[MOD] FRB

On May 06 2012 11:12 Barrin wrote:
I feel like I might be forgetting something.. Hmm.

High Ground will come after FRB GT #2. This 8m with 4pt thing is a lot better than I expected it to be when I wrote the High Ground thread. 8m/4pt goes a long way towards being what I am really after, High Ground can wait.

On May 07 2012 01:08 moskonia wrote:
I fully supported you with the original idea and tried to convince my friends to play also on FRB maps, but this is just stupid, as people pointed, it will just lead to slower deathball games, I played 6m maps and they feel great to play, the only thing they need is 2 gasses that yield 3 points in each collection, and you didn't even do that one here.

I think you should really reconsider this out, cause this wont lead to more interesting games, only longer games. You wont have to expand more then from normal games, and you will see the same amount of deathballs, so this is not only not better from normal games, but much much worse.

On May 06 2012 22:52 Superouman wrote:
I'm against 8m1g and for 6m1g because the worker count to saturate an expand stays the same. It's not only about reducing the income but also reducing the worker count per base so you can gather resources from more bases which are more spread out

On May 07 2012 02:08 Gyro_SC2 wrote:


100% approve !
The players must expand fast because their bases is satured and not because they have slow income.

The next step is to have a better high ground mecanic that encourages the player on the high ground! As I said, units on a ramp shouldn't have the vision on the high ground.

On May 07 2012 02:38 Gfire wrote:
But with a highground advantage, I imagine players will be less inclined to attack
It's possible that would encourage harassment,

On May 07 2012 03:32 Gyro_SC2 wrote:


I think with highground advantage, players will do less a-move timing push. They will have to think more about where to attack, where to defends and that would encorage harassment.

Broodwar is a good game for this reason.

On May 07 2012 04:06 Gfire wrote:

Yes. I think long-term that will probably be true. But when it becomes harder to attack, players will start questioning themselves. They won't know whether it's good to attack at a certain time or not (until they have more experience,) and so they will just do the default thing, which is to sit back. I'm just picturing a FRB GT 2 in the near future and everyone just turtles for a really long time into deathball. Unless pros play on it full time for some time, I don't think that we'll see it develop to what it could be.

Some players who play an aggressive, harass-based style already might do fine, but most players will probably end up more passive than usual until they've figured out how to play it a little better.

This is a good reason to delay the highground advantage for a while, and look just at the resources for the time being, so I support that decision. I'm also not sure what is the best way for the highground advantage to work (chance-based system seems less than optimal.)

As far as pro-mods go though, I'm still working on a unit spreading mod which is something I want to offer as a third point to this cause.

On May 07 2012 01:38 NewSunshine wrote:

I must present this counter-question, because the same sort of thing's been said about HotS, but how do you know it'll be worse?

The end result is the same - less income per base. However, it also takes longer to reach this reduced income, compared to 6m, so if anything there should be fewer deathball action. Also, because there are still 8 mineral patches in a base, having more workers will be required to achieve enough income to even sustain a deathball, where the increased number of workers will make the resulting army a bit smaller - or make it take much longer to get/remax a deathball.

I know it's easy to be skeptical, since it's unproven, but it's usually better to keep an open mind, and give it a chance. Who knows, it could work.

On May 07 2012 02:32 Gyro_SC2 wrote:
@urashimakt

The problem at the moment is: there is no strategic advantage position, not enought control space mechanic. So a lot of games are just big balls fighting. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330085

I think each race benefits of a defensif high ground mechanic!

On May 07 2012 05:00 moskonia wrote:


How do I know it will be worse? for me it is obvious, this idea is really different from the original thought, and accomplishes a different thing completely.

The first idea was meant for people to expand more, so it encourages less deathabll things, since harassment is much stronger, so it makes people split up their army when defending, and people are rewarded if they do multiple attacks at the same time. Also, with 6m people who expand very fast throughout the game can make it so they get maxed almost the same as in 8m, so it rewards greedy people who are aggressive with expanding and not people who are afraid to expand and like to turtle on 2-3 bases.

This idea on the other hand, does not encourage to expand more often, it does not reward multi pronged attacks more then normal, and so is very different from the original. What it does encourage is the choice between making more workers, fro more income, or making less worker, for stronger army. This choice already exist in the game, and while people might have more workers - less army - smaller deathball, the games will be simply longer, and the worst part is after someone lost alot of stuff, they wont have the money to make it again, so things like a Protoss deathball where you need to have "the 300 supply army" as Zerg to defeat it without BL's , will be much stronger.

That is why I dislike the idea.

On May 07 2012 13:13 urashimakt wrote:
It's also useful to note that 6m FRB rewarded 1 base play more than macro play, simply because your very early resource collection was still on the SC2 level while the saturated resource collection was much slower than usual. A player pushing very early would be at an even more immense advantage to someone who attempted to macro up than they would be in the regular game. If you're approaching saturation on 6m FRB, your military units aren't suffering diminishing returns but your workers certainly are.

Some might not agree, but I like FFE or hatch first to be acceptable openers under correct conditions.

On May 07 2012 13:52 EatThePath wrote:


Are you speaking from experience or is this conjecture? This analysis doesn't take into account the time it takes to make a relevant attacking force and get it across the map. Macro up is not a meaningful term for one base play. Do you mean, the mineral investment of taking your natural leaves you too vulnerable to one base play? Or that teching leaves you too vulnerable? In my experience, tech units quickly eclipse the piddling amount of tier zero units you get off one base in 6m, and static defense is also powerful in the same way. For example, one immortal and some micro shuts down warpgate attacks so hard in PvP in 6m.

You reach functional mineral saturation at 12 workers in 6m. This is about the time you make your first military structure. I don't see how a rush becomes any more viable under these conditions.

If you're talking about expanding, it all hinges on race asymmetry and tech units.

One important thing you bring up is that in 6m, surplus worker production in expectation of your natural eats a lot more of your maxed 1base economy. However, I think most people cut workers depending on the early game situation even if they are expanding, in order to make whatever they need to defend.

On May 07 2012 13:52 EatThePath wrote:


Are you speaking from experience or is this conjecture? This analysis doesn't take into account the time it takes to make a relevant attacking force and get it across the map. Macro up is not a meaningful term for one base play. Do you mean, the mineral investment of taking your natural leaves you too vulnerable to one base play? Or that teching leaves you too vulnerable? In my experience, tech units quickly eclipse the piddling amount of tier zero units you get off one base in 6m, and static defense is also powerful in the same way. For example, one immortal and some micro shuts down warpgate attacks so hard in PvP in 6m.

You reach functional mineral saturation at 12 workers in 6m. This is about the time you make your first military structure. I don't see how a rush becomes any more viable under these conditions.

If you're talking about expanding, it all hinges on race asymmetry and tech units.

One important thing you bring up is that in 6m, surplus worker production in expectation of your natural eats a lot more of your maxed 1base economy. However, I think most people cut workers depending on the early game situation even if they are expanding, in order to make whatever they need to defend.

On May 07 2012 14:07 monitor wrote:


I might be way off, but on 6 maps-

Isn't expanding is relatively a higher % of income investment on than 8m maps? Probes are less efficient per cost because you have less minerals but the probe still costs the same as if you had more minerals to spend. Units are also more expensive in ratio to the income. I don't know what the implications are exactly. Does this mean the fix would be to scale back the cost of every unit and structure? Probably not since that would essentially still make the game deathbally, it'd just remove the 3base cap. Essentially raising the supply cap to 300/300 (as Day9 once suggested in the beta) would do a similar thing.

On May 07 2012 14:28 urashimakt wrote:

Experience. If your fast expand build doesn't include pumping workers past 2 per mineral batch and maynarding to your natural, you've just invested a lot of very important minerals into something that's not going to pay off any time soon. It would be a mistake to do the fast expand.

If the initial mineral income before saturation is also slowed down, there's still room to attempt a fast expo. If what you hope to see achieved is a smaller number of workers required to fully saturate a base then I propose that a solution come from somewhere less dangerous than the 6m idea.

On May 07 2012 22:25 Gyro_SC2 wrote:
I got an idea how to make the highground avantage in the sc2editor.

We just need to put some sight blocker-invisible in each ramp.
I need help because im not a good mappers !

At first I wanted to put the sight blocker at the top of the ramp but I had the problem that they block the space for the building construction in the game :S .

After I wanted to put the sight blocker in the ramp, but I wasn't able to change the footprint thing ?

thank

On May 07 2012 19:05 AmericanUmlaut wrote:
My understanding of 6m1hyg's goal was to encourage players to take more expansions, with the intention of forcing armies to be more spread out and encourage a large number of low-supply skirmishes and multiple fronts. Reducing the income per mineral while leaving the number of minerals at 8 doesn't accomplish any of these things: There is now, as in standard SC2, no incentive to go above three mining bases at a time, which means to me that the only difference between FRB GT and standard SC2 will be pacing.

If you're already going down the path of modding maps to achieve your goals, then why not reproduce the inneficient mining of BW workers to increase the reward for taking an additional expansion? Increasing the mining time of a worker by 20% instead of reducing mined resources by the same ratio would reduce your income rate by the same amount for the first eight workers, and would make it impossible to perfectly pair two workers to the same mineral, so you'd get decreasing ROI after the eighth worker as each worker bounced more and more frequently before finding a free spot. The result would be that with 70 workers, you'd need 9 bases to have perfect worker efficiency, and there would thus always be an advantage to having more bases than your opponent.

On May 08 2012 00:09 Gyro_SC2 wrote:
I made one map with High ground adbantage!

6m hyg HA Cloud Kingdom LE
US server

HA stand for High Ground Advantage
The HA system come from : http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=335595#14

On May 08 2012 00:13 MNdakota wrote:


What exactly are the advantages?

On May 08 2012 00:20 RDaneelOlivaw wrote:

There is a % chance that an attack will miss when attacking from the low ground

On May 08 2012 00:22 MNdakota wrote:


Do you know the percentage at all? Sorry if I'm being ignorant!

On May 08 2012 03:29 urashimakt wrote:
Just to clear up a couple points, the chance to hit was 53% and SC2 introduced different elements of RNG.

I bet you didn't know the time between each unit's attack is randomized, did ya?

On May 08 2012 03:57 moskonia wrote:
The time between each unit attack is not randomized, unless they patched the thing each unit has an attack speed, for example: stalker has 1.44, ling has 0.7 and marauder attacks every 1.5 (1 with stim) sec. I don;t see your random factor here.

On May 08 2012 03:58 OldManSenex wrote:


Um, do you have a source? Because I've never heard anything even remotely like this.

On May 08 2012 04:10 moskonia wrote:
I will do some tests, but I highly disbelieve it, please link a valid test results you, or someone else made.

On May 08 2012 03:57 moskonia wrote:
The time between each unit attack is not randomized, unless they patched the thing each unit has an attack speed, for example: stalker has 1.44, ling has 0.7 and marauder attacks every 1.5 (1 with stim) sec. I don;t see your random factor here.

That's the displayed base attack period. The actual weapon cooldown between attacks is randomly generated based on that and two other variables called the Random Delay Min and Max.

On May 08 2012 03:58 OldManSenex wrote:
Show nested quote +


Um, do you have a source? Because I've never heard anything even remotely like this.

Yes. It's right there in the data. Here's the Marine's stats.



The marine's actual attack period is anywhere between .7983 and .9858 seconds. That's a pretty significant difference (max is 25% longer than the min), but when you average it out the "randomness" just seems to disappear.

On May 08 2012 04:10 moskonia wrote:
I will do some tests, but I highly disbelieve it, please link a valid test results you, or someone else made.

This has been known by the mapping community for a long time. The fact that no one notices is a testament to the overreaction people have to "randomness".

1.) Increased time-at-patch.
This adjustment aims to lower the overall mining rate, as well as incentivize taking expansions, especially taking expansions beyond the current optimal 3. The biggest selling point is that it will emulate BW mining by reducing the utility of a 3rd worker on a patch and increasing "bounciness". However, it doesn't work like that. The worker AI in SC2 will not bounce like it did in BW, they settle down readily based on scanning for available patches and worker pileup. Moreover, the effect of increasing time-at-patch doesn't elevate the diminishing returns effect so much as speed up and solidify the saturation point. If you increased time-at-patch by 20%, close patches (3 squares, centered) would be saturated with 2 workers, period. In fact they'd be slightly oversaturated. Far patches (4 squares, or 3 squares at corners) would be nearly saturated. Thus, anything beyond 16 workers would yield such a small increased income as to be not worth it at all. Even if additional workers did bounce around, they wouldn't be adding any useful mining anyway, and the deleterious mistiming effect on the original 16 would be neglible. What does this mean? It only exaggerates the dynamics we currently have, not fix them in any way.

On May 08 2012 06:08 Gfire wrote:


I understand all that. The point of it is to make it so 16 workers on one base is worse than 16 worker son two bases. It gives an earlier incentive to expand but also lowers the maximum number of workers per base, much like 6m except that early mining will also be lowered (which is what Barrin said there was a need for in this thread.) Something similar could come about by keeping 6m but increasing the return delay which will lower income with low amounts of workers but keep the maximum income the same, with more value on the third worker (but third worker is a lower amount of total workers because it's 6m.)

On May 08 2012 06:15 RFDaemoniac wrote:
I would rather that you change the high ground mechanic than this... I'm fine with a miss rate, I think that it's actually the best solution. Is there something visual that we can do to show you that your unit missed (other than a "miss" apear above their head)? It's definitely not necessary but I think it might be nice to help players understand what's going on.

On May 08 2012 06:15 RFDaemoniac wrote:
I was also sold on 6m1hyg. I like that gas was cheaper than if you had 2g, I think that the flexibility in whether you take one gas or two gas can be approximated by how many workers you put on gas and you're forcing people to click on a geyser to see how much gas they've mined (ZOMG TOO HARD! please...). People worry about gas steals but that just means that you have to either block the initial scout or take it before the scout can... not too hard imo.

With 8m/4pt, now you have 80% of the mineral collection (slash effectively more like 82-85% because you're encouraging us to put all of the mineral patches closer together) and 75% of the gas collection as standard 8m2g. This is a huge problem imo, I think that if anything gas should be a higher portion of income but probably the same.

Also taking more bases and spreading out definitely seemed to be the point of it, and this definitely defeats that...

The map that I had made, FRB Winding Straits definitely encouraged you to spread out and attack through multiple paths and rewarded splitting up your army and has resulted in some very interesting games (played at or below diamond or off-race masters, which is actually even more encouraging because these are typically players who would be less likely to switch to being more harass oriented).

I would rather that you change the high ground mechanic than this... I'm fine with a miss rate, I think that it's actually the best solution. Is there something visual that we can do to show you that your unit missed (other than a "miss" apear above their head)? It's definitely not necessary but I think it might be nice to help players understand what's going on.

I like the idea of keeping 6m but with an increased return delay (don't change worker speed, but perhaps make them sit at the nexus/cc/hatch for a while before they give up the minerals). This seems to be the best of both worlds.

On May 08 2012 06:24 EatThePath wrote:


You're talking about increasing time-at-patch by like 50% or more so that 2 workers is significant oversaturation. Wow. o.O That would definitely decrease the income rate, especially early, by quite a bit, as well as diminish the utility of workers beyond one per patch. I was just trying to make it clear to other people who don't understand all that.

Increased return delay, possibly on 6m, seems like it would work okay. I am not sure I have a good grasp of the reasoning behind decreasing the early income, though. It seems like the only thing we concretely want is to make more than 3 bases more attractive than 3 bases, as in, strategically superior. We are going about it by making it significantly economically superior, and in the case of 6m, more or less mandatory.

On May 08 2012 06:56 RFDaemoniac wrote:
Is the return delay something that can be countered by manually telling them to return to the nexus? I think this would add a lot of micro to mining that we don't necessarily want...

How do you make a curve?
(1) Increase time spent mining a mineral field (not the same as return delay, might even want to remove it).
(2) Increase time spent before deciding to find a new patch.
(3) Reduce worker's ability to find the right new patch.
(4) Align proper mining rate: without changing mineral field distance from CC or worker movement speed/acceleration, probably works best with some # of 5pt mineral fields given the ideal range of workers per base.

But doing that is going to make most people feel like their workers got dumber. They'll only accept it from Blizzard, I expect. It's also much harder to learn (when you already know current 8m). I'm not really sure I can do it properly.

On May 10 2012 04:42 AmericanUmlaut wrote:
A minor update: I've been playing around with the map editor all night. Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't figure out a way to get gradually decreasing returns from workers after the first 8. I tried just jacking their movement speed to high heaven, but even that doesn't change how much they bounce; once you get to 16 workers, they quickly settle into perfect worker pairs, even though they're spending almost all of their time waiting for a mineral to be freed up.

The other ideas I've had are preventing workers from waiting at occupied minerals and giving them a collision radius even when they're mining (removing the mineral walk ability so they get in each others' ways a bit as their numbers increase), but I can't figure out a way to do either of those things in the map editor.

On May 11 2012 00:06 AmericanUmlaut wrote:

The problem is that the goal isn't to simply reduce the number of workers required to reach 100% saturation. We had that with 6m, and I agree with Barrin's criticism of that ruleset. I'd like to have the the increased income per worker, from the 9th worker on, be somewhat less that the first eight, scaling down until you were getting a small but relatively insignificant additional income from workers after 16. So maybe the 9th worker gives you 95%, the 10th worker 94% and so on, then a cliff at 16 workers where you are only getting 50%, scaling quickly to almost zero additional income. That would create a situation in which a player on more mining bases than his opponent is rewarded, even at more than three mining bases, because his workers' mining efficiency would be increased.

On May 11 2012 00:33 AmericanUmlaut wrote:

Purely hypothetically, what if you added a trigger that made a worker spin in circles for X time and then continue whatever it was doing if its coordinates are within Y of a friendly worker? I am completely new to the Galaxy editor, but something like that must surely be possible?

On May 11 2012 03:12 ScoSteSal wrote:
What would be the problem with workers having an aura that adds a stacking debuff (movement speed and/or mining slow) to all workers within a certain (extremely small) distance of them? Just asking for clarification of why something mentioned earlier in the thread is not a viable solution.

On May 11 2012 03:55 ScoSteSal wrote:
ok, what about the debuff being only on mining time, say, 5% stacking per worker's aura affecting the mining worker? Also, what is a global timescale slow?

On May 11 2012 05:36 AmericanUmlaut wrote:
Actually, a stacking speed debuff aura would create exactly the effect I'm looking for. It's true that you could overcome it by just adding more and more workers, but each worker would be slightly less effective, and you could increase the mining efficiency of a worker by moving it to a new base with fewer workers. How hard is it to create such an aura?

On May 11 2012 23:21 Gfire wrote:
How do you add a stacking behavior that reduces mining speed? Is that possible?

On May 19 2012 00:09 Frozenhelfire wrote:
I liked the 6m version of this mod a lot more. 8 mineral patches with 4 per trip brings back all of the problems I thought you/"we" were trying to avoid. With the 6m variation you had to expand to more than three bases to get optimal incomes. With 8m/4pt you reach your optimal income on three bases, it is just less income.

On May 19 2012 00:58 NewSunshine wrote:

Maybe i'm missing something, but this argument's been made for a while, and doesn't make any sense to me. It can't be the same income we're used to on 3 bases now, because it's not the same level of income. The income you get off three bases with this setup is broadly similar to the 6m setup, only bases don't saturate so quickly, and income is slower across the board. I know it's easier to wrap one's head around the 6m concept, since all it really does is lop 1/4 off the top, but thinking about it this doesn't seem like a valid argument against it. Not to say there's nothing wrong with it, but compared to 6m is definitely a step in the right direction.

On May 19 2012 01:47 Frozenhelfire wrote:
The amount of workers it takes to saturate an 8 mineral base remains the same no matter how much you drop the income of the patch. Simply dropping the amount of minerals the trip gives you doesn't change the rate of expansion as much as manipulating the amount of workers it takes to saturate a base. If three bases was optimum before for a race it will still be the optimum now. I still want to play on the 8m/4pt before I bash it too much. However, my gut reaction is that I still like 6m more because it involved periods of time where you want to cut workers to get some army out or get an expansion started. 6m bases at least gave you more of a reason to expand.

On June 02 2012 21:21 Superouman wrote:
I changed my mind concerning this mod, it doesn't fix anything. It only makes the deathball smaller and early/mid game longer.

On June 16 2012 12:10 sluggaslamoo wrote:
If you are doing a mod, increase the mining delay instead of lowering the mineral gather count, and then increase the mineral income rate to compensate. I forgot what the sweet spot was, I think I doubled the mining delay, and made returned minerals to 8 instead of 5.

I can't remember what the attribute is, but if you change it, the worker will continue mining for longer before returning.

This should cause less linear saturation, the workers will "glitch out" kinda like BW does, meaning faster expansions will yield better ROI faster, or even splitting the workers between more bases should yield better returns.

The problem is the current mining delay is perfectly timed so that a worker will return as a worker is going towards it. If you mess with this timing, the mining rate should theoretically be less linear.

On June 16 2012 12:24 MNdakota wrote:


I like this idea and I've heard it come up before. I approve.

On June 24 2012 10:12 PiPoGevy wrote:
How is FRB these days

On July 03 2012 09:29 haitike wrote:
Barrin is playing Diablo3 it seems. I dont know if He still thinks this mod is a good idea.

Personally I dont like the Starbow proyect. Yes, it is nice and fix lot of problems, but still It is not Starcraft2, It never could be adopted by competitive play.

On July 03 2012 11:01 haitike wrote:
Starbow proyect is fine, I have played it and It is super fun.

I wanted to say that I dont like it like a "FBR sucessor that fix competitive SC2". My english is so bad sometimes

On July 05 2012 10:05 moskonia wrote:
People have realized this is bad, it just gives slower deathballs, and so they abandoned it, this "progress" killed the FRB imo.

On July 05 2012 10:11 MNdakota wrote:


Yes, exactly.

On July 05 2012 12:26 haitike wrote:


Starbow use FRB, isnt it?

I don't think it gives slower deathballs at all. Rather It opens up a lot more avenues of play

On July 05 2012 21:29 moskonia wrote:

What does this even say? do you have any evidence, or are you just being a fanboy? there is no reason this is better then 6m1hyg or the normal game. Reducing the income is just silly and screws balance to a point where the only reason to continue trying to do this is because you miss BW and BW had less income, which imo is a silly reason. Unless you have evidence which this mod makes better games no one will take it seriously, and as shown people stop liking it.

On July 05 2012 21:53 Qwyn wrote:


+ Show Spoiler +

I was originally opposed to this. But then I realized one of the big issues here, which was gas control. Obviously for this system to be perfect it would have to have a saturation curve w/diminishing returns.

I don't miss BW. I never played BW competitively. I arrived on scene around the announcement of SCII and this has always been the game I play. But at the same time I have observed BW and take things from it that I think SCII is lacking and look for a way to transpose them.

Here is my current conjecture.

That deathballs occur rapidly in SCII due to the easy access to high amounts of vespene at every expansion, and by extension the easy access to third base w/ gas.

The SCII 3 base saturation max revolves around gas. All the timings in this game revolve around gas. I don't much care for the mineral side of this, more for the gas side. Forcing players to expand around the map to acquire their 3rd/4th gas is a big deal.

Lower gas income is a big deal.

I have played around 30 games on this so far and the lower gas count influences gameplay dramatically.

On July 06 2012 08:03 MNdakota wrote:


I know this is unrelated in a sense but you could try out the Starbow mod which includes some of the Brood War units into SC2 along with the features that made SC2 awesome.

There are units for area control and stuff and it changes the gameplay majorly.

I think you would like it.

On February 09 2013 13:55 SiskosGoatee wrote:
Actually, I wanted to make a post detailing a way to simplify this concept for a long time but it can be summed up by this novel observation:

It is often said that BW saturation rules are better because 47 min workers in SC2 provide optimal saturation on 3 bases, in BW it can still go much higher. This isn't a completely fair comparison. In SC2 you start with two more workers, they harvest less, they produce more quickly, you have two gasses. Everything says: "You are supposed to have more workers in SC2 at any given point". And this is true. It takes far longer in BW to get 47 workers on mins than it does in SC2. So all would be well, except one fatal flaw: Workers still cost the same amount of supply.

Essentially, 70 workers in BW is equivalent to about 110 workers in SC2. Which is just more than you ever want to get because that eats in your max too much (unless you're Siskos, I have no problem playing P and Z up to 120 workers but that aside, I play like a retard anyway). Together with units in SC2 just in general taking more supply than in BW. Effectively it's like playing BW with a pop cap of 120. The pop cap in BW didn't see nearly as much actual significance as in SC2. People maxing was actually something that was something of note. Now it does add a certain strategic element in SC2, in BW it's just a case of 'more is more', in SC2 you actually have to throw units away far more often to decide what you want to max on. But still, I feel the FRB thing can far more easily be expressed by simply raising the supply cap to 300 and that is all. With a 300 supply cap people will probably be content to say go to 120 workers, thereby requiring more than 3 bases.

On February 09 2013 13:55 SiskosGoatee wrote:
Actually, I wanted to make a post detailing a way to simplify this concept for a long time but it can be summed up by this novel observation:

It is often said that BW saturation rules are better because 47 min workers in SC2 provide optimal saturation on 3 bases, in BW it can still go much higher. This isn't a completely fair comparison. In SC2 you start with two more workers, they harvest less, they produce more quickly, you have two gasses. Everything says: "You are supposed to have more workers in SC2 at any given point". And this is true. It takes far longer in BW to get 47 workers on mins than it does in SC2. So all would be well, except one fatal flaw: Workers still cost the same amount of supply.

Essentially, 70 workers in BW is equivalent to about 110 workers in SC2. Which is just more than you ever want to get because that eats in your max too much (unless you're Siskos, I have no problem playing P and Z up to 120 workers but that aside, I play like a retard anyway). Together with units in SC2 just in general taking more supply than in BW. Effectively it's like playing BW with a pop cap of 120. The pop cap in BW didn't see nearly as much actual significance as in SC2. People maxing was actually something that was something of note. Now it does add a certain strategic element in SC2, in BW it's just a case of 'more is more', in SC2 you actually have to throw units away far more often to decide what you want to max on. But still, I feel the FRB thing can far more easily be expressed by simply raising the supply cap to 300 and that is all. With a 300 supply cap people will probably be content to say go to 120 workers, thereby requiring more than 3 bases.

On February 09 2013 20:35 gCgCrypto wrote:.
Only concern of mine is the Techheavyness of Z and P at the moment.
While Terran would still be able to use their T1 and T2 units to great effect because they are designed well, a Zerg and Protoss army would become a even bigger all High Tech ball of doom.
This however is nothing you could fix with mapmaking alone, its just the effect of a C&C dev team designing SC2.

On February 09 2013 20:44 SiskosGoatee wrote:
Oh please stop embarrassing yourself reproducing popular rhetoric which holds no real basis in reality. You have to be kidding me, the zealot is like the most common PvT lategame unit, PvZ sees stalkers up to the final mass carrier transition. Zerglings are used up to the very endgame versus Terran. PvP sees massive amounts of zealots in the lategame. ZvZ is roach based even at the very end, if it isn't it's ling/ultra based. Terran is in fact the only race which can avoid their T1 units in the lategame in every matchup. Mech in TvT and TvZ and mass ghost/viking in TvP.

On February 09 2013 22:58 gCgCrypto wrote:

Have you seen a maxed Zerg army in WoL lately?

or a PvP army lategame?

maby a PvZ lategame army?

Its all high tech with maby some Meatshield because you lack gas...

As Z you dont want to have ANYTHING but Broodlords Infestors and Corrupters lategame, maby some queens for good mesure.

As P you dont want to have anything but immortals, colossi and archons lategame (PvP)

vs Z you want only Carrier HT Archon (if you get there ever)

ZvZ is all Broodlord Infestor lategame aswell.

THINK before shitting all over yourself

On February 09 2013 23:19 SiskosGoatee wrote:
Why yes, it's filled with Zerglings versus T and Hydras and roaches versus Z.

Which tends to be completely filled with massive amounts of zealots.

Filled with stalkers before a super lategame mass carrier transition takes place.

No, the majority of supply in them are T1 units.

I guess that's why these guys make tonnes of banelings and Zerglings with it right. Please show me game of pure infestor/broodlord that wasn't versus Protoss.

Please, show me any game where this happened.

I agree.

Yeah, except the roaches, hydras and corruptors

Please, you almost sound like one of these BW elists who's last SC2 game watched was in the beta who heard fancy terms from their fellow BW elistist like 'deathball' and continues to propagate weird myths.

In any case Terran is definitely the race that can go without T1 the most, either by going mech or in the only matchup where mech doesn't work get one of those Byun style ridiculously ghost heavy armies with not a marine or marauder in it any more.

Which of course isn't a problem whatsoever, the concept of 'T1' for Terran works different anyway, you can get to T2 with Terran a loooot quicker than the other races and you can play 2 of the 3 matchups pretty much by making 4 marines early game and then switching to fact units. The race is designed to be able to work with only fact units. That's just not how Protoss works because robo units lack AA for one. It's also not how Z works.

On February 10 2013 01:27 SiskosGoatee wrote:
Nahh, that discussion is still going on and it's hilarious the silly myths many people procreate. Like that some people actually believe that SC2 has harder counters than BW because someone once said that some-where. Are you kidding me? BW counters are so scaringly hard compared to SC2. A quick look at the damage model also indicates that. Some BW units do 25% of their max output against some units. Entire parts of tech trees couldn't be used because they were countered so brutally hard.

On February 10 2013 01:27 SiskosGoatee wrote:

Or my absolute favourite when people complain that WoL is 'too much about splash compared to BW', lol, are you kidding me. BW was all about splash, everything in BW is about splash and AoE. The entire game revolves around splash, the only mu that doesn't completely revolve around it is ZvZ.

On February 10 2013 01:27 SiskosGoatee wrote:


And whatever flaws the design or balance WoL, HotS or BW have has nothing to do with software design.

On February 10 2013 02:28 gCgCrypto wrote:


Thats not true at all, did you even ever play a game of BW???
There are little to no hard counters.

If i have a ling hydra army sure a reaver puts the P in favour but i can still compensate by mass and splitting etc.
If i have a Zerg army without Corrupters/Vipers/Broodlords or Ultras and my oponent has colossi i´m dead, period (assuming none of us got ahead)

THAT is a hardcountersituation and those simply didnt exist in BW for the most part.

(eccept whens omething didnt shoot air, it got hardcountered by air)
Corsairs didnt hard counter mutas while still being good vs them

Lurkers didnt hard counter Marine Medic

Scourge didnt hardcounter all air (because you could micor vs them and you needed to split them up because of overkill etc)

For SC2
Colossi hardcounter most all of Zergs ground but Ultras

Immortals hardcounter all Tanks and Thors hard as fuck

Tempests Hardcounter Broodlords

HTs hardcounter Vipers

Good examples for unit interaction would be:
Lings and Banelings, while Banes are good against Lings proper micro can turn this around

Marines and Banes for the same reason

so yeah don´t talk about stuff you have no idea about.

Thats interesting, never ever heared about this, neither in any SC2 forums (eccept for now obviously)
nor in the BW forums

Eccept for the fact that its software and software allways has flaws

Eccept for the fact that its software and software allways has flaws

On March 08 2013 00:07 Barrin wrote:
I have abandoned this project a while ago and denounced it's current iteration multiple times. This is not what I had in mind when I wrote Breadth of Gameplay in SC2, and no other mod that is out right now comes much closer.

Because of recent events, I plan on remaking this from the ground up - possibly under a new name - and which should be much more likely to reflect what I really have in mind - after I write another post more fully explaining it. Hopefully I'll be done long before LotV, but until then I'm

REQUESTING THREAD CLOSE

On November 15 2014 06:01 Plexa wrote:
Probably a good time to revive this thread from the graveyard. Even though Barrin abandoned the project and claimed it didn't live up to his breadth of gameplay post, this is one of the most tested economy variants and offers and interesting counterpoint to Blizzards current changes.

On November 20 2014 14:16 jcr2001 wrote:
Does anyone know exactly what happened to this idea? From what I understand, it seems like it wasn't favoured because it just had the same deathball problems, just slower, and on 4 base. Are they implying that it's a unit design issue? It also looks like it wasn't really tested in HotS, after all those crazy changes to promote aggression came in.

In general, we found that when people were playing macro-oriented styles, games did tend to be scrappier and feature more multi-pronged play. One issue from the tournament that we ran is that this was just a one-time thing for these players, and only a few of them played on FRB maps at all leading up to the event, so there was a lot of early cheese that ended games quickly. As a result of the changed economy, players didn't know how to defend the early aggression, and there weren't enough games played or attention given to the gamemode for a real meta or standardized builds to develop. That being said, there were some really interesting games. The optimist in me believes that if players were to play FRB over the course of several months, we would start to see a healthier balance between early aggression, viable expansion defense, and exciting games.

On November 24 2014 09:19 jcr2001 wrote:

Ah yes, I remember watching your casts back when it was 6m1g FRB. Thank you for casting those games!

What exactly do you mean by "scrappier"? Is that in some sense, the aim of the experiment: to encourage all-over-the-map action? I thought it was a good idea but I never saw any games from it and HotS came out.

I'd like to see Blizzard experiment more with economy rates to encourage multi-base play than just putting a timer on players. Then again, everything needs testing; maybe Blizzard's idea is better.

On November 25 2014 09:25 yakitate304 wrote:

Thanks for the support but I actually never casted! I was just the person who assembled the tournament lineup and pull in the small amount of sponsorship and extra broadcasting (on the now defunct cybersports.tv) that we received. Senex and Pull were the two casters, both for general community FRB games and the eventual tournament.

And yes, by "scrappier" I did mean that the macro games we saw featured more action taking place with smaller armies at different spots on the map. Since expansions were more numerous, people needed to split their army more in order to either do damage to their opponent without losing a base of their own, or to defend/attack in multiple spots. It could just be confirmation bias on my part, though!