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On June 11 2014 21:17 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2014 20:47 ChristianS wrote:
I've seen people talk about the marine so many times in this thread and the only time I actually saw a real proposed change, not just vague "the marine is too strong" stuff, was someone saying damage should be 5 +1 to light instead of 6 "because they're too good against lings and mutas." What, remove the combat shield upgrade? Drop range by 1?
The marine is a pretty good tier 1 unit. It trades well against light targets (zealots, zerglings) in small numbers, and badly against heavy targets in small numbers (roaches, stalkers). The real strength of the marine as the game goes later is that with small collision radius and very high attack rate, they scale better than pretty much any other single-target damage. That doesn't make them OP; by the same logic, hydralisks should have been one of the best units in the WoL Zerg arsenal.
What is the fix here? How should the Terran race function without the option of marines as a basis for the army? Because you have to be more specific than 'buff somewhere else.' What, tank damage buffed to 50 flat, marine range down to 4? Battlecruiser DPS doubled, marine dps halved? Seeker missile hits twice as fast, but stim is removed? If you actually apply the "nerf marine, buff the rest of Terran" idea none of the concrete proposals sound good for the game. This 5+1 was something I proposed, but not as an actual "nerf the marine like this", but rather as a "they should have looked at the stats when they created the game and seen that the marine was too good all around. And since there are marauders vs armored anyways, why not make marine's dps vs armored lower than marauder's dps vs armored." Something that you might apply in a new expansion, when things get shaken up anyways. Of course not to make them worse vs mutas and lings, since they wouldn't change against those units at all. Rather the opposite, keep them as good against those units, make them weaker against armored things. And yeah, I pretty much stand by that opinion. 2 stimmed marines have 21dps vs everything, ground and air1 stimmed marauder has 20dps vs armored ground, 10 vs other ground, can't shoot air at all 1 roach has 8 dps vs everything ground, can't shoot air at all ... (of course there are other advantages of those units; please refrain from "but roaches have 145HP"; "but marauders have +1range and concussive shells", that is of course true, but at the end of the day, the overall picture and the actual gameplay will prove that you'd rather have marines then roaches, in many, many more scenarios then you want it vis-verca) I believe there is something seriously off with how the marine is balanced against other units. Like, if I had to draw a graphic in which I rate the unit strength (so combat strength, versatility, overall usefullness) for all Terran units, it would spike very hard at the marine, and other rather strong Terran units like the marauder would only be at half its level. When, in a perfect RTS world that allows for a lot of variety, you want all of the units to be on somewhat the same level in this chart. (which doesn't mean they should all be equally good in combat; one may be better early, one better late, one more mobile, one more versatile etc...) And I believe that this inequality stems a lot from nerfs in WoL to Terran, as well as the overall design process going around these very strong marines. Because, since they come so early and only cost minerals, anything gasheavy a Terran can play in theory, he can play with the marine as mineraldump, early safety, super-anti-air unit. Which makes it necessary that all gasheavy Terran units have to be treated as "how does this combine with the marine", and none of those units can be overly strong in scenarios when you want to fight marinecounters. To give an example: you cannot buff the siege tank in a way that reactively mixing them in upon seeing banelings, makes you wellprepared against banelings. Because it's the only tool around for zerg to really combat marines (before ultralisks). Of course you may be able to tweak the numbers upon what we have now, but at the end of the day, you are not going to be able to implement a siege tank that can deal very well with either, 300+HP Archons/Ultralisks/Colossi and 30-80HP Banelings/HTs. Because Marine/Medivac counters other singlefire compositions so hard (at least in the longrun), that the Terran counters to marinecounters must be very, very soft. (that is not to say that the marine is the only such unit in the game, that is outside of a healthy "balance corridor"; current mutalisks, or WoL Infestors to name two others; but the marine has always been like that; with the other units, there is usually immidiate imbalance towards that race involved, since the rest of the race hasn't been as nerfed down as the Terran race has been)
Yes, the marine is a versatile mineral dump. No, not every Terran strategy has to revolve around that mineral dump (i.e. mech). And DPS comparisons aren't really fair for a few reasons. I'll list them in order of decreasing obviousness.
1. HP of a unit is very important in relation to DPS because you want to know how units will trade. If we were only considering base trades, DPS would be the only significant statistic (that is, can roaches or marines kill a base more quickly?). But since they're fighting each other directly, the really important statistic is how quickly marines kill roaches versus how quickly roaches kill marines. And for that question, what matters is, more or less, RKPS (roaches killed per second) versus MKPS (marines killed per second). Depending on scale, roaches do pretty well in that trade.
2. Armored units aren't just called that for the sake of receiving +damage from marauders, it's also because they generally have armor. Which is really good against marines. So a marine takes 25.0 seconds to kill a roach, 16.6 if stimmed; while a roach takes 6 seconds to kill a marine (8 seconds with combat shield and no stim). A marauder, on the other hand, takes 22.5 seconds to kill a roach, 15 seconds if stimmed; but a roach takes 18 seconds to kill a marauder, 16 if it stimmed. The math becomes a great deal more complex when medivacs enter the equation, but the point is that with armor and HP factored in, marines don't trade so absurdly well. The extreme of this dynamic is trying to use marines to fight ultralisks – they're basically meat shields for the marauders in that fight.
3. So then we get to the real strength of the marine: scaling. Sure a couple marines don't trade well against roaches, but how about 100 marines? And with such a low collision radius, they do in fact trade better in large numbers since more marines will be firing at once than the roaches, particularly in enclosed spaces. This means that marines will always favor larger numbers and smaller spaces when they're fighting roaches. But that just means that marines, like hydras, are best in a straight-up army-to-army shoot out with no AoE involved. In the early game marines won't be able to achieve the critical mass necessary for that type of engagement; in the late game the marines will have to spread out to mitigate AoE, meaning that straight-up shoot out hardly ever happens in a real game.
Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot. Battlecruisers should be the best unit in the game. Marines should become quickly become obsolete in TvZ once the muta clump gets big enough, because if you stack enough mutas in one spot they'll easily beat marines in DPS per area.
Point is, Starcraft is a complex game, and you can't demonstrate that something is overpowered by comparing a single unit stat. Yes, the Terran race is balanced around the marine, in the same way that the Protoss race is balanced around the Colossus and the Zerg race is balanced around the Zergling – if anything they have becomes overpowered when combined with that unit, it gets nerfed. This is why Protoss (at least in WoL, and this is still somewhat true) can't have a really powerful air superiority unit (phoenixes die to vikings and corruptors) – because colossus dominate the ground so efficiently that you have to be able to beat a Protoss in the air. This is why Zerg is balanced so he has to be ~1 base ahead of his opponent – because zerglings and other fast units give Zerg so much map control that if being a base ahead gave Zerg an advantage, he'd be at an advantage every game. And yes, that's why the best units in the vT matchups are the ones that kill marines very efficiently, and those are the units Terran struggles against.
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On June 12 2014 07:23 ChristianS wrote:
Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot. It's part of the reason why voidrays, and skytoss is so powerful
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Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot
Yes ofcourse.
Look at mutalisk. Why are they so strong? Because Terran lack any good AA.
Good design in an rts=You have good AA tools which Terran lack in sc2.
So in general, air units shouldnt be a problem but it is not because they are air units, more that the design is not well done.
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On June 12 2014 07:23 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2014 21:17 Big J wrote:On June 11 2014 20:47 ChristianS wrote:
I've seen people talk about the marine so many times in this thread and the only time I actually saw a real proposed change, not just vague "the marine is too strong" stuff, was someone saying damage should be 5 +1 to light instead of 6 "because they're too good against lings and mutas." What, remove the combat shield upgrade? Drop range by 1?
The marine is a pretty good tier 1 unit. It trades well against light targets (zealots, zerglings) in small numbers, and badly against heavy targets in small numbers (roaches, stalkers). The real strength of the marine as the game goes later is that with small collision radius and very high attack rate, they scale better than pretty much any other single-target damage. That doesn't make them OP; by the same logic, hydralisks should have been one of the best units in the WoL Zerg arsenal.
What is the fix here? How should the Terran race function without the option of marines as a basis for the army? Because you have to be more specific than 'buff somewhere else.' What, tank damage buffed to 50 flat, marine range down to 4? Battlecruiser DPS doubled, marine dps halved? Seeker missile hits twice as fast, but stim is removed? If you actually apply the "nerf marine, buff the rest of Terran" idea none of the concrete proposals sound good for the game. This 5+1 was something I proposed, but not as an actual "nerf the marine like this", but rather as a "they should have looked at the stats when they created the game and seen that the marine was too good all around. And since there are marauders vs armored anyways, why not make marine's dps vs armored lower than marauder's dps vs armored." Something that you might apply in a new expansion, when things get shaken up anyways. Of course not to make them worse vs mutas and lings, since they wouldn't change against those units at all. Rather the opposite, keep them as good against those units, make them weaker against armored things. And yeah, I pretty much stand by that opinion. 2 stimmed marines have 21dps vs everything, ground and air1 stimmed marauder has 20dps vs armored ground, 10 vs other ground, can't shoot air at all 1 roach has 8 dps vs everything ground, can't shoot air at all ... (of course there are other advantages of those units; please refrain from "but roaches have 145HP"; "but marauders have +1range and concussive shells", that is of course true, but at the end of the day, the overall picture and the actual gameplay will prove that you'd rather have marines then roaches, in many, many more scenarios then you want it vis-verca) I believe there is something seriously off with how the marine is balanced against other units. Like, if I had to draw a graphic in which I rate the unit strength (so combat strength, versatility, overall usefullness) for all Terran units, it would spike very hard at the marine, and other rather strong Terran units like the marauder would only be at half its level. When, in a perfect RTS world that allows for a lot of variety, you want all of the units to be on somewhat the same level in this chart. (which doesn't mean they should all be equally good in combat; one may be better early, one better late, one more mobile, one more versatile etc...) And I believe that this inequality stems a lot from nerfs in WoL to Terran, as well as the overall design process going around these very strong marines. Because, since they come so early and only cost minerals, anything gasheavy a Terran can play in theory, he can play with the marine as mineraldump, early safety, super-anti-air unit. Which makes it necessary that all gasheavy Terran units have to be treated as "how does this combine with the marine", and none of those units can be overly strong in scenarios when you want to fight marinecounters. To give an example: you cannot buff the siege tank in a way that reactively mixing them in upon seeing banelings, makes you wellprepared against banelings. Because it's the only tool around for zerg to really combat marines (before ultralisks). Of course you may be able to tweak the numbers upon what we have now, but at the end of the day, you are not going to be able to implement a siege tank that can deal very well with either, 300+HP Archons/Ultralisks/Colossi and 30-80HP Banelings/HTs. Because Marine/Medivac counters other singlefire compositions so hard (at least in the longrun), that the Terran counters to marinecounters must be very, very soft. (that is not to say that the marine is the only such unit in the game, that is outside of a healthy "balance corridor"; current mutalisks, or WoL Infestors to name two others; but the marine has always been like that; with the other units, there is usually immidiate imbalance towards that race involved, since the rest of the race hasn't been as nerfed down as the Terran race has been) Yes, the marine is a versatile mineral dump. No, not every Terran strategy has to revolve around that mineral dump (i.e. mech). And DPS comparisons aren't really fair for a few reasons. I'll list them in order of decreasing obviousness. 1. HP of a unit is very important in relation to DPS because you want to know how units will trade. If we were only considering base trades, DPS would be the only significant statistic (that is, can roaches or marines kill a base more quickly?). But since they're fighting each other directly, the really important statistic is how quickly marines kill roaches versus how quickly roaches kill marines. And for that question, what matters is, more or less, RKPS (roaches killed per second) versus MKPS (marines killed per second). Depending on scale, roaches do pretty well in that trade. 2. Armored units aren't just called that for the sake of receiving +damage from marauders, it's also because they generally have armor. Which is really good against marines. So a marine takes 25.0 seconds to kill a roach, 16.6 if stimmed; while a roach takes 6 seconds to kill a marine (8 seconds with combat shield and no stim). A marauder, on the other hand, takes 22.5 seconds to kill a roach, 15 seconds if stimmed; but a roach takes 18 seconds to kill a marauder, 16 if it stimmed. The math becomes a great deal more complex when medivacs enter the equation, but the point is that with armor and HP factored in, marines don't trade so absurdly well. The extreme of this dynamic is trying to use marines to fight ultralisks – they're basically meat shields for the marauders in that fight. 3. So then we get to the real strength of the marine: scaling. Sure a couple marines don't trade well against roaches, but how about 100 marines? And with such a low collision radius, they do in fact trade better in large numbers since more marines will be firing at once than the roaches, particularly in enclosed spaces. This means that marines will always favor larger numbers and smaller spaces when they're fighting roaches. But that just means that marines, like hydras, are best in a straight-up army-to-army shoot out with no AoE involved. In the early game marines won't be able to achieve the critical mass necessary for that type of engagement; in the late game the marines will have to spread out to mitigate AoE, meaning that straight-up shoot out hardly ever happens in a real game. Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot. Battlecruisers should be the best unit in the game. Marines should become quickly become obsolete in TvZ once the muta clump gets big enough, because if you stack enough mutas in one spot they'll easily beat marines in DPS per area. Point is, Starcraft is a complex game, and you can't demonstrate that something is overpowered by comparing a single unit stat. Yes, the Terran race is balanced around the marine, in the same way that the Protoss race is balanced around the Colossus and the Zerg race is balanced around the Zergling – if anything they have becomes overpowered when combined with that unit, it gets nerfed. This is why Protoss (at least in WoL, and this is still somewhat true) can't have a really powerful air superiority unit (phoenixes die to vikings and corruptors) – because colossus dominate the ground so efficiently that you have to be able to beat a Protoss in the air. This is why Zerg is balanced so he has to be ~1 base ahead of his opponent – because zerglings and other fast units give Zerg so much map control that if being a base ahead gave Zerg an advantage, he'd be at an advantage every game. And yes, that's why the best units in the vT matchups are the ones that kill marines very efficiently, and those are the units Terran struggles against.
Somewhere in between these comparisons I said that dps is of course not everything, I just took it because it is the stat that is off with marines in my opinion.
You can do all those comparisons you talked about, at the end of the day you will have a versatile mineral only unit trading better with specialized antiground units like the roach and the marauder that also cost gas. Which is wrong.
That's why I took those units as comparisons, because by design they should be superior to the marine. Even more as you say, they are not only limited to attacking ground themselves, they also possess one of the biggest strengths against these kind of fast/low damage attacks: armor. And still they lose to marines.
If you do those comparisons not in between versatile marine and groundspecialized roach/marauder, but between versatile-versatile, the results become quickly even more skewed. Note that in my opinion, the roach and the marauder are pretty strong ranged combat units to begin with. But unlike the marine, they sacrifice something (antiair; higher costs; specialized damage) for this.
Yes, of course starcraft is more complex than comparing one stat, or even multiple stats. Yet, I'm saying the marine's combat power has been placed on the wrong unit. Units should be somewhat equal in overall strength. They are not, if one unit is more versatile and stronger than another. That's the whole dilemma. The marine by design shouldn't be a strong combatant against many things, because it is a versatile one. Just like the stalker, the hydralisk, the battlecruiser, the carrier don't have that kind of costefficiency when being faced in straight combat. That kind of costefficiency is for the zealot, the roach, the marauder, the immortal, the tank, the colossus, the ultralisk, which are all dedicated ground killers.
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On June 12 2014 07:53 Dangermousecatdog wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2014 07:23 ChristianS wrote:
Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot. It's part of the reason why voidrays, and skytoss is so powerful
Sure, it's one of the reasons they're good, but they don't completely break the game because there are answers to that. In FFA, maybe, mass voidray might be broken, but in a reasonable 1v1 you have answers to that. It looked a little too strong in PvZ for a while but these days it doesn't really seem problematic.
On June 12 2014 08:00 Foxxan wrote:Show nested quote +Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot Yes ofcourse. Look at mutalisk. Why are they so strong? Because Terran lack any good AA. Good design in an rts=You have good AA tools which Terran lack in sc2. So in general, air units shouldnt be a problem but it is not because they are air units, more that the design is not well done.
I don't understand, are you being sarcastic? Mutalisks are strong right now but it's not because terran doesn't have any AA. My whole post was about marines, for god sake. A pack of marines will trade favorably against all but the biggest mutalisk pack if it doesn't have ground support; a pack of marines with a single thor will trade favorably against ANY mutalisk pack. Where you start getting problems is when:
a) The mutalisks refuse to engage your pack of marines, and instead fly around to your different bases preventing you from expanding very much.
b) The mutalisks prevent any drops from getting to Zerg bases, meaning the only way to stop him from expanding is a straight-forward frontal assault.
c) When your only option to win is a big frontal assault, it's not hard for Zerg to anticipate it and at least kill the army, even if it's somewhat inefficiently. And as long as you didn't keep the push alive long enough to damage his economy, he can trade inefficiently all day, since he's only losing the zerglings and banelings, not the muta pack.
Not that I'm arguing TvZ is imbalanced – I don't know enough about the current state of the matchup to say – but mutalisks are not good just because they stack until they have crazy dps. Like Zerglings, they're good for the map control and base advantage they allow.
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Time to post the latest Aligulac list. The previous list can be found at the end of this post.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/pKEYuFe.png)
Regarding winrates, PvT has fluctuated back from T having a slight advantage to P having a minuscule advantage. In PvZ, P has also improved although it hasn't caught up with Z. On the other hand, T has improved in the TvZ MU (110 had 45%, 111 had 47%) and its even now.
In terms of populations measured in numbers of mirror MUs, there's virtually no change compared to the last list, the proportions are very close. This means that there is no repopulation of terrans according to these numbers and there are 4 times fewer TvTs than ZvZs.
As T MUs have even winrates, there cannot really be a repopulation with these numbers.
Furthermore, a word of caution, I'd say that this was one of the best periods for Terran in a long while, Taeja won Hsc 9 (where Z had a comparatively weaker list of players), Maru is tearing up Code S, and Innovation is kicking as in teamleagues and the Dragon cup. I don't think they contributed overly much to the final winrates (their games are still a small fraction of all the games), but taken together they did contribute significantly. If they don't keep their winning ways going, winrates can plunge below 50% again. And, their wins aren't helping repopulate in any way.
On May 29 2014 02:45 Ghanburighan wrote:Uploading the latest Aligulac list. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/wem39XJ.png) Unfortunately there was a TvZ patch in the middle of the period, so those numbers could be anything now. But it looks like P is doing worse against Z in terms of winrate. But the population ratios haven't changed compared to the last list, though. It's still roughly 1/4 TvT, 2/4 PvP and 1/1 ZvZ.
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On June 11 2014 21:44 LSN wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2014 21:37 Faust852 wrote:
^What would you propose to counterbalance the bio nerf? t3 buff ? lol.
I just think you have trouble in PvT and blame it on bio instead of your own skills. rines + medivacs would be fine alone, without the maurauders. Cause mauraders are too tanky in the mix (with heal) and disable the opponent to exit from a fight at all with concussive shells. I would simply remove the maurader or make it a lategame unit. Probably factories should not cost any gas in return. Thors should be removed and replaced with something that can compete with marines. Just roughly what I would start with.
remove maraduers? yeah toss just need to make 3 templars now and BOOM everything u have is gone.. LSN youre ether trolling or SILVER toss. Terran winning lately? mean that taeja won HSC? ofc,, he was by far the best player there..
Pure bio medivac A MOVE isnt strong at all. it dies to everything, including roaches. you need to micro 10 times better than the opponent to have a slight chance to trade well... the problem of that tho, to win a game, you have to have super engagement 10+ times to actually win the game.. ONE MISTAKE and youre dead.
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On June 12 2014 02:14 FreeZEternal wrote:
Unless you are top masters/GM, you should not be complaining about TvP. IMO you just need to drop better.
For me (diamond) TvP just isn't fun, it might be balanced but it's not enjoyable.
The first 10 minutes are spent trying to stay alive if I scout a missing pylon (especially with a fast double gas).
Then it's a guess as to whether I'm up against proxy Oracle, Blink with MSC or DTs, the tech for which can be build anywhere on the map and the counters for each are different. And even if Protoss goes for an fast expo, Photon Overcharge ensures I can't pressure it much at all.
After that there is the early portion of the mid-game where I generally feel best as either Colossi or Storm will be out but not both. I don't have top level micro and dodging storms and managing vikings and bio all at the same time is difficult.
At the lategame though, the combination of Storms/Colossi generally just melts my Bio as I can't split and EMP and do everything else at the same time yet.
Warp Prisms are also an absolute nightmare to deal with. Having 10 chargelots in your base can be game ending.
Drops might help but that is a lot easier to say than it is to execute in an actual game.
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On June 12 2014 17:05 Thezzy wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2014 02:14 FreeZEternal wrote:
Unless you are top masters/GM, you should not be complaining about TvP. IMO you just need to drop better. For me (diamond) TvP just isn't fun, it might be balanced but it's not enjoyable. The first 10 minutes are spent trying to stay alive if I scout a missing pylon (especially with a fast double gas). Then it's a guess as to whether I'm up against proxy Oracle, Blink with MSC or DTs, the tech for which can be build anywhere on the map and the counters for each are different. And even if Protoss goes for an fast expo, Photon Overcharge ensures I can't pressure it much at all. After that there is the early portion of the mid-game where I generally feel best as either Colossi or Storm will be out but not both. I don't have top level micro and dodging storms and managing vikings and bio all at the same time is difficult. At the lategame though, the combination of Storms/Colossi generally just melts my Bio as I can't split and EMP and do everything else at the same time yet. Warp Prisms are also an absolute nightmare to deal with. Having 10 chargelots in your base can be game ending. Drops might help but that is a lot easier to say than it is to execute in an actual game.
yeah, playing that matchup is complete and utter bullshit in the early game.
Though I don't care about not being able to attack. I just want to be able to know what is going on to be able to play a strategy game, not poker.
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The early game could be remedied by modifying the MSC and Photon Overcharge.
I'd be much more accepting of the threat of Oracles and whatnot if I could atleast return the favor, especially if Protoss fails at doing any damage.
As it is, it feels as if Protoss can throw so much at me early game if I don't scout an expansion that I have to prepare for every possibility (unless I directly scout the specific tech building), meaning that the damage is partially done already.
If the attack then fails Protoss can hide behind Photon Overcharge and the game is still even.
I'd favor slowing down the Mothership Core to Overlord speed and then adding a speed upgrade for it at the Cybernetics Core which would improve the speed to 2.25 (marine speed).
It would only cost 50/50 but take 110 or 140 seconds to research. This means Protoss would have to choose between Warp Gate or MSC speed on the Cybernetics Core, reducing the threat of the MSC itself as well as Blink. You could still have Blink, but you'd have to do it with a delayed Warp Gate timing. It also means a MSC that still moves out on the map early is much more vulnerable and may not be available to cast a Photon Overcharge.
Oracles and DTs remain unchanged and if you park the MSC between the main and natural you can still cast Photon Overcharge easily.
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I don't understand, are you being sarcastic? Mutalisks are strong right now but it's not because terran doesn't have any AA.
I forgot to mention the Marine. My bad.
Other than him, terran have none which is a design flaw.
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On June 12 2014 14:35 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2014 07:23 ChristianS wrote:On June 11 2014 21:17 Big J wrote:On June 11 2014 20:47 ChristianS wrote:
I've seen people talk about the marine so many times in this thread and the only time I actually saw a real proposed change, not just vague "the marine is too strong" stuff, was someone saying damage should be 5 +1 to light instead of 6 "because they're too good against lings and mutas." What, remove the combat shield upgrade? Drop range by 1?
The marine is a pretty good tier 1 unit. It trades well against light targets (zealots, zerglings) in small numbers, and badly against heavy targets in small numbers (roaches, stalkers). The real strength of the marine as the game goes later is that with small collision radius and very high attack rate, they scale better than pretty much any other single-target damage. That doesn't make them OP; by the same logic, hydralisks should have been one of the best units in the WoL Zerg arsenal.
What is the fix here? How should the Terran race function without the option of marines as a basis for the army? Because you have to be more specific than 'buff somewhere else.' What, tank damage buffed to 50 flat, marine range down to 4? Battlecruiser DPS doubled, marine dps halved? Seeker missile hits twice as fast, but stim is removed? If you actually apply the "nerf marine, buff the rest of Terran" idea none of the concrete proposals sound good for the game. This 5+1 was something I proposed, but not as an actual "nerf the marine like this", but rather as a "they should have looked at the stats when they created the game and seen that the marine was too good all around. And since there are marauders vs armored anyways, why not make marine's dps vs armored lower than marauder's dps vs armored." Something that you might apply in a new expansion, when things get shaken up anyways. Of course not to make them worse vs mutas and lings, since they wouldn't change against those units at all. Rather the opposite, keep them as good against those units, make them weaker against armored things. And yeah, I pretty much stand by that opinion. 2 stimmed marines have 21dps vs everything, ground and air1 stimmed marauder has 20dps vs armored ground, 10 vs other ground, can't shoot air at all 1 roach has 8 dps vs everything ground, can't shoot air at all ... (of course there are other advantages of those units; please refrain from "but roaches have 145HP"; "but marauders have +1range and concussive shells", that is of course true, but at the end of the day, the overall picture and the actual gameplay will prove that you'd rather have marines then roaches, in many, many more scenarios then you want it vis-verca) I believe there is something seriously off with how the marine is balanced against other units. Like, if I had to draw a graphic in which I rate the unit strength (so combat strength, versatility, overall usefullness) for all Terran units, it would spike very hard at the marine, and other rather strong Terran units like the marauder would only be at half its level. When, in a perfect RTS world that allows for a lot of variety, you want all of the units to be on somewhat the same level in this chart. (which doesn't mean they should all be equally good in combat; one may be better early, one better late, one more mobile, one more versatile etc...) And I believe that this inequality stems a lot from nerfs in WoL to Terran, as well as the overall design process going around these very strong marines. Because, since they come so early and only cost minerals, anything gasheavy a Terran can play in theory, he can play with the marine as mineraldump, early safety, super-anti-air unit. Which makes it necessary that all gasheavy Terran units have to be treated as "how does this combine with the marine", and none of those units can be overly strong in scenarios when you want to fight marinecounters. To give an example: you cannot buff the siege tank in a way that reactively mixing them in upon seeing banelings, makes you wellprepared against banelings. Because it's the only tool around for zerg to really combat marines (before ultralisks). Of course you may be able to tweak the numbers upon what we have now, but at the end of the day, you are not going to be able to implement a siege tank that can deal very well with either, 300+HP Archons/Ultralisks/Colossi and 30-80HP Banelings/HTs. Because Marine/Medivac counters other singlefire compositions so hard (at least in the longrun), that the Terran counters to marinecounters must be very, very soft. (that is not to say that the marine is the only such unit in the game, that is outside of a healthy "balance corridor"; current mutalisks, or WoL Infestors to name two others; but the marine has always been like that; with the other units, there is usually immidiate imbalance towards that race involved, since the rest of the race hasn't been as nerfed down as the Terran race has been) Yes, the marine is a versatile mineral dump. No, not every Terran strategy has to revolve around that mineral dump (i.e. mech). And DPS comparisons aren't really fair for a few reasons. I'll list them in order of decreasing obviousness. 1. HP of a unit is very important in relation to DPS because you want to know how units will trade. If we were only considering base trades, DPS would be the only significant statistic (that is, can roaches or marines kill a base more quickly?). But since they're fighting each other directly, the really important statistic is how quickly marines kill roaches versus how quickly roaches kill marines. And for that question, what matters is, more or less, RKPS (roaches killed per second) versus MKPS (marines killed per second). Depending on scale, roaches do pretty well in that trade. 2. Armored units aren't just called that for the sake of receiving +damage from marauders, it's also because they generally have armor. Which is really good against marines. So a marine takes 25.0 seconds to kill a roach, 16.6 if stimmed; while a roach takes 6 seconds to kill a marine (8 seconds with combat shield and no stim). A marauder, on the other hand, takes 22.5 seconds to kill a roach, 15 seconds if stimmed; but a roach takes 18 seconds to kill a marauder, 16 if it stimmed. The math becomes a great deal more complex when medivacs enter the equation, but the point is that with armor and HP factored in, marines don't trade so absurdly well. The extreme of this dynamic is trying to use marines to fight ultralisks – they're basically meat shields for the marauders in that fight. 3. So then we get to the real strength of the marine: scaling. Sure a couple marines don't trade well against roaches, but how about 100 marines? And with such a low collision radius, they do in fact trade better in large numbers since more marines will be firing at once than the roaches, particularly in enclosed spaces. This means that marines will always favor larger numbers and smaller spaces when they're fighting roaches. But that just means that marines, like hydras, are best in a straight-up army-to-army shoot out with no AoE involved. In the early game marines won't be able to achieve the critical mass necessary for that type of engagement; in the late game the marines will have to spread out to mitigate AoE, meaning that straight-up shoot out hardly ever happens in a real game. Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot. Battlecruisers should be the best unit in the game. Marines should become quickly become obsolete in TvZ once the muta clump gets big enough, because if you stack enough mutas in one spot they'll easily beat marines in DPS per area. Point is, Starcraft is a complex game, and you can't demonstrate that something is overpowered by comparing a single unit stat. Yes, the Terran race is balanced around the marine, in the same way that the Protoss race is balanced around the Colossus and the Zerg race is balanced around the Zergling – if anything they have becomes overpowered when combined with that unit, it gets nerfed. This is why Protoss (at least in WoL, and this is still somewhat true) can't have a really powerful air superiority unit (phoenixes die to vikings and corruptors) – because colossus dominate the ground so efficiently that you have to be able to beat a Protoss in the air. This is why Zerg is balanced so he has to be ~1 base ahead of his opponent – because zerglings and other fast units give Zerg so much map control that if being a base ahead gave Zerg an advantage, he'd be at an advantage every game. And yes, that's why the best units in the vT matchups are the ones that kill marines very efficiently, and those are the units Terran struggles against. Somewhere in between these comparisons I said that dps is of course not everything, I just took it because it is the stat that is off with marines in my opinion. You can do all those comparisons you talked about, at the end of the day you will have a versatile mineral only unit trading better with specialized antiground units like the roach and the marauder that also cost gas. Which is wrong. That's why I took those units as comparisons, because by design they should be superior to the marine. Even more as you say, they are not only limited to attacking ground themselves, they also possess one of the biggest strengths against these kind of fast/low damage attacks: armor. And still they lose to marines. If you do those comparisons not in between versatile marine and groundspecialized roach/marauder, but between versatile-versatile, the results become quickly even more skewed. Note that in my opinion, the roach and the marauder are pretty strong ranged combat units to begin with. But unlike the marine, they sacrifice something (antiair; higher costs; specialized damage) for this. Yes, of course starcraft is more complex than comparing one stat, or even multiple stats. Yet, I'm saying the marine's combat power has been placed on the wrong unit. Units should be somewhat equal in overall strength. They are not, if one unit is more versatile and stronger than another. That's the whole dilemma. The marine by design shouldn't be a strong combatant against many things, because it is a versatile one. Just like the stalker, the hydralisk, the battlecruiser, the carrier don't have that kind of costefficiency when being faced in straight combat. That kind of costefficiency is for the zealot, the roach, the marauder, the immortal, the tank, the colossus, the ultralisk, which are all dedicated ground killers.
You are still guilty of looking just at a small aspect of the game.
Marines without upgrades do NOT trade well with roaches or stalkers in the early game. Especially if you compare armies that different races can field at certain times in the game.
Midgame marine heavy armies start to shine when the investments in infrastructure and upgrades kicks in and the right support units are on the field. You need to realize that when terran places down barracks with reactors they are quite limited in what they can produce out of them. Terran is only able to finetune the rine/rauder ratio and the support units. Marineproduction will always be the inflexible backbone of bio play. The unit kind of has to do at least ok against everything because of that.
Still I kind of see your point. You'd like to see rines a little bit weaker and rauders a little bit stronger against armored units. I think changing this is very problematic because early game defense and reactions to tech switches rely heavily on the versatility of marines. I fear if you want to really change the marine you kind of have to change a lot of other things as well. Building addons and divided upgrade paths for mech and bio make terran very inflexible.
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On June 12 2014 17:37 Thezzy wrote:
The early game could be remedied by modifying the MSC and Photon Overcharge.
I'd be much more accepting of the threat of Oracles and whatnot if I could atleast return the favor, especially if Protoss fails at doing any damage.
As it is, it feels as if Protoss can throw so much at me early game if I don't scout an expansion that I have to prepare for every possibility (unless I directly scout the specific tech building), meaning that the damage is partially done already.
If the attack then fails Protoss can hide behind Photon Overcharge and the game is still even.
I'd favor slowing down the Mothership Core to Overlord speed and then adding a speed upgrade for it at the Cybernetics Core which would improve the speed to 2.25 (marine speed).
It would only cost 50/50 but take 110 or 140 seconds to research. This means Protoss would have to choose between Warp Gate or MSC speed on the Cybernetics Core, reducing the threat of the MSC itself as well as Blink. You could still have Blink, but you'd have to do it with a delayed Warp Gate timing. It also means a MSC that still moves out on the map early is much more vulnerable and may not be available to cast a Photon Overcharge.
Oracles and DTs remain unchanged and if you park the MSC between the main and natural you can still cast Photon Overcharge easily.
pretty much this.
I find it hilarious though that david kim explicitly stated several years ago that terran is the race that relies on doing early damage, yet in pvt it's the protoss who not only has map control for the first ~10 minutes but is also impervious to early rushes.
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On June 12 2014 18:33 submarine wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2014 14:35 Big J wrote:On June 12 2014 07:23 ChristianS wrote:On June 11 2014 21:17 Big J wrote:On June 11 2014 20:47 ChristianS wrote:
I've seen people talk about the marine so many times in this thread and the only time I actually saw a real proposed change, not just vague "the marine is too strong" stuff, was someone saying damage should be 5 +1 to light instead of 6 "because they're too good against lings and mutas." What, remove the combat shield upgrade? Drop range by 1?
The marine is a pretty good tier 1 unit. It trades well against light targets (zealots, zerglings) in small numbers, and badly against heavy targets in small numbers (roaches, stalkers). The real strength of the marine as the game goes later is that with small collision radius and very high attack rate, they scale better than pretty much any other single-target damage. That doesn't make them OP; by the same logic, hydralisks should have been one of the best units in the WoL Zerg arsenal.
What is the fix here? How should the Terran race function without the option of marines as a basis for the army? Because you have to be more specific than 'buff somewhere else.' What, tank damage buffed to 50 flat, marine range down to 4? Battlecruiser DPS doubled, marine dps halved? Seeker missile hits twice as fast, but stim is removed? If you actually apply the "nerf marine, buff the rest of Terran" idea none of the concrete proposals sound good for the game. This 5+1 was something I proposed, but not as an actual "nerf the marine like this", but rather as a "they should have looked at the stats when they created the game and seen that the marine was too good all around. And since there are marauders vs armored anyways, why not make marine's dps vs armored lower than marauder's dps vs armored." Something that you might apply in a new expansion, when things get shaken up anyways. Of course not to make them worse vs mutas and lings, since they wouldn't change against those units at all. Rather the opposite, keep them as good against those units, make them weaker against armored things. And yeah, I pretty much stand by that opinion. 2 stimmed marines have 21dps vs everything, ground and air1 stimmed marauder has 20dps vs armored ground, 10 vs other ground, can't shoot air at all 1 roach has 8 dps vs everything ground, can't shoot air at all ... (of course there are other advantages of those units; please refrain from "but roaches have 145HP"; "but marauders have +1range and concussive shells", that is of course true, but at the end of the day, the overall picture and the actual gameplay will prove that you'd rather have marines then roaches, in many, many more scenarios then you want it vis-verca) I believe there is something seriously off with how the marine is balanced against other units. Like, if I had to draw a graphic in which I rate the unit strength (so combat strength, versatility, overall usefullness) for all Terran units, it would spike very hard at the marine, and other rather strong Terran units like the marauder would only be at half its level. When, in a perfect RTS world that allows for a lot of variety, you want all of the units to be on somewhat the same level in this chart. (which doesn't mean they should all be equally good in combat; one may be better early, one better late, one more mobile, one more versatile etc...) And I believe that this inequality stems a lot from nerfs in WoL to Terran, as well as the overall design process going around these very strong marines. Because, since they come so early and only cost minerals, anything gasheavy a Terran can play in theory, he can play with the marine as mineraldump, early safety, super-anti-air unit. Which makes it necessary that all gasheavy Terran units have to be treated as "how does this combine with the marine", and none of those units can be overly strong in scenarios when you want to fight marinecounters. To give an example: you cannot buff the siege tank in a way that reactively mixing them in upon seeing banelings, makes you wellprepared against banelings. Because it's the only tool around for zerg to really combat marines (before ultralisks). Of course you may be able to tweak the numbers upon what we have now, but at the end of the day, you are not going to be able to implement a siege tank that can deal very well with either, 300+HP Archons/Ultralisks/Colossi and 30-80HP Banelings/HTs. Because Marine/Medivac counters other singlefire compositions so hard (at least in the longrun), that the Terran counters to marinecounters must be very, very soft. (that is not to say that the marine is the only such unit in the game, that is outside of a healthy "balance corridor"; current mutalisks, or WoL Infestors to name two others; but the marine has always been like that; with the other units, there is usually immidiate imbalance towards that race involved, since the rest of the race hasn't been as nerfed down as the Terran race has been) Yes, the marine is a versatile mineral dump. No, not every Terran strategy has to revolve around that mineral dump (i.e. mech). And DPS comparisons aren't really fair for a few reasons. I'll list them in order of decreasing obviousness. 1. HP of a unit is very important in relation to DPS because you want to know how units will trade. If we were only considering base trades, DPS would be the only significant statistic (that is, can roaches or marines kill a base more quickly?). But since they're fighting each other directly, the really important statistic is how quickly marines kill roaches versus how quickly roaches kill marines. And for that question, what matters is, more or less, RKPS (roaches killed per second) versus MKPS (marines killed per second). Depending on scale, roaches do pretty well in that trade. 2. Armored units aren't just called that for the sake of receiving +damage from marauders, it's also because they generally have armor. Which is really good against marines. So a marine takes 25.0 seconds to kill a roach, 16.6 if stimmed; while a roach takes 6 seconds to kill a marine (8 seconds with combat shield and no stim). A marauder, on the other hand, takes 22.5 seconds to kill a roach, 15 seconds if stimmed; but a roach takes 18 seconds to kill a marauder, 16 if it stimmed. The math becomes a great deal more complex when medivacs enter the equation, but the point is that with armor and HP factored in, marines don't trade so absurdly well. The extreme of this dynamic is trying to use marines to fight ultralisks – they're basically meat shields for the marauders in that fight. 3. So then we get to the real strength of the marine: scaling. Sure a couple marines don't trade well against roaches, but how about 100 marines? And with such a low collision radius, they do in fact trade better in large numbers since more marines will be firing at once than the roaches, particularly in enclosed spaces. This means that marines will always favor larger numbers and smaller spaces when they're fighting roaches. But that just means that marines, like hydras, are best in a straight-up army-to-army shoot out with no AoE involved. In the early game marines won't be able to achieve the critical mass necessary for that type of engagement; in the late game the marines will have to spread out to mitigate AoE, meaning that straight-up shoot out hardly ever happens in a real game. Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot. Battlecruisers should be the best unit in the game. Marines should become quickly become obsolete in TvZ once the muta clump gets big enough, because if you stack enough mutas in one spot they'll easily beat marines in DPS per area. Point is, Starcraft is a complex game, and you can't demonstrate that something is overpowered by comparing a single unit stat. Yes, the Terran race is balanced around the marine, in the same way that the Protoss race is balanced around the Colossus and the Zerg race is balanced around the Zergling – if anything they have becomes overpowered when combined with that unit, it gets nerfed. This is why Protoss (at least in WoL, and this is still somewhat true) can't have a really powerful air superiority unit (phoenixes die to vikings and corruptors) – because colossus dominate the ground so efficiently that you have to be able to beat a Protoss in the air. This is why Zerg is balanced so he has to be ~1 base ahead of his opponent – because zerglings and other fast units give Zerg so much map control that if being a base ahead gave Zerg an advantage, he'd be at an advantage every game. And yes, that's why the best units in the vT matchups are the ones that kill marines very efficiently, and those are the units Terran struggles against. Somewhere in between these comparisons I said that dps is of course not everything, I just took it because it is the stat that is off with marines in my opinion. You can do all those comparisons you talked about, at the end of the day you will have a versatile mineral only unit trading better with specialized antiground units like the roach and the marauder that also cost gas. Which is wrong. That's why I took those units as comparisons, because by design they should be superior to the marine. Even more as you say, they are not only limited to attacking ground themselves, they also possess one of the biggest strengths against these kind of fast/low damage attacks: armor. And still they lose to marines. If you do those comparisons not in between versatile marine and groundspecialized roach/marauder, but between versatile-versatile, the results become quickly even more skewed. Note that in my opinion, the roach and the marauder are pretty strong ranged combat units to begin with. But unlike the marine, they sacrifice something (antiair; higher costs; specialized damage) for this. Yes, of course starcraft is more complex than comparing one stat, or even multiple stats. Yet, I'm saying the marine's combat power has been placed on the wrong unit. Units should be somewhat equal in overall strength. They are not, if one unit is more versatile and stronger than another. That's the whole dilemma. The marine by design shouldn't be a strong combatant against many things, because it is a versatile one. Just like the stalker, the hydralisk, the battlecruiser, the carrier don't have that kind of costefficiency when being faced in straight combat. That kind of costefficiency is for the zealot, the roach, the marauder, the immortal, the tank, the colossus, the ultralisk, which are all dedicated ground killers. You are still guilty of looking just at a small aspect of the game. Marines without upgrades do NOT trade well with roaches or stalkers in the early game. Especially if you compare armies that different races can field at certain times in the game. Midgame marine heavy armies start to shine when the investments in infrastructure and upgrades kicks in and the right support units are on the field. You need to realize that when terran places down barracks with reactors they are quite limited in what they can produce out of them. Terran is only able to finetune the rine/rauder ratio and the support units. Marineproduction will always be the inflexible backbone of bio play. The unit kind of has to do at least ok against everything because of that. Still I kind of see your point. You'd like to see rines a little bit weaker and rauders a little bit stronger against armored units. I think changing this is very problematic because early game defense and reactions to tech switches rely heavily on the versatility of marines. I fear if you want to really change the marine you kind of have to change a lot of other things as well. Building addons and divided upgrade paths for mech and bio make terran very inflexible.
The way armor works, it doesn't matter if you fight 0-0, 1-1, 2-2, or 3-3 with marines against somethine else. Marines actually get worse in equal upgrade scenarios against a lot of units, e.g. roaches (in general every unit with a damage >=15 per shot upgrades better than marines). Of course you need the stim and shield upgrades, but I see these kind of upgrades much more as a economical and timingbased bump. Eventually you are going to have them, just like a Zerg will eventually have his spire.
Reactors are a good point, but let me point out something:
Originally there have been a lot of discussion about whether it is actually worth it to build reactors with barracks (for factories and starports it's very clearly better). Since a reactor costs gas and a similar amount of ressources overall, compared to a new barracks.
I think the main reason why we see reactors triumph so hard over extra barracks is simply that bio play doesn't really need the gas as much but really needs the minerals that the extra barracks would cost. Which again leads back to marines being so good in comparison to the gasheavier Terran units that you actually don't really want as much. You'd rather have 7barracks only capable of producing marines, than 5barracks and 3factories with a mixture of addons, since marines are better than the varied composition you could produce of the later setup.
And, at least in my opinion, that is the wrong way to go. A "costeven" mixture of specialists should beat a mono composition of one versatile unit.
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I find it utterly bullshit that there is no breathing room for terran in tvp. I cant tell u how many times i seen replays where a protoss just makes 2 units, a mothership core and a stalker/sentry til the 10+ minute mark and they are able to get away with it cause of overcharge. Its bullshit, where is there room for error with protoss? There is no way to punish protoss for greedy/bad play. Example: I proxy rax a zerg and it fails, i get countered bane all inned and lose. It Makes sense. I Went for a high risk build and it did not pay off. Now a protoss proxy gate/stargates me and it fails, i counter and cant even kill 1 probe cause of overcharge. Makes sense? No. The Mothership core needs to be removed or changed. I think it should be attached to the nexus, and if i surprise attack a protoss in the main while its attached at the natural, then he would have to cast a spell to teleport it to the nexus being attacked which would mean a delay much like the mass recall would have a delay. that way we can at least get SOME dmg done, makes no sense why protoss cant be bothered til after 10+ min mark. If terran made just 1 unit for defense for the 10 min mark would we be able to hold a surprise attack? blizzard needs to get rid of the 'get out of jail free' card unit
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On June 12 2014 19:27 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2014 18:33 submarine wrote:On June 12 2014 14:35 Big J wrote:On June 12 2014 07:23 ChristianS wrote:On June 11 2014 21:17 Big J wrote:On June 11 2014 20:47 ChristianS wrote:
I've seen people talk about the marine so many times in this thread and the only time I actually saw a real proposed change, not just vague "the marine is too strong" stuff, was someone saying damage should be 5 +1 to light instead of 6 "because they're too good against lings and mutas." What, remove the combat shield upgrade? Drop range by 1?
The marine is a pretty good tier 1 unit. It trades well against light targets (zealots, zerglings) in small numbers, and badly against heavy targets in small numbers (roaches, stalkers). The real strength of the marine as the game goes later is that with small collision radius and very high attack rate, they scale better than pretty much any other single-target damage. That doesn't make them OP; by the same logic, hydralisks should have been one of the best units in the WoL Zerg arsenal.
What is the fix here? How should the Terran race function without the option of marines as a basis for the army? Because you have to be more specific than 'buff somewhere else.' What, tank damage buffed to 50 flat, marine range down to 4? Battlecruiser DPS doubled, marine dps halved? Seeker missile hits twice as fast, but stim is removed? If you actually apply the "nerf marine, buff the rest of Terran" idea none of the concrete proposals sound good for the game. This 5+1 was something I proposed, but not as an actual "nerf the marine like this", but rather as a "they should have looked at the stats when they created the game and seen that the marine was too good all around. And since there are marauders vs armored anyways, why not make marine's dps vs armored lower than marauder's dps vs armored." Something that you might apply in a new expansion, when things get shaken up anyways. Of course not to make them worse vs mutas and lings, since they wouldn't change against those units at all. Rather the opposite, keep them as good against those units, make them weaker against armored things. And yeah, I pretty much stand by that opinion. 2 stimmed marines have 21dps vs everything, ground and air1 stimmed marauder has 20dps vs armored ground, 10 vs other ground, can't shoot air at all 1 roach has 8 dps vs everything ground, can't shoot air at all ... (of course there are other advantages of those units; please refrain from "but roaches have 145HP"; "but marauders have +1range and concussive shells", that is of course true, but at the end of the day, the overall picture and the actual gameplay will prove that you'd rather have marines then roaches, in many, many more scenarios then you want it vis-verca) I believe there is something seriously off with how the marine is balanced against other units. Like, if I had to draw a graphic in which I rate the unit strength (so combat strength, versatility, overall usefullness) for all Terran units, it would spike very hard at the marine, and other rather strong Terran units like the marauder would only be at half its level. When, in a perfect RTS world that allows for a lot of variety, you want all of the units to be on somewhat the same level in this chart. (which doesn't mean they should all be equally good in combat; one may be better early, one better late, one more mobile, one more versatile etc...) And I believe that this inequality stems a lot from nerfs in WoL to Terran, as well as the overall design process going around these very strong marines. Because, since they come so early and only cost minerals, anything gasheavy a Terran can play in theory, he can play with the marine as mineraldump, early safety, super-anti-air unit. Which makes it necessary that all gasheavy Terran units have to be treated as "how does this combine with the marine", and none of those units can be overly strong in scenarios when you want to fight marinecounters. To give an example: you cannot buff the siege tank in a way that reactively mixing them in upon seeing banelings, makes you wellprepared against banelings. Because it's the only tool around for zerg to really combat marines (before ultralisks). Of course you may be able to tweak the numbers upon what we have now, but at the end of the day, you are not going to be able to implement a siege tank that can deal very well with either, 300+HP Archons/Ultralisks/Colossi and 30-80HP Banelings/HTs. Because Marine/Medivac counters other singlefire compositions so hard (at least in the longrun), that the Terran counters to marinecounters must be very, very soft. (that is not to say that the marine is the only such unit in the game, that is outside of a healthy "balance corridor"; current mutalisks, or WoL Infestors to name two others; but the marine has always been like that; with the other units, there is usually immidiate imbalance towards that race involved, since the rest of the race hasn't been as nerfed down as the Terran race has been) Yes, the marine is a versatile mineral dump. No, not every Terran strategy has to revolve around that mineral dump (i.e. mech). And DPS comparisons aren't really fair for a few reasons. I'll list them in order of decreasing obviousness. 1. HP of a unit is very important in relation to DPS because you want to know how units will trade. If we were only considering base trades, DPS would be the only significant statistic (that is, can roaches or marines kill a base more quickly?). But since they're fighting each other directly, the really important statistic is how quickly marines kill roaches versus how quickly roaches kill marines. And for that question, what matters is, more or less, RKPS (roaches killed per second) versus MKPS (marines killed per second). Depending on scale, roaches do pretty well in that trade. 2. Armored units aren't just called that for the sake of receiving +damage from marauders, it's also because they generally have armor. Which is really good against marines. So a marine takes 25.0 seconds to kill a roach, 16.6 if stimmed; while a roach takes 6 seconds to kill a marine (8 seconds with combat shield and no stim). A marauder, on the other hand, takes 22.5 seconds to kill a roach, 15 seconds if stimmed; but a roach takes 18 seconds to kill a marauder, 16 if it stimmed. The math becomes a great deal more complex when medivacs enter the equation, but the point is that with armor and HP factored in, marines don't trade so absurdly well. The extreme of this dynamic is trying to use marines to fight ultralisks – they're basically meat shields for the marauders in that fight. 3. So then we get to the real strength of the marine: scaling. Sure a couple marines don't trade well against roaches, but how about 100 marines? And with such a low collision radius, they do in fact trade better in large numbers since more marines will be firing at once than the roaches, particularly in enclosed spaces. This means that marines will always favor larger numbers and smaller spaces when they're fighting roaches. But that just means that marines, like hydras, are best in a straight-up army-to-army shoot out with no AoE involved. In the early game marines won't be able to achieve the critical mass necessary for that type of engagement; in the late game the marines will have to spread out to mitigate AoE, meaning that straight-up shoot out hardly ever happens in a real game. Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot. Battlecruisers should be the best unit in the game. Marines should become quickly become obsolete in TvZ once the muta clump gets big enough, because if you stack enough mutas in one spot they'll easily beat marines in DPS per area. Point is, Starcraft is a complex game, and you can't demonstrate that something is overpowered by comparing a single unit stat. Yes, the Terran race is balanced around the marine, in the same way that the Protoss race is balanced around the Colossus and the Zerg race is balanced around the Zergling – if anything they have becomes overpowered when combined with that unit, it gets nerfed. This is why Protoss (at least in WoL, and this is still somewhat true) can't have a really powerful air superiority unit (phoenixes die to vikings and corruptors) – because colossus dominate the ground so efficiently that you have to be able to beat a Protoss in the air. This is why Zerg is balanced so he has to be ~1 base ahead of his opponent – because zerglings and other fast units give Zerg so much map control that if being a base ahead gave Zerg an advantage, he'd be at an advantage every game. And yes, that's why the best units in the vT matchups are the ones that kill marines very efficiently, and those are the units Terran struggles against. Somewhere in between these comparisons I said that dps is of course not everything, I just took it because it is the stat that is off with marines in my opinion. You can do all those comparisons you talked about, at the end of the day you will have a versatile mineral only unit trading better with specialized antiground units like the roach and the marauder that also cost gas. Which is wrong. That's why I took those units as comparisons, because by design they should be superior to the marine. Even more as you say, they are not only limited to attacking ground themselves, they also possess one of the biggest strengths against these kind of fast/low damage attacks: armor. And still they lose to marines. If you do those comparisons not in between versatile marine and groundspecialized roach/marauder, but between versatile-versatile, the results become quickly even more skewed. Note that in my opinion, the roach and the marauder are pretty strong ranged combat units to begin with. But unlike the marine, they sacrifice something (antiair; higher costs; specialized damage) for this. Yes, of course starcraft is more complex than comparing one stat, or even multiple stats. Yet, I'm saying the marine's combat power has been placed on the wrong unit. Units should be somewhat equal in overall strength. They are not, if one unit is more versatile and stronger than another. That's the whole dilemma. The marine by design shouldn't be a strong combatant against many things, because it is a versatile one. Just like the stalker, the hydralisk, the battlecruiser, the carrier don't have that kind of costefficiency when being faced in straight combat. That kind of costefficiency is for the zealot, the roach, the marauder, the immortal, the tank, the colossus, the ultralisk, which are all dedicated ground killers. You are still guilty of looking just at a small aspect of the game. Marines without upgrades do NOT trade well with roaches or stalkers in the early game. Especially if you compare armies that different races can field at certain times in the game. Midgame marine heavy armies start to shine when the investments in infrastructure and upgrades kicks in and the right support units are on the field. You need to realize that when terran places down barracks with reactors they are quite limited in what they can produce out of them. Terran is only able to finetune the rine/rauder ratio and the support units. Marineproduction will always be the inflexible backbone of bio play. The unit kind of has to do at least ok against everything because of that. Still I kind of see your point. You'd like to see rines a little bit weaker and rauders a little bit stronger against armored units. I think changing this is very problematic because early game defense and reactions to tech switches rely heavily on the versatility of marines. I fear if you want to really change the marine you kind of have to change a lot of other things as well. Building addons and divided upgrade paths for mech and bio make terran very inflexible. The way armor works, it doesn't matter if you fight 0-0, 1-1, 2-2, or 3-3 with marines against somethine else. Marines actually get worse in equal upgrade scenarios against a lot of units, e.g. roaches (in general every unit with a damage >=15 per shot upgrades better than marines). Of course you need the stim and shield upgrades, but I see these kind of upgrades much more as a economical and timingbased bump. Eventually you are going to have them, just like a Zerg will eventually have his spire. Reactors are a good point, but let me point out something: Originally there have been a lot of discussion about whether it is actually worth it to build reactors with barracks (for factories and starports it's very clearly better). Since a reactor costs gas and a similar amount of ressources overall, compared to a new barracks. I think the main reason why we see reactors triumph so hard over extra barracks is simply that bio play doesn't really need the gas as much but really needs the minerals that the extra barracks would cost. Which again leads back to marines being so good in comparison to the gasheavier Terran units that you actually don't really want as much. You'd rather have 7barracks only capable of producing marines, than 5barracks and 3factories with a mixture of addons, since marines are better than the varied composition you could produce of the later setup. And, at least in my opinion, that is the wrong way to go. A "costeven" mixture of specialists should beat a mono composition of one versatile unit.
The reason why rines are that strong in larger number against roaches, stalkers or even rauders is not only because they are small. They are one of the few hitscan units without projectiles and overkill. This makes a very big difference.
Stalkers for example scale very badly against marines because they all shoot the closest marine, while marines do only effective dps. That's also part of the reason why rauders do so bad against a large number of berserkers.
But in general I agree. I would also like to see more diversified army mixtures from terran. I think bio tank TvT is by far the best matchup. Games with this composition are highly dynamic and still offer positional play. Roach, Hydra vs bio tank also kind of offers the same. Too bad Mr Kim thinks tanks are boring.
Another problem with this hugely diversified armies from terran is that they can be at times even harder to control while the other races have more "control synergy". A toss deathball for example kind of arranges itself in a quite useful manner while mixed terran armies can be a real pain^^.
What i would like to try is to combine factory and rax upgrades and split of the air upgrades again. This could really open up very interesting compositions. But sadly this will never happen.
Edit: IMHO split upgrade paths for ground units in general are a relict from broodwar. It is that way because it always have been this way. I would really like to see the game without different paths for rax and factory as well as for zerg attack upgrades. If you think about it the game could be so much more interesting without this hugely limiting factor on army compositions. Tech switches would still be hard enough. You still have to build the infrastucture and the unit specific upgrades. All this can be scouted. There really is no reason to make this especially hard to do.
Air units on the other hand are something entirely different and deserve to be harder to switch to.
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On June 12 2014 14:35 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2014 07:23 ChristianS wrote:On June 11 2014 21:17 Big J wrote:On June 11 2014 20:47 ChristianS wrote:
I've seen people talk about the marine so many times in this thread and the only time I actually saw a real proposed change, not just vague "the marine is too strong" stuff, was someone saying damage should be 5 +1 to light instead of 6 "because they're too good against lings and mutas." What, remove the combat shield upgrade? Drop range by 1?
The marine is a pretty good tier 1 unit. It trades well against light targets (zealots, zerglings) in small numbers, and badly against heavy targets in small numbers (roaches, stalkers). The real strength of the marine as the game goes later is that with small collision radius and very high attack rate, they scale better than pretty much any other single-target damage. That doesn't make them OP; by the same logic, hydralisks should have been one of the best units in the WoL Zerg arsenal.
What is the fix here? How should the Terran race function without the option of marines as a basis for the army? Because you have to be more specific than 'buff somewhere else.' What, tank damage buffed to 50 flat, marine range down to 4? Battlecruiser DPS doubled, marine dps halved? Seeker missile hits twice as fast, but stim is removed? If you actually apply the "nerf marine, buff the rest of Terran" idea none of the concrete proposals sound good for the game. This 5+1 was something I proposed, but not as an actual "nerf the marine like this", but rather as a "they should have looked at the stats when they created the game and seen that the marine was too good all around. And since there are marauders vs armored anyways, why not make marine's dps vs armored lower than marauder's dps vs armored." Something that you might apply in a new expansion, when things get shaken up anyways. Of course not to make them worse vs mutas and lings, since they wouldn't change against those units at all. Rather the opposite, keep them as good against those units, make them weaker against armored things. And yeah, I pretty much stand by that opinion. 2 stimmed marines have 21dps vs everything, ground and air1 stimmed marauder has 20dps vs armored ground, 10 vs other ground, can't shoot air at all 1 roach has 8 dps vs everything ground, can't shoot air at all ... (of course there are other advantages of those units; please refrain from "but roaches have 145HP"; "but marauders have +1range and concussive shells", that is of course true, but at the end of the day, the overall picture and the actual gameplay will prove that you'd rather have marines then roaches, in many, many more scenarios then you want it vis-verca) I believe there is something seriously off with how the marine is balanced against other units. Like, if I had to draw a graphic in which I rate the unit strength (so combat strength, versatility, overall usefullness) for all Terran units, it would spike very hard at the marine, and other rather strong Terran units like the marauder would only be at half its level. When, in a perfect RTS world that allows for a lot of variety, you want all of the units to be on somewhat the same level in this chart. (which doesn't mean they should all be equally good in combat; one may be better early, one better late, one more mobile, one more versatile etc...) And I believe that this inequality stems a lot from nerfs in WoL to Terran, as well as the overall design process going around these very strong marines. Because, since they come so early and only cost minerals, anything gasheavy a Terran can play in theory, he can play with the marine as mineraldump, early safety, super-anti-air unit. Which makes it necessary that all gasheavy Terran units have to be treated as "how does this combine with the marine", and none of those units can be overly strong in scenarios when you want to fight marinecounters. To give an example: you cannot buff the siege tank in a way that reactively mixing them in upon seeing banelings, makes you wellprepared against banelings. Because it's the only tool around for zerg to really combat marines (before ultralisks). Of course you may be able to tweak the numbers upon what we have now, but at the end of the day, you are not going to be able to implement a siege tank that can deal very well with either, 300+HP Archons/Ultralisks/Colossi and 30-80HP Banelings/HTs. Because Marine/Medivac counters other singlefire compositions so hard (at least in the longrun), that the Terran counters to marinecounters must be very, very soft. (that is not to say that the marine is the only such unit in the game, that is outside of a healthy "balance corridor"; current mutalisks, or WoL Infestors to name two others; but the marine has always been like that; with the other units, there is usually immidiate imbalance towards that race involved, since the rest of the race hasn't been as nerfed down as the Terran race has been) Yes, the marine is a versatile mineral dump. No, not every Terran strategy has to revolve around that mineral dump (i.e. mech). And DPS comparisons aren't really fair for a few reasons. I'll list them in order of decreasing obviousness. 1. HP of a unit is very important in relation to DPS because you want to know how units will trade. If we were only considering base trades, DPS would be the only significant statistic (that is, can roaches or marines kill a base more quickly?). But since they're fighting each other directly, the really important statistic is how quickly marines kill roaches versus how quickly roaches kill marines. And for that question, what matters is, more or less, RKPS (roaches killed per second) versus MKPS (marines killed per second). Depending on scale, roaches do pretty well in that trade. 2. Armored units aren't just called that for the sake of receiving +damage from marauders, it's also because they generally have armor. Which is really good against marines. So a marine takes 25.0 seconds to kill a roach, 16.6 if stimmed; while a roach takes 6 seconds to kill a marine (8 seconds with combat shield and no stim). A marauder, on the other hand, takes 22.5 seconds to kill a roach, 15 seconds if stimmed; but a roach takes 18 seconds to kill a marauder, 16 if it stimmed. The math becomes a great deal more complex when medivacs enter the equation, but the point is that with armor and HP factored in, marines don't trade so absurdly well. The extreme of this dynamic is trying to use marines to fight ultralisks – they're basically meat shields for the marauders in that fight. 3. So then we get to the real strength of the marine: scaling. Sure a couple marines don't trade well against roaches, but how about 100 marines? And with such a low collision radius, they do in fact trade better in large numbers since more marines will be firing at once than the roaches, particularly in enclosed spaces. This means that marines will always favor larger numbers and smaller spaces when they're fighting roaches. But that just means that marines, like hydras, are best in a straight-up army-to-army shoot out with no AoE involved. In the early game marines won't be able to achieve the critical mass necessary for that type of engagement; in the late game the marines will have to spread out to mitigate AoE, meaning that straight-up shoot out hardly ever happens in a real game. Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot. Battlecruisers should be the best unit in the game. Marines should become quickly become obsolete in TvZ once the muta clump gets big enough, because if you stack enough mutas in one spot they'll easily beat marines in DPS per area. Point is, Starcraft is a complex game, and you can't demonstrate that something is overpowered by comparing a single unit stat. Yes, the Terran race is balanced around the marine, in the same way that the Protoss race is balanced around the Colossus and the Zerg race is balanced around the Zergling – if anything they have becomes overpowered when combined with that unit, it gets nerfed. This is why Protoss (at least in WoL, and this is still somewhat true) can't have a really powerful air superiority unit (phoenixes die to vikings and corruptors) – because colossus dominate the ground so efficiently that you have to be able to beat a Protoss in the air. This is why Zerg is balanced so he has to be ~1 base ahead of his opponent – because zerglings and other fast units give Zerg so much map control that if being a base ahead gave Zerg an advantage, he'd be at an advantage every game. And yes, that's why the best units in the vT matchups are the ones that kill marines very efficiently, and those are the units Terran struggles against. Somewhere in between these comparisons I said that dps is of course not everything, I just took it because it is the stat that is off with marines in my opinion. You can do all those comparisons you talked about, at the end of the day you will have a versatile mineral only unit trading better with specialized antiground units like the roach and the marauder that also cost gas. Which is wrong. That's why I took those units as comparisons, because by design they should be superior to the marine. Even more as you say, they are not only limited to attacking ground themselves, they also possess one of the biggest strengths against these kind of fast/low damage attacks: armor. And still they lose to marines. If you do those comparisons not in between versatile marine and groundspecialized roach/marauder, but between versatile-versatile, the results become quickly even more skewed. Note that in my opinion, the roach and the marauder are pretty strong ranged combat units to begin with. But unlike the marine, they sacrifice something (antiair; higher costs; specialized damage) for this. Yes, of course starcraft is more complex than comparing one stat, or even multiple stats. Yet, I'm saying the marine's combat power has been placed on the wrong unit. Units should be somewhat equal in overall strength. They are not, if one unit is more versatile and stronger than another. That's the whole dilemma. The marine by design shouldn't be a strong combatant against many things, because it is a versatile one. Just like the stalker, the hydralisk, the battlecruiser, the carrier don't have that kind of costefficiency when being faced in straight combat. That kind of costefficiency is for the zealot, the roach, the marauder, the immortal, the tank, the colossus, the ultralisk, which are all dedicated ground killers.
No it isn´t. If you want to compare marine stats with other units and take stim into consideration, then look at the whole picutre:
Marine: w/o stim and Combat Shields
HP / supply: 45
DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: ~7.0
DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: ~5.8
Marine: w stim and w/o Combat Shields
HP / Supply: 35
DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: ~10.5
DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: ~8.6
Marine: w stim and Combat Shields
HP / Supply: 45
DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: ~10.5
DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: ~8.6
Roaches:
HP / Supply: 72.5
DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: 4
DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: 3.5
So we see that those fuckin imbalanced Marines are way worse in a head on fight than those shitty roaches, if they have neither stim nor Combat Shields. (Their DPS/Supply is pretty close, while their HP/Supply is heavily in favor of roaches)
If Stim comes into play, it´s pretty even. Marines do 215% of the DPS/supply of roaches, while roaches have 207% of the HP/Supply of Marines. Only when we hit both Techs, Marines become superior here.
And that´s why you have to stop to spread your stupid myth of imba marines. The Marine itself is shit. He gets shit on by every unit in the game. The tech upgrades and support units make the marine work. And to compensate that, it´s one of the units with the most hardcounters against it in the game. So stop spreading your lies. Back up your facts with real data, or stop posting here.
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19533 Posts
On June 12 2014 21:25 TeeTS wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2014 14:35 Big J wrote:On June 12 2014 07:23 ChristianS wrote:On June 11 2014 21:17 Big J wrote:On June 11 2014 20:47 ChristianS wrote:
I've seen people talk about the marine so many times in this thread and the only time I actually saw a real proposed change, not just vague "the marine is too strong" stuff, was someone saying damage should be 5 +1 to light instead of 6 "because they're too good against lings and mutas." What, remove the combat shield upgrade? Drop range by 1?
The marine is a pretty good tier 1 unit. It trades well against light targets (zealots, zerglings) in small numbers, and badly against heavy targets in small numbers (roaches, stalkers). The real strength of the marine as the game goes later is that with small collision radius and very high attack rate, they scale better than pretty much any other single-target damage. That doesn't make them OP; by the same logic, hydralisks should have been one of the best units in the WoL Zerg arsenal.
What is the fix here? How should the Terran race function without the option of marines as a basis for the army? Because you have to be more specific than 'buff somewhere else.' What, tank damage buffed to 50 flat, marine range down to 4? Battlecruiser DPS doubled, marine dps halved? Seeker missile hits twice as fast, but stim is removed? If you actually apply the "nerf marine, buff the rest of Terran" idea none of the concrete proposals sound good for the game. This 5+1 was something I proposed, but not as an actual "nerf the marine like this", but rather as a "they should have looked at the stats when they created the game and seen that the marine was too good all around. And since there are marauders vs armored anyways, why not make marine's dps vs armored lower than marauder's dps vs armored." Something that you might apply in a new expansion, when things get shaken up anyways. Of course not to make them worse vs mutas and lings, since they wouldn't change against those units at all. Rather the opposite, keep them as good against those units, make them weaker against armored things. And yeah, I pretty much stand by that opinion. 2 stimmed marines have 21dps vs everything, ground and air1 stimmed marauder has 20dps vs armored ground, 10 vs other ground, can't shoot air at all 1 roach has 8 dps vs everything ground, can't shoot air at all ... (of course there are other advantages of those units; please refrain from "but roaches have 145HP"; "but marauders have +1range and concussive shells", that is of course true, but at the end of the day, the overall picture and the actual gameplay will prove that you'd rather have marines then roaches, in many, many more scenarios then you want it vis-verca) I believe there is something seriously off with how the marine is balanced against other units. Like, if I had to draw a graphic in which I rate the unit strength (so combat strength, versatility, overall usefullness) for all Terran units, it would spike very hard at the marine, and other rather strong Terran units like the marauder would only be at half its level. When, in a perfect RTS world that allows for a lot of variety, you want all of the units to be on somewhat the same level in this chart. (which doesn't mean they should all be equally good in combat; one may be better early, one better late, one more mobile, one more versatile etc...) And I believe that this inequality stems a lot from nerfs in WoL to Terran, as well as the overall design process going around these very strong marines. Because, since they come so early and only cost minerals, anything gasheavy a Terran can play in theory, he can play with the marine as mineraldump, early safety, super-anti-air unit. Which makes it necessary that all gasheavy Terran units have to be treated as "how does this combine with the marine", and none of those units can be overly strong in scenarios when you want to fight marinecounters. To give an example: you cannot buff the siege tank in a way that reactively mixing them in upon seeing banelings, makes you wellprepared against banelings. Because it's the only tool around for zerg to really combat marines (before ultralisks). Of course you may be able to tweak the numbers upon what we have now, but at the end of the day, you are not going to be able to implement a siege tank that can deal very well with either, 300+HP Archons/Ultralisks/Colossi and 30-80HP Banelings/HTs. Because Marine/Medivac counters other singlefire compositions so hard (at least in the longrun), that the Terran counters to marinecounters must be very, very soft. (that is not to say that the marine is the only such unit in the game, that is outside of a healthy "balance corridor"; current mutalisks, or WoL Infestors to name two others; but the marine has always been like that; with the other units, there is usually immidiate imbalance towards that race involved, since the rest of the race hasn't been as nerfed down as the Terran race has been) Yes, the marine is a versatile mineral dump. No, not every Terran strategy has to revolve around that mineral dump (i.e. mech). And DPS comparisons aren't really fair for a few reasons. I'll list them in order of decreasing obviousness. 1. HP of a unit is very important in relation to DPS because you want to know how units will trade. If we were only considering base trades, DPS would be the only significant statistic (that is, can roaches or marines kill a base more quickly?). But since they're fighting each other directly, the really important statistic is how quickly marines kill roaches versus how quickly roaches kill marines. And for that question, what matters is, more or less, RKPS (roaches killed per second) versus MKPS (marines killed per second). Depending on scale, roaches do pretty well in that trade. 2. Armored units aren't just called that for the sake of receiving +damage from marauders, it's also because they generally have armor. Which is really good against marines. So a marine takes 25.0 seconds to kill a roach, 16.6 if stimmed; while a roach takes 6 seconds to kill a marine (8 seconds with combat shield and no stim). A marauder, on the other hand, takes 22.5 seconds to kill a roach, 15 seconds if stimmed; but a roach takes 18 seconds to kill a marauder, 16 if it stimmed. The math becomes a great deal more complex when medivacs enter the equation, but the point is that with armor and HP factored in, marines don't trade so absurdly well. The extreme of this dynamic is trying to use marines to fight ultralisks – they're basically meat shields for the marauders in that fight. 3. So then we get to the real strength of the marine: scaling. Sure a couple marines don't trade well against roaches, but how about 100 marines? And with such a low collision radius, they do in fact trade better in large numbers since more marines will be firing at once than the roaches, particularly in enclosed spaces. This means that marines will always favor larger numbers and smaller spaces when they're fighting roaches. But that just means that marines, like hydras, are best in a straight-up army-to-army shoot out with no AoE involved. In the early game marines won't be able to achieve the critical mass necessary for that type of engagement; in the late game the marines will have to spread out to mitigate AoE, meaning that straight-up shoot out hardly ever happens in a real game. Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot. Battlecruisers should be the best unit in the game. Marines should become quickly become obsolete in TvZ once the muta clump gets big enough, because if you stack enough mutas in one spot they'll easily beat marines in DPS per area. Point is, Starcraft is a complex game, and you can't demonstrate that something is overpowered by comparing a single unit stat. Yes, the Terran race is balanced around the marine, in the same way that the Protoss race is balanced around the Colossus and the Zerg race is balanced around the Zergling – if anything they have becomes overpowered when combined with that unit, it gets nerfed. This is why Protoss (at least in WoL, and this is still somewhat true) can't have a really powerful air superiority unit (phoenixes die to vikings and corruptors) – because colossus dominate the ground so efficiently that you have to be able to beat a Protoss in the air. This is why Zerg is balanced so he has to be ~1 base ahead of his opponent – because zerglings and other fast units give Zerg so much map control that if being a base ahead gave Zerg an advantage, he'd be at an advantage every game. And yes, that's why the best units in the vT matchups are the ones that kill marines very efficiently, and those are the units Terran struggles against. Somewhere in between these comparisons I said that dps is of course not everything, I just took it because it is the stat that is off with marines in my opinion. You can do all those comparisons you talked about, at the end of the day you will have a versatile mineral only unit trading better with specialized antiground units like the roach and the marauder that also cost gas. Which is wrong. That's why I took those units as comparisons, because by design they should be superior to the marine. Even more as you say, they are not only limited to attacking ground themselves, they also possess one of the biggest strengths against these kind of fast/low damage attacks: armor. And still they lose to marines. If you do those comparisons not in between versatile marine and groundspecialized roach/marauder, but between versatile-versatile, the results become quickly even more skewed. Note that in my opinion, the roach and the marauder are pretty strong ranged combat units to begin with. But unlike the marine, they sacrifice something (antiair; higher costs; specialized damage) for this. Yes, of course starcraft is more complex than comparing one stat, or even multiple stats. Yet, I'm saying the marine's combat power has been placed on the wrong unit. Units should be somewhat equal in overall strength. They are not, if one unit is more versatile and stronger than another. That's the whole dilemma. The marine by design shouldn't be a strong combatant against many things, because it is a versatile one. Just like the stalker, the hydralisk, the battlecruiser, the carrier don't have that kind of costefficiency when being faced in straight combat. That kind of costefficiency is for the zealot, the roach, the marauder, the immortal, the tank, the colossus, the ultralisk, which are all dedicated ground killers. + Show Spoiler +No it isn´t. If you want to compare marine stats with other units and take stim into consideration, then look at the whole picutre:
Marine: w/o stim and Combat Shields
HP / supply: 45
DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: ~7.0
DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: ~5.8
Marine: w stim and w/o Combat Shields
HP / Supply: 35
DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: ~10.5
DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: ~8.6
Marine: w stim and Combat Shields
HP / Supply: 45
DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: ~10.5
DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: ~8.6
Roaches:
HP / Supply: 72.5
DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: 4
DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: 3.5
So we see that those fuckin imbalanced Marines are way worse in a head on fight than those shitty roaches, if they have neither stim nor Combat Shields. (Their DPS/Supply is pretty close, while their HP/Supply is heavily in favor of roaches)
If Stim comes into play, it´s pretty even. Marines do 215% of the DPS/supply of roaches, while roaches have 207% of the HP/Supply of Marines. Only when we hit both Techs, Marines become superior here.
And that´s why you have to stop to spread your stupid myth of imba marines. The Marine itself is shit. He gets shit on by every unit in the game. The tech upgrades and support units make the marine work. And to compensate that, it´s one of the units with the most hardcounters against it in the game. So stop spreading your lies. Back up your facts with real data, or stop posting here.
This is only theoretical "data" which is most of the time completely useless, but yeah ty for dividing some numbers.
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Right now, there is only one terran that can consistently beat tosses and Zergs at high level, and this is Maru.
-Flash and TY are really good but only in highly prepared scenarios, with specific strategies adapted to a special map.
-Byong and innovation are good but can never reach top 16 or top 8.
-Taeja can kill international player but is unproven against the elite (Zest,SoS,Hero,Classic,Shine to mention the scariest).
Maru is the only terran that can win a bo3/bo5 against a top tier P or Z.
I don't think you can really consider this fair for T.
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On June 12 2014 21:25 TeeTS wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2014 14:35 Big J wrote:On June 12 2014 07:23 ChristianS wrote:On June 11 2014 21:17 Big J wrote:On June 11 2014 20:47 ChristianS wrote:
I've seen people talk about the marine so many times in this thread and the only time I actually saw a real proposed change, not just vague "the marine is too strong" stuff, was someone saying damage should be 5 +1 to light instead of 6 "because they're too good against lings and mutas." What, remove the combat shield upgrade? Drop range by 1?
The marine is a pretty good tier 1 unit. It trades well against light targets (zealots, zerglings) in small numbers, and badly against heavy targets in small numbers (roaches, stalkers). The real strength of the marine as the game goes later is that with small collision radius and very high attack rate, they scale better than pretty much any other single-target damage. That doesn't make them OP; by the same logic, hydralisks should have been one of the best units in the WoL Zerg arsenal.
What is the fix here? How should the Terran race function without the option of marines as a basis for the army? Because you have to be more specific than 'buff somewhere else.' What, tank damage buffed to 50 flat, marine range down to 4? Battlecruiser DPS doubled, marine dps halved? Seeker missile hits twice as fast, but stim is removed? If you actually apply the "nerf marine, buff the rest of Terran" idea none of the concrete proposals sound good for the game. This 5+1 was something I proposed, but not as an actual "nerf the marine like this", but rather as a "they should have looked at the stats when they created the game and seen that the marine was too good all around. And since there are marauders vs armored anyways, why not make marine's dps vs armored lower than marauder's dps vs armored." Something that you might apply in a new expansion, when things get shaken up anyways. Of course not to make them worse vs mutas and lings, since they wouldn't change against those units at all. Rather the opposite, keep them as good against those units, make them weaker against armored things. And yeah, I pretty much stand by that opinion. 2 stimmed marines have 21dps vs everything, ground and air1 stimmed marauder has 20dps vs armored ground, 10 vs other ground, can't shoot air at all 1 roach has 8 dps vs everything ground, can't shoot air at all ... (of course there are other advantages of those units; please refrain from "but roaches have 145HP"; "but marauders have +1range and concussive shells", that is of course true, but at the end of the day, the overall picture and the actual gameplay will prove that you'd rather have marines then roaches, in many, many more scenarios then you want it vis-verca) I believe there is something seriously off with how the marine is balanced against other units. Like, if I had to draw a graphic in which I rate the unit strength (so combat strength, versatility, overall usefullness) for all Terran units, it would spike very hard at the marine, and other rather strong Terran units like the marauder would only be at half its level. When, in a perfect RTS world that allows for a lot of variety, you want all of the units to be on somewhat the same level in this chart. (which doesn't mean they should all be equally good in combat; one may be better early, one better late, one more mobile, one more versatile etc...) And I believe that this inequality stems a lot from nerfs in WoL to Terran, as well as the overall design process going around these very strong marines. Because, since they come so early and only cost minerals, anything gasheavy a Terran can play in theory, he can play with the marine as mineraldump, early safety, super-anti-air unit. Which makes it necessary that all gasheavy Terran units have to be treated as "how does this combine with the marine", and none of those units can be overly strong in scenarios when you want to fight marinecounters. To give an example: you cannot buff the siege tank in a way that reactively mixing them in upon seeing banelings, makes you wellprepared against banelings. Because it's the only tool around for zerg to really combat marines (before ultralisks). Of course you may be able to tweak the numbers upon what we have now, but at the end of the day, you are not going to be able to implement a siege tank that can deal very well with either, 300+HP Archons/Ultralisks/Colossi and 30-80HP Banelings/HTs. Because Marine/Medivac counters other singlefire compositions so hard (at least in the longrun), that the Terran counters to marinecounters must be very, very soft. (that is not to say that the marine is the only such unit in the game, that is outside of a healthy "balance corridor"; current mutalisks, or WoL Infestors to name two others; but the marine has always been like that; with the other units, there is usually immidiate imbalance towards that race involved, since the rest of the race hasn't been as nerfed down as the Terran race has been) Yes, the marine is a versatile mineral dump. No, not every Terran strategy has to revolve around that mineral dump (i.e. mech). And DPS comparisons aren't really fair for a few reasons. I'll list them in order of decreasing obviousness. 1. HP of a unit is very important in relation to DPS because you want to know how units will trade. If we were only considering base trades, DPS would be the only significant statistic (that is, can roaches or marines kill a base more quickly?). But since they're fighting each other directly, the really important statistic is how quickly marines kill roaches versus how quickly roaches kill marines. And for that question, what matters is, more or less, RKPS (roaches killed per second) versus MKPS (marines killed per second). Depending on scale, roaches do pretty well in that trade. 2. Armored units aren't just called that for the sake of receiving +damage from marauders, it's also because they generally have armor. Which is really good against marines. So a marine takes 25.0 seconds to kill a roach, 16.6 if stimmed; while a roach takes 6 seconds to kill a marine (8 seconds with combat shield and no stim). A marauder, on the other hand, takes 22.5 seconds to kill a roach, 15 seconds if stimmed; but a roach takes 18 seconds to kill a marauder, 16 if it stimmed. The math becomes a great deal more complex when medivacs enter the equation, but the point is that with armor and HP factored in, marines don't trade so absurdly well. The extreme of this dynamic is trying to use marines to fight ultralisks – they're basically meat shields for the marauders in that fight. 3. So then we get to the real strength of the marine: scaling. Sure a couple marines don't trade well against roaches, but how about 100 marines? And with such a low collision radius, they do in fact trade better in large numbers since more marines will be firing at once than the roaches, particularly in enclosed spaces. This means that marines will always favor larger numbers and smaller spaces when they're fighting roaches. But that just means that marines, like hydras, are best in a straight-up army-to-army shoot out with no AoE involved. In the early game marines won't be able to achieve the critical mass necessary for that type of engagement; in the late game the marines will have to spread out to mitigate AoE, meaning that straight-up shoot out hardly ever happens in a real game. Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot. Battlecruisers should be the best unit in the game. Marines should become quickly become obsolete in TvZ once the muta clump gets big enough, because if you stack enough mutas in one spot they'll easily beat marines in DPS per area. Point is, Starcraft is a complex game, and you can't demonstrate that something is overpowered by comparing a single unit stat. Yes, the Terran race is balanced around the marine, in the same way that the Protoss race is balanced around the Colossus and the Zerg race is balanced around the Zergling – if anything they have becomes overpowered when combined with that unit, it gets nerfed. This is why Protoss (at least in WoL, and this is still somewhat true) can't have a really powerful air superiority unit (phoenixes die to vikings and corruptors) – because colossus dominate the ground so efficiently that you have to be able to beat a Protoss in the air. This is why Zerg is balanced so he has to be ~1 base ahead of his opponent – because zerglings and other fast units give Zerg so much map control that if being a base ahead gave Zerg an advantage, he'd be at an advantage every game. And yes, that's why the best units in the vT matchups are the ones that kill marines very efficiently, and those are the units Terran struggles against. Somewhere in between these comparisons I said that dps is of course not everything, I just took it because it is the stat that is off with marines in my opinion. You can do all those comparisons you talked about, at the end of the day you will have a versatile mineral only unit trading better with specialized antiground units like the roach and the marauder that also cost gas. Which is wrong. That's why I took those units as comparisons, because by design they should be superior to the marine. Even more as you say, they are not only limited to attacking ground themselves, they also possess one of the biggest strengths against these kind of fast/low damage attacks: armor. And still they lose to marines. If you do those comparisons not in between versatile marine and groundspecialized roach/marauder, but between versatile-versatile, the results become quickly even more skewed. Note that in my opinion, the roach and the marauder are pretty strong ranged combat units to begin with. But unlike the marine, they sacrifice something (antiair; higher costs; specialized damage) for this. Yes, of course starcraft is more complex than comparing one stat, or even multiple stats. Yet, I'm saying the marine's combat power has been placed on the wrong unit. Units should be somewhat equal in overall strength. They are not, if one unit is more versatile and stronger than another. That's the whole dilemma. The marine by design shouldn't be a strong combatant against many things, because it is a versatile one. Just like the stalker, the hydralisk, the battlecruiser, the carrier don't have that kind of costefficiency when being faced in straight combat. That kind of costefficiency is for the zealot, the roach, the marauder, the immortal, the tank, the colossus, the ultralisk, which are all dedicated ground killers. No it isn´t. If you want to compare marine stats with other units and take stim into consideration, then look at the whole picutre: Marine: w/o stim and Combat Shields HP / supply: 45 DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: ~7.0 DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: ~5.8 Marine: w stim and w/o Combat Shields HP / Supply: 35 DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: ~10.5 DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: ~8.6 Marine: w stim and Combat Shields HP / Supply: 45 DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: ~10.5 DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: ~8.6 Roaches: HP / Supply: 72.5 DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: 4 DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: 3.5 So we see that those fuckin imbalanced Marines are way worse in a head on fight than those shitty roaches, if they have neither stim nor Combat Shields. (Their DPS/Supply is pretty close, while their HP/Supply is heavily in favor of roaches) If Stim comes into play, it´s pretty even. Marines do 215% of the DPS/supply of roaches, while roaches have 207% of the HP/Supply of Marines. Only when we hit both Techs, Marines become superior here. And that´s why you have to stop to spread your stupid myth of imba marines. The Marine itself is shit. He gets shit on by every unit in the game. The tech upgrades and support units make the marine work. And to compensate that, it´s one of the units with the most hardcounters against it in the game. So stop spreading your lies. Back up your facts with real data, or stop posting here.
There is really no need for the agressive tone. While you are right to an extend you forgot to mention that marines have one HUGE advantage. They have a hitscan attack and to their damage at a very high rate of fire. Both reduces overkill. This is a very important aspect in bigger fights.
But you are right. Marines are NOT a superunit. They have strenghts and weaknesses.
On June 12 2014 21:44 The_Red_Viper wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2014 21:25 TeeTS wrote:On June 12 2014 14:35 Big J wrote:On June 12 2014 07:23 ChristianS wrote:On June 11 2014 21:17 Big J wrote:On June 11 2014 20:47 ChristianS wrote:
I've seen people talk about the marine so many times in this thread and the only time I actually saw a real proposed change, not just vague "the marine is too strong" stuff, was someone saying damage should be 5 +1 to light instead of 6 "because they're too good against lings and mutas." What, remove the combat shield upgrade? Drop range by 1?
The marine is a pretty good tier 1 unit. It trades well against light targets (zealots, zerglings) in small numbers, and badly against heavy targets in small numbers (roaches, stalkers). The real strength of the marine as the game goes later is that with small collision radius and very high attack rate, they scale better than pretty much any other single-target damage. That doesn't make them OP; by the same logic, hydralisks should have been one of the best units in the WoL Zerg arsenal.
What is the fix here? How should the Terran race function without the option of marines as a basis for the army? Because you have to be more specific than 'buff somewhere else.' What, tank damage buffed to 50 flat, marine range down to 4? Battlecruiser DPS doubled, marine dps halved? Seeker missile hits twice as fast, but stim is removed? If you actually apply the "nerf marine, buff the rest of Terran" idea none of the concrete proposals sound good for the game. This 5+1 was something I proposed, but not as an actual "nerf the marine like this", but rather as a "they should have looked at the stats when they created the game and seen that the marine was too good all around. And since there are marauders vs armored anyways, why not make marine's dps vs armored lower than marauder's dps vs armored." Something that you might apply in a new expansion, when things get shaken up anyways. Of course not to make them worse vs mutas and lings, since they wouldn't change against those units at all. Rather the opposite, keep them as good against those units, make them weaker against armored things. And yeah, I pretty much stand by that opinion. 2 stimmed marines have 21dps vs everything, ground and air1 stimmed marauder has 20dps vs armored ground, 10 vs other ground, can't shoot air at all 1 roach has 8 dps vs everything ground, can't shoot air at all ... (of course there are other advantages of those units; please refrain from "but roaches have 145HP"; "but marauders have +1range and concussive shells", that is of course true, but at the end of the day, the overall picture and the actual gameplay will prove that you'd rather have marines then roaches, in many, many more scenarios then you want it vis-verca) I believe there is something seriously off with how the marine is balanced against other units. Like, if I had to draw a graphic in which I rate the unit strength (so combat strength, versatility, overall usefullness) for all Terran units, it would spike very hard at the marine, and other rather strong Terran units like the marauder would only be at half its level. When, in a perfect RTS world that allows for a lot of variety, you want all of the units to be on somewhat the same level in this chart. (which doesn't mean they should all be equally good in combat; one may be better early, one better late, one more mobile, one more versatile etc...) And I believe that this inequality stems a lot from nerfs in WoL to Terran, as well as the overall design process going around these very strong marines. Because, since they come so early and only cost minerals, anything gasheavy a Terran can play in theory, he can play with the marine as mineraldump, early safety, super-anti-air unit. Which makes it necessary that all gasheavy Terran units have to be treated as "how does this combine with the marine", and none of those units can be overly strong in scenarios when you want to fight marinecounters. To give an example: you cannot buff the siege tank in a way that reactively mixing them in upon seeing banelings, makes you wellprepared against banelings. Because it's the only tool around for zerg to really combat marines (before ultralisks). Of course you may be able to tweak the numbers upon what we have now, but at the end of the day, you are not going to be able to implement a siege tank that can deal very well with either, 300+HP Archons/Ultralisks/Colossi and 30-80HP Banelings/HTs. Because Marine/Medivac counters other singlefire compositions so hard (at least in the longrun), that the Terran counters to marinecounters must be very, very soft. (that is not to say that the marine is the only such unit in the game, that is outside of a healthy "balance corridor"; current mutalisks, or WoL Infestors to name two others; but the marine has always been like that; with the other units, there is usually immidiate imbalance towards that race involved, since the rest of the race hasn't been as nerfed down as the Terran race has been) Yes, the marine is a versatile mineral dump. No, not every Terran strategy has to revolve around that mineral dump (i.e. mech). And DPS comparisons aren't really fair for a few reasons. I'll list them in order of decreasing obviousness. 1. HP of a unit is very important in relation to DPS because you want to know how units will trade. If we were only considering base trades, DPS would be the only significant statistic (that is, can roaches or marines kill a base more quickly?). But since they're fighting each other directly, the really important statistic is how quickly marines kill roaches versus how quickly roaches kill marines. And for that question, what matters is, more or less, RKPS (roaches killed per second) versus MKPS (marines killed per second). Depending on scale, roaches do pretty well in that trade. 2. Armored units aren't just called that for the sake of receiving +damage from marauders, it's also because they generally have armor. Which is really good against marines. So a marine takes 25.0 seconds to kill a roach, 16.6 if stimmed; while a roach takes 6 seconds to kill a marine (8 seconds with combat shield and no stim). A marauder, on the other hand, takes 22.5 seconds to kill a roach, 15 seconds if stimmed; but a roach takes 18 seconds to kill a marauder, 16 if it stimmed. The math becomes a great deal more complex when medivacs enter the equation, but the point is that with armor and HP factored in, marines don't trade so absurdly well. The extreme of this dynamic is trying to use marines to fight ultralisks – they're basically meat shields for the marauders in that fight. 3. So then we get to the real strength of the marine: scaling. Sure a couple marines don't trade well against roaches, but how about 100 marines? And with such a low collision radius, they do in fact trade better in large numbers since more marines will be firing at once than the roaches, particularly in enclosed spaces. This means that marines will always favor larger numbers and smaller spaces when they're fighting roaches. But that just means that marines, like hydras, are best in a straight-up army-to-army shoot out with no AoE involved. In the early game marines won't be able to achieve the critical mass necessary for that type of engagement; in the late game the marines will have to spread out to mitigate AoE, meaning that straight-up shoot out hardly ever happens in a real game. Anyway, if high DPS per area is what makes marines OP, then there's a category we're ignoring entirely: air units. Air units should be the most broken shit, since you can literally stack an entire 200/200 army on one spot. Battlecruisers should be the best unit in the game. Marines should become quickly become obsolete in TvZ once the muta clump gets big enough, because if you stack enough mutas in one spot they'll easily beat marines in DPS per area. Point is, Starcraft is a complex game, and you can't demonstrate that something is overpowered by comparing a single unit stat. Yes, the Terran race is balanced around the marine, in the same way that the Protoss race is balanced around the Colossus and the Zerg race is balanced around the Zergling – if anything they have becomes overpowered when combined with that unit, it gets nerfed. This is why Protoss (at least in WoL, and this is still somewhat true) can't have a really powerful air superiority unit (phoenixes die to vikings and corruptors) – because colossus dominate the ground so efficiently that you have to be able to beat a Protoss in the air. This is why Zerg is balanced so he has to be ~1 base ahead of his opponent – because zerglings and other fast units give Zerg so much map control that if being a base ahead gave Zerg an advantage, he'd be at an advantage every game. And yes, that's why the best units in the vT matchups are the ones that kill marines very efficiently, and those are the units Terran struggles against. Somewhere in between these comparisons I said that dps is of course not everything, I just took it because it is the stat that is off with marines in my opinion. You can do all those comparisons you talked about, at the end of the day you will have a versatile mineral only unit trading better with specialized antiground units like the roach and the marauder that also cost gas. Which is wrong. That's why I took those units as comparisons, because by design they should be superior to the marine. Even more as you say, they are not only limited to attacking ground themselves, they also possess one of the biggest strengths against these kind of fast/low damage attacks: armor. And still they lose to marines. If you do those comparisons not in between versatile marine and groundspecialized roach/marauder, but between versatile-versatile, the results become quickly even more skewed. Note that in my opinion, the roach and the marauder are pretty strong ranged combat units to begin with. But unlike the marine, they sacrifice something (antiair; higher costs; specialized damage) for this. Yes, of course starcraft is more complex than comparing one stat, or even multiple stats. Yet, I'm saying the marine's combat power has been placed on the wrong unit. Units should be somewhat equal in overall strength. They are not, if one unit is more versatile and stronger than another. That's the whole dilemma. The marine by design shouldn't be a strong combatant against many things, because it is a versatile one. Just like the stalker, the hydralisk, the battlecruiser, the carrier don't have that kind of costefficiency when being faced in straight combat. That kind of costefficiency is for the zealot, the roach, the marauder, the immortal, the tank, the colossus, the ultralisk, which are all dedicated ground killers. + Show Spoiler +No it isn´t. If you want to compare marine stats with other units and take stim into consideration, then look at the whole picutre:
Marine: w/o stim and Combat Shields
HP / supply: 45
DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: ~7.0
DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: ~5.8
Marine: w stim and w/o Combat Shields
HP / Supply: 35
DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: ~10.5
DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: ~8.6
Marine: w stim and Combat Shields
HP / Supply: 45
DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: ~10.5
DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: ~8.6
Roaches:
HP / Supply: 72.5
DPS against 0 Armor / Supply: 4
DPS against 1 Armor / Supply: 3.5
So we see that those fuckin imbalanced Marines are way worse in a head on fight than those shitty roaches, if they have neither stim nor Combat Shields. (Their DPS/Supply is pretty close, while their HP/Supply is heavily in favor of roaches)
If Stim comes into play, it´s pretty even. Marines do 215% of the DPS/supply of roaches, while roaches have 207% of the HP/Supply of Marines. Only when we hit both Techs, Marines become superior here.
And that´s why you have to stop to spread your stupid myth of imba marines. The Marine itself is shit. He gets shit on by every unit in the game. The tech upgrades and support units make the marine work. And to compensate that, it´s one of the units with the most hardcounters against it in the game. So stop spreading your lies. Back up your facts with real data, or stop posting here. This is only theoretical "data" which is most of the time completely useless, but yeah ty for dividing some numbers.
He did not start with the "data". Someone else claimed marines were very dominant in the game because of their terribly high dps. He just put this into context. Thats not completely useless. Your post was.
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