nice post , i do disagree with it and i think your perspective is a bit scewed because of the "but i loved the old thingy soo much and i want the new thingy just the same" syndrom .
and i will explain why.
but never the less really nice discussion
On April 16 2011 09:35 mahnini wrote:
A fundamental design flaw. In ZvP how do you prepare for an upcoming battle? ZvT? PvT? PvZ? TvP? Chances are the answer everyone gives to that question is exactly the same. You minimize or maximize surface area, what else can you do? Units in this game don't require setup time. The function of nearly every unit in this game is simple and one dimensional, reduce or improve DPS. One of the few exceptions to this is the siege tank, I'll touch more on this later.
i totally disagree , take a simple protoss ball in your picture (no t3+ units)
idealy you want zelot on front , sentries and immortals after , but targeting and backing up after the spell cast , you want force fields gaurdian shield you want to use stalker blinks , you want stalkers using the 6 range to kite things ... and i dont think i ever saw a close to Perfect engagment.
game is fast indeed and abit forgiving with the okay of how 1a work , but and its a big but when pro's will start executing unit micro perfectly it will have to become mandatory to do that and the setup and execution will evolve indue time .
GSL 1 was mostly 1 a . now we start to see abit more clean engangments , but just as MK marin spread i am sure there will be much more (zergling spread ?)
there is alot to play with in the engagment which can result in diffrent outcomes , we still see stalkers going before zelots , in time it will evolve for sure .
sc2 has alot of specific abilities no one using them effectivly yet, is not equal to their not exist.
Do you know what game flow is? We used to have a term that was used abundantly on this board that described a pivotal aspect of competitive play. Controlling the game flow is, in essence, controlling the pace of the game. In ZvT, if a Terran wanted to push out and kill your third, you exercised your map control to slow down the Terran push by slowly moving back lurkers as they got in tank range. Conversely, if you wanted to force an engagement as Terran you unsiege and attack towards another position or drop harass his bases, forcing the Zerg to completely reposition. When you're controlling the flow, the only things that can happen are the things you allow to happen. If he wants a big fight, you drop everywhere. If he wants a macro game, you attack him constantly.
The importance of map control.
yes , when people QQ zerg cannot beat a protoss death ball , the vets say "well you are not supposed to you need to work around it"
its still true , but the metagame still has not got there , but we definitly see signs of start of it (morrow july for example)
there is speed advantage of units. there are banling bombs there are drops there are stealth units
and we all saw matches when those were utillize to controll space.
but as players still mastering the big issues (timing compositions) the more beautifull subtle things neglected , but there is absolutly no reason game wise for it not to happen , it will happen.
Player-unit interaction.
feedbacks / emps wars. what do you do against fungals ? engage while spreading , sniping . FF micro is the same for everyone ? luckly for zerg we only have one MC
i still do not see players managing each of the caster sperealty during engagmet , although it will add to thier effectivness alot .
if you reread your segment you will see that the diffrent in mechanics of spellcasters is actually irrelevant to the reason why the interaction is used less or more . it can be used and therefor it will be used.
Mechanics were more than a skill gap.
okay i must say thats the one line that drove me to write this post instead of working on my article.
bad mechanics are bad thingfor a game or a spot . it can NEVER be a good thing , and if you think it is , think why . artificial/technical obsticals are exactly that , bugs .
yes it can be beautifull to see a player select each unit and tell it to move to a specific position because if you just tell everyone to move they will walk in circles.
but its simply better players waste their time on stratagic decision , microing each spellcaster or macroing more bases.
no one even remotly close to have too much free time in SC2, and while i remmeber the stupid "ceiling" posts at the start of sc2 i think people realise now there is soo many moves you can do in each second its silly to even think that .
and if a game can do the reduntant no brain decisions for you , its give more time for you to do the smart moves ,
and while hand dextirity is impressive hand dextirity combined with thinking is ten folds as impressive .
sc2 is a new game , its look similar it have good parents , but its a new kid and it will need time to grow .
games will evolve timing and anti timing will be mapped , maps will improved , map control and micro will advance , the game is less then a year each gsl season look soo much better then the previous ,
when that will stop happening for a month or two we can start thinking maybe the games is being figured out already , antill then , enjoy the growth .
all i am really saying is stop compering between sc/bw to sc2 they are diffrent games , one is a 10 y.o game and the other is what a year ? even if the basics and experiance stayed , people still need play time to figure out the in and outs cause they are freaking important.
when stuff switching so rapidly really you can't get faults out . and its okay to absolutly love BW for all eternity, but you doing sc2 injustice that you dont try to enjoy it for what it is , and give it the proper time to evolve itself.
i have only respect for the old folks of bw , they are the heart and soul of this community but please please please please PLEASE take notice between object and subjective ideas and posts and don't mix between them for the love of god , after that you going to watch flash and we are stuck with the "game is broken it is true XXX say so " whiny kids
On April 16 2011 20:12 dkby wrote: Frankly OP is so subjective from the very beginning it's almost a caricature. How can you compare a new fresh game with another one which has years of balancing and one expansion ?
Your "Can you name 6 things going on during this battle?" comparisons are meaningless because there's only t1 units on the sc2 picture (except for the medivacs). Your BW picture would have only shown marines firebats and medics against zealots and dragoons, all right, but yea there would be less things going on...
I totally disagree with your critics about the easier gameplay. Playing BW effectively required to have a ridiculous high apm just to do BORING things : to select each building to make a unit is boring, to select casters one by one to cast a spell is a pita, unit selection limited to 12 units was a huge pita, and path finding was very frustrating. To make the game easier is a good thing, it's just stupid when you select 2 HT and they both cast storm when you press the T button just once. If I buy a game it's to have fun playing it, not to be amazed by gosus whose 400 apm are use mainly to compensate the terrible interface.
I agree with some points though, about maps controls and spellcasters abilty mainly. But again, you talk a lot about lurkers, which appeared in the expansion. Kinda biased point of view.
Give SC2 some time.
I really think you need to play SC:BW before you make such retarded statements.
"Do boring things" that take like 10 seconds, alot of people myself find macro quite fun(which i found insanely fun to be macroing and microing during a huge fight and pulling it off) I dont think ive ever had to "fight" against the interface either, and i only played at a C/C+ iccup level.actually having to control your units intstead of mindlessly amoving like in SC2 Your part about the non smart cast is pretty funny also, also broodwar was released what? 3 months or something after SC vanilla.
And theres only been 2 balance patches since it came out, why cant blizzard balance SC2 this way? The real reason why is because they wont give in on some of their stupid ideas(warpgates as many have said being the main problem with the game)
TLDR; Play broodwar before you make such ignorant statements about something you dont know anything about
However, I do very much agree with the OP, theres just so much clutter compared to Broodwar that you cant really tell whats going on, things like Adelscott vs MVP where he was forcefield walling stuck out as amazing, however most blob vs blob fights are just pretty boring.
I thought your english sucked so I looked next to your name just to realize you live in noobville. Good for you.
On topic:
The first game of the StarCraft series was released for Microsoft Windows on 31 March 1998.
The expansion was released in the United States on 30 November 1998.
Your estimation is not even half of the reality. Also, you may not agree with his statement, and maybe some people do. His statements were opinions, so were your statements. You ask him to play BW before making ignorant statement. I will ask you to live life before being a random prick and then do exactly the same thing that just pissed you off. Hypocrite.
This thread really needs to get closed now, not only is it not going anywhere, it's regressing.
I have the impression that almost all the points made by the OP are directly related to how the new pathfinding engine works compared to the old one.
In BW, the fact that no matter what you do, all your units can't fight at the same time produce longer fights and reward micro a lot more (because a lot of units are not doing anything if you don't). The problem is : dumbing down the engine to that level would be inacceptable today, it is just impossible to purposely make units dumb, hoping it will make the game better. Blizzard will have to find an other way to fix it, or don't fix at all.
It just seems some people wanted sc2 to come out as refined as BW is after 10 years of constant (r)evolution. You can't want this. It's impossible. You will have to wait, fortunately, for a shorter time than it took for BW, because internet/progamers/community/support did grow with esports.
Seriously, I don't understand how one can compare an old but majestuous game, polished by its numerous users over the years., to a delicate piece of high-technology that barely 10 people have started to use properly over the 3 last months. None is better than the other. None lacks something the other had : they aren't the same damn thing. Asking sc2 to feel like BW after less than one year is like asking BW to be as beautiful and easy to handle as sc2 on a Pentium 3 at 266 Mhz : it's illogic.
The OP explains while I still find BW games to be way more interesting and fun to watch compared to SC2. I've yet to see a game in SC2 that's as intense and epic as some of the games of the Averatec intel classic season 1-3.
On April 16 2011 21:20 maartendq wrote: The OP explains while I still find BW games to be way more interesting and fun to watch compared to SC2. I've yet to see a game in SC2 that's as intense and epic as some of the games of the Averatec intel classic season 1-3.
I fully agree to the opening post. The relation of playstyles and unit handling was really reduced to a poor one in SC2. This is what I think since the start of beta and I'm very glad that somebody formulated that so well here. Micro looks absolutely unspectacular, boring and goes way too much into detail instead of beeing obvious like in SC:BW.
Also, the ratio of the importance of single units (or low numbers of units) got really lowered imo. One Reaver? Yes, please. One Colossus? Na, better build four or five! One Siegetank defending an expansion in BW? Can be quite effective. One Tank defending an SC2-Expansion? Waste of money, will get off a maximum of two shots before dying.
SC2 mechanics indeed did reduce the importance of units to the dps I deliver, agreed. As everything just clumbs up to a big blob with everything attackning, micro got diminished. To add a term I kinda missed in OP: Cost efficiency. SC2 barely delivers room for extraordinary cost efficiency by clever usage of units. The only thing making units really cost efficient is to vastly outnumber their opponents and this way have, for example, killing 20 units without losing one. SC:BW left a huge room for cost efficient usage!
Ultimately this is unarguable just by watching the great videos in OP... no time in hell such brilliant scenes would ever work in SC2.
On April 16 2011 21:18 Roggay wrote: I have the impression that almost all the points made by the OP are directly related to how the new pathfinding engine works compared to the old one.
In BW, the fact that no matter what you do, all your units can't fight at the same time produce longer fights and reward micro a lot more (because a lot of units are not doing anything if you don't). The problem is : dumbing down the engine to that level would be inacceptable today, it is just impossible to purposely make units dumb, hoping it will make the game better. Blizzard will have to find an other way to fix it, or don't fix at all.
It doesn't need to be fixed. No one was happy with BW controls, but no one was able to say they were not happy about it because they had nothing to compare with. So they dealt with it the best they could, managed to work around it. And that's what made BW what it is today. People will do the same thing with SC2, they'll explore new things they can do and SC2 will become something else, something better because it has more potential mechanically. It's just less limited than BW, and people will be impressed by good play instead of good ways to handle the poorly made game interface.
Those videos of nada marine control, they're pretty cool... for BW. I just hope you guys know nada is doing much more interesting things with his marines in SC2 right now.
On April 16 2011 21:24 Sated wrote: The main difference between SC:BW and SC2 is that BW has a terrible UI and players have to make up for it with quicker hand-speed and better mechanics. That the UI forces you to use small control groups and makes hand-speed mean more than strategy etc. is not a good thing and it doesn't make things more exciting.
It's like making footballers play with a rugby ball and then claiming that being able to do so shows you have more skill. It doesn't, it just shows you're able to make the best of a bad situation. Would I want to watch a football match played with a rugby ball? No, because you're not gonna see the best of what the players can do.
Seems like you didn't read the op, i suggest you to do it, because you adress something completely different than what the op is trying to express.
I totally agree on your post mahnini. I especially miss the ability to control the map properly. With units all clustering up tanks had to be nerfed but this also lowered the map control gained with them. I also miss the chance to control the map with mines (and Zerg players sure miss their Lurkers which might get a comeback in HotS).
Changes like MBS are good because with the new macro mechanics (Mule/...) there is another time sink. You most of the time also need to grab all your forces and can't let some at the def because the other players is also just moving a ball. This huge engagement also lead to the impression that units are squishier - they aren't but engagements are more clustered up and due to this end quicker.
For the expansions i really would like to see not only need units but also changes to excisting units (you mentioned Fungal vs. Plague - gosh i really hate ability that disallow me to do anything else than watching my units die).
On April 16 2011 21:27 teekesselchen wrote: I fully agree to the opening post. The relation of playstyles and unit handling was really reduced to a poor one in SC2. This is what I think since the start of beta and I'm very glad that somebody formulated that so well here. Micro looks absolutely unspectacular, boring and goes way too much into detail instead of beeing obvious like in SC:BW.
Also, the ratio of the importance of single units (or low numbers of units) got really lowered imo. One Reaver? Yes, please. One Colossus? Na, better build four or five! One Siegetank defending an expansion in BW? Can be quite effective. One Tank defending an SC2-Expansion? Waste of money, will get off a maximum of two shots before dying.
SC2 mechanics indeed did reduce the importance of units to the dps I deliver, agreed. As everything just clumbs up to a big blob with everything attackning, micro got diminished.
How is this micro any different from Nada micro against Lurkers? Also Sjows great banshee control and decisionmaking in his recent Dreamhack run was great, just some examples.
Let's say SC/BW and SC2 never existed. Now bam, they're both released the same day. Which one would you play?
BW without a doubt, the only reason I don't now is because I'm terrible and so far behind I'd never be above C+.
I'm not so sure about that. Considering both games never existed and then they are released on same day, I'm 100% sure that you'll prefer SC2 at least at the beginning, because as a newcomer, SC2's improved UI, pathfinding and other nice features such as worker rally or multiple building selection is a much welcome change.
I wasn't around for the broodwar days (was to busy CS/WoW), but reading this post makes me wish i actually followed it closely.
One thing i wonder though, and maybe someone can answer, is how was SC1 1year after it got released? At the moment we are comparing a 1year old game to a game that evolved itself over 12-13years?
I think there's still a crap ton to improve on even in the absolute highest level (think of army positioning before engagements in literally any pvx, zealots should always be in front, staggered a little to avoid the first aoe shot).
Many units dont even see too much usage yet, primarily because they're so hard to fit into build orders/timings (successful warp prism, raven, etc)
I doubt the OP and others in this thread will see Star 2 turn into anything like Starcraft Broodwar. Star 2 is designed to be fast paced and in your face game play. The new game rewards that style of play so you can't have many units that require positioning and setup time. Like upgrades between tier 2 and 3 mean jack shit if the opponent has more attack units. So all you end up with is ball versus ball of units. Then it evolves into who can reposition their units during the battle to maximize unit count like if you have corruptors attacking your collosi. Who can land the good force field to deny a concave or separate units so there you are repositioning yet again while a moving.
You won't get units like lurkers cause the goal in this game is for anyone of any skill level to land their spell or the ai to land the unit spell for you. Can you imagine how retarded smart cast spines would be? It'd be really hard to dodge them if enough lurkers are setup even with detection. You can't bait siege tanks to fire so you can move the rest of your units in close so they splash themselves without taking a lot of damage to your army. So you won't be able to dodge spines like you can in Brood War with how the ai is setup.
NaDa isn't even half the man he was and that's a result of his real life responsibilities to his studies.
-_-
You don't speak for everyone. The OP isn't talking about the design interface at all, in fact we're trying to avoid it altogether.
No I don't speak for everyone, neither is the OP, or anyone else on TL.
You say he's not even half the man he was before, and that's your opinion, which you use to counter argue ... my opinion. Simply put, this entire thread is an opinion war where no one is right, because no one can be right. We're all wrong for trying to convince others and try to force our opinions onto everybody else.
Some people think nada's BW marine micro was better, some people think it's more impressive in SC2. There's no right side. Both sides are wrong for thinking their side is right.
On another note, real life responsibilities or not, skills aren't based solely on the amount of available practice time. If that was the case, there wouldn't be any tournament and we would just give a trophy to whoever managed to practice the most in the last month.
On April 16 2011 21:30 dezi wrote: I totally agree on your post mahnini. I especially miss the ability to control the map properly. With units all clustering up tanks had to be nerfed but this also lowered the map control gained with them. I also miss the chance to control the map with mines (and Zerg players sure miss their Lurkers which might get a comeback in HotS).
Changes like MBS are good because with the new macro mechanics (Mule/...) there is another time sink. You most of the time also need to grab all your forces and can't let some at the def because the other players is also just moving a ball. This huge engagement also lead to the impression that units are squishier - they aren't but engagements are more clustered up and due to this end quicker.
For the expansions i really would like to see not only need units but also changes to excisting units (you mentioned Fungal vs. Plague - gosh i really hate ability that disallow me to do anything else than watching my units die).
I agree with the statement that it would be very interesting to gain more positional play with units. But there's a problem, if you want a unit that's capable of doing this, it has to be an area of effect spell / unit that's pretty powerful.
But the community clearly doesn't want this. If you read one of the balance threads, live-reports etc. things that get whined about are AOE unit. Colossus, Templar and Tanks for instance. And they all got nerfed. Yet there are still so many whines about them.
If positional play should become stronger used, it has to be forced through units that are really really immobile. Because most units that could give you positional advantages are beeing used in the blob army, because dps is basically everything in this game right now most of the time. If you have ~6-7 Siege Tanks to defend certain map paths, your main army will be to weak and the other guy can just ram through your army and pick of the remaining tanks.
To gain more positional advantages, the units that grant you those need to be incredible strong, but also incredible fragile / slow / difficult to use. Otherwhise we will conitnue to see units like the colossus dominate the game because they can do EVERYTHING without any drawbacks and are an infinite enhancement of dps to your army. You are mobile and have ridiculous damage output. That's wrong. And that's what should be adressed by tweaking the units, there doesn't even have to be new units added. But certain unit roles have to be adjusted dramtically imo.
EPT
