On June 21 2012 03:29 sCCrooked wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2012 21:17 Grimmyman123 wrote:On June 20 2012 16:51 sCCrooked wrote:On June 20 2012 15:41 Grimmyman123 wrote:
But, zerg army's right now in the late game are massively about mineral units like lings or cheap on gas light roaches, with infestors and BL to make up a largely free fighting army, with the tech behind casting it. As such, it is very difficult for "Terran or Protoss to kill the actual units responsible for casting the free army unit.
Wrong. Lategame Z in all matchups relies almost entirely on BL/Festor. An extraordinarily powerful but also unbelievably costly composition that is incredibly difficult and takes an extremely long time to replace when its killed (The first one probably won't kill any decent T or P off completely).
Roach/Ling does not do crap against mothership+all P unit deathballs or 3/3 MMM balls. You are better off investing in static defense at expos or trying to get a few more BLs or festors into your mix.
Why not. All other races have researchable abilities. the emphasis is to prevent rushing on 2 or 3 bases to get out infestors to exploit fungal or 4 infestor hit squadding with infested terrans as fast as possible. The infestor is a support unit, not supposed to make up the army core.
I think its starting to become clear its your understanding of the game that is a bit simplistic and has caused these sorts of ideas to appear as "all-fixing". What you proposed to the infestor would in fact break all Zerg matchups.
hahaha, sorry, I don't think just dismissing every/any idea is a helpful post. adding, or modifying the ideas would be though.
To be blunt, most of your suggestions are just really bad for balance and stem from a lack of deep understanding in the game's mechanics and match-ups. Completely deleting and regrouping with new ideas is probably a better idea than trying to modify these (which would require so much modding, they would not even remotely resemble what they do now).
Thanks, I actually have a good understanding of the game, just that I don't play zerg, so I don't have a one sided opinion. I have tried zerg, but after a few thousand matches of Protoss, the transition isn't easy.
Reading your post - you are saying: Zerg aint broken, don't fix it.
No no you misunderstand me. I'm saying that the problem isn't just with Zerg, the whole game's mechanics stink. They have only worked because very inventive and talented people have MADE this broken game work.
I don't mean to sound like a BW elitist (even though I sort of am), but what we've been saying was wrong with SCtoo from the beginning is what people in the SCtoo community are just now starting to suggest and see.
They're saying extend the early and the midgame by slowing the whole flow down. People in BW brought that up as a main concern years ago. We said it felt like the whole game was so compressed that you couldn't really gain advantages at any particular stage.
Now and only now are the people in the SCtoo community seeing that we were right and that the early/midgame need to be longer to allow larger advantages gained solely on multi-tasking ability. Let me try to explain more clearly without pissing any particular race off:
Incoming Wall of Explanation, Analysis and TextTerran: The "Activision-Blizzard Chosen Child" race. They are given an economy that somewhat stinks in pure comparison to the other two races because they can't chrono-boost their worker facilities to accelerate worker production and they can't use mass-production cycles so early on like Zerg is able to. To counter-act this, they are given orbitals with the option of M.U.L.E.s which accelerate mineral gathering significantly and thusly A-B (Activision-Blizzard) figured they had "fixed" the advantages the other two races could place on their worker production. This is not quite the case since what happens is Terran is able to have tons of minerals that are comparable to if the other two races were chrono-boosting workers the whole time (not on tech buildings or gateways for faster army) while not having much if any gas. This caused Terrans to invest a lot more in their basic tech and unit taken straight from BW.
The Medic/Marine mix (medivacs in SCtoo) was a staple in BW army composition because it was cheap, easy to mass-produce off 2 bases, extremely easy to gain massive cost-effectiveness with proper micro (stutter-step also taken directly from BW), very fast to re-supply on (fast production cycles) and finally it had everything that was necessary for a multi-task-heavy army (maneuverability that was dependent on player input, damage that could rise sharply depending on player input). Terran in both games use essentially the same unit composition for the exact same reasons whether you can get them to admit it or not.
Terran are only now realizing that the design does not let them stay completely on Bio against really good players able to use compositions like Ultra/bane/festor or BL/festor/corruptor because Zerg players are only just now being able to reach this stage and gain advantages properly. You've been using the same MMM strategies for years, you didn't think Zerg would eventually figure out the weaknesses in your builds?
Its not Terrans' fault though. Its A-B's. They designed your race to be so mineral-centric that gas becomes a very limiting factor in viability of massing factory or starport units in amounts great enough to fight against gas-heavy armies of Zerg or Protoss. This, I believe to be the real flaw of Terran. Gas accumulation ability and spending distribution. Give them more gas options and things like "more factories, thus more thors" or something become much more possible.
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Protoss: The middle-man in strength. They were in BW, a race that was sort of "in the middle" in terms of power. They weren't quite as durable as mech, but they weren't as immobile either. They also were far ahead in terms of caster viability and tech tricks. These same concepts exist in SCtoo and are used today (dt timings, air unit openers).
Protoss found that in vs T mech while they were strong enough to really pressure and sometimes win outright vs a Terran who did not protect their tanks well enough, they would have to become much more defensive in the lategame as Terran reaches this critical saturation on the field of mines with mobile vultures and a huge looming tank/goliath ball to constantly make them fear a move-out. The Terran mech of BW relied on basically moving a very powerful defensive position ever-closer to the enemy bases and eventually the defensive position became an offensive position as well since to "defend" the ground super-close to the enemy base would mean eating up the Protoss bases bit by bit.
Protoss used their superior maneuverability to counter this and you started seeing offensive recalls and even recall flanks being used to break apart these defensive positions. While this was very difficult to pull off against very strong Terran armies all situated around mines, turrets and vessels to EMP arbiters, it was in fact possible and created a sense of balance in the matchup.
Protoss in SCtoo are appearing so strong for the reason that Terran is still trying to get away with Bio which is still way too powerful. Its the flaw of too much minerals, not enough gas options for Terran. Protoss are the middle-men and they're not to blame for a fundamental flaw in the game.
Another thing to note is that goon and zealot micro as well as ht positioning for storms and arbiter timings as well as positionings were crucial in PvT in BW. This has all but dissappeared in SCtoo. Blink micro is a very poor substitute in a game where balling your army up and not microing at all (comparatively to BW armies) is the issue. Forcefields actually are very anti-micro. Protoss has no micro option where they can gain the cost-effectiveness of a Bio army, and a Bio army which is nothing but base mineral-dump units should not be able to face a gas-heavy army and win. Protoss can create massive gas-unit-heavy armies and that is why its being perceived as "favored" against Terran.
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Zerg: The forgotten step-child of A-B. I say this because Zerg's fundamental flaws have never been addressed. The fact is we are forced into this extremely gas-heavy style that offers very few advantages in return for quite possibly the lowest mobility other than raw power which can be overcome easily through simply avoiding the strong-front and going for the bases or economy instead.
We have been called "1a race" lately because there's virtually no micro to speak of. The only micro you really have is spreading things and flanking. We do not have any option, like Protoss, of any sort of unit that can reach ridiculous cost-effectiveness with proper micro. We rely entirely on massing everything. I guess A-B watched too many "OMG LOOK HOW MANY ZERGLING" youtube spoof videos and thought this was how we played Zerg in BW. Mass zergling/festor or mass this unit, mass that, its all very boring to orient a race like this.
BW Zerg has a lot of options to exploit two key advantages. Superior maneuverability and massing capability. If you keep up with BW strategy at all, Zerg have been stagnating lately because we have no champion making new builds anymore. ZvT has stagnated so much that we're still using the builds created in the sAviOr era in 2007-08. That's right, 4-5 year old builds. Twice SCtoo's entire lifespan. In that time, BW Terran has figured out every timing and every way of hard-countering Zerg's old tricks much like Terran is finding now in SCtoo. There are now endless options against 2-3 hatch muta and 2-3 hatch lurker strategies that are incredibly effective if followed correctly. Not to mention a change in the meta that happened not more than 1-2 years ago when T figured out they could actually create complete map dominance with their bio armies at great cost efficiency and now they could take 1 (2 on some maps) more base and execute a complete army-type switch to pure mech. Pure mech counters all Zerg's options. Goliaths on a 3-4 base economy with turret and vessel (irradiate) support completely counters mutas. You can add valkyries in too if you feel like it. Tanks and vultures with constant harassment maneuverability and mine-spreading completely negates the possibility of ultras, lurkers, defilers, or zerglings being too effective. In fact this shift was so major, we still don't really have a way to fight it. It becomes even stronger at lower levels because of the mechanics behind mech damage becoming exponentially higher as the mass grows.
In SCtoo, Zerg faced many of the same issues except that they did not have superior maneuverability with speedlings due to just 4 hellions. They did not have massing advantage either because banshee follow-ups mixed with zerg's lack of mobile detection before lair tech could deny thirds for insanely long periods of time. Until the queen change, we literally could not take map control in any way until it was too late and Terran had already reached the point where they could throw completely-mobile and cost-efficient armies around anywhere (dropping them or straight-up pushing). We couldn't match that level of cost-effectiveness and started losing in droves.
Blizzard's answer was not "give them cost effective options" but instead a passive change just like all the other patches have done.
In BW, I could punish any sloppy wall or move-out timing with just 6-10 lings and deal so much punishing damage the lings paid for themselves 5x over. In SCtoo, this is not possible with any basic unit.
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The Fundamental Issue: Multi-tasking is not rewarded evenly amongst the races. Speed is not rewarded evenly either. These are the very things that made BW so balanced and so great. Whoever did the most with their race was almost ALWAYS crowned the winner. The BW community has been saying it since SCtoo was first released as a fundamental flaw and nobody listened.
Speeding up the game with "Faster" was ridiculously bad because all of a sudden, time changed too for whatever reason. Time should remain constant in a game like this. Its necessary to be able to bench yourself. Having a good sense of real time suddenly became a hinderance when you felt 8 real minutes pass and realized you were 6 minutes late on tech and timings in the game.
This also shortened the length of time you could harass or cause damage while building behind it. Extending a game, not compressing and shortening it is the answer.
People are now starting to suggest things like upgrade changes, tech timing changes, etc that would extend the length of the early and midgame. Can we just cut out the ridiculous disguises and say what it really is?
You need cost-effectiveness in every race no matter what unit composition they go for, there needs to be a way to counter it without hard-countering it so hard that there's no way to recover before the army reaches the front. You need sufficient time to exploit advantages you can create in the early and midgame because that will reward multi-taskers who can keep all that up constantly without missing a beat.
Right now every match-up is focussing on the lategame. Even ZvZ is now about coming up with builds that are aimed at hive tech and 13+ minutes. I'm sick of lategame being everywhere and being the only concern.
Maybe I don't like being 2-rax rushed either but I did find it more interesting that there was that option for pressure. Pressure is what makes a game like this really work.
At the risk of sounding like a BW elitist again, look at all the BW matchups. There isn't a single match-up where every race no matter if they're facing mirror or one of the other two races can just do nothing, not worry about any pressure, and go into the lategame. Not one.
At any point in any of the matchups at nearly any level of play, you are constantly under the threat that you are not just going to have someone gain an advantage, but that you will outright die with no hope of recovery if they go for build X and micro it well.
That's the key though. "Micro it well". If you really want to find fixes to this game, demand that A-B take action to reward micro, punish "1a" players and add cost-effective options at every tier on every race that are only cost effective if you multi-task. Tell them they need to slow the game down so you can actually DO things in the early and midgame every matchup.
I know this will just be construed as "oh so you're one of those who thinks WoL should be like BW" rant, but its the truth. You're all already coming to the same conclusions we came to years ago. WoL, if you want it to be more balanced, in fact
should take more advice from its much more-balanced and multi-task-rewarding predecessor. It became a world phenomenon for several reasons. Perhaps ignoring that which made it legendary when developing its sequel was not the best approach.
tl;dr
The above wall of text is only my opinion.
Slow down the flow of the game's tech, don't try to change "time" itself and add multi-task-rewarding options that create massive cost-effectiveness only if micro'd heavily (enough that it takes extreme multi-tasking to keep up with macro along with it).
You are championing a game that calls itself a "multi-tasking" game. Multi-tasking rewards are the answer. Not passive, low-apm, 1a options. There is no reason a player at 300 apm should find someone with 50 apm remotely challenging, yet that is what we have all over ladder right now.
EPT
