on high ground is outranged, he'll have a better chance to pull his units back to force the opponent to move their units into the choke. Then he can attempt to strike back and try to get a few shots off before the opposing units have time to retreat.
This might also be the most logical solution and wouldn't have some of the visual problems of a miss chance (like the sentry beam, how would you visually represent a miss for that?) If needed, this is easily extended to spells for more emphasis on midgame positioning.
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I'm inherently skeptical when the conclusion is: "Do it like SC1". But in this case I'm gon'na have to agree. Nicely done, listing the points you see as misconceptions and provide analysis.
Good read.
All the people who disagree with the article, I challenge you to do the same in the same constructive manner!
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I think the mechanics are much deeper than most people think currently because we just compare it to SC1 a lot and are not treating it as its own game, rather a comparison about what worked better or worse than the last one and you have to understand that if you made a game exactly the same as SC1 and changed just the high ground mechanics I would concede that you have a valid point. In fact however, there are so many elements of how the game is played currently that has changed over SC1 that I don't think picking one aspect and citing a previous mechanic from a previous game and how much more exciting it was is a fair and balanced argument.
I think there is always a high ground advantage that is not being mentioned here, non range units. You are protected from those units 100% and only range units can attack you. I think the high ground advantage in SC2 is a good mechanic in the fact it allows surprise attacks to happen if you do not have any vision ability such as an air unit, scan etc...
High ground does not dominate the game currently, it is one of many tactics on maps to use, flanking units such as those hidden by fog of war or the high grass and smoke allow other tactics. If you make high ground better than it currently is then one mechanic will be too strong. I think there is a good balance currently and we are seeing all kinds of tactics in the game. There are much more things to consider than just map mechanics, they are part of the game although they will not decide games necessarily and no one can refute that universally.
The pace is fast and the games are showing how people are putting unit mixtures together well along with some of the high ground attacks. I think if you want to improve how effective your high ground is then prepare for vision counters. Get a few air units up there to help take down what helps them attack you. Build a turret or a pylon and add cannons you can lay down creep now as a zerg and build a spore or sunken anywhere.
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awesome read i love it
ok im gonna write my solution now
Chance to miss but also a chance to increase the odds for next attack:
Each player has a 25% miss to high ground as a default (start of game). For every time a player hits with any unit up on the high ground his following chance on the next attack would go down 5% and for each miss it goes up 5%.
What this basically does is awarding a player who has "bad luck" to give him extra fortune in the future. It also makes the whole concept of "luck" in the high-ground vs low-ground battle alot lower but not a set value like damage reduction is or the concept of 1/3 attacks WILL hit.
example:
Imagine 3 Marines for team red on the high-ground vs team blue on the low-ground with 3 Marines aswell.
Blues marines are called A,B and C.
A attacks with the default 25% and misses =>
A = 25% and misses
B = 30% and hits
C = 25% and hits
A = 20% etc.
Lets pretend the battle ends here, team blue lost all marines with an outcome of 40% chance to hit for the following attack. 1 minute later into the game a Thor of blue attacks the red marines to finish them off - he would start with a 40% chance to hit. My point im trying to state here is that the default hit chance of 25% is only in the start of the game, not in the start of a battle.
Q: But cant you just abuse this system by making a few smaller units such as marines attack and miss and then on purpose let the larger unit like the Thor hit to give him extra chance to hit?
A: Sure you can try your best to do that but since when the marines attack its just random if they hit or not, so the odds of giving the Thor "luck" would be impossible to manipulate in a battlefield because the Marines could hit just as well as they could miss.
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Osaka27139 Posts
On March 16 2010 18:21 {88}iNcontroL wrote:This article looks strangely familiar...
Don't know why you are sad that people are paying more attention to the problem.
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Im gonna have to agree and say bring back the High Ground advantage through miss chance. Its really noticeable the ramps really hold very little importance in the game anymore, defenders need some more advantage because as of right now only terran even has a hope of doing it (and even then with 1 observer their whole advantage is basically nullified)
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Miss chance is truly the only option for me.. adds most depth, adds slightly more random-factor, adds excitement, makes sense.
This obvious raises an issue with the current cliffwalkers in the game, with this mechanic, it would be so easy to exploit the fact that you can switch between low and high ground all the time.
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On March 16 2010 21:39 Manifesto7 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 16 2010 21:24 no_re wrote:
To me this article seemed full of holes, bias and exaggerations =[ Which... you don't care to point out? Other than the silly lottery analogy (which people are missing the forest for the trees on) I don't see where the bias is. None the people who have complained about stating so strongly that there is a problem have presented evidence that there is no problem.
Sorry for not pointing them out in my first post, that was pretty childish to post my thoughts without backing them up, so here we go.
Well firstly the damage table on "Miss Chance and Damage Reduction" where it states:
"A tank does 35 damage a shot, marines have 40hp.
Normal: Two shots kill a marine.
50% miss: Four shots kill a marine (on average)."
I don't know where this result was found but it stuck out to me, by my calculations:
Let h = hit, m = miss
Chance of 2 shotting marine with 50% miss chance = hh = 0.5^2 = 0.25 = 25%
Chance of 3 shotting marine with 50% miss chance = hmh, mhh = 2x0.5^3 = 0.25 = 25%
Chance of 4 shotting marine with 50% miss chance = hmmh, mhmh, mmhh = 3x0.5^4 = 0.1875 = 18.75%
Chance of 5 shotting marine with 50% miss chance = hmmmh, mhmmh, mmhmh, mmmhh = 4x0.5^5 = 0.125 = 12.5%
Chance of 6 shotting marine with 50% miss chance = hmmmmh, mhmmmh, mmhmmh, mmmhmh, mmmmhh = 5x0.5^6 = 0.078125 = 7.8%
etc..
So comparing 4 shots to kill a marine which will happen only 18.75% of the time with the miss chance with the 3 shot kill with damage reduction 100% of the time seems heavily biased in favour or the article's agenda, especially when 50% of the time the miss chance will equal or better the number of shots needed.
Secondly the "You can miss ten shots in a row." is listed as a misconception and then is proved to be actually true/possible. This is also quite a exaggeration since most the time the situation here that people are worried about is, for a SC1 example:
Your cliff on LT has been dropped in TvP. One tank remains and is damaged enough to be killed by 2 dragoon shots. You have an observer getting you sight and a dragoon that can survive 3 shots from the slower rate of fire seige tank. Say you need to hit 2 of your first 3 shots to kill the tank before your dragoon dies. Now the difference between being able to mine from our natural or being forced to wait another 15 seconds for our next dragoon to finish building is no longer comparable to lottery predictability. If my memory serves correct and shots hit 70% of the time from lower ground, then the dragoon missing 2 or more of those first 3 shots is going to happen 21.6% of the time
+ Show Spoiler +possible combinations: mmm, hmm, mhm, mmh
3(0.7x0.3x0.3)+0.3^3 = 0.216 = 21.6%
Maybe my example is slightly biased the other way, but I feel the true ground lies somewhere inbetween and the article is again showing a bias favourable to what it is trying to argue.
The point "A bit of bad luck will cost you the game." being presented as a misconception is pretty criminal in my view. As in my above example - that could easily cost you the game. Luck is a large part of RTS and always will be, scouting the wrong way on a 4 player map, seeing that tech building before your scout dies, reaver scarabs going dud, one could go on all day. Im not trying to say luck is a bad thing, its what is needed to add a lot of excitement to RTS as a spectator sport, and to play, but trying to argue that some missed shots won't ever cost you the game? Come on.
I actually am on the same side of the article, but find it to be overly biased, exagerrated and dissmisive.
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The OP is well written, but Blizzard probably won't take it seriously.
Starcraft is a very mathy game. The attack range, damage, cooldown, health and cost of units have to be very carefully fine-tuned, taking into consideration things like their mobility, which should be their counters, etc. Arguing for changing the Stalker's damage from 8 (+6 vs. armored) to 10 (+4 vs. armored) doesn't require a huge mathematical analysis, because of ceteris paribus; it's a small, incremental change and therefore the only cases you have to analyze are the ones that are modified due to this change, and how they are modified.
Adding in miss chance is a whole different beast. I already mentioned something the OP did not give due consideration to in the law of large numbers, but there's more. How much miss chance should there be? What kind of timing attacks would this miss chance help deflect? Is this change in addition to, or instead of the current "can't attack into higher ground without sight" mechanic? How does this affect different units, and therefore different races, and on which timings? (e.g. would the hellion's attack be affected?) How does this affect maps with a ramp outside the main vs. those with a ramp outside the natural expansion, for each matchup?
You might think I'm being picky. I'm not. These are all considerations Blizzard HAS TO MAKE about the miss chance mechanic. Or they can take the empirical approach instead, add in miss chance and see how it plays out. In fact, they may have done so already during their many months of internal testing, and reverted to the current system. Regardless, as an outside source suggesting a pretty serious change to game mechanics (one that has been suggested many times already), a descriptive analysis just won't do. Even though Starcraft has miss chance, Starcraft 2 doesn't; the change that is being proposed for SC2 is a pretty serious one and deserves a lot more mathematical analysis than is given in the OP, simply because SC2 is a very mathy game and you're proposing such a significant change. In order to argue that it's a positive change, you must first make mathematical estimates of the way this would change the game, and THEN explain why this change would be a positive one.
As an aside (I've mentioned I disagree with the methodology, not my take on whether additional defender's advantage is needed or not), I think additional defender's advantage would make norush10 types of games where players macro up without any early engagements more viable, which would likely be detrimental to SC2 as a spectator game.
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FREEAGLELAND26781 Posts
Haha I remember a picture in the funny/owned/mass thread that had two marines taking out a sunken on Colosseum. Think the sunken missed 7 times in a row and that cost the zerg player the game.
Great write-up, love how you dispel myths with stats.
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while i'm agreeing with the OP in terms of a miss chance for attacking to a higher ground being a good idea, it's kinda funny to hear praises to randomness while the "random" damage in wc3 is still a subject of hate and rage on these forums
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Really well written and presented, even though I didn't agree with all of your points (e.g. that an outside element of unpredictability is good for cheese). Nice job.
edit: and now, looking at some of the in-depth responses in the thread, I regret cluttering it with this fluff post. Nice thread.
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On March 16 2010 22:22 no_re wrote:
Your cliff on LT has been dropped in TvP. One tank remains and is damaged enough to be killed by 2 dragoon shots. You have an observer getting you sight and a dragoon that can survive 3 shots from the slower rate of fire seige tank. Say you need to hit 2 of your first 3 shots to kill the tank before your dragoon dies. Now the difference between being able to mine from our natural or being forced to wait another 15 seconds for our next dragoon to finish building is no longer comparable to lottery predictability. If my memory serves correct and shots hit 70% of the time from lower ground, then the dragoon missing 2 or more of those first 3 shots is going to happen 21.6% of the time
Maybe my example is slightly biased the other way, but I feel the true ground lies somewhere inbetween and the article is again showing a bias favourable to what it is trying to argue.
The point "A bit of bad luck will cost you the game." being presented as a misconception is pretty criminal in my view. As in my above example - that could easily cost you the game. Luck is a large part of RTS and always will be, scouting the wrong way on a 4 player map, seeing that tech building before your scout dies, reaver scarabs going dud, one could go on all day. Im not trying to say luck is a bad thing, its what is needed to add a lot of excitement to RTS as a spectator sport, and to play, but trying to argue that some missed shots won't ever cost you the game? Come on.
I actually am on the same side of the article, but find it to be overly biased, exagerrated and dissmisive.
I'm just going to address this point for now.
While the example you gave does show that a high ground miss mechanic can decide the game, it also illustrates another point the article brings up. That is, having a miss chance increases the need for intelligent decision making. Going with your example, back when LT was popular on Bnet and there was no such thing as Iccup, Terrans frequently did the fast cliff drop to punish the Toss' expansion. Protoss players were basically forced to do 1 gate robo builds in order to get a shuttle out. The idea is that if a player CHOOSES to not go 1 gate robo on LT, he's making the same basic choice as a Terran player going 14 cc, or a zerg going 3 hatch before pool. He's gambling with his build in order to gain an advantage. He's gambling on the chance that he'll be able to fend off the drop without the benefit of a shuttle which is where the randomness factors in. However, with the current mechanic, there is no gamble. There is no decision to be made. Either you can hold it off or you can't.
That's just my take on the issue. I also would expect there to be some bias, as the article is about why the Broodwar high ground mechanic is better. It's not meant to be a presentation of pure facts. That said, I think the amount of bias is perfectly within reason.
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South Africa4316 Posts
A few quick replies. Like I said, the purpose is to generate discussion not to prescribe a system, so I'm not going to kill the discussion with walls of text.
I agree that balancing the HGA (higher ground advantage) is not as simple as choosing a percentage and implementing it. However, the myriad of implications that Zato pointed out makes the only really feasible way of testing it empirical rather than analytical.
The whole article is based on the law of large numbers. The basic argument is that usually the numbers are large enough, but when they are small then: 1) the battle is not very important (such as late game small battles); 2) the players can make the decision to avoid them or engage in them, adding strategy; or 3) the randomness is part of the strategy (cheese, such as a rush for the higher ground on LT).
Regarding cheese, I got a bit carried away and overstated it. My conclusion that cheese has to depend on luck holds, but most of that luck stems from other factors. However, it is still true that adding a bit of luck to cheese (the higher ground advantage + small numbers) is not a big deal, as cheese is already so luck dependent.
Yes, not everyone agrees that something needs to be done, but if you look at the responses in this thread and the one in iNcontroL's original thread, then almost everyone does.
The range reduction analysis is perhaps a touch simplified, but it does hold. Tanks vs Dragoons work because tanks do not have siege at that point, which makes it possible for dragoons to overcome the 1 range difference (dragoons attack the wall from as far away as possible, tanks come close, dragoons charge in and hit tank). However, if that is changed two a 2 range difference, then it is unlikely that dragoons will get any shots in. With marines, the opposite is at play as marines have a shorter range. They cannot use the retreat and charge strategy like dragoons can, so if they have a smaller range, then they will either be in range of the dragoons when defending (like normal), or out of range (in which case they can't shoot).
While its true that losing a small loss can put you in a disadvantageous situation, its the same in poker. Losing a percentage of your chips can put you on the back foot which forces you to make riskier decisions, etc. Other than that, I mostly feel that the other points still work. Missing an important high templar snipe could be costly, but at the same time if one high templar can make you lose the game, then you shouldn't be engaging at that point of time, or if you do then you should do it knowing that the odds can go against you.
The lottery example is fine. 15/14,000,000 > 1/1,000,000. The limitation of this is obviously that every ten shots you fire add would be like buying another 15 lottery tickets, but straight up the odds of winning the lottery is bigger (with 15 tickets) than missing ten shots in a row. The point is that the odds are very small.
Regarding the argument that a game shouldn't be made unpredictable on purpose, I agree definitely. HGA should be added, if it happens to make the game more unpredictable, then that's an added bonus.
Specific comments:
To no_re: You are mixing up median and mean. The average is 4, the median is 3. The other points have been covered.
To iNc: The article is obviously based on your thread, but it's very different from yours. It clears up lots of the misconceptions that people had in your thread, which is its aim. Also, as mani said, the more discussion the better.
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Very nice article. I agree with pretty much the whole thing...especially the part about predictability. To much predictability makes a game boring...for both the player and the spectator.
How many times have we been watching a SC1 reaver shot and holding our breath? I don't ever get that feeling of excitement in SC2 because everything is so predictable.
Very well put OP!
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There is (would be) no true randomness in the game. Let me put it very simply.
The replay stores a number (typically called "seed") and when re-played, that number then reproduces all random numbers in the same exact pattern/order, so you will always get the same results. However, every game starts with a different seed, so every game has different randomness.
And people who are constantly proposing new and new ideas, have you actually played SC1 and found the high ground mechanics there ruining your games, or you found them plain bad?
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I like your points. I think that people do seem to overestimate the negative aspects of the mechanic without taking into account the positive aspects that it allows. It's so typical that people want to avoid loss so much that they totally discount the positive it comes with, even when it leads to an overall benefit.
The "luck" factor that the miss mechanic introduces that people seem to fear is so vastly insignificant in determining whether you win or not when you account for all the other skill variables of the game. I won't repeat the benefits it allows since you've already mentioned most of them.
It's like giving two cents and getting a dollar in return.
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i agree on most points but i disagree on some other ones/think they are biased a bit.
why should chance improve decision making/add depth to the game (you always claim that without a real reason)?
i think it´s the other way round. and why should chance make decisions harder? they are just as hard as before, the outcome of a good decision is just turned bad sometimes, which does not mean the decision was wrong or harder to make.
less chance=more control -> rewards players with better control/decision making
chance can turn a good decision in a bad one or the other way round and discourages decision making based on small unit number differences.
another thing is, the current system is not always all or nothing. you may gain sight, loose it and regain it, loosing some damage, based on your micro. micro plays a bigger part, which is a advantage.
and why should armor be imbalanced with dmg reduction? it is not imbalanced, i think it is just an additional strategic option, so its a positiv thing!
you claim that a bigger cliff advantage increase tech/expanding options. but how are you supposed to expand to your natural with still having the cliff advantage? on most maps/situations you cannot expand with the help of a cliff (same as in sc1 i think).
and teching is pretty popular in most mus in sc2 (pvz, tvz at least i know as a z player).
another thing: The disadvantage is that it would either be incredibly strong, or incredibly weak, depending on the situation and the units. (regarding dmg reduction)
why is this a disadvantage? sc1 is working this way very often and its a very important thing in sc1, that the strength of your units differ very much depending on the situation. yes its harder to balance, just like the extremely strong spells/units in sc1 like darkswarm/plague/psi/tanks.. were very hard to balance.
a way to easily balance it may be better now, but in the "long balance run" (and the end balance will need a lot of time, till all the additional units from addons are out) it might be better to use a cliff advantage system which is harder to balance but adds more depth to the game.
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This thread is going on a good walk. The only problem is that i fear Blizzard read these pages..
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Great writeup. Great solutions. There must be something done! I like the 25% damage reduction the best.
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I don't have the beta, so maybe I'm missing something here - if so, let me know and just ignore this.
Now. I thought there was a high-ground mechanic: namely, without sight of high ground you couldn't see units up there at all. In fact, the OP mentions this. This is an almost infinitely greater advantage than in SC:BW with its 30% (I believe) miss chance from low ground, high ground units only revealed when firing - at least you have something to shoot at. Now possibly this increased high ground advantage does not adequately off-set the fact that we have cliff-climbers now (Colossus, Reaper, Viking, and of course Zerg still has OLs), but I don't see that we have a "failing" to base some new mechanic on.
And this is a new mechanic. The OP is saying there should be some intrinsic value to high ground beyond merely whether you can see it or not. Why? - I don't believe there was any such thing in SC:BW (I could be wrong), and it did not prove detrimental to the game. Not that I'm necessarily opposed to new mechanics, I just don't understand why there's a problem that hasn't already been solved. The high ground mechanic is more damaging to low-ground units than in SC:BW, with the only offsetting factor being the cliff-climbers.
But let's assume there is a case to be made for increasing high ground advantages in SCII. There are two possibilities which seem logical: Miss chance from low ground is one way to do it and the OP makes the argument for it. So far so good; but why would attacks miss a unit that can be seen? Miss chance in SC:BW makes sense because the high ground unit can't be seen without vision; with vision the advantage goes away quite logically. In SCII, you simply can't hit the high ground unit at all without vision; there is no place for miss chance within the already established mechanics.
Instead - if I had to implement an extra high ground advantage mechanic to increase the already increased (from SC:BW) advantage - the logical one to me would be a high ground range increase: +1 range on high ground. Like the marine bunker range increase, following approximately the same logic. (Or if you've ever tossed a rock off a cliff.)
(It's not that I've averse to miss chances; I'd kind of like to see a damage range mechanic, or miss chance all the time, in the game as being more "realistic"; I just don't think this "low ground miss chance vs. high ground" miss chance mechanic fits in well with the rest of thisgame.)
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On March 16 2010 23:50 LuDwig- wrote:
This thread is going on a good walk. The only problem is that i fear Blizzard read these pages..
Why would that be a problem, we want them to be reading this.
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On March 16 2010 13:21 Daigomi wrote:
Everyone agrees that something needs to be done about the lack of a higher ground advantage.
The article lost all credibility here. Yeah that's right, line one.
For a start there IS a high ground advantage; secondly not everyone agrees it needs changing.
A general problem is the lack of a defensive advantage in the game; there are many ways of solving this without reverting to BW logic. The sentry is an example of a great way to provide defensive advantage.
There are many reasons why miss chance is a bad solution; it's not obvious to new spectators, it doesn't really make sense (particularly on long sloping ramps) and it doesn't give such an advantage to melee units (hence why ZvZ is so fast).
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On March 17 2010 00:07 Klive5ive wrote:Show nested quote +On March 16 2010 13:21 Daigomi wrote:
Everyone agrees that something needs to be done about the lack of a higher ground advantage. The article lost all credibility here. Yeah that's right, line one.
Using the principle of charity, I think he was just saying that we should come up with a solution for it. Of course he didn't mean that every single person agrees with it; it was just a kind of rhetoric. I mean he did spend the entire article arguing a position, so that seems to imply that some people don't agree w/ it...
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I think a miss chance would be great if it was 20%, further reducing that 1 in a million chance for 5 missed shots in a row while still giving a distinct advantage.
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Excellent article!
Distance between bases and destructible rocks are the only real elements that currently impact build choice. Higher ground advantage would add so much strategic depth.
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On March 16 2010 13:21 Daigomi wrote:
50% miss: Four shots kill a marine (on average).
33% miss: Three shots kill a marine (on average).
I think a little table of the chances for particular numbers of shots would be a more helpful way of expressing these probabilities. Something like this:
33% miss
2 shots..............44.4%
3 shots..............29.6%
4 shots..............14.8%
5 shots..............6.6%
6 shots..............2.7%
etc.
Nearly half the time, the marine is dead in two shots. Nearly three times out of four, it's dead in at most three shots. Nearly nine times out of ten, it's dead in at most four.
(For shits and giggles, the recommended 25% miss:
2 shots..............56.3%
3 shots..............28.1%
4 shots..............10.5%
5 shots..............3.5%
6 shots..............1.1%
etc.)
+ Show Spoiler [basic math] +Let k be the number of shots required to kill the target.
n shots (n>=k)..............(n-1 choose k-1) * (miss chance)^(n-k) * (hit chance)^k
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can someone post this on a blizzard forum? or does blizzard employees actually read this?
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^You have no idea how much influence TL has on Blizzard
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People often forget that a 25% chance to miss is not random, it's 25%. I can go into an uphill battle (pun intended) and take my chances, but it's not random, I know exactly what my chances are. I would rarely go into that kind of battle if I needed a better than 25% miss, though I might, which would be amazing if I came out on top. The other option is admitting my positional disadvantage and living to fight another day, either containing for an expo or going for a drop to move his army out of that advantageous position.
A solid percent chance to miss is EXTREMELY important in SC.
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On March 17 2010 01:36 syst wrote:
People often forget that a 25% chance to miss is not random, it's 25%.
This is just a confusing way of talking. The number is not random, you're right. But nobody's talking about that, and whether any individual attack hits or misses is a matter of chance.
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Has ANYONE in this thread ever heard of smooth random? Every 3rd shot misses or something like that?
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Forget mischance, it was a mistake in Broodwar that left small battles with a ledge involved to the dice. Two words, attack speed, that's where the key is. It's a system that shares none of the faults with the other two. A ground unit attacks a guy on higher ground, it gets delayed attack speed before the next shot. No randomness or 2 hit vs 3 hit shinanigans involved. It's a solid disadvantage across the board without the randomness and flaws of the other suggestions, so think about it.
http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=23767539452&sid=3000
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On March 16 2010 22:25 Zato-1 wrote:
The OP is well written, but Blizzard probably won't take it seriously.
Starcraft is a very mathy game. The attack range, damage, cooldown, health and cost of units have to be very carefully fine-tuned, taking into consideration things like their mobility, which should be their counters, etc. Arguing for changing the Stalker's damage from 8 (+6 vs. armored) to 10 (+4 vs. armored) doesn't require a huge mathematical analysis, because of ceteris paribus; it's a small, incremental change and therefore the only cases you have to analyze are the ones that are modified due to this change, and how they are modified.
Adding in miss chance is a whole different beast. I already mentioned something the OP did not give due consideration to in the law of large numbers, but there's more. How much miss chance should there be? What kind of timing attacks would this miss chance help deflect? Is this change in addition to, or instead of the current "can't attack into higher ground without sight" mechanic? How does this affect different units, and therefore different races, and on which timings? (e.g. would the hellion's attack be affected?) How does this affect maps with a ramp outside the main vs. those with a ramp outside the natural expansion, for each matchup?
You might think I'm being picky. I'm not. These are all considerations Blizzard HAS TO MAKE about the miss chance mechanic. Or they can take the empirical approach instead, add in miss chance and see how it plays out. In fact, they may have done so already during their many months of internal testing, and reverted to the current system. Regardless, as an outside source suggesting a pretty serious change to game mechanics (one that has been suggested many times already), a descriptive analysis just won't do. Even though Starcraft has miss chance, Starcraft 2 doesn't; the change that is being proposed for SC2 is a pretty serious one and deserves a lot more mathematical analysis than is given in the OP, simply because SC2 is a very mathy game and you're proposing such a significant change. In order to argue that it's a positive change, you must first make mathematical estimates of the way this would change the game, and THEN explain why this change would be a positive one.
As an aside (I've mentioned I disagree with the methodology, not my take on whether additional defender's advantage is needed or not), I think additional defender's advantage would make norush10 types of games where players macro up without any early engagements more viable, which would likely be detrimental to SC2 as a spectator game.
I really like this post. A miss chance will dramatically change the way this game is played, or be unnoticeable at all. Moreover, it is against blizzards philosophy for starcraft of "Depth and skill through design". Its why they aren't going to nerf auto-surround, and why at least you guys realize the foolishness of trying to get them to. A 25% for things to automatically fail, or a 25% for your being repaired siege tank to suddenly die, or inexplicably not die, while exciting, is counterproductive to their design direction for SC2. That lone siege tank can change the direction of the game.
I think the best solution is to change unit range. It doesn't result in any mechanical change in many matchups, because its an inherently strategic change. For instance, seige tanks benefit inordinately from this, while remaining useful on low ground. Well, their SIEGE tanks aren't they? Doesn't it make sense that they become more useful then marines when laying SIEGE to a ramp? Not only does it move away from random artificial depth, it encourages more strategic options.
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On March 17 2010 01:59 -fj. wrote:
Has ANYONE in this thread ever heard of smooth random? Every 3rd shot misses or something like that?
Yes. (Way to read the thread.)
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On March 17 2010 01:59 -fj. wrote:
Has ANYONE in this thread ever heard of smooth random? Every 3rd shot misses or something like that?
ya ratio vs random. you could even do interval, which is based on time.
i dunno if it's necessary or appropriate though.
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I like the speed reduction tho it doesnt make much sense in realization,
Marine A "Why are we shooting so slow?"
Marine B "Because they are standing on the high ground"
Marine A "And that affects my ability to pull the trigger and reload?"
Marine B "Apparently"
But i think the 25-50% chance to miss would be a much better idea. And it makes a lot more sense in application, beingon the low ground you usually have about 1/10 the size of a target as the one shooting down. All the lower ground unit would see is the high-ground person's head/weapon.
And i think everyone agrees right now there is some balance badly needed. For instance atm in any TvT or ZvZ its mostly mass a teir 1 unit and ignore teching, and if they dont do the same u push and win, if they do the same whoever had the better BO wins. U can only tech or choose a different strat if the two of u mutually decide to do so.
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Have you guys considered making it a damage reduction that isn't clear cut across the board? I understand why a miss % is better than a damage % across the board, but if for example marines lost 2 dmg when shooting up hill and stalkers lost say 2 damage while shooting up hill you would have a 33% decrease for marine and 25% decrease for stalker.
I don't care what they do to be honest... anything blizzard choses i'll adapt to, but right now I'd like some type of high ground advantage. :D
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Excellent read , agree on every point stated :D
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I agree with op.
Miss chance offers much more depth from an observers standpoint as well, because I don't know who will win every battle every time by just looking at the two armies.
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I still think one shouldn't be able to shoot through the ground... but what do I know, maybe I'm missing the point
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i definitely agree that chance needs to be implemented so the player is forced to constantly watch over the battles and make good decisions wrt retreating vs cotninuing. its dumb if you can just gauge it ahead of time and then completely ignore the actual battle.
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On March 17 2010 03:31 MMmmmmmmmm wrote:
i definitely agree that chance needs to be implemented so the player is forced to constantly watch over the battles and make good decisions wrt retreating vs cotninuing. its dumb if you can just gauge it ahead of time and then completely ignore the actual battle.
but the outcome of a battle will not change, or is nearly impossible to change. at least thats what the op is telling us. so that argument is a contradiction for me.
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i took it as something closer to an overwhelming advantage will definitely remain an overwhelming advantage.
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Rather then overcoming numeral disadvantage, now high cliff now rewards the high ground user with if they can deny intel advantage.
Look at it this way, in SC1, high ground lets me defend/attack with less units with high ground
In SC2, high ground lets me have a huge advantage if i can deny all flying units/collosus/scans
The kind of advantage is different, however, its still a huge advantage if i can wipe out the said units. I think thats how things are planned out in sc2
Instead of thinking "hey, please bring this back so that i get back my high ground advantage", we need to think "how do we abuse this high ground advantage given the current situation of SC"
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I am highly educated and not prone to cliche, but here I must deploy this irresistibly apt abbreviation:
tl:dr
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I completely agree with the OP as well as the posts made previously by other members with similar topics. I really hope Blizzard listens and at least gives it a try. I am strongly in favor of miss chance over any other mechanic (% reduction etc).
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agreed 100%. let's hope blizz takes a look at this thread..
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Why only 25% miss rate? I'd rather have it be something like 40% or even 50% like in SC1.
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On March 17 2010 04:55 tYsopz wrote:
Why only 25% miss rate? I'd rather have it be something like 40% or even 50% like in SC1.
SC:BW miss rate was (is) 30%.
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France2061 Posts
On March 17 2010 04:56 Musoeun wrote:Show nested quote +On March 17 2010 04:55 tYsopz wrote:
Why only 25% miss rate? I'd rather have it be something like 40% or even 50% like in SC1. SC:BW miss rate was (is) 30%.
Though the stated miss rate is 30%, I recall that some players tested it extensively and found that the true miss rate is closer to 45%.
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On March 17 2010 04:56 Musoeun wrote:Show nested quote +On March 17 2010 04:55 tYsopz wrote:
Why only 25% miss rate? I'd rather have it be something like 40% or even 50% like in SC1. SC:BW miss rate was (is) 30%.
That is incorrect. The game manual says it is 30%, but it is 50% ingame and has been for a very long time. If you don't believe me go ingame and test for yourself. I'm pretty sure you'll also find evidence for this if you just search TL.net or youtube.
EDIT: snowdrift beat me to it. It could be 45% miss as well, I've never seen anyone sample enough data for an exact percentage.
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wow great write up. i love how you dashed many commonly help beliefs about the miss/ damage reduction.
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I really like this post.
I don't. Because I think it was just a general dislike of randomness for Dustin that did it.
And we are changing the balance and viable builds, thats kinda the point of making a change like this.
Nethertheless, I do think that the Colossi and reapers will need to be rebalanced if these changes were to occur (and they will be more effective). I don't think other units will have to worry about it so much.
The only other significant change would be bigger use of dropships and the like. Which is a +1 for me.
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Hi!
I just signed up for this thread. And i think i have an idea, although i'll probably make an ass out of myself. But to the point:
Why must it be a disadvantage to be on low ground, why can't it be an advantage to be on high ground instead?
When attacking from high ground, make units have a chance of scoring a critical. (I don't know, maybe 10% chance to make double damage)
That would also make running into an ambush so much more painful, because even if you pull back quickly you might loose a unit or two to a (un)lucky crit.
It will also apply the higher ground advantage to attacking melee units.
I see one hole in my own arguement tho': Some units (like sieged tanks) would make an awesome amount of damage. Maybe you could limit the extra damage or something, or not make all units have the same crit damage?
Since this discussion seem a little bit onesided (leave it or give damage reduction) i thought i could make an input here.
/Tom
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You leave out an important aspect of a pure damage reduction solution - most people would probably contend that a damage to unit type system along the lines of SC1 would be more appropriate as well - that in conjunction with a pure damage reduction approach would be appropriate.
Your argument about miss percentage ignores the reality of randomness that any poker player knows all too well - regardless of how perfectly you play the odds, you can still encounter a long string of events where the odds fall out of your favor, regardless of percentages.
Consider attacking tanks uphill with dragoons in SC1. I have personally had games where 1 tank has killed 3 dragoons who were firing nonstop, and the tank still had 50% of it's health left. That sort of thing is typical in SC1, because those odds are applied to a clean slate calculation with each shot, with no regard for past misses, and a fresh randomly generated value. Say the miss chance is 40% - that means 40 of 100 shots miss on average, but it's clearly possible for 90 of 100 shots to miss.
If Blizzard were to implement a damage type to unit type system, rather than full damage + bonuses as it is now, along with reduced damage uphill, the dynamic would be very different. If hydralisks did explosive damage and marines were small targets, and hydras did 6 damage instead of 12, and suffered a 25% uphill damage reduction, they would do 4.5 per shot up hill, making it far more difficult for a group of 8 hydras to crush their way up a Terran ramp like they so easily can do now.
I would argue for, also, rather than being unable to shoot at targets up hill without spotting while being attacked by said uphill units, they suffer both damage reduction AND a miss chance - to provide an even stronger advantage to the uphill units who are not properly within vision.
I agree that unpredictability is not a bad thing, in and of itself, but I would argue that injecting unpredictability for no reasonable cause IS a bad thing.
I would argue that this system is perhaps more difficult to balance, but would lead to BETTER balance.
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There is also to consider that high ground isn´t the ONLY terrain factor anymore. There are also brush and watchtowers.
The point here is that these "fit" together. If we reverted highground brush would be nearly worthless.
Watchtowers are not only a source of intel but a significant tactical position as they reduce positional advantages in their radius.
Airunits are not a real hardcounter since to provide intel they have to surrender their main advantage: mobility.
The opening post doesn´t even realise this angle. Many units and mechanics in SC2 make heavy use of of the current system. The OP is pushing to make High ground a counter to low ground regardless of circumstances. A point is made that random chance is the best way to do so without even CONSIDERING that high ground might not NEED another advantage. After all everyone agrees am I right?
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On March 17 2010 05:53 Unentschieden wrote:
There is also to consider that high ground isn´t the ONLY terrain factor anymore. There are also brush and watchtowers.
The point here is that these "fit" together. If we reverted highground brush would be nearly worthless.
Watchtowers are not only a source of intel but a significant tactical position as they reduce positional advantages in their radius.
Airunits are not a real hardcounter since to provide intel they have to surrender their main advantage: mobility.
The opening post doesn´t even realise this angle. Many units and mechanics in SC2 make heavy use of of the current system. The OP is pushing to make High ground a counter to low ground regardless of circumstances. A point is made that random chance is the best way to do so without even CONSIDERING that high ground might not NEED another advantage. After all everyone agrees am I right?
Your points are good, but unrelated. Additional terrain mechanics are really great, but high ground still fails to provide any tactical advantage in most situations, though it should do so.
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Well written, well reasoned. Thanks very much.
Wish I could say more, but i'm still waiting on my beta key
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On March 16 2010 14:02 Ronald_McD wrote:
StarCraft 1 had a great high ground advantage. I've hated SC2's high ground line of sight bullshit right from the start.
no one is talking about removing the los mechanic. That is a great mechanic. What we are talking about is adding a miss chance to the los mechanic.
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Nice post, Daigomi. Well-thought and well-presented. Thanks for doing this!
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A good general never fights a battle he hasn't already won.
If you losing the game seriously depends on the chance to hit uphill it means you've already lost the game by not securing that position, or you are doing something reckless with your army.
Example A:
Your opponent secured the high ground outside your base and you are now contained.
- If your strategy isn't prepared to deal with this (recall, shuttles, hidden expansions, zealot leg speed, etc.) then you have already lost by giving up an important position which was crucial to you winning the game.
Example B:
Your opponent is turtling at his expansion and the balance of units between you is close enough that you can lose the battle if he gets enough luck with his high ground advantage (i.e. you cant crush him with zealot bombs and stasis).
- Don't attack him like an idiot, just keep map control and expand. Have you learned nothing from Day[9]?
Any situation where that rule wouldn't apply requires either you are playing a superior opponent that you need luck to win against, or that the game/map has an imbalance in it that needs to be fixed.
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I find it a bit comical that there is such a large sentiment against the "get a big ball of units and attack" mentality, but then conversely such support for a mechanic that encourages larger army sizes. A random miss chance has a disproportionate effect in small numbers and only "evens out" over large numbers, thus encouraging larger army play to overcome the effects of randomness.
Take the 10 shots example. It's a bit disingenuous to use the ALL 10 shots scenario to dismiss concerns - of course the odds are very slim (yet even so, it can still happen, and WILL happen over the course of thousands of players playing thousands of games). Rather, let's consider the chance of missing HALF of your shots.
With 10 shots, your chance of missing at least half of them is about 8% - a fairly significant number and far from "lottery" odds.
With 20 shots, your chance of missing at least half is about 1%.
With 100 shots, chance of missing half is microscopic. The more units/shots, the more the actual army effectiveness will converge on its true expected value.
If you attack with a small army, you have a disproportionate chance of having a complete disaster occur through pure luck of the draw. Penalizing small army play with increased randomization risk seems counterproductive to good/entertaining gameplay.
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I don't understand the defense of random elements as a "necessary fact of life". Just because scarabs sometimes failed to explode in SC1 doesn't mean we should desire that type of cryptic gameplay.
If we can find a solution that doesn't involve a random miss chance, all the better. Critical Hits, Resists, Avoidance etc were incredibly infuriating when trying to play arena games competitively. Sure, most of the time everything evened out, but occasionally you will be robbed. If you play 100 or 1000 games, which a serious player will, you will eventually lose to a random element.
And it feels awful and ultimately takes away the player's enjoyment from the game.
I'm not saying that high ground shouldn't have an advantage - it should, and it should be significant. I still don't understand why having that advantage be a random element would be desirable over another equally strong solution that is not random.
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Your assertion about "Miss Chance and Damage Reduction" is incorrect.
Let's take a look at your assertion
-A tank does 35 damage a shot, marines have 40hp.
-Normal: Two shots kill a marine.
Your claim
-50% miss: Four shots kill a marine (on average).
-50% less damage: Three shots kill a marine (17.5 * 3 = 52.5).
My claim
-50% miss: Three shots kill a marine
-50% less damage: Three shots kill a marine
Justification
Average=Expected Value= Sum(X_i*P(X=i))/n for i=1 to n
P(X=i)=P(hit)=.5 for all i
X_i=Damage=35 for all i
The game is to find the lowest value of n s.t. n*Expected Value>=40 (40 comes from the life of the marine)
n*Expected Value= n*sum(X_i*P(X=i))/n
= n*n*35*.5/n since for all i, P(X=i)=.5 and X_i=35.
=35*.5n
=17.5*n
17.5*n>=40
n>=2.285
Since n must be an integer,
n=3
What you did was assume a sequence of Hit then miss, hit then miss, hit then miss... etc. which is not an accurate model of 50% miss rate.
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On March 17 2010 06:18 Louder wrote:
high ground still fails to provide any tactical advantage in most situations, though it should do so.
The current mechanic is a huge advantage, if a enemy engages but fails to protect his spotters he will get demolished. Yeah you don´t get a "free" advatage for being on high ground anymore but why was that a good thing? Shure good positioning should be rewarded but it should be a bit more challenging than "hold your ramp". Impassable Terrain and FoW are already in favour of the defender/highlander, does he really need/deserve more?
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At this point in SC2, it is INCREDIBLY difficult to defend with a lesser force. If you don't have as many units as your opponent, you simply lose an engagement no matter what, even if you're the one defending. This narrows down the possible openings/strategies/build orders you can perform to a very slim amount. In SC1, part of the genius that top players had were cutting as many corners as possible in their builds and army sizes earlier on to gain an advantage. Things such as fast teching, fast harassment, and fast expanding relied entirely on cutting corners with your army size based on the knowledge that you could just barely defend with a lesser force, because you had the defender's advantage. If you try to cut ANY corners with your army size in SC2 at this point, you will lose 9 out of 10 times if he attacks, because he just has more stuff than you. It makes the game a lot more linear in terms of what you can and can't do, and doesn't open up experimentation or risky corner-cutting at all. You're forced to pump out units all game right from the start, because if you don't, you lose. It puts a huge strain on trying to do any other sort of strategy early on, like teching or harassing, because the investment into those things will surely cut your army size that you could have spent that money on, and once your opponent attacks, you will lose.
And while I completely agree that high ground advantage is a huge part of defender's advantage, and that miss % is probably the best option for making that work, I think there are a lot of other factors involved also.
Another thing that I've been thinking of lately is the fact that there are no "defensive" oriented units anymore, and there are no units that have multiple purposes, one being defending. Some examples from SC1 would be: Lurkers in ZvT being able to hold expansions against a much larger force because of their splash damage and being up a ramp or in a choke, mines in TvP being able to hold off a much larger force because of the P needing to take the time to clear them before being in your face, Reavers in PvZ being able to hold against a Hydra all-in or holding an expansion.
All these things are a much smaller force holding off against a much larger force because the units are versatile and have the ability to be used as a defensive tool, which allows you to spend your resources in other ways while you hold off against that larger force. Imagine in SC1 if in ZvT, rather than being able to hold off from the T's massive MnM army with lurkers and dark swarm, you had to just spam hydralisks to stay alive. The ZvT style as we know it would never have existed, because there would be no breathing room for expanding or teching. You would need all your larva and money to spam those hydralisks to stay alive.
There are so fewer units that can be used as defensive tools in SC2. Almost every unit is just simple damage that does nothing else besides that. The only diversity, if you'd even call it that, is the whole +damage to light/armored units (which I think is retarded and makes it feel so rock-paper-scissors like).
Anyway, the main point of this post is, a lack of a high ground advantage combined with a lack of units that can be used for multiple roles, one of those roles being defense, makes for a really limited amount of strategies that can be used, and almost completely nullifies the ability to cut corners to gain an advantage, except in the situation where your opponent is stupid and doesn't realize you're cutting corners, which won't happen in higher levels of play. You're forced to spam units just to stay alive. It puts a strain on your resources, making fast teching and expanding hard, and it puts a strain on your building production facilities, making early harassment hard (if you're building harassing units out of your buildings, you aren't building your core army units, which you need to stay alive). It makes SC2 seem a lot more one-dimensional than SC1.
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Amen brother. Hopefully this idea gains momentum and Blizzard makes a change. I remember they only changed the high ground mechanic within the last several months so there's still an opportunity for them to change it back. Unfortunately, the window for that opportunity is closing the closer we get to the end of the beta.
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What's with all these lurkers coming out to dispute the math? Way to "miss the point". What you should be taking away from that example is the fact that, with damage reduction, in many cases, there is NO effect because many units overkill their targets as it is. So some units would be greatly affected and some much less so, or not at all. With the miss chance, it doesn't matter if it takes a particular unit 4 hits or 3 hits, or 11 hits or whatever to kill another unit. The distinction that's important here is that ALL units are affected proportionally by miss chance.
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Osaka27139 Posts
At this point in SC2, it is INCREDIBLY difficult to defend with a lesser force. If you don't have as many units as your opponent, you simply lose an engagement no matter what, even if you're the one defending. This narrows down the possible openings/strategies/build orders you can perform to a very slim amount. In SC1, part of the genius that top players had were cutting as many corners as possible in their builds and army sizes earlier on to gain an advantage. Things such as fast teching, fast harassment, and fast expanding relied entirely on cutting corners with your army size based on the knowledge that you could just barely defend with a lesser force, because you had the defender's advantage. If you try to cut ANY corners with your army size in SC2 at this point, you will lose 9 out of 10 times if he attacks, because he just has more stuff than you. It makes the game a lot more linear in terms of what you can and can't do, and doesn't open up experimentation or risky corner-cutting at all. You're forced to pump out units all game right from the start, because if you don't, you lose. It puts a huge strain on trying to do any other sort of strategy early on, like teching or harassing, because the investment into those things will surely cut your army size that you could have spent that money on, and once your opponent attacks, you will lose.
For those wondering why this article was written, this is the reason.
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ok... first of all I didn't know they got rid of the miss chance... wow that's really bad. That's part of what created the depth of the game we gotta keep that. Good post very though provoking. :D
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On March 17 2010 02:39 mnofstl007 wrote:
I like the speed reduction tho it doesnt make much sense in realization,
Marine A "Why are we shooting so slow?"
Marine B "Because they are standing on the high ground"
Marine A "And that affects my ability to pull the trigger and reload?"
Marine B "Apparently"
I was thinking more along the lines of they take longer to line up a clear shot, or to track enemy troop movement and fire. Which would make sense to me, and the math's easier than other methods.
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On March 17 2010 11:00 Conquest101 wrote:
What's with all these lurkers coming out to dispute the math? Way to "miss the point". What you should be taking away from that example is the fact that, with damage reduction, in many cases, there is NO effect because many units overkill their targets as it is. So some units would be greatly affected and some much less so, or not at all. With the miss chance, it doesn't matter if it takes a particular unit 4 hits or 3 hits, or 11 hits or whatever to kill another unit. The distinction that's important here is that ALL units are affected proportionally by miss chance.
Over the long run, there is no difference in the number of hits required in both a chance miss system and a percent damage reduction system. the only difference is that one has a spread, whereas the other is a constant effect (and thus has no variability/sd/spread).
PS I did not "miss the point". Arguing against one of the claims presented to support an assertion is a legitimate dispute. I agree with the overall notion that there needs to be some greater high ground advantage. I'm just pointing that the assertion that a chance system takes more hits to kill a unit than a flat percentage decrease is simply not true. These two are the same except one has luck associated with it and the other does not.
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ETA on that high ground mechanic?
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On March 17 2010 09:32 Angra wrote:
At this point in SC2, it is INCREDIBLY difficult to defend with a lesser force. If you don't have as many units as your opponent, you simply lose an engagement no matter what, even if you're the one defending. This narrows down the possible openings/strategies/build orders you can perform to a very slim amount. In SC1, part of the genius that top players had were cutting as many corners as possible in their builds and army sizes earlier on to gain an advantage. Things such as fast teching, fast harassment, and fast expanding relied entirely on cutting corners with your army size based on the knowledge that you could just barely defend with a lesser force, because you had the defender's advantage. If you try to cut ANY corners with your army size in SC2 at this point, you will lose 9 out of 10 times if he attacks, because he just has more stuff than you. It makes the game a lot more linear in terms of what you can and can't do, and doesn't open up experimentation or risky corner-cutting at all. You're forced to pump out units all game right from the start, because if you don't, you lose. It puts a huge strain on trying to do any other sort of strategy early on, like teching or harassing, because the investment into those things will surely cut your army size that you could have spent that money on, and once your opponent attacks, you will lose.
exactly
can someone please make sure the blizz developers understand this...between this and incontrol's earlier thread, someone's got to get the word out. I see this as #1 problem they need to fix right now.
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On March 17 2010 12:11 fmagrave wrote:Show nested quote +On March 17 2010 11:00 Conquest101 wrote:
What's with all these lurkers coming out to dispute the math? Way to "miss the point". What you should be taking away from that example is the fact that, with damage reduction, in many cases, there is NO effect because many units overkill their targets as it is. So some units would be greatly affected and some much less so, or not at all. With the miss chance, it doesn't matter if it takes a particular unit 4 hits or 3 hits, or 11 hits or whatever to kill another unit. The distinction that's important here is that ALL units are affected proportionally by miss chance. Over the long run, there is no difference in the number of hits required in both a chance miss system and a percent damage reduction system. the only difference is that one has a spread, whereas the other is a constant effect (and thus has no variability/sd/spread). PS I did not "miss the point". Arguing against one of the claims presented to support an assertion is a legitimate dispute. I agree with the overall notion that there needs to be some greater high ground advantage. I'm just pointing that the assertion that a chance system takes more hits to kill a unit than a flat percentage decrease is simply not true. These two are the same except one has luck associated with it and the other does not.
No, there is a difference. Going with the siege tank example.
33% miss: Three shots kill a marine (on average).
33% less damage: Two shots kill a marine (23 * 2 = 46).
I don't care to do the math, but even if 33% miss does not result exactly in 3 shots on average, it certainly does not result in 2 shots on average, which would be the necessary result to match damage reduction in this case. Even if, as you say, the 50% miss example is not correct, my guess would be that there are plenty of other unit "matchups" that WOULD result in the above scenario.
The thing is, the example doesn't matter. It's unfortunate that his math was wrong, but it doesn't change anything. The point Daigomi was trying to make was:
"Because units do more damage than is needed, damage reduction can have little to no impact on the number of shots required to kill a unit. On the other hand, with the miss-dynamic, the number of shots required to kill a unit increases proportionately with the chance to miss."
One effect varies by unit (omg variability). One doesn't. This still remains true.
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It is blatant stupidity to think you can make a statistical suggestion for balancing the ground mechanic. Basically your 25 percent miss ratio amounts to a wild guess. If you think theory crafting is bad, then you have to agree this article is worse.. Do any of you truly realize the balancing implications of changing the ground mechanic?
User was temp banned for this post.
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Zato-1 hit the biggest issues spot on. If Blizzard wanted to, I believe they could design some kind of system involving misses and/or damage reduction to make things fair.
Not only is the miss system much more complicated for balance than the current system. The best example is in TvT, where in SC:BW its never a good idea to attack sieged tanks on a cliff with tanks. Even if you do have a considerable army advantage, you may suffer huge casualties before you can even do damage. But then, we have cases such as PvP where goons can just bust a ramp by just having 2 or 3 more goons.
Another issue that blizzard cares deeply about is the intuitiveness. They want to make the game easier to pick up and play, and a high ground miss chance is much less intuitive than requiring sight above a hill before you can shoot them. Not everyone notices the "miss" animation above their units in a battle, and there's no easy way to teach (in game) that the miss chance is 30%.
And finally, changing the current system will not have a definite change on the way the game is played. Currently 1 base builds are much more popular not solely because of high ground advantage, but more because of the harassment options available, the lack of good defensive units, and the current maps.
Also, in the end ramps are a choke, and ARE a significant advantage. It just shouldn't be played the same way as in brood war.
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On March 17 2010 12:53 Conquest101 wrote:
No, there is a difference. Going with the siege tank example.
33% miss: Three shots kill a marine (on average).
33% less damage: Two shots kill a marine (23 * 2 = 46).
I don't care to do the math, but even if 33% miss does not result exactly in 3 shots on average, it certainly does not result in 2 shots on average, which would be the necessary result to match damage reduction in this case. Even if, as you say, the 50% miss example is not correct, my guess would be that there are plenty of other unit "matchups" that WOULD result in the above scenario.
The thing is, the example doesn't matter. It's unfortunate that his math was wrong, but it doesn't change anything. The point Daigomi was trying to make was:
"Because units do more damage than is needed, damage reduction can have little to no impact on the number of shots required to kill a unit. On the other hand, with the miss-dynamic, the number of shots required to kill a unit increases proportionately with the chance to miss."
One effect varies by unit (omg variability). One doesn't. This still remains true.
Now that I think about a bit more, his overall assertion that the number of hits required to kill a unit will increase due to overkill may be true.
PS .
I think the probability model of a miss rate system would be.
Probability(Target will die in N shots)=(N-1 choose k-1)*p^k*(1-p)^(N-k)
where
p is hit rate
k is the number of shots unit A needs to kill unit B (assuming 100% hit rate).
On the other hand, the calculation for percent damage reduction is simply linear.
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On March 17 2010 14:27 fmagrave wrote:
I think the probability model of a miss rate system would be.
Probability(Target will die in N shots)=(N-1 choose k-1)*p^k*(1-p)^(N-k)
where
p is hit rate
k is the number of shots unit A needs to kill unit B (assuming 100% hit rate).
I agree! That's why I posted it two pages ago.  (Edit: Three pages. And man this really didn't have to start a new page, sorry about that.)
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I think the range idea is absolutely awesome and would love to see that implemented for something different :D
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And about:
"A bit of bad luck will cost you the game."
If u have an army aventage but u are force to attack up the tarrain - u just DO NOT. u fall back fo a second , regroup and then attack again. That just another reason for high ground misssing mechanics. It works both ways - for defender and agressor. You need to stay focus all the time. If u cry about the fact that the smaller , but standing at the high ground army destroyd u - well its just and only your foult not a game mechanics.
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On March 17 2010 13:08 stink123 wrote:
Another issue that blizzard cares deeply about is the intuitiveness. They want to make the game easier to pick up and play, and a high ground miss chance is much less intuitive than requiring sight above a hill before you can shoot them. Not everyone notices the "miss" animation above their units in a battle, and there's no easy way to teach (in game) that the miss chance is 30%.
You don't have to teach the player that the miss chance is 30%. You just need to tell them that units positioned on high ground have an advantage. Players will learn or rather feel the actual value by playing. Majority of values in all sorts of games are hidden from the player and they just intuitively learn them over time by playing. That's normal.
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your main reason is, that high ground advantage would give more expanding/teching options. but as a zerg player i cannot agree.
1.) expanding: if you expand (to your nat) you loose your high ground advantage, so how are you supposed to hold an expansion with the help of high ground?
2.) you tell us teching is impossible? in zvp and zvt i can see A LOT of teching. just like in bw! there are voidray, phoenix rushes, fast tech to immortals, and in zvt fast banshee, and so on.
the only rush that could counter it is a roach rush, and i think the defender bonus is still large enough to hold a roach rush with cannons/bunkers and the choke and tech up.
so are you only talking about tvt pvp tvp? if not, please give an example how teching is denied in a certain situation!
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Has anyone also considered the possibility of other positional advantages that might add some flavor to the game? Things like cover and flanking are the first things that come to mind.
Cover: Basically the fact that a target is not fully exposed makes it harder to hit. Things like buildings, terrain features, even other units provide cover. The idea here would be to make positioning of troops and choice of target more of a conscious decision on the part of the player. "Do I try to focus fire down the ghosts/marrauders in the back of the pack and risk missing with my ground forces, or do I try to take out the meatshields that are on the front line?" " Do I try to take a position from the front, or do I need to go around and try to flank it and reduce a cover bonus?"
Flanking: Something that I think would add a lot of flavor to the game and perhaps deemphasize single massive armies. The idea here is that there is some reward to engaging an opponent on multiple sides perhaps a flat damage increase. There could be interesting ways to make this apply a bit differently to multiple races, perhaps you wouldn't get a bonus against a protoss unit if its shields were still up. Maybe ultralisks and or thors would have more damage reduction on attacks from the front, but be vulnerable to attacks from the sides and behind.
In general the idea is to generate more decisions for a player to make, other than right now it is "he is building unit x, which means I need to add unit y to my forces in equivalent supply." Some questions that might come up are: "Do I really want to assault that position with ground forces, or do I really need to hit it with some air and ground in order to reduce a cover/highground advantage." Do I really want to clump all of my forces into a single large army and reduce the overall effectiveness of my units because they have to shoot through the space that other friendly units occupy?" "Do I have the possibility of being flanked and how does that influence where I need to move my troops and have a backup force?"
Anyway just some thoughts, maybe I'll elaborate later on.
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France2061 Posts
On March 17 2010 20:04 spad12 wrote:
Has anyone also considered the possibility of other positional advantages that might add some flavor to the game? Things like cover and flanking are the first things that come to mind.
Cover: Basically the fact that a target is not fully exposed makes it harder to hit. Things like buildings, terrain features, even other units provide cover. The idea here would be to make positioning of troops and choice of target more of a conscious decision on the part of the player. "Do I try to focus fire down the ghosts/marrauders in the back of the pack and risk missing with my ground forces, or do I try to take out the meatshields that are on the front line?" " Do I try to take a position from the front, or do I need to go around and try to flank it and reduce a cover bonus?"
Flanking: Something that I think would add a lot of flavor to the game and perhaps deemphasize single massive armies. The idea here is that there is some reward to engaging an opponent on multiple sides perhaps a flat damage increase. There could be interesting ways to make this apply a bit differently to multiple races, perhaps you wouldn't get a bonus against a protoss unit if its shields were still up. Maybe ultralisks and or thors would have more damage reduction on attacks from the front, but be vulnerable to attacks from the sides and behind.
In general the idea is to generate more decisions for a player to make, other than right now it is "he is building unit x, which means I need to add unit y to my forces in equivalent supply." Some questions that might come up are: "Do I really want to assault that position with ground forces, or do I really need to hit it with some air and ground in order to reduce a cover/highground advantage." Do I really want to clump all of my forces into a single large army and reduce the overall effectiveness of my units because they have to shoot through the space that other friendly units occupy?" "Do I have the possibility of being flanked and how does that influence where I need to move my troops and have a backup force?"
Anyway just some thoughts, maybe I'll elaborate later on.
That sounds like Company of Heroes and other Relic games. It's a nice mechanic, but those games revolve entirely around micro and tactics. I don't think such an elaborate system would be appropriate for Starcraft, especially since the game hasn't been developed with that in mind from the get-go. Artificial cover and flanking bonuses (Starcraft had a "natural" flanking bonus) may work in low unit count, squad-based games, but it's the sort of thing that'll be unmanageable for players in a macro game like SC2, with so many units involved. And how are you going to find cover for your 150 food army anyway? Walls or potholes aren't going to protect them.
The high ground advantage and chokes/open ground provide enough tactical options.
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Starcraft does (according to the battle.net site) have a cover bonus. Mapmakers just don't use enough doodads these days for us to ever see it.
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Even though Idra (A professional gamer) has voiced his opinion against the random factor he uses the blanket statement of many progamers are for it, I'd like to see some documentation on that. Personally miss chance is bad and he did prove that it's POSSIBLE to miss 10 shots in a row. I still prefer the idea of -1 range while firing up hill, it's more realistic(firing up a cliff would reduce your range after all) and it would probably solve the problem of high ground advantage since the units on top get a few free shots in. Combine that with the need to scout up hill first and high ground seems to have a strong defensive advantage.
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not to get off topic, but theres alot of chance stuff thats been taken away. mines are gone, no lurkers means no possibility of stop lurkers, no reavers mean no scarabs (though i guess the article mentions this one). and other mechanical stuff like perfect vs imperfect splits, and even glitchy units to some extent; MBS, smart casting, etc etc.
i think this is the direction that blizzard has chosen to go in. not only do they want to streamline the battles, they're striving for the player to have perfect execution each and every time. this is how they make it "accessible" to new players. so i don't think blizzard is going to change this, it certainly doesn't make sense for them to do so in the direction they're going in.
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Just to complete the list of alternatives in the OP. Instead of penalizing units that shoot from low ground, it is of course also possible to give bonuses to the high ground units. The net effect of this is of course similar, but there are some subtle differences. (Also bonusses are generally more fun than penalties, right?) This gives the following three additional alternatives.
Increased damage for high ground units
Units firing from higher ground do +x% damage
This is very similar from the reduced damage for units firing from lower ground option discussed in the OP. It has the same drawback of having a very nonlinear effect across the board.
Increased range
Units firing from higher ground have increased range
From all options mentioned this might actually make the most sense in terms of real world logic. (Not that that should be an argument) Similar arguments on pro and con side as for the decreased range mechanic.
One subtle difference is that the player on the high ground is choosing the affected units. This means that defender can choose units that would maximize the effect this mechanic (increasing the effectiveness of the mechanic). Whereas, in the penalty case the player on the lower ground chooses with what unit he attacks, obviously in a way that he is minimally affected by the penalty, possibly nullifying the effect. (Sieged tanks firing up a cliff are not going to be too worried about the decrease in range.)
This makes the a range bonus (IMO) slightly more attractive than the range penalty option. In my opinion this option could also be interesting as an alternative.
increase firing rate
Units on higher ground fire fast
Logically, this makes even less sense to me than the reduced firing rate. For the rest similar arguments apply. The effect is linear, etc.
To me the reduced firing rate and increased range options seem the most attractive. I'm not convinced by the pro randomness arguments in the OP. IMHO unpredictability in starcraft should result from small differences leading to big effects (chaoticness for the mathematically inclined), rather than from an RNG. The reaver scarab thing is an example of this. As far as I know scarab path finding is 100% deterministic (i.e. no RNG is involved). This means that whether a scarab lands or not is a 100% in control of the players. Even if it is effectively impossible to really predict the outcome, some players (thru instincts gathered by experience) will be better at landing their scarabs then others.
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In reality nothing is absolutely deterministic: ΔxΔp≥ℏ/2
Honestly, with RNG the thing that separates the truly great players from the good ones is how they will respond when RNG does not act in their favor. The goal for an RNG system for a high ground advantage would be a system that has some RNG, but the RNG effect is not so great that a player cannot recover from a bad RND streak.
Everything has a finite probability associated with it. Sometimes that probability is so small that we approximate it to be deterministic.
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Just to clarify, are the reasons Blizzard removed high ground miss-chance and doodad miss-chance because:
1. They don't like probability based mechanics.
2. They think it makes the game unintuitive.
Are those the only reasons?
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The old mechanic also wouldn´t work as intuitivly with Brush and Watchtowers. It also doesn´t emphatise the advantage of air-superiority as much.
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On March 18 2010 02:22 spad12 wrote:
In reality nothing is absolutely deterministic: ΔxΔp≥ℏ/2
[offtopic]
That is a popular misconception about quantum mechanics. QM is deterministic. Only the semi-classical approximation to QM is non-deterministic. In any case that is completely irrelevant for starcraft, since on the level of computer electronics ℏ=0, and everything is determinstic. That includes any RNG.
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In trying to balance three entirely different races, Blizzard has to make some compromises. One of those compromises is making maps very uniform. Everything is symmetrical, has a choke, a natural expansion, etc.
If high ground was made significantly more powerful, you'd have disparity between maps where your choke is a ramp and where is is flat. This would be an additional factor that would need to be balanced or all maps would have to be standardized. The maps are boring enough as it is.
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On March 16 2010 21:39 Manifesto7 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 16 2010 21:24 no_re wrote:
To me this article seemed full of holes, bias and exaggerations =[ Which... you don't care to point out? Other than the silly lottery analogy (which people are missing the forest for the trees on) I don't see where the bias is. None the people who have complained about stating so strongly that there is a problem have presented evidence that there is no problem.
Evidence for the fact that there is no problem with SC2's current cliff dynamic is easy to present.
First, if you believe there's a "problem" with the cliff dynamic because you want players to have a strong high ground, the no vision approach is an incredibly strong mechanic. One player can decimate an entire base from high ground all because his opponent had no air units to provide vision. Then, alternatively based on that, if the low-ground player has vision he can completely negate this high ground advantage (which arguably adds another layer of strategy). (If fact, I believe this makes high ground and its simple vision counter TOO extreme if anything. I'd prefer a cliff advantage for SC2 that's less powerful without vision and more powerful with vision than how the game currently has it configured.)
Second, if you believe there's a "problem" with the cliff dynamic because players need more automatic defensive advantages for tech-tree investment, you can easily argue that such a problem comes from some other dynamic present in the game (before we blame the current cliff advantage). Most obvious would be the incredibly weak nature of defensive structures in SC2. Defensive structures have traditionally been the very things that were supposed to counter early-game units while being easily countered by late-game units. If this obvious, early-game role for defensive structures does not exist in SC2, perhaps we should petition to have that fixed before we ask Blizzard to "fix" SC2's cliff dynamic to provide a similar effect. (Plus, one could argue that not every map should begin a player's defensive position on high ground.)
Even more troubling was the way the article dismissed criticisms that said his idea would result with random wins. Daigomi acted like these criticisms were easily and obviously wrong when he provided no truly strong arguments to justify that claim (and, as others have pointed out, many of his arguments were very weak). While I'll admit he could be right that StarCraft 2 has enough back and forth combat to make any random wins next to impossible (I'm no expert on how chance manifests itself in games), many of my doubts about that remain (I could list them if you're interested).
Most troubling, however, was the way he didn't include a very wide list of alternatives. Making chance behave "more like it should" by putting a chance limiter on his miss percentage (as a couple people have pointed out in this thread) is a good way to have what he wants while keeping the game much more predictable. Also, removing damage-to-armor bonuses when a unit attacks high ground (as one person suggested) or introducing a new balance system into the unit damage system for high ground in the first place (to give strengths and bonuses to specific units when attacking to/from high ground) would be easier to balance than a flat, %-based reduction but it would otherwise function the same. However, he didn't mention either of these possibilities (or others that people mentioned).
All in all, for claiming to be impartial with this issue and claiming to consider everything important, this article failed to actually meet that claim. I thought it was a great dissertation otherwise. I don't see why it needed to pollute itself with obvious exaggerations at those few points.
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Your assertion about "Miss Chance and Damage Reduction" is incorrect.
/.../
My claim
-50% miss: Three shots kill a marine
-50% less damage: Three shots kill a marine
Actually, as has been pointed out before, the required number of hits to kill a unit is affected proportionally to the miss chance, so that if it takes n shots to kill a unit with 0% miss chance, it will take n/(1-p) shots (on average) to kill the same unit with p% miss chance.
Your calculations are wrong in that you assume that the damage dealt by a tank is always 35, which is not the case. The first hit on a marine deals 35 damage, but the second hit deals only 5 (because the marine only has 40-35=5 hit points left), so that the average damage dealt is 20 per hit, and, with 50% miss chance, 10 per shot, not 17.5 as in your calculations. Correcting the numbers in your calculation, we get 20*0.5n>=40 -> n=4, as expected.
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South Africa4316 Posts
On March 19 2010 12:12 Tiptup wrote:Show nested quote +On March 16 2010 21:39 Manifesto7 wrote:On March 16 2010 21:24 no_re wrote:
To me this article seemed full of holes, bias and exaggerations =[ Which... you don't care to point out? Other than the silly lottery analogy (which people are missing the forest for the trees on) I don't see where the bias is. None the people who have complained about stating so strongly that there is a problem have presented evidence that there is no problem. First, if you believe there's a "problem" with the cliff dynamic because you want players to have a strong high ground, the no vision approach is an incredibly strong mechanic. One player can decimate an entire base from high ground all because his opponent had no air units to provide vision. Then, alternatively based on that, if the low-ground player has vision he can completely negate this high ground advantage (which arguably adds another layer of strategy). (If fact, I believe this makes high ground and its simple vision counter TOO extreme if anything. I'd prefer a cliff advantage for SC2 that's less powerful without vision and more powerful with vision than how the game currently has it configured.)
That's exactly my argument. The current cliff mechanic is either game changing or useless, where it should rather be reasonable advantage all the time. However, I would argue that the current mechanic will more often be useless than overpowered. Players know what advantage the higher ground offers, so having a few air units present for big battles will become the norm, completely nullifying the advantage. So yeah, I agree, you need a more stable mechanic that gives an stable advantage all the time.
Second, if you believe there's a "problem" with the cliff dynamic because players need more automatic defensive advantages for tech-tree investment, you can easily argue that such a problem comes from some other dynamic present in the game (before we blame the current cliff advantage). Most obvious would be the incredibly weak nature of defensive structures in SC2. Defensive structures have traditionally been the very things that were supposed to counter early-game units while being easily countered by late-game units. If this obvious, early-game role for defensive structures does not exist in SC2, perhaps we should petition to have that fixed before we ask Blizzard to "fix" SC2's cliff dynamic to provide a similar effect. (Plus, one could argue that not every map should begin a player's defensive position on high ground.)
This doesn't contradict my point at all, it simply shows that there are multiple reasons for the problem, something which I will once again agree with wholeheartedly. Yes, defensive structures are weak, but so is the higher ground.
Even more troubling was the way the article dismissed criticisms that said his idea would result with random wins. Daigomi acted like these criticisms were easily and obviously wrong when he provided no truly strong arguments to justify that claim (and, as others have pointed out, many of his arguments were very weak). While I'll admit he could be right that StarCraft 2 has enough back and forth combat to make any random wins next to impossible (I'm no expert on how chance manifests itself in games), many of my doubts about that remain (I could list them if you're interested).
You say that no strong arguments were made, but you do not show why the arguments were weak. Some people have raised criticisms, most of which I have addressed. How specifically were the arguments weak?
Most troubling, however, was the way he didn't include a very wide list of alternatives. Making chance behave "more like it should" by putting a chance limiter on his miss percentage (as a couple people have pointed out in this thread) is a good way to have what he wants while keeping the game much more predictable. Also, removing damage-to-armor bonuses when a unit attacks high ground (as one person suggested) or introducing a new balance system into the unit damage system for high ground in the first place (to give strengths and bonuses to specific units when attacking to/from high ground) would be easier to balance than a flat, %-based reduction but it would otherwise function the same. However, he didn't mention either of these possibilities (or others that people mentioned).
If this is the most troubling aspect of the article, then I am unperturbed. What you are saying I did not cover simply fell outside of the scope of the article. The purpose of the article was to clear up some of the misconceptions regarding miss chances to allow a constructive debate to take place. As such, it was not crucial that I cover all the alternatives, as they are not part of the misconceptions. The ones I did look at were mentioned very briefly to give readers an idea of what the alternatives were, but it was never intended to be a comprehensive examination of the alternatives. If you believe that these require more attention, feel free to write an article on them, and I will feature it on the front page.
All in all, for claiming to be impartial with this issue and claiming to consider everything important, this article failed to actually meet that claim. I thought it was a great dissertation otherwise. I don't see why it needed to pollute itself with obvious exaggerations at those few points.
I'm glad you thought it was good. Most of the criticisms so far have been misunderstandings, or people not thinking the issue through thoroughly (or in the case of maths, applying the wrong formulas). However, in between people have raised many interesting points, and I have enjoyed reading the debate in this thread.
Just a quick note, I made one reply a few pages back which briefly addressed some of the criticisms. If you haven't read it, just quickly check it out before replying
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i think adding high ground advantage will also fix the mass roach problem with ZvZ
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Bang up job, Daigomi.
One of the key differences of miss chance vs. other systems is touched on in various examples, but I would encapsulate it like this: high ground miss chance advantage has a psychological effect that the other systems don't. (In the spirit of listing features, let's not outright call that a shortcoming.) It is scary to attack high ground in SC1 because you don't know exactly what's going to happen. I love watching the pros dance back and forth on Heartbreak Ridge. From the SC2 I've watched and played, this particular element is almost entirely missing. In my vision of Starcraft at its finest (the RTS, right?)--a battle of wits requiring focus and interface control--the tactical palate is greatly enriched with the psychological element of miss chance. Whether that, or SC1 defender advantage as we know it, is appropriate to the style of SC2 is a different question. I have faith that creative top players can invent new tech-based strategies regardless, and a solidifying build order metagame will help inform them. I really like watching players exploit minimal defense for econ and tech growth though. I think that heightens the fundamental RTS tension of military threat vs. long term power. Which is the most fun for connoisseur spectators. 
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Australia4514 Posts
Another option, increase the damage that units from high-ground do. Similar to the reduction but in reverse.
Decrease any armor factor for units on low-ground.
These options are probably inferior to the others, but just pointing out that there are many ways to skin a cat.
Something has to be done at least.
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Hi, if p is the miss chance and a marine need to be hit two times to be killed, then the expected number of shots you need to kill a marine is
2/(1-p)
Meaning: With a miss chance of 0.5 (=50%) the expected number of shots is 4.
Math
+ Show Spoiler +Consider a model where a tank shoots at one marine at a time. The tank shoots as long at the marine which he is firing at is alive. When the tank kills the current marine he proceeds with the next.
We are looking at the shoots of the tank. We can classify each shoot as
1. a shoot which didn't kill the marine and after which the marine was hit 0 times.
2. a shoot which didn't kill the marine and after which the marine was hit 1 times.
3. a shoot which killed the marine (meaning that he was hit a second time)
We can consider these three possibilities as states of a markov chain.
The matrix of this chain is [(p, 1-p, 0), (0, p, 1-p), (p, 1-p, 0)].
This chain is ergodic with the stationary distribution [p/2, 1/2, (1-p)/2].
The value (1-p)/2 is the proportion of the shoots which killed a marine with respect to all shoots. This means a proportion of (1-p)/2 of all shoots killed a marine.
The mean recurrent time of state 3 (= the mean number of shoots you need to kill a marine after the shoot which killed the last marine) is 1/[(1-p)/2] = 2/(1-p). And this is the expected number of shoots you need to kill a marine.
Notice that for p=0 (no miss chance) you need 2/(1-p) = 2/1 = 2 shoots to kill a marine.
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On March 22 2010 00:47 Kiwikawa wrote:Hi, if p is the miss chance and a marine need to be hit two times to be killed, then the expected number of shots you need to kill a marine is 2/(1-p) Meaning: With a miss chance of 0.5 (=50%) the expected number of shots is 4. Math + Show Spoiler +Consider a model where a tank shoots at one marine at a time. The tank shoots as long at the marine which he is firing at is alive. When the tank kills the current marine he proceeds with the next.
We are looking at the shoots of the tank. We can classify each shoot as
1. a shoot which didn't kill the marine and after which the marine was hit 0 times.
2. a shoot which didn't kill the marine and after which the marine was hit 1 times.
3. a shoot which killed the marine (meaning that he was hit a second time)
We can consider these three possibilities as states of a markov chain.
The matrix of this chain is [(p, 1-p, 0), (0, p, 1-p), (p, 1-p, 0)].
This chain is ergodic with the stationary distribution [p/2, 1/2, (1-p)/2].
The value (1-p)/2 is the proportion of the shoots which killed a marine with respect to all shoots. This means a proportion of (1-p)/2 of all shoots killed a marine.
The mean recurrent time of state 3 (= the mean number of shoots you need to kill a marine after the shoot which killed the last marine) is 1/[(1-p)/2] = 2/(1-p). And this is the expected number of shoots you need to kill a marine.
Notice that for p=0 (no miss chance) you need 2/(1-p) = 2/1 = 2 shoots to kill a marine.
Can you create a probability curve of my chances of getting into the SC2 beta next? ^_^
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On March 22 2010 03:53 Deviation wrote:
Can you create a probability curve of my chances of getting into the SC2 beta next? ^_^
Unfortunately this is out of reach.
+ Show Spoiler +btw, instead of using the admirable concept of markov chains you also can simply use the (multiple of the) mean of a geometric distribution. Just for the sake of completeness... (...not that we can ever reach completeness...)
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Big Math hurt my brane.
I too hope Blizzard reintroduces the miss chance concept. It makes the most sense to me and as long as the randomness is controlled it will be fine.
For example, the blademaster in WC3 has a 15% chance of a critical hit. This value is true even If it get's 10 critical hits in a row, because after the ten hits, it will have a lower chance of getting successive critical hits meaning that the final percentage of critical hits it gets in a game will be about 15%. Think of it as applying the "law of averages" like when you're rolling a dice and you notice that five hasn't come up after 20 throws. You think five should come up soon, and is more likely to come up next than say... six. Blizzard turned this into math.
Though to be fair, a blademaster getting 10 crits in a row would kill two of any hero, leading to a win so this is a bad example T_T.
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Sorry I didn't reply to this right away. I've been playing a lot of the StraCraft 2 beta (and Demon's Souls for the PS3) in my spare time the last few days.
On March 20 2010 06:17 Daigomi wrote:Show nested quote +On March 19 2010 12:12 Tiptup wrote:
Even more troubling was the way the article dismissed criticisms that said his idea would result with random wins. Daigomi acted like these criticisms were easily and obviously wrong when he provided no truly strong arguments to justify that claim (and, as others have pointed out, many of his arguments were very weak). While I'll admit he could be right that StarCraft 2 has enough back and forth combat to make any random wins next to impossible (I'm no expert on how chance manifests itself in games), many of my doubts about that remain (I could list them if you're interested). You say that no strong arguments were made, but you do not show why the arguments were weak. Some people have raised criticisms, most of which I have addressed. How specifically were the arguments weak?
I don't really believe your primary arguments were weak. in fact, on the whole I'd say my concerns about random issues are now more on your side now than anything should blizzard go in that direction (they don't really bother me as much now). I believe your arguments were lacking only in the sense that they failed to fully achieve the way they were presented. Stronger statements in the article like making "the misconceptions" into a very unquestionable-looking list and saying things like "they are all almost entirely wrong" need stronger proof than what I read. In particular, some of the arguments to reject certain ideas, like referring to poker or a lottery, were highly questionable.
The same went for my criticism of the lack of alternatives mentioned. It's not that your treatment of alternatives was not vigorous enough for your purposes, it was the tone of the article, as if everything it had to say were the final word of truth, that made the lack of alternatives into a criticism from me.
As for details, the following is why I'd say your arguments can at least be questioned (starting from the "It is the same as damage reduction, just worse" section and going down):
1. "Easier to balance" doesn't usually mean "better." A game that is more difficult to balance is often more difficult to understand when playing and that can often be good. A complex game system allows different players to have more or less skill with it. The best games in the world are complex in this way. As such, while straight damage modifier would give us a more complex game, that could potentially be beneficial for the sake of fun.
2. You don't need a unit to miss ten times in a row in StarCraft 2 to greatly throw off its predictable unit balance. Many of the unit matchups involve a low hit/kill ratio. Two Siege Tanks missing their initial volley at a group of Zerglings could have a large affect on whether they die or not.
3. In light of number 2, your poker analogy (as someone else pointed out) breaks down when you consider how many players will often have a string of bad luck in poker. If that were to happen at a critical moment in StarCraft, that would be game changing.
4. You're wrong to say that StarCraft 2 is not "all in." First, with a game like StarCraft 2, determining whether a player is all in or not is highly relative and depends a great deal upon the circumstances. On the whole, though, we can certainly say that StarCraft 2 is far more "all in" than in the original StarCraft. In the new game it seems like players are much more inclined to mass a large army at the center of the map and attack the biggest enemy targets (even as their own base is being destroyed by specialty units). This means that each battle is more critical. As such, I'd imagine that, for example, attacking up a ramp with your primary army might become problematic with a large miss chance.
5. A 1% loss or gain due to unpredictable unit balance would certainly not be a concern, but it seems plausible to me that certain unit matchups could sometimes result in much larger changes. Losing an extra 10-20% of your marines at the start of a single battle could have devastating effects. Whereas before your whole group of Marines would have won the battle, your whole group now gets hunted down by Zerglings. That kind of an upset would be dramatic for determining which side wins the game.
6. In StarCraft 2 it is very difficult to retreat due to the game's focus. As I said in number 4, the game is heavily centered on big army clashes. (Unique strategies, like harassment, now come less from the disorganized scope of the game, as in SC1, and more from specialty units designed for mobility and/or concealment.) It currently seems to me that if you lose even a slight amount on a battlefield, your enemy will usually push you into your base and finish you off right away. Sure, as you said, chokes and ledges would prevent an army on higher ground from following your retreating army right away, but that shouldn't slow down a pursuit by too much. StarCraft 2 units are very mobile and move much more smoothly than units in SC:BW.
7. In StarCraft 2 (like in StarCraft 1) it is very difficult to retreat a unit because of how fast combat moves. A little missed micro and you've lost a lot of guys. That would be pretty unforgiving in the case of some really bad luck. In fact, StarCraft 2 has combat that moves even faster than StarCraft 1 (if you ask me). At my skill level, when even closely watching a battle I'm losing half my guys before pulling them back. (Hah. It really sucks.)
8. I agree it would be fun to see unit matchups less than precisely predictable when "cheese" maneuvers are being carried out. However, as other people have pointed out (and you answered) cheese is already very unpredictable and random due to player choices and their ability to keep track of complex variables. There's really no need to add a further potential benefit based on chance (though I agree the affect might be fun).
9. Unpredictability for the sake of spectators is something already present in StarCraft 2. While seeing a scarab not explode as it should have is certainly a compelling event, I'd imagine there are already enough compelling events that we don't need random misfires built into the game. Plus, I find that games are more enjoyable when you're rewarded for being good enough to know what's going to happen when that result is a difficult thing to predict.
10. I prefer games where every result provided by the game is potentially predictable in some way. I may be weird but I find it more special when players (people's actions) are what provide random results in a game. It just seems to make a more ideologically pure game to me. I wouldn't want a first-person shooter to have random miss chances, so why must I be okay with the same thing being in StarCraft? Of course, that said, StarCraft isn't a game that has the luxury of being ideologically pure game and if a chance miss against high ground solves a lot of problems (and doesn't really add any) I'm fine with it, but that still wouldn't seem quite as fun to me for some reason (and I'd hope that others could understand my sentiment here).
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I have to take issue with the entire impetus of this article.
Why should there be a higher ground advantage? Without higher ground advantage, the player with the bigger army will almost always win the battle, as there are very few tactical opportunities for the player with the smaller army.
This is an interesting statement, but one that I feel does not bear up under scrutiny.
Your statement here suggests that the high ground advantage matters primarily for defending one's main base and natural expo from direct ground attacks. So I'll examine the statement from that perspective: the player wanting the HGA is trying to play defensively and hold their main/natural.
Admittedly, since the Beta hit, I haven't been following SC1 very much. However, I seem to recall quite a few SC1 maps that had no high ground advantage in the spawn locations at all. Heartbreak Ridge, Medusa, etc. Some SC1 maps like Colosseum prefer to put expansions on the high ground rather than the main, while still allowing them to cover the choke point. And there are even some SC1 maps that went so far as to have inverse high ground advantage, where the natural was up a hill and thus the aggressor had the advantage.
So I have to ask. If SC1 was capable of having reasonably balanced maps that reverse the high ground advantage, stripping it from the attacker and giving it to the defender, how important could having the HGA possibly be to SC1's style of play? This suggests that the "bigger army will almost always win the battle" phenomenon may be caused by something other than HGA that can be taken away.
However, let's ignore that. Let's assume that you are correct, that in order to effectively be able to defend your main/natural, in order for a smaller army to beat a bigger one, you need to have some form of defensive advantage. And SC2 gives you one in the form of its high ground mechanics.
The HGA in SC2 comes in two parts, like the HGA in SC1. Part 1 is what has been discussed: units on high ground cannot be attacked by units on low ground unless you can gain vision on the high ground. Part 2 is something that people seem to freely ignore, but is very important: melee units can't attack uphill. Nothing can defeat this advantage.
From the perspective of a Terran player, this is naturally a meaningless statement. The units that a Terran player has none of can't do something. So what?
From the perspective of a Zerg player like myself, this means quite a lot. Roaches have a range of 3. And even with the 3D perspective that reduces the effective size of cliffs, that doesn't leave the Zerg many options for attacking uphill. Far more units on the cliff are able to attack the Roaches than Roaches can attack up the cliff.
This effectively means that the second HGA against a SC2 Zerg player is very damaging to Tier 1 Zerg. Zerglings and Banelings are of no value if they can't get into range to attack, and Roaches for all their high Hp and damage, simply aren't good enough. Therefore, I would submit that, no matter how many Overlords you have with vision over those cliffs, it won't matter much to whether or not you can get up a ramp.
Which brings up another important point. Due to the lack of Tier 1 ranged attackers for Zerg, they also have few ways of actually using HGA. Yes, in Tier 2, Zergs can get Hydralisks which have the range needed to actually use cliffs. But until then? Zerg have little to go on.
This is also around the time that you claim that the HGA in SC2 becomes ineffective. But my point is this: the utility of HGA, even when effective, is race specific. And the Zerg do not have the units to make effective use of it early on. So even if we were to make a more permanent HGA, you still would have to shuffle Zerg units around and rebalance everything to make it useful for them.
SC2 has used this HGA mechanic for years now, while it has been in development. It is as central to the race balance as mining rates; any change to those requires adjusting the cost of every unit, usually in non-obvious ways. Because of that, changing the HGA mechanic at this late date is... unwarranted. Not unless you had some very, very compelling evidence that it would fundamentally and dramatically improve the quality of the game.
A second reason why there should be a higher ground advantage has to do with tactics.
And this is a very good point: combat tactics.
The Part 1 of the current SC2 HGA is very binary. You either have it, or you don't. If the aggressor lacks vision, you get free hits. They can't even so much as shoot back, even if they have units that might be able to. Similarly, if the aggressor has vision, no more free hits. No more HGA, save for the effectiveness of melee/short-ranged units.
However, the thing I think you forget is that, with one exception I'll get to in a moment, there's something you can do about it.
Something must be providing the aggressor with vision, yes? That something, in almost all cases, can be killed. If you kill it, they no longer have vision, and your HGA is protected.
This creates different tactics than SC1. Rather than simply relying on an advantage that can only be defeated through superior firepower, you must maintain your advantage. If you want to keep those pesky Hydralisks from killing your Siege line on a hill, you must invest in Vikings to kill off Overlords/Overseers. Not a lot, mind you; a couple would be sufficient.
What this does is force you to expend effort to keep your advantage. It doesn't require a ton of money, but it does require spending APM and attention. You have to watch for Overlords or Observers. And you have to kill them or make them back off. You aren't allowed to simply get a bonus and sit on it; you have to do something. And that something is combat tactics.
The one problem of course is that there is nothing you can do about a ComSat scan. That really throws a wrench into a mechanic that otherwise would create some interesting play styles. Terran players basically get a HGA-breaking ability; the only real balancing agent is the fact that using it takes ~270 minerals. And if it means the difference between their timing push failing or succeeding, I'm pretty sure they'll consider it an investment.
ComSat aside, if you can effectively defend your high ground from units that give them vision, then your maintain a decisive HGA. This shifts the play from how many units the aggressor has to a different tactical level: control of the air. Going out to snipe Medivacs. Using detection to snipe Obvservers. And so on.
In SC1, the HGA was a fundamental stopper: it halts the aggressor's attack. In SC2, it simply continues the fight by other means, forcing both sides to now fight over air control. Both sides have something important to gain, and both sides have a lot on the line. There would be less on the line if the defender knew that he would still have an advantage against ranged units regardless of the outcome.
This is interesting. This is a new dynamic. And it is one that is worthwhile.
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I recently got beta, and before playing it I agreed with the author above, a lot of people are talking about how sc2 seems designed around the old miss system, which would be completely wrong, given that most of the units are new and act differently than the old ones and the ways that you play the game are VERY different from the old style of sc1. Also I always found miss chance extremely annoying as it didn't allow for effective pushes into static defences and made the game less complex because it took the chance for an effective low to high ground push away with a smaller force, allowing anyone who macroed less effectively to camp out using micro of a few units to drag on the game for a longer amount of time. SC2 already feels fast and decisive but still manages to give 20-30 minute games just like SC1 why bother reintroducing an old mechanic thats just going to slow it down even more?.
No to miss chances, its annoying, it slows the game down, and as the intelligent poster above me said no miss chances introduces air battles, something that was hardly seen out of zvanybody in sc1.
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South Africa4316 Posts
On March 24 2010 10:59 Tiptup wrote:+ Show Spoiler +Sorry I didn't reply to this right away. I've been playing a lot of the StraCraft 2 beta (and Demon's Souls for the PS3) in my spare time the last few days. On March 20 2010 06:17 Daigomi wrote:Show nested quote +On March 19 2010 12:12 Tiptup wrote:
Even more troubling was the way the article dismissed criticisms that said his idea would result with random wins. Daigomi acted like these criticisms were easily and obviously wrong when he provided no truly strong arguments to justify that claim (and, as others have pointed out, many of his arguments were very weak). While I'll admit he could be right that StarCraft 2 has enough back and forth combat to make any random wins next to impossible (I'm no expert on how chance manifests itself in games), many of my doubts about that remain (I could list them if you're interested). You say that no strong arguments were made, but you do not show why the arguments were weak. Some people have raised criticisms, most of which I have addressed. How specifically were the arguments weak? I don't really believe your primary arguments were weak. in fact, on the whole I'd say my concerns about random issues are now more on your side now than anything should blizzard go in that direction (they don't really bother me as much now). I believe your arguments were lacking only in the sense that they failed to fully achieve the way they were presented. Stronger statements in the article like making "the misconceptions" into a very unquestionable-looking list and saying things like "they are all almost entirely wrong" need stronger proof than what I read. In particular, some of the arguments to reject certain ideas, like referring to poker or a lottery, were highly questionable. The same went for my criticism of the lack of alternatives mentioned. It's not that your treatment of alternatives was not vigorous enough for your purposes, it was the tone of the article, as if everything it had to say were the final word of truth, that made the lack of alternatives into a criticism from me. As for details, the following is why I'd say your arguments can at least be questioned (starting from the "It is the same as damage reduction, just worse" section and going down): 1. "Easier to balance" doesn't usually mean "better." A game that is more difficult to balance is often more difficult to understand when playing and that can often be good. A complex game system allows different players to have more or less skill with it. The best games in the world are complex in this way. As such, while straight damage modifier would give us a more complex game, that could potentially be beneficial for the sake of fun. 2. You don't need a unit to miss ten times in a row in StarCraft 2 to greatly throw off its predictable unit balance. Many of the unit matchups involve a low hit/kill ratio. Two Siege Tanks missing their initial volley at a group of Zerglings could have a large affect on whether they die or not. 3. In light of number 2, your poker analogy (as someone else pointed out) breaks down when you consider how many players will often have a string of bad luck in poker. If that were to happen at a critical moment in StarCraft, that would be game changing. 4. You're wrong to say that StarCraft 2 is not "all in." First, with a game like StarCraft 2, determining whether a player is all in or not is highly relative and depends a great deal upon the circumstances. On the whole, though, we can certainly say that StarCraft 2 is far more "all in" than in the original StarCraft. In the new game it seems like players are much more inclined to mass a large army at the center of the map and attack the biggest enemy targets (even as their own base is being destroyed by specialty units). This means that each battle is more critical. As such, I'd imagine that, for example, attacking up a ramp with your primary army might become problematic with a large miss chance. 5. A 1% loss or gain due to unpredictable unit balance would certainly not be a concern, but it seems plausible to me that certain unit matchups could sometimes result in much larger changes. Losing an extra 10-20% of your marines at the start of a single battle could have devastating effects. Whereas before your whole group of Marines would have won the battle, your whole group now gets hunted down by Zerglings. That kind of an upset would be dramatic for determining which side wins the game. 6. In StarCraft 2 it is very difficult to retreat due to the game's focus. As I said in number 4, the game is heavily centered on big army clashes. (Unique strategies, like harassment, now come less from the disorganized scope of the game, as in SC1, and more from specialty units designed for mobility and/or concealment.) It currently seems to me that if you lose even a slight amount on a battlefield, your enemy will usually push you into your base and finish you off right away. Sure, as you said, chokes and ledges would prevent an army on higher ground from following your retreating army right away, but that shouldn't slow down a pursuit by too much. StarCraft 2 units are very mobile and move much more smoothly than units in SC:BW. 7. In StarCraft 2 (like in StarCraft 1) it is very difficult to retreat a unit because of how fast combat moves. A little missed micro and you've lost a lot of guys. That would be pretty unforgiving in the case of some really bad luck. In fact, StarCraft 2 has combat that moves even faster than StarCraft 1 (if you ask me). At my skill level, when even closely watching a battle I'm losing half my guys before pulling them back. (Hah. It really sucks.) 8. I agree it would be fun to see unit matchups less than precisely predictable when "cheese" maneuvers are being carried out. However, as other people have pointed out (and you answered) cheese is already very unpredictable and random due to player choices and their ability to keep track of complex variables. There's really no need to add a further potential benefit based on chance (though I agree the affect might be fun). 9. Unpredictability for the sake of spectators is something already present in StarCraft 2. While seeing a scarab not explode as it should have is certainly a compelling event, I'd imagine there are already enough compelling events that we don't need random misfires built into the game. Plus, I find that games are more enjoyable when you're rewarded for being good enough to know what's going to happen when that result is a difficult thing to predict. 10. I prefer games where every result provided by the game is potentially predictable in some way. I may be weird but I find it more special when players (people's actions) are what provide random results in a game. It just seems to make a more ideologically pure game to me. I wouldn't want a first-person shooter to have random miss chances, so why must I be okay with the same thing being in StarCraft? Of course, that said, StarCraft isn't a game that has the luxury of being ideologically pure game and if a chance miss against high ground solves a lot of problems (and doesn't really add any) I'm fine with it, but that still wouldn't seem quite as fun to me for some reason (and I'd hope that others could understand my sentiment here).
Fuck. I just wrote a huge reply that got swallowed up by an accidental close. Anyway, I'll summarise it for you. This means that I won't cover each point in great depth, but it doesn't mean they don't have the depth.
I agree that the article was overstated, but, given the situation, it was necessary. While all the misconceptions have a grain of truth, like it is physically possible to miss 10 shots in a row, they are all either exaggerated or inconsequential. The position was overstated in order to avoid certain arguments(like "since it is possible to miss 10 shots in a row, miss shots should be excluded"). Instead, I wanted people to argue about the real issues here, the things that can have a feasible impact on the game rather than a possible impact in one game out of a million.
1. Easier to balance is an advantage, but decisions should not be based on it. When options are equal, then it should be considered. Artificial complexity raises the learning curve without raising the skill ceiling, so it is generally a bad thing.
2. Missing five times is still very unlikely. Three times are plausible, but if three times can lose you a battle, then you should know that you are taking a risk by engaging in the first place. This can be a calculated risk, but not all calculated risks pay off.
3. The misconception is that one piece of bad luck will cost you the game, which I argued is very unlikely. A string of bad luck can cost the game, just like in any other sport it can, but not only is it even more unlikely to have a string of bad luck that one case of bad luck, it is just as unlikely that the bad luck will be so important that it will determine a game. Also, when you come up with a situation where a miss plays a chance, try to imagine how a player would get in that situation in a real game and what effect it would have. How many games will two siege tanks be shooting at zerglings on higher ground, and have the outcome of the game depend on them hitting their first shots? I can't think of any games where this seems likely, and in the few games where it could occur, only 6.25% of them will be spoiled by the "bad luck".
4 & 6. Players are more likely to mass attack in the middle, but this is not relevant to HGA (although ironically, it could be fixed by HGA), since battles in the middle are not influenced by HGA generally. Battles occur up a hill in one situation, when the attacker has a larger force and is trying to overrun a smaller force. In such a situation, the attacker can always retreat early enough and kill anything following, while the defender can retreat and try to hold the ramp (an even bigger tactical advantage).
5. Related to #4, but lets quickly create a scenario:
You have 30 marines holding the higher ground vs. hydras (roaches would prove my point even better). You lose 20% of your marines unexpectedly. It happened so quickly that you did not have time to retreat. If you were expecting to lose only 6 marines in the first 10 seconds, then this situation is impossible, since the expected shots to kill 6 marines is at 25% miss is 32, which, if fired perfectly, is only enough to kill 8 marines, not 12. In order to kill 20% of your army unexpectedly, at least 60% of your army needs to engage, in which case the hydras need to shoot 96 times in a row without missing to kill an unexpected 20%. Even if you expected to lose 80% of your marines (in which the impact of losing an additional 20% becomes questionable), the hydras would need to hit 120 times out of 128 shots to make this happen, or they would need to miss 6.25% of the time in a sample of 128 shots, something that is seriously unlikely.
My point is not that it cannot conceivably happen, but that these situations which are easy to think of are very unlikely in game. Even more unlikely is that it happens so quickly that you cannot retreat. The only situation where a significant loss quickly is feasible is when marines attack tanks. However, the player with the marines would be aware of the risk in such a situation.
7. Covered already. The only units that really have a chance of quickly and unexpectedly killing units on higher ground in SC1 were tanks, lurkers, and reavers. Only tanks remain, and they attack very slowly. The only time when they can really unexpectedly wipe out your army is when they only need to hit once or twice, and in such situations the attacker will know that there is a risk involved.
8. As you yourself said, very few cheeses are affected by HGA. So basically, there are things adding a big element of randomness to cheeses, and then HGA adds a little bit more to a very small percentage of cheeses. This is definitely not a big concern.
9. Watching players make difficult predictions is exactly why it's important to have miss-chances. Damage reduction is easy. 10 marines beat 5 on HG but lose to 8. With misschances, 10 marines should beat 5 and lose to 8, but some lucky target firing against the 8 could lead to 10 vs 7, which is a new decision. Furthermore, your implication is that random misfires are built in to make it compelling is clearly false. Random misfires are built in for many reasons, it just happens to make it more compelling too.
10. The most competitive FPS games all have predictable miss-chances included, the only difference being that it is much more predictable in SC and has a much smaller impact. CS is the most obvious example, but even Q3 has the machine gun which is not accurate (otherwise it would be overpowered) and the plasmagun which could be said to have a misschance (much more so than any other gun, the PG is expected to miss a certain number of times). Good players cope with misschances, and take advantage of them, and as I said, this is a much, much smaller part of the game in SC.
Compare the bad luck of a random miss-chance with the bad luck of scouting the wrong starting position. Which one is the most likely to happen, which one has the largest impact on the game, and which one adds the most to the game strategically? The fact that people don't complain about starting locations shows why the effects of miss-chance are grossly exaggerated, and why my article was a bit overstated to make people realise that.
On March 24 2010 12:52 NicolBolas wrote:I have to take issue with the entire impetus of this article. Show nested quote +Why should there be a higher ground advantage? Without higher ground advantage, the player with the bigger army will almost always win the battle, as there are very few tactical opportunities for the player with the smaller army. This is an interesting statement, but one that I feel does not bear up under scrutiny. Your statement here suggests that the high ground advantage matters primarily for defending one's main base and natural expo from direct ground attacks. So I'll examine the statement from that perspective: the player wanting the HGA is trying to play defensively and hold their main/natural. Admittedly, since the Beta hit, I haven't been following SC1 very much. However, I seem to recall quite a few SC1 maps that had no high ground advantage in the spawn locations at all. Heartbreak Ridge, Medusa, etc. Some SC1 maps like Colosseum prefer to put expansions on the high ground rather than the main, while still allowing them to cover the choke point. And there are even some SC1 maps that went so far as to have inverse high ground advantage, where the natural was up a hill and thus the aggressor had the advantage. So I have to ask. If SC1 was capable of having reasonably balanced maps that reverse the high ground advantage, stripping it from the attacker and giving it to the defender, how important could having the HGA possibly be to SC1's style of play? This suggests that the "bigger army will almost always win the battle" phenomenon may be caused by something other than HGA that can be taken away. However, let's ignore that. Let's assume that you are correct, that in order to effectively be able to defend your main/natural, in order for a smaller army to beat a bigger one, you need to have some form of defensive advantage. And SC2 gives you one in the form of its high ground mechanics. The HGA in SC2 comes in two parts, like the HGA in SC1. Part 1 is what has been discussed: units on high ground cannot be attacked by units on low ground unless you can gain vision on the high ground. Part 2 is something that people seem to freely ignore, but is very important: melee units can't attack uphill. Nothing can defeat this advantage. From the perspective of a Terran player, this is naturally a meaningless statement. The units that a Terran player has none of can't do something. So what? From the perspective of a Zerg player like myself, this means quite a lot. Roaches have a range of 3. And even with the 3D perspective that reduces the effective size of cliffs, that doesn't leave the Zerg many options for attacking uphill. Far more units on the cliff are able to attack the Roaches than Roaches can attack up the cliff. This effectively means that the second HGA against a SC2 Zerg player is very damaging to Tier 1 Zerg. Zerglings and Banelings are of no value if they can't get into range to attack, and Roaches for all their high Hp and damage, simply aren't good enough. Therefore, I would submit that, no matter how many Overlords you have with vision over those cliffs, it won't matter much to whether or not you can get up a ramp. Which brings up another important point. Due to the lack of Tier 1 ranged attackers for Zerg, they also have few ways of actually using HGA. Yes, in Tier 2, Zergs can get Hydralisks which have the range needed to actually use cliffs. But until then? Zerg have little to go on. This is also around the time that you claim that the HGA in SC2 becomes ineffective. But my point is this: the utility of HGA, even when effective, is race specific. And the Zerg do not have the units to make effective use of it early on. So even if we were to make a more permanent HGA, you still would have to shuffle Zerg units around and rebalance everything to make it useful for them. SC2 has used this HGA mechanic for years now, while it has been in development. It is as central to the race balance as mining rates; any change to those requires adjusting the cost of every unit, usually in non-obvious ways. Because of that, changing the HGA mechanic at this late date is... unwarranted. Not unless you had some very, very compelling evidence that it would fundamentally and dramatically improve the quality of the game. Show nested quote +A second reason why there should be a higher ground advantage has to do with tactics. And this is a very good point: combat tactics. The Part 1 of the current SC2 HGA is very binary. You either have it, or you don't. If the aggressor lacks vision, you get free hits. They can't even so much as shoot back, even if they have units that might be able to. Similarly, if the aggressor has vision, no more free hits. No more HGA, save for the effectiveness of melee/short-ranged units. However, the thing I think you forget is that, with one exception I'll get to in a moment, there's something you can do about it. Something must be providing the aggressor with vision, yes? That something, in almost all cases, can be killed. If you kill it, they no longer have vision, and your HGA is protected. This creates different tactics than SC1. Rather than simply relying on an advantage that can only be defeated through superior firepower, you must maintain your advantage. If you want to keep those pesky Hydralisks from killing your Siege line on a hill, you must invest in Vikings to kill off Overlords/Overseers. Not a lot, mind you; a couple would be sufficient. What this does is force you to expend effort to keep your advantage. It doesn't require a ton of money, but it does require spending APM and attention. You have to watch for Overlords or Observers. And you have to kill them or make them back off. You aren't allowed to simply get a bonus and sit on it; you have to do something. And that something is combat tactics. The one problem of course is that there is nothing you can do about a ComSat scan. That really throws a wrench into a mechanic that otherwise would create some interesting play styles. Terran players basically get a HGA-breaking ability; the only real balancing agent is the fact that using it takes ~270 minerals. And if it means the difference between their timing push failing or succeeding, I'm pretty sure they'll consider it an investment. ComSat aside, if you can effectively defend your high ground from units that give them vision, then your maintain a decisive HGA. This shifts the play from how many units the aggressor has to a different tactical level: control of the air. Going out to snipe Medivacs. Using detection to snipe Obvservers. And so on. In SC1, the HGA was a fundamental stopper: it halts the aggressor's attack. In SC2, it simply continues the fight by other means, forcing both sides to now fight over air control. Both sides have something important to gain, and both sides have a lot on the line. There would be less on the line if the defender knew that he would still have an advantage against ranged units regardless of the outcome. This is interesting. This is a new dynamic. And it is one that is worthwhile. [/spoiler][/spoiler]
Your reply got swallowed to, so I'm keeping this short.
There are multiple ways to include tactics to the game, higher ground is just one. A map like Rivalry would be just as strategic in SC2 as it was in SC1. The reason for the middle battles in SC2 is because the maps are built on SC1 HGA templates without having a HGA. Draw the new maps without higher ground (which is the way they play) and they are flat, lifeless maps that naturally lead to middle-clashes.
The maps you use from SC1 do not contradict my point (which in no way is my central point), in fact they often support it. Colosseum had a safe expansion, but the outside expansion was both easier to defend thanks to the higher ground, and it offered defense for your main as well. Maps like Neo Requiem show why HGA is so important. ZvP turned into mass zealots vs mass zerglings on the map, because players could not get any teching done.
Your statement that there are two aspects of higher ground is true in one way, and wrong in another. Melee units cannot attack across a wall, and higher ground forms a wall, just like space does. This makes higher ground no different than any other divide, which clearly gives map makers fewer strategic options in maps. Your points are true for divides in the map in general, but there is no specific advantage to higher ground (other than making the map prettier).
What could be true is that introducing a further advantage to HGA could imbalance the game, but if we assume that it adds strategy to the game, then it would be worth balancing around this. What is left is proving that it would add strategy, something for which there is more than enough evidence available. Firstly, many top players believe that it is crucial to the strategy (we have to assume that they have some understanding of what is strategic, even if it is only an innate understanding). Secondly, battles are mostly large clashes that immediately determine the result of the game, something that never happened on maps like Loki in SC1, but would most likely still happen in SC2, even if Loki was remade (imagine the higher ground as walls on Loki). Thirdly, having HGA inherently gives more strategic possibilities to map makers, which should translate into more strategic play. Fourthly, there are all the reasons already mentioned in the article.
There is just no reasonable argument that adding a reasonable HGA will decrease the strategic possibilities in the game. There might be arguments that it has other disadvantages, but it cannot be said that it will not add more possibilities.
Regarding the fact that spotters can be killed, I never suggested removing the current mechanic from the game. Instead, I suggested improving the HGA, since the current mechanic is insufficient on its own. The problem with the current mechanic is that it already existed in SC1. In SC1 higher ground had two advantages: a 50% miss rate, and units were revealed very briefly when they attacked. In SC2, the miss rate was completely removed, while units are not revealed anymore.
However, in SC1, attacking up to higher ground without a spotter made the 50% miss chance into an 80% disadvantage, since you attacked much less. Almost no higher ground battles took place in SC1 without some kind of spotter or a massive unit advantage, and sniping the spotter was still a strategy used to give an advantage to the defender. The problem with the sight mechanic alone is that it is just too easily overcome. Not only are there tons of available spotters (and trying to snipe a few obs, the weakest spotters in the game, in between carriers in SC1 will tell you how ineffective this strategy is), but most of the time, units can just run up to the higher ground while taking a few hits. That is what was done in SC1, players used a spotter to push the defenders back, and then charged up to the higher ground. In SC2, where there is no miss-chance and there are multiple units that don't even need chokes, this is even simpler.
In SC2, the HGA is not a disadvantage to the attacker. Just like detection, it is something you simply have to have and once you have it, the effects are nullified. For every banshee you build to stop Zerg from getting sight, Zerg can build a mutalisk to get sight with. Requiring spotters adds interesting possibilities to the game, but on its own it is just not strong enough in enough situations to make the game tactically diverse.
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What could be true is that introducing a further advantage to HGA could imbalance the game, but if we assume that it adds strategy to the game, then it would be worth balancing around this.
That is a very big assumption to go ransacking the game over. We're not talking about minor unit tweaks here; you're talking about drastically changing how all of Tier 1 Zerg works. Which drastically changes how air battles work vs. Zerg, since Tier 1 Zerg has no anti-air. If you move Hydralisks down to Tier 1, they must now necessarily be weaker. And something else has to go to Tier 2. If Roaches go up to Tier 2, then you have a Zerg Tier 1 that is elementally weak to upgraded Hellions, and mass Zealots become a significant problem. If you move the Banelings, then Zerg have no defense against mass Marines. If the Zerg have air defense in Tier 1, then entire strategies revolving around fast-teching to Banshees or Void Rays simply are unworkable. And so on.
I'm not convinced that an assumption is worth it. I would rather that they focus on doing things that add strategy that don't require fundamentally rebalancing every unit in the game.
Firstly, many top players believe that it is crucial to the strategy (we have to assume that they have some understanding of what is strategic, even if it is only an innate understanding).
Many top players also believed that Hellions were useless just a few weeks ago. Live and learn.
Secondly, battles are mostly large clashes that immediately determine the result of the game, something that never happened on maps like Loki in SC1, but would most likely still happen in SC2, even if Loki was remade (imagine the higher ground as walls on Loki).
So were battles in SC1 in the early days. This is simply the result of an unevolved metagame.
Thirdly, having HGA inherently gives more strategic possibilities to map makers, which should translate into more strategic play.
There already is HGA; the question is whether it should be something you have to fight for or not.
However, in SC1, attacking up to higher ground without a spotter made the 50% miss chance into an 80% disadvantage, since you attacked much less.
I think this is somewhat indicative of the problem, because this is simply not globally true. This is true of some units, but not of others. For Siege Tanks in Siege Mode, it certainly is true. For Marines, or any ranged unit that depends on rate-of-fire, it is not.
You're looking at this from a very Terran perspective, and a Terran Mech perspective besides. When looked at from a Protoss or Zerg perspective, this advantage is far less important if not entirely meaningless. This is a big part of the reason why Protoss and Zerg players used HGA far less in SC1 than Terrans, and it also shows part of the problem with this kind of thinking: Siege Tank-itus.
StarCraft 2 should not be a game built around a single unit. It should not be a game where mechanics are bent around making a single unit the most valuable unit in the game, and "strategy" in the game should not be measured by the utility of this unit. This is how it was for 1/3rd of SC1, and that wasn't good.
Just like detection, it is something you simply have to have and once you have it, the effects are nullified. For every banshee you build to stop Zerg from getting sight, Zerg can build a mutalisk to get sight with. Requiring spotters adds interesting possibilities to the game, but on its own it is just not strong enough in enough situations to make the game tactically diverse.
What you said about detection is simply not true. Corsair/DT was a fairly common Protoss tactic vs. Zerg, even though Zerg are guaranteed from day 1 to have detection. It can work, and even if it doesn't, it forces the Zerg to invest in air defenses. It creates tactical and strategic diversity. Same goes with DTs vs. Terran. Scans are a problem, but you can force them to run out of scans. And without Turrets, the Terrans are incredibly open to DT harassment.
So I'm not seeing how the current HGA fails to make the game tactically diverse. The current HGA is a disadvantage to the attacker; it simply isn't a permanent one. Nor should it be.
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Why would changing the HGA necessitate re-balancing all units in the game?
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South Africa4316 Posts
On March 25 2010 03:19 NicolBolas wrote:
That is a very big assumption to go ransacking the game over. We're not talking about minor unit tweaks here; you're talking about drastically changing how all of Tier 1 Zerg works. Which drastically changes how air battles work vs. Zerg, since Tier 1 Zerg has no anti-air. If you move Hydralisks down to Tier 1, they must now necessarily be weaker. And something else has to go to Tier 2. If Roaches go up to Tier 2, then you have a Zerg Tier 1 that is elementally weak to upgraded Hellions, and mass Zealots become a significant problem. If you move the Banelings, then Zerg have no defense against mass Marines. If the Zerg have air defense in Tier 1, then entire strategies revolving around fast-teching to Banshees or Void Rays simply are unworkable. And so on.
I'm not convinced that an assumption is worth it. I would rather that they focus on doing things that add strategy that don't require fundamentally rebalancing every unit in the game.
Firstly, you are making some very big assumptions here. While I conceded that it might change the balance of the game, I never said that it definitely would. SC1, for example, can be just as balanced on flat maps as it is on maps with higher ground. The short range roach worry you mention will be, by and large, true for all tier 1 units. Furthermore, I don't see how adding a HGA will be more damaging to roaches than any other units. Roaches have difficulty attacking up to higher ground, now it will be 25% more difficult, just like it will be 25% more difficult for marines or tanks or any lower ground units. The point is, the roaches range is its disadvantage, a 25% miss doesn't make its short range a bigger disadvantage. Relatively speaking its the exact same disadvantage.
Show nested quote +Firstly, many top players believe that it is crucial to the strategy (we have to assume that they have some understanding of what is strategic, even if it is only an innate understanding). Many top players also believed that Hellions were useless just a few weeks ago. Live and learn.
Yes, the top players can make mistakes, but when their opinions are supported by reasonable arguments then it is worth considering.
Show nested quote +Secondly, battles are mostly large clashes that immediately determine the result of the game, something that never happened on maps like Loki in SC1, but would most likely still happen in SC2, even if Loki was remade (imagine the higher ground as walls on Loki). So were battles in SC1 in the early days. This is simply the result of an unevolved metagame.
I also considered this, but having played the game and read the opinions of others, I just don't buy it. It is not like the players playing now have suddenly forgotten the use of tactics, of retreating, or of taking advantage of the map. The game, in its current condition, is just not conducive to positional play. Also, the difference between our arguments is that I provided reasons for why it's not the unevolved metagame, while you claimed that this is the cause without providing any evidence.
Show nested quote +Thirdly, having HGA inherently gives more strategic possibilities to map makers, which should translate into more strategic play. There already is HGA; the question is whether it should be something you have to fight for or not.
The current HGA is, in most cases, irrelevant. Yes, there is an advantage, but it doesn't allow positional play because the advantage is nullified too easily.
Show nested quote +However, in SC1, attacking up to higher ground without a spotter made the 50% miss chance into an 80% disadvantage, since you attacked much less. I think this is somewhat indicative of the problem, because this is simply not globally true. This is true of some units, but not of others. For Siege Tanks in Siege Mode, it certainly is true. For Marines, or any ranged unit that depends on rate-of-fire, it is not. You're looking at this from a very Terran perspective, and a Terran Mech perspective besides. When looked at from a Protoss or Zerg perspective, this advantage is far less important if not entirely meaningless. This is a big part of the reason why Protoss and Zerg players used HGA far less in SC1 than Terrans, and it also shows part of the problem with this kind of thinking: Siege Tank-itus. StarCraft 2 should not be a game built around a single unit. It should not be a game where mechanics are bent around making a single unit the most valuable unit in the game, and "strategy" in the game should not be measured by the utility of this unit. This is how it was for 1/3rd of SC1, and that wasn't good.
The one race I've never been able to play is Terran. Saying that my view of HGA is terran is absurd. In SC, Terran got the biggest advantage from HGA, no doubt. However, Zerg used HGA to defend expansions or hold important positions on the map (think hydra play on HBR or lurker defenses on maps like Katrina), and Protoss used it more than enough with dragoons.
Also, ironically, the revealing issue was the smallest problem for tanks. The only time when spotters weren't used in fights from lower ground up was when tanks were part of the attack, as they still get most of their shots off. Units with fast rates of fire were hurt by it since they only fire half the time. Tanks fired whenever they were reloaded.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the idea that when you think of HGA you think of it as helping you defend your main. HGA is much more than that, especially on creative maps. Take HBR for example, the whole map resolves, for all races, about taking the higher ground and using the higher ground. Hydras hold it against dragoons, dragoons hold it against tanks, any player that can take the higher ground can have an advantage. The same goes for so many maps, Loki and Katrina are two examples I already mentioned, but there are tons.
HGA is not the same as defending a choke. A choke is usually a bigger advantage than HGA, which is why Zerg and Protoss used HGA less, because they couldn't out range units from higher ground, so it was more effective defending the choke than engaging in a higher ground battle.
Also, saying that SC1 strategy revolved around siege tanks is a stupid statement.
Show nested quote +Just like detection, it is something you simply have to have and once you have it, the effects are nullified. For every banshee you build to stop Zerg from getting sight, Zerg can build a mutalisk to get sight with. Requiring spotters adds interesting possibilities to the game, but on its own it is just not strong enough in enough situations to make the game tactically diverse. What you said about detection is simply not true. Corsair/DT was a fairly common Protoss tactic vs. Zerg, even though Zerg are guaranteed from day 1 to have detection. It can work, and even if it doesn't, it forces the Zerg to invest in air defenses. It creates tactical and strategic diversity. Same goes with DTs vs. Terran. Scans are a problem, but you can force them to run out of scans. And without Turrets, the Terrans are incredibly open to DT harassment. So I'm not seeing how the current HGA fails to make the game tactically diverse. The current HGA is a disadvantage to the attacker; it simply isn't a permanent one. Nor should it be.
Corsair/DT was anything but a common tactic. Corsairs were effective because they denied zerg scouting in general, and in the beginning this lack of scouting was taken advantage of with DTs. Corsair/DT is a surprise tactic, and it works because the other player doesn't invest similar resources into stopping your corsairs.
Sniping spotters in SC2 will not be the same, because players will invest similar resources on sniping vs maintaining. For each resource you waste on getting a sniper, I can waste the same resources on defending a spotter. In the end, the air units cancel each other out, and no HGA exists.
The difference between your example and SC2 is that in your example they were surprise tactics, while in SC2 it will be expected. A better (although still flawed) example is marines vs lurkers in SC1. Zerg tries his best to snipe science vessels, but in general Terran can maintain his spotters, because Terran is prepared and knows the importance of maintaining a spotter. However, even this example doesn't quite show how easy spotting is, because science vessels are considerably more expensive than scourge, and could be sniped in an instant, something which won't be true in SC2. In SC2, spotters will be roughly as strong and as expensive as those units trying to snipe them, making successful sniping much harder. Note that I don't have a problem with the mechanic, I think it would be fun to see players try to snipe, but most of the time it will be as if there is no HGA.
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I've been a long time reader of TL and have never posted but I signed up just for this discussion.
I am one of the people that don't agree with having too much HGA. IMO it is wrong for the OP to assume everyone agrees that there should be more HGA. SC1 pros have been so used to having ramp and HGA that I feel the views here are too biased towards having HGA.
In my opinion it should NOT be a right for you to build 2-3 zealots (vs zerg) to block a ramp and tech straight to corsairs. If you choose to tech with such few units you should be taking a MAJOR risk, not a minor one.
Quoting the OP
"Without higher ground advantage, the player with the bigger army will almost always win the battle" <---- Not really, scouting and consequently unit composition play a part also.
"This leads to a very linear game development, where both players need to mass armies in order to stay in the game"<----- I agree in the fact that both players must mass to a certain degree but this makes decision making (on when to tech/expand) play an even more critical role. In my opinion a good strategy game should not allow for such extreme fast tech/exp options as BW did (see the 2 zlot block into sairs).
You should NOT be able to completely skip a whole tier of units and go straight into air or cloaked units etc. If you want those units faster than your opponent or you want an expansion earlier than your opponent you must take a BIG RISK by sacrificing unit production. This in itself requires a lot of strategic decision making. In addition it would not necessarily result in a boring game because potentially it would result in more skirmishes and timing attacks etc rather than the game ending because someone rushed straight to DTs and the other didn't scout and build detectors. In fact there would be less room for 'cheese' tactics which IMO is better for all.
"it prevents the game from turning into a macro competition where large armies clash in the middle of the map to decide each match" <---- No, as previously mentioned it could result in more timing attacks. attacking with your first 10 zerglings because your opponent has chosen to tech. In late game, strategic decision making in where an when to attack also decide the match (drops, backdoor etc) rather than both players just clashing in the middle (unlikely IMO).
Having said all of that I do agree that there should be a DEFENDER'S advantage (not high ground advantage). I feel overall there needs to be (i) more effective (ii) cheaper and (iii) easier to get defensive structures. The reason I feel this is preferable than HGA is that defensive structures must be PAID for by the defender, not given by right. You want to fast tech or fast expand? Yes you can by building defensive structures that are more cost effective than mobile troops BUT you have paid for them in resources and map control. There should always be a sacrifice in choosing to tech or expand, and having more powerful defensive structures allows a player to choose to sacrifice mobile troops for static defenses. You can now tech or expand but you cannot attack your enemy.
In the game's current state this is not viable because of how weak and hard to get defensive structures are. My proposal to fix this:
1. Make defensive structures more powerful or cheaper allowing a defender to have an advantage. This allows for options of fast tech and FE.
2. Make defensive structures available at the very start of the game without the need for forge, gate, spool, rax etc. This is very important because it must not be too much of a sacrifice to get these defensive structures as it ALREADY makes you sacrifice map control. Additionally since it doesn't require additional tech buildings to make you can always switch out of making defensive structures to making units at no cost other than the defensive structures already built. This fixes the problem of "I see my opponent has built a forge so I can freely expand". He hasn't invested 150 in a forge and then cannon so it is easier for him to switch to building units if he scouts and feels you are trying to take advantage by expanding without building units. Yes if you see an early cannon you could probably expand once but not safely a second time. In return your opponent has used the cannons to earn an early expand himself or an early tech so it is kind of even. I don't really see the purpose in making players build a forge before cannons. It doesn't help the game overall in any way IMO.
Something to consider as an alternative to HGA, which I am deadly against because as previously mentioned, I feel strongly that you should have to earn or pay for your right to tech or expand. IMO this will result in a more entertaining game which is more battle and army based rather than tech and scouting based. It would also reduce the viability of the all in 'I WIN' tactics which I totally hate (eg fast DT vs anyone, or fast phoenix vs zerg before they get hydra/mutes). These are not fun games to play or watch.
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I think the solution for making Starcraft 2 interesting must be a combination of high-ground advantage and stronger base defense or general more bonus for fighting inside your base.
No Bonus at all like it is right now enforces every player to mass units all the time. No cool all-over-the-map spread game or certain fasttechs for special unit compositions exept for a few very save ones that are more like cheese than actually considered "normal play".
-> Give a nice miss chance such as 33% against high ground
-> Stronger or cheaper Tanks or weaker counters against it
-> Giving something to Protoss and Zerg, for example buffing Cannons hp (in BW, way less of an armys units could attack simultaniously, so everything dies faster. Buffing HP would reduce this effect ofc)
Makes more tactics available, no need for investing everything for instant units, cool stuff such as lots of expansions and harassment going on or cool fast techs and so on all this stuff everyone misses.
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I think Blizzard was trying to eliminate luck from starcraft completely. Though I do agree that tactically and realistically, the units on higher ground should have an advantage, it is really sort of difficult to say exactly how to implement such an advantage.
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I have to say I'm for the high ground advantage.
In sc2, it feels like army positioning just doesn't have much of an influence on games anymore, which makes it feel like there is less strategy involved in decision making. Most game now are decided by attack timing and army composition.
Maybe its what blizzard was intending, but I don't like it.
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I know reviving such an old thread is bannable, but this op of such high quality and relevance that i chose to revive this old one instead of creating one instead.
By reviving this op i would like to get to know if the general consensis on this subject.
The goal behind this would be Blizzard importing the suggested changes of the op.
I am aware of the fact that i could get temp. banned for beating on the dead horse, but to me this is one of the two bigger problems of sc2 mechanics (the other one being the lack of t3 casters) .
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I think the chances of Blizzard making a fundamental mechanical change such as this so late in the game is approximately 0.01%.
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EPT
