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Hydras before speed upgrade slower than Zealots and Marines? That doesn't feel even remotely Zergy.
Early game they should be managable. Lategame they should be FAST. Zerg is all about raw mobility.
What feels zergy? Hydras were slower than marine and zealot in bw, speedhydras were slower than speedlots or stimrines, and now im suggesting almost same but with ability to be faster on creep. For me most zergy zerg will be always broodwar zerg.
Zerg have quite mobile and very strong units, but with low (or lowish) range. Zergs units works best in small engagements and thats how you can reward multitasking for z. Striking at many locations and spreading forces.
Okay, this is different than what I was hearing from others. But I still haven't seen Corsairs used...
Belive me. Its matter of time. Right now you cant even fight with them with air units once they get their speed upgrade and are bit massed. People will learn how broken it is soon after we will have stable version for some time.
I like the way you think, this is how I felt too. I also considered suggesting Lockdown mess with building production, but I thought better of it to leave the option open for Contaminate to make a return which feels really Zergy. EMP doesn't deal damage though, except versus shields, so I wouldn't necessarily consider them boring. But time will tell.
EMP is combat spell. Lowering opponent durability by half is HUGE. "In your face" abilities dont neccesary fit into ghost theme i think, but crippling opponent or stabbing his back for sure imho.
I love the new Stalkers without the armored bonus and with faster attack speed. I would rather keep the Immortal and let people mess around with the stats to make it feel more interesting.
But why? In SC2 they can at least snipe units quite effective with that bonus. Right now they are better at amoving and worse when microed (comparing to sc2). Whats cooler about them?
What is it you don't like about the unit? If it's the old spell line-up (yuck, Force Field) then I wouldn't be concerned, the plan was to give it some brand new spells.
1. Bad memories.
2. Rididiculous model, not as badass as other toss units :d.
Well, a strong defender's advantage is a major design goal of Starbow. But I forgot cannons used to be weaker in BW... maybe they could do with a health reduction, especially with Chrono Boost and lack of early anti-armor now (which I don't think is a problem in itself, btw, I like the fact that less bonus damage to Armored is flying around now).
Sure it is. But there still should be risk. Right now you can defend vs early allins as toss very easly. Now they are basically 2 times more effective than in BW.
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NA is now updated with the latest patch! 
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Two replays with the latest patch:
http://drop.sc/256064 TvT Gossen vs LtKilgore
http://drop.sc/256060 TvP Gossen vs hipo
Zerg have quite mobile and very strong units, but with low (or lowish) range. Zergs units works best in small engagements and thats how you can reward multitasking for z. Striking at many locations and spreading forces.
I wish this was true. Zerg A-moves with complete army and either win or lose. There are some extra elements in the combat though, like Dark Swarm, burrow lurkers etc. But we never see a Zerg split his armies to attack from multiple angles and surrond enemy army. Maybe to harass enemy bases.
How do you mean that Zerg works best in small engagements?
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Work best in small numbers cause most of the time they need to get close to enemy (lings and ultras) or need a lot of space (hydras and ultras), otherwise they stand on each others way, block eachother and half of z units is dying pointlessly. Other races units have better range most of the time. Marines in bigger numbers rip trough lings. Siegetanks in big numbers melts everything. Toss aoe (HT/Reaver/Archon) just covers HUGE areas. Spliting army will force opponent to split their. I bet 6 tanks will easly kill 15 hydras, or probably even 20. But if you force t to have them spread by 2 in 3 positions then you can easly break it with 3 atacks with 4. Sc2 gave us habbit of amoving whole army into one big engagement. It will take a lot of time to learn again how to play properly.
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Time. Maybe less effective untis in groups (like slower projectiles, so they overkill more). We have base already. Give it time. Finish unfinished.
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I do think some of the maps contribute to the problem. The bases need to be further apart and the maps need to be bigger. I mean waaay bigger.
Remember when Tal'Darim Altar came out and everyone thought that was huge? Well, go back and play Brood War for a minute, and you'll realize even that is just like.. medium sized.
I don't remember which map it was I watched the other night with December vs Arkuss in a ZvP, but you could see the main and natural Nexi within the same screen, and then a short scroll to the side, you could see the nat and third Nexi in the same screen, and then the third and fourth etc.
That shit did NOT happen in Brood War. Something people forget is that everything was proportionately smaller in that game, which means the camera for the player was further "zoomed out" than it is in SC2. That means when porting over maps you need to make everything even larger and more spacious than you might have considered at first.
When we see players having bases that actually have huge travel time between them, then they will absolutely HAVE to split their forces to defend them all and can't just move from base to base to base with one big deathball before the attacker has time to do significant damage. Then small chokes won't just be desirable, they'll be necessary, so that space control with smaller groups of units is possible, otherwise the games will all result in base trades.
TL;DR Let's go map hunting around the forums, and AIM BIG.
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I don't know about if the camera was more zoomed out in BW, but I agree that the maps need to be bigger, though not very much bigger.
currently it takes about a minute to go from one main to the other, I think that is a fair enough distance.
but the most important thing to focus on regarding maps is ramp and chokepoints size in my opinion (as well as the layout of said ramps and chokepoints).
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I think base layout is more important.
Most of the maps today are all the same formulaic garbage with the first three bases tucked together in a neat little triangle and a fourth just off the the side somewhere, and it's just too easy for players to concentrate their forces to defend all bases simultaneously.
I never really noticed how bad it was until Starbow, when I started thinking about how the different economy (less workers per base) would force players to spread out. Thing is, is that it doesn't, if the bases are all still clustered really close together like that. We need maps with more winding spaces between each base, more locations to set up tactical maneuvers, flanks and siege positions.
We need more room to work with than what most of the current SC2 maps offer, in my opinion. Brood War maps just felt better, and I think it was largely due to size, pardon the pun haha.
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who's up for some games tonight ? i can be on around 19.00 CET if anyone cares :p
december.. arent u losethegame on EU? :-)
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On September 21 2012 02:04 SmileZerg wrote:Show nested quote +On September 21 2012 01:37 Danko__ wrote:
@Hydras
Imho, slow them down to 2(+0,4 from creep)/3(+0,6) with upgrade. Move speed upgrade to hatch tech, just make research take 110 sec/150min/150gas.
Slow hydras wont be ultimate defence anymore, but still good (they wont catch corsairs etc so easly). With (quite big) investment they gonna become treat for quite some time (as you can get upgrade quite early and delay lair), securing map and treatening opponent. Also, overal nerf to their speed (3,25speed right now) will make speedlots hydra fights possible for zealots to take. Hydras before speed upgrade slower than Zealots and Marines? That doesn't feel even remotely Zergy.
If you directly convert the BW speeds to SC2, as far as I have tested, they would have (an unusually obscure) 2.089285714...
and 50% more with the upgrade, which is 3.133928571...
so it was actually true that they were slower than zealots and marines before they had the speed upgrade, but they got 50% more speed from it, as opposed to (from my testing) the 40% that zealot legs and stim gave, which meant they had only a smidgeon below the (SC2 effective) 3.15 move speed that fast marines and zealots had.
I sent a huge reply to Danko__ just now after he asked me where I got the figures from.
I can resend it to anyone who wants to know how I got my numbers. >:D
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But why? In SC2 they can at least snipe units quite effective with that bonus. Right now they are better at amoving and worse when microed (comparing to sc2). Whats cooler about them?
I have to agree with Danko on this one. Microing Stalker is currently less rewarding in Starbow than it is in BW or in SC2. The lack of bonus against armored make them less effective when it come to snipe units like Tank, Goliath or Lurker. The way their range upgrad work is also a problem because imo, it doesn’t provide any real advantage to Stalkers. Upgrad shall allow units to do something they cannot do without it. For example, +1 attack allow Zealots to 2-shoot Zerglings (making +1 Zealot pressure very effective) and +2 range in BW allow Dragoons to outrange bunker and un-sieged Tank. In Starbow, Stalker’s range upgrad only make kitting a bit easier but it doesn’t give them anything new. They can’t outrange bunker, they can’t outrange Tanks. Combined with the lack of bonus against armored, it can be a problem against some 2-base tank push in PvT. In BW, it was possible to delay this kind of push by kitting Tank and forcing them to Siege (it was rewarding micro). In Starbow, if you catch Tanks in the middle of the map, the Terran don’t even have to siege: In fact, unsieged Tanks have the same range than upgraded Stalker and with only 10 damage per shot, Stalkers don’t do enough damage to quickly snipe them…
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@Void ray
It doesn't have much of a role in the game. Corsairs are better anti air (sometimes better at antiground with lift) and in starbow carriers are alot stronger it seems. I can't really imagine a situation where going for void rays is a better option than going for carriers unless your trying something cheesy.
@Cosair
The lift could stay but it is weird. A spell with makes a target unit (enemy or friendly) unable to move , shoot or take damage for x amount of time would be interesting imo.
@Photon cannons
Don't change them yet, they create some interesting situations with chrono boost when your opponent feigns an attack and makes you waste it.
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Kabel, do you have any intentions of adding carrier micro as described by Nony's post?
Someone even made a tutorial in that thread on how to adjust settings in editor to make it similar to BW. Hope it helps:
On September 18 2012 07:55 Goldfish wrote:To make Interceptors mimic the BW AI - Go to Unit Tab > Interceptors > Combat Tab > Set the "Default Acquire Level" to "Offensive" instead of None.
Then click on the Carrier - Set the "Minimum Scan Range" to 16. Finally go to the rightmost tab on the weapon, and under "Target Sorts" add "TSPriority" (make sure TSPriority is the topmost one) and "TSDistance" (this makes it so the Interceptors automatically go after anything that is attacking, then if there are the same, they go after the nearest target) (Overall what the changes do is make the Interceptors automatically attack every enemy within 16 range. That also means that as long as there are enemies present, the Interceptors will never return to the Carrier unless you move out of the "16 leash" range distance or you press stop.) There you go. Carrier Brood War style! Additionally, if you want to keep SC2 Interceptor AI but allow an upgrade that upgrades the Interceptor into BW AI + Show Spoiler + First give the Interceptors a behavior that has "Passive Flag" on it "after" the above changes are made (give the behavior to the interceptor of course). Passive makes it so the interceptors won't auto acquire (it will still attack anything the Carrier attacks; again this should be done after the above changes).
Once the upgrade is researched, you could have a validator disable the buff and thus enabling BW Interceptor AI for the Carrier. You'd need a Validator that checks if an upgrade is "not" researched.
So - make a requirement that has "this upgrade is complete" under "use", make a Validator that does "not" have "Find" check and make it target that requirement, then add that Validator under "Disable" to the Behavior with the passive flag on it, finally add the behavior to the interceptor.
That's really similar. Also, you can make interceptors regenerate health in the cargo too by making it so a behavior is added to interceptors that grants regen while interceptors are in cargo. This works similar to the bunker (bunkers actually adds a behavior that grants +1 range when units are in the cargo).
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^ If it works, I love that. ♥
Kabel, just a note, while you want to have more small choke points, do be careful not to make too few path options when doing so. Bad, early sc2 maps feature too many passageways that are too tight (even Shakuras Plateau is tight just about everywhere). You need there to be tight optional paths and ways for races to defend and hold area with defensive set-ups, but I feel like Brood War had maps that were overall more open than the average sc2 map.
A ball of death that can always attack with splash damage in a relatively tight space for a large army is always a worse situation than a ball of death that any race with any composition can at least try to flank (a slow mech or other army attempting to flank might not have much success with that option though, of course).
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@smaller chokepoints
I will lower the size of the choke points on some of the maps in the map pool on EU. Wanna see what kind of impact that has on the gameplay.
@Carriers
I will have a look at this in the editor. (Since I uploaded a new patch yesterday I will not upload anything new for a few days)
@Fungal Growth
The infestor is the unit I have changed most during development. Several abilties has been tried on it, but it has not been a better or more interesting unit than the orginial Infestor. And it still is not. I am asking you all: What is the problem with SC2 Fungal Growth? How could Fungal Growth be to fit into the current Starbow?
Overall, it is a spell that truly forces the enemy to split his armies, since the effect from Fungal is so devestating. You do not want to get fungaled! (spelling?) I will aim to replace or remove abilities when there is something wrong with them. First I want to see if they can be adjusted in anyway to fit in the game.
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@Fungal
Perhaps making it lower energy, lower radius, high as fuck dps, slow instead of stun and storm-like (if you go out of the radius, you won't take any more damage).
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no..
Fungal is actually quite nice as it is in sc2 just that with the smart AI the units move in clumps..
now you have to click three times to make them clump up to make a lot of dmg..
i think the fungal would be a nice addition to zerg army as it is, as i think it's not as effective now as it is in sc2
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Im online on EU now if anyone wanna play.
I have modifed two maps to have much smaller choke points all over the map. Lets see how that effects the gameplay.
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@Spelling of "fungaled/fungalled" - neither, to "fungal" is not and hopefully never shall be introduced as a real word. Until that future non-existent day, either will suffice should you feel the need to type it out anyway.
I'm comfortable with SC2 Fungal Growth but so far I have no qualms with what I've seen in replays of the modified version with the 50%(yes?) slow as that seems to do the job about as well anyway but it looks much nicer to see units struggle and fail to escape. >:D
That said, I feel it's a shame that it deals less damage each second than medivacs heal, but I'm not sure how you'd change that without either completely removing the bonus versus armoured or increasing the energy cost (so not ideal) and the current SC2 FG deals less than medivacs heal anyway.
Caas' comment makes it sound like it's changed again though. Maybe I need to check it again!
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/d6vlg.jpg)
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