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Just to clarify:
I aim to get all core units/buildings to have BW balance. This is what me and December have been doing for a couple of weeks now in the editor. There are only a few units left to do that with.
All values from BW will not fit perfect into this. But I want to lay that foundation. Steal the basic balance from BW.
Work from there.
Then we can start to adjust stats/balance etc so it fits better with the SC2 engine and with the other stuff in Sbow. For example, shall Marines have 45 HP or 40, due to the engine?
That is all.
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On September 16 2013 06:28 Foxxan wrote:Show nested quote +On September 16 2013 06:00 Xiphias wrote:What kind of proof are you looking for? Don't just offend others by making general statements about them. You do that a lot  @azelja You come off as rude Show nested quote +That does not answer the question of whether Marines need a nerf or not but holy crap, it's not hard to figure out. What excactly is not hard to figure out? That zerglings benefit from unlimited unit selection? Thats a no brainer. What I asked was why zerglings benefitted more from it
Lol, I think that is actually sig-worthy :D
And: Yeah, it's a no-brainer, imo, why Zerglings benefit more from it than Marines. And apparently to Xiphias as well, seeing as how he didn't explain that further.
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Without reading all 400 pages of thread... Have you ugys tossed around the idea of putting BW hotkeys back in? Like, i for mines, o for siege, and s for goon range?
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Unit test map "Starbow Tester 2.0" Updated!
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@phyanketto: SC2 lets you use whatever hotkeys you want, right?
Kabel, we really really need Changelog+Documentation. Or else we're going to keep forgetting why we did things and keep patching in circles. imo we should name the next patch v0.1, and have a public changelog on the wiki. It would help so much.
also, I agree with hider and xiphias that the immortal + stalker combo was much more interesting than the current omni-goons + pointless stalkers. Throwing goons in is just a lazy solution under the guise of "BW as a base". We didn't even try giving immortal a weak anti-air. Or giving Stalker a better anti-air attack than ground attack. Or something crazy like making Sentinel's traps only hit air units, but do more damage (are reavers + storm not enough ground based aoe?). There were tons of things we could have tried, but instead we got goons. I'd like to give more time to try to make immortal+stalker work.
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Alright, NOW NA is properly updated.
It was behaving oddly x.x
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Or giving Stalker a better anti-air attack than ground attack.
To be fair, it kinda did have 16 damage vs normal, which made it better vs banshees and dropships.
Giving it a special 20+ damage attack vs all air units would obviously be broken (as it would rape all air units then, would create a weird dynamic).
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Watched a stream of this yesterday (forget who) but it got me very interested in this! Is there a decent amount of people playing on NA? I get pretty bad ms to EU :/
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On September 16 2013 06:28 Foxxan wrote:Show nested quote +On September 16 2013 06:00 Xiphias wrote:What kind of proof are you looking for? Don't just offend others by making general statements about them. You do that a lot Like some argument why marines dont benefit as much? You cant just say things without any reason @azelja You come off as rude Show nested quote +That does not answer the question of whether Marines need a nerf or not but holy crap, it's not hard to figure out. What excactly is not hard to figure out? That zerglings benefit from unlimited unit selection? Thats a no brainer. What I asked was why zerglings benefitted more from it Marines can groupup with medics, and still use stim for every marine. Marines is a unit terran builds alot of against zerg, so much easier to move them around The defender with range units, against melee units, benefit from the pathing, since melee gets slowed quite alot. Range gets slowed to but they shoot at range Flanking, i would argue and say its easier to flank if u have many control groups and not just one. Since you need to organise your troops, with accurate attacking So, only because it doesnt show imbalance at moment it mean it is not imbalanced? Random games is very far off, you should know this azelja. Broodwar have a history of 15years, thats alot of data.
Azelja gave some good reasons, but there is more.
SC2 is balanced around unlimited unit seletcion and pathing and we find a much weaker zergling and a stronger marine. Now I think that is reason enough. Just play some games. BW lings rapes BW marines with samrter pathing (not as smart as SC2 though) and unlimited selection. We can, ofc, playtest this more if needed but it seemed to me when I was watching games yesterday nad the day before that this was something more people noticed and not just me and Azelja. That's why I did not give many reasons, more just stating what people seemed to say in chat but not in the forum.
@Fishriot
Not as many as on EU, but we are getting more people there as well. Dec, Doominator and some more play there once in a while, if you join as well, then maybe NA can be alive and lively again 
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On September 16 2013 15:01 Fishriot wrote:
Watched a stream of this yesterday (forget who) but it got me very interested in this! Is there a decent amount of people playing on NA? I get pretty bad ms to EU :/
I'm in the same boat with you. I can play but it is having better ping is so much more nice.
Feel free to pm me if you want my skype, Either I could give you a game some time or I've got a some guys on my friends that would be more than happy to give you a game if they are not busy. Doesn't compare to the activate player base of EU though. The more NA peeps we get the easier it will be to get a game!
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@ unlimited selection, lings vs. marines
It would have made more sense to just nerf lings instead of buffing Marines to maintain the relationship of marines vs lings from BW. But when that is said, I am ok with marines being a bit better in the other matchups as well.
@ EU /NA
We could make some kind of agreement that we play at EU untill 12PM CET, then we switch to NA.
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@Lings
Problem is that you need zerglings to have good enough stats to be able to fight against protoss.
@EU/NA
Mmmmm. Interesting idea. It would definently encourage more NA guys to hang out in the SBOW chat channel.
I'd still like to see SOME sort of dedicated chat platform. We tried IRC before but it didn't stick. Not everyone has skype, plus that would get unmanageable when more people join.
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From what I have seen (and I don't play terran ...  ) it seems that a slight buff to the marines would not break the game and maintain the zealot vs lings in PvZ.
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@Lings versus marines
I still dont hear any solid arguments. How excaclty do lings rape marines in this engine?
Since marines are ranged, when they reach critical they win versus lings without micro. Combine this with medic and firebat
In bw, smallsquads of marines/medics die versus lings = zerglings become cost effecient
The higher the squad, the less and less the zerglings becomes cost effecient till he becomes cost ineffective
With smallsquads, terran have the firebat. One or two firebats can change the tide quite heavy in favor of terran against zerglings
I havent heard any argument yet really, so zerglings benefit more from the engine because they(?)
1) They can attack the same target smarter? They clump up on one unit much better than in broodwar?
Marines, on the other hand they clump also better than in bw.
What kind of games are we talking about here? Xiphias, did you watch some random terran or something?
Medics even have the matrix on medics right now.
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On September 16 2013 16:45 Foxxan wrote:
@Lings versus marines
I still dont hear any solid arguments. How excaclty do lings rape marines in this engine?
Since marines are ranged, when they reach critical they win versus lings without micro. Combine this with medic and firebat
@ marine & lings
I watched a couple of yesterday games. The fact alone that marauders(bat) were never produced makes it pointless any balance argument.
@ goon
I share the feeling that having goon makes stalker such a a difficult unit to have in the game. They will overlap no matter what.
I'm still for the immortal + stalker or some big big change to the stalker.
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@LaLush's Eco concern.
I think I know why the stupid worker AI acts differently in the SC2 engine than it did in BW. This is just a thought, I have done no tests here. This is what I think happens:
In BW when a worker gets to a patch and there is someone there it goes to find another IF there are others which are open!
In SC2 I think they move regardless if others are not open.
I suspect this is why adding a ton more workers in one mineral line is more effective in BW than in Starbow atm. Anyone up for testing this?
@ Lings Vs Marines. Let's test this more and see how it feels. If the engine does this or that it is a difficult thing to prove, much more easy to test and see. What I mean by saying that is simply this: X lings should beat Y marines in a certain setting. If not, then maybe we need to change some values. I have no need to discuss this matter further.
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Just to quickly clarify my opinion the Stalker/Immortal/Dragoon issue.
As I see it, we have three diifferent "viable" strategies;
Strategy 1: Implement Dragoon and the Stalker. This strategy has a well thought out plan on how to eventually give the Stalker a role as a harass-unit. The current obstacles for this to be possible have already been identified, and various possible solutins should be tested ASAP.
Strategy 2: Implement a mathematical balanced version of the Stalker and the Immortal.
Startegy 3: Implement the Dragoon only. No stalker or Immortal. This is the easy, "boring" solution that will result in Sbow being ready for release very quickly, but it will also result in Starbow being very little differentiated from BW.
I obvioulsy prefer strategy 2, as I believe it offers the most variety in terms of gameplay options. I talked about how it makes PvT a bit more fun earlier, but I think it also is benefical for PvZ, as it makes toss early game stronger which means they don't have to forge expand but instead can do 1 gate expo for instance and fight against the zerg out in the open. This will obvioulsy require further balancing, but IMO it is worth the time.
IMO the current solution seems to be this; Implement Stalker and Dragoon and cross fingers that someone eventually finds a way to make it a viable harass-unit. Untill/if then, the Stalker will be a unit with very little use, which gives an "unclean" game.
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Carrier BT in Sbow is 120 seconds. In BW it was 140 seconds. Though obvioulsy the BW BT's are generally a bit higher, but I think it should be increased due to the effect of chrono boost. If BW was balanced on the basis of carriers coming out at time X, then it could be protoss favored if carriers can come out at time X - Y.
Also, any news on when siege pick up will be back in the game (as an upgrade)?
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I tried lots of different variations of harvest time and return delay. But messing too much with harvest time has the side effect of making certain mineral patches on certain spawn positions mine optimally at only 2 workers per patch.
Example: The patches farthest to the sides on 9 o'clock position (Roadrunner) will stabilize and mine optimally with 2 worker saturation because they are at an optimal distance from the nexus, whereas no patches on the 12 o'clock position will stabilize because those patches are closer.
My conclusion from testing is that increasing max income rate is only possible through decreasing harvest time or through increasing the yield per trip (8 --> 9 or 10).
Tweaking the harvest time can only be done if worker speed is increased. And I guess worker speed can only be increased if you speed up the rest of the game proportionally as well. Starbow seems to have lower worker move speed than both sc2bw and SC2. It's a general complaint of mine for Starbow that it both looks and plays very slow. The one thing Blizzard had right with SC2 is IMO the faster pace of gameplay. Because you just can't replicate the same depth in gameplay with MBS and unlimited selection when keeping a slow gamepace. Another annoyance of setting the pace of the game so low is that the SC2 engine's built in glide distances for air units are hard to utilize when everything moves so slow.
The other option is increasing yield but keeping harvest time the same. To not screw up early game mining rates you would have to experiment with return delays. The problem, though, is that in Starbow you can't experiment too much with return delay because then some mineral patches start mining optimally at 2 worker saturation. I wish the editor had more advanced features like randomizing the return delay at (0.5 +- 0.1). Something like that would make tweaking much easier.
SC2BW has basically the same harvest time as Starbow, but SC2BW's workers move quicker, so you can play around with harvest time and return delay a bit more without breaking things. MavercK also added some strange "turn delay" when the worker is handing off minerals to the CC/Nexus/Hatch instead of tweaking the return delay. But it's basically the same thing as a return delay.
So SC2BW has faster workers, same harvest time as Starbow, but have a "turn delay" that looks to be more than 0.5. Tweaking any return delay more than ~0.2 on Starbow unfortunately causes some patches to mine optimally on 2 workers.
Another option is to spend more time on tweaking mineral layouts on starbow maps so that different spawn locations don't produce different income rates. I imagine this can be a bit hard though. I don't know how precise Blizzard allow you to be in the placement of mineral patches.
The final option of course is to leave everything as it is.
My guess for what makes Brood War's max income rate higher, while at the same time keeping its income rate low on lower saturations: Workers have both return delay and turn delay. Plus workers don't necessarily move in straight or predictable paths. So they are very stupid at the start.
In SC2, modders who try to recreate this stupidity generally go for an increased harvest time. Increased harvest time will unfortunately always produce a lower max income rate at maximum saturation (in any game).
So it's a hard problem to crack. And it's basically impossible to do anything about it with current worker speeds anyway. To have a crack at it you must be able to lower harvest time and play around with return delays.
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I know you guys compared speeds in BW with SC2 directly. Probably on a BW map ported to SC2 with what should have been the same dimensions.
But obviously MavercK did the same thing as you guys did and arrived at different values.
A BW map ported to SC2 might not perfectly correspond in size even if they were technically made in the same dimensions with regards to tiles.
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EPT
