Zerg and free units - Page 10

On January 31 2013 11:32 Unsane wrote:


This thread was supposed to point out the design flaw of free units for the swarming race.

Taking a look at BW zerg, you couldn't surround the terran or toss while he was in his base. You could also expand a lot while he was in his base. It was easy to surround the terran or toss when he moved out. Your cost ineffective units became very cost effective when all of them, being melee, could attack him all at once. So you expanded more, thanks to the map control he relinquished so he could survive the early/mid game. This forced your opponent to either move out or lose to your expo advantage. When it came time to attack him if he wasn't moving out, you were supposed to throw units at him, but you could because you were actually mining on 5ish mineral lines at once while he was maximum 3. The economics in BW played a role in how many bases each race needed, zerg included, and map control was given to the race that needed more bases.

Now zergs can win on fewer bases because of the cost effectiveness of their free units. This should never be the case. Even with many of the same map control mechanics they were given in BW (speed lings). This is a design flaw, cost effectiveness is mech's territory and mech, btw, is not about being slow or immobile, its about being cost effective, at the cost of having to always be prepared. Terran design was supposed to be about holding ground and being the most cost effective out of the races. A toss was even far more wasteful than a terran. A zerg only received effective units to attack a fortified position late late in the game, and these units weren't mindless 1A units, bad players were bad with them.

And before you claim there must have been an imbalance, there was. For the race that was supposed to be more wasteful. For the race that was supposed to expand because they were simply were given mechanics that favoured this.
In ZvP, zerg tended to win more.
In ZvT, zerg tended to win more.
In PvT, toss tended to win more.

This imbalance in the statistics is linked solely to which race was expected to take more bases. And everyone was happy with this imbalance.

EDIT: trust me, id love to have zerg compensated for being less cost effective....

On January 31 2013 06:41 Rabiator wrote:

You didnt think that one quite through and try the idiot way to prove your point by totally ignoring that those Broodlings are killing the Marines while the Marines only kill "free stuff that gets replaced at almost twice the range of the Marine". So your calculations are totally skewed and personally I hate people who try to fake a statistic into proving their point. In any case you have a "1 Broodlord = 3 stimmed Marines" equation and dont include the damage which those 4 Broodlings do to the Marines in the same time; the Broodlord will still be there at the end of the five seconds, but the Marines will be gone (more or less).

If your "calculation" was correct, why arent we seeing Marines advancing on Broodlords and killing them then anyways?

4 Broodlings deal 80 damage for initial impact and (6.2 * 7.5) = 46,5 for a total of 126,5 damage ... at 9.5 range even. Thats basically almost three dead STIMMED Marines.

On January 31 2013 13:18 Spyridon wrote:




Seems your 2nd paragraph contradicts the first? You say if somethings legitimately imbalanced it should be addressed, then say its way too early to judge from a balance perspective...

All there is to go by atm is watching the trends of how Terran and Protoss have changed, and if that's any indication Terran and Protoss are even at higher ranks, with Zerg still far behind.

I'm sure peoples counter argument for this is going to be that the balance is going to change, but lets face it, the current results hold a lot more weight than guesses of what is actually going to happen in the future.

Look at pretty much every Zerg thread on the HotS forum. You will find endless amounts of people who say "just get burrow instead of ling speed" who don't even understand the basics of Zerg build orders, or the fact that researching burrow delays either your queens or lair, harming or preventing macro focused builds and leaving some glaring weaknesses to be exploited.

So why are people (even in this thread) STILL arguing about the WoL metagame on a HotS forum? As I said, shows how ridiculous people are being...

Why do you keep talking about WoL balance when this is supposed to be about HotS?

In response to saying Zerg leave their base all the time, again check out the Zerg threads on the HotS forum. I've even stated to others many times that there are situations you can leave (particuarly in ZvT), but that doesn't change the fact that there still exists builds where Zerg can't safely leave base until lategame tech (heavy tank pushes for example).

How could you decide what the best part of getting broodlords are supposed to be? They were the upgrade from Guardians to Broodlords in WoL, and one of the things that made up for Zergs lategame being significantly weaker than it was in BW.

Without completely rebalancing Zerg as a whole, removing broodling and locusts would gimp the whole concept of Zerg siege. Even moreso than BW, Zerg is balanced to be weaker unit per unit in small numbers, but powerful in heavier numbers. This is the only reason the current iteration of Zerg siege works.

But mostly what I was saying, was it's silly that people complain about EVERY single unique strength of the Zerg race. Apparently if something works different from the other races, it's OP.

Once again, why are you arguing about WoL balance in a HotS forum, where you even said yourself its too early to judge HotS balance?

But you said yourself, its way too early to judge HotS, so why would you try to from a prior iteration? Hell, even judging from past patches doesn't make sense. 2 balance patches ago the leaderboards were all Protoss, look at what just a couple small changes did.

BL/Infestor is still strong, but nowhere near as strong as it was in WoL, and Terran has not only more and stronger ways to harass to prevent it from getting to that point, but also some new timings that could be exploited.

You could call anyone who isnt crying about anything being gamebreakingly OP an objective player, which there are few around these days.

BL/Infestor was an issue in WoL I agree, but this isn't even the same iteration of the game, people need to let that go.

How bout I bring up how OP Terran was at release of WoL (in comparison to the end of WoL) and use that for an argument of balance? How would you feel about that? That's basically what people are doing now with Zerg. It makes no sense to argue balance out of old + outdated information.

Not paranoid, just kind of annoyed. You don't see topics popping up for every single buff that Terran and Protoss get, saying free siege and free hallucation are game-breakingly OP and not fun to deal with, yet the few buffs that Zerg got have people complaining that the race is broken, when the results show nothing of the sort.

You say I'm dismissing peoples opinion, I wouldn't mind an argument if you had some sort of information or results to back it up. But instead of that, people are using "opinion" as "fact", when in reality they have no facts to back up their claims. I'm not dismissing their opinions, reality is. If Zerg starts dominating, and these issues people are complaining about actually do become a problem, then I'll have no problem accepting opinions that these issues are a problem. But that's not the reality of the situation.

At least WoL BL/infestor was backed up by results. Now people are complaining about "burrowed banelings" and "free units" with absolutely no results to back that up. Where are all these dominant Zerg players, with their burrowed baneling bombs and unstoppable ultralisks and limitless amount of free units that are "impossible to deal with"?

Zerg isn't in this all-powerful state that people are acting like they are, and definitely not in a state that nerfs should be happening to the few strong aspects of the race that are keeping Zerg working in HotS.

On January 31 2013 19:02 ChristianS wrote:

If you think the world is against you, and they're actually not, that's paranoid.

On January 31 2013 18:04 Big J wrote:
Even though it has nothing to do with the discussion above, I just had to comment on this:

From Wikipedia, Swarm Seeds, the ability of the Broodlord: Spawns Broodlings upon each of the Brood Lord's attacks.
Somewhere I must be missing the fact that BROODLINGS do impact damage...

So there are two different units that deal damage to your units during the combat. The Broodlord and the Broodling. The whole discussion is about the Broodling, so I really have no clue why you would add the initial impact damage of the Broodlord to that discussion... It is completely independend of the Broodling. If you don't believe me, check Liquipedia WoL Beta Balance Patch 7, that changed the Broodlords damage but didn't have any effect on Broodlings.

Furthermore, I really have no clue what (6.2 * 7.5) = 46,5 should be... A Broodling has 6.2dps, but I don't get the rest. Your example featured 4 Broodlings and every Broodling lives up to 8seconds. So if you want to calculate the total possible damage by 4 Broodlord attacks+4Broodlings over their lifespawn (which it seems like you were aiming for), the approximation is 6.2*8*4+20*4 = 198.4=278.4.
If you want to calculate the total damage done upon impact of the Broodlords projectile and the Broodlings first attack, it's 4*20+4*4=96 (as a Broodling has 6.2dps, but only 4damage per hit)

On January 31 2013 19:29 Protosnake wrote:


It's not about the world, it's about you.

Zerg was the swarm all-in race for a long time, spamming cost-ineffective units out of 2/3 base until it stopped working because of how mono-dimensional and predictable it was
So they needed to transition into something able to be cost effective : infestor/broodlords, that created a lot of issue, gameplay and balance wise, mostly because since it was the only real way of being aggressive and cost-effective, it was hard to nerf without breaking the entire race

Now they are trying to fix that by giving Zerg more aggressive options at more various timing, and you want to deny that right, probably thinking that early WoL Z was a good idea, so in the end you somewhat want Z to get nerfed

On January 31 2013 19:02 ChristianS wrote:
There's no contradiction between saying "there could be imbalances" and "I think it's too soon to say Zerg as a race is underpowered in HotS." I haven't even seen any statistics on winrates in HotS; even if there were any, they would largely be meaningless, because the game changes pretty much every week. Blizzard is largely making changes based on what they think makes for better gameplay at the moment, because there really isn't a good way to measure global balance at this point.

why are you so offended that the people who are opposed are vocal about it?

Because we have to consider the lategame design during beta, and there's very little evidence so far as to what lategame HotS actually looks like, so we have to guess based on the more well-explored WoL lategame and what we know about the new units. For example, someone might have the concern that viper/broodlord would be a difficult composition to deal with because the vipers can blinding cloud anything that gets in range of the broodlords, thus preventing them or the vipers from ever being hit. That's a potentially legitimate concern, but we wouldn't have seen it much yet because lategame HotS games are rare. So we compare it to the existing WoL metagame and try to decide just how troublesome this new composition really would be.

While I'm unaware of any tank pushes that make it unsafe for zerg to ever leave their base from game start to hive tech, I'll take your word for it. Even if there are effective contain strategies against zerg, so what? If one player dedicates resources to containing the other, and then the other player is temporarily contained, that sounds like how the game is supposed to work to me. If you dedicate the resources to breaking out (say, building mutalisks), then you are no longer contained.

What strikes me as odd about this is that Zerg has BY FAR the easiest time maintaining map presence of any of the races. Protoss probably has the hardest time, unless you count observers (and that's not really map presence). In general map control usually goes to the player with the faster units, which is nearly always the zerg player. So you complaining about Zerg's many woes of being unable to move out on the map is, well... I don't know how else to describe it, other than patently untrue.

I didn't decide it. I observed it, based on playing and watching Starcraft. Broodlings have nice little advantages like forcing tanks to unsiege, but when it comes down to it, they're not that powerful and they have fairly little to do with why BL/infestor is so strong. I know broodlings aren't that important compared to fungal combined with siege range, because if the problem were the broodlings, it wouldn't be very difficult to deal with. If you've ever fought a BL/infestor army with 4-8 hellions in your own army, you know that the broodlings are virtually a non-issue. It's really easy to kill off the broodlings; but when you do, there's still a broodlord infestor army driving toward your base that you haven't done anything about, because the broodlings aren't that important.

In general Zerg is designed to be weak in small numbers but strong in overwhelming numbers, but broodlord infestor does not follow this rule. The infestor is one of the most cost-efficient units in the game, and if you manage broodlord infestor right, you can easily do it without losing a single broodlord, or at least force your opponent to trade 50+ supply to kill one or two broodlords that you immediately replace. That's not winning through strength by numbers; that's winning through having a more cost-efficient army than your opponent.

I don't actually know why you disagree with me so strongly. I only stepped into this forum trying to clarify what the real issue with broodlord/infestor really is, since people seemed to think it was free units that make it difficult to deal with. I tried to make clear that this is not, in fact, the issue with broodlord/infestor, and that the Swarm Host doesn't really suffer from any of the problems broodlord/infestor does.

How can you possibly judge the balance of a new game, when most people haven't even really stopped using the strategies from the old game yet?

This is where balancing by comparison to WoL comes in. If the Warhound is significantly stronger than every WoL unit was, the Warhound is probably OP. If Swarm Host pushes are doing a lot more damage than Zerg pushes in WoL typically did, it might be that the Swarm Host is a little too strong.

Giving Terran more options and timings to attack Zerg before broodlord infestor comes out does not address the broodlord infestor issue, and let's not pretend for a second that it does. The problem isn't even exactly that the matchup's win rate is skewed, although it may be; the problem is that if the Terran's win condition is to kill Zerg before hive tech, and the Zerg's win condition is to reach hive tech, then that's bad game design, regardless of win rates.

You've made quite clear that a) you think Zerg is probably UP in HotS, and b) you think the forum is systematically biased against Zerg. But actually, there was a thread complaining about the free siege upgrade. When the widow mine was buffed, there were complaints about it. When the caduceus reactor and emergency thrusters buffs came down, everyone was in an uproar about it. Just recently there was a thread built on the premise that Zerg, as a race, is underpowered (I didn't follow the thread, but I suspect you were somewhat in favor of the premise). I don't see any evidence that the community is especially biased against Zerg or any other race; it's just people giving feedback about the game, which is what a beta is for.

If you think the world is against you, and they're actually not, that's paranoid.

On January 31 2013 19:55 Rabiator wrote:

For the "initial 20 damage" just look up the Broodlord and you see "20 damage".
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Brood_Lord

On January 31 2013 19:55 Rabiator wrote:For the damage over 5 seconds you take the damage per SECOND (6.2) - which is bigger than the individual attack since the cooldown is less than 1 - and multiply it by the number of "Broodling seconds". Here I noticed that I made a mistake in the calculation, because there are two Broodlings which last the full five seconds (I only counted one) and another one joins them after 2.5 seconds, so the total "Broodling seconds" isnt 7.5 but rather 12.5 for a total of 6.2 * 12.5 = 77,5 damage. Add this to the 4 * 20 = 80 damage from the initial impact of the four Broodlings and you get 157.5 damage of one Broodlord against those Marines, which means the three Marines would all be dead before the five seconds are up, thus one Broodlord deals with more than that easily and even if any remaining Marines could reach the Broodlords they still have to travel a distance of 4.5 before doing that and there would be new Broodlings all the time, so the Terran has lost quite a lot before the first "real hit point" is lost by the Zerg. In addition there are rarely any "unsupported Broodlords" in a game ever and this support - usually in the form of Infestors - can make the "getting there" part a bit tricky.

On January 31 2013 19:55 Rabiator wrote:
Obviously there is some sort of adjustment in this due to the defensive / offensive upgrades, but the fact remains that Broodlords deal a huge amount of damage through endlessly generating free units while preventing any ground based AA units from getting there (unless they have Blink) and the ones that actually get into range are usually dealt with by the support units of the Broodlords.

On January 31 2013 22:50 Big J wrote:


Yes. For the Broodlord. It has nothing to do with the Broodling effect. It's completly independend. I don't know why you would add this to the Broodlings balance.



Again, the Broodlings don't have any initial damage. It's the Broodlord that does that damage. Even more, I don't get how you get to four times 20. It's two or three times twenty, depending whether you treat the 5th second attack as inside or outside the 5second intervall.


No. The Broodlord does 20damage. As a sideeffect it creates 1 (or two) Broodlings. You keep on mixing those two things together and putting it as if the Broodlings do the 20damage. They don't. This is important. The thread is about the created units and what effects they have on the game, not whether the 20damage per shot of the Broodlord are too strong.

On January 31 2013 23:43 Rabiator wrote:

Rofl ... not including the initial damage into the equasion is stupid, because it is the total of all the attacks of the Broodlord which counts. You are trying hard to fake the statistic in your favour by not including everything ...

You also called me out as using "strawman arguments" eariler ... you might want to rethink that, because I dont leave anything out and saying "the initial 20 damage is the Broodlord attack and doesnt belong to the Broodling" is nitpicking. Its the sum of the attack which counts and this includes both initial and ongoing damage dealt by the Broodlings; they are not separate.

The original comparison was between 3 stimmed Marines and a single Broodlord over a time of 5 seconds. You have 2 initial Broodlings for 40 damage, another at 2.5 seconds (the delay of the Broodlord) and then the last one at 5 seconds. Thus you come up with 4 * 20 damage in that 5 second period.

On January 31 2013 17:16 Protosnake wrote:


Taking a look at BW zerg, pretty much every unit was cost effective, Zergling were insanely strong and so were hydralisk and defilers, the larva mechanic was more limiting the number of unit than increasing it

Why shouldnt zerg be cost-effective ? Did you missed the part where it was the case for most of WoL and their winrates plummeted because of how predictable and easy to counter it was ?
"Cost-effectiveness should be the territory of Mech", but yet Terran can still play Zerg style by going full bio ? This isnt broodwar, there should be more than 1 comp available to every race, and it is.

Winrates were changing every year and if Z was statistically favored in ZvP it wasnt the case at all for ZvT : http://i.imgur.com/gmXwO.png

On February 01 2013 05:46 Unsane wrote:


You did not read my post, evidently.

The statistic you've also provided is unrelated to the statistic i gave, yours shows 3 month trends, i meant overall but that apparently wasn't clear enough.

Zerg was cost ineffective when it came to attacking a defensive toss/terran position. they had to expo a lot to over come that defensive position. It was easy to expo a lot cause they tended to have map control. People liked this style of gameplay much more. Zerg felt much more zerg. Now they dont. Now, they build units that are extremely cost effective, not just decent cost effectiveness, but extremely cost effective. Extreme cost effectiveness while they still have superior map control mechanics, its actually disappointing to see how less skillful zerg is from BW zerg.

On February 01 2013 06:10 Big J wrote:


Yes and that is what zergs tried for a long time. But apperantly, a Terran with 3-4bases and 3-4mules mines more overall than a zerg on 5,6,7,8 or whatever number of bases in Starcraft2. The only advantage incomewise you get from more bases, is that you can have a better gas income. Guess what more gas leads to? You can produce more high tech units than your opponent. That's the advantage zerg has, nothing else.
Hell, in TvZ Terran basic units are better than Zerg basic units open field. You must field infestors to combat MMM costefficiently, at least when the Terran starts to go for multipronged attacks, against which banelings are incredibly bad.
So not only do Marines and Marauders with medivac support beat ling/roach/hydra/baneling/mutalisk/queen based play, Terran also gets more of them due to higher mineral income from mules.

It's very simple. Terran basic units are better than zerg basic units in direct confrontations, so zerg has to build something else or try to outnumber the Terran. You can outnumber a Terran with 3vs2bases, but you cannot do it with Xvs3bases. So the only actual option is to build something else. It's actually disappointing how people don't see that the viability of low tier bio compositions is the reason why the other races HAVE TO deathball vs Terran. You get worn down if you try to play active vs it and you get destroyed in ball vs ball fights unless you field massive amounts of high tech units.
Not gonna start about TvP. Protoss deathball kills all non-EMP ground play in the lategame. Nothing more to say.

Also, as this is HotS: I believe Vipers and buffed ultras in trade for weaker infestors is a step in the right direction, because with those units zerg low tier units become a lot more potent and Zerg might actually be capable of staying groundbased vs Protoss.

On January 31 2013 11:32 Unsane wrote:


Now zergs can win on fewer bases because of the cost effectiveness of their free units. This should never be the case. Even with many of the same map control mechanics they were given in BW (speed lings).

On February 01 2013 07:27 Cloak wrote:


I disagree about the cause. A lot of the defunk people are alluding to about Zerg you can squarely blame Roach/Ling for. Zerg was never meant to have a powerful 75/25 so early without taking a beating in other areas and screwing up the maps. The same with Zerglings, which actually got the biggest buff (although Marines get really strong midgame) of the 3 basics since BW. It's now a lot easier to right+stop click for perfect surrounds, and their fluidity made their strength go up significantly. Terran has Hellbat, and Protoss has Sentry, but the limitations those counters bring leads to the problems I'll outline. Zealots, I'd argue are worse than their BW version, and Marines got better. Not claiming imba, just following the threads to where we end up today with 3rd's needing to be taken easily, because Roach/Ling needs to be defendable, and why 2 base Zerg does fine. And why the Zerg Sauron strat of BW loses its luster in SC2, because 3 bases saturates income/production, and everyone can take 3 bases. Protoss and Terran can take their thirds unopposed, and Zerg has no recourse but to turtle even further. So you get really lame games where both sides turtle turtle turtle until the deathball. The end effect is that Zerg can use its unfettered macro for the BLs and the SHs and Infestors, so they're more the symptom, not the cause.

On February 01 2013 06:10 Big J wrote:


Yes and that is what zergs tried for a long time. But apperantly, a Terran with 3-4bases and 3-4mules mines more overall than a zerg on 5,6,7,8 or whatever number of bases in Starcraft2. The only advantage incomewise you get from more bases, is that you can have a better gas income. Guess what more gas leads to? You can produce more high tech units than your opponent. That's the advantage zerg has, nothing else.
Hell, in TvZ Terran basic units are better than Zerg basic units open field. You must field infestors to combat MMM costefficiently, at least when the Terran starts to go for multipronged attacks, against which banelings are incredibly bad.
So not only do Marines and Marauders with medivac support beat ling/roach/hydra/baneling/mutalisk/queen based play, Terran also gets more of them due to higher mineral income from mules.

It's very simple. Terran basic units are better than zerg basic units in direct confrontations, so zerg has to build something else or try to outnumber the Terran. You can outnumber a Terran with 3vs2bases, but you cannot do it with Xvs3bases. So the only actual option is to build something else. It's actually disappointing how people don't see that the viability of low tier bio compositions is the reason why the other races HAVE TO deathball vs Terran. You get worn down if you try to play active vs it and you get destroyed in ball vs ball fights unless you field massive amounts of high tech units.
Not gonna start about TvP. Protoss deathball kills all non-EMP ground play in the lategame. Nothing more to say.

Also, as this is HotS: I believe Vipers and buffed ultras in trade for weaker infestors is a step in the right direction, because with those units zerg low tier units become a lot more potent and Zerg might actually be capable of staying groundbased vs Protoss.

On February 01 2013 01:34 Thieving Magpie wrote:
Thread starts suggesting unit generating units should be redesigned to be more fun--defensive zerg players whine that we're trying to nerf Broodlords...

My understanding of this thread has been a discussion on the mechanics of the Zerg race--specifically it's ability to spawn temporary units. I don't know what this sudden surge of "don't nerf BL please, Zerg so weak!" came from...

The problem is not that Broodfestor is too strong, the problem people are having is that Zerg acts more like a mech player than Terran does. And I'm not talking about efficiency, I'm talking game style. Broodfestor players literally leapfrog spines like tanks, they're literally playing mech. Instead of tanks they use infestors, instead of minefields they use spine walls, instead of bunkers/vultures they use broodlings to defend they're tankfestors. Blizzard made mech work--they just gave it to the wrong race.

Why? Because token generation is slow and requires a buildup in order to be powerful. They're efficiency comes from longevity, not from kills/second. So giving Zerg that mechanic forces them to do exactly what Terran in BW did when they were given efficient free units (Spidermines) they turtle and spawn as many free units as possible.

This is not about balance or whether Zerg would be weak or not--this is gameplay, and how Zerg is playing too much like Terran and Terran playing too much like Zerg. So can we please stop trying to protect broodlords from nerfs that aren't even talked about! Could we not misunderstand "bring back old style ZvX" as needing broodlords and instead see it as a request to change the units so that they play more like how Zerg played in 2011 when sc2 was at its strongest.

On February 01 2013 07:45 Ghanburighan wrote:


I very much like this post. It's in stark contrast to the many posts that followed arguing that X is too strong, or Y is too weak.

Even though it's correct, as was later pointed out, that terran might have a mineral mining advantage at certain stages of the game due to mules, and a good mineral dump (marines), the fact that terran has less map control and slower units on the one hand, and slower saturation of bases on the other, does not allow the roles of zerg and terran to be fully reversed. Nor do I think they should be.

And I think it's clear that current HotS or WoL zerg and terran don't play the way zerg played in 2011 in the heyday of DRG (who was a beast before the turtle composition came about and remains a beast now without it). But HotS zerg is on the knife's edge. IdrA seems to make roach hydra viper work quite well which plays much more akin to 2011 zerg. On the other hand, the development team has not been focusing on a roach, hydra, viper composition; leaving those units relatively untouched for a while. So, this discussion will hopefully demonstrate that there are a number of people that prefer a different design choice than the one they are currently making, and if we believe LR over the past months threads, it's a sizeable part of the community that wants zerg to play different.