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On April 14 2010 17:18 Falling wrote:Show nested quote +On April 14 2010 16:50 sk` wrote:
In short, the "Roach" thread highlights the problem. A cool unit was made, which created a balance problem, thus units to counter it were needed; however, those too created balance problems and the cycle continues. Had the team started with "Zerg should behave like N and thus need unit X." It wouldn't have been the same.
For example, in BW did anyone every say, "Man, if only Zerg had a short-mid range meat shield unit named after an insect." Hu? No. Effectively, they had that in the Ultra, bringing it down to T1.5 does what for the race?
SC2 has no shortage of examples like that and they all stem from the same point. No plan. Throw it at the wall and see what sticks... But isn't this simply a problem of in what order did something come about/ a matter perspective. Would not any new unit created become 'a balance problem'? It's a new unit, so it'll need to be balanced. That's a problem, therefore other units are needed to counter it. Now whether they had in their heads which units countered which units at the beginning or whether certain units were created in order to balance that cool unit, we don't know. We can't know from the interview and our argument is only based on assumption.
Any new unit has the potential to be a balance problem, but there's a big difference between creating a unit on the basis of "wouldn't it be cool if..." and trying to fit that into the game vs looking at the game, seeing what elements are weak or could be improved, and designing units to fit those needs.
The roach is the ultimate example because it fills a role that was already filled: the T1.5 ranged unit to complement the zergling. What started out as a cool concept of the regenerating meat shield has been watered down to the point of being a slightly more expensive, slightly less damaging zealot who has 3 range. Except that unlike the hydralisk that it's meant to replace, the roach can be hard countered by immortals and marauders (who have their own slew of issues), or air units. Meanwhile the hydralisk, which is an iconic unit, has been bastardized into an expensive, slow, glass cannon.
Medivacs and warp prisms are examples of design done right. You could look at the design of SC1 and the way drop ships worked, and conclude two things:
1) Drop ships themselves are boring, functional units that aren't very cool.
2) Air mobility is an extremely important element, and drop ships are important to that.
Thus the medivac and warp prism are born, as multi dimensional, cooler drop ships.
Overlords losing the ability to see cloaked and the introduction of overseers is another example. Cloaked units lost their impact against zerg, who by default were virtually immune to the concept. Answer: take that ability away by default, and provide a replacement. Maybe not that exciting, but it's functional. Overseers solve an issue, rather than exist just to be cool.
The problem is there are simply too many roaches and thors that exist to be "cool" and not enough medivacs and overseers that exist to address real needs in the design.
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Canada11349 Posts
You say that Medivacs and Warp Prism were 'designed right,' but you have no idea by what process they got those ideas. That was my point. We don't know. It was a creative process where anything goes and limits were put later. For all we know the Roach was intended to fill a function and the Medivac was a random idea.
Any new unit has the potential to be a balance problem, but there's a big difference between creating a unit on the basis of "wouldn't it be cool if..." and trying to fit that into the game vs looking at the game, seeing what elements are weak or could be improved, and designing units to fit those needs.
This assumes you have a functioning game to begin with. Essentially that they took Brood War as the core and simply added or deleted more units. However, if they were looking for a new game aka SCII and not Brood War with better graphics, then you're building the game from the ground up, but with a lot of crossover. So you have no way of knowing whether one unit would 'fit' amongst all the others because you're creating all those other units at the same time. (And adding some of the older ones.)
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On April 14 2010 21:59 TerranUp16 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 14 2010 21:05 DarQraven wrote:
This approach seems very familiar to me, and I'm afraid some of you are understanding it the wrong way. I'm an industrial design student, and besides the engineering/marketing part, there's the completely open phase where you brainstorm for different possible solutions to a problem or even brainstorm for possible problems to solve in the first place.
The most effective approach is to generate as many ideas as you possibly can, not even necessarily within the range of feasibility or even physical possibility. Then distill from that huge pile of ideas.
Limiting yourself early on in a creative process like this is hell. It restricts the range of your ideas and prevents 'cross-pollination' of ideas. Most often, the result is the most obvious answer, while another less obvious solution might be way better in the end.
Let me explain.
Blizzard, being the creative bunch that they are, can undoubtedly come up with all kinds of mechanics and roles for new units. The only limit to what they can think up is how much coffee, time and motivation they have.
Let's say during this process employee A comes up with the Terran Lone Ranger unit, a cowboy on horseback that can throw a lasso and draw in units from the opponent's army, so that the player can use this ability to break enemy positioning. This idea could have originated in a random brainfart, it could have been derived from the redneck nature of Terrans, it could have been a random image the employee saw on TV, it could have been anything.
This is a completely unfeasible idea of course and very out of place in the lore of SC2.
The point is, though: however 'wrong' this idea might be, it does serve to maybe inspire employee B (or even A itself) to think about units that emphasize positional play more.
Abilities like Sentry Force Field or the Phoenix's Graviton Beam could have originated in this way.
This effect is further amplified when creatively working in larger teams. The cross-pollination often happens in your head if you work on something alone, but pooling ALL ideas, not just the good ones, serves the purpose of accelerating the creative process immensely, as well as broadening its scope. I don't really disagree. It really depends on what level you're on and where you're working with the development. So, purely at the unit stage, it's rather fine if I just stop and go, "Ok guys, just go ahead and think of the most batshit-insane stuff you can and we'll whisk through it," but you need to have a plan for test all of that against, even if you aren't testing it against that plan immediately. So taking the example from my previous post where we have the planning for the ground Zerg siege unit. We could take thousands of unit concepts and cull through them to see how they relate to that plan, and we could eventually come across one or more that fit it really well. Alternately, we could come across some concepts that don't quite fit the role or that stretch it or etc, but we might decide that's ok and we want to check and see if maybe doing it that way is more viable or better- but even in doing so we still want to re-evaluate our original plan and tweak it accordingly so that we can adjust our evaluation criteria accordingly. Because even after finding something we like there's a pretty good chance that we'll like a lot about that thing but it just may not be completely workable so we want to redo our framework so that we can refine future efforts along that course, instead of getting to something and going, "That's frickin' awesome and way better- let's use it!". And then you use it and you find that while it's pretty awesome, it has some pretty big issues and so you try and fix those issues and all of a sudden it's not what you started with. Instead, you could have just figured out that this thing was indeed awesome but that it needed a bit of a redesign or that this thing put you on the right track but you still need something different to get it right. Anyway, in response to other posts about how Blizzard handles iteration, I... how to put this... "know" (I don't work at Blizzard, but I've read plenty of interviews besides this one and have followed them pretty closely as a developer) how Blizzard handles iteration, that they're perfectly willing to shove a concept into a game and completely scrap it if it's not working in favor of something different. And, I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but that's completely fine when you're consistent with that. When you're consistently willing to scrap what isn't working and completely rework or redesign it or just flat-out scrap it because you realize you don't actually need it, that's fine and it will work (eventually). It takes a lot more time and resources than most studios have to offer for their projects, but Blizzard ISN'T most studios. They're Blizzard. The problem I have currently and I think the pervasive issue, is not so much that Blizzard's methods are fundamentally flawed, but rather that they are getting to a point where they are abandoning their commitment to those methods. It's completely possible that even Blizzard is running out of time and/or money/funding for this method and they simply can't let it run to its full completion. If so, that's a very strong argument in the direction that Blizzard's iterative method is not fully feasible. Alternately, Blizzard is growing too attached to some of their creations and their hands are growing weak at the executioner's switch. The significance of the quote then, is the confirmation of the route that Blizzard took to get where they are, and as I mentioned previously, if they really are not going to fully commit to that route, that could prove a palpable issue for SC2. I think the ray of sunshine though is that they *should* hop back onto that route for the expansions and those should give Blizzard a second and third chance to play that out. But at the moment, I have serious concerns about the Roach and Marauder, that they are going to continue to drag down SC2, and I am concerned about the Thor and Mothership continuing to be as stretched as they are from their original concepts and to continue to stretch to the minimal limits of their new roles. I don't really feel that either is an optimum solution for where they are currently, and I also feel that other even if the aforementioned are all addressed, other similar issues lurk but haven't yet been brought to the forefront. Among those, I really agree that the Zerg in particular just do not feel quite "Zerg-y" enough and while the Roach plays a big role in that, I am going to point my finger squarely at the Queen's mutant larvae macro mechanic because the number one reason I feel the Zerg are not as different as they once were is because they feel less like an infection, disease, plague now because they can fight off roughly equal bases whereas in StarCraft 1 they had to and were encouraged to expand much more and to take control of sizable parts of the map, and as Protoss or Terran you were constantly thwarting a full-on infestation, knowing that if you let it grow too much or get too far ahead of you that it would just overwhelm you. Creep Tumors and creep-shitting Overlords I feel are a very hollow replacement for that. And I'm not really sure that Blizzard particularly intended to remove this element of the Zerg.
another excellent post!
you've made my list of fabulous
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On April 14 2010 21:59 TerranUp16 wrote:
The problem I have currently and I think the pervasive issue, is not so much that Blizzard's methods are fundamentally flawed, but rather that they are getting to a point where they are abandoning their commitment to those methods. It's completely possible that even Blizzard is running out of time and/or money/funding for this method and they simply can't let it run to its full completion. If so, that's a very strong argument in the direction that Blizzard's iterative method is not fully feasible. Alternately, Blizzard is growing too attached to some of their creations and their hands are growing weak at the executioner's switch.
That was something I noticed quite a lot as the beta went on. For whatever reason, Blizzard seems extremely reluctant to do anything about the Roach, Marauder, Thor, and Mothership despite the growing evidence that these units just aren't fitting very well in their roles (aside from the Marauder which does it too well).
The Roach lost any of its identity as a fast regen unit and is basically now just a Protoss unit in Zerg clothing. The Thor obviously wants to be this heavy siege unit, but it didn't work out and now Blizzard keeps trying to shoehorn it in into some weird anti-air unit. The Marauder does it role well, but it's far too strong at the moment since it counters almost every single tier 1 unit and makes half of the Terran army obsolete. And the Mothership has obvious problems due to it being an Arbiter-wanabee. Starcraft 2 is supposed to be an improvement on the original, and I see no improvements when we have Goliath and Arbiter wanabees in the game.
Blizzard may say that they're willing to sacrifice units even in the beta, but their actions and words say otherwise. It's pretty obvious that they'll do everything possible to avoid doing that, and unfortunately they're willing to even sacrifice game quality if it means keeping their beloved units in. There's still opportunity for the expansions to help, but I really hope we don't have to wait that long, especially since people want SC2 to be a worthy successor NOW rather than later.
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this is one of the best threads i'd ever seen, like the roach and marauder ones.
I think you should post it on btnet
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On April 12 2010 14:32 0neder wrote:
So the siege tank is now more unique because it's totally useless?
Isn't that what they were going for?
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On April 15 2010 09:16 RoosterSamurai wrote:Show nested quote +On April 12 2010 14:32 0neder wrote:
So the siege tank is now more unique because it's totally useless? Isn't that what they were going for?
I miss the siege contains 
SC2 doesnt look the same without them..and lore wise..
"hey lets get theese new tanks, they are more expensive and do less damage"
"-good idea, thats why you are an officer!"
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You can't really talk about Lore for SC2. Overlords losing the ability to detect? Now that's evolution!
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On April 15 2010 09:44 Crisium wrote:
You can't really talk about Lore for SC2. Overlords losing the ability to detect? Now that's evolution!
Or may everyone elses cloak tech just got a lot better 
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On April 15 2010 09:48 Half wrote:Show nested quote +On April 15 2010 09:44 Crisium wrote:
You can't really talk about Lore for SC2. Overlords losing the ability to detect? Now that's evolution! Or may everyone elses cloak tech just got a lot better
lol. Makes sense actually. The cloaking tech even LOOKS different to be honest. I think the best way to address the Marauder and the Roach is to either make them less useful in high numbers, or to make them more useful in low numbers but harder to mass. Robo Facility units are already useful in low numbers, so those units should be made to be harder to mass quickly. I think good overall shape of the situation would be:
1. Marauder becomes a more "infantry-like" unit in terms of health, cost, and damage.
2. Roach becomes more of a survivable unit (with proper control), but is less massable.
3. Immortals and Colossi have significantly increased build times. Increase gas cost of Immortal. With the above modifications, each unit will be much more significant in smaller numbers, but also they become much more valuable to the player using them.
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On April 15 2010 11:54 LunarC wrote:Show nested quote +On April 15 2010 09:48 Half wrote:On April 15 2010 09:44 Crisium wrote:
You can't really talk about Lore for SC2. Overlords losing the ability to detect? Now that's evolution! Or may everyone elses cloak tech just got a lot better lol. Makes sense actually. The cloaking tech even LOOKS different to be honest. I think the best way to address the Marauder and the Roach is to either make them less useful in high numbers, or to make them more useful in low numbers but harder to mass. Robo Facility units are already useful in low numbers, so those units should be made to be harder to mass quickly. I think good overall shape of the situation would be: 1. Marauder becomes a more "infantry-like" unit in terms of health, cost, and damage. 2. Roach becomes more of a survivable unit (with proper control), but is less massable. 3. Immortals and Colossi have significantly increased build times. Increase gas cost of Immortal. With the above modifications, each unit will be much more significant in smaller numbers, but also they become much more valuable to the player using them.
i also suggest to add levels to units and neutral creeps around the map
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On April 15 2010 11:57 iG.ClouD wrote:Show nested quote +On April 15 2010 11:54 LunarC wrote:On April 15 2010 09:48 Half wrote:On April 15 2010 09:44 Crisium wrote:
You can't really talk about Lore for SC2. Overlords losing the ability to detect? Now that's evolution! Or may everyone elses cloak tech just got a lot better lol. Makes sense actually. The cloaking tech even LOOKS different to be honest. I think the best way to address the Marauder and the Roach is to either make them less useful in high numbers, or to make them more useful in low numbers but harder to mass. Robo Facility units are already useful in low numbers, so those units should be made to be harder to mass quickly. I think good overall shape of the situation would be: 1. Marauder becomes a more "infantry-like" unit in terms of health, cost, and damage. 2. Roach becomes more of a survivable unit (with proper control), but is less massable. 3. Immortals and Colossi have significantly increased build times. Increase gas cost of Immortal. With the above modifications, each unit will be much more significant in smaller numbers, but also they become much more valuable to the player using them. i also suggest to add levels to units and neutral creeps around the map
Don't get it. Are you saying that my suggested changes will make Starcraft 2 more like Warcraft 3? Explain how.
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On April 15 2010 11:57 iG.ClouD wrote:Show nested quote +On April 15 2010 11:54 LunarC wrote:On April 15 2010 09:48 Half wrote:On April 15 2010 09:44 Crisium wrote:
You can't really talk about Lore for SC2. Overlords losing the ability to detect? Now that's evolution! Or may everyone elses cloak tech just got a lot better lol. Makes sense actually. The cloaking tech even LOOKS different to be honest. I think the best way to address the Marauder and the Roach is to either make them less useful in high numbers, or to make them more useful in low numbers but harder to mass. Robo Facility units are already useful in low numbers, so those units should be made to be harder to mass quickly. I think good overall shape of the situation would be: 1. Marauder becomes a more "infantry-like" unit in terms of health, cost, and damage. 2. Roach becomes more of a survivable unit (with proper control), but is less massable. 3. Immortals and Colossi have significantly increased build times. Increase gas cost of Immortal. With the above modifications, each unit will be much more significant in smaller numbers, but also they become much more valuable to the player using them. i also suggest to add levels to units and neutral creeps around the map
....
His suggestions have nothing to do with WC3. In fact, his marauder change makes it less like WC3
~_~
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On April 15 2010 03:32 Falling wrote:
You say that Medivacs and Warp Prism were 'designed right,' but you have no idea by what process they got those ideas. That was my point. We don't know. It was a creative process where anything goes and limits were put later. For all we know the Roach was intended to fill a function and the Medivac was a random idea.
My point was that Medivacs and Warp Prisms represent a useful evolution from SC1. They address a weakness in the existing game. If you want to claim that happened by accident, fine, whatever, for the sake of argument assume it happened by accident. The point remains that some new units in SC2 fulfill a useful purpose and others exist just to be new. Whether they started out having some useful purpose at some point in time, they have no purpose now compared to what they replaced. Ergo form doesn't follow function, and they should be scrapped or redesigned to fit some place else.
Besides which, that conclusion doesn't even make sense. If roaches for example were designed to fill an identifiable need, how did they end up displacing hydralisks instead of filling that need? The very act of using them for something they weren't originally designed for is exactly what I am talking about: Shoehorning units in just to get them in.
Any new unit has the potential to be a balance problem, but there's a big difference between creating a unit on the basis of "wouldn't it be cool if..." and trying to fit that into the game vs looking at the game, seeing what elements are weak or could be improved, and designing units to fit those needs.
This assumes you have a functioning game to begin with. Essentially that they took Brood War as the core and simply added or deleted more units. However, if they were looking for a new game aka SCII and not Brood War with better graphics, then you're building the game from the ground up, but with a lot of crossover. So you have no way of knowing whether one unit would 'fit' amongst all the others because you're creating all those other units at the same time. (And adding some of the older ones.)
They did have a functioning game, and SC2 was clearly NOT built from the ground up. It's SC1 with better graphics, redesigned UI, and then added, deleted, and modified units. Or are you going to try to tell me that they wound up with virtually identical unit sets and game mechanics by total coincidence? Why didn't they wind up with Dune 2000 instead? Because it's not coincidence, and they didn't start from scratch. They started from SC1, then added and deleted units.
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For the Warp Prisms and Medivacs, I think the succinct point of that is in SC1, Dropships and Shuttles were just that- Dropships and Shuttles. They were potentially important yet ultimately single-role units. But, when you watch high-level SC1, you start to see the interesting concept that they didn't, necessarily, require air dominance to operate- you didn't need to escort them with Wraiths/Scouts/etc. So moving forward from there, it would be interesting to expand their roles to make them worthwhile in more situations (pretty much since they can be) and to make them more interesting, and both the Medivac and Warp Prism fill that nicely.
And yes, as Wintermute is saying here, SC2 wasn't built from the ground-up. Almost no game really is. Every game draws inspiration from somewhere. The beginning of the development process is researching what already exists. And yes, that research comes before you even know what you want to do even in the most general terms (ie genre)- it may not be a formal development phase, but it is done (and it subtly is of course why games tend to fall under genres and to follow various conventions and etc). After you brainstorm a bit more about what you specifically want to do, you do yet more research into the games that are closest to what you want to do- in SC2's case, that is obviously SC1.
In the process of all that research though you do get bases upon which your game is constructed. StarCraft 2's GUI was not created on a blank board from blank minds- it was constructed by researching existing GUIs (including SC1's, WC3's, and probably many others- for example displaying number key binding groups is new for Blizzard RTS games but not new to RTS games as a whole) and then figuring out what conventions of those GUIs were worth using and figuring out how to refine and tweak them for SC2 (including the continuing evolution of the command grid where three squares have been added to every Blizzard RTS since SC1 xD).
For the units and armies of SC2, you get to a decision where you can decide to not take anything from the original (basically Dawn of War 2 versus Dawn of War 1- DoW 2 tossed basically all unit design and tier structuring and etc from DoW 1 to the wind and instead redrew from the source material- Warhammer 40k), you can decide to take only the factional identities from the original (that is, the concepts that made them different; trying to think of a good example of this that's relevant but Batman v Batman Beyond might be a decent starting comparison), you can decide to keep specific identities from the factions but to toss the factional identities to the wind (WarCraft 2 versus WarCraft 3- there are Footmen, Knights, Grunts, etc... in both but Humans and Orcs in WC3 moved far beyond being relative mirrors of each other), you can choose to keep specific identities and to keep the factional identities (could be what SC2 is aiming for?), or you can do something else (insert long list here).
Browder's comments suggest that only the units are being taken and then those units and new units are being used to form the factional identity. Now, the hmh part of this is that if you look at how WC3 handled this, it really took the units in name only and then fit them in where they needed to go and that worked rather nicely. In SC2, the retained units are pretty much refilling their roles and in doing so shaping factional identity to a degree. The remaining roles vacated by departed units and/or units in purgatory (ie those that Blizzard has deemed non-critical/unnecessary to keep and that get tossed into the pool of unit ideas that will maybe work or maybe won't but that have no weighting in their favor) are then up for remolding.
What you get out of all of the above is that you can definitely formulate a plan for your three races that you can compare your new unit concepts to if you want to go that route; or else, again, you can just keep throwing darts at your board and anything that's not a bullseye you yank off and either toss again or just discard (for example, the Roach obviously wasn't a bullseye throw, but maybe it was close to take the dart off the wall and finnagle with it a bit- ie toss it to Tier 2, make it less massable and perhaps even less of a tank but make it more of an assassin that leverages its burrowed movement and it's still the same "unit" but it's been retweaked quite a bit and when you throw it next it might be a bullseye) in favor of a new dart. But as mentioned, you need to keep throwing darts until you get it right *OR* you need a plan that will let you hone your darts before you throw them so you don't need to throw or discard nearly as many darts.
As for systemic mistakes in design... devastating and potentially expensive to fix, but it is the job of a game designer to not do that- you should have the capability of foresight and should be able to work through detailed plans. It's a rather analytical occupation and is far more complex an art than most people give it credit for- it's almost like programming with a very high-level language (English or your choice of spoken toungue xD) but having to deal more directly and flexibly with user interaction/feedback than code does. It's far from just about being able to have "cool ideas". Also notable that WC3 went through about four redesigns as I recall and I'm pretty sure still had a shorter dev cycle (duly noted that WoW apparently fubarred SC2's dev cycle so it's a tough comparison).
But then it's also notable that factional plans and etc start at a very general level and then grow more and more specific until they get to the unit level when you take that approach. If, when you finally get to the unit level and something isn't working then of course you do get the "oh crap" and you do need to check through the framework and the steps leading up to where you were to figure out how to fix it and to stabilize the impacts of that fix (not unlike figuring out why you lost a 45-minute match of StarCraft). Again, I'll point to the example of DoW 2 where units have been removed, added, shoved around, etc... primarily in a post-release environment (aka fewer devs and less time and money to allocate towards such activities). If a game really has massive systemic problems then it's just going to be a failed effort and unfortunately that is that (not too different from not developing a proper plan and then ending up throwing darts forever but never hitting the bullseyes you need because as mentioned even Blizzard only has finite time and money and therefore a finite supply of darts). The difference between the two approaches though in terms of game design is that if you have talented, experienced game designers you're going to hit the mark of what you're looking for a high percentage of the time, whereas when you devolve into little plannig and reliance super-heavily on testing, you really can't predict how long that's going to take to hit the desired mark. Again though, in various circumstances the latter is perfectly fine and in fact that is one of the reasons why scientific research benefits from spreading talent and instances of research (while fostering a community where ideas/findings/etc can be exchanged to jog minds and etc) because some of those instances of research will never pay off and will flounder in the dark forever while others will quickly hit the target- the net effect of all those parallel attempts will work faster and relatively cheaper than a single, completely coordinated one despite that the latter may be more consistent; and then the key to all of that is that the payoff for hitting the target is big enough so that nowhere near every instance needs to hit a target compared to game design where that's not quite as true.
@LunarC- I think the bigger issue w/Immortals is damage because if their DPS was brought down it would allow Siege Tanks to engage in an unsieged slugging war with Immortals, which sounds bad for the utility of the Immortal but in actuality forcing Tanks to unsiege is a massive victory for the Immortal since it effectively buffs all of your Gateway units.
Also, I only feel like the Collossus is such an issue atm because of the massively decreased viability of mech, as Siege Tanks have no issue dealing with Collossi straight up.
@ClouD- LolxD but for a more constructive take, to avoid allowing such changes to bring SC2 down that path, shifting Roaches and Hydras in the tech tree and improving the massability of Hydras again would be the answer (although Blizzard seems to not want Hydras in Tier 1 because they seem to feel that will make SC2 too much like SC1 -_- in which case they just need to scrap the Roach at this point then because they need a new/different concept to fill that T1 slot).
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I can't see blizzard ever putting hydras back to tier 1.5. They would then have to rebalance banshees, phoenix, and void rays so that they could be useful for harassing zerg.
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Remember that both the original Starcraft and Warcraft 3 were bland and uninteresting compared to the expansions and that Blizzard was willing to significantly adjust unit roles and playstyles. While at this point in beta they aren't likely to fundamentally change the way the game plays, except to nudge it in what they see as the right direction and proper balance, this is a possibility for Heart of the Swarm and the inspiration they will draw on for those changes are threads such as these, so it's worthwhile to have these discussions.
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On April 15 2010 18:41 Attica wrote:
I can't see blizzard ever putting hydras back to tier 1.5. They would then have to rebalance banshees, phoenix, and void rays so that they could be useful for harassing zerg.
Not sure about that. Er, well, decreasing build time on Void Rays wouldn't be a big issue in TvP since Marines counter Void Rays nicely and it's not an issue to get them out early (dunno about PvP), but for Pheonix and Banshees, I don't think it's too big an issue. Especially for Banshees since if you transition from Banshees into mech then you've got a very nice advantage of skewing the Zerg's composition towards Hydralisks which, since this isn't StarCraft 1 and Hellions are helpful against Hydralisks compared to Vultures, that's pretty big.
For PvZ Pheonix (shrug). Also, like with TvZ, how does the Hydra-heavy unit composition work out for you? 'cuz we're all familiar with Zerg builds in Brood War where Zerg doesn't want to have to make Hydralisks if he can get away with it and then P capitalizes on that with DT-'sair (or even just 'sairs to put the hurt down on Overlords).
On a side note, I think the Pheonix may play a bigger role in PvT if/once mech is found to be more viable as already in 2v2 and FFA I've seen decent amounts of Pheonixes be able to lift-up Tanks and/or Thors and punish them and it requires a really big investment by T into Turrets and/or Marines since I haven't yet seen the relative investment in Vikings v Pheonixes work out while still keeping a proper ground army and since Thors are so costly you just can't mass them like you could Goliaths so Pheonixes' ability to pick-up a Thor pretty much invalidates the Thor's AA capabilities. Again, I don't know *how viable* or *how big of a role* because I'm not sure on the 1v1 feasibility yet since so far it hasn't really been necessary, but at a bare minimum I think it could make for an interesting deviation build like Valkonic in TvZ while in PvZ Pheonixes may still be like 2-Port Wraith TvZ.
Point, really, is that for Pheonixes, if the desire is to keep them as-is atm, I wouldn't be too worried about earlier Hydralisks shoving them out of the utility picture.
Edit: "hasn't", not "ahsn't" xD
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so i see
they didnt have any goals
they tried to repeat the fluke
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On April 15 2010 19:56 Kim_Hyun_Han wrote:
so i see
they didnt have any goals
they tried to repeat the fluke
They're gonna throw so much money at it they might get something in the end; Monkey and typewriter style.
What baffles me is if they say they tried to create interesting and unique units... why did they take the vulture and spider mine out?
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EPT
