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On April 09 2010 04:39 HTX wrote:
I think the main issue is that there is less skill required anymore to manage your larva for eather drones or units. SC1 zerg players have to make choices every time and this needs practice and thinking.
It's all about timing in SC2. And Spawn Larva is a big part of that.
In SC1, it always felt like you were barely squeezing out a few Drones when you could. It was basically a binary choice: make a drone, or make a unit. In SC2, the prevalence of larva gives you more options. At the same time, it gives you more ways to screw up.
If you spend a full Spawn Larva cycle, 7 larva per hatchery, on only drones, you will have very quickly gotten a lot of workers. Far more than a Protoss or Terran in the same timeframe. However, in so doing, you have gotten zero units. At that moment, an alert player can start pressuring you. Between the time you first start making those Drones and your next SL cycle, they have a small window of opportunity to cull your standing army, if not sack your natural.
As people start to understand this, they will take advantage of it more and more. Zergs will simply be unable to spend entire SL cycles on Drones; they will have to build units. They will have to make decisions about how many of those 7 larva per Hatchery to invest in Drones vs. Units. It's not a binary choice anymore, and playstyle will show through.
An aggressive player will play more like SC1, opting to get as few Drones as they can, maybe 1 or two per SL. An econ player will get more Drones, even to the point of investing in additional Spine Crawlers to help pick up the slack. Some players will opt for a more middle-of-the-road approach, getting a more even split.
The difference between SC1 and SC2 in this respect is that you can always make some Drones; it's now a question of how many.
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Grieve <3 the way u put it =)
And for all u who suggest a larva cap would u also agree with a gateway/rax/factory cap? blizz would have to put a limit on every unit/worker producing stucture. dont be a moron.
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well if you think about it its not that extreme. while having 3 hatcheries/3 queens be able to easily compete with anything the toss/terran can throw at them, 3 queens cost 1.5 hatches and are very fragile, so its just a little less than 5 hatch 3 base zerg in BW keeping up with 2 base toss/terran with many more production facilities.
I can understand where people are coming from tho, just having the mining hatches being able to keep up with a player who goes heavy in units seems on the surface pretty unfair, he needs to spend no money on extra production.
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Spawn larvae is no different from having another 2.5 or whatever hatcheries. The ONLY thing it does is saves you money and drones, while forcing you to use an unforgiving macro mechanic. It's really stupid to argue that spawn larvae gives zerg such a huuuuge production boost lategame when all it does is increase the production ability of zerg early and midgame (3.5-4.5 hatch early game, 7 hatch midgame).
"Why the heck is a unit that costs 150 producing more larva than a hatchery anyways?"
Why the heck is a unit that costs 50 mana mining more minerals than something that costs actual minerals anyways? It's the race's macro mechanic. Each race has a different one, and they each focus on specific aspects of the game. Zerg's is basically replacement hatcheries that require actual work to maintain.
By the way, you have to constantly use spawn larvae, every sub-25 seconds, or else it just gets wasted. It's so much more forgiving than with the other two races, where you can just chronoboost multiple buildings or MULE every sub-50 seconds or twice every sub-100 if you build up energy.
I agree with lowering the larva cap, though. 19 is a bit ridiculous.
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Blizzard should have given the queen Proton Charge with a slightly nerfed Spawn Larva (or even mutant larva) for energy tension.
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OP is retarded. A queen is just like making an extra hatchery, except it costs 150 minerals instead of 300. So basically, zerg just saves 150 minerals for each queen they make instead of a hatch, just like how Terran gains some minerals each time they make a MULE.
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One thing I've seen suggested to equalize out the macro mechanics of zerg is to make a larvae cap (perhaps somewhere in the range of 7-9) and allow multiple spawn larva injections at once. Thus saving up would still cost you, but you could spend the extra energy from the queen if you made a mistake. Would solve the problem of zerg players spawning a billion larva late game, and also make them a more forgiving race early to mid.
Potential abuses of this, though, would be making multiple queens per hatchery. Oh well. =/\
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Energy Tension Queen
Drone Nectar (Same as Proton Charge, AoE buff, +1 mineral gathering for drones)
Spawn Larva (2 Larva, Hatcheries can hold 7 at a time)
Gestation (Channeling ability, speeds up zerg build constuction)
Creep Tumor
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maybe they could add an upgrade that gives faster larva spawn as default that needs hive tech to upgrade (hive tech needs more stuff imo)
they could nerf spawn larva from 4 to 3
in this way u wouldnt get over-many larva early mid game and u wouldnt get too few larva late game ^^
why dont they give autocast to spawn larva? they want it to be some macro mechanic that u must learn or what?
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On April 09 2010 05:11 teamsolid wrote:
OP is retarded. A queen is just like making an extra hatchery, except it costs 150 minerals instead of 300. So basically, zerg just saves 150 minerals for each queen they make instead of a hatch, just like how Terran gains some minerals each time they make a MULE.
The problem is that you are not only saving 150 minerals for each queen you make instead of a hatch. With queen hatch combination you dont need as much hatches in midgame (compared to sc1) so you dont have to spend your money for production buildings hence you can spend all your money for your army. And worse than this you dont need to think about getting new hatches before your eco kicks in due to the spawn larva abillity.
In short: you can drone like the other races, have equal armys (all fine so far) , but you are saving a lot of money because you are not forced to hatch more and then you can spend the money right away on units to secure more ground or outproduce him with equal bases.
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On April 09 2010 02:52 Jugan wrote:
You shouldn't base your evidence on your personal winrate.
What should I base it on then? The opinions of the majority of people (not you) who dont even play the race?
On April 09 2010 02:52 Jugan wrote:
I feel like zerg is at a huge advantage against terran, as they are able to macro incredibly and get away with it. From my experience (and I could be wrong), I often have trouble trying to punish a zerg that goes hatchery before spawning pool. By the time my first couple of marines get there, they are already outnumbered by zerglings. I watched one of my replays where my opponent went hatchery before spawning pool. I constantly pumped SCV's, except when to make the OC. At the point I had 19 SCV's, he had over 30 drones, which is a little ridiculous.
On April 09 2010 02:55 Floophead_III wrote:
I never said zerg is imbalanced and is winning everything. I said zerg is broken. The balance lies in the inability of zerg to fight off early pressure, but if they do they can literally mass roach or mass baneling to victory. There is no unit for terran besides the marauder that can deal with mass roach.
clearly, one of you two are doing it wrong.
And thats the problem the same way you cant fight mass roach unless you went mass marauder, there is no way for zerg to fight mass marauder.
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On April 09 2010 05:32 HTX wrote:Show nested quote +On April 09 2010 05:11 teamsolid wrote:
OP is retarded. A queen is just like making an extra hatchery, except it costs 150 minerals instead of 300. So basically, zerg just saves 150 minerals for each queen they make instead of a hatch, just like how Terran gains some minerals each time they make a MULE. The problem is that you are not only saving 150 minerals for each queen you make instead of a hatch. With queen hatch combination you dont need as much hatches in midgame (compared to sc1) so you dont have to spend your money for production buildings hence you can spend all your money for your army. And worse than this you dont need to think about getting new hatches before your eco kicks in due to the spawn larva abillity. In short: you can drone like the other races, have equal armys (all fine so far) , but you are saving a lot of money because you are not forced to hatch more and then you can spend the money right away on units to secure more ground or outproduce him with equal bases.
This would be remotely close to true if you completely disregard the fact that the other races have macro mechanics as well.
And if you ignored the fact that you lose a drone every time you built a building.
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Hatcheries cost 350 minerals + time to build the drone + time to build the hatch. Queens cost 150, actually fight things and can be used to plant creep tumors, produce MORE larva than a hatchery, and are easily replaced if they die.
Zerg can still accidently make too many drones or too few drones. SC2 has not changed the fact that you need to know when to drone and when to not. The strength of spawn larva is moreso that you don't need any time to build up an army. With 2 hatch 2 queen you can pump over 36 lings in a minute. That's absurd. Marines take 25 seconds to build. You would need 8 reactor barracks to match that rate of production. That's 200/50 * 8 or 1600/400 resources just to match zerg's production factor which they spent a whopping 350+150*2 = 650 minerals on. Not to mention they also expanded by making more production. To match their expansions you'd need to spend another 400 minerals.
So what if zerg has 20 less drones than you have scvs. All that extra money has to go into production just to keep up with the rate zerg makes units. The point is that zerg hardly needs full saturation to pump a ridiculous number of units, because they never needed to invest in all that production in the first place.
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There could be some nice alternatives to spawn larva, like upgrades to hatcheries that let them make larva more quickly, or even decreasing the hatchery cost and build time to let the zerg player get more down rather than depend so heavily on the queen's specials. You could then use the queen for her other abilities rather than keep her slaved to the hatchery.
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The OP over-simplified the problem a little, especially with the lategame conclusion.
Zerg gets (up to) 1 larva every 15 seconds per hatch, and an additional 1 larva every ten seconds from a queen.
Up until saturation, probes and scvs take 17 seconds to complete, so ignoring all macro mechanics, zerg can only keep up economically if they build nothing but drones.
The queen produces up to one larva every 10 seconds. Terran needs 3 barracks to match that output with marauders, but one reactor barracks gets them nearly there. Ignoring chronoboost, protoss needs 3 gateways to produce a zealot for every roach/pair of zerglings and 4 to produce stalkers/sentries 1:1.
This is an apples:oranges comparison, but my basic point is that zerg isn't getting an unreasonable production capability - once protoss or terran expands, running 6 barracks or warpgates is reasonable, although you're more likely to see 2-3 and 2-3 tech buildings.
In the late game things change drastically. To use the most extreme example, I'm going to go straight to carriers/battlecruisers - with a 120/110 second build time, you'd need to build 12 stargates to match zerg's capacity to build broodlords or ultralisks. (At 75 seconds, thors and colossus are a little bit more reasonable). What really hurts here is the gas costs - 8 tech production facilities is prohibitively expensive.
So (part of) the reason that zerg are running you over late game is that their parallel production system ramps up as the build time of the units increase. Zerg builds more and more efficiently relative to protoss/terran as the units get bigger.
So nerfing spawn larva would destroy zergs early game, and not have the desired effect in the late game, where you will just make it cost-effective for zerg to spend some minerals on an extra hatch the way they did in BW.
Solutions are much harder to find than problems, but there are a few things that might work.
You could make production buildings cheaper, although that would change a bunch of timings.
Or you could ramp up the macro mechanics - if chronoboost stacked then a couple of nexuses would make protoss very reactive, and if mules could gas then terran could afford the extra buildings.
Or (the way blizzard has handled it to date) you could make zerg units flimsier than terran/protoss, so that zerg loses more units and needs to build more. In a very real way, the hydra hit-point nerf was nerfing spawn larva.
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I dont see why spawn larvae is such a sticking point for some people. ZvP in broodwar requires 5 hatches on 3 bases. All spawn larvae does is allow the zerg to use 3 hatches on 3 bases with 2 or 3 queens for the same production levels.
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The reason they are bothered is that for the first time, the zerg can stack larvae. I agree that is kinda weird and way different from BW, in that it really affects lategame play.
But I don't think the larvae stack up all that fast really, and once they get past 3, queens are your only source of larvae from then out. You got 2 queens, you'll get 8 larvae per 40 (?) secs until you finally start building more units. So you aren't getting 5 hatches worth of larvae unless you are spending them all.
The only difference is that in BW when you got a huge army you had to suicide it before you could get any more larvae. Given how fast my units die in the average skirmish, I don't know if I could survive without a steady supply of larvae late game. T/P armies are STRONG. It is not uncommon to have 30 or 40 hydras die in a skirmish and leave 4 collosus roaming around regenning shields.
In any case, even if my theoretical production rate is fast, I'm still constrained by resources and I'm never going to produce more than I can afford. Also the first 30 or so larvae of every hatch/queen combo is going to be used for drones and buildings, so that lowers the overall rate of effective army regeneration within the game by a bit.
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I agree that zerg is way too easy to macro but nerfing spawn larva will make zerg too weak early and mid-game without any other changes imo.
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On April 09 2010 06:36 guitarizt wrote:
I agree that zerg is way too easy to macro but nerfing spawn larva will make zerg too weak early and mid-game without any other changes imo.
how about buffing the zergling/hydra
and going down to 5-7 larvae is not a bad idea imo
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EPT
