On June 13 2014 02:25 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2014 22:05 Big J wrote: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. 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. I was obviously talking about marines with stim and combat shields, which you might have gotten from phrases like "stimmed marines", lol. I guess you are so angry, because with your calculations it would indeed be much closer. Thing is, in my world 72.5/45 equals 1.61111, not 2.07, so roaches only have 161,11111% of the marine's HP/supply, with combat shields and umstimmed 132%.These are the numbers for the stim/shield/unhealed marine vs roach: DPS/s: Marine 215% > 100% Roach HP/s: Roach 161% > 100% Marine So yeah, shields alone make marines stronger than roaches. And all of those calculations are done for the 1armor roach, against the 0 armor marine, so the dps calculations are lower than average for the marine, and higher than average for the roach, given that all units but ultralisk, BC, Carrier, Tempest in the game have 0 or 1 armor, and Protoss shields in general start at 0 armor. Edit: Sorry, now I get how you meant it. Yeah, stim without shields and medivacs isn't that great. I'll skip quoting everything you've said in the last couple pages and just try to respond to as much of it as I can. First of all, in the case of roaches normal upgrade scaling doesn't apply. For marines versus hydras, for instance, it doesn't matter if both sides are 0-0, 1-1, 2-2, or 3-3; each additional attack is cancelled out by one additional armor on the other. But in the case of roaches, they actually get +2 from each attack upgrade, meaning that 1-1 roaches do more damage against 1-1 marines than in the 0-0 vs 0-0 case. This means that at equal upgrades three roach shots do 48, then 51, then 54, then 57, so the difference isn't huge in turns of number of hits to kill a marine, but since the marines are also often being healed by medivacs, the extra damage is significant. I'll also say just to be clear: roaches are not specialty fighters. Roaches don't specialize in anything, except maybe meat shielding. Because despite what you say, not every unit in a race's arsenal has to be of equal strength. Some, like the zergling, are extremely versatile and used all game long. Others, like the roach, are only useful in a specific window to achieve a specific goal. Roaches are really strong early game, because they're cheap, survivable, and fairly light on larva. That means they're really good for 1-, 2-, and 3-base all-ins, and they're good for holding off early aggression, but they're not something you want in your 200/200 army. And there's nothing wrong with having situational units like that. What they aren't is a "specialty ground killer" like you're saying. This isn't an Ensemble Studios RTS, so we don't have those kind of rock paper scissors unit interactions. Every race has a few solid units that can serve as the basis of an army; their other units are sprinkled in to fit specific needs. The reaper does not need to be strong enough to be the basis of an army, nor does the ghost. Roach armies are easy to max on, but they suck; there's nothing wrong with that dynamic. While you're wrong that a unit hitting both ground and air means it should suck at both, you're right that a unit should have some downside. And the marine does. Mix a few banelings into your roach army and suddenly Terran needs bunkers or tanks or wall-ins or hellions or widow mines or something to avoid getting steamrolled. Play a marine-heavy style against a Protoss going colossus and you'll find out why the rule I've heard is to never have more than one reactor barracks in TvP. Marines are not an indomitable force; they're a pretty good unit, with weaknesses to be avoided and an incredibly high skill cap. If anything, more units should be as well designed.
Well, what you call "being wrong" is plainly my philosophy of designing/balancing units and playstyles as equal.
What you say is "how it should be" is just plainly how it is, not some design goal. That there are units that are massively more useful than others is probably not a design goal.
I didn't say that when a unit hits both ground and air it should suck at both. I merely said that the marine doesn't have enough downsides in my opinion. Even more as you quoted one designchoice of mine would have been to make marines 5+1vs light. So I don't see how you can even keep a straight face saying that I said "a unit hitting both ground and air means it should suck at both". In which universe does that make the marine bad against phoenixes, mutalisks, banshees or plainly all the nonground ground attacking flyers like medivacs or corruptors?
My opinion is simply that I believe the game is better if more playstyles are possible, and for that units have to be balanced against each other as I said. If you don't believe that, that's fine as well. However, given all the complaining about Mech not being playable, all the complaining about staleness of matchups. Given how often blizzard emphasized that they want to bring units into play that aren't used as much, I don't think I'm alone.
I could be completely wrong about this specific measure too, and there surely is a way to make more playstyles viable without nerfing the marine. I just believe it is one, that gives the most freedom in how to buff other things.
Anyways, that's my last response to this shit. I didn't want to get involved in the first place and originally just wanted to clarify the wrong quote of mine... and see where it got me...
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