TvP Mech still not viable? - Page 35

On December 16 2012 20:23 Lyyna wrote:
Bio is better, still doesn't mean mech is not viable. people don't really get this..

On December 16 2012 20:04 Thezzy wrote:
I don't consider Thor/Hellion to be truly Mech.
For me, Mech is not specifically Mechanical units, but a playstyle.

A playstyle that builds up slowly, creeps across the map, taking expansions and being brutally cost-efficient but immobile.
In BW a Siege Tank line basically meant: 'You can't go here'. Running into a Siege Tank line with nearly any army was a death sentence. Supported by Spider Mines, Science Vessels and Goliaths, Mech was all-round solid, the only true weakness being slow and immobile but having enormous damage projection to make up for it.
Spider Mines could cover for flank attacks and some Starport units with Vultures could deal decently with harassment.

Tanks were also 150/100/2 and did a whopping 70 damage to many units and Immortals, Void Rays, Phoenixes, Blink and Warp Gate and so on did not exist.

Protoss had a much harder time harassing and bypassing the Mech army and even more difficulty engaging it.
But, because Mech was so slow and immobile to get up and running, this was a fair tradeoff.

In SC2, there is far too much mobility and harassment available to make that tradeoff as fair as it was in BW.
On top of that, the core unit of a Mech play (Tanks) got a painful nerf in comparison to BW.
Their damage was cut in half against a lot of units, their gas cost increased by 25% and their supply increased by 50%.

Whereas 40 supply tanks could do 70*20 = 1400 damage at best, in WoL this dropped to 50*13 = 650 damage, but only against Armored. It drops even further against non-Armored units.
BW Tanks did do 75% damage against some units and 50% damage against units like Zerglings, but even then you could get more Tanks for the same supply.

With unit AI much better and far more harassment options available (Blink, Warp-ins, Void Ray/Phoenix) the immobility of Mech hurts more and the tanks can't make up for it anymore.

Even a fully maxed 200/200 3/3 Tank heavy army cannot as easily destroy a Protoss army.
Furthermore, due to the Warp-in mechanic, Mech has to win a landslide victory in order to survive the next wave.
Whereas warping in 15 Chargelots is nearly instant, Mech is painfully slow to rebuild.

There is no single thing that makes Mech harder in TvP, it's everything put together.
Mechanical units can still work decently against Protoss (Thor/Hellion/Ghost with some Viking/Tank support), but you will need excellent scouting and army awareness to prevent Protoss from doing a tech-switch that kills you.

The simple fact that no pros are using true Mech in any of the tournaments is already evidence enough that Bio is simply better, otherwise the pros would have used Mech.
We see it on streams here and there and we see some pros use it occiasionally on the ladder but until we start seeing it frequently on tournaments the vast majority will likely stay with Bio.

On December 16 2012 20:28 Psychobabas wrote:
How about this:

Give the siege tank the warhound haywire missiles as an upgrade.

So it would deal better damage to protoss mech units (as hellbats can deal with zealots), not mess up tvz in the slightest, and still keep bio and biomech TvT viable!

What do you think?

On December 17 2012 03:23 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:


In short, SC2 is a different game than BW. But that doesn't mean you can't use similar playstyles as in BW. At the same time though, there are new styles, that may or may not be present in BW. Also, I feel the majority don't consider mech to be just mechanical units, though there are some that like to include air units as mech.

You are right though, for all the new options that Protoss has, mech should be much much stronger. Right now it can barely win straight up fights (and this is if you engage very well) in the early-mid game, with you being unable to pressure unless you do some sort of thor based mech, because if you try to punish him for lets say, expanding too much, you won't have your walls at home to make your engagement that much stronger. In the lategame, yes you can win fights more easily, but even so you have to keep your army together.

Like you mention, I would really like the tank to hold ground better. In BW you could have a few somewhere and feel pretty safe about holding it. In SC2 you can see this in TvT. But in TvP, everything is so much faster, so much tankier, that a few tanks barely does anything without a full wall defending them.

I think the siege tank can definitely be redesigned and balanced regarding its stats. Right now, simply making it stronger won't be the best idea, because of Terran's good scaling lategame thanks to MULEs (once you reach like 50 tanks you can kill almost everything even with little to no support units). It could also make early all-ins too strong from the Terran. I think the only thing that can really fix this though is removing siege tank smart fire. After all, widow mines don't have it do they? ( They overkill). If they buff tanks so that they're better early and midgame individually, but make them overkill (so that all-ins aren't too strong because the tanks need to spread out to be used as efficiently as possible), that would help mech from not having to be so fricken scared until the lategame. At the same time, you can hold more ground in the lategame without having to deathball your army in one place, and grouping up 50 tanks in one area won't be too strong due to overkill, forcing them to spread out.

On December 17 2012 03:23 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:


In short, SC2 is a different game than BW. But that doesn't mean you can't use similar playstyles as in BW. At the same time though, there are new styles, that may or may not be present in BW. Also, I feel the majority don't consider mech to be just mechanical units, though there are some that like to include air units as mech.

You are right though, for all the new options that Protoss has, mech should be much much stronger. Right now it can barely win straight up fights (and this is if you engage very well) in the early-mid game, with you being unable to pressure unless you do some sort of thor based mech, because if you try to punish him for lets say, expanding too much, you won't have your walls at home to make your engagement that much stronger. In the lategame, yes you can win fights more easily, but even so you have to keep your army together.

Like you mention, I would really like the tank to hold ground better. In BW you could have a few somewhere and feel pretty safe about holding it. In SC2 you can see this in TvT. But in TvP, everything is so much faster, so much tankier, that a few tanks barely does anything without a full wall defending them.

I think the siege tank can definitely be redesigned and balanced regarding its stats. Right now, simply making it stronger won't be the best idea, because of Terran's good scaling lategame thanks to MULEs (once you reach like 50 tanks you can kill almost everything even with little to no support units). It could also make early all-ins too strong from the Terran. I think the only thing that can really fix this though is removing siege tank smart fire. After all, widow mines don't have it do they? ( They overkill). If they buff tanks so that they're better early and midgame individually, but make them overkill (so that all-ins aren't too strong because the tanks need to spread out to be used as efficiently as possible), that would help mech from not having to be so fricken scared until the lategame. At the same time, you can hold more ground in the lategame without having to deathball your army in one place, and grouping up 50 tanks in one area won't be too strong due to overkill, forcing them to spread out.

On December 17 2012 04:27 ZjiublingZ wrote:


I 100% agree with your thoughts on the Tank. I really don't see any other way, at all, to make Tanks better against Protoss without being too strong against Zerg and WAY too strong against Terran. I've thought about this so many nights, and this is really the only reasonable solution I have thought of. Of course changing such a core unit would drastically effect the game, but hey, they did it with the Infestor.

On December 17 2012 04:03 Rabiator wrote:

While I despise the stupid "its a different game argument" at the start you are coming to the right conclusions that the game doesnt really "feel right" atm and that the balance is kinda off for mech (and especially the Siege Tank). This has to do with the stupidly high mobility of Zerg and Protoss plus the ability to charge in as a super tight clump of units. To stop Siege Tanks from being too good they had to be nerfed and this changed them from "scary in a group of 5-6" to "mildly annoying in a small group". Its simple math and game design concepts which clash here, but sadly too many people dont see it.

If you want to fix the Siege Tank to its proper "threatening" state you have to increase the damage, BUT you also have to make sure that people cant fill the battlefield as quickly with them ... which means taking out economic boosts like the MULE. Since you take out the economic boost for one race the others need to lose theirs as well ... in short: Inject Larvae and Chronoboost ... and since Zerg lost their production speed boosts the ones for Terran and Protoss - Reactor and Warp Gate - have to go as well. Once this is done the devs have to make sure that "Joe Bronzeleague" wont lose all his army by a-moving it into a bunch of tanks and just force-spread the units on movement AND restricting the number of units in a control group to 12 ... while making it possible for pros to tighten their clumps of units through the use of micro.

After all this you would gain a higher importance for expensive (=exciting) units due to fewer production cycles being available; you could have more outrageous attacks or spells (usually AoE) since you can allow them to be 1-shotting and NOT kill half the army of your opponent AND you even add more micro for pros instead of simply limiting yourself to "Marine splitting" which is a) Terran only and b) putting the defender at a disadvantage over the attacker when it should be the other way round with the attacker having to work harder for a victory. That and Siege Tanks "working as intended again" would be quite good consequences of a few changes to the "general mechanics". Sadly Blizzard isnt yet at a point to admit that "more more more units" and "faster faster faster speed" are not going to work to make the game easy enough to play for casuals AND easy enough for viewers to follow and understand in an eSport. Sticking spells and abilities on everything wont make them exciting and only destabilize the game.

On December 17 2012 04:08 Azoryen wrote:
Instead of over analysing why mech doesn't work and coming up with solutions, people should realize that Blizzard apparently has no intention of making mech work anymore and try to analyse that instead.

I mean, Blizzard has the knowledge and power to make mech viable, they don't need any more suggestions from anyone. If they haven't done it this far into the BETA, is simply because they prefer not to.

If I had to guess, I'd say they tested it internally and realized that T can't ever have very strong lategame compositions because of MULEs, which make possible for T armies to exceed in size the opposing army by 50 supply. And since they have huge resistance to changing basic mechanics like MULEs, that's the end of any hope of T ever being allowed to reach lategame compositions that can match Z and P.

On December 17 2012 08:27 Resistentialism wrote:
Part of what made mech TvP in bw balanced was that the highly mobile TvP styles where pretty bad. Protoss doesn't have the options to do econ/pressure builds in the mid game because the danger is that you'll lose your army in the middle of the map to bio or lose to drops. Protoss generally has to all-in or turtle. The other thing is that terran vulture harass was primarily shut down with core units and this harass denial was mostly efficient, so long as the protoss could get the right positioning.

Maybe with protoss' new scouting options, and the couple extra gimmicky harass options, you could say that protoss ought to be able figure out the difference between a primarily bio and primarily mech terran composition a little easier.

I don't know, if I had to paint a small vignette of what made PvT v mech right it was small numbers of dragoons taking pot shots at a bunker they outranged, forcing the terran to get siege mode earlier than they really wanted to. Against a bio opening in WoL this is pretty much suicide 90% of the time.

It's hard to imagine how to balance a terran style that can turtle super hard til they can out-muscle the best protoss units, while also being able to harass with hellions to punish protoss greed, while all the while the protoss is worried about being killed by bio until 12 minutes into the game. (Please Note: This is NOT what the game is like at the moment, for the record.)

On December 17 2012 07:16 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:


Blizzard has consistently been mentioning how they're trying to make mech in TvP work. Might you want to elaborate why you think they gave up? We just got a huge patch recently and then another buff to widow mines, so maybe they want to do things slowly. After all we still have about 2 months left of beta, so we can still see a few more patches.

On December 17 2012 09:01 SheaR619 wrote:


Isnt hallucination like practically free atm so scouting isnt an issue? Also stargate play is also really good and viable against mech compare to BW. A phoenix opening is in no way bad at all by denying hellion drop and scouting so you should be able to tell if he going for what imo.

On December 16 2012 20:23 Lyyna wrote:
Bio is better, still doesn't mean mech is not viable. people don't really get this..

On December 17 2012 09:02 Azoryen wrote:

Sure:
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/6631904103?page=2#23
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/6606362316?page=2#25

These aren't even recent posts, so I don't know why you guys are wasting your time with this.

Also, you mentioned yourself the problem of MULE scaling and I might add the even more complex problem of how MULEs allow T to have 40% more army supply into his max. This forces ZvT and PvT match-ups to be all about Z and P not allowing T to ever get to that situation, so even if you have fancy lategame mech (or air) compositions, your evenly matched opponents will not let you get to them. And for the game to be balanced, Blizzard must give Z and P the means to do exactly that.

Terrans need to understand that you can't have strong lategame compositions + be allowed to reach them + be able to match 80 drones economy with 30 scvs + MULEs and have a 170 supply army against a 120 supply army.
That will never happen.