A Quantitative Analysis of the Ultralisk - Page 2

On April 02 2011 08:39 Mailing wrote:

The only units that can fight voids are corruptors and hydra. Hydra die before the colossus do, almost always. Corruptors are not only weak to void rays themselves, but stalkers also do great damage to them.

On April 02 2011 08:48 Refreshe wrote:
The reason, I feel, that the ultras are not that good is because of tier 2ish unit counters against the ultras i.e Marauders and Immortals. Those two units completely murder ultras.

On April 02 2011 08:39 Mailing wrote:
The reason saying IdrA should of got T3 sooner was sketchy was not because ultra are bad against protoss (they are), but because Cruncher had like 15 void rays.

Void Rays are the ABSOLUTE counter to both zerg T3 units, there is almost no harder counter in the game.

The only units that can fight voids are corruptors and hydra. Hydra die before the colossus do, almost always. Corruptors are not only weak to void rays themselves, but stalkers also do great damage to them.

If you think Muta can fight the deathball, that's a jokie.

ANd averagely, human and his dog has 3 legs.

“But Ultralisks can absorb damage!” you say. I reply, “There are numbers for that, too.” An Ultralisk has 500 hit points, and we’ll say 3 armor (we all know the upgrade is mandatory). The average attack against armored units does 15.1 damage every 1.16 seconds. The armor value of 3 reduces that to 12.1 damage every 1.16 seconds, which means it takes an average of 41.48 hits to kill an Ultralisk. If we divide that by cost, we get 0.05856.

On April 02 2011 09:20 QtreadzSD wrote:


I don't think it's that simple. You can't say because an ultralisk has three armor that damage over time is simply decreased by 3. For instance, if an ultra has three armor and a marine does six damage, every shot will be mitigated by 3 damage, and the damage over time is HALVED, not decreased by three. (6 damage/shot * five shots/sec = 30 damage/sec, 3 damage/shot * five shots = 15 damage/sec. Notice, 15 (not 27) is half of 30.)

This leads us to the conclusion that ultralisks vs marines have a cost effective hp/cost ratio of around 0.1, higher than any of the other units that you calculated.

To have a completely valid comparison between tanky units, you must now take the armor capabilities of all the tank units you are comparing vs all the different units because the armor of your tank decreases the damage over time by a FRACTION, not an additive value.

By all means, you can average the cost effectiveness of one unit against all of the other units in the game and then compare once more. Since ultras, I believe, have the highest armor in the game, they will not nearly be as horrible as you might think.

On a side note: Yes, ultras are too damn expensive.

edit: Damage over time further decreases with +3 carapace alongside. Marines will end up doing 1 damage, nearly 1/6 the damage over time as before.

You can't make a mathematical argument to conclusively say the ultralisk is a horrible unit. It is supposed to be used in synergy with other zerg ground units. Just like a ball of stalkers isn't great, and a ball of colossus isn't great, if you combine them together, their effectiveness is far more than the sum of their parts. 4 ultras combined with a huge swarm of zerglings and banelings with infester support is capable of tearing through any protoss ground composition you could think of. Ultras tank the splash damage and break forcefields, allowing lings and banelings to get a surround and deal massive dps rather than get melted instantly. Fungal growth is icing on the cake.

The other point to remember is that converting supply into an arbitrary mineral cost does not make for a good analysis. The two should be treated separately.

On April 02 2011 11:00 Taf the Ghost wrote:
As with what came up in another of the threads that tried to analyze units by numbers, the concept of "DPS Density" is important, and why the Ultralisk is so weak.

The basic answer to the problem is not a per-unit comparison but a Marginal-unit comparison. It's not a question of 1 Marine vs 1 Ultralisk, it's a question of 20 Marines vs 4 Ultralisks. If you add a 5th Ultralisk, does the situation turn in your favor? What about a 6th?

The problem with UItralisks is the maximum useful is 4 on almost all maps. 6 Going into a fight is probably the most you want to have on the field at any 1 time. Unless you're pulling a last-second Ultras switch, which means you're going to be just plowing them right into the opponent. Most of the rest of the units in the game don't have anywhere close to the limitations to the utility of their numbers. Ranged-DPS numbers don't stop having good Marginal utility until the "ball" can't shoot all the way across itself.

Once the spacing issue can be quantified, then we'll be able to really compare them.