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Hi guys, after watching quite a lot of pro games, I am starting to see the biggest problem a deathball can cause.
Two important facts I just want to point out about deathball:
The first is the transition into a deathball.
How fast/safe it is to get to that strong deathball.
Zerg for example in WoL, tries to rush into broodlord infestors because it is relatively fast to get to and ride on that momentum to continue building up that deathball because they know the opponent almost cannot attack into them once the broodlord infestors are out.
It takes time for the other race to get their appropriate unit composition.
(or for some, they would just try to end the game right there. Which is also where zerg deathball often get beaten because they skipped upgrade for the faster tech, the immobility makes drop stronger and pushing out that early means the bases do not have enough spines/spores ready)
This is why TvP we almost never see any sky deathball, it's too vulnerable to millions of timings.
But if the map allows, then both would try to get to that air deathball asap, example being MVP vs Squirtle in the GSL final. But as of now, there is almost no other games that goes to mass air deathball in TvP other than on some progamers' stream.
With the new units addition available for Protoss such as MsC, stargate grants detection, mobile harassment, it allows protoss to have a much more safer opening and stargate becomes a very legitimate tech choice
The second fact is the strength of the deathball.
Sky deathball is the strongest deathball, it's not about how many air units there are, but it's about who can dominate the air fight. Once you have the air, you have the game.
In TvZ for example, you can't really engage the ultra zerg deathball which has 10+ infestors and some broodlords with lots corruptors, especially if they are 3-3, unless you have the BCs raven etc deathball.
Broodlord infestor corruptor queen is the zerg air deathball.
Terran has BCs Vikings tanks thor and raven (sometimes with ghosts)
Toss is much more sky units heavy, a mix of void ray, tempest/carriers, HTs and archons.
The WoL protoss deathball is much more ground heavy and has the hardest time to get to mass air, which is why Z always wins in the late game.
even if Protoss managed to do a full air transition Zerg air deathball was still relatively strong because of infestors. (full air transition was popular once in Korea but was found ineffective due to fungal killing interceptors and ITs were too strong)
That is imo, why a "broken" mechanic of archon toilet was kept to make sure Protoss still has a way to engage it and now that in HoTS there is other air units for Protoss, vortex is not needed anymore.
What's the problem?
This means whichever race has the Strongest air strength, that race will always be unbeatable in the ultra late game air deathball vs air deathball situation assuming both are equally skilled and no one makes a major mistake
(we should not rely on opponent's mistake to call it balanced)
I have yet to see a zerg managed to beat a skyterran after the infestor nerf and rarely before the nerf. A slow push of missile turrets, raven HSMs and pdds, vikings snipe and BC's yamato, makes it impossible to engage.
But how is it all kind of "balanced" in the ZvT case? The transition into skyterran is difficult, there are lots of vulnerable timings that the Terran will lose out right, which is similar to TvP.
You also cannot just simply open with air tech as terran, making the transition slow.
Zerg on the other hand can get to that broodlord infestors much earlier and safer.
But if the Terran managed to get to sky transition, then the massive momentum that the zerg had suddenly matters little because it all comes down to one huge engagement and it is incredibly difficult to have a relatively equal trade.
One good example is Thorzain vs Targa epic match here:
http://drop.sc/279567
Showcasing almost all my points about the timing to transition and the strength of the deathball etc
Key point summary of the game:
+ Show Spoiler +Thorzain went mech, went for almost maxed push against TargA's 4th. Lost horribly and went down to almost maxed on roaches zerg vs a 130ish supply terran.
TargA goes to broodlord transition, back stabbing with some roaches etc
saw thorzain with high vikings and some thors and ravens, build up more corruptors and broodlords.
eventually died to slow sniping by yamato, HsM, Pdds, missile turrets and tanks slow pushes.
So just a final sentence to end this topic, the game will have one more expansion after this but it will not likely to ever get rid of the 'who has the stronger deathball' problem.
What should Blizzard do? Or what Can they do?
TL;DR:
Air deathballs are too powerful in SC2
Fundamental design flaw that cannot be fixed by expansions alone
The only limiting factor is the ability to transition (how safe and fast)
At ultra end game situation, the winner of the game is too dependent on who has the strongest air deathball for the respective race.
[edit] reorganised and reworded a little to make it more clear
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What should Blizzard do? Or what Can they do?
Nerf the Nexus Cannon. The problem are not the air units itself, the problem is that it is too easy to be very greedy and survive any not allin midgame timings with it.
Th problem with brood/infestor was not (only) the units it was the fact that you could go 12 minute hive with 70 drones and almost no units thanks to the power of spines and long range queens.
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I would love to see some sort of nerf to the mechanic of air units, maybe a faster spread so they can't attack all stacked up which is what gives the strength of the deathball. I am not so sure about nerfs to units stats, since then no one will build them for non-deathball use as well, which is not what we want.
I would like to have air as an option, but it should only be the better option based on the map and playstyle, I think a ground based army should be stronger when fighting in open space, while the air should win if it gets into a good position like the high ground near the 3rd in daybreak where ground units can't reach.
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maybe some use of vipers, infestor, 3/3 corruptors, and spores are the solution I guess. Maybe a few hydra or queen since you have corruptors to tank the BC shots and nothing on the ground to prevent a good concave.
His army is very weak spread out so that can be a place to abuse. Hes got sensor towers, Pfs, and turrets that dont cost supply so that might not be the ideal way to handle it especially since units you would drop arnt extremely ideal vs split up BCs (hydras do meh vs them).
Id probly focus on a micro intensive fight where u try to use viper energy to pull BCs, then use spore crawlers to regen energy on the spot. Then if you have a ton of excess gas you can make like 10 overseers to contaminate his starports if u know where they are. Then morph just a few broodlords to help you push and you can probly make a dent.
Thats all I can think of at the moment about zvt vs sky terran.
Overall yea deathballs are pretty favored which is annoying, but the medivac speed boost, oracles and phoenix +1 range are all pretty good reasons to do small counter attacks.
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I think in ZvP when Protoss gets that massive air army then you might want to try and kill as many bases as possible with a ground army so that they can only have that army once, and then just try and kill them through a slow grind down with Hydra/Corrupter/Queen and a forest of spores.
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[...]What should Blizzard do? Or what Can they do?
They should and probably will wait and see how the metagame actually develops and not rely on theorycrafting too much before the game has even been released.
Also, I think you use the words "impossible" and "unbeatable" a little too much.
There were quite a few "unbeatable" strategies in WoL, if I recall correctly. People will need more time to figure out how to deal with those deathballs.
You alfeady mentioned timing pushes yourself, but there are probably Otter possibilities. They might involve clever positioning, drop play (Harassment/ tech building snipe), mass expanding, etc to abuse the immobility of such a deathball.
We've seen those deathballs in WoL and often times the opponent was not able to defeat ist in a direct engagement but still win the game by being able to reinforce faster/hit and run on expansions or production facilities and eventually tearing down the deathball piece by piece if necessary.
I don't think that there is supposed to be a "counter-deathball" for every army out there.
Also, we have seen far too little HotS gameplay yet to claim how the game is going to develop. Most pros have Not even switched to HotS yet as there are still Tons of WoL tournaments.
I agree with you that the MsC and the Oracle open some new Stargate tech paths, but that those 2 units make a transition back to robo unecessary seems like a pretty bold statement to me.
To put it in your words, I have yet to see a teching toss to hold off some big swarmhost attack without the splash from colossi/ht, whatever that means.
PS: should there be any really strange words in this text, my iPhone is to blame for that.
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On January 29 2013 16:36 shockaslim wrote:
I think in ZvP when Protoss gets that massive air army then you might want to try and kill as many bases as possible with a ground army so that they can only have that army once, and then just try and kill them through a slow grind down with Hydra/Corrupter/Queen and a forest of spores.
Base race only works so much. Since if you bypass his deathball to kill his bases. He will either defend if he feels he can. Or go kill your bases. So by the time you kill all his bases, most (if not all) of your bases are probably gone as well. So it still comes down to 1 army vs 1 army with no chance to rebuild on either side. Of course, if your army is strong enough to kill his bases while also defending your own, it works. But if this was the case, your army could probably take his army head on anyways.
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Why does protoss even need the Planetary nexus anyways? This make it so much easier for them to turtle up (as if it weren't so before). Like what does the nexus even do? Gateway expand is still less eco friendly than an ffe so it really doesnt change much besides the fact that Toss can now have a pf.
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The Nexus cannon is incredibly good at defense, as are the new void rays since they have such high damage output off the bat now. This allows for Toss to tech directly into their late game deathball while being as greedy as they want (fast third base, double air upgrades, ect)
Terran now has widow mines as well as no upgrade on siege tanks, this allows for them to also be extremely greedy off the bat (tripple cc, double ups, ect)
Zerg still has queens which are extremely good, also burrow at hatch tech makes it a coinflip for your opponent to be aggressive in the early stages as a few burrowed banes could be insta gg.
Add to this the fact that 3rd bases on the new maps are so damn easy to take, it all justs leads to boring 200/200 turtle fests into a big a move battle. If each race is to have amazing defensive capabilities then 3rd bases NEED to be challenging to take, otherwise small engagements will not be happening (I don't count oracle harass, or suicide hellbat drops as engagements).
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On January 29 2013 16:41 wongfeihung wrote:
I haven't run into too much trouble (i.e. completely unbeatable) when facing mass air units. Here's my take on going against an opponent with a mass-air composition.
Take advantage of the mass-air composition's natural immobility (excluding mass Muta). Wherever their main army is, you're not. Attack their main/expos whenever they move to the middle of the map. Destroy their income; destroy their production; destroy everything except their army. Occasionally, they'll attempt to leave a group of units behind in order to try to defend their main or expos; pick those off with your entire army (strength in numbers, your army > their half army), as well as any potential reinforcements before they reach the main army.
I tried that once against toss air deathball in HotS with terran.
It wasnt very succesfull, some of the problems:
Skytoss doesnt lack minerals, he will have enough cannons at each expansion to make sure you wont do damage with just 1-2 medivacs, you really need to bring a significant force.
The moment I did saw his main army move out, I also moved out, went past his army with more mobile bio (lol at trying that with mech), and flattened his third, natural, and did quite some damage to his main. He did exactly the same to my base. So at this point we severely hurt each others infrastructure/income, but he still had a vastly superior army, that didnt really improve my position in any way.
Sky armies arent that immobile, since they can bypass terrain (my opponent mixed in quite some colossi, which also bypass most terrain), there mobility is better than what you would think with only looking at movement speed.
Aditionally, what my opponent didnt do, but what he should have done, toss armies have the best mobility of any army. You say if he leaves behind some units to defend you should pick them off with your main army. Small issue: toss armies can teleport around.
I agree the main problem is the nexus cannon for toss. For zerg it would be queen, and for terran there probably is some similar problem (as terran not most unbiased there, but I would guess widow mines, especially the threat of them, they dont even need to be there). If I look at WoL, for me personally there werent problems zerg until the queen range boost, which allowed them to play alot more greedy to get to that deathball.
Although it isnt just these few units, but the entire (meta)game, which allows for very greedy openings to 3/4 base turtles to 200/200 deathballs.
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United Kingdom12022 Posts
The way to reduce the power of an air deathball is bigger, wider maps.
The reason why Broodlord infestor was so strong is that every map was bloody tiny in terms of width (see Ohana, Daybreak, Cloud Kingdom, Antiga Shipyard), so you could never actually avoid the damn army to go around and kill all the bases.
Air deathballs are slow and on a well designed map you can completely avoid them and go do what you need to do.
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United Kingdom14103 Posts
On January 29 2013 19:12 Qikz wrote:
The way to reduce the power of an air deathball is bigger, wider maps.
The reason why Broodlord infestor was so strong is that every map was bloody tiny in terms of width (see Ohana, Daybreak, Cloud Kingdom, Antiga Shipyard), so you could never actually avoid the damn army to go around and kill all the bases.
Air deathballs are slow and on a well designed map you can completely avoid them and go do what you need to do.
This this this this this.
Mapmakers have an incredible power to influence balance through their design, if the ladder map pool was changed more often and tournaments were quicker to change theirs we would see more varied games, particularly if there are maps where traditional builds do not work i.e. Arkanoid.
+ Show Spoiler +I understand the reasons for the ladder pool not changing quickly and the same for tournaments, but this would alleviate the problem somewhat. So please don't call me out saying "but you can't change the map pools often because X" or "Day9 said that we should do Y" cause we've all heard it all before.
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I don't understand this obsession with finding "deathballs" and then crying in agony once you see someone play that way.
You know what happened to PvZ?
It became the most amazing matchup IF Protoss was competent enough to make something happen, abusing the slow pace and weak defensive capabilities against multi-pronged attacks.
Rain playing PvZ looks SOOOO good to me.
He pressures one base while attacking another from a proxy Pylon only to distract Zerg and get a Warp Prism in to snipe tech and Queens.
THIS is the way the matchup would have evolved if not for HotS.
Sooner or Later more and more Protoss would mimic this style and get more and more successful with it.
At one point Zerg would have to adapt and realize that a incredibly slow army will only win if your opponent allows it.
At your first game of starcraft what do you do?
You get some buildings and some units, keep everything together and at one point win or lose.
The same thing happens at Pro level, in the beginning you try to get a big army that wins against the other dudes army.
At some point people figure out that one race has the better but slower army and after losing enough they try to develop ways to still beat it.
How the HELL do you expect to be a game that has a few months of Beta to be ANYTHING OTHER than a turtle fest.
Sure a few players will try to find other ways to play the game, but without all the knowledge and experience that is just inferior style.
Do you HONESTLY believe that Starcraft 2 can be at the same level of quality as BW after less than a fifth of the same time of gathering experience?
Sure Starcraft 2 evolves really quickly compared to the early BW but it will still take a ton of time and a couple of special people that understand the game far better than the rest to make this happen.
Starcraft always gets compared to other sports, Soccer 30 years back was incredibly terrible.
Compared to what you see now it was simply shit! That is how we will think in 5 years.
Hell that is how we already think about what happened a year ago.
In all honesty, calm your beards! This game WILL at some point not rely on deathballs in a lot of matchups.
HotS and hopefully LoV will give more options for cool strategy that can be used to outplay someone who turtles and hopes to win with a single attack.
TL;DR
Don't expect anything BUT deathballs for at least another year of HotS, no matter what happens to the game, this is the easiest way to secure victory over a lot of people no matter what.
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^
I guess you are somewhat correct.
But there are two main problems
One is it appears fighting bits and pieces against a deathball aren't working too good in all matchup except TvT.
We have terran constantly dropping against an immobile deathball in TvZ or TvP as well, but the problem is, from what I can see, limited by map design, more vision and the strong defensive capability of spine spore cannon PFs bunker, a few zealots + HTs etc.
We do see toss warping zealots against Terran late game, Terran doing marine marauders runby etc. But none can end the game against a deathball and it always have to end with a deathball vs deathball fight.
The only one where abusing immobility works well is in TvT bio vs Mech. whether it's because it's easier to catch mech unsiege than broodlord infestor bad positioning, I am not sure
The 2nd is IF one managed to get to the deathball that is the best for their respective race, then should this deathball be unbeatable?
In that TvZ I posted, the Targa vs Thorzain game, once Thorzain gets to that high BCs and raven counts, there is almost nothing Targa could have done to break that.
PFs and tanks shut down runbys, sensor gives early warning. Killing off add ons were all he could do. He needed a lot of supply to kill off Terran air units as well.
The reason why I used that game is because Targa could have got drop and maybe finish the game earlier, but when it gets to that ultra late game situation, he has no way to break out.
Should the game be designed this way?
There are indeed situation where both can get into their best unit compositions, should one overpower the other just because of unit design?
It's very likely that these issues won't be solved no matter what LotV gives us because WoL has laid down the foundation and if we don't tackle these questions, nothing will change.
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United Kingdom12022 Posts
On January 29 2013 21:06 ETisME wrote:
^
I guess you are somewhat correct.
But there are two main problems
One is it appears fighting bits and pieces against a deathball aren't working too good in all matchup except TvT.
We have terran constantly dropping against an immobile deathball in TvZ or TvP as well, but the problem is, from what I can see, limited by map design, more vision and the strong defensive capability of spine spore cannon PFs bunker, a few zealots + HTs etc.
We do see toss warping zealots against Terran late game, Terran doing marine marauders runby etc. But none can end the game against a deathball and it always have to end with a deathball vs deathball fight.
The only one where abusing immobility works well is in TvT bio vs Mech. whether it's because it's easier to catch mech unsiege than broodlord infestor bad positioning, I am not sure
The 2nd is IF one managed to get to the deathball that is the best for their respective race, then should this deathball be unbeatable?
In that TvZ I posted, the Targa vs Thorzain game, once Thorzain gets to that high BCs and raven counts, there is almost nothing Targa could have done to break that.
PFs and tanks shut down runbys, sensor gives early warning. Killing off add ons were all he could do. He needed a lot of supply to kill off Terran air units as well.
The reason why I used that game is because Targa could have got drop and maybe finish the game earlier, but when it gets to that ultra late game situation, he has no way to break out.
Should the game be designed this way?
There are indeed situation where both can get into their best unit compositions, should one overpower the other just because of unit design?
It's very likely that these issues won't be solved no matter what LotV gives us because WoL has laid down the foundation and if we don't tackle these questions, nothing will change.
Not that I disagree with you there, but that comes entirely down to map design, rather than game design.
Maps are simply not big enough and have either far too many bases or bases that are not spread out enough.
You can't abuse the mobility of big sky armies as none of the maps are wide or large enough to actually go attack a base where there army isn't.
Ohana for example you could sit your sky army outside your third and defend all your bases by moving left or right ever so slightly. Daybreak has the same problem.
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On January 29 2013 20:18 rEalGuapo wrote:
I don't understand this obsession with finding "deathballs" and then crying in agony once you see someone play that way.
You know what happened to PvZ?
It became the most amazing matchup IF Protoss was competent enough to make something happen, abusing the slow pace and weak defensive capabilities against multi-pronged attacks.
The abomination that is PvZ is the most amazing matchup? It is a toss doing a 3 immortal all-in and if it fails a 15 minute death animation starts, with the small possibility to cancel the animation with a good vortex.
At worst the zergs should spread out their overlords better so they see warp prisms coming (they have completely air superiority at this point), and use a few corrupters to intercept them. With good creep spread you can pretty much stop proxy pylons and can never be surprised over land.
@Qikz, just blaming map design is too easy. There are also large maps, and they still have the same problem. Attacking where the deathball isnt? In case of zerg they can always see you coming. And he can then always attack where your army isnt: defending your base.
Simply making larger maps wont help anything, you then need at least to combine it with requiring more than 3 bases for full saturation.
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Yeah I can easily see protoss being really strong to the point of OP going full sky and some ground army mostly sky
But at least in terms of ZvP going sky toss from the start means the zerg can go insane on the drones and expansions
Blizzard will tweak units stats if needed to ensure that skytoss unbeatable deathball is only unbeatable should you let them get it by making mistakes (like not scouting at all or making really bad trades)
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United Kingdom12022 Posts
@Qikz, just blaming map design is too easy. There are also large maps, and they still have the same problem. Attacking where the deathball isnt? In case of zerg they can always see you coming. And he can then always attack where your army isnt: defending your base.
The maps we have now, say Whirlwind may seem big but it still has the issue of the bases being far too close together.
If they were more spread out, you could expand virtually everywhere against a deathballing player and due to their mobility they wouldn't be able to instantly go kill all your bases in one swift move. They'd have to move around the map to do it in which case would put them out of position.
Say for example we had Fighting Spirit in SC2. I know it's not the perfect example, but it's an alright size of a map and it works great for stopping deathballing due to how spread the bases are to take your fourth. You need to take it behind a big push and if you're attacking into the fourth/fifth/sixth bases of your opponent, you're still pretty far from their main.
Against an air opponent Fighting Spirit isn't very good either due to the lack of clear defining air space (minus the small gap behind the naturals) and places to hide from ground units, but that's a discussion for another thread I guess. What I'm trying to say is if you saw and scouted someone going for skytoss for example (which wouldn't really be all that hard), you could take the three corners of the map and spread your production all over the place with all your extra money.
Due to how spread the bases would be it would be impossible for the slower, less mobile army to actually deal a killing blow to you without you being able to intercept/react as the bases are far apart and it'd be super hard for the air deathball to actually defend. Now take Ohana, or even Whirlwind as an example, due to the nature of the base layouts, a big air or ground deathballing player only has a short flight/walk from one base, into a domino effect heading straight into their main. If you lose one base to a massive army on whirlwind, you're pretty much going to lose the rest of them shortly after, where as on a map with more spread out bases, even as spread as say fighting spirit, there's travel time between them.
It's one of the reasons Ohana is such a joke of a map. If you take out the fourth base and they're trying to base trade a base for a base, you might as well go all in with your base trade as by the time you get back to your main, you've already lost all your mining bases as they're right on top of each other.
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I mean I am watching GSL now, ryung vs byun. imo, one of the best TvT so far in 2013.
That map is HUGE ass and exciting mid game due to how spread out the bases are.
All action stops once it gets to the sky transition.
SCVs are sac to make rooms for more air units.
no one can do much because it's too hard to engage.
Then the game just ends with the winner winning the air.
That's why I would argue it's more than just maps, it could be the vision, the static defense too strong etc
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Obviously it's static defense too strong.
Too strong defense = too risky to engage = everyones just macro up until the final deathball.
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United Kingdom12022 Posts
I wouldn't say static defense being too strong is the case at all. If anything it's too weak outside of zerg since spine/spore crawlers are sick good. Base defense and lack of a decent way of defending against bigger armies with smaller amounts of units, due to map design (not enough chokes to abuse for the defender/high ground visibility being too easy to get) that it promotes people to "ball" their army as if they attack, they'll just lose all their bases in a base trade.
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As many people have said it's mainly just the maps. For example: star station you cannot go skytoss "effectively" beacuse if the zerg knows their timings they can fully deny a 3rd base, or pressure heavily while expanding. Getting a 4th from there is quite hard as protoss. Essentially, any map with a hard 3rd/4th makes skytoss not very viable due to timing attacks. So to say that it's safe/easy to get is only half true. It's very easy to get on some maps though, in which case it's strength is quite a problem unless the zerg gets away with expanding without any punishment.
If the maps are fixed then I agree to an extent that the balance would be less of an issue, but to be honest, counter attacks don't really work too well versus protoss now that they have the mothership core which just lets you teleport back to any base if you need. Let alone the fact that generally you leave 10-20 supply open for harass that you can just warp in to defend. I honestly think the tempest and VR need a re-evaluation.
edit: I'd like to add that I wish the game would drift away from attempting to use so many sky units, whatever the race. Imho what protoss needed was a new ground unit that could be microed throughout all phases of the game like the blink stalker but with something that made it more of a dynamic unit and was a bit faster like a reaper(or something). Throwing in things like a tempest/oracle that 2 shots workers are going to take forever to balance well and I think blizzard is making it harder and harder to balance with these sorts of units. (Each race has similar units.. which makes it even worse..)
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The problem lies within Starcraft Air design.
Air in Starcraft has 3 advantages:
1) pathing - the obvious one. Air units fly and are unhindered by other units
2) spacing - you can stack many air units, making them a very efficient ball
3) invulnerability vs many attacks (vs all units without GtA/AtA attacks)
It's this 3rd point that is extremly problematic in conjunction with combat units like Battlecruisers, Void Rays, Carriers, Tempests and Broodlords.
Basically anytime ground timing attacks get stoppable, the game gets pushed further towards building the best composition possible. And which composition is better than a deathball of highly supplyefficient units that render over half of the opponents options useless, due to invulnerability?
Imo, there are only two ways to go about that problem (assuming that blizzard won't remove all of the mentioned units):
a) make (nearly) all units directly useful vs Air
b) make all AtG units either EXTREMLY weak vs AtA and make AtA come with strong drawbacks
make those AtG units or not very useful vs GtA units
Right now, we are in the situation that in theory Broodlords and BCs are a (supplywise) hardcounter to every ground unit, so they force airsuperiority from the opponent. And Carriers/Void Rays are very close to this efficiency as well! (Tempests on their own might be OK, as they don't do well against Marines/Hydras/Stalkers)
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United States4883 Posts
Just throwing this out there as my recent observation...I've been playing BW the past couple of weeks, taking a break from SC2, and I noticed something really interesting. In BW, it really doesn't help to stack your air units, especially in large engagements (aside from obviously mutas, wraiths, and corsairs, I'll get to that). The main reason is 1) no smartcast, so mass yamato'ing is actually impossible, 2) AoE (STORM, valkyrie) is way powerful, and, most importantly, 3) having overkill makes units way less efficient clumped up.
With the design of SC2 giving all units a smart-target AI that avoids overkill as well as giving a lot of air units fairly fast attacks, there's just not a downside to stacking your air units for maximum efficiency damage except perhaps getting stormed or seeker missile'd. Even then, you don't need to spread units TOO far, and the air ball can work at a fairly high efficiency rate.
Overkill doesn't affect small groups of air units in BW because you would generally get only enough of those units to snipe things (5-6 mutas will always one-shot a marine, about 5 wraiths will snipe a dropship, etc). In large air battles, it's much stronger to set up as large of a wall as possible.
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I'm not at all convinced that SkyToss is an unbeatable death ball.
It's very early to say, still I'm under the belief that Terran air death ball is the strongest, but impossible to get to and am still under the consumption that Infestors along with new tools for Zerg can deal with the Toss Death ball.
However it is still a death ball and very easy to get to and frankly I dislike having so many air units in my composition game design-wise.
But I don't think there's a huge problem with it balance-wise.
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Air units in general should not be a strong option vs ground units. For example in Broodwar air units had retarded low dps vs ground (scout, wratih), none at all (scourge, devourer, corsair, valkyrie) or were extremely hard to get while also being well hardcountered by a lot of efficient GtA, AtA units (BC's, Carriers).
A wraith had about as much dps as one unstimmed marine vs ground, while being 5 times the cost (including gas). But still you could see mass wraith in TvT or even some wraith strats vs Zerg.
Compare that with a Voidray who has as much DPS as an immortal vs armored units (while being charged). Also in Sc2 there is only one dedicated AtA fighter (corruptor) compared to 4 Pure AtA fighters in Broodwar + 2 who were WAY better AtA than AtG.
All other units can fight ground directly while phoenix can lift units and kill them and Vikings can land whenever needed (although they are way better in the air then on the ground, which is good). This results in an Air army that is actually capable of fighting ground armies on their own, while also being more mobile and not affected by terrain.
This would be reasonable to balance out if there were more AtA fighters ingame, but those cannot be introduced due to the existance and relieance of Protoss colossus.
This is why we have Air doomballs and boring gameplay.
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On January 29 2013 20:18 rEalGuapo wrote:
Starcraft always gets compared to other sports, Soccer 30 years back was incredibly terrible.
Wow wow wow. I agreed with all the rest, but this is ridiculous. Soccer 30 or 40 years ago was all about creativity. Now it's an athletism contest. It's all about kicking the ball 30m away and running everywhere. It degraded to European soccer condition.
Oh wait...
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I see it as just a big argument to buff GtA for every race. Stalkers and Hydras are especially mediocre for trading efficiently. (Marines are good until hard countered, and Thor should be a Goliath) It seems that all the viable GtAs also having the same GtG anchors down their bite.
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Marines are very cost effective vs air, but not terribly supply efficient.
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weaken AtG imo. That's what BW had and it worked fine. Air can harass but almost never overpower unless you're way ahead or heavily invested.
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United Kingdom12022 Posts
On January 30 2013 01:41 ddrddrddrddr wrote:
weaken AtG imo. That's what BW had and it worked fine. Air can harass but almost never overpower unless you're way ahead or heavily invested.
I think this could work, but only if they weaken the non capital ships.
I think Battlecruisers and Carriers certainly need to be high damage due to their weaknesses and Banshees and Mutas for example should do good AtG so they can hurass effectively and actually be good units.
I'm not so sure Broodlords and voidrays need to do super high damage though, if anything I always thought the Broodlord was going to be what the tempest is now (tempest should do lower damage too) where it forces engagements rather than creates an entire army itself.
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I feel like that thanks to the Nexus overcharge the third base on maps can now be further away since the Protoss now has a means to kind of defend a third base without relying only on perfect forcefields.
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On January 30 2013 01:13 Cloak wrote:
I see it as just a big argument to buff GtA for every race. Stalkers and Hydras are especially mediocre for trading efficiently. (Marines are good until hard countered, and Thor should be a Goliath) It seems that all the viable GtAs also having the same GtG anchors down their bite.
Agreed with this completely. Air units in SC2 deal so much damage that they somehow counter GtA units which shouldn't make sense. In particular I'm looking at the Hydralisk. I think it's a joke that this unit consistently loses to air units when it is Zergs only GtA unit besides the Queen. I see the same similarities with Stalkers in ZvP and how they lose to Mutas or Broodlords once a critical mass is reached. Rather than nerfing air units across the board, is rather see GtA units (Thors, Stalkers, and Hydras in particular) receive a buff that makes them more cost efficient against air units. I don't know if that means a special damage modifier to be more effective vs air units only or what but something needs to be done so that SC2 doesn't become an all air game due to GtA being inadequate vs. air.
Another point I strongly believe that others have said is the maps. The maps make defending based super easy to the point where on some maps it's possible to defend up 4 or 5 bases with a slow moving deathball. This needs to change. Maps should be wider and much bigger so that its impossible to defend all your bases by moving your entire army from point A to point B. in other words multi pronged attacks should be able to indirectly beat a deathball due to mobility advantage. Instead when these multi pronged attacks occur it either gets easily defended or we see a base trade scenario in which the deathball will still have the advantage because of the stronger army in the end.
In addition to making bigger maps I'd also like to suggest removing Xel Naga watch towers from the game as they simply make it too easy to defend against incoming attacks. All races have their own scouting tools and the watch towers just make defending against said attacks too easy. Zerg had Overlords, creep, and ling scouts. Protoss has observers and hallucinations. Terran has sensor towers, scans, and hellions. There's no reason to have watch towers when all races have a variety of ways to scout. This most likely won't happen though because Blizzard would never remove such a thing from the game.
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This is all just pure speculation and you're asking Blizzard to make balance changes based on what may happen?
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Normally there should be a "rock-paper-scissors" 4-cycle that goes like this:
Air-to-Air > Air-to-Ground > Ground-to-Ground > Ground-to-Air > Air-to-Air
Meaning that normally, there should be Ground-to-Air units that can turn the tide of a sky-only battle. Like goliaths vs carriers in BW TvP.
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On January 30 2013 02:57 tehemperorer wrote:
This is all just pure speculation and you're asking Blizzard to make balance changes based on what may happen?
In case you missed it, it's in the game right now, pretty much every toss go Stargate because of how powerful it is and turtle until they get their invincible army of death
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On January 30 2013 04:03 Protosnake wrote:Show nested quote +On January 30 2013 02:57 tehemperorer wrote:
This is all just pure speculation and you're asking Blizzard to make balance changes based on what may happen? In case you missed it, it's in the game right now, pretty much every toss go Stargate because of how powerful it is and turtle until they get their invincible army of death
Could you (or anyone else) provide some replays or VoDs of that happening? Never seen a Skytoss death ball on any stream or in any game I played.
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A lot of your post was garbled so I had trouble following it, but it seems to be in part a balance whine about Protoss and in part crystal ball gazing meta-gaming analysis in an attempt to whine about HoTS.
A few things you should bear in mind.
1. It's of course not true that the race with the best late game army will always win. This is obviously wrong. I don't know how you could write that with a straight face.
2. It's impossible to tell whether any unit combination is "unbeatable" at this point. BL-infestor was always terrifying (post ghost nerf) yet it took the queen buff and about a year to finally get the composition to be "unbeatable" (in ZvT matchups) and of course Zergs still lose all of the time, even with BLord infestor. In any event, it's far, far too early to tell what combination of units is the "ultimate army".
3. Any game with different units, upgrades, etc. is going to have better and worse armies and likely an "ultimate army" that players will strive to get other things equal. I think you mean to say that you don't like games that always go to the super late game stage where players turtle in order to build their ultimate armies. It's always possible to play like that and you see that sort of play from lots of mid tier pros and random GM players (I would guess). But I see lots of games in HoTS that don't get to this stage, where the players have played extremely aggressively for the entire game, so I question how much this is actually a problem. Moreover the best players aren't even playing HoTS seriously so it's not possible to tell how much the "deathball" problem is actually a problem. (As an aside, this problem has been overstated by WOL haters for quite some time. When you watch the highest level players play, quite often, there is action for most of the game. E.g., watch the recent Creator -- Gumiho IPL FC series. Armies clash, one player usually gets the better of the exchange but the loser is usually not totally crippled and the fight stretches on sometimes for 10-20 minutes straight. It was highly entertaining.)
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On January 30 2013 04:34 The_Darkness wrote:
A lot of your post was garbled so I had trouble following it, but it seems to be in part a balance whine about Protoss and in part crystal ball gazing meta-gaming analysis in an attempt to whine about HoTS.
A few things you should bear in mind.
1. It's of course not true that the race with the best late game army will always win. This is obviously wrong. I don't know how you could write that with a straight face.
2. It's impossible to tell whether any unit combination is "unbeatable" at this point. BL-infestor was always terrifying (post ghost nerf) yet it took the queen buff and about a year to finally get the composition to be "unbeatable" (in ZvT matchups) and of course Zergs still lose all of the time, even with BLord infestor. In any event, it's far, far too early to tell what combination of units is the "ultimate army".
3. Any game with different units, upgrades, etc. is going to have better and worse armies and likely an "ultimate army" that players will strive to get other things equal. I think you mean to say that you don't like games that always go to the super late game stage where players turtle in order to build their ultimate armies. It's always possible to play like that and you see that sort of play from lots of mid tier pros and random GM players (I would guess). But I see lots of games in HoTS that don't get to this stage, where the players have played extremely aggressively for the entire game, so I question how much this is actually a problem. Moreover the best players aren't even playing HoTS seriously so it's not possible to tell how much the "deathball" problem is actually a problem. (As an aside, this problem has been overstated by WOL haters for quite some time. When you watch the highest level players play, quite often, there is action for most of the game. E.g., watch the recent Creator -- Gumiho IPL FC series. Armies clash, one player usually gets the better of the exchange but the loser is usually not totally crippled and the fight stretches on sometimes for 10-20 minutes straight. It was highly entertaining.)
Also, putting all your units on one screen and a-moving them is easiest way to play the game. As DB said, they cannot stop people from doing it, because it is the easiest way to play. People are always going to blob their units and we are likely to see a ton of it in beta. Why? Because it took forever for people to learn to split marines or use blink stalker micro correctly.
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I disagree that Sky Deathball is the unavoidable future of HotS and potentially LotV. Deathballs are here to stay, but I disagree that sky deathballs trump ground ones.
To me, sky deathballs can be a problem depending on the opponent's anti-air. In WoL PvZ, Infestor Broodlord (which is basically a sky deathball with caster support) is really hard for Protoss to stop because Infestors are too strong and Protoss anti-air (Stalkers, Phoenix primarily) sucks. But what about PvT? Protoss can deal with Terran air units just fine, and Terran can also deal with Protoss air units, so a Protoss sky deathball is weaker than a ground one, and a Terran sky deathball isn't that problematic either. What about ZvT? Sure, Infestor Broodlord is also strong here (though less so than in PvZ), but you don't see many Terran sky deathballs. If we go back to PvZ, Protoss sky deathballs only work as a tech switch and if the Zerg is caught unprepared for them- properly prepared, Zerg will smash a Protoss sky deathball because they have great anti-air (Corruptors + Infestors).
You could argue that air units are becoming much stronger in HotS (which is patently true for Protoss at least), but I don't see why the ultimate deathball is necessarily a sky deathball; in WoL, sky deathballs are weaker than ground deathballs for both Protoss and Terran; it's just a coincidence that the strongest deathball of them all, Infestor + Broodlord, happens to be a sky deathball.
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i strongly believe for sc2 to be a great and entertaining game for the viewers, it needs to be roughly 70-80% ground focused and 20-30% air focused
all matchups follow this rule in WoL and are pretty exciting to watch.
Even WoL PvZ and TvZ because while zerg does have lots of broodlords as their ultimate goal, protoss and terran are fighting and do have the tools fo fight against zerg and whittle them down before they can get 20 broodlords
I highly disagree with DB's hots intentions of making "sky play" viable. IMO sky play SHOULD be a niche, and hard to pull off, because if its "easy and highly viable" its just bad for a RTS, IMO
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United Arab Emirates439 Posts
I think your post touched on a critical point, but didn't explore it enough. We see a lot of the Sky Deathball builds working the best on maps that strongly encourage turtling. Easy 4 bases seems to especially encourage the deathball. But a relatively small number of bases also seems to encourage it - because once a player gets most of those bases, their opponent can't counter their turtling/slow army by simply gaining a large resource advantage, and then overwhelming them with standard anti-air units (be it Vikings, or Hydralisks, or Corruptors, or Void Rays, Tempests, perhaps even Blink Stalkers (because of their mobility more than anything). This is the same thing we see in WoL. Once players have secured their expansions
I think there needs to be a strong movement for more open maps, with farther away expansions - especially 4th+ expansions. And also a very high number of expansions I feel is important.
Between that and, as you pointed out, players discovering timings to kill too quick of an air transition, I do not think it is nearly as dire of a problem as you make it out to be.
Perhaps Zerg will need some buff to Corruptor's corruption, or Hydralisks anti-air, if in a few months it's still impossible for them to deal with, even if it's harder for the T and P to get to it. Perhaps some races will need a buff to their Static D as a way to prevent the Air Deathball from just base-trading as soon as it maxes out.
But it is a VERY bad idea to start balancing the game before we start trying to balance through maps, when this change to maps is something people have wanted for a long time, and which encourages more interesting game play. Otherwise we get to a situation where we are stuck with the maps we have because of the game being balanced around them.
So you must always ask yourself first: can we make better maps to improve the situation?
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Not so worried about the sky deathball, Toss currently has the best and it shuts down the air deathballs of the other races (already doing it in WoL after the Infested Terran nerf). I would say with Mothership and Vortex WoL Skytoss wins if you have to control for it. So the HotS one feels for me atleast weaker, but 10 times easier to control.
And Terran can deal quiet okay with it in normal ways. But I am really worried about Zergs Sky defense. If I want to beat someone going skytoss it is mostly waiting till they enter creep. And engage with a few Infestors Queens and a ton of Spore Crawlers. If the Infestors can pull of 3 chain fungals, then most of the toss army dies to some defensive structures, that are immune to storm and easily outhealed by Queens. It looks retarded though ...
But Terran Air aside, they are either extremely fragile or damn expensive and slow. When using Air units you don't really feel that there is a tradeoff for having increased mobility and immunity from alot of units. Toss and Zerg have really tanky air. I guess they wanted to design it in a way so that every race can take air superiority. But overlooked the issue that spellcasters create with ground anti air.
And that it is almost impossible to regain air control once you fall behind. With the super high Air to Ground range, there is also not alot the Ground can do to support the Air. So that once the advantage is taken, there is no way to turn it around except the opponent makes a mistake.
I can't really remember one rts where air units really worked out well in the end. So it would be quiet impressive if Sc2 would succeed there. But I think they were closer in Wings then with the current Swarm to achieve this.
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The problem of a "sky deathball" isnt that it exists, but rather that - due to the mobility - the air units cant be dealt with sufficiently by ground forces AND not all races have an equally powerful air army. This disparity between the races is what could create an imbalanced and rather one sided game.
Ground armies should be able to deal with a serious sky deathball and atm they arent really able to do it. The problem with Protoss doing this is that you might be able to defeat the sky deathball with a lot of Vikings or Corruptors maybe, but are then left with relatively useless units once the Protoss seriously starts warping in ground units again. Vikings and Corruptors are just stupid one-dimensional units and you are forced into building them too often. Now in BW the Zerg T3 units were morphed from Mutalisks and those were really nice to have on their own, but no one builds Corruptors or Vikings to "attack stuff" ... just because you need them to deal with Colossi or air or give vision. That is the real problem of air these days.
On January 30 2013 11:28 bankobauss wrote:
I highly disagree with DB's hots intentions of making "sky play" viable. IMO sky play SHOULD be a niche, and hard to pull off, because if its "easy and highly viable" its just bad for a RTS, IMO
Due to the "ground not able to deal with air" and "not all races are equally able to do it" problems this is exactly the right point of view. In BW it was acceptable to have "Carrier play" because of the huge investment, but in SC2 there is too much money to be able to build too many units - if you set your mind to it - and then there are the "instant tech switch mechanics" of massive numbers of larvae and Warp Gate, which really screw up the game by making it potentially erratic.
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I agree, StarCraft 2 is way too air and caster focused. Heart of the Swarm only adds to this problem. Blizzard really needs to take a good hard look at the game their creating, and start thinking about what will attract viewers and demand skill from players.
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The real problem with air units is there overall design and the way they are implemented in SC2 (and I feel strongly this was an issue in WC3 and TFT too). They simply hover and move and do damage like ground units that have no pathing restrictions and they can stack on top of each other. Furthermore, many of the best anti-air units are air units (Vikings, Corrupters, Phoenixes)!
That leads to incredibly boring play where you A-move anti-air units into air units. Because there is no terrain, sight limitations or pathing restrictions to contend with, the more powerful force just wins. There is very little strategy or dynamic play that can happen, and less opportunities for skill to show.
Compare this to a game like Total Annihilation, where air units don't simple hover and act like ground units, they go on strafing runs, greatly limiting their firepower. Also, ground anti-air defenses are very strong in that game compared to SC2.
Perhaps TvZ has the relationship that works best in SC2. To counter Mutalisks you build Marines and Thors (ground units). This is an interesting dynamic, because even with Marines and Thors on the field the Mutalisk player can do damage, since the Mutalisks can outmaneuver the ground forces.
Compare that to PvZ where Phoenixes counter Mutalisks and PvZ, which is incredibly boring because the Phoenix can outfly and outfight the Mutalisk; even mass Mutalisks can do very little once Phoenix's reach a critical mass and have the range upgrade. The Zerg player simply transitions in PvZ, there is little opportunity for dynamic play, unless the Protoss player didn't get a Stargate or two, and plans to hold with Blink Stalkers and Storm. In that case, it becomes dynamic and interesting.
Blizzard created this problem when they nerfed timings into oblivion. SC2 went from a game with maps like Slag Pits and Metalopolis where timing attacks dominated to a game where it is wisest turtle up and scout for timings and then the side with the best end game composition wins. In my opinion, that is worse. I prefer the middle ground, where timings are viable and difficult to hold unless scouted and prepared for which limits turtle play and removes us from the this sky dominated end game that is boring.
Just because all races can get to the end stage, doesn't mean the end stage is balanced... and far from it. Zerg will always have the advantage in the end due to the Larva mechanic in turtle up games. They can drone and drone and then quickly mass an army with saved up Larva. And unless their late game units are significantly weaker than Terran or Protoss units then they'll dominate the end game since they can switch from a Broodlord dominated army into Ultralisks quickly.
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In BW, a lot of pressure timings exist in all match-ups which made the sky death ball transition difficult to obtain. In Wol however, i feel design is a large problem that contributes to this issue. Let's look at Zerg. The queen buff has essentially allowed safer 3rds which culminates to a stronger macro potential and consequently, made hive tech more accessible by several minutes. (In 2011, the average hive tech unit begins appearing around the 17-18 minute mark. Now, we see blords and ultras appearing 2-3 minutes earlier)
Then queen buff and overall infestor power in WoL is a testament to this problem. In a TvZ, the timings that were once effective ie hellion harass, is defeated by having more than 3 queens on the field (standard play). Furthermore, T and P mid game is weakened further by the added utility and strength of infestors. This eliminated/discouraged timings that were once in existence, resulting in a one dimensional game, where the Zerg player attempts to focus on turtling and macro, to produce a sky/infestor army which will trade very favourably. Meanwhile, the protoss/terran does the same in an attempt to produce counters to those air units, which makes the overall dynamic stale.
What we're experiencing here in Hots is similar to WoL, except now Protoss appears possess the dominant sky force. In WoL however, Z sky deathball was noticeably weaker in large wide maps, which greatly enabled better players such as Rain to abuse that immobility. I'm not complaining OP or trying to balance whine, and i know it's too early to determine balance at this stage, but i would like to see a more vulnerable skytoss such as immobility. As it stands, instant recall limits the risks of dedicated multi pronged for a skytoss comp which doesn't do much but encourage players to turtle and obtain that difficult to stop army.
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Easiest solution is to make the minerals in bases less or at least the natural and make 3rd/4th bases much harder to hold. One of the biggest problems right now is the current map pool keeps making it easy for all races to hold a 3rd, and with all the new added early game protection, this makes it almost impossible to rush unless you all-in. Even then if you fail at the all in you have invested so much you mise well just gg out.
By reducing the minerals at the Nat / 3rd it will force people to squabble over bases more. Right now any race can pretty well create a death ball off 3 bases easily, except maybe zerg. Zerg really needs that 4th sometimes as there unit compositions are not as cost effective. None the less it is still achievable, which turns it into this turtle vs turtle mode matchup till both players have there death ball and merge in the middle of the map somewhere.
Another thing that could help is make static defenses less powerful. It is so EASY to defend a base with static defenses even if your army is miles away, even when your opponent hits it with tier 3 units. Gone are the days of 2-3 over lords filled with cracklings and ultra to do hit and runs on expansions  This makes it very discouraging for anyone to engage early on for the fear there army will be wiped out and then the other player will just counter with an A move and win. If players could engage more earlier on safely this would be less of a problem. Take for example ZvT with a mech build. One of the best strategies is drop play to do damage, or reduce tank/thor numbers while you expand and build up to tier 3. As if you can keep the numbers down you can prevent the death ball from hitting critical numbers making it manageable later on. So take away the ability to hold a 3rd easily or lower resources and boom, less death ball problems or at least you don't see the death balls till very LATE game.
To conclude I think the death ball problem is A.) A design flaw, B.) Current map design makes it to easy to hold 3rd bases / resources are 2 easily obtained giving you all the resources you need for a death ball and its to hard to siege or engage a base as it stands without be suicidal so everyone is just forced to turtle till death ball time or you throw the game away.
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On January 30 2013 00:52 Qgelfich wrote:
Air units in general should not be a strong option vs ground units. For example in Broodwar air units had retarded low dps vs ground (scout, wratih), none at all (scourge, devourer, corsair, valkyrie) or were extremely hard to get while also being well hardcountered by a lot of efficient GtA, AtA units (BC's, Carriers).
This is it IMO.
The other problem is that the best ground anti air comes from units that are super hard countered by aoe (storm, FG, colossus, ect). So the best solution, at least for Terran and Zerg, is to counter air is by going air yourself.
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As a z player i cannot beat mass void and strorm, no matter how many times i remax with corruptor/infestor/hydra whatever i just get smashed no matter what i do
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Zerg needs stronger ground to air. So that means either buffing the infestor(bad idea) or buffing the hydra ( )
Also, I feel that the Carrier really has no place in SC2. With it, Protoss air is way too versatile against Zerg.
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On January 31 2013 05:59 happyness wrote:Zerg needs stronger ground to air. So that means either buffing the infestor(bad idea) or buffing the hydra ( )
Note how there was the exact same problem in WoL, before the infamous infestor buff.
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On January 31 2013 05:59 happyness wrote:Zerg needs stronger ground to air. So that means either buffing the infestor(bad idea) or buffing the hydra ( ) Also, I feel that the Carrier really has no place in SC2. With it, Protoss air is way too versatile against Zerg.
Wrong on both accounts ...
1. From a "common sense perspective" you cant simply "buff everything every time", because you start a never ending cycle of increasing damage and hp. So the only option is "restraint", but I guess that has been an unpopular word for about two or three decades.
2. Not the Carrier should go but all the new - but stupid - air junk Protoss gets with HotS. There are too many air units with HotS and Starcraft has always been great because the number of units to choose from was LIMITED. Too many units to choose from only make the game complicated and not better.
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The problem with Air Deathballs is the same problem as Ground Deathballs. SC2 has many mechanics that encourage deathballing, such as efficient harvesting, de-emphasis on space control, unit clumping, A-move AoE.
I've always believed that the best way to remove deathballs would be to revamp the mineral economy in SC2 to be less efficient and closer to BW. Here's a repost from the other deathball thread:
Honestly I think the biggest change to break up deathballs would be revamping mineral income. The 1st SCV on a mineral patch should harvest more, the 2nd and 3rd SCV should harvest less.
The BW economy was highly inefficient. The difference in income between 30 and 40 workers is much smaller than the difference between 10 and 20 workers. For this reason, at some point it becomes more cost-effective to build units and harass, instead of building exponentially more workers.
In addition, 40 drones on 4 bases was DRAMATICALLY more income than 40 drones on 3 bases or 40 drones on 2 bases. This encouraged expanding before full saturation (actually, there was no such thing as full saturation in BW) and therefore made much more positional play - BW players were encouraged to spread themselves thin, so controlling and occupying space was a big part of the game.
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SC2's economy is too efficient. The difference in income from 50 to 60 workers is just as big as 30 to 40 workers or 10 to 20 workers. Every mineral you spend in combat units greatly weakens the exponential ramp-up of your economy to 200/200. As a result, it is much more difficult to use small harassing attacks. Even if you spend 500 minerals on Hellions and kill 600 minerals of units, your opponent is probably still ahead because he climbed on to the exponential economy curve. Attacks have to do TERRIBLE TERRIBLE DAMAGE or your economy falls far behind. As a result there are way too many all-ins or semi-all-ins and much fewer BW style harasses.
Worse yet, there is no benefit to building multiple under-saturated bases. Therefore there is less incentive to make wide-spread, poorly-defended bases and therefore less importance on space control and positional play.
A simple change to SCV mining mechanics would greatly decrease Deathball Syndrome, even if nothing is changed with regards to pathing, AoE, etc.
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But that logic is essentially what made into Warcraft 3. Both the upkeep and creep-hunting made early skirmishes and map control more preferable than turtling and building economy. I liked Warcraft 3 a lot, but I don't think that's what SC2 fans want.
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For Terran, you only really need the Ravens and BC's. You can't really feedback all 12 or so Ravens because they can start casting one or two PDD's early, potentially wasting shots, plus it's just hard. Infestors get Yamto'd if they even try to get in range to cast an NP or whatever, each Yamato kills a Voidray making Voidrays a terrible choice against late-game BC's, and Corruptors are just awful.
In TvT, to an extent you need some Vikings, but you don't need that many because your BC's will be in front taking the damage while the enemy Vikings try to kite and cannot fire on your Vikings which will be shooting at the enemy Vikings every time they stop. Not to mention PDD's and Yamato Cannon blasts thinning the numbers of the enemy Vikings and wasting a number of their shots.
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I'm really sick of sky compositions, especially mass sky/mass caster compositions. Broodlord/Infestor was our first taste of this problem. Soon it will be Tempest/High Templar and other wacky compositions. My new hatred is the mass Void Ray junk that is happening in PvP. I've been trying to make a Gateway style work, but it becomes increasingly tricky in the late game, and especially a map pool that gives you so many easy bases.
It should be more difficult to just get a bunch of air units or caster units. They should be balanced to take more of a support role than being the best type of army composition. I'd really like to see SC2 head in the direction of a more ground focused game.
These armies shouldn't be common or easy to tech to or achieve. In Brood War, there was usually a crazy back and forth on mid tier units...Tanks, Vultures, Goliaths, Dragoons, Speed Zealots, Zerglings, Hydras, Lurkers, Mutalisks. It usually took a game 25-30 minutes before you would even see a considerable amount of Tier 3 units. For example, once Zergs reached Hive tech, they needed to research Consume, rely on Cracklings/Dark Swarm/Plague for a bit before they could get massive amounts of Ultralisks.
This problem comes down to the way SC2 is paced and the ease of resources on as little as 3 bases. Some changes are definitely needed, but we need to be careful what we change and how. Maybe some rebalancing of the later tier units, maybe regarding production time of either the unit itself or the tech. Maybe we need the standard of mapmaking to change. Maybe Blizzard needs to adjust resources somehow? Who knows what the solution is, honestly? I'd really like to see more mid tier skirmishes and wars of attrition, instead of camping and getting the best army possible while massing gateways/larva/orbitals. So often in this game you see double upgrades and lots of camping. I remember in Brood War, watching pro games you didn't see double upgrades often unless for a specific build (i.e. Flash's Double Armory build versus Protoss), this is because Brood War was so timing focused and build orders had to be very optimized or else you would either not hit a timing, or get killed by one yourself.
TLDR; Mass Air/Caster armies are boring to watch, play with and play against.
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On February 13 2013 13:51 usethis2 wrote:
But that logic is essentially what made into Warcraft 3. Both the upkeep and creep-hunting made early skirmishes and map control more preferable than turtling and building economy. I liked Warcraft 3 a lot, but I don't think that's what SC2 fans want.
Too many "SC2 fans" are gullible and believe everything which Browder says and he always says the stuff they do is awesome. That is a sad fact of todays world, that we arent "responsible consumers" - which we should be - but rather gullible fools who believe in advertisements / the president / politicians / economic spokespersons who claim that making less profit is bad for the nation ...
Browder said in one of those interviews in their big tournament in China that they are looking to get rid of the deathball, but that was a clear lie, because they havent done anything along that line. Deathballs are really boring to watch and despised by many in the community, because they are the only viable strategy - which Browder claimed we wanted to have (in another interview from China) - and no real alternative exists. That is a sad thing and adding yet another deathball to the repertoire is not improving the game.
Getting rid of deathballs WITHOUT A COMPLETE REBALANCE is easy:
On January 31 2013 07:09 Piousflea wrote:The problem with Air Deathballs is the same problem as Ground Deathballs. SC2 has many mechanics that encourage deathballing, such as efficient harvesting, de-emphasis on space control, unit clumping, A-move AoE. I've always believed that the best way to remove deathballs would be to revamp the mineral economy in SC2 to be less efficient and closer to BW. Here's a repost from the other deathball thread: Show nested quote +Honestly I think the biggest change to break up deathballs would be revamping mineral income. The 1st SCV on a mineral patch should harvest more, the 2nd and 3rd SCV should harvest less.
The BW economy was highly inefficient. The difference in income between 30 and 40 workers is much smaller than the difference between 10 and 20 workers. For this reason, at some point it becomes more cost-effective to build units and harass, instead of building exponentially more workers.
In addition, 40 drones on 4 bases was DRAMATICALLY more income than 40 drones on 3 bases or 40 drones on 2 bases. This encouraged expanding before full saturation (actually, there was no such thing as full saturation in BW) and therefore made much more positional play - BW players were encouraged to spread themselves thin, so controlling and occupying space was a big part of the game.
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SC2's economy is too efficient. The difference in income from 50 to 60 workers is just as big as 30 to 40 workers or 10 to 20 workers. Every mineral you spend in combat units greatly weakens the exponential ramp-up of your economy to 200/200. As a result, it is much more difficult to use small harassing attacks. Even if you spend 500 minerals on Hellions and kill 600 minerals of units, your opponent is probably still ahead because he climbed on to the exponential economy curve. Attacks have to do TERRIBLE TERRIBLE DAMAGE or your economy falls far behind. As a result there are way too many all-ins or semi-all-ins and much fewer BW style harasses.
Worse yet, there is no benefit to building multiple under-saturated bases. Therefore there is less incentive to make wide-spread, poorly-defended bases and therefore less importance on space control and positional play.
A simple change to SCV mining mechanics would greatly decrease Deathball Syndrome, even if nothing is changed with regards to pathing, AoE, etc.
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United Kingdom12022 Posts
because they are the only viable strategy
That isn';t true at all. If there were more chokey maps or more maps that benefited attacking in large amounts of areas at once it'd be completely different.
The problem is, is outside of maybe Bifrost and Planet S every proffesionally played Starcraft 2 map rewards people with sitting with their entire army in one place and it doesn't reward splitting your army either.
The big issue is the lack of a decent high ground advantage, but even using more highground and smaller ramps around the map would be much better than what we have now. There's never any positions outside of say the one that gives you access to all three of your bases that you actually need to defend as your bases are so close together they can move in between them, so why would you ever bother splitting up your armies?
The game doesn't cause deathballs, players do. It's easy to split your army, but nobody wants to bother doing it as the maps give no reason to. If maps had bases with less minerals/gas like more maps are being made to have these days, it'd encourage more army movement and more places to defend, which then encourages people to split up more.
I've said this countless times, but look at Cloud Kingdom and Ohana. If you don't attack with your whole army, you'll just lose a base trade. Where bases are so close together on those awful maps, if you kill one base or lose one, there's no turning back since you'll never get back in time to defend your other bases, even with SC2s movement speed you'll lose atleast to your natural on those maps without having a chance to get back.
Fighting Spirit however would be different. The bases are more spread and you're more likely to lose your third, kill there's and still be able to get back and defend your own natural as long as you've split well and are defending the bridge. Maps are too small in SC2, that's why Planet S is so good because it feels big to actually play on it. The issue is when you get large maps so far in SC2 they always have a ridiculous number of bases or a really stupid layout like atlantis spaceship or metropolis. Planet S is probably the best designed map in the entire map pool right now. It's not small, it's large, but with the bases a decent amount apart to allow hurass and also army splitting to attack to be relevant.
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Sky Death Balls shouldn't be the best possible army. A ground army should be able to beat it. If not - everyone will go air units and that will be really boring to watch.
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If only Zerg still had scourge...
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here is my totally awesome and ingenious idea to stop all air deathballs forever
give every race a new ability thats really expensive and hard to get and specializes in anti-air-deathball power
terran
planetary gravity enhancer (building, costs 2000/2000 and builds very slow)
ability: enhance gravity, costs 200 energy
effect: grounds all air units for 25 seconds, dealing 100 damage to them, making them immobile and attackable by ground units
protoss
global psi link (high templar ability, researchable at templars archive for 2000/2000)
new HT ability: atmospheric psi storm
you have to select 5 high templars at once to cast athmospheric psi storm, dealing psi storm damage to everything thats flying
zerg
overlord poison cloud (overlord ability, researchable at hive for 2000/2000)
passive overlord ability, deals 1dmg/min per flying overlord to all enemy air units
there you go, i solved it, thank me later
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On February 13 2013 20:04 llIH wrote:
Sky Death Balls shouldn't be the best possible army. A ground army should be able to beat it. If not - everyone will go air units and that will be really boring to watch.
It actually fits the name Starcraft quite well LOL.
On a serious note, yeah, they should really consider increasing the difficulty in transitioning to sky deathballs.
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A slightly stronger air deathball can be beaten as long as it's not too much stronger and if its lack of mobility can be abused.
Thorzain v Targa isn't an example of why a sky terran deathball is unbeatable. Thorzain didn't win the game because he got a sky terran deathball. The Sky Terran Deathball was how he finished an already won game. Everything he needed to do to win happened before he switched to viking/raven. As Day[9] points out in the daily, he could've won the game a lot faster if he'd simply denied Targa's 6th which was quite feasible. Yes, he did lose his army during the attack on his fourth, but it wasn't a horrible loss. He was left with 3 banshees vs targa's 30 roaches; a difficult but defendable situation. It was his only bad engagement. What's more serious is that by the time that push happened around 18:00, Targa hadn't even started mining from his fourth, and Thorzain had just finished building his 4th, 5th, and 6th command centers. Thorzain was doing a ton of damage with hellion harassment. Targa's worker count losses were staggering, and then he lost his fifth to a push while Thorzain set up his fifth. A 4-base Zerg against a 5-base Terran is a lost game for the Zerg. True, he got a 5th shortly thereafter but was already way behind. By the time Thorzain had those BCs and ravens in position with the sensor towers set up, Targa was surviving on fumes. His unit loss count was almost double Thorzain's. Then Thorzain just starved him out.
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The problem is that the best anti air units are air units themselves for all races.
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On January 29 2013 20:18 rEalGuapo wrote:
I don't understand this obsession with finding "deathballs" and then crying in agony once you see someone play that way.
You know what happened to PvZ?
It became the most amazing matchup IF Protoss was competent enough to make something happen, abusing the slow pace and weak defensive capabilities against multi-pronged attacks.
Rain playing PvZ looks SOOOO good to me.
He pressures one base while attacking another from a proxy Pylon only to distract Zerg and get a Warp Prism in to snipe tech and Queens.
THIS is the way the matchup would have evolved if not for HotS.
Sooner or Later more and more Protoss would mimic this style and get more and more successful with it.
At one point Zerg would have to adapt and realize that a incredibly slow army will only win if your opponent allows it.
At your first game of starcraft what do you do?
You get some buildings and some units, keep everything together and at one point win or lose.
The same thing happens at Pro level, in the beginning you try to get a big army that wins against the other dudes army.
At some point people figure out that one race has the better but slower army and after losing enough they try to develop ways to still beat it.
How the HELL do you expect to be a game that has a few months of Beta to be ANYTHING OTHER than a turtle fest.
Sure a few players will try to find other ways to play the game, but without all the knowledge and experience that is just inferior style.
Do you HONESTLY believe that Starcraft 2 can be at the same level of quality as BW after less than a fifth of the same time of gathering experience?
Sure Starcraft 2 evolves really quickly compared to the early BW but it will still take a ton of time and a couple of special people that understand the game far better than the rest to make this happen.
Starcraft always gets compared to other sports, Soccer 30 years back was incredibly terrible.
Compared to what you see now it was simply shit! That is how we will think in 5 years.
Hell that is how we already think about what happened a year ago.
In all honesty, calm your beards! This game WILL at some point not rely on deathballs in a lot of matchups.
HotS and hopefully LoV will give more options for cool strategy that can be used to outplay someone who turtles and hopes to win with a single attack.
TL;DR
Don't expect anything BUT deathballs for at least another year of HotS, no matter what happens to the game, this is the easiest way to secure victory over a lot of people no matter what.
The other problem giving people more reasons to push for death balls and turtle is the fact that naturals and 3rd are WAAAAY to easy to hold and have way to many resources. Most races don't need more then a natural to at least start reaching their death ball build potential and securing a 3rd is just icing on the cake.
To make matters worse as a Zerg player you can have 5-6 bases to his 3 and it doesn't matter in the slightest. Cost efficiency wise you can throw 200/200 army after army at skytoss and you won't widdle it down enough to save your important still mining bases so there is no PUNISHMENT for hiding on 3 bases till your ready to push out.
No matter what race you play if your opponent has 3 bases up on you, you should suffer immensely! Sadly this is not the case and only adds to the problem.
I think if they adjusted the way the maps are and some of the resources it would force people to play out the early/midgame more to squabble over resources / bases. However, I don't see this happening
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the reason why air deathballs are stronger than ground ones is that the units with GtA attacks are not late-game units (with the only exception being the thor).
by "not late-game units" I mean their cost/supply is low.
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I dont agree or disagree with everything you said, but I do agree that deathballs are a problem that blizzard has had ample to time to deal with. What have we gotten? a new protoss air deathball and the same zerg deathball that nobody can really deal with. if this expansion comes out and its no better than wol, im gone from the game.
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On February 14 2013 04:18 rustypipe wrote:
The other problem giving people more reasons to push for death balls and turtle is the fact that naturals and 3rd are WAAAAY to easy to hold and have way to many resources. Most races don't need more then a natural to at least start reaching their death ball build potential and securing a 3rd is just icing on the cake.
To make matters worse as a Zerg player you can have 5-6 bases to his 3 and it doesn't matter in the slightest. Cost efficiency wise you can throw 200/200 army after army at skytoss and you won't widdle it down enough to save your important still mining bases so there is no PUNISHMENT for hiding on 3 bases till your ready to push out.
No matter what race you play if your opponent has 3 bases up on you, you should suffer immensely! Sadly this is not the case and only adds to the problem.
I think if they adjusted the way the maps are and some of the resources it would force people to play out the early/midgame more to squabble over resources / bases. However, I don't see this happening
If we implemented this in the game, zerg would win 90% of the games, terran 9% and protoss maybe 1% due to unscouted proxy gates. The difficulty in defending expansions and denying opponent expansions is very very different between races. And actually, in current map pool, protoss vs z can attempt to take a really fast third only on entombed and to some extent ohana. All other maps have thirds that are either moderately or hard to defend. The hots slightly changes that, though.
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Yeah I'm really worried about Air Deathballs, because they can't interact with the terrain in any way, (going through choke, up cliff etc.) Makes it really boring to watch maxed out air armies.
Protoss new Air-deathball scares me the most.
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Mass air armies vs mass air armies better not be the ultimate goal of any RTS. As long as air isn't dominant, position and maps matter so much more. Air bypasses so much of that and makes it less like chess and more like whoever makes the most of X wins.
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On February 14 2013 03:03 summerloud wrote:
here is my totally awesome and ingenious idea to stop all air deathballs forever
give every race a new ability thats really expensive and hard to get and specializes in anti-air-deathball power
terran
planetary gravity enhancer (building, costs 2000/2000 and builds very slow)
ability: enhance gravity, costs 200 energy
effect: grounds all air units for 25 seconds, dealing 100 damage to them, making them immobile and attackable by ground units
protoss
global psi link (high templar ability, researchable at templars archive for 2000/2000)
new HT ability: atmospheric psi storm
you have to select 5 high templars at once to cast athmospheric psi storm, dealing psi storm damage to everything thats flying
zerg
overlord poison cloud (overlord ability, researchable at hive for 2000/2000)
passive overlord ability, deals 1dmg/min per flying overlord to all enemy air units
there you go, i solved it, thank me later
Nope, sc2 is not an MMO or MOBA the solution is a hard counter to anything that the other race can MASS to win, just as lings, mutas, marines, tanks, etc. all have hard counters and airtoss should be no different, right now zerg doesnt have anything that does the job.
Infestors used to do this but we all know what happened to the infestor, and now we're back to the early stages of WoL when protosses used to go for the colosus voidray comp but now it's worse because zerg does not have many options to punish the protoss early game with the addition of the MS core.
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The reason for all this is imo, that static defense is too strong against ground and too weak against air.
Mass Air should win you games, if you get in a good position by abusing your mobility. It should not kill mass turrets/spores/cannons/whatever like it does now.
So, if Blizzard wants to balance this Air thing that is going on, it should probably do
a) buff static anti air
b) introduce a new kind of late game anti air defense system
e.g. synergies between towers: more turrets nearby -> turret damage increases
or a t3 tech air tower upgrade
Mass Air is fun, but it should be exactly the opposite of what it is. YOU (the mass air guy) should be the own, waiting like a spider in its net, to poke the enemy where it hurts most. Yes, taking expansions should be hard for your enemy. But if he had like bazillions of towers, you'd have no chance to remove that with mass air.
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On January 29 2013 21:12 Qikz wrote:Show nested quote +On January 29 2013 21:06 ETisME wrote:
^
I guess you are somewhat correct.
But there are two main problems
One is it appears fighting bits and pieces against a deathball aren't working too good in all matchup except TvT.
We have terran constantly dropping against an immobile deathball in TvZ or TvP as well, but the problem is, from what I can see, limited by map design, more vision and the strong defensive capability of spine spore cannon PFs bunker, a few zealots + HTs etc.
We do see toss warping zealots against Terran late game, Terran doing marine marauders runby etc. But none can end the game against a deathball and it always have to end with a deathball vs deathball fight.
The only one where abusing immobility works well is in TvT bio vs Mech. whether it's because it's easier to catch mech unsiege than broodlord infestor bad positioning, I am not sure
The 2nd is IF one managed to get to the deathball that is the best for their respective race, then should this deathball be unbeatable?
In that TvZ I posted, the Targa vs Thorzain game, once Thorzain gets to that high BCs and raven counts, there is almost nothing Targa could have done to break that.
PFs and tanks shut down runbys, sensor gives early warning. Killing off add ons were all he could do. He needed a lot of supply to kill off Terran air units as well.
The reason why I used that game is because Targa could have got drop and maybe finish the game earlier, but when it gets to that ultra late game situation, he has no way to break out.
Should the game be designed this way?
There are indeed situation where both can get into their best unit compositions, should one overpower the other just because of unit design?
It's very likely that these issues won't be solved no matter what LotV gives us because WoL has laid down the foundation and if we don't tackle these questions, nothing will change. Not that I disagree with you there, but that comes entirely down to map design, rather than game design. Maps are simply not big enough and have either far too many bases or bases that are not spread out enough. You can't abuse the mobility of big sky armies as none of the maps are wide or large enough to actually go attack a base where there army isn't. Ohana for example you could sit your sky army outside your third and defend all your bases by moving left or right ever so slightly. Daybreak has the same problem.
That's not really the point with sky terran, though. RSL today had Brat_OK vs Goswser on Entombed valley, where Brat_OK teched to sky terran, while Goswser built up a bank of 12k/10k. Goswser went around Brat_OK's army and killed all of his bases (while four of Goswser's bases remained intact, although some of them were mined out). Goswser lost, because despite more supply and 20 spore crawlers, and mining bases, he could not engage battlecruiser raven. Brat_OK won an 80 minute game.
Goswser should have killed earlier when he had an advantage, no doubt about it. But it's still weird that there's an army Terran can get which is so unapproachable that they don't need a mining base.
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On February 14 2013 07:18 Prugelhugel wrote:
The reason for all this is imo, that static defense is too strong against ground and too weak against air.
Mass Air should win you games, if you get in a good position by abusing your mobility. It should not kill mass turrets/spores/cannons/whatever like it does now.
So, if Blizzard wants to balance this Air thing that is going on, it should probably do
a) buff static anti air
b) introduce a new kind of late game anti air defense system
e.g. synergies between towers: more turrets nearby -> turret damage increases
or a t3 tech air tower upgrade
Mass Air is fun, but it should be exactly the opposite of what it is. YOU (the mass air guy) should be the own, waiting like a spider in its net, to poke the enemy where it hurts most. Yes, taking expansions should be hard for your enemy. But if he had like bazillions of towers, you'd have no chance to remove that with mass air.
The problem with that design is maps with islands. Take an island base, turret it up, and poof, you've guaranteed at least a stalemate if not a win.
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The problem with sky deathballs is that GtA units suck late game. Hydras, Stalkers, Marines/Thors... none of them get the job done against a skyball. Spellcasters don't even help them trade with air. (festors used to, but not post-nerf. storm does little damage to air compared to BW)
Compare this to BW where each race had a strong GtA backbone with a strong anti-air caster:
Goliaths + Ghosts (Lockdown!)
BW Hydras + Defilers (Plague! Swarm!)
Dragoons + Templars (Storm!)
Air should be strong because of mobility, not because it can A-move and win against any ground unit composition. Unfortunately in HotS this is not the case. In WoL the only unstoppable skyball was BL/Festor, but now that is hardcountered by tempest or raven so we see Terran and Toss skyballs.
The skyball solution - IMO - is to buff hydras, thors and stalkers against air. Give hydras a +2 base range vs air, make High Impact Payload strong enough to trade efficiently vs Carriers and VRs, and give stalkers different damage numbers vs ground and vs air.
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On February 14 2013 07:18 Prugelhugel wrote:
The reason for all this is imo, that static defense is too strong against ground and too weak against air.
Mass Air should win you games, if you get in a good position by abusing your mobility. It should not kill mass turrets/spores/cannons/whatever like it does now.
So, if Blizzard wants to balance this Air thing that is going on, it should probably do
a) buff static anti air
b) introduce a new kind of late game anti air defense system
e.g. synergies between towers: more turrets nearby -> turret damage increases
or a t3 tech air tower upgrade
Mass Air is fun, but it should be exactly the opposite of what it is. YOU (the mass air guy) should be the own, waiting like a spider in its net, to poke the enemy where it hurts most. Yes, taking expansions should be hard for your enemy. But if he had like bazillions of towers, you'd have no chance to remove that with mass air.
Buffing stuff isnt the way to go ... not putting in stupid stuff - basically anything which requires something else that already is in the game to be changed - is.
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On February 14 2013 04:02 FlyingBeer wrote:
A slightly stronger air deathball can be beaten as long as it's not too much stronger and if its lack of mobility can be abused.
Thorzain v Targa isn't an example of why a sky terran deathball is unbeatable. Thorzain didn't win the game because he got a sky terran deathball. The Sky Terran Deathball was how he finished an already won game. Everything he needed to do to win happened before he switched to viking/raven. As Day[9] points out in the daily, he could've won the game a lot faster if he'd simply denied Targa's 6th which was quite feasible. Yes, he did lose his army during the attack on his fourth, but it wasn't a horrible loss. He was left with 3 banshees vs targa's 30 roaches; a difficult but defendable situation. It was his only bad engagement. What's more serious is that by the time that push happened around 18:00, Targa hadn't even started mining from his fourth, and Thorzain had just finished building his 4th, 5th, and 6th command centers. Thorzain was doing a ton of damage with hellion harassment. Targa's worker count losses were staggering, and then he lost his fifth to a push while Thorzain set up his fifth. A 4-base Zerg against a 5-base Terran is a lost game for the Zerg. True, he got a 5th shortly thereafter but was already way behind. By the time Thorzain had those BCs and ravens in position with the sensor towers set up, Targa was surviving on fumes. His unit loss count was almost double Thorzain's. Then Thorzain just starved him out.
I disagree with your analysis. Targa took the approach when ahead, be more ahead and went into a broodlord infestor army while Thorzain had to restart from his failed attack.
But Thorzain already had the sky transition ready, he was producing off 6 starports when TargA just had his broodlords and corruptors number high.
So he went onto doing roaches runbys and buying time to get a more ideal unit composition
The problem of the game isn't base number that Targa had. He had no issue with his income and his bank, he stayed max and had a bank for a looooooooooooong time. The game is to be won with a key engagement.
The problem was that he couldn't engage that sky transition, but his own units get constantly sniped by HSMs and yamatos while he couldn't kill anything at all due to pdd and thors protection.
That unit loss count is exactly what I am talking about. There is no efficiently way to engage it, even with 50 corruptors and around 20+ infestors support with queens
Did you not see how targa back off from every engagement because he simply cannot engage? Even with all the time to prepare, all the units he could have produced?
The game could have won differently by both players theoretically, but the game shows how even with lots of bank, lots of time, maxed upgrades, the game is won by a stronger air deathball due to the unit design. And this problem may occur in Hots with the new protoss air units, or even in Lotv if there are more air units to be made. (or even those which are effective against air, such as infestors, HTs, archons, Thors)
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On February 13 2013 20:04 llIH wrote:
Sky Death Balls shouldn't be the best possible army. A ground army should be able to beat it. If not - everyone will go air units and that will be really boring to watch.
The mistake you have made is to assume that one races air death ball needs to be countered by another armies air death ball. If the best death ball toss has is an air ball but the best course death ball is thor+mines+Vikings or hydra+queen+investor then its fine.
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EPT
