|
On Static Defense
Food for thought. I will discuss this with the team. hopefully we can find something. Larva is now a lot more valuable so you will see more combat units and fewer spine forests. Hopefully we can do the same thing with Terran.
Honestly, I think you are just better off designing a game around multitasking harassment. I don't mean that in a cold or condescending way. It has been a frustrating but enlightening experience trying to design a mod only to find that a lot of good theory is "wasted" on the inherent limitations (mechanical or identity) of Starcraft. For example, you have to have very simple spell effects or passives or upgrades in SC, you have much more design space in a MOBA like Dota or LoL because you have 1 piece to work with. I am happy to say that I am working on an RTS style game that is not beholden to pre-existing identities and mechanics and can be primarily focused on things like multitasking and tactical combat instead of managing an economy.
|
|
|
On March 25 2013 21:24 DaOrks wrote:
Invaluable information and a healthy discussion topic.
|
Interesting discussion in the last few days. I'm on vacation and didn't bring a laptop so I won't be playing until next weekend.
|
Patch 3 Preview and accounted article are now on the main page.
We also are taking this opportunity to update and revise our main page for readability and accuracy. We look forward to your feedback.
|
Glad to see you guys are trying to improve the audio part of SC2, as well. The most I did was replace things with BW sounds (mainly for explosions/deaths). I look forward to future changes, especially the sound and economy. 
I still hugely prefer the core ranged Protoss unit to have a projectile, but I guess I will have to play more OneGoal games to see how the Immortals actually feel.
Have you thought of slowing down the projectiles?
|
We live in interesting times!
From the Front Page Biatch!
Widow Mine
-Damage increased to 130 from 120. (Splash unaffected)
-Unstable Payload now targets air again.
-Supply increased to 2 from 1.
-Increased range to 5 from 4.
-Drilling Claws removed.
-New Upgrade, Aranae Manufacturing upgraded at Factory Tech Lab.
Cost: 100/100/80.
Effect: Reduces rearm time to 25 seconds from 40 seconds.
I'm gutted by the reversion of the supply/range/anti-air changes... I really thought they were all improvements 
Raven
-Spell modified: Auto Turret
-Damage is increased to 12 from 8
-Attack speed increased to 1.5 from .8
-Now displaces enemy units when deployed
I hope the health/timer on these has been nerfed given that they now do a tonne more damage? They last for years in WoL/HotS and that's pretty terrifying with the new numbers. Also is there any worry these will end up being the new forcefield given that they can displace units? I guess they're smaller and can be targeted down.. but they do damage themselves so I am scared!
Queen
-Health increased to 180 from 175
-Increased cost to 150/50 from 150
-Queens are now Armored units
-Increased starting energy to 50 from 25
-Transfuse now heals 200 health over 4 seconds instead of 150 instantly
-Spawn Larva removed
-New ability: Spawn Assault Colony
Cost: 50 energy
Effect: Creates Assault Colony at target location
New Structure: Assault Colony
-Dimensions: 2x2
-80 Health, Armored/Biological
-Ability: Passively generates one assault larva every 15 seconds. Holds up to 2 assault larva at a time
New Unit: Assault Larva
-Can morph into any basic zerg combat unit (No Drones, Overlords, Brood Lords or Swarm Hosts)
-Produced by Assault Colony
Yikes! This should prove.. interesting :D To clarify can Assault Colonies be planted anywhere on the map like a nydus or are they just plantable on creep? I'm assuming it's the latter but the former does evoke a zergy version of proxy pylons... which I guess is something you could do anyway with creep spreading ovis... intriguing!
Viper
-Blinding Cloud removed.
-New Spell: Microbial Eclipse
Cost: 100
AoE: 3
Duration: 25 Seconds.
Effect: Attacks dealt to Biological targets in area are reduced to 0. (Spell damage is still dealt Eg: Snipe, Unstable Payload, Seeker Missle, Storm, and Fungal.)
I'm a bit sad to see blinding cloud go.. but I guess this kinda fulfils the same role anyway so it's not a huge deal. I can imagine this looking kinda funky when anything zerg is hugging terran bio within it and nobody's getting hurt.
Venalisk
-New flying AA Unit
-Cost 150/50/1 (Total) (Requires Spire)
-Hatches in batches of 2.
-HP: 85 Armor: 1 Medium
-Movespeed: 3
-Air Attack: 10. Range 5 Attackspeed 1.
-Passive: Caustic Saliva
-Wasp Attacks apply Caustic Saliva Debuff. Units with the debuff take 2 additional points of damage from attacks.
-Can Burrow.
Though in general this sounds cool I have the same slight reservation as I did with the previous corruptor iteration.. that being that you could easily get stuck with junk supply made up of air-to-air units that do nothing else, something the other races don't have a problem with. I mean I guess you can burrow them around the map for vision in that situation.. it still doesn't seem that satisfying though.. will have to see how often that comes up.
Finally, profound changes to the overall economy are in the future. We are currently testing a variant of FRB with 2 gold mineral patches that run out quickly and 4 blue minerals that have more minerals than standard Starcraft 2. There are a lot of cool dynamics that this brings in theory, but we aren't comfortable enough with the math to implement it. It will be ready when its ready.
I'm assuming this means bases will fully saturate sooner? If so I'm really worried/disappointed by that.. for the reasons brought up by Lalush previously (re-quoted in spoiler below if anyone's interested). I imagine this must be super awkward to deal with because though everything else in the game looks super cool getting this one element wrong could really throw away all that hard work.
+ Show Spoiler +Lalush on Reddit
My personal opinion is:
FRB's weakness (with worker AI being kept the same) was that build orders would conform faster to one standard. If workers are intelligent and relieve eachother from mining duty more or less perfectly -- and you only have 6 mineral nodes -- you will only need 12 workers before your own income and your opponent's are identical and capped on one base. The same number for 2 bases is also very small. So according to me FRB with SC2 worker AI serves to conform build orders to one standard too quickly.
I don't know if Barrin agrees with me on that specific point of critique. But I think it's valid. In BW, you had linear growth until 9 workers (most main bases had 9 patches as opposed to 8), then declining growth upwards to 30 workers and beyond (I'm talking about saturation on 1 base here).
These are the conditions I want to have met from a resource system:
Diminishing returns after saturation of 1 worker per patch. Why? In order to incentivize expanding beyond 3 bases, and to reward the skilled players who can manage to defend while spreading themselves out thin. Staying in one's own 3 base corner of the map should not be encouraged by the economic system.
There should still be an increase in minerals/min mined beyond a saturation of 2 and even 3 workers per patch. Brood War's income curve was much smoother and maxed out at somewhere around 3.5 workers per patch. Why? To among other things achieve a greater variety within one base builds. There should exist a slight differentiation in income between someone who makes 30 workers and has to cancel their expansion while falling back into their base and someone who only made 22-24 workes before they all-inned.
Over-saturating your main base and/or your natural should not act as a direct penalty. Sure you will be behind if you cancelled your expansion and fell into your base. But your superior saturation should still somewhat aid you in breaking out of a hopeless situation.
If there instead is almost 0 effect of having more than 20 probes mining minerals on 1 base, then naturally build orders will conform to one standard quicker than if the income curve instead were smoother and provided gains, albeit small ones, up until 30-35 workers on one base. And it's here-in that the part of my critique that applies to both FRB/SC2 lies. If build orders conform to one standard too quickly it all becomes a game of cost efficiency (which pretty much sums up most PvP's).
I believe audience's prefer to see matchups with some asymmetry in them. Where one player can afford to be wasteful -- if ever so slightly. Falling behind in stalker count in PvP, for example, should not be as much of a death sentence as it is now.
On reddit, there is frequent mention of how much more interesting Muta/ling/baneling was than Infestor/BroodLord. Without knowing it, reddit themselves are promoting and showing a preference to play styles where asymmetric and frequent trades occur. Muta/ling/bane is fun because there is wastefulness involved in the matchup. There is an asymmetry involved in it. Zerg for once actually live up to their swarmy reputation by constantly prodding and throwing away units.
And that's the exact same reason why Muta/Bane/Ling doesn't work in the late game, and hence why zerg players eventually abandoned it. Mutaling bane is not cost efficient in the late game -- and in a game where economies conform in the late game, there is simply no room for using strategies which involve asymmetrical (cost inefficient) trading.
Oh also can I make a big imploring noise for you to either make sure you can modify all the hotkeys through the front end or release all the hotkey names (whatever you call the things you put in the hotkey text file) for those you can't. For the current patch I couldn't set hotkeys for:
Burrow for Swarm Hosts
Rally Locusts for Swarm Hosts
Tunnelling Claws from Swarm Host Den
Roach Armour from Swarm Host Den
Swarm Host Upgrade from Swarm Host Den
Spawn Scourge from Cocoon
Which seems pretty funny given that I'm using TheCore.. or attempting to, and Foxy's on the design team XD
|
Few things I would like to make sure an eye is kept is...
when your macroing, is it intuitive to hotkey your assault colonies with your hatcheries? Will the same larva still show up in the command bar? Will the colonies need to be tabbed through in order to get to their larva? Is assault larva going to be represented the same as normal larva?
Can I seamlessly make drones from my hatcheries, then slam some units out of my hatcheries AND or colonies from one cntrl group, or will I have to split the control groups?
Is there consideration for having assault colonies littered around the home bases AND out in the map as proxy pylon-esq production points? As in is it necessary to have different control groups based on WHERE the colonies are? What about all the listed above; meaning separate cntrl groups for hatcheries, colonies near home, and colonies in field because otherwise it would be a macro-ing nuisance?
Would the above be a bad thing? If not / if so why?
Would the same happen to Hatcheries, Lairs, and Hives since they don't share the same cap of larva?
Am I just worrying over nothing and need to just get the $#@! game already? (Possibly)
<----DarkGrid Hotkeys user.
I like a clean interface :D
|
Assault Larva are tracked by the same tab, and will take priority when making combat units.
|
On March 26 2013 09:58 Spaceboy wrote:We live in interesting times! Show nested quote +From the Front Page Biatch!
Widow Mine
-Damage increased to 130 from 120. (Splash unaffected)
-Unstable Payload now targets air again.
-Supply increased to 2 from 1.
-Increased range to 5 from 4.
-Drilling Claws removed.
-New Upgrade, Aranae Manufacturing upgraded at Factory Tech Lab.
Cost: 100/100/80.
Effect: Reduces rearm time to 25 seconds from 40 seconds. I'm gutted by the reversion of the supply/range/anti-air changes... I really thought they were all improvements
The Warhound will be like the Diamondback, not enough to hold back mutas alone. Given how strong mutas are in hots and OneGoal, it is important that conditional splash be present and available. Which necessitates 2 supply. That said, with Arenae Manufacturing, the Widow Mine can be a consistent means of holding ground.
Show nested quote +Queen
-Health increased to 180 from 175
-Increased cost to 150/50 from 150
-Queens are now Armored units
-Increased starting energy to 50 from 25
-Transfuse now heals 200 health over 4 seconds instead of 150 instantly
-Spawn Larva removed
-New ability: Spawn Assault Colony
Cost: 50 energy
Effect: Creates Assault Colony at target location
New Structure: Assault Colony
-Dimensions: 2x2
-80 Health, Armored/Biological
-Ability: Passively generates one assault larva every 15 seconds. Holds up to 2 assault larva at a time
New Unit: Assault Larva
-Can morph into any basic zerg combat unit (No Drones, Overlords, Brood Lords or Swarm Hosts)
-Produced by Assault Colony Yikes! This should prove.. interesting :D To clarify can Assault Colonies be planted anywhere on the map like a nydus or are they just plantable on creep? I'm assuming it's the latter but the former does evoke a zergy version of proxy pylons... which I guess is something you could do anyway with creep spreading ovis... intriguing!
This is our first big experiment with macro mechanics, we may reintroduce spawn larva as a cheap, less effective alternative. Time and testing will tell.
Show nested quote +Viper
-Blinding Cloud removed.
-New Spell: Microbial Eclipse
Cost: 100
AoE: 3
Duration: 25 Seconds.
Effect: Attacks dealt to Biological targets in area are reduced to 0. (Spell damage is still dealt Eg: Snipe, Unstable Payload, Seeker Missle, Storm, and Fungal.) I'm a bit sad to see blinding cloud go.. but I guess this kinda fulfils the same role anyway so it's not a huge deal. I can imagine this looking kinda funky when anything zerg is hugging terran bio within it and nobody's getting hurt.
They won't be hugging, they will be attacking and doing 0 damage.
Show nested quote +Venalisk
-New flying AA Unit
-Cost 150/50/1 (Total) (Requires Spire)
-Hatches in batches of 2.
-HP: 85 Armor: 1 Medium
-Movespeed: 3
-Air Attack: 10. Range 5 Attackspeed 1.
-Passive: Caustic Saliva
-Wasp Attacks apply Caustic Saliva Debuff. Units with the debuff take 2 additional points of damage from attacks.
-Can Burrow. Though in general this sounds cool I have the same slight reservation as I did with the previous corruptor iteration.. that being that you could easily get stuck with junk supply made up of air-to-air units that do nothing else, something the other races don't have a problem with. I mean I guess you can burrow them around the map for vision in that situation.. it still doesn't seem that satisfying though.. will have to see how often that comes up.
Time and testing will tell. Unburrowing to nap passing Drop ships may be really satisfying.
Show nested quote +Finally, profound changes to the overall economy are in the future. We are currently testing a variant of FRB with 2 gold mineral patches that run out quickly and 4 blue minerals that have more minerals than standard Starcraft 2. There are a lot of cool dynamics that this brings in theory, but we aren't comfortable enough with the math to implement it. It will be ready when its ready. I'm assuming this means bases will fully saturate sooner? If so I'm really worried/disappointed by that.. for the reasons brought up by Lalush previously (re-quoted in spoiler below if anyone's interested). I imagine this must be super awkward to deal with because though everything else in the game looks super cool getting this one element wrong could really throw away all that hard work. + Show Spoiler +Lalush on Reddit
My personal opinion is:
FRB's weakness (with worker AI being kept the same) was that build orders would conform faster to one standard. If workers are intelligent and relieve eachother from mining duty more or less perfectly -- and you only have 6 mineral nodes -- you will only need 12 workers before your own income and your opponent's are identical and capped on one base. The same number for 2 bases is also very small. So according to me FRB with SC2 worker AI serves to conform build orders to one standard too quickly.
I don't know if Barrin agrees with me on that specific point of critique. But I think it's valid. In BW, you had linear growth until 9 workers (most main bases had 9 patches as opposed to 8), then declining growth upwards to 30 workers and beyond (I'm talking about saturation on 1 base here).
These are the conditions I want to have met from a resource system:
Diminishing returns after saturation of 1 worker per patch. Why? In order to incentivize expanding beyond 3 bases, and to reward the skilled players who can manage to defend while spreading themselves out thin. Staying in one's own 3 base corner of the map should not be encouraged by the economic system.
There should still be an increase in minerals/min mined beyond a saturation of 2 and even 3 workers per patch. Brood War's income curve was much smoother and maxed out at somewhere around 3.5 workers per patch. Why? To among other things achieve a greater variety within one base builds. There should exist a slight differentiation in income between someone who makes 30 workers and has to cancel their expansion while falling back into their base and someone who only made 22-24 workes before they all-inned.
Over-saturating your main base and/or your natural should not act as a direct penalty. Sure you will be behind if you cancelled your expansion and fell into your base. But your superior saturation should still somewhat aid you in breaking out of a hopeless situation.
If there instead is almost 0 effect of having more than 20 probes mining minerals on 1 base, then naturally build orders will conform to one standard quicker than if the income curve instead were smoother and provided gains, albeit small ones, up until 30-35 workers on one base. And it's here-in that the part of my critique that applies to both FRB/SC2 lies. If build orders conform to one standard too quickly it all becomes a game of cost efficiency (which pretty much sums up most PvP's).
I believe audience's prefer to see matchups with some asymmetry in them. Where one player can afford to be wasteful -- if ever so slightly. Falling behind in stalker count in PvP, for example, should not be as much of a death sentence as it is now.
On reddit, there is frequent mention of how much more interesting Muta/ling/baneling was than Infestor/BroodLord. Without knowing it, reddit themselves are promoting and showing a preference to play styles where asymmetric and frequent trades occur. Muta/ling/bane is fun because there is wastefulness involved in the matchup. There is an asymmetry involved in it. Zerg for once actually live up to their swarmy reputation by constantly prodding and throwing away units.
And that's the exact same reason why Muta/Bane/Ling doesn't work in the late game, and hence why zerg players eventually abandoned it. Mutaling bane is not cost efficient in the late game -- and in a game where economies conform in the late game, there is simply no room for using strategies which involve asymmetrical (cost inefficient) trading.
Nothing is final. We may be doing something like Lalush's suggestion in the future. We are not rushing something as fundamental as the economy.
Oh also can I make a big imploring noise for you to either make sure you can modify all the hotkeys through the front end or release all the hotkey names (whatever you call the things you put in the hotkey text file) for those you can't. For the current patch I couldn't set hotkeys for:
Burrow for Swarm Hosts
Rally Locusts for Swarm Hosts
Tunnelling Claws from Swarm Host Den
Roach Armour from Swarm Host Den
Swarm Host Upgrade from Swarm Host Den
Spawn Scourge from Cocoon
Which seems pretty funny given that I'm using TheCore.. or attempting to, and Foxy's on the design team XD
Noted and forwarded to our map maker.
|
Microbial Eclipse
Interesting take on Dark Swarm style spell.
|
Woah, way to shake things up haha. Looking forward to giving the patch a go
|
|
|
Test Map for Patch 3 will be released sometime today. Stay tuned.
|
Nice work on the thread Dylan. It looks great!
|
|
|
On March 27 2013 08:48 ItWhoSpeaks wrote:
Test Map for Patch 3 will be released sometime today. Stay tuned.
Oh, early than anticipated. Sweet.
|
Ok, Patch 3 Test Map is finally online. You can find it in the custom games section. Be warned, about half of it doesn't work.
I have been bug hunting for the last 4 hours. We are slowly but surely squashing the game-breaking ones.
|
Anyone want to join me in speculating about how the new zerg macro mechanic will end up affecting the race? In terms of build fundamentals, general playstyle, new options available, changes in the base mechanics etc etc. I find the new concept really interesting and I think it'll be super fun seeing how it plays out.. although I do worry that without a dedicated pro scene suddenly springing up around OneGoal we may never find out the truly optimal ways of utilising everything.
The only things that intuitively strike me as a general rule for the new zerg play is that you're really going to want to spend absolutely all of your hatch larva on drones/ovis without fail unless you're all-inning/otherwise going to die. Obviously that's not a hugely insightful statement as it's much the same as standard SC2 but whatever! A second thing that pops out is that in the current context of the game zerg might be a little bit boned in terms of straight economy given that the other two races still have mules/chrono to accelerate their economies while zerg has lost theirs. Obviously this is a fluid environment and those macro mechanics may also get tweaked in the future.. but dealing with the current situation I'm guessing this will mean a heavy emphasis on zerg to start pressuring early and maintain that pressure pretty much constantly to stop the other two races shooting off into the distance economically (obviously emphasising aggressive play is a big part of the design so this isn't a shock either).. but beyond this all I really have is a huge amount of questions!
Almost all of the openers for zerg in SC2 revolve around getting your pool up and having a queen (or two) pop out straight away to start off your economy, this is clearly going to get changed around a bunch. Obviously there's some constraints here imposed upon us by potential dangers.. say for instance if we want to open safely in ZvZ 15 pool is probably still going to remain around the right mark. But what revolves around these constraints? Do we have to fit in an early gas to get a queen out as soon as our pool pops? Do we even need a queen that early given that we probably only want to be making drones at that point anyway if we can help it? Is it worth getting the early queens for safety even if we may not want to spend any of the initial assault larva? Is it worth getting a queen early on just to start building up our assault colonies for later game production, or maybe we invest in an earlier macro hatch to boost our economy and delay queen production to have more queens later on and make up our army production then? How many assault colonies do we actually need late game and hence how many queens do we need?
Thinking about the assault colonies themselves, where should we locate these badboys? Would it make sense to group them centrally between all our bases such that our army spawns in one place and is reasonably close to all bases... but is probably closer to the enemy and more easily sniped? Should we just safely stack our colonies in our base as if they were barracks (they only have 80 health, will this mean that we're super prone to game-losing drops?). Should we decentralise our production and have colonies spattered all over our creep .. this hedges our bets with regard to losing colonies to attacks/drops.. but will mean our armies are produced in a more disconnected fashion and may end up proving less effective if we rally straight to a place of contention. Will the idea of proxying colonies turn out to be a meaningful part of standard play or will it prove too gimmicky?
All of these are interesting questions and while I can definitely see how the positional element of this new mechanic is an added decision/aspect to Spawn Larva I can imagine that in the long term these questions may be somewhat figured out/standardised and hence not add too much in terms of decision making on a game by game basis. That's not to say I'm against the mechanic as a whole though.. as the benefits of making the drone/army production decision less binary (and hence incentivising more constant aggression over time) and removing massive larva stacking in favour of constant production are I think very nice ideas.
Hmmm I'm sure I had some other points to muse on but for now I've forgotten them so that'll have to be it! Time to get on the test map and see this all actually feels :D
|
If Assault Colonies are not enough by themselves, we have a whole slew of things to supplement the mechanic. ArcherofAuir has been very helpful in the development of macro mechanics.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
