People did this whine in the beta. They're wrong then and they're wrong now. SC2 is emphatically not all about hard counters. The scenarios you described are all wrong.
Since you want to talk about a "spectator" point of view..
Have you been watching GSL, or IEM, or the team tournament on gom right now? You claim that "all games come down to one big fight in the midgame", battles are so fast that it's impossible to follow what's happening, and the game is all about building the right hardcounter.
But in the games I'm watching, there's constant action from start to finish (in the games that don't end with a quick timing push, which is unavoidable at this stage of the game and on these maps)
Almost all games involve a standard backbone force supplemented by tech units, rather than massing "hard counters" (which would be a stupid idea, since for the most part they're not really hard counters, they're soft counters.) The "web of hardcounters" everybody was scared of early on never materialized because they're not hardcounters with a handful of exceptions (terran pure mech gets basically hardcountered by voidrays, for example.)
And battles last plenty long enough to follow, especially since SC2 lacks BW style crazy damage units like oldschool psistorm, reavers, siege tanks, and cracklings. ((edit: and how could I forget spidermines and scourge?) Their SC2 counterparts really have nothing on the old units damagewise..
On October 14 2010 23:56 lololol wrote: Armored isn't medium, medium simply doesn't exist anymore.
Medium exists. Units that are neither armored nor light are the new 'medium.'
Technically yes, but it doesn't play the same.
A unit will deal the same damage to 2 of the 3 following armor types: light, armored, 'medium'/no-class.
In BW that wasn't true.
But is it necessary at all? The only units that would benefit from that are units that deal fair amount of damage to armored units. I don't think that making Marauders, Immortals, Siege Tanks and Vikings stronger against anything more (for example Hydras) is a good idea.
My theory is that battle are too short since the skill levels varies too much, the game is still young(in starcraft time) and we have yet too see that more and more players becomes more skilled at SC2.
its not simply that "oh unit dps is way too high" its more like that even the pros sometimes just mass up one army and attack instead of trying too have long drawn out battles with 30min+ of pure action.
I think we need too give the game more time(and more units if blizzard change its mind) and see how more endurant strats are made viable.
Meaning that your Stalker, which says 10 Damage (14 vs. Armored) also does 14 to Massive, despite the fact that the Stalker has no listed damage for vs. Massive units.
It doesn't deal any additional damage to massive targets. And it deals less damage than Dragoon but you use it as an example of the worse system at work.
What he's saying is that every massive unit is also armored. So its like the massive descriptor is unnecessary (except for corrupter). The system itself is fine, with + damage instead of reduction, but it seems like they had all of these possibilities with the different unit types, but just gave up and settled on armored and light. Again, the game is fun to play, I love it, but a more in depth system could have made it more dynamic.
I by no means can claim to be an expert on Broodwar, but the assertion that the new damage system is the significant deciding factor on the speed of battles seem like a pretty dumb one to me.
There were plenty of things in broodwar that kill masses of units really fast siege-tanks/lurkers/cracklings/storm/plague. The reason why battles still took place over a relatively longer period of time than they do in Starcarft 2 was, from my observation, mostly due to the limitations of control, unit collision, and the space was occupied by units.
A 200/200 army in broodwar quite simply took a lot more of the relative space on the map then the armies in this game do. Even when full engagements happened like and arbiter tech protoss trying to break a meching terrans siege line. Just because of the sheer mass of space that both armies would occupy. The fight would of course last longer than the SC2 equivalent where 300 food of combat units can fit in one frame of the screen.
Another big reason, again in my opinion, would be the limitation on control. Twelve unit control groups quite simply make it a lot harder to bring your whole army together for one concerted effort than just simply using 1 as the control group for your main army with a few others dedicated to specialty units. If the whole army of each side was able to engage each other simultaneously battles in broodwar would've looked very similar to the way they look now in starcraft 2.
Another aspect of control is how MBS effects rally placement. Adjusting rallies on the fly actually took a significant amount of time as opposed to say clicking 5/6/7 and right clicking where you want your reinforcements to arrive. This provided for a lot more skirmish play with portions of the army engaging with other portions.
As far as collision, the fluid dynamic that units in starcraft 2 exhibit while certainly interesting and tactically significant in it's own right. It makes units much more vulnerable to area affect abilities and attacks. Imagine how much more deadly defiler plague and storm would have been if units clumped the way they do in this game.
The size of the maps is probably also worth mentioning, but I think in general it's pretty agreeable that Starcraft 2 is a more cramped game then it's predecessor with mechanics that support it's compression.
Again like I said I'm certainly no Broodwar expert, but I think most of the reasons I listed were much more significant in the creating the longer lasting battles seen in Stracraft 2's predecessor.
P.S. To the guy who said, "He's tired of seeing 20 stimmed marauders kill "16" Ultralisks because they hard counter them." All I can say is haha haha hahahaha ha ha ha hahaha oh man comedy.
Meaning that your Stalker, which says 10 Damage (14 vs. Armored) also does 14 to Massive, despite the fact that the Stalker has no listed damage for vs. Massive units.
It doesn't deal any additional damage to massive targets. And it deals less damage than Dragoon but you use it as an example of the worse system at work.
What he's saying is that every massive unit is also armored. So its like the massive descriptor is unnecessary (except for corrupter). The system itself is fine, with + damage instead of reduction, but it seems like they had all of these possibilities with the different unit types, but just gave up and settled on armored and light. Again, the game is fun to play, I love it, but a more in depth system could have made it more dynamic.
OK but to quote myself:
Few units being Massive affects the game only in a good way: It makes sense that Marauders can't slow Ultras, Thors and Colossi. It makes sense that Phoenix can't use Graviton Beam on them. It helps Zerg to deal with capital ships and Colossi without the need for overpowered AA. and that's it. I don't get why it's not good.
I forgot to add that only massive units can break Force Fields.
And I think devs got too fed up by the talk about SC2 being too gimmicky.
the damage types and the giant. high hp. high cost. slow moving units detracts from starcraft. i've said it many times but units like the thor and mothership feel extremely forced the thor is just a giant goliath. the mothership is just a giant arbiter.
would you rather have 2-3 goliaths or 1 thor? would you rather have 2-3 arbiters or 1 mothership?
i know im going to cop alot of crap for this but the differences between warcraft and starcraft were extremely clear.
warcraft units featured these things high supply cost expensive large health pools low damage/attack speed slow moving
starcraft units featured low supply cost cheap units low health fast attacks/high damage alot of very fast moving units.
you can see how units like the thor and mothership simply do not fit. i understand blizzard wanting to make it original. but a giant goliath? can you really call that a "new" unit? read it somewhere once and i laughed "Zerg are supposed to be the "Swarm" yet the only unit they have that is 1 food or less is the zergling/baneling
im kind of going off topic here but im trying to express a point of view that i think blizzard made alot of bad design choices in starcraft 2. damage types being one of them. another big design flaw i feel they made was killing the diversity between the races. roach going from 3 > 4 range, while being a good change. just feels even more like a stalker/marauder. starcraft 1 was unbalanced at certain tiers. but on the grand scale was very balanced and fluid. it feels like the only distinguishing feature of each race now is their "macro mechanic"
obviously none of this is going to change in future expansions. or i seriously doubt it.
I don't want to be a dick but this debate seems meaningless. I found the exact quote from Dustin Browder. Blizzard considers the "hard counter" system much better and I seriously doubt it is ever going to change.
"Q: The damage modifiers have been slowly weeded out through the patches, have you thought about getting rid of them completely? A: StarCraft had a damage system that was similar to ours only it was more complicated and a lot less clear. We are very happy with our damage system as a significant improvement over the original StarCraft and will continue to use it as a balance tool to try to create the best strategy game we can. There are no plans to cut it."
I personally believe SC1 damage system to be immensely superior and it's one of the reasons the game has lived for so long. I might be wrong but the people who made the game don't agree with me... so I just go back to my dark corner and weep.
I noticed something to this effect when comparing protoss shields from BW to protoss shields from SC2.
Take for instance the ghost and dragoon from BW. The ghost does reduced damage to the dragon (i believe 1/4 of the stated damage) when the ghost is attacking a dragoons health. While the dragoon's shields were up this damage reduction would not occur and the ghosts full damage would be dealt to the shields.
Now we once again look at SC2 where this no longer occurs. A marauder which does base 20 damage to an armored unit does 20 damage to the unit's shields as well, so long as the unit is armored.
Disclaimer: I do not believe this is a balance problem, but I believe that in 'concept' it should have been implemented to the game. After all, what really is the difference between a zealot's shields, and a stalkers shield?
The only unit to break this exception is the Immortal, which has an ability that states that its shields are different from other unit's shields
It's not the + damage system that's the problem. The problem is there are alot of units with high damage values in SC2 compared to SC1. Just look at a list of the damage values and you can see how much higher SC2 values are overall
On October 15 2010 10:43 kasumimi wrote: I don't want to be a dick but this debate seems meaningless. I found the exact quote from Dustin Browder. Blizzard considers the "hard counter" system much better and I seriously doubt it is ever going to change.
But they don't call it a "hard counter" system, so you shouldn't put those words in Dustin Browder's mouth. I'm not sure where this idea came from about there being more hard counters in SC2. BW had a very similar, but more confusing, system for accomplishing the same objective. It also had a lot of units that were explicitly designed to counter specific units, and that did so much more effectively than in SC2 in many cases. I would argue that unit counters were stronger in BW -- to the extent that it made many units completely inviable against certain matchups. Bio against toss comes to mind, as does big air against zerg. It also had the effect of completely changing the nature of the matchup as new tech emerged (vessel/defiler in TvZ).
It seems like the system they have in place could do everything the previous system could do and more if they wanted to use it that way. For example, there's nothing to say corruptors couldn't do 10 with 6 bonus to armored and another 6 bonus to massive if they wanted it to have a smooth scale to the damage as the target gets bigger.
So perhaps your beef is in the way they've done the stats as opposed to the system itself
On October 15 2010 09:18 MavercK wrote: the damage types and the giant. high hp. high cost. slow moving units detracts from starcraft. i've said it many times but units like the thor and mothership feel extremely forced the thor is just a giant goliath. the mothership is just a giant arbiter.
would you rather have 2-3 goliaths or 1 thor? would you rather have 2-3 arbiters or 1 mothership?
i know im going to cop alot of crap for this but the differences between warcraft and starcraft were extremely clear.
warcraft units featured these things high supply cost expensive large health pools low damage/attack speed slow moving
starcraft units featured low supply cost cheap units low health fast attacks/high damage alot of very fast moving units.
you can see how units like the thor and mothership simply do not fit. i understand blizzard wanting to make it original. but a giant goliath? can you really call that a "new" unit? read it somewhere once and i laughed "Zerg are supposed to be the "Swarm" yet the only unit they have that is 1 food or less is the zergling/baneling
im kind of going off topic here but im trying to express a point of view that i think blizzard made alot of bad design choices in starcraft 2. damage types being one of them. another big design flaw i feel they made was killing the diversity between the races. roach going from 3 > 4 range, while being a good change. just feels even more like a stalker/marauder. starcraft 1 was unbalanced at certain tiers. but on the grand scale was very balanced and fluid. it feels like the only distinguishing feature of each race now is their "macro mechanic"
obviously none of this is going to change in future expansions. or i seriously doubt it.
/rant
i'm sorry but did you want every single unit to be new? stalker is a "new" unit but it's basically a dragoon what about colossi? they're a brand new unit how does a roach feel like a stalker/marauder besides the range being the same roaches can burrow and move and regenerate, stalkers can blink, and marauders can stim and slow
i doubt you really gave this game a shot since you started working on your brood war custom map very early after release
EPT
