Consequences of a Larger Map Size

On January 19 2011 18:36 [Eternal]Phoenix wrote:
This is the kind of incorrect reasoning which leads to crappy balance/maps in the first place. I cannot disagree with the OP enough on this issue.

OP: You say that zerg can pump drones all day in response to attacks and that these maps are zerg imbalanced. I'm going to show that that's completely 100% incorrect.

First and foremost:
-Your assumptions rest on the fact that zerg will outeco and outmacro T and P.
-You believe that Z automatically wins in larger macro games where T and P cannot be super aggressive early
-Your argument is entirely based on the idea that if T and P are aggressive that Z will have enough time to drone up to crush the attack.

Lets tackle these 1 by 1 shall we:

Zerg will outeco and outmacro T and P. WRONG!

While zerg does have the ability to make large amounts of drones, it does not do so very well until 2 hatch/2 queen are out. In addition, zerg production is bursty, so while it seems like they can drone up a ton at once, in reality they're not droning up any more than a 5 hatch hydra build in BW would allow them to, it's just in large batches. Sure, perhaps if zerg made nothing but drones until 200 supply they'd get there way faster than T or P, but what good would that do them?

Try something as P. Open nexus first and chrono nothing but probes constantly while setting up for whatever midgame play you have in mind. Go check at 10 minutes how many probes you have vs zerg's dronecount. This is what you can do as P on GSL maps, and you won't see zerg be vastly ahead from it.

Here's another fact to consider. Zerg mines less minerals per base than T or P. Test it for yourself if you don't believe me, but a fully saturated Z base yields about 60-100 mineral per minutes less than protoss, and due to mule supersaturation terran 2 base is nearly even with Z 3 base. Once T gets a high yield 3rd, T economy soars to unmatchable heights!

But, lets say that players eco really hard for fear of over-committing to an attack and losing an army needlessly. Zerg expands and gets as much tech as possible. T expands and builds up a massive tank count. P expands and techs up while building up caster energy. What happens next?

Zerg automatically wins macro games vs T and P. WRONG!

Zerg armies suck. This isn't anything new. Zerg is designed to be a swarm race of less efficient units, right? Wait... hold on! You're saying that lurkers being able to kill 10x their supply/cost in bio is inefficient? Defilers making a single ling capable of breaking a terran push is inefficient? Scourge being able to trade 25/75 for almost any air unit in the game is inefficient?

People are not yet used to the fact that zerg lategame sucks. They are horribly inefficient and only rely on the enemy being unprepared. Every single zerg unit is awful at large scale engagements, and every single zerg unit is too costly for what it does, even at hive tech.

This means zerg needs "more army" to go head to head with T and P. Lets look at the supply costs of zerg units though: Hydras, roach, mutas, infestors - all 2 food. Ultralisks and broodlords are 6 food a piece! Only zerglings and banelings are .5 food and are therefore reasonably food-efficient. Have you ever seen ling/bling do anything to mass tank or mass colossus? Storms and blue flame hellions? What about air? Zerg can't win games off ling/bling alone, but any other unit makes their maxed armies even weaker!

What does this mean? In any engagement lategame, zerg has to have the bigger army, but a bigger economy to reinforce faster. How? You can't do it. Zerg will automatically lose every single engagement if he tries to play with an 80 food army to get 120 drones to outmacro a terran with 70 scvs and 4 OCs spamming mules. What if zerg cuts drones to open up space for army. Well, then you have 150 food of zerg army and 50 drones. P and T might trade armies or even lose the first engagement, but you certainly won't have the money to instantly remake a 150 food army. Add that with zerg's inefficiency when attacking and you'll never beat a T or P who has some good backup defense (cannons/PFs/warpin/turrets) and some good production.

The truth is that Protoss will never ever ever lose a lategame vs a zerg. All you have to do is get a brutal combo of archon/storm, gateway units, immortals, and voidrays. Heck, you can go for the allkill and get a mothership too, they work great! How is Z ever supposed to crack that ball, especially since you're basically running into neverending storms and zealots with warpin. P can instantly remax nonstop until he's at your main.

Zerg can drone up to crush any midgame timing attacks by T or P. Perhaps this one is true.

I will say that there is good reasoning which states that zerg should be able to handle any early/midgame aggression by T or P as long as they prepare right. Of course, isn't that ok? What makes T and P have to attack? Why would they attack? Could they not expand and play for lategame instead?

Say you have a nice marine/tank midgame ball, and zerg is starting to drone his 3rd. How would you deal with this as a terran? You could opt to attack and try to kill him. You see that very often in GSL games, bnet games, games from all skill levels. It seems like a logical thing to do, and in some cases it might still be a good option. However, what if instead you used that army to secure map control, and took a nice juicy high yield base, just like Jinro did vs Idra on Jungle Basin. Now suddenly zerg is playing from behind again and either has to continue expanding to take the lead, eventually hitting the stage where they have too much eco to ever win a direct fight, or they have to attack, and attacking into PFs/siege tanks is nearly impossible. You're forcing zerg into a lose/lose by not attacking, but instead forcing army in case you do attack, and then using that map control to take more bases.

It was ok for zerg to play the expand and eco game in BW because they had good lategame options, even borderline overpowered options. Plague, swarm, ultralisks, cracklings, superior mobility with ultraling, mass doom drops with swarm. Zerg lategame was the scariest thing for anyone to deal with in BW, not because they had so many units, but because their units were frighteningly strong. In SC2 when I see a hive, I just start making voidrays from 3 stargates and laugh my way to victory. There's nothing zerg can do lategame that scares me.

So in the end, who benefits the most from these GSL maps? Is zerg truly overpowered because of spawn larva? I don't believe so. I think zerg is forced to play allins and aggression by their very nature, and I don't believe these larger maps help zerg do that. In fact, I would argue that Protoss is completely broken on these large maps, and terran plays perhaps a bit differently, but retains a lot of its strengths.

Warpin is the only ability which ignores map distance. In effect, if you have pylons somewhere, you have an army there. Once lategame hits P can have upwards 12-20 or more warpgates. Sure, you saw that all the time in BW PvT, but remember that protoss had to walk those units across the map, and vs a T mech army they weren't very efficient either. With warpin storm how can gateway armies be thought of as weak? Zealot/templar is one of the scariest combos to deal with and you can stream it endlessly from any point on the map. Warpin also allows protoss to deal with any harass to far away expansions without dedicating units there. In effect, they don't need map control to defend harassment. In BW you had to spam cannons like crazy in order to avoid losing expansions, and even then, tanks and dark swarm meant you still needed map control.

What about terran? Tanks are still the most fearsome unit in ground to ground combat. In large enough numbers, tanklines are virtually impenetrable by anything other than mass immortals. Tanks are immobile though, but PFs are not. PFs+turrets+ supply depot walls around said PFs offer an antiharassment power which is unrivaled. Terran can simply expand and use stationary defense to keep his expansions alive vs small attacks, and use his large tank-based army to deal with the larger army. Perhaps against protoss this isn't such a bad thing. After all, protoss has carriers, immortals, colossi, and can actually go head to head with the tank ball. What does zerg do? Nothing really. Broodlords in theory, but 1 viking and those broodlords will do nothing. How hard is it to park some vikings over a turret line?

I haven't made a decision as to TvP on GSL maps. People seem to feel that protoss is too strong, and certainly I'm inclined to believe that, at least in lategame. However, T drop play is very strong on larger maps and as the expansion count rises so does the power of drop play.

With 100% certainty I can conclude that PvZ is broken beyond fixing. TvZ is also very bad, though maybe not quite as bad as PvZ. Zerg lategame doesn't have the efficiency and flexibility it needs to.

My ending comment will be that the GSL maps are the best thing that could happen to SC2. They show us the limitations and flaws in game design that the bad Blizzard maps were hiding since early beta. Because Blizzard chose awful maps to balance on, they have achieved awful balance on other maps. You cannot treat these two pillars separately. Maps and balance go hand in hand, and Blizzard chose to ignore that simple fact. At least this is a wake up call for them to fix SC2 for HotS.