Public Profile for TheAntZ

"Back in Brood War, you had a nice counter interaction between clearly overpowered spells – irradiate and dark swarm, EMP, stasis field, and recall, psionic storm and, well, storm dodging and mutalisk sniping. Fast forward to SC2 and the emergence of autocasting, and the dynamics and unit potential are changed entirely. First, many spell interactions are no longer possible. Storm dodging is a thing of the past, as a pack of templar can deplete their energy in rapid succession faster than enemy units are physically able to move out of the damage radius. Spells like fungal growth suffer a similar fate. And then there are the new spells. Force field is a prime example of a spell that shuts down dynamics instead of promoting them, because, aside from a high-tech massive unit ramming into them, there is literally no way for an opponent to micro against force field. The success or failure of the battle, then (especially in the early and mid game), depends solely on a single player, and how well he places his force fields, while the other player can only sit back and watch. Compare this to even a terribly underused spell like disruption web, which forced more micro from the opponent, as well as created a positional advantage, and the difference between the two games is clear. And, with spells so much easier to handle, it’s blatantly obvious that a nerf is needed. But with the nerf to spells comes a terrible price – a single spell caster’s unit potential is decreased considerably. Again, look at high templar. No amount of SC2 high templar will ever be able to match the devastation and havoc Jangbi's few could wreak on a tank line. No amount of infestors will change the a game as much as GGplay's defilers did versus Iris. And with the dumbing-down of spell casters, we lose one more important thing: key timing windows. Remember in TvZ when all the Zerg had to do was hold out until a single ability finished before he could turn the entire game around? Remember how nail-bitingly exciting it was to watch those old Savior games where he would stall and stall until the very last second? Or the hydra bust that comes right before storm finishes? Or the siege mode and mines that come out just in time to stop the early Protoss aggression? Such hit-or-miss precision, such tense anticipation is no more.

A similar phenomenon exists with the reduction of splash damage. We have gone from the lurker to the baneling, from the corsair to the phoenix, from the reaver to the immortal and colossus, from the spider mine to the, well, nothing, and from the archon to the pitiful ball of a unit that goes by the same name. In Brood War, splash damage was a double edged sword. It forced micro from both you and your opponent (manually targeting to maximize damage versus splitting your army to minimize damage), but it also exponentially grew in power, such that a critical mass was with ranged splash units existed at surprisingly small numbers. The point? Splashing units in small numbers are great in that they encourage battle dynamics, but a large number of splashing units is hard to balance. So, with SC2, the units lose much of their splashing ability and effectiveness to compensate for easier control and smart AI. And even then, you can still see the tremendous power of splash units en masse. Just take a look at all the “Terran mech imba” threads that clutter the strategy forum. For balance’s sake, there’s no way you could argue against Blizzard’s decision of watering down splash damage. But with that decision, you will no longer bet on how many kills a reaver harass will net, or watch one of the most brilliant timing attacks in Starcraft history." - Saracen

"Starcraft 2 has a lot of units and abilities that people want weakened or that have been weakened already. Force field, for example, is too strong when you have 10 sentries and large armies clash—largely because smart cast enables you to split his your opponent's army in two in a second. Roaches are great in general: they are easy to mass huge amounts of, have lots of HP and only cost one supply (this is actually the one issue where you could claim that they were imbalanced after the regeneration nerf). There are many other examples: banelings are commonly complained about, banshees are mentioned often, brood lords and mutalisks have both undergone quite some discussion and the Mule and the queen's inject larvae ability are incredibly good.

Do these units or skills make the game or break the game? It can be both. Looking back at BW, there were, prior to some patches, a few imbalances that literally broke the game. The insanely fast spawn rate of larvae back in 1.00 is one example, the reaver harassment from 1.02 (back when reavers had a 0 second firing rate after being dropped from a shuttle) was another. These had to be fixed by balance patches because there wasn't anything players could do to counter them. However, there are also examples of ridiculously powerful abilities that stayed in the game and that, in my opinion, made the game what it was.

The best example is dark swarm with lurkers. This is essentially a combination that has only one terran counter: irradiate. Lurkers burrowed underneath dark swarm are practically invincible to anything other than irradiate that terran is likely to have. Yet it stayed in the game, and it definitely didn't break the game."

"Other examples of this include: storm dealing 114 damage (initially 128) to a wide range of units in a matter of seconds, sometimes turning a game around completely; irradiate dominating zerg air to such an extent that once terran had 3-4 vessels out, there was hardly a point in building any new units; 3-3 terran mech dominating everything in the game cost-wise... Broodwar had many examples of "overpowered" units or abilities, and they never broke the game.

During the SC2 beta we have already seen some key nerfs: storm is smaller, EMP is smaller, roaches are no longer invincible with the regeneration upgrade... Marauders have also been nerfed somewhat , and in my opinion, in a good way—I actually called for making the slow an upgrade a couple hours before the most recent patch! This is essential not only for the marauders, but because they do to a great degree fill the role of the siege tank—marauders are pretty much as good as tanks at everything other than killing hydralisks and static defense, but they are way more mobile, can be healed, and fare significantly better against melee units."

"In conclusion: Brood War had a really large amount of units and abilities that were overpowered in a vacuum. In fact, virtually every unit except the marine, zealot, dragoon and hydralisk were "too strong" in certain settings, forcing the players to alter their game to fit the units. Yet somehow, BW ended up being quite balanced, even if it took a long time. This was part of Starcraft's greatness because it essentially allowed for the extremely high tension and uncertainty of BW—even if someone was far ahead, extreme comebacks could still happen. If a terran got properly flanked by a defiler-lurker-ultra-ling army, he could lose virtually everything and kill almost nothing in return; a zerg could be dominating a zerg vs protoss game only to lose his army to a few well placed storms and his economy to more storms; a protoss could be dominating in a protoss vs terran game only to have one attack fail completely because the spider mines killed the zealots faster than anticipated, or vice versa, the zealots could drag a bunch mines into tanks blowing them all up creating an improbable comeback for the protoss player.

Many units in Brood War had the potential to kill more than 10 times their own cost. Vultures were the fastest units in the game, two-shotted peons, costed 75 minerals and no gas, were able to put 3 "scarabs" into the ground that blew up anything that walks near them... I mean, three scarabs by themselves cost 45 minerals if you bought them from the reaver (disregarding the reaver cost), and reavers were often unable to fire more than that. Basically, if you compared the races unit for unit, stuff did not add up at all. Zerglings were much better than zealots cost wise, yet a dynamic evolved where protoss would end up having one attack upgrade more than zerg had armor at most stages of the game, and in this event zealots were better. Despite all these glaring imbalances, everything worked out great in actual gameplay. It's certainly hard to replicate, but we must avoid balancing SC2 by making everything suck equally hard.

Watching the current nerf-trend, I am certain that an equivalent of dark swarm and burrowed lurker would not have had the slightest chance of making it out of the SC2 beta, and that this fear of the overpowered could eventually end up hurting the game." - Liquid'Drone

"However, and bear in mind that this is stated with very limited experience... (And we do need to consider that we are in the first two weeks of the beta test.) As a long-lasting competitive game, Starcraft 2 might have less ”Awe-factor” than Starcraft did. It lacks flashy micromanagement. Walking up and down cliffs with reapers raping peons, it feels awesome. But it’s easy. I could pull it off quite decently the second game I played with Terran. Obviously it improves, but most of the micromanagement has the same feel to it. Blizzard has improved the AI to such an extent that the units actually behave the way you tell them to – but this also means that anyone is able to pull off what they are trying to do. Watching someone shoot a perfect free kick in football would not be impressive if you knew he just had to decide to do this, it is impressive because even though he knows exactly what to do, it is really difficult to execute it. This allegory can be transferred to mostly all sports, especially any involving a ball: if it is easy, it’s not impressive." - riptide

"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." - Daigomi

"The other one is doing damage to high ground as long as you have vision. If you are rushing an opponent you will obviously have vision of his high ground and do 100% damage. This negates the effect you want the chokes to have. On the other hand if you have a mass of units dropped on your cliff: tanks, marines, maybe a few vikings, it is very hard to get vision of this. If you can't see units that are firing at you, how do you counter? Let's look at a game from the PlayXP invitational between hyo and kkong. With the Colossus killed, all that stands in the way of complete cliff domination is one scan and obs snipe. In the game itself it never happens, but it's easily foreseeable in future TvP cliff drops.

With 100% hits on vision, the games get pushed to extremes; chokes become less of a factor when rushing (it's not hard to get vision of a choke early game) and cliffs become immensely strong. Basically, it's all or nothing, and this becomes really hard to balance, especially when it comes to maps. If cliffs on LT were tough in Broodwar, in SC2, they're golden ground - get there, setup and you literally cant be budged." - Liquid'Nazgul