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United States7483 Posts
The reason we have deathballs is because of the design philosophy from the beginning (Terrible terrible damage). Blizzard's goal with the game was to have attacking on a regular basis be the main goal and main behavior, and to have constant battles. They wanted to avoid defensive games and eco focused games when they made it, and the stats of units and maps were made with that in mind. Over time they slowly realized this was really dumb, and made small changes a little at a time to units and the maps. This helped, but the core design of unit mechanics is still there. That's why deathballs exist, because units were designed with damage in mind, not function.
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On November 13 2012 07:04 Patate wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2012 06:44 Rabiator wrote:On November 13 2012 06:33 Patate wrote:On November 13 2012 06:06 neptunusfisk wrote:
Lurker lurker lurker. Stronger siege tanks. High ground advantage. No brood lords. Plague instead of fungal. I disagree with the BL part. It is a very interesting unit (way more than the guardian). Of course lurker vs swarm host is a no brainer: the swarm host is simply stupid and it's not original (its a burrowed Brood Lord). The Broodlord is not "interesting", it is "unfair", because it spawns free units which screen it from ground units that might be able to attack it otherwise. This is the reason why the BL is the only "capital ship" that can work in SC2 and it is a poor reason. Any ability which makes a unit "invulnerable" to attacks of the opponents army is bad. Thus the Broodlords free units (and the Swarm Host as well, though to a lesser extent since their locusts arent spawned in machinegun rapidity as for the BL), Forcefield and Fungal Growth are pretty unfair or outright overpowered. It is the design concept that makes it so and not the implementation (a Forcefield of 2 second duration would be useless for example) and they usually are either useless or overpowered. Just because people have learned to deal with them doesnt make them less bad concepts. Oh yeah well the reasons why SC2 has been unpopular as of late (or less popular), was those frustrating design things. I can't remember how many times I've heard casters desperately trying to make a game exciting: "SICK FORCEFIELDS" "SICK FUNGLES" . How are they any good? any mid masters can pull those off, it's simply not impressing. I want to go back to my comment concerning the bases with less income. Right now, a good zerg can get maxed at the 11 minutes mark. That leaves absolutely no time for any kinds of harassment or pressure (other than all-ins or designated pressure builds that land before 11 min). So in a way, you cannot really react fast enough to anything, which really makes , along with FF-FG-Vortex-Concussive (etc..) playing SC2 a pretty annoying experience at time.
"Fewer resources per base" only favors Zerg, since they have the most mobile army that can defend multiple bases through map awareness (creep spread) and pretty good defensive structures. Its the wrong way!
Tackle the problem from the other side by removing the boosts for unit production and economy. Broodwar had none of that and worked fine. Adjusting a "general mechanic" is the much more reliable way than relying on mapmakers to "not screw up". Maps can and should only do so much.
On November 13 2012 15:00 Whitewing wrote:
The reason we have deathballs is because of the design philosophy from the beginning (Terrible terrible damage). Blizzard's goal with the game was to have attacking on a regular basis be the main goal and main behavior, and to have constant battles. They wanted to avoid defensive games and eco focused games when they made it, and the stats of units and maps were made with that in mind. Over time they slowly realized this was really dumb, and made small changes a little at a time to units and the maps. This helped, but the core design of unit mechanics is still there. That's why deathballs exist, because units were designed with damage in mind, not function.
They clearly failed in the "constant battles" part of the concept since it is much better to wait until maxed and attack then. The asymmetric production speed boosts are yet another reason why "constant battles" are not happening, because race A can get more forces early on, so race B will try to keep safe to get its own boost to kick in later on and get the advantage then. Terrible concept actually and its depressing the guys at Blizzard dont see it.
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United States7483 Posts
On November 13 2012 16:32 Rabiator wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2012 07:04 Patate wrote:On November 13 2012 06:44 Rabiator wrote:On November 13 2012 06:33 Patate wrote:On November 13 2012 06:06 neptunusfisk wrote:
Lurker lurker lurker. Stronger siege tanks. High ground advantage. No brood lords. Plague instead of fungal. I disagree with the BL part. It is a very interesting unit (way more than the guardian). Of course lurker vs swarm host is a no brainer: the swarm host is simply stupid and it's not original (its a burrowed Brood Lord). The Broodlord is not "interesting", it is "unfair", because it spawns free units which screen it from ground units that might be able to attack it otherwise. This is the reason why the BL is the only "capital ship" that can work in SC2 and it is a poor reason. Any ability which makes a unit "invulnerable" to attacks of the opponents army is bad. Thus the Broodlords free units (and the Swarm Host as well, though to a lesser extent since their locusts arent spawned in machinegun rapidity as for the BL), Forcefield and Fungal Growth are pretty unfair or outright overpowered. It is the design concept that makes it so and not the implementation (a Forcefield of 2 second duration would be useless for example) and they usually are either useless or overpowered. Just because people have learned to deal with them doesnt make them less bad concepts. Oh yeah well the reasons why SC2 has been unpopular as of late (or less popular), was those frustrating design things. I can't remember how many times I've heard casters desperately trying to make a game exciting: "SICK FORCEFIELDS" "SICK FUNGLES" . How are they any good? any mid masters can pull those off, it's simply not impressing. I want to go back to my comment concerning the bases with less income. Right now, a good zerg can get maxed at the 11 minutes mark. That leaves absolutely no time for any kinds of harassment or pressure (other than all-ins or designated pressure builds that land before 11 min). So in a way, you cannot really react fast enough to anything, which really makes , along with FF-FG-Vortex-Concussive (etc..) playing SC2 a pretty annoying experience at time. "Fewer resources per base" only favors Zerg, since they have the most mobile army that can defend multiple bases through map awareness (creep spread) and pretty good defensive structures. Its the wrong way! Tackle the problem from the other side by removing the boosts for unit production and economy. Broodwar had none of that and worked fine. Adjusting a "general mechanic" is the much more reliable way than relying on mapmakers to "not screw up". Maps can and should only do so much. Show nested quote +On November 13 2012 15:00 Whitewing wrote:
The reason we have deathballs is because of the design philosophy from the beginning (Terrible terrible damage). Blizzard's goal with the game was to have attacking on a regular basis be the main goal and main behavior, and to have constant battles. They wanted to avoid defensive games and eco focused games when they made it, and the stats of units and maps were made with that in mind. Over time they slowly realized this was really dumb, and made small changes a little at a time to units and the maps. This helped, but the core design of unit mechanics is still there. That's why deathballs exist, because units were designed with damage in mind, not function. They clearly failed in the "constant battles" part of the concept since it is much better to wait until maxed and attack then. The asymmetric production speed boosts are yet another reason why "constant battles" are not happening, because race A can get more forces early on, so race B will try to keep safe to get its own boost to kick in later on and get the advantage then. Terrible concept actually and its depressing the guys at Blizzard dont see it.
Remember that the design was based on super small maps too, where rushing was very powerful, so the correct strategy was generally to rush, and then if it failed, your opponent was supposed to counter attack right then, so the game went back and forth with attacks until one person won (usually the first attack was good enough). Metalopolis was the biggest map in the map pool back then.
General unit design stayed the same while maps got bigger.
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On November 13 2012 16:39 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2012 16:32 Rabiator wrote:On November 13 2012 07:04 Patate wrote:On November 13 2012 06:44 Rabiator wrote:On November 13 2012 06:33 Patate wrote:On November 13 2012 06:06 neptunusfisk wrote:
Lurker lurker lurker. Stronger siege tanks. High ground advantage. No brood lords. Plague instead of fungal. I disagree with the BL part. It is a very interesting unit (way more than the guardian). Of course lurker vs swarm host is a no brainer: the swarm host is simply stupid and it's not original (its a burrowed Brood Lord). The Broodlord is not "interesting", it is "unfair", because it spawns free units which screen it from ground units that might be able to attack it otherwise. This is the reason why the BL is the only "capital ship" that can work in SC2 and it is a poor reason. Any ability which makes a unit "invulnerable" to attacks of the opponents army is bad. Thus the Broodlords free units (and the Swarm Host as well, though to a lesser extent since their locusts arent spawned in machinegun rapidity as for the BL), Forcefield and Fungal Growth are pretty unfair or outright overpowered. It is the design concept that makes it so and not the implementation (a Forcefield of 2 second duration would be useless for example) and they usually are either useless or overpowered. Just because people have learned to deal with them doesnt make them less bad concepts. Oh yeah well the reasons why SC2 has been unpopular as of late (or less popular), was those frustrating design things. I can't remember how many times I've heard casters desperately trying to make a game exciting: "SICK FORCEFIELDS" "SICK FUNGLES" . How are they any good? any mid masters can pull those off, it's simply not impressing. I want to go back to my comment concerning the bases with less income. Right now, a good zerg can get maxed at the 11 minutes mark. That leaves absolutely no time for any kinds of harassment or pressure (other than all-ins or designated pressure builds that land before 11 min). So in a way, you cannot really react fast enough to anything, which really makes , along with FF-FG-Vortex-Concussive (etc..) playing SC2 a pretty annoying experience at time. "Fewer resources per base" only favors Zerg, since they have the most mobile army that can defend multiple bases through map awareness (creep spread) and pretty good defensive structures. Its the wrong way! Tackle the problem from the other side by removing the boosts for unit production and economy. Broodwar had none of that and worked fine. Adjusting a "general mechanic" is the much more reliable way than relying on mapmakers to "not screw up". Maps can and should only do so much. On November 13 2012 15:00 Whitewing wrote:
The reason we have deathballs is because of the design philosophy from the beginning (Terrible terrible damage). Blizzard's goal with the game was to have attacking on a regular basis be the main goal and main behavior, and to have constant battles. They wanted to avoid defensive games and eco focused games when they made it, and the stats of units and maps were made with that in mind. Over time they slowly realized this was really dumb, and made small changes a little at a time to units and the maps. This helped, but the core design of unit mechanics is still there. That's why deathballs exist, because units were designed with damage in mind, not function. They clearly failed in the "constant battles" part of the concept since it is much better to wait until maxed and attack then. The asymmetric production speed boosts are yet another reason why "constant battles" are not happening, because race A can get more forces early on, so race B will try to keep safe to get its own boost to kick in later on and get the advantage then. Terrible concept actually and its depressing the guys at Blizzard dont see it. Remember that the design was based on super small maps too, where rushing was very powerful, so the correct strategy was generally to rush, and then if it failed, your opponent was supposed to counter attack right then, so the game went back and forth with attacks until one person won (usually the first attack was good enough). Metalopolis was the biggest map in the map pool back then. General unit design stayed the same while maps got bigger.
Maps got bigger and gameplay revolves less around "chance" or "overpowered units" (at an early timing) ... thus it improved and the game stayed terrible at its core design.
Starcraft 2 has one big fallacy in its core design and this is that SPEED is BETTER for GAMEPLAY. It isnt, because an increased speed has less margin for error and thus requires more precise balancing. This is terrible for viewers (things are over too quickly) and units (Siege Tanks get off one shot before being overrun by the swarm of Zerglings).
Sadly the "lets balance it on small maps" stupidity continues with HotS and its rather smallish Blizzard-made maps and only after the community pointed that out did they start to add in the bigger maps to the beta. Any in-house-testing was done on the stupid junk stuff they made and this shows how incompetent they truly are. Mechanically they are as good as it gets when implementing it, but the strategic planning on how to go about designing it is where they really need to improve more, MUCH more.
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United States7483 Posts
On November 13 2012 16:57 Rabiator wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2012 16:39 Whitewing wrote:On November 13 2012 16:32 Rabiator wrote:On November 13 2012 07:04 Patate wrote:On November 13 2012 06:44 Rabiator wrote:On November 13 2012 06:33 Patate wrote:On November 13 2012 06:06 neptunusfisk wrote:
Lurker lurker lurker. Stronger siege tanks. High ground advantage. No brood lords. Plague instead of fungal. I disagree with the BL part. It is a very interesting unit (way more than the guardian). Of course lurker vs swarm host is a no brainer: the swarm host is simply stupid and it's not original (its a burrowed Brood Lord). The Broodlord is not "interesting", it is "unfair", because it spawns free units which screen it from ground units that might be able to attack it otherwise. This is the reason why the BL is the only "capital ship" that can work in SC2 and it is a poor reason. Any ability which makes a unit "invulnerable" to attacks of the opponents army is bad. Thus the Broodlords free units (and the Swarm Host as well, though to a lesser extent since their locusts arent spawned in machinegun rapidity as for the BL), Forcefield and Fungal Growth are pretty unfair or outright overpowered. It is the design concept that makes it so and not the implementation (a Forcefield of 2 second duration would be useless for example) and they usually are either useless or overpowered. Just because people have learned to deal with them doesnt make them less bad concepts. Oh yeah well the reasons why SC2 has been unpopular as of late (or less popular), was those frustrating design things. I can't remember how many times I've heard casters desperately trying to make a game exciting: "SICK FORCEFIELDS" "SICK FUNGLES" . How are they any good? any mid masters can pull those off, it's simply not impressing. I want to go back to my comment concerning the bases with less income. Right now, a good zerg can get maxed at the 11 minutes mark. That leaves absolutely no time for any kinds of harassment or pressure (other than all-ins or designated pressure builds that land before 11 min). So in a way, you cannot really react fast enough to anything, which really makes , along with FF-FG-Vortex-Concussive (etc..) playing SC2 a pretty annoying experience at time. "Fewer resources per base" only favors Zerg, since they have the most mobile army that can defend multiple bases through map awareness (creep spread) and pretty good defensive structures. Its the wrong way! Tackle the problem from the other side by removing the boosts for unit production and economy. Broodwar had none of that and worked fine. Adjusting a "general mechanic" is the much more reliable way than relying on mapmakers to "not screw up". Maps can and should only do so much. On November 13 2012 15:00 Whitewing wrote:
The reason we have deathballs is because of the design philosophy from the beginning (Terrible terrible damage). Blizzard's goal with the game was to have attacking on a regular basis be the main goal and main behavior, and to have constant battles. They wanted to avoid defensive games and eco focused games when they made it, and the stats of units and maps were made with that in mind. Over time they slowly realized this was really dumb, and made small changes a little at a time to units and the maps. This helped, but the core design of unit mechanics is still there. That's why deathballs exist, because units were designed with damage in mind, not function. They clearly failed in the "constant battles" part of the concept since it is much better to wait until maxed and attack then. The asymmetric production speed boosts are yet another reason why "constant battles" are not happening, because race A can get more forces early on, so race B will try to keep safe to get its own boost to kick in later on and get the advantage then. Terrible concept actually and its depressing the guys at Blizzard dont see it. Remember that the design was based on super small maps too, where rushing was very powerful, so the correct strategy was generally to rush, and then if it failed, your opponent was supposed to counter attack right then, so the game went back and forth with attacks until one person won (usually the first attack was good enough). Metalopolis was the biggest map in the map pool back then. General unit design stayed the same while maps got bigger. Maps got bigger and gameplay revolves less around "chance" or "overpowered units" (at an early timing) ... thus it improved and the game stayed terrible at its core design. Starcraft 2 has one big fallacy in its core design and this is that SPEED is BETTER for GAMEPLAY. It isnt, because an increased speed has less margin for error and thus requires more precise balancing. This is terrible for viewers (things are over too quickly) and units (Siege Tanks get off one shot before being overrun by the swarm of Zerglings). Sadly the "lets balance it on small maps" stupidity continues with HotS and its rather smallish Blizzard-made maps and only after the community pointed that out did they start to add in the bigger maps to the beta. Any in-house-testing was done on the stupid junk stuff they made and this shows how incompetent they truly are. Mechanically they are as good as it gets when implementing it, but the strategic planning on how to go about designing it is where they really need to improve more, MUCH more.
More or less, but the issue with the HOTS maps wasn't that they were too small, some of them were outright huge. It was just lousy map design in general that made those maps terrible. Howling Peaks, for example, has way too many attack paths and a huge natural, which makes it very hard to take for Protoss.
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On November 13 2012 17:06 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2012 16:57 Rabiator wrote:On November 13 2012 16:39 Whitewing wrote:On November 13 2012 16:32 Rabiator wrote:On November 13 2012 07:04 Patate wrote:On November 13 2012 06:44 Rabiator wrote:On November 13 2012 06:33 Patate wrote:On November 13 2012 06:06 neptunusfisk wrote:
Lurker lurker lurker. Stronger siege tanks. High ground advantage. No brood lords. Plague instead of fungal. I disagree with the BL part. It is a very interesting unit (way more than the guardian). Of course lurker vs swarm host is a no brainer: the swarm host is simply stupid and it's not original (its a burrowed Brood Lord). The Broodlord is not "interesting", it is "unfair", because it spawns free units which screen it from ground units that might be able to attack it otherwise. This is the reason why the BL is the only "capital ship" that can work in SC2 and it is a poor reason. Any ability which makes a unit "invulnerable" to attacks of the opponents army is bad. Thus the Broodlords free units (and the Swarm Host as well, though to a lesser extent since their locusts arent spawned in machinegun rapidity as for the BL), Forcefield and Fungal Growth are pretty unfair or outright overpowered. It is the design concept that makes it so and not the implementation (a Forcefield of 2 second duration would be useless for example) and they usually are either useless or overpowered. Just because people have learned to deal with them doesnt make them less bad concepts. Oh yeah well the reasons why SC2 has been unpopular as of late (or less popular), was those frustrating design things. I can't remember how many times I've heard casters desperately trying to make a game exciting: "SICK FORCEFIELDS" "SICK FUNGLES" . How are they any good? any mid masters can pull those off, it's simply not impressing. I want to go back to my comment concerning the bases with less income. Right now, a good zerg can get maxed at the 11 minutes mark. That leaves absolutely no time for any kinds of harassment or pressure (other than all-ins or designated pressure builds that land before 11 min). So in a way, you cannot really react fast enough to anything, which really makes , along with FF-FG-Vortex-Concussive (etc..) playing SC2 a pretty annoying experience at time. "Fewer resources per base" only favors Zerg, since they have the most mobile army that can defend multiple bases through map awareness (creep spread) and pretty good defensive structures. Its the wrong way! Tackle the problem from the other side by removing the boosts for unit production and economy. Broodwar had none of that and worked fine. Adjusting a "general mechanic" is the much more reliable way than relying on mapmakers to "not screw up". Maps can and should only do so much. On November 13 2012 15:00 Whitewing wrote:
The reason we have deathballs is because of the design philosophy from the beginning (Terrible terrible damage). Blizzard's goal with the game was to have attacking on a regular basis be the main goal and main behavior, and to have constant battles. They wanted to avoid defensive games and eco focused games when they made it, and the stats of units and maps were made with that in mind. Over time they slowly realized this was really dumb, and made small changes a little at a time to units and the maps. This helped, but the core design of unit mechanics is still there. That's why deathballs exist, because units were designed with damage in mind, not function. They clearly failed in the "constant battles" part of the concept since it is much better to wait until maxed and attack then. The asymmetric production speed boosts are yet another reason why "constant battles" are not happening, because race A can get more forces early on, so race B will try to keep safe to get its own boost to kick in later on and get the advantage then. Terrible concept actually and its depressing the guys at Blizzard dont see it. Remember that the design was based on super small maps too, where rushing was very powerful, so the correct strategy was generally to rush, and then if it failed, your opponent was supposed to counter attack right then, so the game went back and forth with attacks until one person won (usually the first attack was good enough). Metalopolis was the biggest map in the map pool back then. General unit design stayed the same while maps got bigger. Maps got bigger and gameplay revolves less around "chance" or "overpowered units" (at an early timing) ... thus it improved and the game stayed terrible at its core design. Starcraft 2 has one big fallacy in its core design and this is that SPEED is BETTER for GAMEPLAY. It isnt, because an increased speed has less margin for error and thus requires more precise balancing. This is terrible for viewers (things are over too quickly) and units (Siege Tanks get off one shot before being overrun by the swarm of Zerglings). Sadly the "lets balance it on small maps" stupidity continues with HotS and its rather smallish Blizzard-made maps and only after the community pointed that out did they start to add in the bigger maps to the beta. Any in-house-testing was done on the stupid junk stuff they made and this shows how incompetent they truly are. Mechanically they are as good as it gets when implementing it, but the strategic planning on how to go about designing it is where they really need to improve more, MUCH more. More or less, but the issue with the HOTS maps wasn't that they were too small, some of them were outright huge. It was just lousy map design in general that made those maps terrible. Howling Peaks, for example, has way too many attack paths and a huge natural, which makes it very hard to take for Protoss.
Personally I consider Photon Cannons to be a very underused building in Protoss gameplay and this is in part the fault of people like Day[9] who always say stuff like "thats a cannon he didnt want to build" or "he built A Spine Crawler, so he is safe now" while the truth of the matter is that ONE defensive structure doesnt help at all against any half-hearted attack or harrass, but several or lots will help a lot more. How many times have people been ruined by drops in their natural? And why did it succeed? Because they were too greedy to build precautionary turrets.
If you want to make a point, why dont you make it so that no one misses it? Build 5 cannons in your natural so the opponent needs more than a single medivac of marines to do significant damage. It doesnt cost the world and just slows you down a bit, but "attack timings" are a bad concept for a game as well as the deathball.
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The way to defeat deathballs is to attack them directly by punishing players for forming them. Broodwar did so in part by having such a clunky interface and such poor pathing that deathballs were nigh-impossible, because it was so damn hard to actually get the damn thing together and get it moving properly, and partly because of how heavily they punished deathball play with their units. To show how, I'll use the example of air units.
In Broodwar, air units lacked the horrible pathing of ground units (because they never had to path at all), so the deathball could be formed just as well if not better than in SC2 thanks to the help of the stacking trick (include a very slow or immobile unit in your control group, and your units won't unstack). Anyone who cares to try will quickly discover that giant stacks of Battlecruisers or Carriers will roll over any number of AIs, and we all know about the legendary Broodwar Muta stacks (which were essentially deathballs in miniature, limited only by unit selection and my next topic of discussion). So why were Battlecruisers nigh-unusable in multiplayer, why were Carriers limited to an answer for Mech, and why did mass Muta never take over Broodwar? The answer is in the units that countered that kind of unit clumping. Carriers and Battlecruisers could not be used against Zerg, because Plague would ravage them and leave them easy prey for Scourge, Hydralisks, or Devourers. They were unusable against Protoss because of Psionic Storm, which they were far too slow to move out of, and the power and mobility of the Dragoon and the Scout, of all things. Carriers were only good against Terran, who had no good anti-air splash, even though the Goliath was easily superior to the Dragoon in its anti-air capacity and the Wraith could match the Scout. Battlecruisers were weak to Terran, though, because they lacked sufficient range to avoid being slaughtered by Goliaths and left no easy way to defend against the sheer horror that is Vulture drops. Mutalisks were excellent in all three matchups, but became quickly outdated in ZvT because of Irradiate/Valkyries, ZvP because of Corsairs/Storm/Archons, and ZvZ if the game ever got far enough to progress to Queens and Ensnare (I know of exactly one game where this happened, and it was GLORIOUS).
The connecting principle is that these units always stop being usable when strong AOE comes online. This is the secret of breaking the deathballs in SC2 as well. Give each race access to some AOE strong enough that clumps of units are crushed, and deathballs will instantly go out of date. Players will only move around with packs of units small enough that obliteration due to AOE is not crippling, and make sure they have some of that AOE themselves. It will be possible to hold ground with small numbers of units and good positioning, and the game will focus more on the whole map rather than big clumps of units.
Fortunately, HotS is already going this way. The Viper, Oracle, and Widow Mine all punish this type of play. It's a step in the right direction. I have high hopes for HotS, and if things aren't quite there yet, then with LotV as well.
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On November 13 2012 17:27 Rabiator wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2012 17:06 Whitewing wrote:On November 13 2012 16:57 Rabiator wrote:On November 13 2012 16:39 Whitewing wrote:On November 13 2012 16:32 Rabiator wrote:On November 13 2012 07:04 Patate wrote:On November 13 2012 06:44 Rabiator wrote:On November 13 2012 06:33 Patate wrote:On November 13 2012 06:06 neptunusfisk wrote:
Lurker lurker lurker. Stronger siege tanks. High ground advantage. No brood lords. Plague instead of fungal. I disagree with the BL part. It is a very interesting unit (way more than the guardian). Of course lurker vs swarm host is a no brainer: the swarm host is simply stupid and it's not original (its a burrowed Brood Lord). The Broodlord is not "interesting", it is "unfair", because it spawns free units which screen it from ground units that might be able to attack it otherwise. This is the reason why the BL is the only "capital ship" that can work in SC2 and it is a poor reason. Any ability which makes a unit "invulnerable" to attacks of the opponents army is bad. Thus the Broodlords free units (and the Swarm Host as well, though to a lesser extent since their locusts arent spawned in machinegun rapidity as for the BL), Forcefield and Fungal Growth are pretty unfair or outright overpowered. It is the design concept that makes it so and not the implementation (a Forcefield of 2 second duration would be useless for example) and they usually are either useless or overpowered. Just because people have learned to deal with them doesnt make them less bad concepts. Oh yeah well the reasons why SC2 has been unpopular as of late (or less popular), was those frustrating design things. I can't remember how many times I've heard casters desperately trying to make a game exciting: "SICK FORCEFIELDS" "SICK FUNGLES" . How are they any good? any mid masters can pull those off, it's simply not impressing. I want to go back to my comment concerning the bases with less income. Right now, a good zerg can get maxed at the 11 minutes mark. That leaves absolutely no time for any kinds of harassment or pressure (other than all-ins or designated pressure builds that land before 11 min). So in a way, you cannot really react fast enough to anything, which really makes , along with FF-FG-Vortex-Concussive (etc..) playing SC2 a pretty annoying experience at time. "Fewer resources per base" only favors Zerg, since they have the most mobile army that can defend multiple bases through map awareness (creep spread) and pretty good defensive structures. Its the wrong way! Tackle the problem from the other side by removing the boosts for unit production and economy. Broodwar had none of that and worked fine. Adjusting a "general mechanic" is the much more reliable way than relying on mapmakers to "not screw up". Maps can and should only do so much. On November 13 2012 15:00 Whitewing wrote:
The reason we have deathballs is because of the design philosophy from the beginning (Terrible terrible damage). Blizzard's goal with the game was to have attacking on a regular basis be the main goal and main behavior, and to have constant battles. They wanted to avoid defensive games and eco focused games when they made it, and the stats of units and maps were made with that in mind. Over time they slowly realized this was really dumb, and made small changes a little at a time to units and the maps. This helped, but the core design of unit mechanics is still there. That's why deathballs exist, because units were designed with damage in mind, not function. They clearly failed in the "constant battles" part of the concept since it is much better to wait until maxed and attack then. The asymmetric production speed boosts are yet another reason why "constant battles" are not happening, because race A can get more forces early on, so race B will try to keep safe to get its own boost to kick in later on and get the advantage then. Terrible concept actually and its depressing the guys at Blizzard dont see it. Remember that the design was based on super small maps too, where rushing was very powerful, so the correct strategy was generally to rush, and then if it failed, your opponent was supposed to counter attack right then, so the game went back and forth with attacks until one person won (usually the first attack was good enough). Metalopolis was the biggest map in the map pool back then. General unit design stayed the same while maps got bigger. Maps got bigger and gameplay revolves less around "chance" or "overpowered units" (at an early timing) ... thus it improved and the game stayed terrible at its core design. Starcraft 2 has one big fallacy in its core design and this is that SPEED is BETTER for GAMEPLAY. It isnt, because an increased speed has less margin for error and thus requires more precise balancing. This is terrible for viewers (things are over too quickly) and units (Siege Tanks get off one shot before being overrun by the swarm of Zerglings). Sadly the "lets balance it on small maps" stupidity continues with HotS and its rather smallish Blizzard-made maps and only after the community pointed that out did they start to add in the bigger maps to the beta. Any in-house-testing was done on the stupid junk stuff they made and this shows how incompetent they truly are. Mechanically they are as good as it gets when implementing it, but the strategic planning on how to go about designing it is where they really need to improve more, MUCH more. More or less, but the issue with the HOTS maps wasn't that they were too small, some of them were outright huge. It was just lousy map design in general that made those maps terrible. Howling Peaks, for example, has way too many attack paths and a huge natural, which makes it very hard to take for Protoss. Personally I consider Photon Cannons to be a very underused building in Protoss gameplay and this is in part the fault of people like Day[9] who always say stuff like "thats a cannon he didnt want to build" or "he built A Spine Crawler, so he is safe now" while the truth of the matter is that ONE defensive structure doesnt help at all against any half-hearted attack or harrass, but several or lots will help a lot more. How many times have people been ruined by drops in their natural? And why did it succeed? Because they were too greedy to build precautionary turrets. If you want to make a point, why dont you make it so that no one misses it? Build 5 cannons in your natural so the opponent needs more than a single medivac of marines to do significant damage. It doesnt cost the world and just slows you down a bit, but "attack timings" are a bad concept for a game as well as the deathball.
The problem with that mentality is that if you aren't VERY careful, you're going to end up weakening your main army so much that your opponent says "okay" and groups up his army and sweeps the floor with you. I find that the acceptable level is to build no more than one Cannon when you're mining off of one base, no more than four on two bases, as many as three per base on three bases, and then infinite cannons on four bases. The big issue is that one Cannon=one Gateway, so if you try to plant any too early you're going to find your infrastructure to be unbearably bad. Once you've got your requisite 8-10 Gateways down, it starts getting much more valuable to protect that infrastructure and your mining operations than to set more up. So I'd say that planting five Cannons in your nat is completely overkill, but putting two Cannons in the flight path into your main and third is perfectly reasonable.
Note: all this gets thrown out the window if someone's all-inning you. Then again, so does everything else, like "avoid drafting workers into your infantry".
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On November 13 2012 14:24 winsonsonho wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2012 12:10 Inquisitor1323 wrote:On November 13 2012 08:34 bananafone wrote:
What if you changed the size of units? One of the reasons deathballs are so good is because its easyto get a lot of units clumped up very close together. Marines are a very good deathball unit exactly because of this. They are actually quite fragile but they are among the smallest units in the game. Imagine that the size of the marine was increased to that of the... Thor (exaggeration to prove a point). It would be a terrible deathball unit because if you had more than 20 only half of them would be able to attack. The strength of a single marine would be completely untouched, but clumped in deathballs marines would be awful.
A nice examples of this mechanic in the game already is a brood lord vs ultralisk comparison. Looking at raw stats there is almost no reason whatsoever to get brood lords. They do single target damage as opposed to splash, they are slow as fuck and have both less armor and hp. However being an air unit they dont have a size and can be clumped together as tight as you want them to be. Ultralisk's on the other hand are massive (pun intended) and frequently stop each other from attacking, thus making them bad in large numbers. If we scaled the Ultralisk's size down to say that of a zergling i am sure it would be one of the best units in the game if not the best unit. 5 ultras or 5 brood lords? 20 ultras or 20 brood lords?
The point of all this should be quite clear. The size of the unit greatly affects a units ability to perform in deathball situations and really only that, so maybe this ought to be looked at. hmm... so we could make literally every unit the size of a thor and... problem solved! But seriously, the reason we have deathballs is because of pathing and better AI. Did you miss the part where @bananafone wrote (exaggeration....) He just meant that if the marine for instance had a slightly larger collision radius/size the dps density of a deathball of marines would decrease. Hence, the effectiveness of a marine deathball vs groups of marine balls would be lower. You failed to actually give a real reason why you thought his reasoning was incorrect. Furthermore, there isn't only one reason we have deathballs (pathing and AI). Other reasons for the deathball include; map design (size and locations of naturals and thirds), deathball movement speeds, high deathball dps (due to clumping), hard-counter units (an army of one unit type is too easily countered in sc2), and some others that I probably haven't thought of. I agree with @banafone.. Unit size/unit collision radius needs to be increased for the marine. The issue with the Protoss deathball is that even though collision radius is somewhat high for most of their units, the major dps dealer, the Collosus, has such a long range and can also walk on top of Zealots and the like. Collision radius thus makes very little difference to the Protoss when the Collosus is incorporated. This is one of the main reason why Protoss rely the Collosus; for its way superior dps and range. Moving on to Zerg, there is no rouch deathball because it isn't as effective due to the low range and their relatively high collision radius. However, the infestor/Lord deathball is so effective because of the Broodlords high dps and the infestor's ability to make up for all of the Broodlords' weaknesses (slow speed, inability to attack air). I rate that the collosus' attack path needs to be changed (idea from another thread) so that it travels away from the collosus rather than sweep radially. This would allow it to keep its strength vs deathball, but lower its effectiveness slightly vs smaller groups or concaved armies. Secondly, I think the infestor needs to be a little less of the best unit in the game. I would like to see the infestor become less strong and the hydra made stronger. I do not think that only one or two changes such as the ideas above will fix the deathball issue. Obviously the deathball technique will still be easier and more effective to use for lower level players. But for the top players to use positional play more, I think two more issues also need to be adressed. Firstly, moment speed of units like maurader, collosus, and infestor need to be somewhat reduced so that each of the deathballs are less mobile as a unit. Secondly, the naturals and thirds should not be as close as they are to the main base. This would make it harder to defend all of your bases with one army. Lastly, I do agree that changing pathing and AI would help too, but Blizzard and a number of players have already tested it and deemed it ineffective at reducing the dsathballs' effectiveness. Blizzard have said already that they won't change pathing. To be honest, it makes sense that blizzard want the deathball to be easy to maintain and useful, so that the game is easier for lower level players. However they do seem to want to make positional play more effective for use by top players. I think Blizzard are on the right track, but need to make some changes to some underlying issues with the game rather than only adding new units and abilities that do not seem to be breaking up the deathball.
Did you miss the part where I was kidding? The marine doesn't need a size or radius increase. Its size is a double-edged sword so to speak, it may increase DPS but also makes it more vulnerable to AOE. In addition, the marine is the only unit that you consistently see being split. To top that off, a few well-placed Seige Tanks, Infestors, or HTs can shut down large amounts of marines relatively well.
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I honestly think that the SC2 Deathball works because you can select so many units and hotkey them under a tab, or even select army units with one button. And the fact that units tend to clump up, because if you clump up ranged units, they are more effective than just sending in packs of 5-10 of them at a time at an opponent's defenses or deathball.
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I think its just a mix of many different problems
Static defense hurts your econonmy too much, and starts sucking big time once your opponent gets upgrades
The innitial base advantage, terran bunkers / buildings, protoss warpins / msc and zerg Queens / creep, all lose importance and strenght at a 200 / 200, or when ten 3/3 marines enter and stim your base to shreds.
I would give protoss a similar upgrade to the 2 armor, maybe (durable defense, +100 life and -0.X fire rate on cannons). Also let the mothership cast a stronger purify on the nexus. Costs are 50/50 at the dark shrine?
Zerg, When in range of a lair/hive one Queen (changes to the next if she dies), gets infused with the power of the swarm. Gains 2/3 armor, life regeneration, and +3/4 attack.
Terran, well, they have better lategame defense anyway.
Then again this migh just shut down small raiding parties even more!
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On November 13 2012 21:37 Inquisitor1323 wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2012 14:24 winsonsonho wrote:On November 13 2012 12:10 Inquisitor1323 wrote:On November 13 2012 08:34 bananafone wrote:
What if you changed the size of units? One of the reasons deathballs are so good is because its easyto get a lot of units clumped up very close together. Marines are a very good deathball unit exactly because of this. They are actually quite fragile but they are among the smallest units in the game. Imagine that the size of the marine was increased to that of the... Thor (exaggeration to prove a point). It would be a terrible deathball unit because if you had more than 20 only half of them would be able to attack. The strength of a single marine would be completely untouched, but clumped in deathballs marines would be awful.
A nice examples of this mechanic in the game already is a brood lord vs ultralisk comparison. Looking at raw stats there is almost no reason whatsoever to get brood lords. They do single target damage as opposed to splash, they are slow as fuck and have both less armor and hp. However being an air unit they dont have a size and can be clumped together as tight as you want them to be. Ultralisk's on the other hand are massive (pun intended) and frequently stop each other from attacking, thus making them bad in large numbers. If we scaled the Ultralisk's size down to say that of a zergling i am sure it would be one of the best units in the game if not the best unit. 5 ultras or 5 brood lords? 20 ultras or 20 brood lords?
The point of all this should be quite clear. The size of the unit greatly affects a units ability to perform in deathball situations and really only that, so maybe this ought to be looked at. hmm... so we could make literally every unit the size of a thor and... problem solved! But seriously, the reason we have deathballs is because of pathing and better AI. Did you miss the part where @bananafone wrote (exaggeration....) He just meant that if the marine for instance had a slightly larger collision radius/size the dps density of a deathball of marines would decrease. Hence, the effectiveness of a marine deathball vs groups of marine balls would be lower. You failed to actually give a real reason why you thought his reasoning was incorrect. Furthermore, there isn't only one reason we have deathballs (pathing and AI). Other reasons for the deathball include; map design (size and locations of naturals and thirds), deathball movement speeds, high deathball dps (due to clumping), hard-counter units (an army of one unit type is too easily countered in sc2), and some others that I probably haven't thought of. I agree with @banafone.. Unit size/unit collision radius needs to be increased for the marine. The issue with the Protoss deathball is that even though collision radius is somewhat high for most of their units, the major dps dealer, the Collosus, has such a long range and can also walk on top of Zealots and the like. Collision radius thus makes very little difference to the Protoss when the Collosus is incorporated. This is one of the main reason why Protoss rely the Collosus; for its way superior dps and range. Moving on to Zerg, there is no rouch deathball because it isn't as effective due to the low range and their relatively high collision radius. However, the infestor/Lord deathball is so effective because of the Broodlords high dps and the infestor's ability to make up for all of the Broodlords' weaknesses (slow speed, inability to attack air). I rate that the collosus' attack path needs to be changed (idea from another thread) so that it travels away from the collosus rather than sweep radially. This would allow it to keep its strength vs deathball, but lower its effectiveness slightly vs smaller groups or concaved armies. Secondly, I think the infestor needs to be a little less of the best unit in the game. I would like to see the infestor become less strong and the hydra made stronger. I do not think that only one or two changes such as the ideas above will fix the deathball issue. Obviously the deathball technique will still be easier and more effective to use for lower level players. But for the top players to use positional play more, I think two more issues also need to be adressed. Firstly, moment speed of units like maurader, collosus, and infestor need to be somewhat reduced so that each of the deathballs are less mobile as a unit. Secondly, the naturals and thirds should not be as close as they are to the main base. This would make it harder to defend all of your bases with one army. Lastly, I do agree that changing pathing and AI would help too, but Blizzard and a number of players have already tested it and deemed it ineffective at reducing the dsathballs' effectiveness. Blizzard have said already that they won't change pathing. To be honest, it makes sense that blizzard want the deathball to be easy to maintain and useful, so that the game is easier for lower level players. However they do seem to want to make positional play more effective for use by top players. I think Blizzard are on the right track, but need to make some changes to some underlying issues with the game rather than only adding new units and abilities that do not seem to be breaking up the deathball. Did you miss the part where I was kidding? The marine doesn't need a size or radius increase. Its size is a double-edged sword so to speak, it may increase DPS but also makes it more vulnerable to AOE. In addition, the marine is the only unit that you consistently see being split. To top that off, a few well-placed Seige Tanks, Infestors, or HTs can shut down large amounts of marines relatively well.
I did miss that, because I took it as sarcasm, which is not the same as kidding.. You obviously meant to undermine the idea of collision radius being increased. I agree that size is a double-edged sword. However, I'd rather see AOE be less devastating to marines and see marines be less devastating themselves.
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United States7483 Posts
On November 14 2012 01:14 winsonsonho wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2012 21:37 Inquisitor1323 wrote:On November 13 2012 14:24 winsonsonho wrote:On November 13 2012 12:10 Inquisitor1323 wrote:On November 13 2012 08:34 bananafone wrote:
What if you changed the size of units? One of the reasons deathballs are so good is because its easyto get a lot of units clumped up very close together. Marines are a very good deathball unit exactly because of this. They are actually quite fragile but they are among the smallest units in the game. Imagine that the size of the marine was increased to that of the... Thor (exaggeration to prove a point). It would be a terrible deathball unit because if you had more than 20 only half of them would be able to attack. The strength of a single marine would be completely untouched, but clumped in deathballs marines would be awful.
A nice examples of this mechanic in the game already is a brood lord vs ultralisk comparison. Looking at raw stats there is almost no reason whatsoever to get brood lords. They do single target damage as opposed to splash, they are slow as fuck and have both less armor and hp. However being an air unit they dont have a size and can be clumped together as tight as you want them to be. Ultralisk's on the other hand are massive (pun intended) and frequently stop each other from attacking, thus making them bad in large numbers. If we scaled the Ultralisk's size down to say that of a zergling i am sure it would be one of the best units in the game if not the best unit. 5 ultras or 5 brood lords? 20 ultras or 20 brood lords?
The point of all this should be quite clear. The size of the unit greatly affects a units ability to perform in deathball situations and really only that, so maybe this ought to be looked at. hmm... so we could make literally every unit the size of a thor and... problem solved! But seriously, the reason we have deathballs is because of pathing and better AI. Did you miss the part where @bananafone wrote (exaggeration....) He just meant that if the marine for instance had a slightly larger collision radius/size the dps density of a deathball of marines would decrease. Hence, the effectiveness of a marine deathball vs groups of marine balls would be lower. You failed to actually give a real reason why you thought his reasoning was incorrect. Furthermore, there isn't only one reason we have deathballs (pathing and AI). Other reasons for the deathball include; map design (size and locations of naturals and thirds), deathball movement speeds, high deathball dps (due to clumping), hard-counter units (an army of one unit type is too easily countered in sc2), and some others that I probably haven't thought of. I agree with @banafone.. Unit size/unit collision radius needs to be increased for the marine. The issue with the Protoss deathball is that even though collision radius is somewhat high for most of their units, the major dps dealer, the Collosus, has such a long range and can also walk on top of Zealots and the like. Collision radius thus makes very little difference to the Protoss when the Collosus is incorporated. This is one of the main reason why Protoss rely the Collosus; for its way superior dps and range. Moving on to Zerg, there is no rouch deathball because it isn't as effective due to the low range and their relatively high collision radius. However, the infestor/Lord deathball is so effective because of the Broodlords high dps and the infestor's ability to make up for all of the Broodlords' weaknesses (slow speed, inability to attack air). I rate that the collosus' attack path needs to be changed (idea from another thread) so that it travels away from the collosus rather than sweep radially. This would allow it to keep its strength vs deathball, but lower its effectiveness slightly vs smaller groups or concaved armies. Secondly, I think the infestor needs to be a little less of the best unit in the game. I would like to see the infestor become less strong and the hydra made stronger. I do not think that only one or two changes such as the ideas above will fix the deathball issue. Obviously the deathball technique will still be easier and more effective to use for lower level players. But for the top players to use positional play more, I think two more issues also need to be adressed. Firstly, moment speed of units like maurader, collosus, and infestor need to be somewhat reduced so that each of the deathballs are less mobile as a unit. Secondly, the naturals and thirds should not be as close as they are to the main base. This would make it harder to defend all of your bases with one army. Lastly, I do agree that changing pathing and AI would help too, but Blizzard and a number of players have already tested it and deemed it ineffective at reducing the dsathballs' effectiveness. Blizzard have said already that they won't change pathing. To be honest, it makes sense that blizzard want the deathball to be easy to maintain and useful, so that the game is easier for lower level players. However they do seem to want to make positional play more effective for use by top players. I think Blizzard are on the right track, but need to make some changes to some underlying issues with the game rather than only adding new units and abilities that do not seem to be breaking up the deathball. Did you miss the part where I was kidding? The marine doesn't need a size or radius increase. Its size is a double-edged sword so to speak, it may increase DPS but also makes it more vulnerable to AOE. In addition, the marine is the only unit that you consistently see being split. To top that off, a few well-placed Seige Tanks, Infestors, or HTs can shut down large amounts of marines relatively well. I did miss that, because I took it as sarcasm, which is not the same as kidding.. You obviously meant to undermine the idea of collision radius being increased. I agree that size is a double-edged sword. However, I'd rather see AOE be less devastating to marines and see marines be less devastating themselves.
You're assuming that it would scale proportionally in both directions, but I don't think it would. With proper positioning and a concave, marines would be just as strong as they are now, but would suffer less damage from AoE, which would result in a flat out buff. In end-game it might be a bit more proportional with sheer numbers, but until max armies it would likely be an indirect marine buff. Blizzard has nerfed AoE instead of going this direction, which I think works out okay.
That said, there are other solutions.
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On November 12 2012 23:08 bananafone wrote:
Why does so many solutions to deathballs involve better defensive positioning? I really dont get it, we already have a matchup functioning that way -> mech TvT. Now it might just be me, but i really dont consider that particular matchup all that fun to watch or play. If you buff defensive positioning you will get more defensive positioning. Its actually pretty simple, but defensive positioning isn't really what anybody want is it?
Personally what I want to see is more harass. Currently hellions, oracles, banshees, terran bio drops and infestors does this well, in my opinion. Most of these units share the same weakness in that they too fragile to be used in real combat so they rely on hit and run tactics to do the damage they need. That, if you ask me, is the key to breaking up death balls; making units that are good enough to warrant use, but are too fragile to be used in deathballs. Its not actually about breaking up deathballs by demotivating the use of deathballs, but rather about motivating the use of units that just plain dont fit into deathballs. Most of the new units fit reasonably well into this scheme. You can always argue whether we have enough of these new units, but we are definately (in my opinion) moving in the right direction.
I've the thread backwards, but I did want to respond to the TvT point. I respect that you might not enjoy that particular matchup, however you can't really deny that TvT has the most variety in how it's played out with any number of viable openings, midgame and lategame compositions all perfectly viable. There are also 0 hard counter units in the matchup, everything single units serves multiple purposes and while mixture of units is very important it is not the most important part of the matchup.
Here's an example, when playing Bio vs. Mech marauders are really helpful to both pickoff tanks as well as soak damage from hellions and tanks. That being said you have plenty of time to start mixing them into your main composition after you figure out your opponent is going mech and you don't even have to actually make them. Marines/Medivacs are perfectly capable of taking down a mech army IF you have a significant advantage in the engagement by skillfully catching your opponent offguard or at a bad angle. At the same time you can't simply a-move a perfect mixture of marauder/marine/medivac over a well positioned mech army, you'll lose that fight extremely badly. The game then evolves from being about what units people are making into how they are using the units they have, and that is what makes this game exciting.
Cloak Banshee's make for a great TvT opener, they perform good scouting and excellent harass early on. At the same time even unprepared your opponent probably won't be crippled by your banshee play unless he plays it out very poorly. As the game transitions into the midgame and the lategame the money you spent very early on cloak can turn to a huge advantage as you make a few cloaked banshee's to take out your opponents mech army after wrestling air dominance from him. This kind of short term->long term use of a unit simply doesn't happen in other matchups, and the roles of other units in the other mu's doesn't really change.
TvT is also very unique in that it allows for huge comebacks, you can be down 50 or 60 supply from a bad fight and still comeback to win. You won't be pulling that off very often in TvZ or TvP, ZvZ, ZvP and PvP. TvT is about how you use your units to your advantage, more so than actually just having the units.
The difference between how a top tier Terran handles his army and positioning and a masters player is extremely evident and you regularly see great plays made by the top Terrans. I can't say the same for the difference in infestor or colossus usage between top tier players and their lesser counterparts, I can't tell the difference between any zerg's infestor control only how they get to their armies, I can tell the difference between MKP's army and MMA's though, and they're both amazing micro and control players. MKP will be right in your face microing the shit out of a small skirmish while MMA will be dropping 2 places at once without losing a unit.
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On November 13 2012 20:42 Acritter wrote:
The way to defeat deathballs is to attack them directly by punishing players for forming them. Broodwar did so in part by having such a clunky interface and such poor pathing that deathballs were nigh-impossible, because it was so damn hard to actually get the damn thing together and get it moving properly, and partly because of how heavily they punished deathball play with their units. To show how, I'll use the example of air units.
In Broodwar, air units lacked the horrible pathing of ground units (because they never had to path at all), so the deathball could be formed just as well if not better than in SC2 thanks to the help of the stacking trick (include a very slow or immobile unit in your control group, and your units won't unstack). Anyone who cares to try will quickly discover that giant stacks of Battlecruisers or Carriers will roll over any number of AIs, and we all know about the legendary Broodwar Muta stacks (which were essentially deathballs in miniature, limited only by unit selection and my next topic of discussion). So why were Battlecruisers nigh-unusable in multiplayer, why were Carriers limited to an answer for Mech, and why did mass Muta never take over Broodwar? The answer is in the units that countered that kind of unit clumping. Carriers and Battlecruisers could not be used against Zerg, because Plague would ravage them and leave them easy prey for Scourge, Hydralisks, or Devourers. They were unusable against Protoss because of Psionic Storm, which they were far too slow to move out of, and the power and mobility of the Dragoon and the Scout, of all things. Carriers were only good against Terran, who had no good anti-air splash, even though the Goliath was easily superior to the Dragoon in its anti-air capacity and the Wraith could match the Scout. Battlecruisers were weak to Terran, though, because they lacked sufficient range to avoid being slaughtered by Goliaths and left no easy way to defend against the sheer horror that is Vulture drops. Mutalisks were excellent in all three matchups, but became quickly outdated in ZvT because of Irradiate/Valkyries, ZvP because of Corsairs/Storm/Archons, and ZvZ if the game ever got far enough to progress to Queens and Ensnare (I know of exactly one game where this happened, and it was GLORIOUS).
The connecting principle is that these units always stop being usable when strong AOE comes online. This is the secret of breaking the deathballs in SC2 as well. Give each race access to some AOE strong enough that clumps of units are crushed, and deathballs will instantly go out of date. Players will only move around with packs of units small enough that obliteration due to AOE is not crippling, and make sure they have some of that AOE themselves. It will be possible to hold ground with small numbers of units and good positioning, and the game will focus more on the whole map rather than big clumps of units.
Fortunately, HotS is already going this way. The Viper, Oracle, and Widow Mine all punish this type of play. It's a step in the right direction. I have high hopes for HotS, and if things aren't quite there yet, then with LotV as well.
I am glad another has concluded the same. It's so simple, why would it be so hard to break up a death ball? AOE by nature discourages clumping, especially if it does lots of damage, like AOE was in BW. If the goal is to please spectators by making battles go more "back and fourth' or just last longer in general ( as people say like BW ), then AOE additions might be what's needed. Unfortunately though I personally believe that when comparing the evolution of BW vs SC2 it's obvious that blizzard's constant patching has interfered at least somewhat with the matchups' evolving, BW was rarely patched leaving the strategy evolving all up to the players where as SC2 has been heavily patched when problems arise in matchups, making quick fixes that end up with negative unintended consequences. The constant patching possibly has prevented SC2 to reach an equilibrium at which the battles become more numerous.
Also I like the new additions in HOTS as well and believe that HOTS strategies will be very different, or at least I pretend to haha ^^.
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On November 17 2012 12:41 ZaeYeL wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2012 20:42 Acritter wrote:
The way to defeat deathballs is to attack them directly by punishing players for forming them. Broodwar did so in part by having such a clunky interface and such poor pathing that deathballs were nigh-impossible, because it was so damn hard to actually get the damn thing together and get it moving properly, and partly because of how heavily they punished deathball play with their units. To show how, I'll use the example of air units.
In Broodwar, air units lacked the horrible pathing of ground units (because they never had to path at all), so the deathball could be formed just as well if not better than in SC2 thanks to the help of the stacking trick (include a very slow or immobile unit in your control group, and your units won't unstack). Anyone who cares to try will quickly discover that giant stacks of Battlecruisers or Carriers will roll over any number of AIs, and we all know about the legendary Broodwar Muta stacks (which were essentially deathballs in miniature, limited only by unit selection and my next topic of discussion). So why were Battlecruisers nigh-unusable in multiplayer, why were Carriers limited to an answer for Mech, and why did mass Muta never take over Broodwar? The answer is in the units that countered that kind of unit clumping. Carriers and Battlecruisers could not be used against Zerg, because Plague would ravage them and leave them easy prey for Scourge, Hydralisks, or Devourers. They were unusable against Protoss because of Psionic Storm, which they were far too slow to move out of, and the power and mobility of the Dragoon and the Scout, of all things. Carriers were only good against Terran, who had no good anti-air splash, even though the Goliath was easily superior to the Dragoon in its anti-air capacity and the Wraith could match the Scout. Battlecruisers were weak to Terran, though, because they lacked sufficient range to avoid being slaughtered by Goliaths and left no easy way to defend against the sheer horror that is Vulture drops. Mutalisks were excellent in all three matchups, but became quickly outdated in ZvT because of Irradiate/Valkyries, ZvP because of Corsairs/Storm/Archons, and ZvZ if the game ever got far enough to progress to Queens and Ensnare (I know of exactly one game where this happened, and it was GLORIOUS).
The connecting principle is that these units always stop being usable when strong AOE comes online. This is the secret of breaking the deathballs in SC2 as well. Give each race access to some AOE strong enough that clumps of units are crushed, and deathballs will instantly go out of date. Players will only move around with packs of units small enough that obliteration due to AOE is not crippling, and make sure they have some of that AOE themselves. It will be possible to hold ground with small numbers of units and good positioning, and the game will focus more on the whole map rather than big clumps of units.
Fortunately, HotS is already going this way. The Viper, Oracle, and Widow Mine all punish this type of play. It's a step in the right direction. I have high hopes for HotS, and if things aren't quite there yet, then with LotV as well. I am glad another has concluded the same. It's so simple, why would it be so hard to break up a death ball? AOE by nature discourages clumping, especially if it does lots of damage, like AOE was in BW. If the goal is to please spectators by making battles go more "back and fourth' or just last longer in general ( as people say like BW ), then AOE additions might be what's needed. Unfortunately though I personally believe that when comparing the evolution of BW vs SC2 it's obvious that blizzard's constant patching has interfered at least somewhat with the matchups' evolving, BW was rarely patched leaving the strategy evolving all up to the players where as SC2 has been heavily patched when problems arise in matchups, making quick fixes that end up with negative unintended consequences. The constant patching possibly has prevented SC2 to reach an equilibrium at which the battles become more numerous. Also I like the new additions in HOTS as well and believe that HOTS strategies will be very different, or at least I pretend to haha ^^.
Lets take the Siege Tank from SC2 and turn it into a Siege Tank from BW with 70 damage instead of a meager 35 (+15 vs armored). What will happen? Once you get a sufficient number of Tanks - or even a single one early - you will outdamage EVERYTHING and kill the AUTOMATICALLY TIGHT formations of your opponent. That is a terrible idea and increasing the AoE damage is NOT a good way to get rid of tight formations if there is no change made to the pathing that you can choose NOT to have your units clump up.
"Overpowered" or rather "very strong" AoE only works if it is not automatically destroying a huge clump of your army and to prevent that we would need "forced spreading of units with micro allowing for tight positioning" as it was the case in BW.
Even then the increased productivity and economy of SC2 will allow for Siege Tanks coming out too fast for their damage output. Fixing the Tank for this increased power by increasing the production time wont be exactly good, because it makes anyone going mech weak for the start and change the style too much in the direction of the Widow Mine ... a direction it is already pushed too much in.
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Back in the days when I was learning to make simple programs for the computer - which was about 20 years ago - there was the "party planer program", which is simply a matrix which has units "like and dislike" all other units. The movement AI should/could be changed to implement something like this so "that bunch of Zealots" try to push their way through all the Stalkers and Sentries in front of them in an attempt to get to the enemy. Marines might automatically run from a bunch of Banelings until there are too many other Marines or bigger units behind them which basically say "stand and fight and possibly die you coward".
This is what an "advanced pathing" could be like, but not the "everything acts as if they had magnets on their outside" kind of pathing. Random movement among a bunch of units of a single type is soooooo needed in SC2 to spread out the units ...
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This deathball behaviour is mostly a problem involving matchups with protoss, TvT, ZvT and ZvZ are quite fine in this respect already and quite close in quality to their BW counterpart I think (ZvZ even is much better in sc2).
The P deathball is just a result of it most times being the best option. Not being able to retreat along with bad harass options forces the 'defending until critical mass' sort of play. Protoss strength is just in timing attacks and big fights because their options support that: the sentry is MUCH better for supporting a tight group of units then supporting a spread out army.
Protoss hardly get's punished either for clumped up armies because the aoe against them is rather limited. Fungal is a limited damage spell and splitting hardly helps as they will get their damage off anyway, exactly the same with EMP. The concentrated firepower of being clumped and having your colossi over your army is often nearly as good as nicely spreading your army to avoid AoE, considering how difficult splitting is P tends to focus on other things before and during fights.
Spreading your army as P is just virtually irrelevant compared to using your spells correctly, warping in during the fight and focussing key units. Only thing you really care about for spreading are colossi battles in PvP and your HT in PvT.
Just slightly incentivizing spreading by making it more important to have your units spread and actually making it easier to spread (formation movement for example) will go a long way already. The fact that units look like one big clump while moving over the field probably won't ever be changed.
Also deathball play and lack of back and forth action are related but different subjects. The lack of back and forth action in sc2 in general is just the difficulty of retreating.
In BW and almost any other RTS one or even both armies in a matchup can retreat without much losses, typically the faster army. The setup is then usually that the faster army is weaker straight up but the player get's map control in return which can be used for harassing or gaining an economic advantage, the slower player tries to force the fight or uses some harass units to do economic damage. In sc2 however most matchups have a weird setup where neither player can retreat from a fight often because certain spells and abilities disable this. Forcefield, fungal, concussive shell + stim, blink etc are all abilities that punish retreating too heavily. Sometimes they enable retreating but they generally tend to do this worse. This just leads to both players having to commit to the fight or lose too much on the retreat with the natural result of the game resorting to timing attacks and turtling. Afterall what would you do if you knew you will lose a fight and can't avoid it either if you move out? You defend and wait till you can win that one fight with a timing, which is exactly what protoss does almost every game.
Promoting back and forth play needs to be done by actually being able to retreat and/or having good harass options. Protoss has neither, zerg has few, terran is the only one with plenty. Right now blizzard is only looking at the harass option though and making a half-assed job out of it, even worse they give terran an anti-harass unit.
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On November 18 2012 02:55 Rabiator wrote:
Lets take the Siege Tank from SC2 and turn it into a Siege Tank from BW with 70 damage instead of a meager 35 (+15 vs armored). What will happen? Once you get a sufficient number of Tanks - or even a single one early - you will outdamage EVERYTHING and kill the AUTOMATICALLY TIGHT formations of your opponent. That is a terrible idea and increasing the AoE damage is NOT a good way to get rid of tight formations if there is no change made to the pathing that you can choose NOT to have your units clump up.
"Overpowered" or rather "very strong" AoE only works if it is not automatically destroying a huge clump of your army and to prevent that we would need "forced spreading of units with micro allowing for tight positioning" as it was the case in BW.
Even then the increased productivity and economy of SC2 will allow for Siege Tanks coming out too fast for their damage output. Fixing the Tank for this increased power by increasing the production time wont be exactly good, because it makes anyone going mech weak for the start and change the style too much in the direction of the Widow Mine ... a direction it is already pushed too much in.
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Back in the days when I was learning to make simple programs for the computer - which was about 20 years ago - there was the "party planer program", which is simply a matrix which has units "like and dislike" all other units. The movement AI should/could be changed to implement something like this so "that bunch of Zealots" try to push their way through all the Stalkers and Sentries in front of them in an attempt to get to the enemy. Marines might automatically run from a bunch of Banelings until there are too many other Marines or bigger units behind them which basically say "stand and fight and possibly die you coward".
This is what an "advanced pathing" could be like, but not the "everything acts as if they had magnets on their outside" kind of pathing. Random movement among a bunch of units of a single type is soooooo needed in SC2 to spread out the units ...[/QUOTE]
I was not advocating specifically for the tank, just the principle behind increasing AOE options in the game. I completely disagree about the clumping of units creating such a problem with AOE. Clumping forces a player to constantly spread / micro their army, which starts to make for some pretty massive / sick battles because of the intricate positioning...like BW but SC2 is known for deathball so I guess that's why you're thinking the way you are.
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On October 13 2012 08:45 Filter wrote:
Tweaking the game to promote defensive positioning might just be the cure to all this turtle nonsense that we're looking for.
Lol? Promoting defensive positioning = more people defending (since you have a higher chance of winning if you're defending) = more people turtling (in order to have a higher win rate)
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On November 18 2012 12:00 Freezd wrote:Show nested quote +On October 13 2012 08:45 Filter wrote:
Tweaking the game to promote defensive positioning might just be the cure to all this turtle nonsense that we're looking for.
Lol? Promoting defensive positioning = more people defending (since you have a higher chance of winning if you're defending) = more people turtling (in order to have a higher win rate)
*Sigh*!
Turtling isnt viable as a way to win atm; the only thing you can hope to achieve is stalling your opponent for some time until he has got enough economy and production to trade inefficiently and finally crush you. This is very true for Terrans due to the amount of building space they need for production compared to the other two races. Turtling simply makes you give up any form of map presence.
The game is dominated by the "lets grab every unit we have and attack at one spot" deathball tactic with maybe some drop play to "pull strings". It wouldnt be so terrible to have other viable strategies available to the player apart from this one.
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EPT
