[A] Starbow - Page 217

On February 20 2013 10:25 Laertes wrote:
I don't believe that Arbiters are OP. I really don't. I refuse to believe that they are because a few days before the tournament your build order was "OP". I believe that the arbiters aren't really that good, you were caught unawares and that's okay. The counter to arbiters are low cost fodder units like marines. Namely marines in fact. Arbiters won't able to stasis everything if you have enough marines. Think about it, they are reliant on other units to do their work. See if you can find solutions instead of qqing just cause you couldn't come up with the counter in the tournament.

On February 20 2013 18:54 NukeD wrote:
Yeah deathballs do occur in BW, but they are not as clumped up as in SC2 or Starbow. Deathballs should exist in my opinion, it adds variety to the game, but not in the way where you can only see a bunch pf healthbars on top of eachothet. More importantly, as Decemberscalm mentioned, when they are not as clumped up, its possible to engage a deathball with smaller amount of units a d still hold ground.

And yes I agree there is a lot more to it why deathballs occur, I just suggested that the root of the problem is the pathing. Everything else, the units, economy etc, are factors that are build upon the pathing. You cant fix the later if you dont fix the former. If you try that then you get a bunch of odd and watered down solutions like Hellbats being biological, widow mines costing supply or siege tanks doing lower damage.

On February 20 2013 14:10 Danko__ wrote:
I'm not sure if statis is really so bad spell designwise. It's not like Fungal nor like vortex. Yes, it limits your control over units, but that doesn't mean you can't to anything after its cast. Your army is not just dead at end of duration. You still can regroup rest of your army to help these units. If anything needs to be changed with it then I guess it should be aoel/cast range/duration (longer one!). After all its latest tech of toss which can be used 1 by each expensive arbiter every 3 -4 mins? if toss is massing arbiters so badly you should be able to get couple of vessels to (along with turrets by siege lines) counter them.

On February 20 2013 19:28 Big J wrote:


The pathing is the easy fix. And the most annoying one for the player.
In 2013 this is a very cheap fix to a game not offering enough strategic depth to promote spread out play.

What an RTS game has to get right to avoid deathball play is the action per production ratio.

On February 20 2013 21:21 Zaphod Beeblebrox wrote:
A few options here:

Shorten the range on stasis (Making it easier to EMP or use turrets to defend)
Make the arbiter acceleration or top speed slower (same as above)
Give the arbiter less HP (more fragile - easier to defend)

Change the mechanics of stasis slightly to allow more counterplay - like make stasis an AOE field on the ground that freezes units after a 2-3 second delay (lower the cost if the change is this drastical)

Change the techpath for arbiters (include templar archives AND fleet beacon). This will make arbiter timings hit a lot slower, and make them less of a midgame unit. Added benefit of letting the Terran player severely punish a Protoss that rushes arbiters.

Goliaths with 50% more stats and cost is adding to the problem of arbiters (easier to stasis). The same can be said to the spider mines being slightly worse than in BW. Buffs to these two units may give the Terran players a better buffer against Protoss.

There are two reasons why 1) isn't a valid argument. Lets assume that the terrran has split his units in 2-3 positions over the map in the late game (to defend like 5 expansions). At position x he has a a cuple of mines + a plantary, a couple of goliaths, and like 10 tanks to defend it. Without arbiters there would be no way the toss could break this expansion cost efficiently. However, with stasis he can stasis the goliaths + 5 of the tanks (assuming they are clumped up. Then he can easily kill the remainig tanks and the plantary including scvs.
Assuming the terran wasn't in it a lead prior to this, he will right now be quite a lot behind since that exchange didn't come out cost efficiently for the terran player and now he is behind in eco.

So lets assume that the terran player groups a lot of his remainings forces to try and defend the stasis'ed units. However, the protoss player predicts it (which really isn't that difficult) and on the path towards the expansion the "remaining units" get stasis'ed which means that he can't actually defend the original stasis'ed units. The protoss player can now retreate and dominate other places at the map or he can continue fighting the terran army with like half of the forces always being stasis'ed.

2) I touched science vessel vs arbiters briefly in my original post. One of the design flaws of WOL was that it too often came down to one short moment. Battles were too often decided by having great unit control over 1 second rather than over the course of the whole game. The thing is that if you believe EMP should be the counter to stasis then we get the WOL dynamic where you either hit the EMP before stasis and wins or your stasis and tanks get stasis'ed before emp get off and you lose. This doesn't create very interesting games and this is why I suggest that stasis gets redesigned so that the terran player gets a second chance.

Secondly, you must remember as well that the terran player is split up over the whole map in the game. Having enough science vessel to cover all your tanks is practically impossible. Further, since this isn't WOL where you just have one deathball which you move back and fourth to defend multiple places, you can't pay as much position to all your unit groups the whole time. This means that some time the toss player will attack you with you being caught slightly unaware in the sense that you don't have time to get the emp off before stasis. In WOL you would always know exactly where your opponents army were in relation to your own army. In Starbow this is different and rightly so (because splitting up army is more entertaining to watch). However, stasis needs to be redesigned to make tvp balanced various equal skill levels.
With the current arbiter, tvp mech might be balanced at korena pro level, however, at 2-3 levels below it favors the protoss (assuming he gets arbiters).

So I thought of perhaps giving it a passive ability with increased movement speed (like 25%) in a small area around the unit.

If you are defending then you can easly presplit your tanks. Stacking 5 of them in one place is quite bad and quite easy to avoid at any level of play when defending (unless aoe is really broken). Its just mistake which can be easly avoided once we will have more experience.

You can reinforce with your more mobile forces with different routes. You are supposed to have lots of turrets lategame (with insane range). You dont need to move all your other tanks. Just fly in with vessels, emp, bring vultures and snipe zealots, or at least bate them out/kill some before tanks unfreeze.

Battles often are decided by one bad step, or one bad decision. Loosing 2 stalkers earlygame to 3 mines can be lethal. Moving your army into vs siege line will always cost you a lot. Misscalculating can cost you half of your army or more. Games are often won by one big mistake. And also, hiting emp is not win when you are defending. It will only stop attacking toss. He will be able to come back later. Also, if you wont hit EMP, you can delay toss in other ways. You can cast nerve jammers as well.

You shouldnt complain about that. Vessels are cheaper, earlier tech and emp cost less energy. Also, terran have best maphacks in game. Its not like you CANT predict your opponents movement. Scans, floating buildings, 9 range turrets AND sensor towers makes defending MUCH easier.