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DISCLAIMER : This is not a balance thread, I do not primarily intend to discuss the effects that a change of the food cap would have on balance.
I've been thinking for quite some time about the SC2 food cap. There has been a few threads about that but most of them were balance suggestions. My view on the topic is different and I'd be interested to know if some of you share my opinion.
I've always enjoyed SC but I'm a very casual player. However I love following the pro-scene and I watch quite a lot of VODs ever since I discovered TLnet.
I have still in memory those epic battles that would occur in BW between two maxed out armies, esp in TvP or late game ultra/cracklings ZvP. I loved micro battles too but those big slugfests really had a special feel (like NaDa or Oov pushing out with 30+ tanks, Pusan sending out a tsunami of gateway units at his opponent).
As much as I enjoy watching SC2 games, I have yet to experience that specific feeling that was a decent part of my addiction to watching VODs. Everytime I hear Tastosis/Kelly saying "omg both player are maxed out they are going to engage !" I look at my screen and I'm like "that's all ???"
I think it's especially true for Terran marauder balls/mech armies and all kind of zerg armies beside mass lings (which you very rarely see since adrenal glands aren't what they used to be), protoss is less affected because of the size of stalkers which are protosses bread and butter in almost every MUs. Every time a "big" macro fight is about to start I feel some kind of a let down compared to BW.
As a player too I have been struck by this : "Haha I'm maxed out b**ch ! Prepare to feel the pain ! Wait .... where's the rest ... ?" It really takes out quite a lot of fun out of the game as a spectator, be it of your own games (who doesn't enjoy the visual aspect of having a bigass army ?) or of replays/VODs.
Have you ever felt the same way ? If so did you completely got over it after a few months or does it still strike you ? Do you think it can hurt the game as an Esport ? What's your opinion on the current SotG from a spectator's point of view ?
edit : my english is a little crappy, sry for all the mistakes
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I don't know if I feel let down. It depends on the game. For example, I remember an epic TvP, cross on Lost Temple, where Terran had a Maginot Bunker/tank line supported by BCs, and Protoss had a Voidray/Stalker/Zealot ball - that was awesome. It does seem to happen less though.
But the reason your army seems smaller is that the units path a lot better than in BW. An SC2 maxed army takes 1/2 the space of a maxed BW army.
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I think 200 is fine considering you have plenty of options with unit composition and the ratio of workers to offensive units. It's hard enough to control 200 units and micro all of them as it is. So it's not disappointing to me when I watch a vod or live match of starcraft. The food count might change but likely not until the expansion will we see a ptr with something like this. Maybe 250 by then?
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A fight between maxed armies is boring. Macro games where nothing happens for 10 minutes, and then there's one big battle that determines who wins I don't even bother watching anymore.
A game where both sides are constantly throwing **** at each other like the Foxer vs Kyrix series in GSL2 on the other hand is amazingly entertaining.
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Units just need to spread out more, BW armies took up about four times as much space.
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On March 23 2011 19:25 sluggaslamoo wrote:
Units just need to spread out more, BW armies took up about four times as much space.
Yeah I agree with this. The pathfinding AI is also really good at clumping units together effectively so you can go blob vs blob.
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You're right, a maxed out army doesn't quite have the "omg it's maxed out!" feel like it should have. A maxed out Zerg army should look like they do at the end of the campaign mission Zero Hour on brutal... where it's screens and screens full of zerg units. You can see it at times in 2v2 games, combined maxed armies are pretty epic.
It probably can't be changed without effecting balance too much in SC2, but I'm kinda expecting a 250 food cap come HoTS.
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I think the problem is with workers. Blizzard redesigned resource management by having workers train and mine faster but only bring in 5 minerals at a time. So the average maxed player today has nearly twice as many workers as the average BW player did--but while the amount of resources they mine scaled, their food did NOT scale, meaning a disproportionate amount of food is taken up by workers.
Add 20 to 50 supply to the max count, Blizzard!
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In addition to all the points in the OP, 200/200 fights are way more boring than maxed vs. slightly not-maxed.
Making workers cost 1/2 a supply or capping it at 300 for HotS would make me happy enough to explode.
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I agree , also there are many SUPER units that have food restrictions very high (immortal, colossi, thor) they should raise the cap at least to 250 in my view.
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On March 23 2011 20:26 dragonsuper wrote:
I agree , also there are many SUPER units that have food restrictions very high (immortal, colossi, thor) they should raise the cap at least to 250 in my view.
It is exactly these "super units" which make it necessary for the food cap to stay at 200. The reason is quite simple: These units (well Colossi basically) stack very well and can reach a critical number. This simply means that there is so much concentrated firepower combined in one space that anything the opponents throw at them gets annihilated before having a chance to deal significant damage. If you increase the food cap you can have more of these units and that is bad.
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workers do overall take up a lot more food than in BW, and not just for mining minerals, but remember that in BW there was only 1 gas per base (other than very few exceptions like two double gas expansions on Longinus, etc.), so it only required 3 instead of 6 workers to mine gas
in most macro games I see players having 80+ workers, so their "maxed out army" is actually just 120 or less food
Day9 and many others had suggested 300 food cap before, but Blizzard thinks it's too much for most comps to handle.. but perhaps the food cap could be raised only for 1v1 and not for team games?
and I do agree about the spectator's point of view, there are very few games where there are battles all over the map (one exception that instantly comes to mind was Jinro vs Socke on Desert Oasis at MLG) as opposed to BW. it's much more entertaining to watch back-and-forth BW-like games rather than ones that are decided by just one huge battle.
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You also get way more workers per base now, especially as zerg. In brood war zergs would only have like 13 drones at every base, now u need full saturation on ur bases so once u get to 4 or 5 bases u've already used up like 100 supply on workers =/. I definitely thing its something blizzard has to address.
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Thx for the input, I didn't think about the workers stuff but It makes sense. The stacking/pathing stuff also plays a role, as well as camera angle and zoom (In SC2 by default you're a bit farther away than in BW I think).
Still in my mind it creates less epic battles in the late game.
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If foodcap was raised, Deathballs would be even more effective when the entire point of deathball is to get the critical number of say, colossi or thor or carrier and then basically a-move to enemy base.
But what I WOULD want to see from games is that unit spread when there is fights all around the map. We are already seeing some transition into this style of play but I'm still waiting for it to be as epic as BW fights generally. (I'm not BW player  )
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I disagree with all the people who think that raising the cap will make the game more interesting/fun to watch.
The game as it is now has other fundamental issues that make it uninteresting and sometimes boring to watch.
-Autoloss/win through BO where the game is judged in a 10 seconds
-1 huge conflict of maxed armies and then deathball that lives = gg
just to name a couple.
Of course the pros abuse how fragile early-mid game is and we end up seeing games like the GSL finals where in all honestly where not spectator worthy at all.
Don't get me wrong there are some amazing games out there but they are too few to keep me interested. And the "hehe my secret build order will definitely work" games are 80% at pro-level.
As a spectator my interest in following pro-SC2 has dwindled simply because I don't find the games impressive; SC:BW plays a big part in this when I remember screaming like a 15yo watching the pros clash.
TL;DR: I'm bored as a spectator too, food cap has nothing to do with it.
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I think the armies just look smaller because the units take up less space and move smoother, there is a thread somewhere where someone made a map and changed the radius of the units to make it more brood war like the armyies looked alot bigger.
As a spectator it is more entertaining to have all of the little micro battles going on everywhere, with all the little stuff going on a probe here and probe there. It is just more frantic and fun to watch.
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I think the problem is that armies die way too fast in SC2. The improved pathing makes units stack up much tighter, which in turn makes AoE damage so much more powerful than in BW.
IMO, there really isn't a clear solution to the problem. Increasing collision-size would be a good idea, but would probably have to be accompanied by changed to the maps (increased choke-width?).
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On March 23 2011 19:40 zarepath wrote:
I think the problem is with workers. Blizzard redesigned resource management by having workers train and mine faster but only bring in 5 minerals at a time. So the average maxed player today has nearly twice as many workers as the average BW player did--but while the amount of resources they mine scaled, their food did NOT scale, meaning a disproportionate amount of food is taken up by workers.
Add 20 to 50 supply to the max count, Blizzard!
In addition units in SC2 just take up more supply than they did in BW, like every zerg unit being 2+ except zergling, tanks being 3 from 2, ultras from 4->6, muta from 2->3 etc etc
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On March 23 2011 20:51 kasumimi wrote:
TL;DR: I'm bored as a spectator too, food cap has nothing to do with it.
I fully agree and the explanation is more or less the "fish swarm effect". If we always see big blobs of units facing other big blobs of units we cant focus on small details. These battles get boring. In BW every small group of units is important, but with the perfect unit control and unlimited unit selection they are bunched up too much.
Terran mech is particularly screwed by these two details somewhat because they are relying on positional play which doesnt need perfect movement or unlimited unit control either.
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The 'clumping' of units makes armies look much much smaller in SC2. You should have a look at the mod someone made to change the collision size of units. It makes the game look much more BW-esque in terms of army sizes and engagements.
I really hope Blizz has a look at it.
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The problem is not a unit cap, the problem is that players don't feel the need (or the possibility) to engage before max. If engaging before 200/200 would be worth it, zergs wouldn't be sitting around, waiting for T and P to attack. Somehow SC2 doesn't encourage little engagements (besides harassment) anymore, and that's basically what always kept the supply down. The 200 supply limit didn't even matter in BW.
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As a spectator, I find the maxed army battles not very exciting. Stuff dies too fast and there are too many units involved, so it's hard to follow the action(and it's not like there's any action to follow because microing in a maxed battle isn't that important).
If the food cap increased, the action would be even more hard to follow, and turtles would turtle even longer which would produce less exciting games.
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Nothing can be like BW. Even the future expansions, Sc3 or Sc4 or whatever.
BW was a mix of great balance, hard gameplay, old-style mechanics, retarded AI and... some sort of luck. This mix was great.
As as a spectator point of view, modern mechanics, infinite group selection, gameplay speed of SC2 etc etc are making the matches boring,
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On March 23 2011 21:26 Spekulatius wrote:
The problem is not a unit cap, the problem is that players don't feel the need (or the possibility) to engage before max. If engaging before 200/200 would be worth it, zergs wouldn't be sitting around, waiting for T and P to attack
This.
There isnt any advantage to engage befor 200/200, except some little marine drops, 4 DT running each at any expansion and a couple of burrow banelings, that's all. If u split your army too much around the map you can't face the incoming deathball and it's insta gg.
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On March 23 2011 21:36 BalZer wrote:
This.
There isnt any advantage to engage befor 200/200, except some little marine drops, 4 DT running each at any expansion and a couple of burrow banelings, that's all. If u split your army too much around the map you can't face the incoming deathball and it's insta gg.
such statement show that people don't know how to play the game.
so what, if food cap was 300 everyone would wait for 300 then engage?
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Oh that's no problem to fix... just decrease screen size to half and we have armies twice as big :D
But to be honest: I never played nor watched any sc1. I don't know how units look, battles look etc. When I watch SC2 maxed battles, they look huge to me taking up the whole screen, because I don't compare to other games. I only see the difference between SC2 battles. So I could care less about any army size increase.
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On March 23 2011 21:40 freetgy wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 21:36 BalZer wrote:
This.
There isnt any advantage to engage befor 200/200, except some little marine drops, 4 DT running each at any expansion and a couple of burrow banelings, that's all. If u split your army too much around the map you can't face the incoming deathball and it's insta gg.
such statement show that people don't know how to play the game. so what, if food cap was 300 everyone would wait for 300 then engage?
the problem is not people need 200/200 to engage, the problem there is only one big engagement in the game
200/200 engagements are so popular cos everyone right now is capable to sit and defend until 200/200 and then move out, one big battle and boom, one lose and one win, gg. 80% (or even more) of the games end like this.
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I also feel that SC2 is missing the spectator magic that BW had and it's largely due to unit collision size.
Not only might increasing the collision radius on some units make the game more fun to watch, it could help with some of the existing balance problems. If marines/marauders had a larger collision radius (I mean fuck, that actually *overlap* right now, it looks ridiculous), fewer of them could attack the same target at the same time, reducing their insane ball-DPS. Simultaneously this would have the effect of nerfing psi-storm/collos as fewer total units could be hit at a time.
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I was under the impression that the natural clumping was a design choice by Blizz, so you'd have to micro more to spread your units against AoE.
The deathball arguments are just how the current players play and the distances between bases on some map.
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You can argue all you want for the foodcap to be increased, but it's not a battle you are going to win. My laptop has good enough specs for SCII, yet it stutters when I use large zergling/baneling armies. It's the same when supplies get higher in teamgames.
Blizzard is not going to make a higher foodcap until they are sure it won't effect performance, so unless there's a great breakthrough in pathing algorithm efficiency or something, don't expect it.
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On March 23 2011 21:40 freetgy wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 21:36 BalZer wrote:
This.
There isnt any advantage to engage befor 200/200, except some little marine drops, 4 DT running each at any expansion and a couple of burrow banelings, that's all. If u split your army too much around the map you can't face the incoming deathball and it's insta gg.
such statement show that people don't know how to play the game. so what, if food cap was 300 everyone would wait for 300 then engage?
I believe a huge part of the problem is spellcasters. There are all sorts of spells in BW that allow you to chip away at the opposing army which are missing in SC2 or easily counterable by a-move units. Units such as mutalisks and reavers in BW are also much better snipers than their BW counterparts. It's not so much that people don't know how to play the game but many of the tools are gone.
That and many units got their supply increased in SC2. For example, hydras went from 1 to 2 and siege tanks went from 2 to 3.
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What is said here, I believe, only applies to 1v1 games.
I believe in team games, things are much much more epics. Yes, even in 3s and 4s! Of course, it is less competitive, but the amount of battles happening all over the map will obviously outmatch 1v1 games.
If you play alot of team games, perhaps you can understand me. But the feeling of grandeur in these games can be quite exciting. There's just too many things happening at once. Its chaos, like war should be.
The worst team games are when all maxed army face other maxed armies. Not only does it lags, but nobody has any idea what is happening. Just too many units shooting at each other.
I think some of you have a biased opinion of how games should be, because I find them interesting. Build order, what the opponent is doing, how is he reacting? Perhaps more POV stream for tournaments would be even more amazing? I think the game where Idra played against IMMVP (in his stream) was epic because alot of things were unknown to Idra. When Artosis (?) recasted it with the spectator POV, the game lost some of its magic. You were able to see where MVP could have attacked to take down Idra, you knew when the game was over, when in fact, when played by Idra, he had no clue of what was happening. Spectator POV removes the 'fear' and unknown of individual player. Some watcher, like myself, can enjoy player POV over spectator POV. Although, my tastes are not that defined, so I really don't mind spectator POV, and even enjoy them.
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I think the food cap being small is an illusion caused by units clumping up so much. There was a custom map that caused units to clump up less, and it looked a lot more like BW.
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EPT
