On October 24 2012 13:46 EatThePath wrote: Engagement dynamics are governed by local DPS density. This is the source of much of the depth in RTS games. Higher DPS density is inherently rewarded because you are dealing concentrated damage. It's like focus fire happening automatically, in analogy. Usually there are lots of factors that mitigate this basic strength to make the game more interesting, many of which make use of the ability of units to reposition to avoid high enemy DPS and to increase your own local DPS. The most typical dynamic is pursuing an engagement with units in a high DPS area while retreating from your opponent's high DPS area. In the simplest way, a flank does this automatically, but there are lots of other formations you could imagine, and the complexity of situations quickly develops once you have units with different stats and abilities.
High dps density is basically a measurement of how big an individual unit is and how many you have. The damage it puts out is linear and only really matters when range matters. This is also why melee units are inherently stronger and why ultralisks have such great troubles being effective in a lot of ways.
The direct counterpart to density is splash damage. The denser the ball, the more effective splash becomes, unless it is a colossus. The interesting thing about colossus is that their AoE is actually more suited to fight against concaves than balls.
If you make units ball up less, you also make splash less powerful. Then suddenly you will realize that the units that become more viable due to weaker splash are the very same units that promote dps density in the first place, meaning you wont actually adress the issue imo.
Let's imagine extreme cases to illustrate the point I'm making. What if units didn't collide at all. One of the above "mitigating factors" is the banal fact that units can't take up the same space, but lets get rid of that. 12 marines vs 12 marines, go. Well... the only strategy will ever be stacking your marines perfectly on top of one another and then walking straight at the enemy and target firing the top of the stack. If you do anything else, like try to make an arc, you will quickly lose out on the local DPS front. Pull micro just means you've lost local DPS. Retreat can only lose local DPS in a similar way.
Marines have a hitpoint to dps ratio of 6.4. With stim it is 4.3. In comparison, a stalker(the other end of the spectrum) has 23.2 to light and 16.5 to armored. On top of that, the fire rate of a marine is 1 shot every 0.86 seconds(0.57 with stim), where as the stalker shots every 1.44 seconds.
Micro has to do with opportunity cost. Marines do way more damage than they do surviving, meaning it becomes imperative to let them dps. The reason you are not so rewarded from micro in deathballs is because damage output is so high that it overshadows the superior position that you can attain from micro. Attacking with a deathball is fire and forget in a lot of ways.
Also, the slower something fires, the easier it is to actually move it without losing dps time at all. With marines shooting twice per second, you end up clipping a lot, you just dont notice it the way you notice clipping an attack timer with a thor for example.
My point is that there are plenty of way to encourage splitting and encourage a better position (maps are important here as well). I don't dislike the current unit movement and pathing because in my perspective it is a huge improvement from brood war. The unwanted effect that has is a tendency to clump units and that benefits some units more than others. As Browder has also confirmed, this does not change by changing the way that units retain formations, at least not in practise.
What if units did collide as normal, and their collision barrier was twice their actual size, but you could place them close together with attention. But while in transit and unattended at their destination, they would be somewhat spread out. 12 marines vs 12 marines, go. This looks completely different. Attacking is now a lot harder; the system has inherent defenders advantage. Attacking units have to move into position, which reduces their local DPS. Just to attack on even footing, you have to arrange an elaborate position and synchronize the arrival of your units, otherwise you'll be suffering from a DPS deficit (despite mirror armies!) from the outset. And no matter what formation you take, the defender can adjust to demand further actions on your part. And so on and so on, but the defender always has the upper hand.
I agree that this is a nice example. Yet, what becomes of siege tanks and our beloved colossus? In my eyes this would also be a massive buff to bio, against any non bio composition.
You could essentially achieve the same results by arbitrarily restricting units from firing depth wise in a formation. Say that units block LoS of each other. You could also reduce the length of each unit of "range". That effectively does the same thing as just increasing the size of all units, without distorting the scale of the game. You could also have a slight "penetration" effect from single target units, so that any unit standing behind a unit would take 25% of the damage or something, making deep formations less attractive to wide ones.
The big issue imo is that in order to say that an idea is good, we need to make sure to test it properly, but who has the time and energy to do that? On paper, you suggestion here feels pretty good, but I can make up a bunch of speculative counter arguments rather easily.
I actually think the pathing is even worse than the clumping. Harvesters that go around minerals to mine unless you micro them. Army suddenly split. You have to spend time waiting after you click to see what happens and correct. That kind of crap never happened in ez mode BW.
We have already decided it's not useful, that's why we didn't put it in a patch. I'm not going to waste time, energy and resources testing something that doesn't do anything positive for the game. A change like this will require extensive testing and take a lot of effort to make sure it didn't break anything in campaign or anywhere else in the game.
If you don't agree, that is totally cool. Go test it now. You have an editor. I'm not stopping you. =)
They are wasting their time energy and resources with HotS anyway. Why not put it to something positive?
I know for a fact that most low level players can not deal with AOE.
A good example is a platinum Terran going up against ling baneling. He gets absolutely crushed because 2 banelings kill 20 clumped up marines. Same idea with Protoss players going against Fungals. If units would spread out more, this kind of game ending AOE wouldn't be so broken.
Even marines in BW didn't get massacred as easily by Reavers. Maybe 5 or so died from one blast, and that was because they didn't clump so much.
On October 25 2012 04:51 Zombo Joe wrote: They are wasting their time energy and resources with HotS anyway. Why not put it to something positive?
I know for a fact that most low level players can not deal with AOE.
A good example is a platinum Terran going up against ling baneling. He gets absolutely crushed because 2 banelings kill 20 clumped up marines. Same idea with Protoss players going against Fungals. If units would spread out more, this kind of game ending AOE wouldn't be so broken.
Even marines in BW didn't get massacred as easily by Reavers. Maybe 5 or so died from one blast, and that was because they didn't clump so much.
Then you would have these same players unable to get up and down ramps to get into a defensive position.
Splitting vs AoE is part of a skill cap.
I would prefer not to see unit movement change and instead see a focus on units that require micro in their own right to be more effective without the need of a spell to be a micro unit.
As it is now all the units we have are micro units because of spells for the most part.
Wanna know whats fun? controlling certain units to do cool things when controlled well.
Banshees and Stalkers against marines for example in the early game. We need more micro unit interaction at more stages of the game. So far the swarm host actually kind of adds to this. If I put stalkers in front of collossus as an a move the stalkers die and lose numbers. If I blink my stalkers back they survive more. So I need to actually blink back stalkers while my collossus are there while ALSO trying to defend them or keep vipers from taking them.
Its very cool and really fun. Before vipers I can basically step forward a could collossus and put others on hold position to slowly chew away at a swarm host massing player.
We have already decided it's not useful, that's why we didn't put it in a patch. I'm not going to waste time, energy and resources testing something that doesn't do anything positive for the game. A change like this will require extensive testing and take a lot of effort to make sure it didn't break anything in campaign or anywhere else in the game.
If you don't agree, that is totally cool. Go test it now. You have an editor. I'm not stopping you. =)
Telling the community, their customers, that they're wrong about their preferences. Nice. Each time they talk, it surprises me less and less why their recent games haven't been up to their usual (older) standards.
We have already decided it's not useful, that's why we didn't put it in a patch. I'm not going to waste time, energy and resources testing something that doesn't do anything positive for the game. A change like this will require extensive testing and take a lot of effort to make sure it didn't break anything in campaign or anywhere else in the game.
If you don't agree, that is totally cool. Go test it now. You have an editor. I'm not stopping you. =)
Telling the community, their customers, that they're wrong about their preferences. Nice. Each time they talk, it surprises me less and less why their recent games haven't been up to their usual (older) standards.
DB is an RTS expert compared to almost any unit movement complainer. We can trust his conclusion more than the wish of someone who does not understand the game to a level as an expert.
We have already decided it's not useful, that's why we didn't put it in a patch. I'm not going to waste time, energy and resources testing something that doesn't do anything positive for the game. A change like this will require extensive testing and take a lot of effort to make sure it didn't break anything in campaign or anywhere else in the game.
If you don't agree, that is totally cool. Go test it now. You have an editor. I'm not stopping you. =)
Telling the community, their customers, that they're wrong about their preferences. Nice. Each time they talk, it surprises me less and less why their recent games haven't been up to their usual (older) standards.
Maybe we should ask Day[9] to text D. Browder. Day[9]: Hey D. Browder units clump we need to fix this. D. Browder: NP Day[9] NP i change that shit. Day[9]: D. Browder your so bro your so bro
We have already decided it's not useful, that's why we didn't put it in a patch. I'm not going to waste time, energy and resources testing something that doesn't do anything positive for the game. A change like this will require extensive testing and take a lot of effort to make sure it didn't break anything in campaign or anywhere else in the game.
If you don't agree, that is totally cool. Go test it now. You have an editor. I'm not stopping you. =)
Telling the community, their customers, that they're wrong about their preferences. Nice. Each time they talk, it surprises me less and less why their recent games haven't been up to their usual (older) standards.
DB is an RTS expert compared to almost any unit movement complainer. We can trust his conclusion more than the wish of someone who does not understand the game to a level as an expert.
I really have to ask: where does this confidence come from? Is there anything in his resume that screams "this guy knows what he's doing"? The only question I really need to ask myself is, "what exists in SC2 that wasn't taken straight from BW that has actually added interesting gameplay dynamics?". At least in my mind, the only examples are the Phoenix and the current incarnation of the Widow Mine.
I just think: why would anyone look to DB and be so inspired to have faith when there's incredibly smart people like QXC and Day[9] (I admit I'm biased. hmc'10) that clearly understand what makes an RTS interesting and entertaining so much better.
As I've suggested, but not said outright, people are talking about 2 separate but related issues.
1) Unit movement-- How units move across the map, around terrain, etc. 2) Unit "clumpiness"-- How those units interact when they come together to form a ball.
Of course how units move on the map affects how they form a ball, but we need to realize that we have people talking about 2 things here.
Let's look at this video:
If you watch, marines have a tiny bit more trouble walking up a ramp, but still form a ball at the end.
Now let's look at this video:
In SC2, units tend to form a ball automatically at every click. This video shows how numbers can be tweaked so that the player can actively control his units formation while moving: whether in a ball (as they do now) or more spread out (as they do in his mod). I believe this video modifies the magic box, but Im not entirely sure.
My suggestion:
A fix would require modifying movement and control in such a way that units don't move entirely optimally (NOT Broodwar-bad but just a bit imperfectly) with a simple move command, while also allowing the player to spread out his units and keep them spread out like in video #2.
Why do I think this would be good?
Because if units move perfectly (like now) it keeps the deathball stuck together as it moves across the map instead of spreading it out like in Maverck's video. A-move a toss army across the map and it still forms a ball when it ends up at the other players base.
If you fix this, it makes controlling your army a more skillful exercise. Not some uber l33t apm-fest but enough that the player needs to pay careful attention to his army's movement.
picture how stalkers are a bit faster than zealots, stalkers and colossi. If you simply a-move across the map, your stalkers will die first. This modified movement makes armies slower, as they will have to negotiate obstacles, or risk being picked off one-by-one in the same way that stalkers sometimes get picked off because they are faster. A good player will control his army carefully when navigating terrain because he does not want this to happen.
Imagine an army at the top of the cliff in Maverck's map. Those marines would walk one-by-one into a meatgrinder. In SC2, they would all arrive together and perform much better. But a good player would stop at the foot of the ramp and make sure he wasn't walking into a trap
So what does adding the magic box ability do?
It means that you can keep your army spread out and moving in any formation the player chooses (as in the second video). That means that you can keep your army in whatever formation is best while it moves, unless it has to move through terrain or something.
This makes it easier to control your units in a battle while taking nothing away from the game: you can still clump your units if you want.
The marines start out perfectly spread so that one baneling will never hit more than 1 marine. In SC2, if the banelings run in and you try to move your marines back, they will begin to clump up and start to die. If you make the magic box better, you can move your entire marine army back while keeping them in that exact spread out formation. Imagine how different the battle would be.
But if the terran wanted to suddenly move all his marines into a tight ball (imagine zerglings come instead), he could do that by clicking in the center of his army, causing his marines to converge together
Yeah, I think we need to change how we present our arguments. Our argument should be that the change promotes micro because the units don't immediately ball up after you spent so much painstaking work to split them apart. It's wasted effort to constantly fight the game that automatically balls up your units after every reposition.
We have already decided it's not useful, that's why we didn't put it in a patch. I'm not going to waste time, energy and resources testing something that doesn't do anything positive for the game. A change like this will require extensive testing and take a lot of effort to make sure it didn't break anything in campaign or anywhere else in the game.
If you don't agree, that is totally cool. Go test it now. You have an editor. I'm not stopping you. =)
Telling the community, their customers, that they're wrong about their preferences. Nice. Each time they talk, it surprises me less and less why their recent games haven't been up to their usual (older) standards.
I'm with you. 5 Years ago did Blizzard ever say that something was too hard, so they wouldn't do it despite the benefits?
In summary of multiple connected threads/issues: DPS density/unit pathing and the macro mechanics of the game reinforce each other to produce the deathball syndrome. The faster game speed + macro mechanics and the overwhelming advantage of dps density encourages passivity, weakens the efficacy of harassment, and prevents multi-front engagements. The unease about HOTS that the community is slowly articulating is due to Blizzard's unwillingness to radically alter the game through the expansions (or if they are, they are not communicating this). Blizzard has to prioritize the spectating quality of the game over everything else as the "serious" player base undergoes the normal decline, if sc2 is to continue as an esport.
They should just have units take more space. Like have an invisible bubble so that a group of marine is actually bigger because there is space between them.
This would make battles longer (because it takes more effort or more time to reach full dps) and more fun to watch (due to being longer and more spread) which is what this game needs imo.
Would it break balance ? Probably. But hey HotS will break balance anyway, patches are here for a reason its not like WoL came out balanced.
EPT
