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Maybe We're Looking At Deathballs Backwards - Page 5

Forum Index > StarCraft 2 HotS
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Zrana
Profile Blog Joined August 2010
United Kingdom698 Posts
November 18 2012 13:24 GMT
#81
The issue is, AoE is too weak. If you make AoE stronger then you have to split up your big death army or it's just gonna get mauled by the first high templar or bunch of tanks that comes along.
sebvolc
Profile Joined March 2011
Denmark20 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-11-18 14:06:34
November 18 2012 13:58 GMT
#82
A easy fix for the "death-ball problem" would be to limit control groups to XX supply. This would make the actual control of them harder to pull off, thus making them weaker. This would probably fix allot of the core game design problems of sc2.
The problem here being that it would virtually mean that they would have to start from scratch again with balancing the game, so it is not going to happen. Of course you have to limit on supply and not units to not heavily favor for instance Protoss over Zerg etc. larger units over smaller units.
Lets say that a maxed army -workers would require 4 control groups, making it at a 30~35 supply cap per group. This would both making splitting your armies up in several locations viable and doing more multi pronged an positional play stronger, but also weaken the death-ball overall.

I know they are not going to do it, but they could at least test it out at a "balance test map" or something like that. 35 supply limit on control groups Go!Go!

edit:
Actually I do don't know which is best supply limited control groups or unit limited control groups. But it would be easy to test, and easy to implement. I feel that they should at least try it out in internal testing and with a few pro's to see the effect, play with the numbers and see what works out etc.
Rabiator
Profile Joined March 2010
Germany3948 Posts
November 18 2012 14:07 GMT
#83
On November 18 2012 22:24 Zrana wrote:
The issue is, AoE is too weak. If you make AoE stronger then you have to split up your big death army or it's just gonna get mauled by the first high templar or bunch of tanks that comes along.

Making AoE stronger doesnt really solve the problem, because the game is "dumbed down" due to this autoclumping mechanic and will take lots of work to keep the units spread apart. Only Korean kids will be capable of doing that while every casual will get steamrolled by AoE units. Making AoE stronger will only turn Browders statement of "players WANT TO CLUMP THEIR UNITS" to be false, but the movement mechanic will still suck. [INTERVIEW]

The only real solution is a movement mechanic which keeps units spread out like in BW plus limiting the number of units per control group. Limiting it by supply is a terrible idea because of Zerglings and Banelings - which basically require that the number isnt high - and having 6 supply units in the game as well ... which then means you need AGES to get any units to the battle. 12 units is a decent limit ...
If you cant say what you're meaning, you can never mean what you're saying.
Qwertify
Profile Joined September 2008
United States2531 Posts
November 18 2012 14:15 GMT
#84
Death balls are a fairly odd thing. There are measures to prevent masses of units from being so effective, and yet they still are because most of these death balls have support units that make them immune to such tactics. Between two deathballs of exact units, positioning is key, and the outcome may be swayed heavily even with tiny mistakes.

In ZvP, in particular, sentry/stalker/immortal/warp prism death balls are annoying, as well as the templar/archon/mass stalker/immortal/collosus/mothership death ball. Unless the opponents army has been crushed, or is out of expansions, the Protoss player will be able to remass his army and go for a final push.

This is fine for the Protoss. It is nice that the player should have a second chance. The zerg player on the other hand, if he fails to counter the attack, is dead no matter what. This is largely due to the fact that Colossi and Immortals stay alive in battle because they can sit in the back and have high HP, and gateway units can be warped in with a Prism to immediately reinforce.

Zerg can remass their army quite quickly, but they can't do it in front of their opponents base.

This problem I think can be countered by limiting the number of warp gates a player can have, or units built with a warp gate have a longer production time (in this case they delay to warp in another unit is longer than the actual build time).

Whatever Blizzard decides to do about this, if anything at all, it is hard to draw a line as to how much a player should do to win the game. You don't want to make it too much of a task to win a game. It is much better to have a series of seven matches, rather than one really long game where is it more back and forth, not because of some comeback, but because players can easily defend and remass their army. Could you imagine if the supply was limited to 100? Games would go on for much longer because 50 supply armies would have a very hard time breaking through even a small amount of defensive structures. So that line has to be drawn between volatility of a game, and how long you want it to last. The game cannot be so volatile however, that player skill is irrelevant. So far I think Blizzard has done a great job.

Deathballs of any race have a way of being managed. Of course there are no direct counters. Its not like you can build a massive amount of lings to counter mass stalker. You have to micro and position yourself quite well. So, end game deathballs are quite even between races, and they might be more volatile since defensive structures become increasingly irrelevant at that stage in the game. The question up to this point is, does any race have to micro better/harder than another to come out with that victory?

My own opinion is that Protoss have it the easiest, with mothership colossus templar, followed by broodlord infestor, and lastly Terrans have it the hardest, with Ghost Raven mech BC.

It comes down to end game armies and how hard they are to micro, and does any one race have an easier time getting that final army over another race.
CJ Entusman #24
sebvolc
Profile Joined March 2011
Denmark20 Posts
November 18 2012 14:25 GMT
#85
On November 18 2012 23:07 Rabiator wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 18 2012 22:24 Zrana wrote:
The issue is, AoE is too weak. If you make AoE stronger then you have to split up your big death army or it's just gonna get mauled by the first high templar or bunch of tanks that comes along.

Making AoE stronger doesnt really solve the problem, because the game is "dumbed down" due to this autoclumping mechanic and will take lots of work to keep the units spread apart. Only Korean kids will be capable of doing that while every casual will get steamrolled by AoE units. Making AoE stronger will only turn Browders statement of "players WANT TO CLUMP THEIR UNITS" to be false, but the movement mechanic will still suck. [INTERVIEW]

The only real solution is a movement mechanic which keeps units spread out like in BW plus limiting the number of units per control group. Limiting it by supply is a terrible idea because of Zerglings and Banelings - which basically require that the number isnt high - and having 6 supply units in the game as well ... which then means you need AGES to get any units to the battle. 12 units is a decent limit ...


I don't think anyone can really know that without throughout testing it out. I don't think the 12 unit limit would work, since the game is design around "no limits" and you probably can not make that drastic a change without screwing all the mechanics of the game completely up and making it an entirely new game. It might work, it might not.

But either way I feel that limiting the number of units in your control groups will give a small nicely scaling disadvantage to massing up of units. The mechanic is really beautiful since you can overcome it with great control. Also this will give the "defenders advantage" quite a boots since it will be easier to pre position your army. Also positioning in attacking becomes much more important.
Overall I can see lots of benefits, and only one major disadvantage (which is the redesigning of the entire balance of the game).
So it is not going to happen, but it would so much fix most of the problems for sc2.
Rabiator
Profile Joined March 2010
Germany3948 Posts
November 20 2012 06:14 GMT
#86
On November 18 2012 23:25 sebvolc wrote:
Show nested quote +
On November 18 2012 23:07 Rabiator wrote:
On November 18 2012 22:24 Zrana wrote:
The issue is, AoE is too weak. If you make AoE stronger then you have to split up your big death army or it's just gonna get mauled by the first high templar or bunch of tanks that comes along.

Making AoE stronger doesnt really solve the problem, because the game is "dumbed down" due to this autoclumping mechanic and will take lots of work to keep the units spread apart. Only Korean kids will be capable of doing that while every casual will get steamrolled by AoE units. Making AoE stronger will only turn Browders statement of "players WANT TO CLUMP THEIR UNITS" to be false, but the movement mechanic will still suck. [INTERVIEW]

The only real solution is a movement mechanic which keeps units spread out like in BW plus limiting the number of units per control group. Limiting it by supply is a terrible idea because of Zerglings and Banelings - which basically require that the number isnt high - and having 6 supply units in the game as well ... which then means you need AGES to get any units to the battle. 12 units is a decent limit ...


I don't think anyone can really know that without throughout testing it out. I don't think the 12 unit limit would work, since the game is design around "no limits" and you probably can not make that drastic a change without screwing all the mechanics of the game completely up and making it an entirely new game. It might work, it might not.

But either way I feel that limiting the number of units in your control groups will give a small nicely scaling disadvantage to massing up of units. The mechanic is really beautiful since you can overcome it with great control. Also this will give the "defenders advantage" quite a boots since it will be easier to pre position your army. Also positioning in attacking becomes much more important.
Overall I can see lots of benefits, and only one major disadvantage (which is the redesigning of the entire balance of the game).
So it is not going to happen, but it would so much fix most of the problems for sc2.

We really need someone with math skills and good articulate skills and connections to Blizzard (in short: someone like Day[9]) to explain things to Dustin Browder and make him understand the problem that the deathball creates. He really seems ignorant of the purely mathematical side of it.
2 Marines vs 1 Zealot compared to 20 Marines vs 10 Zealots compared to 60 Marines vs 30 Zealots ... the balance shifts.

As an ex-casual (I played BW casually, but gave up on SC2 really fast) I can only add that the unlimited unit selection does make things harder to control for people who have not the ability to react as fast as a progamer. Thus forcing people to split their armies into task forces would help a lot and reducing the number of units on the battlefield - by removing the production and economy boosts - would help even more. I think it has been fairly agreed upon that the large amount of casual players attracted by the interesting campaign and the easy and fun multiplayer are what gave BW its cult status, so a lot should be done to make the game casual friendly. You dont make it casual friendly by turning it into a "blob vs blob" game, because there is too much at stake in an "all-in battle". Scouting is at best poor at low levels and thus it is easy to overrun your defenseless opponent (because he took all his troops to the middle of the map).
If you cant say what you're meaning, you can never mean what you're saying.
ledarsi
Profile Joined September 2010
United States475 Posts
November 20 2012 06:48 GMT
#87
Reducing the number of units on the battlefield will not solve the deathball problem. In fact, it will exaggerate it as players spend more time turtling to get to that maxed out unbeatable army because it is simply the strongest and most utility-maximizing thing to do.

The only way to fix the deathball is to make deathballs sub-optimal compared to splitting your army into smaller groups. One effective way to do this is to INCREASE the number of units on the field at once, as very large groups of units do not play well together. Improved pathing makes more units able to work together effectively, but there are still limits with regards to unit size and range. If a player could make 500 marines, it would be sub-optimal to do so instead of having a few smaller groups. I'm not sure exactly what size task force players would settle on in this case, but I imagine five armies of 100 is about right.

Now, I am not suggesting increasing the supply limit to 500. But reducing the supply costs of units will go a long way. The 3 supply tank, 2 supply roach and hydra, 6 supply colossus, etc. etc. has created a situation where you have so few actual units that it makes sense to keep them all in one place. Your "stack" of units isn't actually full even when you are maxed. You haven't started to get diminishing returns yet from adding more units.

Another way to disincentivize deathballs is to simply have powerful abilities and weapons that cannot be mitigated, but which do not stack. I'm talking BW siege tank shots, or dark swarm type hardware. Abilities that make a lower cost and lower supply army able to defeat a larger army in a localized area. Major candidates for this function are PDD and Swarm Hosts, but they presently don't do the job worth a damn, and require massive buffs to be actual anti-deathball functions.

Yet another way to do this is to have units be more expendable. More expensive units hurt more to lose them, so you protect them by having them move about in numbers. Cheaper units can be moved about in smaller groups with less risk. They don't need to do as much damage to be justified, and the absolute loss of being cornered by a huge army and losing the whole group is much less. Having expensive units greatly encourages deathballing.
"First decide who you would be, then do what you must do."
Tobberoth
Profile Joined August 2010
Sweden6375 Posts
November 20 2012 08:20 GMT
#88
On November 13 2012 04:51 Patate wrote:
Actually, the reason why people turtle in this game is that 3 base mining is WAY enough for any production.. more than that is just:
1. more chances of getting dropped
2. more supply for workers, so less for units


Less income per base, and less worker/max supply (whatever the way), is the way to go. That alone will not break the deathball, but it will make up for a way more dynamic early to late-midgame.

I played the 6m1g mod a few months ago, and while the game is not balanced for this kind of gameplay, it rendered OBSOLETE any kind of non-cheesy 1 base play (1-1-1, 4gate, etc..). It also made the game way more dynamic: with less units, we tried harassing the numerous bases in order to gain an advantage in the long run.

This is the main thing that has to be changed. The income per base right now is way too high: there is absolutely no reason why I should be going for a 4th base as a protoss... in pvt for example, it would only make me vulnerable to drops.

Edit: I'd also like to add that the gas should be a limited ressource. Mass High Templar or Infestor play should not be available (without seriously affecting the whole army's composition) until a 5th base. You want to reward macro? do that. Right now, we don't really have macro.. we have sitting on 3 bases and waiting to be maxed. Very rarely did players get maxed in BW, because contains were common, and so were harassments.


This is really it, IMO. In SC2, it's a race to 3base saturation -> endgame deathball. For Zergs, this means 3 bases and an extra base for gas. Hell, even 2 bases is enough if you're going for a simpler and cheaper composition (going mass roach or roach/hydra as zerg for example). The game really gets more interesting and more complex as you have to get more bases, look at BW replays from 1-2 years ago, people exand all over the map and try to defend everything while harassing to keep their opponent back. It becoms like Go where the players try to cut of territories and split the map, and then start to work for that big lategame army, but they are still forced to be active constantly because delaying another base from your opponent makes a big difference. In Sc2, it simply doesn't, because said opponent doesn't actually NEED a 4th base, he's already on the way to the deathball.
Rabiator
Profile Joined March 2010
Germany3948 Posts
November 20 2012 08:53 GMT
#89
On November 20 2012 15:48 ledarsi wrote:
Reducing the number of units on the battlefield will not solve the deathball problem. In fact, it will exaggerate it as players spend more time turtling to get to that maxed out unbeatable army because it is simply the strongest and most utility-maximizing thing to do.

The only way to fix the deathball is to make deathballs sub-optimal compared to splitting your army into smaller groups. One effective way to do this is to INCREASE the number of units on the field at once, as very large groups of units do not play well together. Improved pathing makes more units able to work together effectively, but there are still limits with regards to unit size and range. If a player could make 500 marines, it would be sub-optimal to do so instead of having a few smaller groups. I'm not sure exactly what size task force players would settle on in this case, but I imagine five armies of 100 is about right.

Now, I am not suggesting increasing the supply limit to 500. But reducing the supply costs of units will go a long way. The 3 supply tank, 2 supply roach and hydra, 6 supply colossus, etc. etc. has created a situation where you have so few actual units that it makes sense to keep them all in one place. Your "stack" of units isn't actually full even when you are maxed. You haven't started to get diminishing returns yet from adding more units.

Another way to disincentivize deathballs is to simply have powerful abilities and weapons that cannot be mitigated, but which do not stack. I'm talking BW siege tank shots, or dark swarm type hardware. Abilities that make a lower cost and lower supply army able to defeat a larger army in a localized area. Major candidates for this function are PDD and Swarm Hosts, but they presently don't do the job worth a damn, and require massive buffs to be actual anti-deathball functions.

Yet another way to do this is to have units be more expendable. More expensive units hurt more to lose them, so you protect them by having them move about in numbers. Cheaper units can be moved about in smaller groups with less risk. They don't need to do as much damage to be justified, and the absolute loss of being cornered by a huge army and losing the whole group is much less. Having expensive units greatly encourages deathballing.

More units on the battlefield
I call this the "shark and the swarm of fish problem", because more units will make the screen clustered up with more stuff and make it even more impossible for a viewer to focus on some part of the action. It also DOESNT solve the problem, because that is basically a deathball ... LOTS OF UNITS in a small area.

In your thoughts you are overlooking certain parts of the equasion when you say that "fewer units will make people turtle more":
1. Fewer units on the battlefield is exactly what we had in BW and there was no deathball in that game, because ...
2. fewer units on the battlefield is only ONE of the things needed to be changed. Limited unit selection, forced spreading of units and a slight rebalancing of AoE attacks are equally necessary. Only one of these methods doesnt work!

The point with "fewer units" is basically to put the punch and excitement back into units like the Siege Tank and the Reaver-successor (the Colossus) by NOT making them face off against 40 Zerglings which easily overrun them alone or in the company of only a few infantry.

More expendable units
Bad idea, because this will force the inequality of the production speed boosts between the races even more. Being careful with your expensive units IS an important part of the game. Cheaper units are also less effective and the game *should have* a decent useage for tier 3 units. Expensive units only encourage deathballing because the infantry can be "stacked" so tightly that they are easily overrun. Even then it doesnt matter that there are a lot of Siege Tanks in one area, because they are still overrun quite easily by the least expensive unit in the game ... the Zergling.
If you cant say what you're meaning, you can never mean what you're saying.
Rabiator
Profile Joined March 2010
Germany3948 Posts
November 20 2012 11:36 GMT
#90
On the topic of "large armies"
Large armies sounds nice, because bigger is better, right? Or is it? The huge and very concentrated armies in SC2 are more or less preventing micro like we only get to see very rarely and very early in games, when the supply is less than 100. If you ever see a BW pro with his 2 Zerglings kill the 2 Zerglings of his opponent without losing one of them you will know you have seen micro. Marine splitting is seriously lame compared to that!

So the question becomes:
Do you prefer the game to have more emphasis on micro or on macro (which you would need to support your larger army)?

For me it is clear that the focus should be on micro, because that forces creativity with your units AND it enables a better player to come back after making a mistake. Slower battles with fewer units are simply easier to follow compared to those giant ones which we have in SC2 right now. The focus shouldnt be on any clever plan (buld) to outmacro the opponent and then crush him with clearly superior numbers, but rather on being able to use your units well without having to resort to wave after wave of cheap suicide troops.

Broodwar worked, so why does SC2 have to follow a different economic and production speed? "More explosions, more deaths = better sequel" hasnt really worked for movies which tried to rely on that principle, so why should it work for a game like Starcraft?
If you cant say what you're meaning, you can never mean what you're saying.
ledarsi
Profile Joined September 2010
United States475 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-11-21 01:40:12
November 21 2012 01:31 GMT
#91
There are a few critical features of SC2 that appear to be glossed over in this discussion that "fewer" units will create more micro. The first is that SC2 actually has far lower ceiling for number of units (combat units) than Brood War. You need considerably more workers per base in SC2 than in Brood War, and your fighting units cost much more supply. Consequently you actually do have a smaller army in terms of number of pieces in the board in SC2. These pieces are larger and have bigger numbers, but there are fewer of them. There are countless examples of this, from 2 supply marauders to 6 supply thors to 6 supply ultralisks and colossi, 4 supply immortals, etc. etc. The units in SC2 across the board cost much more supply than units in Brood War. This makes it quicker and cheaper to max out, and encourages doing so if you believe you will have the advantage in a large army battle.

Deathballs and Acceleration/Diminishing Returns + Show Spoiler +

Now, speaking generally, as the size of your army increases past a certain point, additional units begin to give diminishing returns. This is especially true for units with short ranges (particularly melee units). However it also has a significant effect on powerful units and positional units. Adding another unit to the big force yields less utility than putting that unit somewhere else.

SC2 is firmly stuck in accelerating-returns-land due to the small numbers of expensive units. Colossi are a paradigmatic case. Two colossi is MUCH more than twice as strong as just one colossus. Against units that the colossus can actually attack (discounting units like vikings, corruptors, void rays for the moment) they actually never stop having this kind of wildly accelerating returns. Twenty colossi is 120 supply- ridiculously impractical for a real game- and they STILL will never be less effective than multiple smaller groups of colossi. It's only twenty actual units with twenty distinct chunks of HP, and each one is so expensive you can't afford to send it off alone. Sending a colossus out to fight by itself is a waste of resources. Not so for smaller, cheaper units.

Marines (often considered a deathball-y unit in SC2) are actually quite different. They are 1 supply, and an expendable 50 minerals. You can actually send, say, eight, or sixteen marines out on their own (usually by dropship for mobility) and you gain strength by doing so. Splitting the marines in a strategic sense across the map makes marines more effective. However a big army will kill such a small group with zero casualties. So in order to fight a big group and actually win, you have to ball up yourself. Herein lies the reason deathballs are dominant- one player is incentivized to use them, and forces the other to do the same (Prisoner's Dilemma). If they don't, their small forces get destroyed for free, or with minimal damage to the deathball.


Small Units Discourage Deathballs + Show Spoiler +

However, suppose the units are smaller and cheaper, which allows the tiny squads to meaningfully engage a deathball, and do damage without being destroyed for free. They still lose of course, but they inflict *casualties*. This happens when small units are used by both sides. Not with marines fighting colossi or thors or anything huge and expensive, but with marines fighting BW hydralisks. A big army of 1 supply hydralisks vs a small force of marines will win, and sustain casualties. The marines are fighting efficiently by splitting up. Colossi and Broodlords win, and sustain no casualties primarily because of their size and cost, and also because of their mechanics.

There is no compelling gameplay reason apart from "coolness" or gimmick-factor why bigger units would be desirable. Thors, for example, are not a better unit for being stronger and more expensive. It only reduces the number of options a player has for building and controlling that unit. One thor versus three goliaths, for example. What if I only want one goliath, and don't build the other two? Or three goliaths can be in three different places, controlled separately.

More relevant to deathballs, smaller units die more often. A large army of goliaths will suffer casualties for less damage taken than the same army of thors. Each goliath is easier to kill. A smaller enemy army can inflict meaningful, lasting damage that requires resources and production time to recover.

A big army of thors is strong only by relying on its weight. There is no finesse there, only the brute force of HP and DPS. And the enemy is going to need a big enough hammer in order to actually do any lasting damage, and kill even a single thor. You need to do at least 400 damage to even kill one. Whereas if that army was composed of 125 HP goliaths, then a much smaller force becomes much more effective, and can chip away at the goliath army much more easily.


Positional Play Discourages Deathballs + Show Spoiler +

Blizzard seems to like armies clashing, and dislikes positional play as it seems "boring." However the very idea of having a "big battle" presupposes an intent to incentivize deathball play. They focus on units' counter relationships and how compositions interact rather than on how fairly bland units fight one another in uneven distribution.

Suppose for the sake of argument that there is only one type of unit in the entire game. Obviously this unit's properties will have a massive impact on how the game plays.

Zerglings? Mad aggressive attacks to try and end the game immediately. Lots of zergling-on-zergling battles in the middle of the map. It plays fast, and perhaps is exciting, but ultimately there's not a lot more to be said.

Marines are much the same story. Whoever has more in one particular location will win locally. And marines have much stronger accelerating returns than zerglings due to their ranged attack, high dps, and low HP. The game will snowball quickly in favor of the player with more surviving marines early. The long and the short of it is that direct combat units, or "A-move units" are really quite boring if they're all you've got. They kill stuff provided you brought enough hardware, and they lose if you didn't.

Positional units don't follow this rule. An objectively weaker force can defeat a stronger force when well positioned. Unfortunately this dynamic is basically gone from SC2 (except the neutered tank). But in BW there were lurkers, dark swarm, reavers, arbiters, and other ways to get a local advantage for cheap. Put a few lurkers under a dark swarm, and they can bring the entire Russian Army up that ramp and it's not going to matter.

So if we do our one-unit thought experiment with a unit like a Lurker (assuming detection is available somehow) then we actually have a dynamic game. Where players put their lurkers matters. Covering one ramp might leave another ramp exposed. Sending a big force of lurkers forward into just a few lurkers already in position can be a big mistake (not so for marines).

Varying degrees of local advantage, the presence of strong positional units like lurkers, and the presence of force multiplier abilities and effects like dark swarm all act to make big armies acting in concert less effective. They can actually get stalled, or even defeated, by smaller armies used excellently.


Small Units Encourage Micro + Show Spoiler +

Furthermore, micro depends on a player's ability to control their units. The most obvious way to encourage micro is to simply give a player more units to control. Positioning becomes more relevant when there are more pieces on the board, as the main consideration is pieces' positions relative to each other.

Increasing the siege tank's supply cost to 3 is the biggest single nerf to the siege tank that Blizzard has made. A maxed army of siege tanks is now 33% smaller than a Brood War equivalent. Its damage was nerfed considerably, but if the tank were still 2 supply it might be feasible to use the tank in numbers.

This is especially important for a positional unit like the siege tank. At 3 supply you need every single tank you can possible build to be involved in a single fight simultaneously in order to even be effective. If you have a strong economy of about 80 workers, that leaves you only enough room for (at most) 40 tanks if you build literally nothing but scv's and tanks. If tanks were 2 supply, with the same worker count you would max out at 60 tanks. That is a tremendous difference in absolute army strength, resource cost notwithstanding.

With 60 tanks you can put 60 guns in 60 different places, rather than just 40. Mechanically, sieging and unsieging more tanks and controlling their positioning well is a greater challenge. Building that many tanks requires more economy, more production facilities, more time, and better macro, but yields a stronger army as a product of that additional macro skill. And the army is larger and more difficult to precisely manage, and much stronger when correctly micromanaged.


In summary, Blizzard should make big changes to resource and supply costs. They won't, but they should.

Making units bigger only reduces the number of pieces on the board. Their strength is only important relative to each other. Thor vs Thor is the same ballgame as Marine vs Marine, but with fewer pieces. Units should be SMALL to discourage deathballs. Having more pieces on the board makes splitting forces more efficient, less risky when units are destroyed, and causes small armies damage bigger armies as they are defeated. It also creates more opportunity for micro as there are simply more pieces to position, and more groups of units in different locations.
"First decide who you would be, then do what you must do."
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