[D] And Then There's the Mothership... - Page 6

If your in the beta and play Protoss your fairly familiar with the fact that mothership is getting little love from the Protoss community. For the most part on the rare occation that the mothership is used in combination with an attacking; it gets taken down fairly quickly.

Even in pro league when one is brought it last a short amount of time. For example when HD Starcraft commentated the Gerper v Isskincom game, the mothership lasted about + Show Spoiler +
http://www.youtube.com/user/hdstarcraft?blend=2&ob=4#p/u/5/N6ewuQsPzlw

I happen to think the current edition of the mothership is not conducive to offensive play. It really feels more like a defensive ship, a base support tool. The cost of the mothership makes it hard to justify summoning just for defensive use. In fact I was hoping to pull a video for you all but cant find one.

So let’s back up on where it came from and its use. In SC lore it was a unit to support colonist to the edge of the galaxy and back. And some were turned into command ships which would lead armadas.

So to keep in the spirit of it being a far reaching ship means, it must be there to support Protoss expansions. But, in its current state, it is far to high up the tech tree, and far too expensive to support them. (a player is expanding because they are in need of resources).

Well then, it must be a command ship to lead my armada. However at the moment, the general consensus is that its abilities are easily counterable.
-Cloaking : Good players already have detectors when the mothership comes out
-Vortex : their army can hide in the hole with more backup to on the way only for you to get pwned when they come out of the hole.
-Mass recall : The motherships speed makes it too slow to stage a assault with warping in an armada before it will get caught.

I think it IS useful at the moment(minus price and teching cost) for supporting your expansion. Which gets us back to the problem of cost while trying to save up for an expansion.

My solution!
Make Mothership available after stargate is built. Now it makes more sense for expansions. Bring worm hole back and restrict it worming between nexus buildings only. If there is a fear of balance, make the mothership even slower to emphasize its need to be near Nexus for base support so its needs to use Nexus wormhole.

Now lets do the following, add an upgrade in the Fleet Beacon and call it “Command Ship”(or something). The Command Ship button turns your Mothership into an armada support tool. Once upgraded it looses all or part of the following:
-Cloak
-"Nexus wormhole"
-Recall
-Vortex

And it gains all or part of these(from the old beta):
-Recharge Energy
-Planet Cracker
-Faster Speed (match carriers)
-Temporal Rift

We are now matching game lore, while meeting the needs of the Protoss players. Now the mothership is a great Outpost support unit and can be converted (making it balanced through tuning the expense of time, and resources) as needed.

As a Protoss player, I would have a lot of fun with this while it still maintains balance. I think that adjusting cost, time, and energy use; can balance it.

My thoughts for the Mothership and getting it actually used. Constructive thoughts on A) If you like it, B) How do you seeing balancing any kind of implementation of the above, would be appreciated.

On May 21 2010 16:13 Blekk101 wrote:
i thought of some ideas for it a little while back, so i think i'll list them for fun .

1) remove the AoE cloak ability and replace it with an AoE shield regen - adding say 3 shield every tick for every unit in the same radius.

2) remove mass recall and the AoE cloak and give the mothership basically a pylon warp in radius (maybe larger) so you can constantly warp in units. adding to this you would most likely want to get boost it's movement speed a little and get rid of the warp prism.. warp mode and keep it as a drop ship.

3) bring back the planet cracker

those are just some random ideas i had for it to make it more fun and maybe more useful for you toss players.

On May 22 2010 03:36 EmeraldSparks wrote:
Mothership should get a siege mode and become faster. Protoss is mobile enough as is. The Mothership can signify a transition into a positional mass combat playstyle. Basically, a problem with the mothership that a fast mothership (say, fast enough to harass and easily run away) would be absurdly obnoxious, but a super slow mothership is super useless. Having a deployed mode would solve both of these problems in an elegant fashion. In particular, having a deployed mode with some battlefield presence would retain the Mothership's usefulness after having dropped the first (unreliable) vortex, or we could throw that ability out entirely. Finally, it should stop being killed in three seconds by a bunch of hydralisks because that's really lame.

Sample implementation:
+ Show Spoiler +

Basically, let it have the ability to land!! When landing, it becomes able to act as a nexus in that probes can return resources to it. It would still have all of its abilities active though, cloaking the probeline, attacking any enemy units that gets nearby, although now being able to be attacked by ground attacks of course. This would in no way be overpowered or underpowered, since the mothership is more expensive than a nexus, and have less hitpoints, also lacking the chrono boost ability. It would just be a cool little ability that would put back the MOTHER in MOTHERSHIP! If attacked by ground units it could of course liftoff again while decimating them from the skies, then land again.

On May 22 2010 02:46 PGHammer wrote:



And just how did the Arbiter manage that task you so correctly gave it? It cloaked anything (in fact, everything) else within range; unless you had a cloak detector, the Arbiter is all you'd see. (That was why Missile Turrets made for a great anti-Arbie defense.).

Also, the Medivac is a glorified shuttlecraft that functions as a mobile sickbay; you need other air units in addition to the ground units. (In fact, Battlecruisers or even Hellions would have made a great balancing addition.) Go back and look at the replay I posted (of mine) at Desert Oasis; my mistake with Mothership deployment wasn't that I didn't give it enough air cover; I lost the Mothership to ground-based defenses (specifically, to Archons) because I employed no ground troops. Had I followed my own later post and added a proper ground assault-force mix (Stalkers/Immortals/Colossi/Dark Templar, with possibly some Zealots and Archons thrown in), I could have ended things much sooner. (In short, a multi-faceted defense will squish a one-dimensional attack or push, as thelittleone proved against white-ra, who had no air cover.)
As you yourself pointed out, Arbiters in BW were primarily used with *ground* forces, as opposed to Carriers (though they are indeed useful as part of a Carrier/Shuttle-based assault force in BW or even original SC). With both Terrans and Zerg, though, we're seeing things devolve into cheese/harass/spam (especially in the early game); the Protoss, however, can only counter that to an extent with ground forces (Stalkers primarily), as their air units are mostly either too expensive, too specialized, or both. (While you can spam Zealots, it makes a lot more sense to spam Stalkers, as they have better shields and more firepower than Zealots.) Terrans can build air units quicker than Protoss, and the Zerg are faster still (in fact, they typically start with an Overlord), which is why Medivac/Marine rushing can work early against the Protoss (especially if the P player concentrated on Photon Cannon *or* Stalkers, as opposed to a mix of both for defense). In fact, you just pointed out why I prefer a mixed assault (air and ground units) and mixed defenses; however, success using spam/cheese as opposed to a *proper* defense or even attack leads to mass-of-unit devolution, and I'd really rather NOT see SC2 head that way.

On May 21 2010 17:39 Legendary- wrote:
I've still definitely made more motherships than I have carriers. I rather them fix carriers than motherships at the moment because VR are definitely overlapping with what carriers are supposed to be. Two units that are air/ground support and VR is just better in every way (especially once upgraded).

As far as mothership is truly concerned, keep it the way it is, maybe make it a little faster, but reduce the build time as well. For a unit that we can only have one of it takes a lot of chrono boosts to really get it out

On May 21 2010 15:28 Failsafe wrote:


Yeah, it's weird to speculate why a super intelligent race would get rid of their best unit. What kind of Lore explains that? :o

On May 22 2010 04:40 BigDates wrote:



Yes, lets also give it the power of simultaneously firing 20 marauder rockets, and 20 viking rockets.