On March 20 2013 03:44 Vindicare605 wrote: You can't manually target anything with Widow Mines. Their attack is automatic and there's nothing you can do as a Terran player to alter what it fires at other than unburrowing the mine to reset its lock on protocol.
Yes you can, during the 1.5 second window after the time bomb triggers you can focus something else within the Mine's range; the time bomb will reset and the Mine will shoot if the new target is still in range.
how? I should go check again but the last time I played with widow mines there was no attack or move option in the command card while they were burrowed.
hehe pretty nice information thank you. I really love to play around with mines, but I hope they remove any ability to target, it is so much fun to micro against it. With the target ability that is a bit negated, of course it depends on the Terran skill, but I would prefer if it would be solely on the opponents side apart from unburrow. But that may be me who loves to burrow the leading ling and the group runs past the mine. Or clean a mine without losses by burrowing the targeted unit, needs a lack of detection though.
Wait What? he was actually intentionally dodging? I honestly thought he was just getting lucky. There were a few times he went in and i thought on well hes about to loose 40 lings or so and hence loose this fight. Though the mines just missed completely.
Especially in that series vs he gave up many packs of banes to widow mines. (Just an excuse to why i didn't believe he was dodging intentionally.)
This is a great post. I was actually going to try and figure it out after watching the games Sunday, but I'm glad someone got to it before me.
Honestly, if these mechanics are accurate, I think it's a bit silly on Blizzard's part. If the mine's already finished its 1.5 second charge, it shouldn't have to do another 1.5 before firing. It should attack another target right away. If a (real life) influence mine needs a signal (magnetic, pressure, acoustic, whatever) to exceed a certain threshold for X seconds to trigger, it doesn't care if it's one ship or three passing overhead. It just activates. If it loses that threshold, yeah, it resets. I know, SC isn't real life, but this would make more sense in the game, too! I'm guessing the mines were never intended to act like this.
This should be easy to fix in any case. You could have units enter a queue when they enter the radius and leave the queue when they exit the radius. When the mine charge finishes, it just shoots at whatever's at the front of the queue.
On March 20 2013 04:47 Jawcub wrote: Also a simple terran solution to this would be to always keep the mines in pairs, one right behind the first one so that the lings reach the other mines radius when leving the first one. Instead of keeping the mines side to side.
The thing with keeping the mines in pairs is that they could (and usually do) both target the initial ling and can waste a shot unnecessarily. I believe the real solution to this is proper widow mine spacing. If you keep the mines properly spaced almost within the 5 range of each other, you will definitely take out those small packs of lings and banes, since all the active widow mines further down target the remaining units that survived the initial blasts.
Usually when spaced too close together, the initial splash will kill some shit, but that just creates a buffer for the units in the back to swarm through. With properly spaced widow mines, you'll definitely get bang for your buck, and no more unnecessary auto targeting of the same unit.
That was what I meant, I meant that you should keep them far enough behind eachother for the mines not to target the same lings.
On March 20 2013 04:31 MilesTeg wrote: The thing about that Flash vs Life game wasn't that the mines didn't detonate. They DID detonate, they just didn't do as much damage as everyone expected. Maybe they detonated on some overlords? I can't remember well.
It's a bit blurry for me too, I remember a big pack of zergling running on a minefield, only one mine detonate and fire on an area with a high zergling density but strangely kill almost nothing. Day[9] was quite surprised too. Does someone know the replay + timestamp ?
Bahahaha this makes me so happy. It's like 2010 GSL 2 when MKP/Fauxer went "wait, you can split marines against banelings, and then they're not a hard-counter anymore" and BitByBit went "yes please" and every Zerg in the world went "oh shit."
Well, Life makes it look easy but it seems like this unit can be flummoxed by top level players (not me) so it should be fun to watch even though they kill my own gameplay.
If it helps anyone, here's a video of lings running through a widow mine's radius.
Widow mine #1 goes off, but for #2 and #3 there are lings entering the edge of the radius but then exiting before the mine can fire.
Now there are more lings inside the radius, mine #2 targets the closest one... which exits the radius before the mine can fire, since that ling was already halfway across. This repeats several times, with the end result being that lots of lings run past without the mine ever firing a shot.
So the faster the unit, the smaller the effective radius of the WM is. Interesting. Really makes T put more thought into positioning of WM's and guessing at the pathing of the enemy units.
Good work, OP. In terms of dealing with mines as zerg though, this still feels like it's rather random. And I'm deeply convinced that randomizing elements don't belong in high level competition. :/
great post. I did notice this partly, but i thought i was misreading the radius slightly. Very interesting feature, i hope this won't be patched out in some way.
If life made use of this knowingly, it was brilliant. :D
On March 20 2013 07:24 TwilightRain wrote: Good work, OP. In terms of dealing with mines as zerg though, this still feels like it's rather random. And I'm deeply convinced that randomizing elements don't belong in high level competition. :/
could you explain what you exactly mean by bolded part? I don't really understand how it's random. Also the purpose of the word 'still' is a bit unclear. What exactly compared to when?
On March 20 2013 07:02 Nachtwind wrote: In conclusion that means never place mines farther then 2 units away from each other or you produce "holes" in the target zone. Right?
4 units, but yes (two mines with radius two = 4 units total distance). good point.
That was cool research. It is nice to see people putting in serious effort to study and explain game mechanics that are obvious for us 'average joes '.
EPT
