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I really appreciate your effort of preemptively trying to fend off the usual misinterpretations and misconceptions, and I sincerely feel for you in seeing that it doesn't work half as well as it should.
So to be on topic, I suppose I agree with you overall.
Your suggestion for the 250mm strike cannon and the fungal growth idea however would, I fear, have consequences beyond your designs. But that's a problem that applies to most suggestions. This isn't why I'm making this post however.
I'm an agnostic at heart (not just in terms of religion), so I don't like working with absolutes. But let's say that the game isn't fundamentally broken in one way or another, and that minor tweaks could possibly fix these issues. Perhaps an army consisting of something other than mass marines could be viable in all match ups, perhaps even cost effective when factoring in things such as mobility, map control, pressure and so forth. The problem is that, as you say, with marines being so good in the early game you pretty much have to have them. Fine. But once you reach later stages of the game you've invested quite a bit in reactored barracks and there simply isn't enough gas to make both the sufficient number of factories and/or starports to mass up your intended mid- to late-game army composition and the cost for the units themselves, and there is especially not enough time to do so before your opponent retrains enough units from those barracks/warpgates/hatcheries to overrun your not at all finished army.
So given that the intended army composition would actually be viable, shouldn't it be enough to simply alleviate the transition from early bio to late-game mech somehow?
Also assuming that Blizzard are more or less firm in that they have the correct build times for the Terran units, so that there aren't too early timings for cloaked banshees for example, we need to have a solution that kicks in during the mid-game. And so... my suggestion:
How about an upgrade that improves the tech lab. The upgrade would give buildings attached to a tech lab faster build time for all units. It could be a set number of seconds reduced, as with warpgate over gateways, or preferably a percentage. The latter would be equally beneficial to all units, instead of favoring simple units like marines.
The upgrade could be researched at perhaps a fusion core (but boy would that be late) or at the armory, or even pretty much any tech lab after you reach a certain requirement (starport or armory). The details are for Blizzard to decide obviously, the important thing is what this could mean if implemented correctly.
1. Transitioning into more tech-oriented units will be considerably easier as you can macro up your army faster with less infrastructure.
2. Though hardly reaching the power of stacked larvae after reaching 200/200 or plenty of warpgates at the ready for near-instant front-line warp-in, the tech lab upgrade would make it easier to re-max an army, and it would prove invaluable in tight spots as your next wave of tech units would arrive earlier.
The implementation of this kind upgrade may of course demand additional tweaks, as you'd pretty much always have this upgrade in the later stages of the game which means BCs suddenly simply build faster (perhaps all good, perhaps not, perhaps a complete non-issue) and depending on where in the tech tree the upgrade is situated thors and/or banshees as well. Though I hardly think cloaked banshees could possibly come out any sooner if you need to invest gas into this research first, so it shouldn't change much regarding cloak detection timings.
Sorry for the overly long post. I hope something comes of my attempt at creative suggestions. Use and alter the ideas as you see fit.
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Learn how to play and you'll see that marines are easily countered, or if you're a terran that they're still very effective late game. This is probably one of the most absurd arguments about a unit I've ever read.
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United States1307 Posts
You should really clarify your argument into a two sentence answer, so it doesn't have to be interpreted in paragraphs of text. I think you're saying that marines are too essential throughout th entire game because in the late game they are easily defeated. But the question you're not asking is how important marines are in the late game, every Terran late game depends almost exclusively on tanks/thors and/or Vikings, which I think are very well equipped to deal with anything. But again, please for the love of god add a thesis statement.
And marines aren't too good in the early game, in low numbers speedlings, roaches, stalkers, and to an extent zealots devastate them. I really don't think they are an issue, except against Zerg where marine king's play show the silliness of zvt.
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On December 15 2010 16:02 confusedcrib wrote:
You should really clarify your argument into a two sentence answer, so it doesn't have to be interpreted in paragraphs of text. I think you're saying that marines are too essential throughout th entire game because in the late game they are easily defeated. But the question you're not asking is how important marines are in the late game, every Terran late game depends almost exclusively on tanks/thors and/or Vikings, which I think are very well equipped to deal with anything. But again, please for the love of god add a thesis statement.
And marines aren't too good in the early game, in low numbers speedlings, roaches, stalkers, and to an extent zealots devastate them. I really don't think they are an issue, except against Zerg where marine king's play show the silliness of zvt.
I did.
From the original OP:
The problem: The marine can be massed extremely easily, it's extremely efficient for it's cost, and it has a huge amount of firepower and durability with medivacs.
The real problem: The marine plays too many roles in a terran army for a late game army to succeed. If the marines are gone, the Terran is dead.
On December 15 2010 16:01 Novice wrote:
Learn how to play and you'll see that marines are easily countered, or if you're a terran that they're still very effective late game. This is probably one of the most absurd arguments about a unit I've ever read.
Learn how to read.
On December 15 2010 15:46 Bogeyman wrote:
I really appreciate your effort of preemptively trying to fend off the usual misinterpretations and misconceptions, and I sincerely feel for you in seeing that it doesn't work half as well as it should.
So to be on topic, I suppose I agree with you overall.
Your suggestion for the 250mm strike cannon and the fungal growth idea however would, I fear, have consequences beyond your designs. But that's a problem that applies to most suggestions. This isn't why I'm making this post however.
I'm an agnostic at heart (not just in terms of religion), so I don't like working with absolutes. But let's say that the game isn't fundamentally broken in one way or another, and that minor tweaks could possibly fix these issues. Perhaps an army consisting of something other than mass marines could be viable in all match ups, perhaps even cost effective when factoring in things such as mobility, map control, pressure and so forth. The problem is that, as you say, with marines being so good in the early game you pretty much have to have them. Fine. But once you reach later stages of the game you've invested quite a bit in reactored barracks and there simply isn't enough gas to make both the sufficient number of factories and/or starports to mass up your intended mid- to late-game army composition and the cost for the units themselves, and there is especially not enough time to do so before your opponent retrains enough units from those barracks/warpgates/hatcheries to overrun your not at all finished army.
So given that the intended army composition would actually be viable, shouldn't it be enough to simply alleviate the transition from early bio to late-game mech somehow?
Also assuming that Blizzard are more or less firm in that they have the correct build times for the Terran units, so that there aren't too early timings for cloaked banshees for example, we need to have a solution that kicks in during the mid-game. And so... my suggestion:
How about an upgrade that improves the tech lab. The upgrade would give buildings attached to a tech lab faster build time for all units. It could be a set number of seconds reduced, as with warpgate over gateways, or preferably a percentage. The latter would be equally beneficial to all units, instead of favoring simple units like marines.
The upgrade could be researched at perhaps a fusion core (but boy would that be late) or at the armory, or even pretty much any tech lab after you reach a certain requirement (starport or armory). The details are for Blizzard to decide obviously, the important thing is what this could mean if implemented correctly.
1. Transitioning into more tech-oriented units will be considerably easier as you can macro up your army faster with less infrastructure.
2. Though hardly reaching the power of stacked larvae after reaching 200/200 or plenty of warpgates at the ready for near-instant front-line warp-in, the tech lab upgrade would make it easier to re-max an army, and it would prove invaluable in tight spots as your next wave of tech units would arrive earlier.
The implementation of this kind upgrade may of course demand additional tweaks, as you'd pretty much always have this upgrade in the later stages of the game which means BCs suddenly simply build faster (perhaps all good, perhaps not, perhaps a complete non-issue) and depending on where in the tech tree the upgrade is situated thors and/or banshees as well. Though I hardly think cloaked banshees could possibly come out any sooner if you need to invest gas into this research first, so it shouldn't change much regarding cloak detection timings.
Sorry for the overly long post. I hope something comes of my attempt at creative suggestions. Use and alter the ideas as you see fit.
Yea I agree balancing sucks. All ideas are rather stupid; I just threw that out there as a shitty example. My personal changes would probably change the game beyond the way I intended to be as would yours.
I try to avoid balance talks whenever I try to bring up the role of a unit, but it's inevitable that something is gonna change that will affect the marine, be it a patch or a gameplay trend. I wasn't focused on balancing the marine, but more showing that it's too important in the army. Yes, buff/nerfs are an option towards fixing the marine, but that isn't the only option.
I try to focus on how players can change the way we play rather than screaming "imba, blizz plz nerf/buff something." Obviously, my efforts weren't clear enough and people are constantly posting balance suggestions and/or flaming me for wanting a nerf/buff. I wanted to see if people came to the same conclusion I have after playing numerous games -- marines are too important not to get, making them one of the best units in the early game and one of the handicaps the Terran race has to deal with in the late game, causing numerous trends like 2rax scv/marine allins and strats based on massive amounts of marines. If other people have a different opinion about marines, I want to hear their side of the story before I suggest anything dramatic to Blizz.
I made a thread during beta about how hellion turrets, tank turrets, and thor pivots didn't make any sense. After getting approval on TL, I posted it on the B.Net forums. They changed the hellion and thors in the next patch. I hope to do the same thing with this thread, but this is a much more controversial topic and the fix to this is very muddy and cluttered.
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Blizzard agrees with you OP. They said themselves that they thought Marines were really OP and UP at the same time, and that they were struggling to find a solution because of the crucial roles the marine plays. So they have to be very delicate.
I agree. Because of the lack of versatility for Terran in the late game and the ease of counters in the late game, Terrans do have difficulty in a straight up battle.
But maybe that's the problem. Who said that you always had to do a straight up battle? You can always poke and prod around defenses. Marauder drops, viking harass, hellion harass, set up small blockades with tanks. Make it so that you use the specialized roles of each unit effectively in different scenarios so that in the end the eventual confrontation, the army is weak enough to engage.
That is the price we pay. If we don't use Barracks units, we HAVE to get one of everything to feel safe. If we have to get one of everything to feel safe, our army becomes too small and gets rolled over by macro.
I think in some ways, the Terran army is too specialized e.g the Thor. I like the Thor as a concept. I don't like it because it seems like a too overpowered Goliath and so has to be 'fixed' so it doesn't break the game (anti-air may be large but only good against mutas). If we had Goliaths with good anti air back, it would release some of the burden of the anti air of the marine.
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EPT
