Another Look at High Ground Advantage - Page 3

On January 24 2013 02:25 arcHoniC wrote:


The problem with 70% of damage or something is that most damages like the marine is 5 or something and so its hard to give the same advantage to all units. A miss percentage would be equal for all units though.

On January 23 2013 23:50 drkcid wrote:


It wont encourage turtling because if someone plays too defensive waiting to be attacked on a high ground position the other player can get map control, better economy, better tech. Also drops, nydus or small distracting attacks would become more important.
Nobody is going to throw a deathball to another deathball in a defensive position with new high ground mechanics.

On January 24 2013 03:20 Warpath wrote:
I made a similar topic yesterday morning, but it didnt seem to get much attention at all. Hope you get some more notice, as it stands maps are just chokes everywhere.

if you want to see the arguements i made, though it can be TLDR'd to saying ramps = chokes
+ Show Spoiler +

On January 24 2013 06:20 xsnac wrote:
first of all : imo i dont think there is much need for defender advantage , is alredy hard to punish zerg 3 base or terran 3 fast cc if you open 1 gate expand or ffe as protoss .


adding stuff like : has X% chance to miss , is DUMB . you cant be seriously with having a % to do something if we want that sc2 to be taken as a serious sport/esport . all random chances were removed from sc2 , why should we bring them back ? defender advantage is already big and is hard to punish greedie play in sc2 atm .

On January 24 2013 04:00 nottapro wrote:



I am not following you.

The way I am proposing is both. But rather then a miss percentage being no damage, its a reduction in damage. So a marine has a say 30% chance of say 50% reduced damage.

Currently. With no high ground advantage. Marine fires 10 shots, all hit at the same damage.
Total Damage: 10 * 5 = 50 damage


Second proposal a flat miss rate. Lets say that is a 30% chance of missing.
His first 7 would be 5 damage, his normal dps. Then 3 shots would be 0 damage, a complete miss.
Total Damge: 7 x 5 + 3 x 0 = 35 damage
This has the problem that people might micro but technically no bullets were fired so their micro was wasted energy. Too frustrating.

Third proposal a flat percentage rate. Lets say 70% damage reduction.
All shots hit, 5 damage is reduced to 3.5.
Total Damage: 10 x 3.5 = 35 damage
All your units are at the same lowered damage during the entire engagement, there is no illusion of miss rate, its just a flat damage reduction with no fluctuations. Advantage, very predictable and easy to calculate, you would ALWAYS need 10 marines to come out even attacking 7 which are on highground, disadvantage, a flat rates give no fluctuating advantage to larger armys, meaing that high ground is always more favorable then larger armys.


My proposal
Flat miss rate is replaced with damage reduction.
He fires 10 shots. 7 Hit at 5 damage, his normal dps. Then 3 shots would be reduced say by 50% damage = 2.5.
(values are for example purposes only)
Total damage: (7 x 5) + (3 * 2.5) = 42.5
This is the best of both worlds, all your shots hit, but damage rate fluctuates, maintaining the illusion of missed shots while not sacrificing micro or flattening the percentage of damage done over time.

So sometimes 10 units will completely destroy 7 marines, or sometimes they will come out even. The larger army at the bottom, won't have its micro canceled, the engagement is somewhat predictable, but larger armys still have a fluctuating advantage, making it a risk for both sides to chose to engage.

See previous quotes to see how this system is implemented properly imitating the Warcraft 3 code.

On January 24 2013 03:56 awesomoecalypse wrote:
What about if shooting up cost you 1 range? So Marines would be effectively range 4 if attacking the high ground. This would reduce their dps density and add a consistent disadvantage to attacking high ground, without relying on randomness

On January 23 2013 16:25 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:


You have a good point here about it being easy to spot high advantage. He even admits it here, saying that Zerg has two good spotters, both of which are not very valuable nor hard to get.

Like you say, I am one of those who do not feel a chance factor belongs in SC2. However, what they could do is something similar to the semi-random system in WC3, in which it wasn't pure random (AKA it would be pretty consistent over small sample sets), or make it even less random by making it something like "miss every Xth attack". But beyond that, I can't think of anything that Blizzard and I would both like.

Skill:

I think you may need some clarification here, I don't really see your point. So I get that you like for there to be some forgiveness and comeback ability.



But then... you say that it can create 1 sided battles. You say it's important "for this to work", for what to work? Do you want or not want them to retreat, to have abilities like time warp to stop them from retreating or to help them escape? Make it unforgiveable to run into a bad spot, but overall make games be more forgiveable via comebacks through running into bad spots?

I would like to see what you mean here, can you elaborate?

I believe Blizz is most likely still open (as usual) on this topic as long as there is a good solution, but I can't think of anything else. Maybe something like an increase in armor? A decrease % in damage was also suggested on Bnet, but that can cause complications like decimals and such (IIRC there are decimal damages in the game already though, with things like Mutalisk attack bounce and such -- maybe this would be best).

If anything I think a % decrease would be best, and a very small one of course, since small differences end up causing a big difference in the result.

On January 24 2013 08:51 Serpico wrote:

People talk about chance then forget about the fog of war, it's one of the biggest randomizing factors in the entire game....