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Re-topic. Perhaps we can actually discuss this instead of have people flame me without providing their own suggestions. As per my other post, I want to discuss the armor types in SC2. I do not want to discuss BW armor types, I do not want to compare BW to SC2. What I want is a serious discussion on the state of armor types in SC2. There is only TWO armor types. If Blizzard intends to use an armor-type system, there needs to be more than two types.
I posted my suggestion and all I got was trolls pointing out stupid information that I already knew (like the real damage Marauders do - guess what 20 damage was an EXAMPLE). People really need to stop taking the first opportunity possible to flame, and actually read what I said. If you don't like the armor types I suggested, come up with something else, but do not sit there and try to defend Blizzard's blatantly poorly though-out two armor system in SC2.
My proposal is simple.
Implement a new armor type for buildings and a new armor type for siege type units. Now for those of you who wish to provide your own take on what should be done with armor-types please feel free to reply. I want to have a real discussion on armor types here, not a flame war.
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Seems like the topic got deleted or something while I wrote up this, so let me paste it here:
It might be a good thing to have more than 2 damage values for 1 unit (base and base + bonus). But it wouldn't make sense to implement it so that the unit deals less than base damage to some targets. Instead it could be like this:
base damage: 5
bonus vs light: 3
bonus vs armored: 7
Which is much more consistent.
In fact some units already have more than 2 damage values:
Baneling:
base damage: 20
bonus vs light: 15
bonus vs structure: 60
That's because banelings have a seperate attack for buildings. Ultralisks also have one, but afaik they deal normal damage. Yes it's a different attack with different animation etc, but the result is the same, Ultralisks have bonus damage against buildings.
SC2 has way more than 2 armor types. One unit can have several types. There are:
Light
Armored
Biological
Psionic
Structure
Massive
Did I miss one? Dunno... Yeah those modifiers don't really sound like armor types but as far as game mechanics are concerned they are. Archons deal bonus damage to biological for example.
Most units have either light or armored, but some units (Queen) don't.
Technically Blizzard has the option to tweak damage similar to what you want, but this just hasn't been used a lot yet.
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WC3 has:
Hero Armor, Heavy Armor, Medium, Light Armor,Unarmored, Fortified (buildings)
Attacks were:
Normal, Piercing, Siege, Chaos, Magic and Hero
I don't want a game that is just trying to memorize what units do damage to what, extra to this, reduced to that... for days and days.
Though, in support of your idea, making 3 attack types, and 3 armor types may be easier to balance than just Light vs Armored because, as in RTS, 3 seems much easier to balance than 4 or 5... in terms of races, and I would imagine the same balancing issues would affect armor types.
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Yea good point. I know there is actually more than two armor types, but since most units only get bonuses to +light and +armored exist those become effectively the only two that matter. Still I think that Blizzard needs to take a serious look at Armor-Types because I'm sure that slight tweeks in that area it could fix a lot of the things that seem like unit-specific imbalances.
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On April 07 2010 05:20 cursor wrote:
WC3 has:
Hero Armor, Heavy Armor, Medium, Light Armor,Unarmored, Fortified (buildings)
Attacks were:
Normal, Piercing, Siege, Chaos, Magic and Hero
I don't want a game that is just trying to memorize what units do damage to what, extra to this, reduced to that... for days and days.
Though, in support of your idea, making 3 attack types, and 3 armor types may be easier to balance than just Light vs Armored because, as in RTS, 3 seems much easier to balance than 4 or 5... in terms of races, and I would imagine the same balancing issues would affect armor types.
Well despite what a lot of people think of War3 I actually liked the way it forced specific micro mechanics related to the armor-types. However I do agree that for SC it probably wouldn't be the best to have so many types. The real issue I have with the current system is that it seems like Blizzard is trying to use a WC3-esque system, and simply missed the goal. Sure we all love the hard-counter system because there is clear choices of X unit beats X unit, but without the soft counter side of things too (viable soft counters that is) battles seem to really lack depth.
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for sure there will be a unit with bonus dmg vs psionic... i mean in on of the two datadisks...
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should just go back to the original..
example-
base damage 20
vs heavy 20
medium 15
light 10
really was a better system
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I just wish Zerg had something that dealt bonus dmg against armored so we could kill buildings easy mode too.
I mean, Immortals 3-shot spine crawlers and Marauders just LOL at them.
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A third armor type might be a good idea. I think the real problem with the implementation of bonus damage is that many of the units are taking it too far and it begins to feel artificial and force extreme hard counters. In BW the maximum bonus or penalty was 50% damage. Now we are seeing units do more than double their normal damage to certain armor types. Helion, Baneling, Immortal, are some of the units that come to mind right away.
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On April 07 2010 05:33 zazen wrote:
I just wish Zerg had something that dealt bonus dmg against armored so we could kill buildings easy mode too.
I mean, Immortals 3-shot spine crawlers and Marauders just LOL at them.
Immortals don't 3-shot spine crawlers, what are you smoking?
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Some good points. Yea Zazen I agree Zerg's only options for building damage are A. really massive army B. Banelings or C. Ultralisks. Ultralisks take too long to tech to be really viable vs an early wall-in and Banelings are easily manageable by all three races to prevent damage to buildings. I have no problem with units getting bonuses versus certain units, but a 'hard-counter' system eventually leads to one person massing a unit that doesn't really have a counter (other than the same unit/corresponding unit from a given race). Some units should straight-up own other units, but it shouldn't force the exact same style of play or unit type to counter it. (For example if in PvP mass Immortal is countered by mass Immortals or mass Phoenix/Void Rays, and mass Phoenix/Void Rays is countered by mass Phoenix/Void Rays with slightly better micro....)
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What you are all referring to are not armor types per se, just modifiers (they identify the target). There is no need to add a 3rd modifier since we already have it; its called Structure and there are attacks that are specific anti-structure (reapers, benalings). However the problem is structures all identify as armored as well. I do believe this has been brought up (if not here on b.net).
I wouldn't mind if Siege Tanks and Colosus had a anti-structure attack (for god sake that's how real world tanks work!), but they don't...
In any case its obvious blizzard has placed a lot of either placeholders or cruft. In other words stuff that had a place but still exists after its target purpose spell/unit/etc was removed long ago.
Right now I believe only the following count,
Structure -- Benaling, Nukes, Reapers
Biological -- Ghost Snipe, Archons
Armored -- <you know it>
Light -- <you know it>
Massive -- Corruptors etc
Air -- <you know it>
Orphaned modifiers
-- Psionic
-- Mechanical
Did I miss one?
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United States12240 Posts
On April 07 2010 05:15 SichuanPanda wrote:
Re-topic. Perhaps we can actually discuss this instead of have people flame me without providing their own suggestions. As per my other post, I want to discuss the armor types in SC2. I do not want to discuss BW armor types, I do not want to compare BW to SC2. What I want is a serious discussion on the state of armor types in SC2. There is only TWO armor types. If Blizzard intends to use an armor-type system, there needs to be more than two types.
I posted my suggestion and all I got was trolls pointing out stupid information that I already knew (like the real damage Marauders do - guess what 20 damage was an EXAMPLE). People really need to stop taking the first opportunity possible to flame, and actually read what I said. If you don't like the armor types I suggested, come up with something else, but do not sit there and try to defend Blizzard's blatantly poorly though-out two armor system in SC2.
My proposal is simple.
Implement a new armor type for buildings and a new armor type for siege type units. Now for those of you who wish to provide your own take on what should be done with armor-types please feel free to reply. I want to have a real discussion on armor types here, not a flame war.
I'm not a troll and I wasn't flaming you. I won't repeat what I said in the previous topic, but I'll advise against reposting locked topics. If you really want to get technical though, Ghosts, Queens and Archons are Psionic (not light or armored) and Biological is a secondary classification against which Archons do bonus damage. There's no real reason to complicate the armor system and unit relationships further without muddying everything.
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well... having no attribute can be considered an armor type as well.
see archon: he's only psionic atm, which does nothing. so he doesn't receive extra damage from anything - the best armor type one can have :p
so i say remove "armored" from ultralisks to make it more interesting to build than just 4 roaches for the same HP
(and "mechanical" is for SCVs/MULEs to repair - yes that's half the toss arsenal, too)
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The only thing I feel like needs to be changed, is that bldgs should have their own armor/unit type. It's kind of ridiculous to see marauder,immortal, tank, etc. Doing their full damage+bonus damage to bldgs. They die sooooooo fast that it's absurd.
In bw, units that did concussive damage (like ghost/vulture) only did a small amount to structures, other units did their full. In this game it's a bit backwards, everything does full, and some units get bonus vs them, and others don't get their bonus. But everythings' base damage is pretty high to begin with so you don't really have hellions or ghosts doing 4 damage or whatever, they do like 10.
So take something like immortal, which does 20~ +30~ and at a decent DPS, even without being paired with other units it smashes structures hard. And then look at marauders, 10~ +10~ and STIM. They just rip down buildings super fast, 5 of them does 100 damage per volley, and since they are the core of every terran army and cheap he's always gonna be able to snipe a base at any time, or clean up a base after a battle in seconds.
I never really like the idea of units like siege tanks or bat riders in wc3. Taking out structures ultra fast is not really something that lends to competitive play, it just promotes slippery slope and all in/rushing. Stuff like this greatly reduces chances for comebacks or defending because your base dies faster or as fast as your army does. This shouldn't ever be the case imo.
So perhaps buildings should get 'fortified armor' and all units should do 2/3 of their attack or something. Or armored bonuses just ignored and only things doing bonus/alternate damage to structures are units that say so (like blings or ultras).
Also, lots of units in this game just do higher damage/dps in general when compared to bw. And I think that's probably another factor, because bldgs have about the same hp as they did in bw.
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On April 07 2010 07:09 CharlieMurphy wrote:
The only thing I feel like needs to be changed, is that bldgs should have their own armor/unit type. It's kind of ridiculous to see marauder,immortal, tank, etc. Doing their full damage+bonus damage to bldgs. They die sooooooo fast that it's absurd.
In bw, units that did concussive damage (like ghost/vulture) only did a small amount to structures, other units did their full. In this game it's a bit backwards, everything does full, and some units get bonus vs them, and others don't get their bonus. But everythings' base damage is pretty high to begin with so you don't really have hellions or ghosts doing 4 damage or whatever, they do like 10.
So take something like immortal, which does 20~ +30~ and at a decent DPS, even without being paired with other units it smashes structures hard. And then look at marauders, 10~ +10~ and STIM. They just rip down buildings super fast, 5 of them does 100 damage per volley, and since they are the core of every terran army and cheap he's always gonna be able to snipe a base at any time, or clean up a base after a battle in seconds.
I never really like the idea of units like siege tanks or bat riders in wc3. Taking out structures ultra fast is not really something that lends to competitive play, it just promotes slippery slope and all in/rushing. Stuff like this greatly reduces chances for comebacks or defending because your base dies faster or as fast as your army does. This shouldn't ever be the case imo.
So perhaps buildings should get 'fortified armor' and all units should do 2/3 of their attack or something. Or armored bonuses just ignored and only things doing bonus/alternate damage to structures are units that say so (like blings or ultras).
Also, lots of units in this game just do higher damage/dps in general when compared to bw. And I think that's probably another factor, because bldgs have about the same hp as they did in bw.
I definitely agree with pretty much everything you said. Basically this is my main gripe with the armor-types as well, if unit armor-types never change and remain as they are I wouldn't really be too concerned, however, buildings definitely need a change. I think that either the armor change, or the removal of armored bonuses versus buildings is probably the best solution, without making things overly complicated for casual players.
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I think the true problem is not the armor types or bonus damage system itself. As several people already said in several discussions, broodwar also had a system of armor and weapon types.
But in actual gameplay, the pure fact that certain units dealt more or less damage against certain other units did not make them counters as hard as they are now. Look at Vultures for example, they were used in situations when their attack was kinda weak, but they were still important for their mines. Right now, in most situations there are hard counters, often defined by the way they deal damage, and you won't see many units beside those which try to counter other units directly.
(as blizzard said - "There was a lot of muddy gameplay in BW")
The big problem imo is, that battles became reduced to some kind of army-stats-comparison with weak other factors exept for maybe a seeker missile every 0.5% of games or obviously bad positions inside choke points. Thus, I don't think that the discussion about armortypes have to be solved by changing those, but that it's the gameplay itself that forces those army-stats-comparison-battles (ah I start to love this phrase).
For example, right now you can say that marines are easily countered by any race with storms and banelings and so on. If the games were more split up all over the map similar to BW, both would become less of a threat in general because the game is not decided by a few huge battles only in which banelings find the thankful target of a closely stacked bunch of marines.
This is also kinda related to BeMannerDuPenner's post in "Everything kills everything else too fast!" with armies clumping together to big balls making any attempt of micro apart from obvious actions like storms and EMPs and stimpaks obsolete.
When the action was more spread out, people could actually care about the individual unit's strengths and counter them against each other instead of having a-click and the guy with cooler +damage-boni wins.
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As said in other threads... the biggest problem right now is Roach/Immortal/Marauder. They are way out of place and warp any kind of armor balance.
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On April 07 2010 06:07 Black Octopi wrote:
Orphaned modifiers
-- Psionic
-- Mechanical
Mechanical isn't orphaned, it defines what units an scv can repair, like biological determines what units a medivac can heal (probably transfusion too). Scvs, for example are both mechanical and biological and mechanical and can be repaired and healed by a medivac.
I had thought that "psionic" was an armour type that was basically for not having counters, (archon, and to a lesser extent queen).
I'm another one who think it seems odd that every building is armored - are pylons/supply depots, HQs and production buildings, and spine crawlers/bunkers/turrets really all supposed to have the same armour types?
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On April 07 2010 10:45 MeditationError wrote:Show nested quote +On April 07 2010 06:07 Black Octopi wrote:
Orphaned modifiers
-- Psionic
-- Mechanical
Mechanical isn't orphaned, it defines what units an scv can repair, like biological determines what units a medivac can heal (probably transfusion too). Scvs, for example are both mechanical and biological and mechanical and can be repaired and healed by a medivac. I had thought that "psionic" was an armour type that was basically for not having counters, (archon, and to a lesser extent queen). I see. Forgot about the SCVs.
Also, Mothership is both Psionic - Massive, and High Templar is Biological - Psionic - Light. Seems your theory is wrong. Maybe this has something to do with Vortex.
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So perhaps buildings should get 'fortified armor' and all units should do 2/3 of their attack or something. Or armored bonuses just ignored and only things doing bonus/alternate damage to structures are units that say so (like blings or ultras).
This. All units should deal base damage only when attacking buildings unless they have a special attack that targets buildings (pretty much what Charlie said).
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On April 07 2010 20:04 lolaloc wrote:Show nested quote +So perhaps buildings should get 'fortified armor' and all units should do 2/3 of their attack or something. Or armored bonuses just ignored and only things doing bonus/alternate damage to structures are units that say so (like blings or ultras). This. All units should deal base damage only when attacking buildings unless they have a special attack that targets buildings (pretty much what Charlie said).
I kind of agree but the game would have to be completely re-balanced. Having immortals do almost nothing to buildings wouldn't really make sense. They have less DPS than stalkers without their bonus.
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I think some people here are confusing ARMOR type with UNIT type.
Armor types are light, armored and massive; Units have other types (biological, mechanical, psionic, ...) too to describe their vulnerabilities to certain attacks, repairability and so on.
I can understand the OP, because for me one of the things which make certain units (Marauders for example) seem a bit overpowered is their ability to demolish buildings too fast. Tier 1 units should require a lot of units to accomplish that. While I can agree with a "structural" armor type I am not so sure about giving Tanks and Thors anything of the kind. These two units fall relatively fast, but that is due to a purely game-mechanical reason: Attacking units cluster up a lot more than in Brood War, thus the "damage per attack space" is much higher and this results in faster damage to these units. It has nothing to do with certain units having a bonus vs. armored.
If more people see the "damage per attack space" as a problem too, I can only come up with one solution: Lower the dps on ALL units by the same amount. Adding yet more stats (armor types) would complicate things too much IMO.
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Russian Federation4235 Posts
You kinda have to rethink the whole thing, because SC2 doesn't have armor types.
Instead, it has unit property flags. While you cannot be BOTH Light and Heavy in SC1, in SC2 technically, nothing prevents you from being, say, both Light and Biological, and take increased damage from units who have bonuses vs either.
Armor/weapon types mean there's a matrix somewhere that regulates how much damage a weapon deals vs said armor type. That's final. SC2, instead, has a flat structure of flags that is unique for each unit. Once again, there are no armor types because flags are not exclusive (I suppose you can make a unit that is both Light and Armored, if you wish), and there are no weapon types because each unit has it's own fixed damage bonus (not percentile-based).
If anything, that's a lot more data to memorize than a Weapon/Armor matrix in WC3, and is in fact harder to get a grasp on. I'm still not sure if I like it. For what I'm certain, it's nowhere near the elegancy of SC, where global principles rule local unit relation. However, if local rules global, there's more flexibility. You can make unit A do more damage to a unit flagged with B without touching any other unit.
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This. All units should deal base damage only when attacking buildings unless they have a special attack that targets buildings (pretty much what Charlie said).
Removing armoured from buildings would make all non-special attacksdo base damage. Problem solved. Shjould at least be done on static D.
imo:
Zerg : Biological + Structure
Terran : Mechanical + Structure
Protoss : Psionic + Structure (at least on pylons / nexus)
Just seems like having the armoured tag is more a liability than implying any increased toughness...Each race does have ways of increasing building toughness but they're all quite expensive (Transfusion / Armour Research + SCV coming off gathering to repair / P Shield upgrades)
Maybe these methods should be reduced in cost somewhat to make a softer way of fixing the problem of fast base death.
Just an aside, I think infesters and ghosts should get their default attack giving a bonus against psionic (or energydrain), makes sense really (and slightly offsetting the awesomeness of feedback)
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
I fail to see what is wrong with the status quo. Why bother changing anything is there is not a problem?
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There is absolutely nothing wrong with the armor system in SC2.
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On April 07 2010 21:19 Plexa wrote:
I fail to see what is wrong with the status quo. Why bother changing anything is there is not a problem?
Agreed. What people should be paying attention is yomi's post (Sorry if anyone else has touched base on this topic in thread.)
On April 07 2010 05:39 yomi wrote:
A third armor type might be a good idea. I think the real problem with the implementation of bonus damage is that many of the units are taking it too far and it begins to feel artificial and force extreme hard counters. In BW the maximum bonus or penalty was 50% damage. Now we are seeing units do more than double their normal damage to certain armor types. Helion, Baneling, Immortal, are some of the units that come to mind right away.
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In response to above post:
On April 07 2010 05:39 yomi wrote:
A third armor type might be a good idea. I think the real problem with the implementation of bonus damage is that many of the units are taking it too far and it begins to feel artificial and force extreme hard counters. In BW the maximum bonus or penalty was 50% damage. Now we are seeing units do more than double their normal damage to certain armor types. Helion, Baneling, Immortal, are some of the units that come to mind right away.
Concussive damage only deals 25% damage to large units in BW. That's obviously a 75% penalty. The only unit where it really mattered was the Vulture though, and it had spider mines with explosive damage to deal with large units.
Banelings are 20+15 now, not 15+20 as they were before. So they deal less than double damage.
It's not as big of a change towards hard counters as you make it seem.
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On April 07 2010 21:19 Plexa wrote:
I fail to see what is wrong with the status quo. Why bother changing anything is there is not a problem?
x2. I would like to see more explication from the OP than the "armor system is blatantly poorly thought out" assertion.
Edit: Although this wasn't mentioned in OP, I do agree with many of the replies above that the damage against buildings makes for game-changing play that seems too easy to pull off. E.g., four Void Rays focused on a main takes the main down in ~8 seconds.
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I agree that structures should have a different armor type because those anti-armor'd units (immortals/marauders) are just way too good against them.
However, as for a "siege" armor they already have Bonus damage vs. Massive, and I don't think anything else needs changed in that regard.
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On April 07 2010 20:21 Rabiator wrote:
I think some people here are confusing ARMOR type with UNIT type.
Armor types are light, armored and massive; Units have other types (biological, mechanical, psionic, ...) too to describe their vulnerabilities to certain attacks, repairability and so on.
So both armor types and unit types describe the vulnerabilites of a unit right? Then how are they different?
If you want a subset of unit types that is called armor types then that would be none, light and armored because Blizzard seems to give each unit exactly one of those three. But you'll run into exceptions everywhere and there is no reason anyways to make a difference between, for example, armored and biological. I guess the SC2 engine would even allow a "light - armored" unit.
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EPT
