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On September 01 2012 09:15 Caas wrote:
you just create a game and add an ai..
on the arcade button
This. Just play against easy ai, you won't have the slightest problem defending against their enormous 2 zealot 1 stalker army.
I think the most important thing to do is familiarize yourself with a little bit of BW meta game. This is especially important with the whole lurker/deflier(now swarm guardian), vs sci vessels vs scourge thing going on.
I'm apparently now in gold after not laddering since just after beta. I'm tempted to get it back up to masters or at least diamond, but SC2 plays so boring now if its not 4v4. Damn you Kabel.
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I compared the Brood War air units with the SC2 air units. Both game has good air units for various reasons. But when I added the Reaver to Protoss, Terran needed a way to chase Warp Prism, since Reaver harass was very hard to stop in the early days of the MOD. Vikings were too slow. Fast Vikings looked odd. So I gave them back the Wraith, which also was a great harass tool, especially vs Zerg.
I also brought back the Scourge into the game, since I think its a unit that creates more excitement as an anti-air unit than Corruptors do. Having the slow Vikings as the main Terran flier didn´t stand a chance vs the fast scourge.. Also, Phoenixes with their auto-attack while flying always destroyed Scourges before they could ever hit. Protoss seems to have problem vs mass mutalisks in SC2. I brought back the Corsair as an effective way to deal with mass-mutalisks. I also like that it forces Zerg to split their mutalisks. Having them clumped is not always the best formation when Corsairs are in the game. As a twist to the Corsair I added Anti gravity, to make them even more versatile.
Mutalisks now morph into Brood Lord and Corruptors. The latter is a strong late game anti-air attacker. I also gave Protoss the Arbiter, since they had no flying spell caster. The Mothership is a cool concept, but having one slow unit is not as exiting as having several smaller ones that can fly all over the map to assist you where needed.
Terran had problems vs mass mutalisks too. I remade Vikings to deal splash damage vs air units, kinda like the Valkyre did in Brood War. They became a bit more expensive but much stronger. I also added a new model to it, to make people aware that something is different with the unit.
This sounds like a long winded way of saying that you just swapped out the sc2 air units for the brood war air units. That's a little disappointing.
Remember, you want to be creating Broodwar 2 here, not Broodwar 1.5.
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Well, I add units I find interesting and needed, no matter if its too much from SC2 or BW. If I would think in terms of "oh this is being too much like Brood War or SC2" then a lot of the stuff we see now in the MOD would not have been there.
And besides, there are still lots of SC2-air units in the races.
Protoss: Only Corsairs and Arbiter are BW-units. Everything else is either in both games or in SC2 only, like Void Rays, Warp prisms and Anti gravity on Corsairs.
Zerg: The only unique BW-air unit in the race is Scourge.
Terran: Yes I agree they have a strong BW line up for the air units. Only Vikings are kinda from SC2.
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Just played my first game actually just now on NA, I really like what you've done actually. Terran seems pretty OP with tanks and goliaths (I actually somehow won), but next game I'll play toss or zerg and see what I can do with them.
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Glad to hear you enjoy it. But remember that this is still under development and is not complete. Especially not the balance 
If possible, play vs human opponents since the AI is not so good and they do not use all the new units and abilities properly. (I have no idea how to make intelligent AI)
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Neither does Blizzard, tbh. Is NA updated as regularly as EU? I know the EU player base is much larger.
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Generally the NA version is a bit older than the EU version. The reason is that I often update the MOD on EU. And it takes time and work to republish each map with a new patch. My NA-publisher Laertes aka UloseTheGame would have a lot of work to do if I sent him a new patch 3-4 times a week, and perhaps he would get tired of being the publisher. So I try to be gentle ^^
I generally send him a new "combined" patch every 7-10 days, with all stuff that has changed in the game during the week. I am not sure what update you have now. I sent Laertes a new patch some days ago but he has not responded. Not sure if it is updated or not yet.
Note: Its not that I change the units stats every 2 or 3 day. That would be messy. But I fix errors, make spells work and adjusts bugs that has impact on the balance. For example, the Lurker attack was weird and did not hit the enemy units properly, Corsairs could not lift-off Reavers, Nerve Jammers lasted a minute which turned out to be extremely good when you had a huge clump of Science Vessels who spammed it etc.
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About the economy, it's not that we want it to be more rounded, linear is fine. It's that we want it to not flatten at the end. You said BW had a hard cap that was never reached, therefore every worker was still helpful, even if only slightly. This is what I would like to try and replicate. The amount of theory crafting makes me want to write my own rts...
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On September 01 2012 14:27 RFDaemoniac wrote:
About the economy, it's not that we want it to be more rounded, linear is fine. It's that we want it to not flatten at the end. You said BW had a hard cap that was never reached, therefore every worker was still helpful, even if only slightly. This is what I would like to try and replicate. The amount of theory crafting makes me want to write my own rts...
thats what I meant when I said more rounded.
and to get the effect you are looking for:
I repeat, implement worse AI.
the important part is that even when you have exactly 16 workers the workers should still bounce around and switch mineral patches. right now that is not the case, when you have 16 workers then eventually there will be 1 pair on each mineral patch, thus optimally saturating the entire mineral line.
what is needed is to somehow disrupt this pattern a little now and then to make sure that the workers never "find a home"
in short, make the workers be confused about what to mine and you are done!
out of the top of my head I can think of this solution, though there are any number of solutions, I'm sure:
have the workers mine random nearby mineral fields, instead of the one they were previously mining.
this would mean that every time the worker deposits minerals to the main building it "forgets" which mineral patch it mined last, then it chooses a random nearby mineral patch to continue mine, when it deposits minerals again it will again forget which mineral patch was randomly selected last time, etc.
this inevitably results in overlap where 2 workers want to mine the same mineral, which introduces the workers bouncing around the mineral field no matter how low the saturation is.
the problem with this approach would be that it introduces a random factor.
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I think adding a random AI to the workers will be a bit tricky. I am hesitating to further mess with the values regarding the workers harvest time etc. Instead I have an other thing I want to try.
The saturation time of the main base, and the total max income of the main base is rather low. Fast expanding still seems to be a must, since you can support so little stuff on only one base.
Thereby I am considering adding 1 more mineral patch to each main base. So it has 10 mineral patches and the natural expanions has 7. All other bases have 8.
You still need only 2 workers per mineral patch. So 3 fully saturated bases requires 56 workers. In SC2 you need 90. So it will still be a low amount of workers per base.
If you didn´t know the numbers:
1 worker collects 49 minerals per minute.
2 workers collects 70 minerals per minute on the same mineral patch.
So like before, the more workers you add to a base, the "worse" do they become until you reach a point where no more is needed. Since you need 2 more workers in your main base the maximum saturation time will now be quite near both BW and SC2.
Ok this still won´t make the curve as smooth at the end, as it is in BW/FRB/SC2. But there is still a deacceleration in worker efficency, just not as strong as in the other economies. But the maximum income for the main base, and the worker saturation time will be somewhat similar to the other economies.
Edit: Just to clearify, everything will be the same! The ONLY thing that will happen is that I add 1 more mineral patch to each main base. Everything is like it has been for weeks now.
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For the love of god dont make it that way.
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It has been like this for weeks. The main already has 9 mineral patches, the natural has 7. All other bases have 8.
Everything will be the same except that I add 1 more mineral patch to the main base. The workers mining time, their build time, everything will be like before.
Whats wrong with that?
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Honestly, i think you made mistake when you decided to make workers jump less. It had much more sense back then. Fuck it that doesnt look clear for noobs. Let people get used to it.
Also, what suprises me is how we are so far away from SC2BW mod values. 1 worker/patch => 57/min in sc2bw and 47/min in starbow. Workers bring 1 less resource (12,5% less), mine exactly as fast, but have higher move speed, so decreasment should be even lower than 12,5%. From your research it seems like its 17,5%. Thats weird. Also, our income caps at 550 while in sc2bw at 750. Over 25% less efficent! How is that possible?
Going back in SC2BW direction will fix problems we are currently having i belive. Right now we dont have more efficent workers than in sc2, nor good minerals/gas ratio.
Anyone wanna stream some games? Im bored in work again.
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The economy seems fine, it's probably not the most important thing to tweak at the moment. I like needing fewer SCVs per base, and needing more bases. The concept is solid, and has been executed. Fine tuning can probably come with player experience over time, but assuming that a player will still work towards about 70 SCVs, this makes for games with a ton of bases and spreading out, which greatly enriches gameplay.
The only issue I can think of is the danger of expanding past the natural against all-ins, as seen in the 6m tournament which Ganzi and others participated in, and which all-ins were the rule. Adding a gold mineral patch or two which contain few minerals total might help these bases get to pay for themselves a little sooner. For example, the standard 8 patches, except 2 could be gold and contain only 100 or 200 minerals total. Makes aesthetic sense too, imagining that gold patches spring up here or there amongst blue patches.
ps: How does psi storm in starbow compare to sc2? Same? It was way cooler in bw... better animation too, imo.
edit: wanted to elaborate about the economy.
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Ofcourse its quite playble. Needing less workers per base is cool, but whenever im playing, especially terran bio, i feel like i cant support decent ammount of baracks. Bioball grows so slow, and before you have it reach decent size enemy can easly have tech to defend it easly. I think minerals/gas ratio favors tech/gas expensive builds right now over low-tech/econ builds (and really with terran you can see how mech/biomech is superior to pure bio at everything.). In sc2 you had (numbers from head/this tread, right ones i hope) 750/224 minerals/gas ratio (3,3) while here 550/199,5 (2,8) with same or very similar costs.
Ton of bases with spread out econ is also not working so great. Im not sure if mineral patches are ending faster or game just turned out to be slower, but most of games i see 2-3 mining bases, as all older ones are already mined out. Concept is cool tho.
Im against gold mineral patches in expos to make them pay off faster. Expands are already probably most viable ways to play, while allins are much harder to execute than defend.
Psi story? If you are asking about psi storm, then i have to say its much stronger in starbow than in sc2. Bigger aoe and lasts 50% longer.
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Ofcourse its quite playble. Needing less workers per base is cool, but whenever im playing, especially terran bio, i feel like i cant support decent ammount of baracks. Bioball grows so slow, and before you have it reach decent size enemy can easly have tech to defend it easly. I think minerals/gas ratio favors tech/gas expensive builds right now over low-tech/econ builds (and really with terran you can see how mech/biomech is superior to pure bio at everything.). In sc2 you had (numbers from head/this tread, right ones i hope) 750/224 minerals/gas ratio (3,3) while here 550/199,5 (2,8) with same or very similar costs.
Agreed actually, when I play I found that on 2 bases I might as well go tech/gas heavy. It seems just a bad choice to go for a mineral focused build considering the abundance. Perhaps a global 10-20% increase in the gas cost of things, or some change to gas mining rates?
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Well, im pretty sure its matter of mineral/gas peak income ratio. Somehow we have increadibly low maximal mineral income per base, much lower than in sc2bw mod. I think someone should look into these values and figure out whats wrong with them.
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Thanks for the replay Laertes! I'll have another cast up soon.
I'd be more than happy to publish whenever Ulosethegame is unable to.
I absolutely sympathize with you about the lack of a stable practice partner. All of my SC2 friends are only platinum level or lower. Enjoy your break!
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Hey, my computer has crashed so I have not been online for 2 days. (I am in a public library now) Hopefully I will get the computer to work soon.
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EPT
