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On January 24 2013 08:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2013 08:51 Serpico wrote:On January 23 2013 16:25 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:As long as the enemy does not reveal them, they can blow him into pieces without resistance. Zerg profit the least from height advantage, since their ground range units do not fire very far. But with the Overlord and the Overseer they field two very good spotters 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. When a player has the ability to engage with a huge advantage like this, it could end up creating 1-sided battles where the low-ground player, who gets caught in a bad spot, loses the battle. It's important, for this to work, to give the player the opportunity to retreat from a bad position. 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. People talk about chance then forget about the fog of war, it's one of the biggest randomizing factors in the entire game.... Fog of war in and of itself is not random no more than hotkeys are random.
It creates a lack of information and an entire environment where crazy stuff happens, people act like the game is some neatly packaged machine with no ability for chance. It creates randomness because it creates uncertainty. You as a player cannot possibly know what will happen because of it. People argue against a chance to miss because they don't know exactly what will happen in a certain scenario when another unit has high ground. It's hypocritical. The BW highground mechanic actually created positional play and made maps feel varied in height, now SC 2 maps are completely flat with very little regard to terrain. People arguing against a mechanic that has already been shown to work better, it's actually kind of funny.
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On January 24 2013 08:57 Serpico wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2013 08:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:On January 24 2013 08:51 Serpico wrote:On January 23 2013 16:25 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:As long as the enemy does not reveal them, they can blow him into pieces without resistance. Zerg profit the least from height advantage, since their ground range units do not fire very far. But with the Overlord and the Overseer they field two very good spotters 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. When a player has the ability to engage with a huge advantage like this, it could end up creating 1-sided battles where the low-ground player, who gets caught in a bad spot, loses the battle. It's important, for this to work, to give the player the opportunity to retreat from a bad position. 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. People talk about chance then forget about the fog of war, it's one of the biggest randomizing factors in the entire game.... Fog of war in and of itself is not random no more than hotkeys are random. It creates a lack of information and an entire environment where crazy stuff happens, people act like the game is some neatly packaged machine with no ability for chance. It creates randomness because it creates uncertainty. You as a player cannot possibly know what will happen because of it. People argue against a chance to miss because they don't know exactly what will happen in a certain scenario when another unit has high ground. It's hypocritical. The BW highground mechanic actually created positional play and made maps feel varied in height, now SC 2 maps are completely flat with very little regard to terrain. People arguing against a mechanic that has already been shown to work better, it's actually kind of funny.
Fog of war is a null state. YOu either see it, or you don't. That is not random. Random would be there is sometimes fog of war, and sometimes there isn't. moving a unit to a dark patch might reveal what's there, or it doesn't. That is random.
As is, fog of war is an on/off function.
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United States4883 Posts
On January 23 2013 22:00 Qikz wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2013 21:30 Steglich wrote:
Why not just use a damage reducer instead of a % chance to hit, to completely remove the randomness?
I do agree with browder, anything that is random does not have a place in a strategy game.
But the high ground advantage is not enough in its current state in SC2. Actually, I think having some randomness, especially in attacking highground is really good for strategy. It adds to the :"Do I or don't I" attack into this position kind of thing. Warcraft 3 system would be good though. The current High Ground Advantage isn't really an advantage at all after about 5 minutes.
I agree wholeheartedly with this statement. The percent chance is random in very small groups of units, but in the larger scheme of things, SC2 is a macro game, and if you have enough to bust up the ramp, you do; no amount of high ground "chance" can change the fact that 100 supply of army moving up a ramp should win against a few siege tanks.
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United States4883 Posts
On January 24 2013 03:48 CoR wrote:
actually, high ground makes it super easy to defend any kind of pushes and give a high advantice in fact of vision parts you have to "go trough" etc, its so huge that some maps the high ground expansion makes it easy to go superfast 3base
making even more would make the game STOP it would be no attack for 30 minutes.... if you want that ...
i disagree in all what you say sry but unusable on level higher then diamond
ps: in fact of tanks etc it would also not make alot "sense" that i am worse shooting from ground only in fact of range and using range would make every attack useless in this game
Maps can easily be changed, you know. The maps we have today are a result of the failed "highground advantage", protoss's over-reliance on force fields, and zerg's need for 3-base play.
With a good highground advantage, placing a 3rd expansion on the bottom level of the map encourages low ground areas to be contested, while other raised areas and cliffs can be useful for defending space. This encourages positional play over having to babysit your base, yeah?
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I think a cool high ground advantage would be that forces climbing a ramp will be slower, thus making it harder to charge up into a fortified position while not adding random numbers or uneven values. Simply something like 50% slow will make a great high ground advantage!
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United Kingdom12022 Posts
On January 24 2013 10:11 moskonia wrote:
I think a cool high ground advantage would be that forces climbing a ramp will be slower, thus making it harder to charge up into a fortified position while not adding random numbers or uneven values. Simply something like 50% slow will make a great high ground advantage!
I'm not even sure that's the issue, the fact of the matter is as soon as one unit gets up the ramp, the entire army of his can shoot yours, thus negating the point of the ramp :p
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On January 24 2013 10:20 Qikz wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2013 10:11 moskonia wrote:
I think a cool high ground advantage would be that forces climbing a ramp will be slower, thus making it harder to charge up into a fortified position while not adding random numbers or uneven values. Simply something like 50% slow will make a great high ground advantage! I'm not even sure that's the issue, the fact of the matter is as soon as one unit gets up the ramp, the entire army of his can shoot yours, thus negating the point of the ramp :p
Well, you can kill that unit? Doing so will force the halt of all fire for a short period of time. I already had a few situations where I came with blink stalkers and tried to charge up the ramp while doing blink micro, but due to the current high ground mechanic I kept losing vision whenever I blinked the only unit left on the high ground.
I think the current dynamic is pretty decent in most situations, but making the climb slower will make the advantage more clear since charging up a ramp will take more time - you will take more damage in the mean time. Of course there will still be situations like blinking onto the high ground or colossi, but these are much harder to fix.
Another advantage to my idea is that it will make it possible for map makers to use the terrain to slow down an army much better than before, for example on cloud kingdom since you need to go through the ramps you will be slower, so it gives more tools to the map maker while not ruining the game like other suggestions (a 50% miss chance will require a many changes to abilities and stats for it to to be balanced, while a slow will require very small adjustments if any).
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i think the problems of high ground advantage listed above is a problem caused by the maps
and to be honest i don't think it needs to be stronger from a zerg point of view
terran and protoss can get high ground vision fast enough with observer/hallucination and medivac/scans
drop and blink play makes it easy enough to get to the high ground
as a zerg, stronger high ground advantage is just a indirect nerf which i don't think is needed now
and really, everyone is playing greedy and turtle enough
chokes are already a strong enough defensive tool (not to mention it could be an very aggresive tool combined with FF)
we don't really need a stronger defender's advantage
what we should be encouraging now is more dynamic and aggressive play
again as a zerg i don't really like high grounds especially when they all come in the form of cliffs and chokes
what i would like to see is large open area with a height difference that as the battle go on both sides are changing position, fighting for vision and better concave, more sniping of the opponents spotter sort of like fights with cloaked units
spell casters trying to cast spell to force movements instead of stop movements, herd the opponent into an awkward position
(somewhat like the center of antiga shipyard functions......just why the heck does they have to make 4 chokes?? with a few FF it just makes fighting up there impossible)
this is the kind of effect i think high ground should have in a battle, but now with so many chokes which make high grounds irrevelent(chokes are a much more powerful tarrain) and Xel'Naga towers to gain vision, the use of high grounds are so small
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On January 24 2013 10:11 moskonia wrote:
I think a cool high ground advantage would be that forces climbing a ramp will be slower, thus making it harder to charge up into a fortified position while not adding random numbers or uneven values. Simply something like 50% slow will make a great high ground advantage!
i like this one better than 50% miss
tho 50% slow might be too much??
anyways i prefer this + open field height difference
this will make the difference significant enough but not impossible be beat with a stronger army
i can see it will be very interesting in a TvZ where tanks are on high grounds and zerg trying to overwhelm from all sides
and sure to the protoss's advantage we can add some obstacles to work with FFs, but just pls make it "few obstacles" but not "few passages"
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On January 24 2013 10:59 fish83814 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2013 10:11 moskonia wrote:
I think a cool high ground advantage would be that forces climbing a ramp will be slower, thus making it harder to charge up into a fortified position while not adding random numbers or uneven values. Simply something like 50% slow will make a great high ground advantage! i like this one better than 50% miss tho 50% slow might be too much?? anyways i prefer this + open field height difference this will make the difference significant enough but not impossible be beat with a stronger army i can see it will be very interesting in a TvZ where tanks are on high grounds and zerg trying to overwhelm from all sides and sure to the protoss's advantage we can add some obstacles to work with FFs, but just pls make it "few obstacles" but not "few passages"
Numbers can be tweaked of course, 50% is only an example, but the important part is that every race benefits from this, unlike other solutions which favors Terran most and Zerg least.
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Bosnia-Herzegovina261 Posts
I have to point out one thing that should NEVER be implemented in Starcraft II and that is RNG (Random Number Generator). This is a term widely known by the MMORPG community, and since we all here played at least one RPG game, RNG=critical chance. There should be no "maybe it misses", like a Stalker taking out a 2 HP Siege Tank on the high ground and it misses its shot.
Might as well give an upgrade that Zerglings have a chance to deal x2 damage (a critical strike) or any other random thing. This just does not belong in any competitive play, any RNG is bad and should be avoided at all costs in strategy games such as Starcraft II.
I was a Gladiator (not a huge achievement but serves my argument) in WoW and I hated every aspect of RNG involved in that game. From my Mage's shatter not critting at all, or a random crit that kills me, same goes for DAoC, when someone resists a CC, or even worse, an instant CC (which had, at that time, 8+ minutes cooldown, some even 30 minutes).
Just keep RNG out of Starcraft II.
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On January 23 2013 21:30 Steglich wrote:
Why not just use a damage reducer instead of a % chance to hit, to completely remove the randomness?
I do agree with browder, anything that is random does not have a place in a strategy game.
But the high ground advantage is not enough in its current state in SC2.
Technically, most RTS already have a random element due to the "Fog of War" mechanic.
Also "ironically" (or you'd think because these games have more RNG than SC has), both Dota and WarCraft III have more consistent top teams/players than SC2 has.
SC2 has a much more random element than both Dota and WC3 due to how the game works.
In SC2, the game has way too many potential for game changing mistakes.
Caught out of position one time with your big death ball in SC2? You lose!
Build order disadvantage in SC2? You lose more often than a BO disadvantage in BW and WC3.
SC2 is way too random, way too fast, and way too chaotic compared to other games. It needs something to lessen that and make it more gradual like BW and WC3.
Here are the main problems with SC2 and why it's more random and why mistakes are more game changing:
1. Everything involves a big death ball, and (for most matchups) usually involves one big fight, and once that fight is done, the game is decided and over.
They need to change this so the game is more gradual. In BW, battles happened everywhere and it was viable to split up armies.
2. Something that makes the above more problematic (the deathball problem) is the fact that there are things like Fungal, Force Fields, Concussive Shells, etc.
You are caught out of position once against an opponent with those things, you lose.
3. Finally, units are a lot more stronger and things die faster in SC2. Not only that, nearly every unit takes up more supply than their BW counterpart (Hydralisks for example). (So that means fewer units means more space for the units to form a deathball that can all be melted in seconds.) In BW, things did die fast but due to the lack of "death balls" (units were spread out everywhere and battles happened everywhere), it meant that battles took a lot longer than they do in SC2.
In SC2, there are a few units that do damage and they do it much faster than their BW counterpart. Marauders, Colossus, and Banelings can deal a ton of damage and really quickly too (compared to anything BW has).
Though, the above is only a problem due to issue #1.
Anyway, the point is that SC2 is more random because things like being caught out of position one time or a BO disadvantage changes the game way more than in BW or WC3.
I wouldn't call SC2 a more "unforgiving game", it would imply the player has the capability to avoid said "unforgiving situation" in the first place. Being caught out of position due to Fog of War or BO advantages are practically unavoidable things that will eventually happen to anyone in SC2. I call SC2 a more random game (yes, it has a worse connotation than "unforgiving" but it really needs that to be called "more random" to really describe what the problem with SC2 is). The consequences of said randomness should be toned down in SC2.
Again, WC3 and Dota (both games full of RNG, even the damage done is random - most units do something like 10-20 damage instead of just a consistent 15 damage, for example) have more consistent top players than in SC2, and the reason is the games are more gradual and actually have much less random game changing stuff than SC2 has.
Edit - In SC2, you can lose the entire game due to one bad fungal, one bad set of force fields, and being caught out of position against marauders (slow). In BW, while the spells were way more stronger (storm doing 120 damage and having a bigger radius [in SC2, it's 80 damage and smaller radius], Plague dealing up to 300 damage to everything, including structures), the way armies battled (which again, involved battles generally throughout the entire map, instead of just one small area) meant that these spells were far less game changing than in SC2.
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I think something like a 20%-50% damage reduction when ranged units attack the high ground is worth testing.
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I'm not sure that SC2 really needs stronger defender's advantage, for the following reasons:
1) Defenders are already winning the metagame over attackers. 1-base builds and cheeses are extremely rare. 2nd bases are extremely easy to hold. 3rd bases are mostly safe. The WoL metagame has evolved to where Zerg and Toss players tech up very quickly to their endgame tech (BLs, Colossi), and the pros are adapting to fend off counter-timing attacks such as immortal/sentry all-ins.
2) SC2 has more mechanics that bypass high ground. Stalkers Blink uphill. Banelings roll right up the ramp. Colossi are still firing "downhill" against someone on high ground. A strong high ground mechanic would make it very difficult for Terrans to attack uphill, without affecting Blink or baneling bust all-ins. (let alone BLs, colossi, or skytoss)
3) SC2 has a much higher penalty for failed attacks: This is the big one, and it's due to the much more efficient economy in SC2. The attacker already sacrificed some of his economy to make units. When an attack fails, he's now down units AND economy. The successful defender out-econs and out-techs the attacker very rapidly. (As opposed to BW, where economy cannot be maxed out so easily so the defender doesn't have as big of an econ advantage)
That is why so many SC2 attacks are all-in; if you lose a bunch of units attacking it is very difficult to come back. Not because your defense is weak, but because your economy is weak. Increasing the defender's advantage would further penalize aggressive attacking.
Honestly if we want to encourage multi-pronged attacking and discourage 200/200 deathballs, what we need is a reversion to BW-style mineral economics. There needs to be diminishing returns between 1 SCV/patch, 2 SCV/patch and 3+ SCV/patch. This would nerf the exponential economic increase where cutting a few workers early means you are irrevocably behind on econ unless you can do a ton of damage.
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On January 24 2013 03:21 Thieving Magpie wrote:
It doesn't have to be high ground--trying to put the focus purely on high ground will cause blizz to simply think "well this isn't BW"
What's needed is terrain relevance on a pound-per-pound basis. A terrain difference where two equal units are no longer equal because of terrain.
Chokes only affect large numbers of units
Vision is an on/off function
What's needed is something to make it so that when one stalker fights another without micro--the one in the better terrain wins. I don't care if it's low ground advantage or tree advantage or fog or whatever--but it's needed.
Exactly.
And I also feel it's up to mapmakers to introduce such areas.
No need to change basic game mechanics, just add a few maps with different ground advantage zones and see which ones add interesting and balanced gameplay.
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Russian Federation221 Posts
On January 24 2013 03:48 CoR wrote:
actually, high ground makes it super easy to defend any kind of pushes and give a high advantice in fact of vision parts you have to "go trough" etc, its so huge that some maps the high ground expansion makes it easy to go superfast 3base
making even more would make the game STOP it would be no attack for 30 minutes.... if you want that ...
i disagree in all what you say sry but unusable on level higher then diamond
ps: in fact of tanks etc it would also not make alot "sense" that i am worse shooting from ground only in fact of range and using range would make every attack useless in this game
Do you seriously think that progamers will just sit with 10000 gas and 10000 minerals for 30 minutes without doing anything?
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Russian Federation221 Posts
On January 24 2013 15:50 Alex1Sun wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2013 03:21 Thieving Magpie wrote:
It doesn't have to be high ground--trying to put the focus purely on high ground will cause blizz to simply think "well this isn't BW"
What's needed is terrain relevance on a pound-per-pound basis. A terrain difference where two equal units are no longer equal because of terrain.
Chokes only affect large numbers of units
Vision is an on/off function
What's needed is something to make it so that when one stalker fights another without micro--the one in the better terrain wins. I don't care if it's low ground advantage or tree advantage or fog or whatever--but it's needed. Exactly. And I also feel it's up to mapmakers to introduce such areas. No need to change basic game mechanics, just add a few maps with different ground advantage zones and see which ones add interesting and balanced gameplay.
It's definitely not up to mapmakers.
A very very good mapmaker SUPEROUMAN tried his best to create exciting maps using current game mechanics and eventualy he got disappointed that because of game mechanics of SC2 maps don't influence gameplay that much.
Here is the link on his post
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/6713481997?page=1#0
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On January 24 2013 16:18 MikeMM wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2013 15:50 Alex1Sun wrote:On January 24 2013 03:21 Thieving Magpie wrote:
It doesn't have to be high ground--trying to put the focus purely on high ground will cause blizz to simply think "well this isn't BW"
What's needed is terrain relevance on a pound-per-pound basis. A terrain difference where two equal units are no longer equal because of terrain.
Chokes only affect large numbers of units
Vision is an on/off function
What's needed is something to make it so that when one stalker fights another without micro--the one in the better terrain wins. I don't care if it's low ground advantage or tree advantage or fog or whatever--but it's needed. Exactly. And I also feel it's up to mapmakers to introduce such areas. No need to change basic game mechanics, just add a few maps with different ground advantage zones and see which ones add interesting and balanced gameplay. It's definitely not up to mapmakers. A very very good mapmaker SUPEROUMAN tried his best to create exciting maps using current game mechanics and eventualy he got disappointed that because of game mechanics of SC2 maps don't influence gameplay that much. Here is the link on his post http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/6713481997?page=1#0
Well, he made good maps, but I never saw him trying to implement any new forms of ground advantage in his maps. Again, it doesn't even have to be high-ground advantage. A lot of things can serve similar purpose.
For comparison look at some BW maps: static disruption webs, static dark swarms, lots of interesting features. SC2 editor easily allows such things and more.
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On January 24 2013 08:57 Serpico wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2013 08:54 Thieving Magpie wrote:On January 24 2013 08:51 Serpico wrote:On January 23 2013 16:25 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:As long as the enemy does not reveal them, they can blow him into pieces without resistance. Zerg profit the least from height advantage, since their ground range units do not fire very far. But with the Overlord and the Overseer they field two very good spotters 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. When a player has the ability to engage with a huge advantage like this, it could end up creating 1-sided battles where the low-ground player, who gets caught in a bad spot, loses the battle. It's important, for this to work, to give the player the opportunity to retreat from a bad position. 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. People talk about chance then forget about the fog of war, it's one of the biggest randomizing factors in the entire game.... Fog of war in and of itself is not random no more than hotkeys are random. It creates a lack of information and an entire environment where crazy stuff happens, people act like the game is some neatly packaged machine with no ability for chance. It creates randomness because it creates uncertainty. You as a player cannot possibly know what will happen because of it. People argue against a chance to miss because they don't know exactly what will happen in a certain scenario when another unit has high ground. It's hypocritical. The BW highground mechanic actually created positional play and made maps feel varied in height, now SC 2 maps are completely flat with very little regard to terrain. People arguing against a mechanic that has already been shown to work better, it's actually kind of funny.
That is not random. That simply describes a game with incomplete information.
Even more the game allows you to "temporarily complete" your information by going through the fog
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Canada11349 Posts
@Alex
Yeah, but a lot of those things are kinda gimmicky and most standard maps didn't include those things. High ground advantage is pretty foundational as to how the game is played and how maps can be designed. Simply putting a long open ridge across a map can make a difference instead needing to rely solely on chokes and cliffwalk and not cliff-walkable. (Think Heartbreak Ridge.)
Slowing units down trying to get up narrow ramps I think would also help as it attacking units are under fire for longer. But if you just change high ground and nothing else, I think you will get a turtley game. You also need to mess with the resource intake to give incentive to expand more than three bases to get maxed armies.
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EPT
