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Like the Post OP
well thought out and some interesting ideas.
my 2 cents
#Creep
is not really an issue for Zerg IMO....it is tempting to believe it is a handicap as Zerg units
perform so much better on creep than off it but......
the real problem here is that supply for supply a Terran army of any reasonable unit composition
will roll over a Zerg army of equal size, unless the Z units are positioned just right
(position is not as important for T, any giant clump will do as every unit has a better effective range)
so the onus is pretty much on the Z to micro his unit near perfect to hold his own in a battle.
failure to do so result in losing the battle by a hefty margin.
Creep facilitates this to a better extent thus creating the illusion creep is the problem as its the variable factor.
even baneling play has to be executed perfectly..or stimed marines will just kite your Bling's while siege tanks blow them up and an Infestor anywhere near a siege tank lasts bout 3 nano seconds once again requiring flawless unit control
#Tech labs
the 1/1/1 build and a single tech lab give the Terran access to the vast majority of there entire tech tree and can be reached 7-8 Mins into any game
add an armory and the only unit not available is what? the BC?
combine this with
#Mules
allowing the Terran 200 more mineral per min of a single base than any other race
and mineral sink units that are super effective anti air (marines) or light ground (hellions)
I'm sure more open maps will potentially solve a lot of balance problems
allowing easier surround options for Z and multiple attack paths .....but why isnt balancing Zerg units to be more effective per point of supply an option too?
or forcing Terran to make a few more decisions other than when do build my tech labs
Zerg are forced into making 4-5 crucial and potentially devastating decisions in the first 7-8 mins of every ZvT....Roaches? lair? extra queen? spine? FE? more drones? bling nest?
evo chamber -> spore/potential cloak banshee?
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On September 02 2010 22:48 Tac-Tics wrote:
The Zerg are not supposed to be the "aggressive" race. They are the "infesting" race. Zerg take expansions. The only reason they get the aggro impression is because the 6-pool used to be broken in SC1.
Aside from being a cheesy soft counter to forge FE in BW, 6 pool isn't even considered. I have no idea how you lose to 6 pool in any other situation (since you say it's broken). I have never seen a serious 6 pool in BW in C ladder or higher.
Zerg is said to be aggressive because it needs to be aggressive on harass. The zerg army is like glass. It has to avoid a direct confrontation unless it is semi all-in.
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one thought considering a "creep handicap problem". How about, instead of yelling how sick the speed of zerg is, add one more creep feature - Terran and Protoss'es units are slower on creep! That filthy, quasi-ground makes their legs/caterpillars/etc. caving in.. . What do you think about that?
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On September 02 2010 22:48 Tac-Tics wrote:
The Zerg are not supposed to be the "aggressive" race. They are the "infesting" race. Zerg take expansions. The only reason they get the aggro impression is because the 6-pool used to be broken in SC1.
You have clearly never played BW. 6-pool is a terrible build. 4/5-pool ftw.
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There are changes that have already been decided.
We will have to wait, play 1.1 for a while and from that new position decide what, if anything, is still a problem.
There are probably 50,000 ways to "fix" any given set of problems, but Blizzard has decided on a dozen or so.
These dozen or so changes will alleviate some problems and create new problems.
It seems like this thread is dedicated to making changes yet disregards the fact that new changes are already coming. We cannot simply jump over 1.1 and theorize patch 1.2 changes without first hand experience on what 1.1 will change.
We also cannot simply add changes to 1.1 without knowing if the imminent changes themselves are already good enough.
We now play the waiting game.
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On September 02 2010 23:02 Cibron wrote:
Disagree on tech lab. Zerg can techswitch instantly if they only built the building.
This thread in general has a very healthy discussion. Thank you for bringing so much insight and thought into your post.
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The Power of the Marauder
Honestly I think the marauders are an awesome unit and amazing to play with (terran main) but i can admit that they are overpowered in the early game and in certain aspects. First off marauders give free map control for the whole early game and forces protoss to go tier 2 instantly which eliminates FE play for Toss while letting Terran doing anything they want. The second problem is there upgrades which makes marauders into super heroes. Concussive shells disallows any micro from the opponent and punishes skirmishes and harassment. Stim and marauders is just ridiculous in how fast marauders can kill anything armored, how fast they become (lol synergy), and how little drawbacks are there from using it. I'm not gonna even get into marauder drops which are completely stupid (again im a terran main)
Just like having to go tier 2 vs hydras in PvZ in Brood war made protoss players unable to fast expand...right?
The game's still young, and theres plenty of unexplored builds. stop bitching and work out a solution perhaps?
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As far as i remember the Hydralisk wasn't a hardcounter to Zealots  .
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I believe that the majority of balance complaints from people come from poor execution and mechanics. People don't seem to pay attention to that side of the game much when they analyze replays.
The reason your hydra army got stomped on when you retreated isn't necessarily because they are too slow off creep. It's because you're missing 20 of 'em in your amy when you failed to inject larvae for the last 2 minutes.
Develop good mechanics! It's one of the few solutions that helps in ANY situation!
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I totally agree with your insight on the tech lab. Terran's don't have to mule the entire game, and what they have is essentially a free maphack. I can't imagine how simple it is to scan and do a tech switch, especially when all the units are at a T's disposal.
Not sure about TvP, but in TvZ, it is way too punishing for a Zerg to have anything less than a perfect unit mix. Terrans don't have to worry about this too much, seeing as how their units tend to be flexible in different scenarios.
In fact, it doesn't even matter how much Zerg is ahead. Rarely do I see them on the aggressive, considering the speed off the creep and the turtling capabilities of terran, and this defensive play allows T to catch up. What ends up as a possible victory for zerg during early - mid game usually turns out to be a long-winded macro game.
In Brood War, a dark swarm solved every camping problem. Can you imagine a ZvT without it? Anyone remember that FBH vs savior game on python? A 200/200 timing push seems to be yet another issue here.
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On September 02 2010 23:18 junemermaid wrote:Show nested quote +On September 02 2010 23:02 synapse wrote:
I think Raelcun's (was it Raelcun?) suggestion for academy tech would work well. That requires adding an additional building to the game. Adding attachment timers to a building would probably take a few lines of code.
In the early alpha, you needed a Merc Compound to build a reaper but it was scrapped in favor of putting reapers on the tech lab. It was shown in Blizzard's 2nd Battle Report from back in February. So it probably wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility to bring it back.
I'd be in favor of it but I'm also curious to see the effect of the longer build times. It's a small change but it does make reapers a bit less mass-able which is definitely a problem.
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Reapers are not the problem by themselves, the problem is that defending reaper rush is like participating in paralympic games - even if you win, you are still retarded(behind in tech/economy).
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On September 02 2010 02:56 Nightfall.589 wrote:If anything, the game needs more defensive advantages, which would encourage macro-oriented gameplay, instead of one-base all-ins.
Agreed. I'm not sure if our "skill at defending" will ever increase to the point where we have more common BW-like macro games. The defensive advantages in BW are quite obvious and many of them are missing in SC2.
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With regards to the flexibility that tech labs give in their opening of multiple tech paths rather easily vs the necessity of building many tech labs for many baracks / starports / factories: perhaps something similar to what happened to warp gates early in the beta? Eg. something which makes them a little less powerful early on without radically changing the game or nerfing them significantly in the long run.
Say, for instance their build time was increased somewhat. Maybe from their current 25 to 35-40 seconds. Then from either the e-bay, armoury or possibly the proposed academy building you have an upgrade that brings that tech lab build time down to 20s or even less. Perhaps if it were far enough up the tech tree (maybe requires Armoury, but is researched at one of the other buildings) then it would apply to the reactor as well, reducing that build time down somewhat. What this would mean is that in the long run if you need to make a lot of addons for a lot of structures then you will save time, however, it would punish tech-labbing a tonne of production structures early on to mass these "Tier 1.5" units heavily. Reaper build time wouldn't need to be increased from how it is currently if this were the case and it would slightly slow infantry upgrades and the build up of critical kill-masses of marauders.
I think the map issue is by far the biggest. The map pool in BroodWar had a massive influence on game balance, and with the current crop of ladder maps we can see Blizzard making a VERY poor imitation of korean BW pro scene maps, with all the usual features we're all used to now - small ramps, chokes at base entrances, natural expansions, neutral buildings - and yet most of these maps are pretty god-awful. Other maps still hold on to crap like wide open naturals just thrown in without thought.
Some have in other threads said that if Blizzard lets maphacking and other cheating run rampant on the new battle.net then it will have lost its one attractive feature and people will play elsewhere, but I think the piss poor crop of ladder maps is a far more pressing issue with regards to this. Well designed maps could do more for game balance than any amount of balance patches, especially since through the beta and now the upcoming patch Blizzard has favoured, in place of actual balance patches simply nerfing the flavour of the month once enough people whine about it. They have made some positive balance changes too, but there has been a lot of pandering to those same masses for whom they keep this dumbed down map pool in order to spare them from 'complex' maps. The one moderately interesting map in the pool Incineration Zone (even though it was composed entirely of very small spaces) was removed pre release, probably because it was 'too complicated'.
I think the Xel'Naga watch tower is probably the clearest indication of this dumbing down. It's just too simple, too easy. It's map control for the instant gratification generation. A newbie's guide to controlling space. Where before you would actually need map presence and active scouting now you can just sit a unit next to the tower and gain vision of half of the map. This is especially apparent on the smaller maps (the majority of the maps in the pool). If they must stay in the game, I think a solution might be to have them function like sensor towers (except without with big white area circle on the map, their positions are already marked anyway) so they are useful to an intelligent player but don't provide outright vision.
Even then I think it's a bit lazy, but we definitely need larger maps in any case, where the area the towers cover will be less pronounced and more localised, and especially larger maps with more space for actual tactics to take place in, things like ye olde flaking manoeuvre. Almost every map at the moment is cut up into of small corridors of space divided by impassable space, doodads or height transitions, and any medium sized area is linked to the rest of the map by choke points and smaller corridors. Again, it feels like the newbie's guide to starcraft tactics. Almost as if we are all playing some tutorial maps designed to train new players "look, here's a choke point! You can use this as a force multiplier! It means that if you have your stuff spread out on one side and he comes in through it you'll win, isn't that fantastic!" So many maps feel very artificial in this way; the first few levels of a puzzle game where we are introduced to the various features which in later levels we would see arrayed in ways which challenge us would be presented in a simple fashion similar to this.
Likewise with gold minerals. It's just so artificial. Instead of placing an expansion in the middle of the map, which while more difficult to defend of course would give you another base so that's going to be advantageous, no... there's a GOLD expansion! "Look" it screams "I'm important and tactically significant... because I'm GOLD." I don't mind the idea of having gold minerals as such, especially in place of say an expansion with just more nodes but it's badly used and another sign of SC:Dumbed Down.
I don't know where Blizzard are spending all these millions on E-Sports but it certainly doesn't seem to be in developing decent maps. And they seem totally unaware of this. I mean adding rocks to Desert Oasis to make it easier to defend your natural? (They pretty much did the same with Scrap Station too) Remove the retarded maps from the fucking pool, everyone I know has the worst ones blacklisted in any case. Instead spending over a month tinkering with the build time on this, the damage bonus on that and the cost of this by 5 seconds, a few points or a couple of minerals, go out and find some people who actually know how to build decent maps. If all the maps in the pool didn't force you to clump your units with their constant chokes and tiny corridors of space then half the problems people complain about would disappear. Zerg players, for instance, might find themselves able to actually flank, pincer and out-manoeuvre the Terran slowball. Ultralisks might feel better if they weren't constantly having to squeeze through and fight in spaces that only 2 can fit through. If the maps were bigger and more diverse then more Protoss players might find a use/place in their builds for carriers. I don't think maps can fix the Archon but that unit is just so god-awful compared with its predecessor that I don't even know where to start. Hell bigger, better, more interesting maps might make the reaper useful in the mid and late game since bigger maps make speed more valuable and more interesting maps are going to have more interesting layouts of terrain that they can exploit. This might also might encourage people to use warp prisms more often.
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On September 02 2010 02:56 Nightfall.589 wrote:
Given the number of changes people want to make to the game, you'd figure that Zerg only win 30% of their games, rather then the 49.5% they do on ladder.
I always laugh, and then cry, when I see someone cite ladder win percentage as an indicator of balance. Sadly Dustin Browder has done this very thing without realizing that the matchmaker is what is creating the illusion of balance here.
Think about it... if Terran was super powerful and Zerg super weak, the matchmaker would eventually match lower skilled Terrans against higher skilled Zerg so that each group would achieve their target win ratio of 50%.
Ladder stats prove nothing when a match maker is involved!
A much more reliable measure is tournament results. When you see that the MLG Raleigh had 2 zerg in the top 32 that tells you something.
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On September 02 2010 02:56 Nightfall.589 wrote:
Given the number of changes people want to make to the game, you'd figure that Zerg only win 30% of their games, rather then the 49.5% they do on ladder.
Hydras moving at stalker speeds off-creep would be insanely overpowered. And I can't imagine you referring to anything else when you want to buff off-creep unit movement speeds.
Creep giving movement speed is a good mechanic. It gives the race a much-needed defensive advantage.
If anything, the game needs more defensive advantages, which would encourage macro-oriented gameplay, instead of one-base all-ins.
ladder stats are skewed match making pairs people to have a 50% win ratio, or as close to it as possible.
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I agree with a couple of things.
The marauder HP nerf and merging a HP research upgrade with the Marine combat shield is a good idea.
Also the building idea. I don't mind tech labs, but the fact all they need to get is a tech lab and they have access to all their units in that structure is a little ridiculous (minus 3 units which require a building). It's too hard to see what "tech" they have when they have it all in 1 building.
With Protoss, all gateway units are available after constructing 3 buildings. 1 building for stargate (+Nexus), 1 building for robo.
That is double the buildings required to obtain access to all Protoss's arsenal compared to Terran.
I understand diversity and that no team should be the same, but I can't help but think that it's too hard to scout what Terran are exactly doing when if you see 1/1/1, then you just have to have the unit composition and tech to counter everything Terran can build. What I mean is, if I send an observer into the Terran base, the most information I can receive about what kind of army he has (other than seeing it of course) and what to expect him to be building is based on how many of each tech building he has (3 barracks, 1 factory and 1 starport obviously means some bio spam), and what has tech labs and what has reactors.
Zerg, you just need to see what buildings he has and you instantly know what to build to counter.
Protoss, all their T3 units have a building so you can see what T3 units he is getting and counter accordingly too.
In some cases, if you scout Terran all you can do is hope for the best that his army composition is weak against yours, whereas if you scout Protoss/Zerg, you instantly know what army composition you need. That is what I am getting at here.
As for MULEs, I personally feel that all you need is 1 MULE and your economy is equal to Protoss/Zerg (on 1 base). Protoss because of chrono boosted probes and Zerg because of multiple drone production. So if you just build 1 MULE per each base that your opponent has, then the rest can be spent on scans to see exactly what they're doing, or, save 100 minerals on a supply depot and you will have an equal economy to theirs.
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Tech lab is the only one I'd buy from the argument.
I seriously don't understand why Zergs believe they're supposed to be aggressive all the time.
You guys were not in BW, and you guys are not meant to be aggressive.
What you guys have is speed and explosive macro, that does not equal to being aggressive.
(btw, being aggresive means you have the upper hand in army force, which basically means OP)
Battle dynamics didn't change much at all.
The only thing that changed is game speed, which does make those 'spell interactions' harder imo, but they are still there.
Fungal growth? Remember the queen's ensnare from BW?
True fungal growth is much more powerful of a spell, but the way it shoots out is the same.
Such spell mechanics were there in BW, and I can trace every spell's origin back to BW that's in SC2.
This post, other than Terran's tech lab, is nothing more than whining, sorry for being harsh.
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People seem to forget timings when comparing tech labs to the protoss/zerg teching system. You do need to get a tech lab on all of your barracks to make those specific units out of them, but the quick and relatively early access to tech labs is partially why terran early game is so powerful.
For example, a 5 rax opening doesnt start with 5 barracks being placed down at once, it starts with one barracks + tech lab, then another, then another, then the last few barracks are usually placed simultaneously. But in between these barracks, units are still being produced, and the speed in which the units are produced from the first one or two barracks when compared to waiting for a cybernetics core or a lair/roach warren to finish is something that people need to factor into their posts.
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On September 02 2010 08:44 TSL-Lore wrote:
A couple other issues regarding gameplay:
(1) SCVs that are repairing should be auto-targetted, just like attacking SCVs are. It's ridiculous that a Thor surrounded by SCVs repairing it is invincible to lings, because the lings cannot reach the Thor. Furthermore, it's really difficult to manually target the SCVs because the damn Thor is so big on top, so you can't physically click on them. This is extremely aggravating.
(2) Correct me if i am wrong, but Mutalisks shoot at Medivacs BEFORE shooting at Marines!!?!?!?!? This, combined with the SCV auto-repair not being targetted, just doesn't make any sense. I had a swarm of lings and roaches and mutalisks attacking an infantry group. My flock of Mutas were busy chasing medivacs around while my lings and roaches were hitting the infantry and getting owned because infantry just owns roach/ling so badly. GAAHHHHH SO INFURIATING.
Same thing's been happening to me lately.
Lol i think those are ninja buffs' by blizzard to make Terran even more powerful. I mean, to the casual gamer, they're not gonna notice these things, as broken as it is. Thus, on paper, everything looks 'balanced'. I mean, the casual gamer isn't gonna go around looking up targeting priorities and shit (gosh i don't even though I should).
Leave it to HoTS, they'll ninja edit targeting priorities for zerg units, and Terran won't seem so Powerful anymore. Toss will have to wait till their expansion though.
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EPT
