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On January 03 2013 20:21 ledarsi wrote:
The "you have one second to select your target" idea is silly. Ordinary abilities without such an arbitrary rule are still better when cast quickly and precisely.
I also think that click-spam should be kept to a minimum. It's not really that interesting. What we want is for players to make lots of decisions, and need to make those decisions quickly. Movement or targeting are not interesting simply because they are clicks and therefore require actions to execute, but because a player had the opportunity to do something different, and made a specific selection. Presumably they make that selection because it gives them an advantage- but they could be mistaken. This silly new Yamato idea has exactly the same kind of target-selection decision that normal Yamato does, but requires a player separately specify WHEN they are going to use the ability, and then a separate action for WHAT they intend to shoot at. This is dumb. Pressing the button to select the ability and then clicking a target accomplishes exactly the same thing.
I do think that the Raven is the unit I am least satisfied with in OneGoal right now. Firstly, as much as Ravens were inaccessible for their 200 gas cost, I did like having the most expensive caster as Terran. It just needed to be stronger to justify its inaccessibility and high cost.
Recovery Drone feels like it does not belong on the Raven- I find myself greatly missing Auto-Turret to go along with my actually viable Siege Tanks. Recovery Drone is a good idea, and seems like a fine ability for adding skill and micro, but moving sieged tanks seems contrary to the idea that they can't move at all, and are rooted to the ground. It also has a bit of the same weirdness as Abduct, lessened by being friendly-only, but still not good. Perhaps make it just a repair drone and put it on something else? Perhaps a MULE can sacrifice itself and use the repair drone ability instead of mining.
Furthermore, Seeker Missile has short range again. Despite the lack of splash, the opportunity to use Seeker safely in HOTS actually enables a player to get a significant number of Ravens. Would you be open to changing Seeker Missile, or adding functionality on a different unit that provides the HOTS Seeker's anti-Broodlord functionality? Potentially giving a single-target missile ability to another unit? Perhaps giving the Viking a smaller missile that is intended to be used in numbers that requires research? Say, a pair of charges, each a 40 damage missile against ground or air targets at 15 range on a cooldown? Waits three seconds, during which the target can leave range or vision, or be killed or have some defensive ability cast on it (which all sides should have- defensive abilities that is)?
Lastly, is it really necessary to have the Hellion consume two slots in the Factory? Having the unit always be produced as one or the other is perfectly acceptable as the transform time is so short. I also think the Hellion/Hellbat situation needs to be looked at, but it isn't pressing. They need further differentiation- they are practically the exact same unit. One has more HP, but is slower. Needs something else to differentiate them, or something clever with the transform ability.
I think you should read one my previous posts, because what your indirectly implying is that micro-abilities like shiftattack clciking banelings with tanks are boring (because its just about clicking as much as you can in about 0.5 seconds).
Every single ability in the game is about clicking, and this ability adds a lot of strategical choices as well (some of which I outlined if you read all my posts). The current yamaton cannon actually has zero strategical choice. You a-move into a battle and then yamato some of the big units; The only reason why everybody dislikes the cannon is that we don't see that often, and it takes time for people to get bored with even badly designed abilities (fungal growth was considered a pretty fun spell once as well).
And again, this is completely different from 1-click abilities. 1-click abilities are boring as everyone can execute them. A platinum player can execute the normal yamato as well as I can do it. But this adjusted seeker missile makes such a huge difference between mediocore and bad players which has never been seen in Starcraft 2 previously.
Remember as well that most 1-click abilities are spamable; But when you just have 1 second to attack, it's not spamable, thus it fixes the smartcast problem in a way most people will be satifised with (both BW fanatics and normal sc2 players).
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When a player shift-clicks to attack banelings with tanks, they are saying they would rather their tanks fire at the Banelings than fire at anything else. This is interesting because the player has made an important decision here.
I see nothing interesting about casting an ability that allows me to cast another ability for 1 second. That's only one decision- I want to use the ability on this target. The fact that I want to use it NOW is obvious.
I understand your point that forcing players to do this will make casting the ability more difficult, and make idiots waste energy on fizzled spells. But anyone who is actually good at the game will never have this problem, and there is nothing interesting about the possibility- it is strictly BAD to say "I want to cast this ability now" and then not give a target.
1-click abilities are only "easy" when you only have 3 units that have them- which in SC2's design happens a lot because units cost huge amounts of supply, or you may have more of them, but you definitely want to use all those abilities right now. If you have a large number of units with 1-click abilities, and need to decide whether to use those abilities now or save them for later. Or if the positioning of the ability is significant, or any number of other factors.
What I am saying is that it is absolutely not the case that pro players are the same as platinum players at using "1-click" abilities. But if using those abilities is obvious, and not really a decision, and it doesn't require a lot of thought or choice or planning to use, then yes they are easy. Irradiate is a 1-click ability in Brood War. Hell, Spawn Broodlings is a 1-click ability that INSTAGIBS the target, and it takes massive skill to use correctly because honestly Queens are kind of terrible unless you are amazing. Recall, Dark Swarm, Psi Storm, hell Nukes are 1-click abilities.
The actual execution is not supposed to be the challenging part unless you are participating in the Starcraft Special Olympics, and you get applause just for casting the damn spell at all. Doing it correctly lots of times in lots of different places simultaneously and in different situations, and getting it right under changing conditions, is hard. Nobody thinks we should require the player do a Dance Dance Revolution sequence on the keyboard and combo up just to activate the spell.
The number of clicks required is not what separates the pros from the plats. Any idiot can click quickly. Making the right decisions quickly, even in difficult situations, however, is the realm of pro gamers.
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On January 03 2013 20:53 ledarsi wrote:
When a player shift-clicks to attack banelings with tanks, they are saying they would rather their tanks fire at the Banelings than fire at anything else. This is interesting because the player has made an important decision here.
I see nothing interesting about casting an ability that allows me to cast another ability for 1 second. That's only one decision- I want to use the ability on this target. The fact that I want to use it NOW is obvious.
I understand your point that forcing players to do this will make casting the ability more difficult, and make idiots waste energy on fizzled spells. But anyone who is actually good at the game will never have this problem, and there is nothing interesting about the possibility- it is strictly BAD to say "I want to cast this ability now" and then not give a target.
1-click abilities are only "easy" when you only have 3 units that have them- which in SC2's design happens a lot because units cost huge amounts of supply, or you may have more of them, but you definitely want to use all those abilities right now. If you have a large number of units with 1-click abilities, and need to decide whether to use those abilities now or save them for later. Or if the positioning of the ability is significant, or any number of other factors.
What I am saying is that it is absolutely not the case that pro players are the same as platinum players at using "1-click" abilities. But if using those abilities is obvious, and not really a decision, and it doesn't require a lot of thought or choice or planning to use, then yes they are easy. Irradiate is a 1-click ability in Brood War. Hell, Spawn Broodlings is a 1-click ability that INSTAGIBS the target, and it takes massive skill to use correctly because honestly Queens are kind of terrible unless you are amazing. Recall, Dark Swarm, Psi Storm, hell Nukes are 1-click abilities.
The actual execution is not supposed to be the challenging part unless you are participating in the Starcraft Special Olympics, and you get applause just for casting the damn spell at all. Doing it correctly lots of times in lots of different places simultaneously and in different situations, and getting it right under changing conditions, is hard. Nobody thinks we should require the player do a Dance Dance Revolution sequence on the keyboard and combo up just to activate the spell.
The number of clicks required is not what separates the pros from the plats. Any idiot can click quickly. Making the right decisions quickly, even in difficult situations, however, is the realm of pro gamers.
Regarding choice - Have you read all of my previous posts? I did outline a few occations where terran players could prioritize differently.
Anyway here is my design philosophy regarding choice;
1) The importance of choice is generally overvalued by the community. Most of the time choices don't make games more interesting. Imagine the luxury dilemma of a zerg players trying to decide whether to cast infested terrans or fungal growth. Who cares right? Both abilities are poorly designed and those we don't really care. In the early stages of a game the "choice" thing might be interesting, but it quickly gets boring.
2) Not saying I don't like some choices. LIke when a player gets counterattacked while he is at the middle of the map; He now has to decide whether to go back or base trade. This is kinda interesting, or when a player has a various amount of build orders to choose from, this can be kinda interesting as well.
3) Therefore choices on how to optimally use units should how a low priority when designing the unit. And honestly do you really sit down and watch marine/tank vs bling/muta battles because your interested in seeing whether the terran player chooses to split his marines or target fire banelings?
No right? The reason you like watching these battles is because of the micro opportunities of both players. As spectators we don't really care about choices, though when that is said, we obviously want a variety of different stuff players can do, so battles don't appear to similar.
But let me list a couple of instances where choices matter
1) Assume the protoss has 3 immortals. Target firing those 3 immortals takes just 0.5 seconds for player X, and thus he has to decide whether he wants to target fire other units, micro hellions, target fire collosus with tanks, micro mines (remember they overkill ine Onegoal).
2) How do you optimally position your BC's in a battle. Do you plan on using the cannon from just 1 BC, or should you put 1 bc in the front, 1 in the middle and 1 in the back, so you potentiall can use the cannons from 3 BC's?
3) The toss player has 4 immortals but also 4 warp prism's which are placed just over his immortals (which were intentionaly placed there by the toss player as he knew the terran player had BC's). What should the terran player do? Should he assume the toss player is capable of picking the immortals up, and target fire other units? Maybe he could even target just one immortal, and then target the 4 warp prisms's with the remaining of his actions (as he expects the toss player to react to the yamato cannons by loading the immortals into the warp prism, and targetting the warp prisms allows him to potentially kill both the warp prism and the immortals). This "choice" would actually be extremely entertaining to watch for viewers, as the players can optimize their decisions by knowing what the opposing player is likely to do.
So to sum up:
1) Choices aren't that important.
2) Even if you disagree with that claim, there still many morechoices with the adjusted yamato cannon than with the current cannon or even with Onegoal's new ability to the BC.
I fundenmentally disagree with you that using abilties properly shouldn't be difficult (and I think most players will do). I want units to be easy to learn, difficult to master, and mainly from an execution POV (whether that is postionally or micro based isn't that relevant here).
Regarding your last comment I suspect your may not play the game actively/ or at relatively high level. Clicking fast and precisely is not easy, and is one of the main differences between top players and mediocore players (not anyone can target 5 different immortals over 1 second - just as targetting banelings with tanks isn't that easy).
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No, lowering the energy cost, the damage, and allowing to cast it multiple time per BC would not make it spammable, because it would work like your ability : you can cast it only one for every enemy unit, and it still takes 1 second to send the attack. The interaction possibilities are the same, the skill have just a limited scalability to avoid having to balance it completely differently at low and high skill level. It also adds an interesting choice : do I fire some more or do I keep my energy? Smartcasting won't be too important because the one on one unit should be global and not per BC (to avoid instakilling units). Smartcasting multiple BC will just give you more energy.
He's right on one thing, Hider : any idiot computer can click as fast as you want. And the computer is pretty bad at starcraft. A spell design based on only your APM to make it worthwhile instead of having to choose the right targets seems to be a bad design in itself.
Plus, it makes the BC too important in the battle, being the one expected to down the immortals shield, creating a kind of mothership effect : either you land a perfect shot on your enemy immortals and your tanks shred them or you just loose the fight. It also advocate deathball, encouraging the protoss to mass more immortals than you can target.
No, really, I don't think yamato is what you want to change on the BC.
Even if you have your idea, I think the possibilities of it are fairly clear (either make yamato have multi-target or make it a click as much as you can in 1sec, it's still the same branch of changes). We should let OneGoal designers think about it, we can't add much on it.
What where you thinking of the other propositions of a second ability ?
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On January 03 2013 22:53 Nyvis wrote:
No, lowering the energy cost, the damage, and allowing to cast it multiple time per BC would not make it spammable, because it would work like your ability : you can cast it only one for every enemy unit, and it still takes 1 second to send the attack. The interaction possibilities are the same, the skill have just a limited scalability to avoid having to balance it completely differently at low and high skill level. It also adds an interesting choice : do I fire some more or do I keep my energy? Smartcasting won't be too important because the one on one unit should be global and not per BC (to avoid instakilling units). Smartcasting multiple BC will just give you more energy.
He's right on one thing, Hider : any idiot computer can click as fast as you want. And the computer is pretty bad at starcraft. A spell design based on only your APM to make it worthwhile instead of having to choose the right targets seems to be a bad design in itself.
Plus, it makes the BC too important in the battle, being the one expected to down the immortals shield, creating a kind of mothership effect : either you land a perfect shot on your enemy immortals and your tanks shred them or you just loose the fight. It also advocate deathball, encouraging the protoss to mass more immortals than you can target.
No, really, I don't think yamato is what you want to change on the BC.
Even if you have your idea, I think the possibilities of it are fairly clear (either make yamato have multi-target or make it a click as much as you can in 1sec, it's still the same branch of changes). We should let OneGoal designers think about it, we can't add much on it.
What where you thinking of the other propositions of a second ability ?
The "click-thing" is as previously stated completelly wrong. I don't know why you keep bringing it up. It's exactly the same as shift-attackclcking banelings. Any computer can be programmed to do that as well. Also, again, any computer can be computed to yamta cannon (the normal version) a collosus. This suggestion doesn't change anything for most playyers. Its just rewarding great players and make for interesting games.
The biggest difference between my suggestion and your suggestion is that there is a punishment for activating it at the wrong time. This make it work in a similar fashion as stim does. Also it adds more positonal based play rather than just spamming it endless. Your suggestion will work in a much more similar fashion as snipe does. On the other hand my suggestion rewards players for activating the cannon individually on the correct BC' at the correct time.
Regarding the expectation of giving it the role of killing immortals shields, I expect it to supplement/replace widow mines (Which currently have the role). Your critique honestly seems slightly more relevant to the widow mines. If micro'ing widow mines makes the difference between getting roflstomped in a battle or winning the battle easily the importance of that unit is probably too great.
Regarding your last question, im not exactly sure what you mean? I think giving the BC 2 "micro-intensive" abillities is too much, and since the yamato cannon isn't very well designed I would rather just redesign that ability to make it more interesting while fulfilling the supposed role of the BC. If you have another suggestion I would like to hear it, because as I stated previsously I disagree with Onegoal's idea of giving the BC a "medivac-healing" role.
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We gave suggestions because you came with yours, something about making the BC buff a mono-target buff with a downside. The last proposition I did :
Surcharge :
X energy : Targeted units (maybe only mechanical, it's more fitting with the theme, but it's not really a problem balance wise to allow it on bio, and it could give some very interesting strats, like buffing a ghost to go emp for example) within a range of x receive an increase (I like the armor/movespeed/attackspeed, but it isn't the only option) for x seconds. The buff ends if the battlecruiser dies. At the end of the buff, the unit is stunned and suffers x damage.
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On January 03 2013 21:32 Hider wrote:
Anyway here is my design philosophy regarding choice;
1) The importance of choice is generally overvalued by the community. Most of the time choices don't make games more interesting. Imagine the luxury dilemma of a zerg players trying to decide whether to cast infested terrans or fungal growth. Who cares right? Both abilities are poorly designed and those we don't really care. In the early stages of a game the "choice" thing might be interesting, but it quickly gets boring.
2) Not saying I don't like some choices. LIke when a player gets counterattacked while he is at the middle of the map; He now has to decide whether to go back or base trade. This is kinda interesting, or when a player has a various amount of build orders to choose from, this can be kinda interesting as well.
3) Therefore choices on how to optimally use units should how a low priority when designing the unit. And honestly do you really sit down and watch marine/tank vs bling/muta battles because your interested in seeing whether the terran player chooses to split his marines or target fire banelings?
No right? The reason you like watching these battles is because of the micro opportunities of both players. As spectators we don't really care about choices, though when that is said, we obviously want a variety of different stuff players can do, so battles don't appear to similar.
I disagree with this philosophy that choice seems to be almost irrelevant... Whether or not this is true in SC2 is a different discussion, but it isn't the best concept. You want all players to have a wide variety of choices available to them at any given point in time, and be able to make those choices in the heat of battle. That's one of the reasons that watching Brood War was so fun: so many choices were being made so quickly, and not just in regard to spell choices: The choice to use hold-position lurkers, the choice to use shuttle micro, the choice to send out units for a flank, whether to use Plague or Dark Swarm, Recall or Stasis, etc... For whatever reason, these choices are generally absent in SC2, and are overshadowed by what is always better (why would you use recall on a mothership instead of vortexing Brood Lords? Or why would you make a wall of turrets against mutas instead of using a seeker missile or two?). Hopefully, we can influence some changes in this regard, but for now, this is about where we're stuck at.
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On January 03 2013 23:45 topsecret221 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2013 21:32 Hider wrote:
Anyway here is my design philosophy regarding choice;
1) The importance of choice is generally overvalued by the community. Most of the time choices don't make games more interesting. Imagine the luxury dilemma of a zerg players trying to decide whether to cast infested terrans or fungal growth. Who cares right? Both abilities are poorly designed and those we don't really care. In the early stages of a game the "choice" thing might be interesting, but it quickly gets boring.
2) Not saying I don't like some choices. LIke when a player gets counterattacked while he is at the middle of the map; He now has to decide whether to go back or base trade. This is kinda interesting, or when a player has a various amount of build orders to choose from, this can be kinda interesting as well.
3) Therefore choices on how to optimally use units should how a low priority when designing the unit. And honestly do you really sit down and watch marine/tank vs bling/muta battles because your interested in seeing whether the terran player chooses to split his marines or target fire banelings?
No right? The reason you like watching these battles is because of the micro opportunities of both players. As spectators we don't really care about choices, though when that is said, we obviously want a variety of different stuff players can do, so battles don't appear to similar.
I disagree with this philosophy that choice seems to be almost irrelevant... Whether or not this is true in SC2 is a different discussion, but it isn't the best concept. You want all players to have a wide variety of choices available to them at any given point in time, and be able to make those choices in the heat of battle. That's one of the reasons that watching Brood War was so fun: so many choices were being made so quickly, and not just in regard to spell choices: The choice to use hold-position lurkers, the choice to use shuttle micro, the choice to send out units for a flank, whether to use Plague or Dark Swarm, Recall or Stasis, etc... For whatever reason, these choices are generally absent in SC2, and are overshadowed by what is always better (why would you use recall on a mothership instead of vortexing Brood Lords? Or why would you make a wall of turrets against mutas instead of using a seeker missile or two?). Hopefully, we can influence some changes in this regard, but for now, this is about where we're stuck at.
Yes we want players to demonstrate great micro abilities but we should prioritize entertaining games over choices. Choices in it self aren't interesting. Like people have suggested that speed medis should cost energy to make for choices between using the speed boost and having more energy. This, however, is a boring choice (won't be interesting to watch as spectators), and it has the drawback of reducing the multitasking in the game as it will take longer time for units to get from A to B.
Regarding your definition of choise, it seems to be more similar to what I call micro options (which I am very much for).
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On January 03 2013 23:37 Nyvis wrote:We gave suggestions because you came with yours, something about making the BC buff a mono-target buff with a downside. The last proposition I did : Show nested quote +Surcharge :
X energy : Targeted units (maybe only mechanical, it's more fitting with the theme, but it's not really a problem balance wise to allow it on bio, and it could give some very interesting strats, like buffing a ghost to go emp for example) within a range of x receive an increase (I like the armor/movespeed/attackspeed, but it isn't the only option) for x seconds. The buff ends if the battlecruiser dies. At the end of the buff, the unit is stunned and suffers x damage.
Could you give me some more theoretical ingame uses of that ability.
Is this a kind of ability which creates spectator excitement and rewards players for using it intelligently/mechanically well?
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You seem to forget something major.
Sc2 is a game, not just a show. And the progamers NEED to play the same game as the players for the players to be attracted and jump from playing casually to watching esport.
Choices are interesting if they have a big influence and can be answered by the other player. I agree that little choices like the medivac one aren't major, because in both cases, the enemy with have a medivac full of units in his base, and his answer won't really change depending of that.
Will still be happy to have your opinion on what I was proposing.
Edit :
Some example of uses :
- The ability can be used to quickly boost your siege tanks or your thors in a battle. You need to micro quickly if you want to affect more than one siege tank. Your opponent can react against it because they can just retract and come back when the tanks are stunned at the end of the buff, or choose to focus the BC to try to stun the buffed units.
- It could also be used to surge a few ghosts to go EMP. With a huge drawback : you can fail and have your ghosts stunned.
- It creates excitation because you have the choice of putting everything in a fight, taking a risk by doing so.
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On January 03 2013 23:57 Nyvis wrote:
You seem to forget something major.
Sc2 is a game, not just a show. And the progamers NEED to play the same game as the players for the players to be attracted and jump from playing casually to watching esport.
Choices are interesting if they have a big influence and can be answered by the other player. I agree that little choices like the medivac one aren't major, because in both cases, the enemy with have a medivac full of units in his base, and his answer won't really change depending of that.
Will still be happy to have your opinion on what I was proposing.
Edit :
Some example of uses :
- The ability can be used to quickly boost your siege tanks or your thors in a battle. You need to micro quickly if you want to affect more than one siege tank. Your opponent can react against it because they can just retract and come back when the tanks are stunned at the end of the buff, or choose to focus the BC to try to stun the buffed units.
- It could also be used to surge a few ghosts to go EMP. With a huge drawback : you can fail and have your ghosts stunned.
- It creates excitation because you have the choice of putting everything in a fight, taking a risk by doing so.
So it will work kinda like stim?
Guess it could work - Though I am still a fan of mechanically difficult to execute strategies which demonstrates the skill level between good and great players. I think stim is a great ability and is entertaining to watch, but its not because I really care about the choice of when to use stim. Rather because it incentivizes micro.
I think the drawback of your abilty is that your average master league player will use it in same way as many top top players (or at least it will be difficult for spectators to notice the difference).
But well, if you believe in the following two things;
1) BC's should be a neccesity late game if you mech
2) Mech shouldn't be as micro/apm intensive as bio
then this ability makes a lot of sense as it rewards decision making and buffs mech in certain situations.
As you probably have noticed I believe in the following 3 things:
1) BC's shouldn't be a neccesity late game if you mech, but merely a potential unit one could add (in the same way that you can add thors to counter to your marine/tank composition against a bling/muta army. Not a neccesity but you could do it).
2) It should not be a neccessity to have high APM/great battle micro to win with mech, but in case you do, you can gain a 5% advantage over the opponent (assuming your micro is better than the opponent).
3) Spectators should be able to notice when a player uses an ability decently and when a player uses an ability fantastically.
So to sum up; think your suggestion probably works fine (its better than the passive ability at least), but according to my design philosophy I think one could do better with a more mechanically challenging one.
Btw I think stuff that is entertaining for spectators typically is entertaining to play with that as well (as players). On the other hand, some units are fun to play with for player X, but boring to play against and boring to watch as spectators. (like I actually enjoy turtling though it is insanely boring to play against and watch).
Therefore I always take the POV of the spectators, rather than the players.
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On January 04 2013 00:29 Hider wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2013 23:57 Nyvis wrote:
You seem to forget something major.
Sc2 is a game, not just a show. And the progamers NEED to play the same game as the players for the players to be attracted and jump from playing casually to watching esport.
Choices are interesting if they have a big influence and can be answered by the other player. I agree that little choices like the medivac one aren't major, because in both cases, the enemy with have a medivac full of units in his base, and his answer won't really change depending of that.
Will still be happy to have your opinion on what I was proposing.
Edit :
Some example of uses :
- The ability can be used to quickly boost your siege tanks or your thors in a battle. You need to micro quickly if you want to affect more than one siege tank. Your opponent can react against it because they can just retract and come back when the tanks are stunned at the end of the buff, or choose to focus the BC to try to stun the buffed units.
- It could also be used to surge a few ghosts to go EMP. With a huge drawback : you can fail and have your ghosts stunned.
- It creates excitation because you have the choice of putting everything in a fight, taking a risk by doing so. So it will work kinda like stim? Guess it could work - Though I am still a fan of mechanically difficult to execute strategies which demonstrates the skill level between good and great players. I think stim is a great ability and is entertaining to watch, but its not because I really care about the choice of when to use stim. Rather because it incentivizes micro. I think the drawback of your abilty is that your average master league player will use it in same way as many top top players (or at least it will be difficult for spectators to notice the difference). But well, if you believe in the following two things; 1) BC's should be a neccesity late game if you mech 2) Mech shouldn't be as micro/apm intensive as bio then this ability makes a lot of sense as it rewards decision making and buffs mech in certain situations. As you probably have noticed I believe in the following 3 things: 1) BC's shouldn't be a neccesity late game if you mech, but merely a potential unit one could add (in the same way that you can add thors to counter to your marine/tank composition against a bling/muta army. Not a neccesity but you could do it). 2) It should not be a neccessity to have high APM/great battle micro to win with mech, but in case you do, you can gain a 5% advantage over the opponent (assuming your micro is better than the opponent). 3) Spectators should be able to notice when a player uses an ability decently and when a player uses an ability fantastically. So to sum up; think your suggestion probably works fine (its better than the passive ability at least), but according to my design philosophy I think one could do better with a more mechanically challenging one. Btw I think stuff that is entertaining for spectators typically is entertaining to play with that as well (as players). On the other hand, some units are fun to play with for player X, but boring to play against and boring to watch as spectators. (like I actually enjoy turtling though it is insanely boring to play against and watch). Therefore I always take the POV of the spectators, rather than the players.
This post makes me think you simply have no idea what you are talking about.
Mech is far more mechanically demanding than bio in Brood War, and vastly more difficult to do well. Slower units means you have to play faster to always have them in the right places, at the right times, with the right distribution. Get it wrong, and you hemorrhage expensive units. Secondly, Battlecruisers are NOT necessary if you are going mech. The whole point is that you can build factory units the entire game and have them be useful, similarly to how you can currently build barracks units all game and have them be useful. Furthermore, "micro" does not give a percentile advantage over anyone. Micro gives a hugely variable gain depending on the situation. Sometimes it might be a 10x gain, sometimes a loss because you should have done something more important, like produced units instead of microing vulture harass. Multiplying the effectiveness of your units through micro by large factors should be possible- not just 5 percent. However your opponent should have the same capability, assuming comparable skill levels.
Additionally, strategy games are games first, and spectator sports second. Games are made interesting by a wide variety of possible game states due to different decisions made by players. Chess has a tremendous variety of possible game states because of player choices, and reactions to their opponents' moves. Starcraft is most closely analogous to high-speed chess, where you are allowed to build more pieces and select which pieces you would like as well.
Mechanical execution difficulty is actually very stupid. Imagine if you actually did make using units or abilities quite physically challenging, such as requiring a precisely timed series of keys in a combination, Street Fighter style. That would be ridiculous. Strategy games are interesting due to the wide variety of interestingly different ways players can choose to use the tools they have, and the many different ways a game might play out as a result.
No matter how "mechanically difficult" something is- if it is the same every time, it is going to get boring eventually. That is the biggest complaint that everyone is leveling against SC2. The games are too similar to one another. Whether this is because of big units, few units, anti-micro spells, hard-counter relationships making for deterministic battles, deathballs causing a single battle to be decisive, etc. the game doesn't feel fresh each time.
Just compare this to quite simple board games like Chess or Settlers of Catan, where there is huge variation in what can happen even with much simpler rules than Starcraft 2. Starcraft 2's complexity is so much greater that the number of player choices and possible game states should be TREMENDOUSLY greater. But games tend to look very similar every single time. After a few hundred games, you sort of feel like you've seen it all. And that is boring. No matter how "difficult" it is to do, it's just not interesting because you don't really have to think on the fly and problem-solve, or think strategically to try and get an advantage in a situation you have not encountered before.
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On January 04 2013 09:30 ledarsi wrote:Show nested quote +On January 04 2013 00:29 Hider wrote:On January 03 2013 23:57 Nyvis wrote:
You seem to forget something major.
Sc2 is a game, not just a show. And the progamers NEED to play the same game as the players for the players to be attracted and jump from playing casually to watching esport.
Choices are interesting if they have a big influence and can be answered by the other player. I agree that little choices like the medivac one aren't major, because in both cases, the enemy with have a medivac full of units in his base, and his answer won't really change depending of that.
Will still be happy to have your opinion on what I was proposing.
Edit :
Some example of uses :
- The ability can be used to quickly boost your siege tanks or your thors in a battle. You need to micro quickly if you want to affect more than one siege tank. Your opponent can react against it because they can just retract and come back when the tanks are stunned at the end of the buff, or choose to focus the BC to try to stun the buffed units.
- It could also be used to surge a few ghosts to go EMP. With a huge drawback : you can fail and have your ghosts stunned.
- It creates excitation because you have the choice of putting everything in a fight, taking a risk by doing so. So it will work kinda like stim? Guess it could work - Though I am still a fan of mechanically difficult to execute strategies which demonstrates the skill level between good and great players. I think stim is a great ability and is entertaining to watch, but its not because I really care about the choice of when to use stim. Rather because it incentivizes micro. I think the drawback of your abilty is that your average master league player will use it in same way as many top top players (or at least it will be difficult for spectators to notice the difference). But well, if you believe in the following two things; 1) BC's should be a neccesity late game if you mech 2) Mech shouldn't be as micro/apm intensive as bio then this ability makes a lot of sense as it rewards decision making and buffs mech in certain situations. As you probably have noticed I believe in the following 3 things: 1) BC's shouldn't be a neccesity late game if you mech, but merely a potential unit one could add (in the same way that you can add thors to counter to your marine/tank composition against a bling/muta army. Not a neccesity but you could do it). 2) It should not be a neccessity to have high APM/great battle micro to win with mech, but in case you do, you can gain a 5% advantage over the opponent (assuming your micro is better than the opponent). 3) Spectators should be able to notice when a player uses an ability decently and when a player uses an ability fantastically. So to sum up; think your suggestion probably works fine (its better than the passive ability at least), but according to my design philosophy I think one could do better with a more mechanically challenging one. Btw I think stuff that is entertaining for spectators typically is entertaining to play with that as well (as players). On the other hand, some units are fun to play with for player X, but boring to play against and boring to watch as spectators. (like I actually enjoy turtling though it is insanely boring to play against and watch). Therefore I always take the POV of the spectators, rather than the players. This post makes me think you simply have no idea what you are talking about. Mech is far more mechanically demanding than bio in Brood War, and vastly more difficult to do well. Slower units means you have to play faster to always have them in the right places, at the right times, with the right distribution. Get it wrong, and you hemorrhage expensive units. Secondly, Battlecruisers are NOT necessary if you are going mech. The whole point is that you can build factory units the entire game and have them be useful, similarly to how you can currently build barracks units all game and have them be useful. Furthermore, "micro" does not give a percentile advantage over anyone. Micro gives a hugely variable gain depending on the situation. Sometimes it might be a 10x gain, sometimes a loss because you should have done something more important, like produced units instead of microing vulture harass. Multiplying the effectiveness of your units through micro by large factors should be possible- not just 5 percent. However your opponent should have the same capability, assuming comparable skill levels. Additionally, strategy games are games first, and spectator sports second. Games are made interesting by a wide variety of possible game states due to different decisions made by players. Chess has a tremendous variety of possible game states because of player choices, and reactions to their opponents' moves. Starcraft is most closely analogous to high-speed chess, where you are allowed to build more pieces and select which pieces you would like as well. Mechanical execution difficulty is actually very stupid. Imagine if you actually did make using units or abilities quite physically challenging, such as requiring a precisely timed series of keys in a combination, Street Fighter style. That would be ridiculous. Strategy games are interesting due to the wide variety of interestingly different ways players can choose to use the tools they have, and the many different ways a game might play out as a result. No matter how "mechanically difficult" something is- if it is the same every time, it is going to get boring eventually. That is the biggest complaint that everyone is leveling against SC2. The games are too similar to one another. Whether this is because of big units, few units, anti-micro spells, hard-counter relationships making for deterministic battles, deathballs causing a single battle to be decisive, etc. the game doesn't feel fresh each time. Just compare this to quite simple board games like Chess or Settlers of Catan, where there is huge variation in what can happen even with much simpler rules than Starcraft 2. Starcraft 2's complexity is so much greater that the number of player choices and possible game states should be TREMENDOUSLY greater. But games tend to look very similar every single time. After a few hundred games, you sort of feel like you've seen it all. And that is boring. No matter how "difficult" it is to do, it's just not interesting because you don't really have to think on the fly and problem-solve, or think strategically to try and get an advantage in a situation you have not encountered before.
You are misunderstanding me completely. I was merely talking about the differences between my game philosophy and onegoal's. I think this is like 3rd time I write this to you, but read my previous posts and maybe you will understand the context, and please tone down your offensive tone, when you are the one who keeps misunderstanding. Ask questions instead please.
Anyway, I won't bother responding to you anymore as we have completely different game philosphies and thus we will never come to an agreement.
And as I think most ppl will tend to agree with me that mechanics should be and is extremely important, I don't find this discussion worth the time.
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Hey all, just wanted to thank you all for this productive discussion. It is good to know the SC community has passion and ideas.
Now that I have my account back, it is time to edit the OP. Huzzah!
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All right: Time to step back in the ring and lay down the smackdown.
***cracks knuckles***
Spoiler tags are for neatness :D
On January 03 2013 05:47 FoxyMayhem wrote:Since we're on the same board here, why don't you (or anyone else) have a go at designing a better battlecruiser. Here's the criteria we've identified: 1) It needs to have an appreciable affect with just having one or two, while not getting ridiculous when adding many of them. 2) It needs to supplemental mech mobility on larger maps (we're trying to support even larger maps through our unit design) 3) Ideally has reactionary counterplay so the opponent can express his skill versus it. 4) Ideally requires skill to use well. Some mid-battle babysit micro is permitted, due to the lower micro demands of mech mid-battle thanks to siege tanks. (Having a demanding BC that's designed mostly to work with bio, requiring a lot of midbattle micro to make effective would be a disaster, as the bio requires the majority of your attention to be effective, and thus would render a micro-heavy BC unusable. However, since it doesn't synergize with Bio in any way, we can design assuming it will be played with mech or sky only). 5) Discourages deathball play. 6) Ideally it slows down fights Our design hits criteria 1, 2 and 3. + Show Spoiler +-1 is beacuse it only takes one or two BCs to amp up your mech speed by 20% and dps by 10%.
-2, because the auras do not stack, so having 20 BC's over your mech doesn't make the ridiculous.
-3, thanks to high templar, tempest, vikings, ghosts, corruptors, and vipers being able to kill the BC to shut its aura off, though this would not be true for some sort of instant damage spell, so be careful with those.
It mostly fails on 4 and 5. + Show Spoiler +-On 4, it does require some skill to place them over all the places you want to hold, or micro the advance of you tank line at the high level on very broad maps. It could look so cool. But just having one over a deathball mech is no expression of skill.
-On 5 with deathballing, it is a concern. As with all auras, it encourages clumping, so that is bad. There's one thing that helps with that, though: mech often seiges in a line to be most effective, and since mech must siege we see the deathball much less often, and so adding an aura to it is less toxic than something like mothership cloak and colossus.
Behemoth Reactor actually destructive for 6. + Show Spoiler +But there are reasons we made the exception for the time being: a) it helps mech address hardened shields [though this may not even be necessary since hellions gud tanking unit], b) it helped counter the remax effect of zerg. Currently terran mech has extremely slow rebuild rate compared to the other races and bio, meaning in the endgame, each battle is a singe-point failure. 1 supply widow mines and 2 supply siege tanks help address this through buying time and just taking a long time to kill, but by offering mech a late game efficiency booster through Behemoth conduit, it relieves these some, and we were hoping the expression of skill could come through other ways such as how they position and control area in huge maps.
If you or anyone else can build a better BC that addresses these criteria, or identify more criteria, we'd love to see it.
@Hider:
+ Show Spoiler +Plz dont double post. + Show Spoiler +Makes the thread confusing. Would rather see one big post addressing multiple ppl than multiple posts for different people. Only the OP has the right I believe. I will try and address you first since you have the other most thought out idea from the last few pages. Your redesigned Yamato cannon (If I am reading this correctly it is a replacement, not a separate ability) is an ability that relies on the player able to have a huge burst of APM on a single unit's abilty for 1 second. The opponent has 1 second to react to this ability. That is less than the time it takes for an infestor to break from fog of war and cast a fungal. Blizzard seconds are about .5 real life seconds (game speed is on fastest) Your ability fails to address ANY of the above-mentioned criteria. Only objective #4 has been mildly addressed, but it is nulled by the fact that they explicitly stated they do not want a BC to be competing with the APM sink for bio units. You have basically turned the BC into a Tier 3 WoL Flying Instant Kill Infestor, that becomes overpowered if you have people who are able to click faster for 1 second, never mind whether or not they have been outplayed the entire game. The design is simply ***THIS UNIT WILL DIE NO MATTER WHAT. If I CAN SPAM QUICKLY, THEN A FEW MORE UNITS WILL DIE. *** This is similar to how the infestor works in WoL, where your entire army can be nothing but infestors. Your ability is so powerful, that there is no reason to play any other part of the game effectively, so long as you can hold on until you get infesto,... I mean BattleCruisers. (Terrans and Protoss must kill ZERG early before their infestors come out. Barring that, kill before broodlords or they lose.) This is balancing for the top tier players downward. Yeah, a bronz league scrub can maybe get one or 2 shots off, but anyone gold and above can feasibly spam click 3-5 units easily. It is not physically possible to click that many times within the time span you are giving, nor is it feasibly possible to expect the opponent to have less than a .5 IRL second reaction time. You also promote that your Tier 3 Terran capital ship will "soft counter" the Protoss Tier 1.5 Anti-Armor walker (Immortals). WHY, do we need this. WHAT purpose does having a 400,300 cost unit soft-countering the immortal have, and HOW does this improve the current state of the game, when we already have various levels of "counters" (I will hence forth stop using the word counter because it seems like it is being mis-used here). Answer: We DONT want + Show Spoiler +an overpowered ability that takes little skill to use (cough WoL fungal) and is no fun or offers reasonable counter-play (cough, WoL fungal). Your abiltity in it's current iteration does both. The "you have one second to select your target" idea is silly. Ordinary abilities without such an arbitrary rule are still better when cast quickly and precisely. [ We ALREADY have + Show Spoiler +some beautiful interactions between seige tanks vs immortals with and without shields, hellions tanking immortal's anti-armor shots, stalkers clearing hellions, ghosts depleting shields, high-templar vs ghosts (EMP, snipe vs feedback, archons), widow mines vs immortal shields, etc. We dont need something that completely screws with an already very good interaction. We WANT + Show Spoiler + a unit that can help SUPPORT our core mechanized army (namely the siege tanks and vikings. Vikings count as mechanized  ) Hellions, widow mines, ravens, ghosts, and BattleCruisers are, and SHOULD be designed to support the core of the army. General design promo: + Show Spoiler +Core units are units that are effective in small numbers, and when massed. Support units are units that add to the core composition, to either deal with a specific factor of your opponent's support, or support your own core to destroy your opponent's core. Due to the nature of energy efficiency, and now the smart-casting, no spell-caster should be a part of the core of the army. Hence: Ling Infestor... If lings were the core, and infestors were the support, that would be one thing. But infestors are/were the core, and everything revolves around supporting the infestor. BAD Remember as well that most 1-click abilities are spamable; But when you just have 1 second to attack, it's not spamable, thus it fixes the smartcast problem in a way most people will be satifised with. Response: + Show Spoiler +The only spammable 1-click abilities I can think of that actually have some use are Snipe, Infested Terran, and WoL Forcefields. Any other ability is either not spammable, or not very efficient/useful when spammed (Old raven's auto turret I think would usually be a waste of energy if spammed willy nilly). I think your idea of spammable here is flawed, as most abilities only require 1 or 2 uses per a set amount of time in order to be efficient and or useful. (Spamming storm on an army doesn't do as much as letting the storms do full damage.) 1) The importance of choice is generally overvalued by the community. Most of the time choices don't make games more interesting. Imagine the luxury dilemma of a zerg players trying to decide whether to cast infested terrans or fungal growth. Who cares right? Both abilities are poorly designed and those we don't really care. In the early stages of a game the "choice" thing might be interesting, but it quickly gets boring.
2) Not saying I don't like some choices. LIke when a player gets counterattacked while he is at the middle of the map; He now has to decide whether to go back or base trade. This is kinda interesting, or when a player has a various amount of build orders to choose from, this can be kinda interesting as well.
3) Therefore choices on how to optimally use units should how a low priority when designing the unit. And honestly do you really sit down and watch marine/tank vs bling/muta battles because your interested in seeing whether the terran player chooses to split his marines or target fire banelings? Response: + Show Spoiler +topsecret beat me to it. No need to further extraploate on this one. So I am trying to understand your design philosophy; You just want some units to require skill, but other units should be more attack-move based?
If that's the case this is probably the first time I disagree with your design philosophy. I think it will make much more entertaining games if every single unit in the game is easy to learn difficult to masters. Response: ... This is not WarCraft III, It is Starcraft. The skill should come from how you interact your units with each other, and with the enemy units. Without units that were at least respectably effective on their own, every unit might as well be a spell caster with multiple abilities and powers. We want ARMY CONTROL COMPLIMENTED BY INDIVIDUAL MICRO. Not just individual micro.
@Foxy:
+ Show Spoiler +As for the battlecruiser buffing one unit, that thematically feels more like a medic's role than a 500 ton command ship that is the height of terran tech. I think we need to bark up a different tree. For my ability, it would be buffing several units. (But only a certain amount). A medic I can see helping 1 unit at a time, but chain of command dictates that a company on the ground reports to a ranking officer, and that officer reports to the commander. (Tank Driver: doing the dirty work: BattleCruiser giving tactical advice: You giving the overall objective and batle strategy.) Just from a design view point I feel that fits more with the role of a Flagship, especially with an ability called, Orbital Command Direction.
@ledarsi
+ Show Spoiler +Regarding the seeker missle, the Issue with the raven is not purely that the seeker missle puts it in danger. (Viper blinding cloud puts IT in danger, and it is a VERY strong ability on a very fragile unit. +1 )The issue was that ravens were very inaccesible, (expensive in money and tech) AND did not DO anything useful for the first x-amount of minutes it took to acquire the energy. (Auto Turrets and PDD... Fairly underwhelming abilities for their cost.) The new raven's recovery drone is IMMEDIATELY useful, even though seeker missles are generally better.
Think about infestors, high templars, and ghosts. What if infestor fungal was 125 energy, and you had to wait another minute and a half from the time an infestor popped to being able to actually GET OUT ONE fungal. Despite the energy upgrade. Even so, at least infested terrans had some use. Same with templar, storm cost 75 energy. HT spawn with 50. Imagine if storm was 125, or even 100. They would be next to useless unless your opponent LET you save up energy for storm. Luckily, archons and feedback were pretty good, so that still wouldn't have been as big a concern. Ravens were the only spell caster that were essentially useless when you got them (They at least spawn with 1 PDD with the energy upgrade in WoL and HotS.), and who's final ability was just a copy of another ability from a better unit (HotS' poor man Yamato)
@Nyvis:
+ Show Spoiler +I generally agree with a lot of what you say past putting up your idea, and its getting late for me now. For my idea, think of how cloacking on banshees and ghosts work.
Once the unit is cloaked, another icon appears telling it to decloak. Multiple ghosts selected, you have both the decloak and cloak options available.
The icon for turn off OCD would be available after casted on the first unit from that BC, and the icon for turn on OCD would disappear after casted on the 3rd - 5th unit. (It is better to fully use-up the OCD on 1 BC before starting on another, to minimize the risk involved.) Hope that cleared up a bit.
@OneGoal:
+ Show Spoiler +I do believe my design at least has the best potential to make the BC an effective late-game support / tank with very interesting dynamics, decision making, and counter-play. All major design objectives seem to be in place, and numbers can be tweaked as always.
@All
+ Show Spoiler +I tried to be as constructive as possible without saying, ITS BAD YOUR BAD YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD. If at any point you feel I sounded like a douche, feel free to call me out on it in a constructive manner, and I will be sure to try and address it my next post.
GLHF, put on your reading glasses
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On January 04 2013 12:11 Doominator10 wrote:All right: Time to step back in the ring and lay down the smackdown. ***cracks knuckles*** Spoiler tags are for neatness :D Show nested quote +On January 03 2013 05:47 FoxyMayhem wrote:Since we're on the same board here, why don't you (or anyone else) have a go at designing a better battlecruiser. Here's the criteria we've identified: 1) It needs to have an appreciable affect with just having one or two, while not getting ridiculous when adding many of them. 2) It needs to supplemental mech mobility on larger maps (we're trying to support even larger maps through our unit design) 3) Ideally has reactionary counterplay so the opponent can express his skill versus it. 4) Ideally requires skill to use well. Some mid-battle babysit micro is permitted, due to the lower micro demands of mech mid-battle thanks to siege tanks. (Having a demanding BC that's designed mostly to work with bio, requiring a lot of midbattle micro to make effective would be a disaster, as the bio requires the majority of your attention to be effective, and thus would render a micro-heavy BC unusable. However, since it doesn't synergize with Bio in any way, we can design assuming it will be played with mech or sky only). 5) Discourages deathball play. 6) Ideally it slows down fights Our design hits criteria 1, 2 and 3. + Show Spoiler +-1 is beacuse it only takes one or two BCs to amp up your mech speed by 20% and dps by 10%.
-2, because the auras do not stack, so having 20 BC's over your mech doesn't make the ridiculous.
-3, thanks to high templar, tempest, vikings, ghosts, corruptors, and vipers being able to kill the BC to shut its aura off, though this would not be true for some sort of instant damage spell, so be careful with those.
It mostly fails on 4 and 5. + Show Spoiler +-On 4, it does require some skill to place them over all the places you want to hold, or micro the advance of you tank line at the high level on very broad maps. It could look so cool. But just having one over a deathball mech is no expression of skill.
-On 5 with deathballing, it is a concern. As with all auras, it encourages clumping, so that is bad. There's one thing that helps with that, though: mech often seiges in a line to be most effective, and since mech must siege we see the deathball much less often, and so adding an aura to it is less toxic than something like mothership cloak and colossus.
Behemoth Reactor actually destructive for 6. + Show Spoiler +But there are reasons we made the exception for the time being: a) it helps mech address hardened shields [though this may not even be necessary since hellions gud tanking unit], b) it helped counter the remax effect of zerg. Currently terran mech has extremely slow rebuild rate compared to the other races and bio, meaning in the endgame, each battle is a singe-point failure. 1 supply widow mines and 2 supply siege tanks help address this through buying time and just taking a long time to kill, but by offering mech a late game efficiency booster through Behemoth conduit, it relieves these some, and we were hoping the expression of skill could come through other ways such as how they position and control area in huge maps.
If you or anyone else can build a better BC that addresses these criteria, or identify more criteria, we'd love to see it. @Hider: + Show Spoiler +Plz dont double post. + Show Spoiler +Makes the thread confusing. Would rather see one big post addressing multiple ppl than multiple posts for different people. Only the OP has the right I believe. I will try and address you first since you have the other most thought out idea from the last few pages. Your redesigned Yamato cannon (If I am reading this correctly it is a replacement, not a separate ability) is an ability that relies on the player able to have a huge burst of APM on a single unit's abilty for 1 second. The opponent has 1 second to react to this ability. That is less than the time it takes for an infestor to break from fog of war and cast a fungal. Blizzard seconds are about .5 real life seconds (game speed is on fastest) Your ability fails to address ANY of the above-mentioned criteria. Only objective #4 has been mildly addressed, but it is nulled by the fact that they explicitly stated they do not want a BC to be competing with the APM sink for bio units. You have basically turned the BC into a Tier 3 WoL Flying Instant Kill Infestor, that becomes overpowered if you have people who are able to click faster for 1 second, never mind whether or not they have been outplayed the entire game. The design is simply ***THIS UNIT WILL DIE NO MATTER WHAT. If I CAN SPAM QUICKLY, THEN A FEW MORE UNITS WILL DIE. *** This is similar to how the infestor works in WoL, where your entire army can be nothing but infestors. Your ability is so powerful, that there is no reason to play any other part of the game effectively, so long as you can hold on until you get infesto,... I mean BattleCruisers. (Terrans and Protoss must kill ZERG early before their infestors come out. Barring that, kill before broodlords or they lose.) This is balancing for the top tier players downward. Yeah, a bronz league scrub can maybe get one or 2 shots off, but anyone gold and above can feasibly spam click 3-5 units easily. It is not physically possible to click that many times within the time span you are giving, nor is it feasibly possible to expect the opponent to have less than a .5 IRL second reaction time. You also promote that your Tier 3 Terran capital ship will "soft counter" the Protoss Tier 1.5 Anti-Armor walker (Immortals). WHY, do we need this. WHAT purpose does having a 400,300 cost unit soft-countering the immortal have, and HOW does this improve the current state of the game, when we already have various levels of "counters" (I will hence forth stop using the word counter because it seems like it is being mis-used here). Answer: We DONT want + Show Spoiler +an overpowered ability that takes little skill to use (cough WoL fungal) and is no fun or offers reasonable counter-play (cough, WoL fungal). Your abiltity in it's current iteration does both. The "you have one second to select your target" idea is silly. Ordinary abilities without such an arbitrary rule are still better when cast quickly and precisely. [ We ALREADY have + Show Spoiler +some beautiful interactions between seige tanks vs immortals with and without shields, hellions tanking immortal's anti-armor shots, stalkers clearing hellions, ghosts depleting shields, high-templar vs ghosts (EMP, snipe vs feedback, archons), widow mines vs immortal shields, etc. We dont need something that completely screws with an already very good interaction. We WANT + Show Spoiler + a unit that can help SUPPORT our core mechanized army (namely the siege tanks and vikings. Vikings count as mechanized ) Hellions, widow mines, ravens, ghosts, and BattleCruisers are, and SHOULD be designed to support the core of the army. General design promo: + Show Spoiler +Core units are units that are effective in small numbers, and when massed. Support units are units that add to the core composition, to either deal with a specific factor of your opponent's support, or support your own core to destroy your opponent's core. Due to the nature of energy efficiency, and now the smart-casting, no spell-caster should be a part of the core of the army. Hence: Ling Infestor... If lings were the core, and infestors were the support, that would be one thing. But infestors are/were the core, and everything revolves around supporting the infestor. BAD Remember as well that most 1-click abilities are spamable; But when you just have 1 second to attack, it's not spamable, thus it fixes the smartcast problem in a way most people will be satifised with. Response: + Show Spoiler +The only spammable 1-click abilities I can think of that actually have some use are Snipe, Infested Terran, and WoL Forcefields. Any other ability is either not spammable, or not very efficient/useful when spammed (Old raven's auto turret I think would usually be a waste of energy if spammed willy nilly). I think your idea of spammable here is flawed, as most abilities only require 1 or 2 uses per a set amount of time in order to be efficient and or useful. (Spamming storm on an army doesn't do as much as letting the storms do full damage.) 1) The importance of choice is generally overvalued by the community. Most of the time choices don't make games more interesting. Imagine the luxury dilemma of a zerg players trying to decide whether to cast infested terrans or fungal growth. Who cares right? Both abilities are poorly designed and those we don't really care. In the early stages of a game the "choice" thing might be interesting, but it quickly gets boring.
2) Not saying I don't like some choices. LIke when a player gets counterattacked while he is at the middle of the map; He now has to decide whether to go back or base trade. This is kinda interesting, or when a player has a various amount of build orders to choose from, this can be kinda interesting as well.
3) Therefore choices on how to optimally use units should how a low priority when designing the unit. And honestly do you really sit down and watch marine/tank vs bling/muta battles because your interested in seeing whether the terran player chooses to split his marines or target fire banelings? Response: + Show Spoiler +topsecret beat me to it. No need to further extraploate on this one. So I am trying to understand your design philosophy; You just want some units to require skill, but other units should be more attack-move based?
If that's the case this is probably the first time I disagree with your design philosophy. I think it will make much more entertaining games if every single unit in the game is easy to learn difficult to masters. Response: ... This is not WarCraft III, It is Starcraft. The skill should come from how you interact your units with each other, and with the enemy units. Without units that were at least respectably effective on their own, every unit might as well be a spell caster with multiple abilities and powers. We want ARMY CONTROL COMPLIMENTED BY INDIVIDUAL MICRO. Not just individual micro. @Foxy: + Show Spoiler +As for the battlecruiser buffing one unit, that thematically feels more like a medic's role than a 500 ton command ship that is the height of terran tech. I think we need to bark up a different tree. For my ability, it would be buffing several units. (But only a certain amount). A medic I can see helping 1 unit at a time, but chain of command dictates that a company on the ground reports to a ranking officer, and that officer reports to the commander. (Tank Driver: doing the dirty work: BattleCruiser giving tactical advice: You giving the overall objective and batle strategy.) Just from a design view point I feel that fits more with the role of a Flagship, especially with an ability called, Orbital Command Direction. @ledarsi + Show Spoiler +Regarding the seeker missle, the Issue with the raven is not purely that the seeker missle puts it in danger. (Viper blinding cloud puts IT in danger, and it is a VERY strong ability on a very fragile unit. +1 )The issue was that ravens were very inaccesible, (expensive in money and tech) AND did not DO anything useful for the first x-amount of minutes it took to acquire the energy. (Auto Turrets and PDD... Fairly underwhelming abilities for their cost.) The new raven's recovery drone is IMMEDIATELY useful, even though seeker missles are generally better.
Think about infestors, high templars, and ghosts. What if infestor fungal was 125 energy, and you had to wait another minute and a half from the time an infestor popped to being able to actually GET OUT ONE fungal. Despite the energy upgrade. Even so, at least infested terrans had some use. Same with templar, storm cost 75 energy. HT spawn with 50. Imagine if storm was 125, or even 100. They would be next to useless unless your opponent LET you save up energy for storm. Luckily, archons and feedback were pretty good, so that still wouldn't have been as big a concern. Ravens were the only spell caster that were essentially useless when you got them (They at least spawn with 1 PDD with the energy upgrade in WoL and HotS.), and who's final ability was just a copy of another ability from a better unit (HotS' poor man Yamato) @Nyvis: + Show Spoiler +I generally agree with a lot of what you say past putting up your idea, and its getting late for me now. For my idea, think of how cloacking on banshees and ghosts work.
Once the unit is cloaked, another icon appears telling it to decloak. Multiple ghosts selected, you have both the decloak and cloak options available.
The icon for turn off OCD would be available after casted on the first unit from that BC, and the icon for turn on OCD would disappear after casted on the 3rd - 5th unit. (It is better to fully use-up the OCD on 1 BC before starting on another, to minimize the risk involved.) Hope that cleared up a bit. @OneGoal: + Show Spoiler +I do believe my design at least has the best potential to make the BC an effective late-game support / tank with very interesting dynamics, decision making, and counter-play. All major design objectives seem to be in place, and numbers can be tweaked as always. @All + Show Spoiler +I tried to be as constructive as possible without saying, ITS BAD YOUR BAD YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD. If at any point you feel I sounded like a douche, feel free to call me out on it in a constructive manner, and I will be sure to try and address it my next post. GLHF, put on your reading glasses
Please read all my previous posts regarding the BC adjusted yamato cannon. My suggestion couldn't be more different from the infestor. I even clearly outlined how this ability is not spamable and how it unlike the infestor is much more mechanically challenging and how it revolves choices and how it rewards remicro from the opponent which is totally opposite of the infestor. This ability is much more clsoer to a combination of snipe, the current yamato and siege tanks when they focus fire banelings.
Honestly I am very dissapointed with the quality your response. Many of Onegoal's suggestions are much more warcraft'ish than mine. (passive abillities, "reviving units") units etc. But really I don't care whether its inspired by BW, sc2 or something else. The important thing is making the game as interesting as possible. Passive abilities and abililties with noninterestin decisions are boring.
If you believe mech should never be microintensive, but only revolve around postional play, that is fine (then we just have a different design philosophy). But I like the idea of giving mech players a late game micro unit that rewards great players, rather than having a simple easy to use ability, which your average master league player can use just as well as the best koreans.
Though, I do agree that your suggested BC ability will create counterplays while buffing mech at the same, and therefore I believe it is a pretty decent ability (don't misunderstand me - I would be extremelye happy if this was something Blizzard implemented - but I just expect more from Onegoal as identified myself with the design philosophy for so long - But i think our roads may have crossed now).
I am a believer in maximizing the skill cap while still making it easy to play for newcommers. I think this ability will be too easy to use optimally, unfortunately. After a couple of hundred games most decent players will learn when to use it, and players will know how to react to it optimally. And while this ability will never be bad for the gameply (unlike fungal), it doesn't add that much in differentating the best player in the world from the 50th best.
I am (as previously stated) a fan of designing every single units so that spectators can notice the difference between the 50th best and the best player in the world. From what I understand regarding your design philosophy, you seems to be satifised with only making a few abilties/units difficult to master, and then having a couple of "decisions-abilities".
Regarding the importance of decisions, let me ask you this:
Say a terran player has a couple of ravens with a lot of energy prior to facing a corrupter/broodlord army. The terran player has the option of using pdd(s) and or seeker missiles during the battle. Thus the teran has a decision. But from the spectator-POV is it really the decision between using those two abilities that excites you?
Wouldn't the battle be just as exciting if the terran could only use seeker missile (the old seeker missile of course)? I think so, and in my opinon it is the micro and the uncertainity of the battle which makes it interesting to follow as spectators. Which decisions they make aren't important for us. But we just want to know how the zerg players will react to the seeker missiles (is he capable of splitting his army up), and how much damage they will do.
Again, I am not saying decisions are bad for the game or anything like that, but I believe decision-abiltieis should be prioritized below micro-abilities.
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@Doominator- I have read your post in its entirety, and I largely agree. The high cost and inaccessibility is a problem for Ravens, and just a few with limited energy is not useful.
A few nitpicks however. First, it is actually not the case that the Raven has enough energy for PDD with the energy upgrade in either WoL or HOTS. PDD costs 100 energy, and Corvid Reactor increases Raven starting energy from 50 to 75. If you intend to make many Ravens it is a tremendous improvement, but you are still relying mainly on energy generation and not innate energy on the unit when produced. Ravens are extremely underwhelming casters if you can't keep them alive for a very long time. Auto Turrets are actually very strong- most people don't seem to realize this. The problem is how much the Raven costs, and how inaccessible they are due to the high cost of many Starports to build them.
My thoughts on Recovery Drone aren't that the ability is weak, or bad design. It's a solid ability that encourages micro, and is useful immediately (somewhat). My criticism of the ability is primarily that you are only really going to want to use the ability on Siege Tanks when they are sieged, to move them, and this both feels weird and contrary to siege tanks being static.
Theoretically it might be used to create blink-like pull-back micro with battle hellions or perhaps thors, but realistically it's just not worthwhile for these units. SCV repair is perfectly serviceable for the repair component. For units like Hellions or Thors, the movement is sort of irrelevant, as they can move on their own. Perhaps situationally useful for elevatoring these units onto high ground in a player's main. But the BIG feature this ability gives you is the ability to move tanks which are sieged, which otherwise cannot move. While this is an interesting idea, and clearly creates Raven micro in conjunction with tanks, which is cool (Ravens and Siege Tanks together? YAY!).
However I (opinion) would prefer Ravens support tanks in a different way. Auto turrets in front are a perfectly serviceable option, although it doesn't have to be turrets. I like the idea of Ravens creating additional stuff for the player instead of moving and repairing your other units. True, just a couple turrets is not necessarily useful. The ability might be exchanged for something else which is also useful right away, and in smaller numbers. Or simply buffed so it's a stronger ability, period, considering the Raven's high price tag, and bring it more in line with the 25 energy Infested Terran, as it is 50 energy on a more expensive caster, and deserves to be a bit better.
My point is that Recovery Drone is not the only solution to the Raven being a bit feeble, and switching turrets out for drone reduces the amount of stuff on the board, and removes the positional nature of timed-life turret expendable space control. it also makes Ravens alone even more feeble, as they need something Mechanical to repair. Turrets are essentially Terran destructible forcefields, and work wonderfully with tanks in a more organic way than Abducting them to repair them. Turrets aren't the only option, of course, but for various reasons they seem superior to Recovery Drone, at least in my opinion.
I would also like to hear your thoughts Doominator on what should be done with the Hellion/Hellbat situation. Do you think they need to be changed or differentiated? Possibly exchange the Hellbat for the Perdition Turret concept (instead of turret on Raven perhaps?), created from the Hellion, enabling positional defense of tanks using Hellions, while simultaneously having mobile, squishy hellions for harass. Or maybe the Hellion and Hellbat can coexist, with some modifications to make them more distinct. It's really just a single unit with two faces.
And @hider, mech (or any positional play) is micro intensive. That micro involves moving your units around, and making sure they are in the right place, and shooting at the right targets. With a lot of units this actually becomes very challenging, because you're spread out over an area, ideally you are engaging constantly, and if you get greedy (or overly passive) you can get seriously harmed. Getting caught unsieged is pretty much a death sentence- almost as bad as moving unburrowed lurkers into enemy troops. Masterful use of a large army of units is awe-inspiring to watch, not because the units are hard to use individually, but because in aggregate they behave differently.
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On January 04 2013 12:40 ledarsi wrote:
@Doominator- I have read your post in its entirety, and I largely agree. The high cost and inaccessibility is a problem for Ravens, and just a few with limited energy is not useful.
A few nitpicks however. First, it is actually not the case that the Raven has enough energy for PDD with the energy upgrade in either WoL or HOTS. PDD costs 100 energy, and Corvid Reactor increases Raven starting energy from 50 to 75. If you intend to make many Ravens it is a tremendous improvement, but you are still relying mainly on energy generation and not innate energy on the unit when produced. Ravens are extremely underwhelming casters if you can't keep them alive for a very long time. Auto Turrets are actually very strong- most people don't seem to realize this. The problem is how much the Raven costs, and how inaccessible they are due to the high cost of many Starports to build them.
My thoughts on Recovery Drone aren't that the ability is weak, or bad design. It's a solid ability that encourages micro, and is useful immediately (somewhat). My criticism of the ability is primarily that you are only really going to want to use the ability on Siege Tanks when they are sieged, to move them, and this both feels weird and contrary to siege tanks being static.
Theoretically it might be used to create blink-like pull-back micro with battle hellions or perhaps thors, but realistically it's just not worthwhile for these units. SCV repair is perfectly serviceable for the repair component. For units like Hellions or Thors, the movement is sort of irrelevant, as they can move on their own. Perhaps situationally useful for elevatoring these units onto high ground in a player's main. But the BIG feature this ability gives you is the ability to move tanks which are sieged, which otherwise cannot move. While this is an interesting idea, and clearly creates Raven micro in conjunction with tanks, which is cool (Ravens and Siege Tanks together? YAY!).
However I (opinion) would prefer Ravens support tanks in a different way. Auto turrets in front are a perfectly serviceable option, although it doesn't have to be turrets. I like the idea of Ravens creating additional stuff for the player instead of moving and repairing your other units. True, just a couple turrets is not necessarily useful. The ability might be exchanged for something else which is also useful right away, and in smaller numbers. Or simply buffed so it's a stronger ability, period, considering the Raven's high price tag, and bring it more in line with the 25 energy Infested Terran, as it is 50 energy on a more expensive caster, and deserves to be a bit better.
My point is that Recovery Drone is not the only solution to the Raven being a bit feeble, and switching turrets out for drone reduces the amount of stuff on the board, and removes the positional nature of timed-life turret expendable space control. it also makes Ravens alone even more feeble, as they need something Mechanical to repair. Turrets are essentially Terran destructible forcefields, and work wonderfully with tanks in a more organic way than Abducting them to repair them. Turrets aren't the only option, of course, but for various reasons they seem superior to Recovery Drone, at least in my opinion.
I would also like to hear your thoughts Doominator on what should be done with the Hellion/Hellbat situation. Do you think they need to be changed or differentiated? Possibly exchange the Hellbat for the Perdition Turret concept (instead of turret on Raven perhaps?), created from the Hellion, enabling positional defense of tanks using Hellions, while simultaneously having mobile, squishy hellions for harass. Or maybe the Hellion and Hellbat can coexist, with some modifications to make them more distinct. It's really just a single unit with two faces.
And @hider, mech (or any positional play) is micro intensive. That micro involves moving your units around, and making sure they are in the right place, and shooting at the right targets. With a lot of units this actually becomes very challenging, because you're spread out over an area, ideally you are engaging constantly, and if you get greedy (or overly passive) you can get seriously harmed. Getting caught unsieged is pretty much a death sentence- almost as bad as moving unburrowed lurkers into enemy troops. Masterful use of a large army of units is awe-inspiring to watch, not because the units are hard to use individually, but because in aggregate they behave differently.
I make a distinction between (battle micro) and positional play. Rather I use the term "unit control" which involves both battle micro and how players position their units.
I fully agree that postional play should be the most important for siege tanks units (I am actually a mech player my self, and my battle micro is kinda bad tbh, but I enjoy watching great micro and I know a lot other players enjoy micro'ing), and battle micro should be the most important for bio units. However, I am just of the opinion that it would make the game even more interesting if mech players had the choice of adding a micro-unit (remember though that due to its immoblity the tank/bc army will still revolve primarily around positional play - the (only) difference is that great players now have the opportunities of being 10% more cost effective in a straight up battle if their outmicro their opinion).
When that is said; if one could design the BC so that it added another element to positional play (rather than battle micro as I suggest), then that would be extremely awesome. I think Onegoal tries to do that, and to some extent they successed but I think it may just be somewhat easy to use optimally (e.g. compare this to widow mines which require a lot of APM and positional game understanding to use optimally)
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I generally agree with a lot of what you say past putting up your idea, and its getting late for me now. For my idea, think of how cloacking on banshees and ghosts work.
Once the unit is cloaked, another icon appears telling it to decloak. Multiple ghosts selected, you have both the decloak and cloak options available.
The icon for turn off OCD would be available after casted on the first unit from that BC, and the icon for turn on OCD would disappear after casted on the 3rd - 5th unit. (It is better to fully use-up the OCD on 1 BC before starting on another, to minimize the risk involved.) Hope that cleared up a bit.
So you cancel all the OCDs of one battlecruiser with one usage of the "cancel" button.
I really like the idea of the BC linking with it's troops to give them a buff, though. At this points, I'm mostly looking at small points of your idea ...
For ledarsi, I somewhat agree on the turrets. They were of great design because space was a limiting factor, contrary to infested terrans, but I think using them is a bit hard while in combat because units get in the way of where you want to place them. Oh and if I read carefully, they didn't disappear, they are on reapers now. I don't know if the duration upgrade is still in the game, but you could use some in a lategame composition to control space while in battle, and harass outside of battles.
EDIT :
@hider :
You still didn't answered what I think is the main concern. If the BC is a 5% or a 10% bonus incentive for microing, why make it a major piece of every engagement there is one in, with an ability with such a powerful feel? We don't want the 90% siege tanks/helions/widow mines completely overshadowed by the 10% BC micro.
Plus, your idea sounds a lot more than a 10%, whatever the numbers would be.
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EPT
