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On July 16 2012 20:39 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 18:46 Iamyournoob wrote:On July 16 2012 18:23 iky43210 wrote:On July 16 2012 17:56 Charon1979 wrote:NP, larvae inject now only gives 2 larvae, it's about time that you guys started spending money on production. Which leads to T and P all-inning you early and midgame because you cant keep up with their production and your units are not cost effective at this point of game. make larva not stack like currently to 20. So zerg actually have to invest on more and more hatcheries later into the game I believe there is a lot of truth to this. The art of Zerg in BW was to decide when to drone and when to build army units. Also back then larvae was a very scarce and limiting ressource for Zergs. It also was in the earlier stages of SC2. There is a reason why Zerg was perceived to be weak at that time. P and T had various early game timings (coupled with small maps and bad scouting possibilities) which required a near perfect response from Z in terms of how many drones to make and when to stop doing so. However this was really hard to figure out and without any balance changes it might have taken several months for Zerg players to understand these timings and find an answer to it. The way the game appears to me these days is that: - The amount of early to midgame pushes and their potential vs Zerg has been severely limited - Due to Queens being able to thwart off pressure quite well and Zerg getting 3 bases very early, Zergs are allowed to drone until they have a good saturation, i. e. the trade-off between economy and army is not such a crucial decision variable anymore - Due to mass Queens and many hatches early on larvae is not a scarce ressource anymore, further diminishing the importance of larvae management which was a huge determinant of skill back in the days. Thoughts? The problem with Zerg right now is, that they straight up don't have a good unit to invest into in the early game and early midgame, that allows them to hold in low economy games if the opponent attacks while being good in putting on pressure on the opponent. So you either waste money on ling/roach/bling or you drone up. ZvT and ZvP have both been balanced around exactly one Zerg strategy: Drone to 60+ on 3base in around 10min, then start interacting with your opponent. On the other hand especially Terran and also Protoss (due to production design) kind of have to go for more units and therefore less economy and therefore some pressure against eco-only builds, but due to Zerg not having any options, even the eco-only builds have to be able to hold every attack. Also due to how Terran and Protoss harass works, it's very hard to give it them a "safe" amount of damage: -) reapers (if you could mass them fast like the old days) and hellions are fast with very high worker damage: you get them in the zergs base and you kill everything, not just a small amount -) Banshee's and Voidrays (or voidray pheonix comobos) are either countered with enough antiair very early, or the long producing, slow early antiair (queens/spores) won't get up at all anymore and then it's again a straight up loss and not just a "safe amount of damage" -) There is no reason to stop a Warpgate attack ever, if you are doing damage. On a side note, this is not the case in ZvZ. Due to the opponent having larva as well, you need quite some investments in army/defense all the time. But without walls and longranged units that shoot from behind walls those invested units are actually very useful and straight up playing aggressive is often times a stronger strategy than defensive/ mass drone play. I think the basic idea to counteract this should be to force Zerg into more units earlier (so in the 5-12min time), but make those units also better at dishing out some damage. I think the core of this problem is that blizzard made a unit for such a purpose --> roaches with their high life regeneration capabilities that could be reused again and again - but out of certain reasons it was changed(was it balancing? I'm not sure. I thought I read once that they scrapped this concept because it was too random and too hard to read. You would have to focusfire roaches, but sometimes they would still survive, and other times they would just go down one by one very quickly. But not sure where I got this from or whether it was just something someone told me) And even at the time it was changed, it wasn't too terrible, because 2armor, 1 supply 3range roaches were still quite a good deal for the zerg early on and basically everybody did put down a roach warren in the first 5mins. The problem with 1armor 2supply 4range roaches however ist that the change has made them more expensive (so more commited early on), less durable (so less longterm capabilities of the early roaches) very potent at a timing where you can produce them nonstop (because of the strongly increased costefficientness in big balls of 4range) and completly useless when you have other choices in a maxed scenario. (ultras more durable, zerglings more costefficient and mobile, infestors - a thousand times more universal etc etc) So as I see it, for WoL their/our best hope should be, that they find a sweet spot in which the MUs are balanced and macrogames are possible with neither race having a big advantage by deafault after something like 20min. (BCs/Ravens take to long to get up and to upgrade, Carriers as well, but the Protoss situation with the mothership and warpgate-archons and warpgate-templar is quite better and the transition way smoother) For HotS from what we have seen, I hope that they see the concepts/potential of the units the way I see them and make at least a bunch of those strategies against zerg possible: -) early gateway pressure, due to no forge required to expand (mothershipcore) and due to the safety of not losing units if the zerg is prepared, because of recall -) reactored widow mine openings being able to snipe queens, slowing down the zerg production, while not "killing X drones to get even", and maybe blocking 3rd base spots with burrow and deactivated autodetonate -) Mech play allowing for more passive Terran play, that the other races have to put pressure against -) better capitalship transitions for T/P (redline reactor maybe making earlier BC harass possible, Tempest being useful because it forces engagements, even if you don't have a lot of them. Also less upgrade dependend than the Carrier) -) Oracle harass slowing down zerg and on the zerg flip side: -) hydras and swarm hosts being useful midgame units, that might even work when produced from 2base economy (or even transitionable 1base Swarm Host cheese against Protoss, because he needs obs and an army to kill it?), so no need to balance everything around 10min 60+ drones on 3bases for zerg. -) earlier hive play with viper/hydra upgrade/ling upgrade that does slow down the zerg eco and basecount, but allows to be more aggressive in the midgame (10min hive for vipersupport anyone?) and one last hope: -) plz rework the roach. It's not the unit that it was designed to be. I absolutly hope that your unwillingness to show the roach in the battlereports until now and the fact that you hide most unit stats in them (hydralisks seem quite stronger) means that there is some major changes coming for the roach.
This is such a terrible whining Zerg post that it almost hurt. You are asking for a good unit to defend early on and then it is supposed to deal more damage? Why not ask for an invulnerability bubble which explodes after 5 minutes and kills the enemy?
Hint: If you want a good defensive "unit" build a SPINE CRAWLER ... actually build FOUR of them and block entrance to your base with it. That would have prevented Hellion harrass even without the IMBA Queen buff but you are too greedy for it. Stop wasting larva for Zerglings and get Spines and save the larva for Drones! If you build Zerglings and Roaches for "defense" you are just getting aggressive and are lying about wanting to defend.
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On July 16 2012 18:25 iky43210 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 18:22 Thrombozyt wrote:
Problem:
Capital ships (Carrier, BC) are sadly lacking.
Solution:
For the carrier, the upgrades and the interceptor AI should be changed.
AI change:
As long as the carrier is in the primary range of the last target (range: 8) the interceptor will return after every second volley to the carrier to be repaired and shield recharged. This can happen in between volleys with no loss of dmg. If the interceptors are launched and the carrier retreats out of initial range (8) but stays in control range (currently: 14, could be extended to 18) interceptors are not repaired.
Carriers now have 1(+1) shield armor. Threshold: At +3 shields, carrier gain hardened shields.
Supply cost increased to 8.
Carriers are immune to Neural parasite as there are multiple protoss on board.
For the BC:
Ground Damage changed from 8(+1) to 8(+2).
Threshold: At +3 ship plating, BCs gain +1 armor and 50hp.
BCs can now shoot and move at the same time.
Supply cost raised from 6 to 8.
BCs are immune to Neural Parasite.
Side effects:
Don't really know. One might limit the number of capital ships to 1 per stargate/starport. if anything BC needs to rely less on upgrades, not more. Same with carriers
The point of these changes is to make them a potent late game unit, not a unit that is rushed to. It also bugs me that 'lower the build time' is the most often voiced suggestion. These units are expensive enough that they should make an impact in lower numbers as fire support. The carrier can do this quite well, as it can launch interceptors and as soon as they are out it has a range of 14 currently. Only the interceptors and the carrier itself are too frails as the 'counter units' are already out to combat colossi (again, the colossus is root of another problem). So give them gosu shields and let the interceptors when they have targets in range get repaired every 5 seconds so they can soak up dmg and voila! the unit probably becomes more useful even if you just have 2-3.
BC is the same. With the pitiful range and their crappy acceleration they just fail, especially as they are not that fearsome even if fully upgraded, because the target WILL have +3 armor. Make them benefit more from upgrades and they become really good late late game and for god's sake, let them shoot and move at the same time which solves a great problem with their usage and only makes sense.
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On July 16 2012 20:39 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 18:46 Iamyournoob wrote:On July 16 2012 18:23 iky43210 wrote:On July 16 2012 17:56 Charon1979 wrote:NP, larvae inject now only gives 2 larvae, it's about time that you guys started spending money on production. Which leads to T and P all-inning you early and midgame because you cant keep up with their production and your units are not cost effective at this point of game. make larva not stack like currently to 20. So zerg actually have to invest on more and more hatcheries later into the game I believe there is a lot of truth to this. The art of Zerg in BW was to decide when to drone and when to build army units. Also back then larvae was a very scarce and limiting ressource for Zergs. It also was in the earlier stages of SC2. There is a reason why Zerg was perceived to be weak at that time. P and T had various early game timings (coupled with small maps and bad scouting possibilities) which required a near perfect response from Z in terms of how many drones to make and when to stop doing so. However this was really hard to figure out and without any balance changes it might have taken several months for Zerg players to understand these timings and find an answer to it. The way the game appears to me these days is that: - The amount of early to midgame pushes and their potential vs Zerg has been severely limited - Due to Queens being able to thwart off pressure quite well and Zerg getting 3 bases very early, Zergs are allowed to drone until they have a good saturation, i. e. the trade-off between economy and army is not such a crucial decision variable anymore - Due to mass Queens and many hatches early on larvae is not a scarce ressource anymore, further diminishing the importance of larvae management which was a huge determinant of skill back in the days. Thoughts? The problem with Zerg right now is, that they straight up don't have a good unit to invest into in the early game and early midgame, that allows them to hold in low economy games if the opponent attacks while being good in putting on pressure on the opponent. So you either waste money on ling/roach/bling or you drone up. ZvT and ZvP have both been balanced around exactly one Zerg strategy: Drone to 60+ on 3base in around 10min, then start interacting with your opponent. On the other hand especially Terran and also Protoss (due to production design) kind of have to go for more units and therefore less economy and therefore some pressure against eco-only builds, but due to Zerg not having any options, even the eco-only builds have to be able to hold every attack. Also due to how Terran and Protoss harass works, it's very hard to give it them a "safe" amount of damage: -) reapers (if you could mass them fast like the old days) and hellions are fast with very high worker damage: you get them in the zergs base and you kill everything, not just a small amount -) Banshee's and Voidrays (or voidray pheonix comobos) are either countered with enough antiair very early, or the long producing, slow early antiair (queens/spores) won't get up at all anymore and then it's again a straight up loss and not just a "safe amount of damage" -) There is no reason to stop a Warpgate attack ever, if you are doing damage. On a side note, this is not the case in ZvZ. Due to the opponent having larva as well, you need quite some investments in army/defense all the time. But without walls and longranged units that shoot from behind walls those invested units are actually very useful and straight up playing aggressive is often times a stronger strategy than defensive/ mass drone play. I think the basic idea to counteract this should be to force Zerg into more units earlier (so in the 5-12min time), but make those units also better at dishing out some damage. I think the core of this problem is that blizzard made a unit for such a purpose --> roaches with their high life regeneration capabilities that could be reused again and again - but out of certain reasons it was changed(was it balancing? I'm not sure. I thought I read once that they scrapped this concept because it was too random and too hard to read. You would have to focusfire roaches, but sometimes they would still survive, and other times they would just go down one by one very quickly. But not sure where I got this from or whether it was just something someone told me) And even at the time it was changed, it wasn't too terrible, because 2armor, 1 supply 3range roaches were still quite a good deal for the zerg early on and basically everybody did put down a roach warren in the first 5mins. The problem with 1armor 2supply 4range roaches however ist that the change has made them more expensive (so more commited early on), less durable (so less longterm capabilities of the early roaches) very potent at a timing where you can produce them nonstop (because of the strongly increased costefficientness in big balls of 4range) and completly useless when you have other choices in a maxed scenario. (ultras more durable, zerglings more costefficient and mobile, infestors - a thousand times more universal etc etc) So as I see it, for WoL their/our best hope should be, that they find a sweet spot in which the MUs are balanced and macrogames are possible with neither race having a big advantage by deafault after something like 20min. (BCs/Ravens take to long to get up and to upgrade, Carriers as well, but the Protoss situation with the mothership and warpgate-archons and warpgate-templar is quite better and the transition way smoother) For HotS from what we have seen, I hope that they see the concepts/potential of the units the way I see them and make at least a bunch of those strategies against zerg possible: -) early gateway pressure, due to no forge required to expand (mothershipcore) and due to the safety of not losing units if the zerg is prepared, because of recall -) reactored widow mine openings being able to snipe queens, slowing down the zerg production, while not "killing X drones to get even", and maybe blocking 3rd base spots with burrow and deactivated autodetonate -) Mech play allowing for more passive Terran play, that the other races have to put pressure against -) better capitalship transitions for T/P (redline reactor maybe making earlier BC harass possible, Tempest being useful because it forces engagements, even if you don't have a lot of them. Also less upgrade dependend than the Carrier) -) Oracle harass slowing down zerg and on the zerg flip side: -) hydras and swarm hosts being useful midgame units, that might even work when produced from 2base economy (or even transitionable 1base Swarm Host cheese against Protoss, because he needs obs and an army to kill it?), so no need to balance everything around 10min 60+ drones on 3bases for zerg. -) earlier hive play with viper/hydra upgrade/ling upgrade that does slow down the zerg eco and basecount, but allows to be more aggressive in the midgame (10min hive for vipersupport anyone?) and one last hope: -) plz rework the roach. It's not the unit that it was designed to be. I absolutly hope that your unwillingness to show the roach in the battlereports until now and the fact that you hide most unit stats in them (hydralisks seem quite stronger) means that there is some major changes coming for the roach.
Your early game unit the zergling is so good at dishing out damage that it's the sole reason both terran and protoss wall against zerg. Zerglings are useful in nearly any stage of the game vs terran and are only useless against enough colossi or zealot/archon compositions against protoss. Against Zerg the ling/bling/roach/infestor are the most used units.
So your early game units are the units you build throughout the whole game. And you complain that they don't have utility?
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Your early game unit the zergling is so good at dishing out damage that it's the sole reason both terran and protoss wall against zerg. Zerglings are useful in nearly any stage of the game vs terran and are only useless against enough colossi or zealot/archon compositions against protoss. Against Zerg the ling/bling/roach/infestor are the most used units.
So your early game units are the units you build throughout the whole game. And you complain that they don't have utility?
sorry but thats not true.
The zergling is not good at dishing out damage (at least not if they have no upgrade advantage). The reason why you wall against zerg is that Lings are easily massed in early game (if you cut drones entirely). If it was the terrible terrible damage, 6 pool would be standard in ZvZ as it would be impossible to fight lings with workers only.
You wall against the potential 10000000 speedlings that could come when zerg decides to stop worker production entirely.
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Blizzard will need to look at how they want the terran race to be played. For 2 years, players have gotten attached to going deep into games with cheap, expendable waves of T1 units. It's pretty clear that Blizzard did not design the game to be played that way. They designed it so that high HP units and AOE are the best options for late game play. Protoss and zerg have figured that out. Terran players are still lagging behind. The fact is, if they want success, they're going to have to start playing more like protoss.
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On July 16 2012 22:02 Charon1979 wrote:Show nested quote +
Your early game unit the zergling is so good at dishing out damage that it's the sole reason both terran and protoss wall against zerg. Zerglings are useful in nearly any stage of the game vs terran and are only useless against enough colossi or zealot/archon compositions against protoss. Against Zerg the ling/bling/roach/infestor are the most used units.
So your early game units are the units you build throughout the whole game. And you complain that they don't have utility?
sorry but thats not true. The zergling is not good at dishing out damage (at least not if they have no upgrade advantage). The reason why you wall against zerg is that Lings are easily massed in early game (if you cut drones entirely). If it was the terrible terrible damage, 6 pool would be standard in ZvZ as it would be impossible to fight lings with workers only. You wall against the potential 10000000 speedlings that could come when zerg decides to stop worker production entirely.
Ten zerglings sneaking past a protoss wall-off means games most of the time.
The DPS of a single zergling is greater than that of a marine. The DPSPF (DPS per food) of the zergling is more than twice of both marine and zealot. In terms of 'dishing out damage' the zergling is great. In terms of tanking damage the roach is great. Only the lack of high range means that base-layout is effective against them.
@jdsowa
They only terran unit with reasonable splash is the tank. It's also the only unit-attack that does friendly fire damage and the tank is hard countered by nearly the entire protoss race.
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On July 16 2012 21:51 Thrombozyt wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 20:39 Big J wrote:On July 16 2012 18:46 Iamyournoob wrote:On July 16 2012 18:23 iky43210 wrote:On July 16 2012 17:56 Charon1979 wrote:NP, larvae inject now only gives 2 larvae, it's about time that you guys started spending money on production. Which leads to T and P all-inning you early and midgame because you cant keep up with their production and your units are not cost effective at this point of game. make larva not stack like currently to 20. So zerg actually have to invest on more and more hatcheries later into the game I believe there is a lot of truth to this. The art of Zerg in BW was to decide when to drone and when to build army units. Also back then larvae was a very scarce and limiting ressource for Zergs. It also was in the earlier stages of SC2. There is a reason why Zerg was perceived to be weak at that time. P and T had various early game timings (coupled with small maps and bad scouting possibilities) which required a near perfect response from Z in terms of how many drones to make and when to stop doing so. However this was really hard to figure out and without any balance changes it might have taken several months for Zerg players to understand these timings and find an answer to it. The way the game appears to me these days is that: - The amount of early to midgame pushes and their potential vs Zerg has been severely limited - Due to Queens being able to thwart off pressure quite well and Zerg getting 3 bases very early, Zergs are allowed to drone until they have a good saturation, i. e. the trade-off between economy and army is not such a crucial decision variable anymore - Due to mass Queens and many hatches early on larvae is not a scarce ressource anymore, further diminishing the importance of larvae management which was a huge determinant of skill back in the days. Thoughts? The problem with Zerg right now is, that they straight up don't have a good unit to invest into in the early game and early midgame, that allows them to hold in low economy games if the opponent attacks while being good in putting on pressure on the opponent. So you either waste money on ling/roach/bling or you drone up. ZvT and ZvP have both been balanced around exactly one Zerg strategy: Drone to 60+ on 3base in around 10min, then start interacting with your opponent. On the other hand especially Terran and also Protoss (due to production design) kind of have to go for more units and therefore less economy and therefore some pressure against eco-only builds, but due to Zerg not having any options, even the eco-only builds have to be able to hold every attack. Also due to how Terran and Protoss harass works, it's very hard to give it them a "safe" amount of damage: -) reapers (if you could mass them fast like the old days) and hellions are fast with very high worker damage: you get them in the zergs base and you kill everything, not just a small amount -) Banshee's and Voidrays (or voidray pheonix comobos) are either countered with enough antiair very early, or the long producing, slow early antiair (queens/spores) won't get up at all anymore and then it's again a straight up loss and not just a "safe amount of damage" -) There is no reason to stop a Warpgate attack ever, if you are doing damage. On a side note, this is not the case in ZvZ. Due to the opponent having larva as well, you need quite some investments in army/defense all the time. But without walls and longranged units that shoot from behind walls those invested units are actually very useful and straight up playing aggressive is often times a stronger strategy than defensive/ mass drone play. I think the basic idea to counteract this should be to force Zerg into more units earlier (so in the 5-12min time), but make those units also better at dishing out some damage. I think the core of this problem is that blizzard made a unit for such a purpose --> roaches with their high life regeneration capabilities that could be reused again and again - but out of certain reasons it was changed(was it balancing? I'm not sure. I thought I read once that they scrapped this concept because it was too random and too hard to read. You would have to focusfire roaches, but sometimes they would still survive, and other times they would just go down one by one very quickly. But not sure where I got this from or whether it was just something someone told me) And even at the time it was changed, it wasn't too terrible, because 2armor, 1 supply 3range roaches were still quite a good deal for the zerg early on and basically everybody did put down a roach warren in the first 5mins. The problem with 1armor 2supply 4range roaches however ist that the change has made them more expensive (so more commited early on), less durable (so less longterm capabilities of the early roaches) very potent at a timing where you can produce them nonstop (because of the strongly increased costefficientness in big balls of 4range) and completly useless when you have other choices in a maxed scenario. (ultras more durable, zerglings more costefficient and mobile, infestors - a thousand times more universal etc etc) So as I see it, for WoL their/our best hope should be, that they find a sweet spot in which the MUs are balanced and macrogames are possible with neither race having a big advantage by deafault after something like 20min. (BCs/Ravens take to long to get up and to upgrade, Carriers as well, but the Protoss situation with the mothership and warpgate-archons and warpgate-templar is quite better and the transition way smoother) For HotS from what we have seen, I hope that they see the concepts/potential of the units the way I see them and make at least a bunch of those strategies against zerg possible: -) early gateway pressure, due to no forge required to expand (mothershipcore) and due to the safety of not losing units if the zerg is prepared, because of recall -) reactored widow mine openings being able to snipe queens, slowing down the zerg production, while not "killing X drones to get even", and maybe blocking 3rd base spots with burrow and deactivated autodetonate -) Mech play allowing for more passive Terran play, that the other races have to put pressure against -) better capitalship transitions for T/P (redline reactor maybe making earlier BC harass possible, Tempest being useful because it forces engagements, even if you don't have a lot of them. Also less upgrade dependend than the Carrier) -) Oracle harass slowing down zerg and on the zerg flip side: -) hydras and swarm hosts being useful midgame units, that might even work when produced from 2base economy (or even transitionable 1base Swarm Host cheese against Protoss, because he needs obs and an army to kill it?), so no need to balance everything around 10min 60+ drones on 3bases for zerg. -) earlier hive play with viper/hydra upgrade/ling upgrade that does slow down the zerg eco and basecount, but allows to be more aggressive in the midgame (10min hive for vipersupport anyone?) and one last hope: -) plz rework the roach. It's not the unit that it was designed to be. I absolutly hope that your unwillingness to show the roach in the battlereports until now and the fact that you hide most unit stats in them (hydralisks seem quite stronger) means that there is some major changes coming for the roach. Your early game unit the zergling is so good at dishing out damage that it's the sole reason both terran and protoss wall against zerg. Zerglings are useful in nearly any stage of the game vs terran and are only useless against enough colossi or zealot/archon compositions against protoss. Against Zerg the ling/bling/roach/infestor are the most used units. So your early game units are the units you build throughout the whole game. And you complain that they don't have utility?
A lot of Terrans don't even wall in the early game, because kiting marines or a bunker can hold any non allin attack. But that's not the point I was trying to make. Terran and Protoss wall and deny Zergs any ability to do damage. So producing units is just a bad decision when your production is shared between drones and units, unless you need them for defence. The game is balanced around people making good decisions, so in any scenario in which T/P don't commit to an early attack, zergs only good decision is to make drones.
If however some zerg units could grant safeness and were not a bad decision to go for early on, than the whole game could be balanced around zergs making those units and therefore cutting eco early.
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+ Show Spoiler +On July 16 2012 20:39 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 18:46 Iamyournoob wrote:On July 16 2012 18:23 iky43210 wrote:On July 16 2012 17:56 Charon1979 wrote:NP, larvae inject now only gives 2 larvae, it's about time that you guys started spending money on production. Which leads to T and P all-inning you early and midgame because you cant keep up with their production and your units are not cost effective at this point of game. make larva not stack like currently to 20. So zerg actually have to invest on more and more hatcheries later into the game I believe there is a lot of truth to this. The art of Zerg in BW was to decide when to drone and when to build army units. Also back then larvae was a very scarce and limiting ressource for Zergs. It also was in the earlier stages of SC2. There is a reason why Zerg was perceived to be weak at that time. P and T had various early game timings (coupled with small maps and bad scouting possibilities) which required a near perfect response from Z in terms of how many drones to make and when to stop doing so. However this was really hard to figure out and without any balance changes it might have taken several months for Zerg players to understand these timings and find an answer to it. The way the game appears to me these days is that: - The amount of early to midgame pushes and their potential vs Zerg has been severely limited - Due to Queens being able to thwart off pressure quite well and Zerg getting 3 bases very early, Zergs are allowed to drone until they have a good saturation, i. e. the trade-off between economy and army is not such a crucial decision variable anymore - Due to mass Queens and many hatches early on larvae is not a scarce ressource anymore, further diminishing the importance of larvae management which was a huge determinant of skill back in the days. Thoughts? The problem with Zerg right now is, that they straight up don't have a good unit to invest into in the early game and early midgame, that allows them to hold in low economy games if the opponent attacks while being good in putting on pressure on the opponent. So you either waste money on ling/roach/bling or you drone up. ZvT and ZvP have both been balanced around exactly one Zerg strategy: Drone to 60+ on 3base in around 10min, then start interacting with your opponent. On the other hand especially Terran and also Protoss (due to production design) kind of have to go for more units and therefore less economy and therefore some pressure against eco-only builds, but due to Zerg not having any options, even the eco-only builds have to be able to hold every attack. Also due to how Terran and Protoss harass works, it's very hard to give it them a "safe" amount of damage: -) reapers (if you could mass them fast like the old days) and hellions are fast with very high worker damage: you get them in the zergs base and you kill everything, not just a small amount -) Banshee's and Voidrays (or voidray pheonix comobos) are either countered with enough antiair very early, or the long producing, slow early antiair (queens/spores) won't get up at all anymore and then it's again a straight up loss and not just a "safe amount of damage" -) There is no reason to stop a Warpgate attack ever, if you are doing damage. On a side note, this is not the case in ZvZ. Due to the opponent having larva as well, you need quite some investments in army/defense all the time. But without walls and longranged units that shoot from behind walls those invested units are actually very useful and straight up playing aggressive is often times a stronger strategy than defensive/ mass drone play. I think the basic idea to counteract this should be to force Zerg into more units earlier (so in the 5-12min time), but make those units also better at dishing out some damage. I think the core of this problem is that blizzard made a unit for such a purpose --> roaches with their high life regeneration capabilities that could be reused again and again - but out of certain reasons it was changed(was it balancing? I'm not sure. I thought I read once that they scrapped this concept because it was too random and too hard to read. You would have to focusfire roaches, but sometimes they would still survive, and other times they would just go down one by one very quickly. But not sure where I got this from or whether it was just something someone told me) And even at the time it was changed, it wasn't too terrible, because 2armor, 1 supply 3range roaches were still quite a good deal for the zerg early on and basically everybody did put down a roach warren in the first 5mins. The problem with 1armor 2supply 4range roaches however ist that the change has made them more expensive (so more commited early on), less durable (so less longterm capabilities of the early roaches) very potent at a timing where you can produce them nonstop (because of the strongly increased costefficientness in big balls of 4range) and completly useless when you have other choices in a maxed scenario. (ultras more durable, zerglings more costefficient and mobile, infestors - a thousand times more universal etc etc) So as I see it, for WoL their/our best hope should be, that they find a sweet spot in which the MUs are balanced and macrogames are possible with neither race having a big advantage by deafault after something like 20min. (BCs/Ravens take to long to get up and to upgrade, Carriers as well, but the Protoss situation with the mothership and warpgate-archons and warpgate-templar is quite better and the transition way smoother) For HotS from what we have seen, I hope that they see the concepts/potential of the units the way I see them and make at least a bunch of those strategies against zerg possible: -) early gateway pressure, due to no forge required to expand (mothershipcore) and due to the safety of not losing units if the zerg is prepared, because of recall -) reactored widow mine openings being able to snipe queens, slowing down the zerg production, while not "killing X drones to get even", and maybe blocking 3rd base spots with burrow and deactivated autodetonate -) Mech play allowing for more passive Terran play, that the other races have to put pressure against -) better capitalship transitions for T/P (redline reactor maybe making earlier BC harass possible, Tempest being useful because it forces engagements, even if you don't have a lot of them. Also less upgrade dependend than the Carrier) -) Oracle harass slowing down zerg and on the zerg flip side: -) hydras and swarm hosts being useful midgame units, that might even work when produced from 2base economy (or even transitionable 1base Swarm Host cheese against Protoss, because he needs obs and an army to kill it?), so no need to balance everything around 10min 60+ drones on 3bases for zerg. -) earlier hive play with viper/hydra upgrade/ling upgrade that does slow down the zerg eco and basecount, but allows to be more aggressive in the midgame (10min hive for vipersupport anyone?) and one last hope: -) plz rework the roach. It's not the unit that it was designed to be. I absolutly hope that your unwillingness to show the roach in the battlereports until now and the fact that you hide most unit stats in them (hydralisks seem quite stronger) means that there is some major changes coming for the roach.
Very nice post from the theory side.
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On July 16 2012 22:31 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 21:51 Thrombozyt wrote:On July 16 2012 20:39 Big J wrote:On July 16 2012 18:46 Iamyournoob wrote:On July 16 2012 18:23 iky43210 wrote:On July 16 2012 17:56 Charon1979 wrote:NP, larvae inject now only gives 2 larvae, it's about time that you guys started spending money on production. Which leads to T and P all-inning you early and midgame because you cant keep up with their production and your units are not cost effective at this point of game. make larva not stack like currently to 20. So zerg actually have to invest on more and more hatcheries later into the game I believe there is a lot of truth to this. The art of Zerg in BW was to decide when to drone and when to build army units. Also back then larvae was a very scarce and limiting ressource for Zergs. It also was in the earlier stages of SC2. There is a reason why Zerg was perceived to be weak at that time. P and T had various early game timings (coupled with small maps and bad scouting possibilities) which required a near perfect response from Z in terms of how many drones to make and when to stop doing so. However this was really hard to figure out and without any balance changes it might have taken several months for Zerg players to understand these timings and find an answer to it. The way the game appears to me these days is that: - The amount of early to midgame pushes and their potential vs Zerg has been severely limited - Due to Queens being able to thwart off pressure quite well and Zerg getting 3 bases very early, Zergs are allowed to drone until they have a good saturation, i. e. the trade-off between economy and army is not such a crucial decision variable anymore - Due to mass Queens and many hatches early on larvae is not a scarce ressource anymore, further diminishing the importance of larvae management which was a huge determinant of skill back in the days. Thoughts? The problem with Zerg right now is, that they straight up don't have a good unit to invest into in the early game and early midgame, that allows them to hold in low economy games if the opponent attacks while being good in putting on pressure on the opponent. So you either waste money on ling/roach/bling or you drone up. ZvT and ZvP have both been balanced around exactly one Zerg strategy: Drone to 60+ on 3base in around 10min, then start interacting with your opponent. On the other hand especially Terran and also Protoss (due to production design) kind of have to go for more units and therefore less economy and therefore some pressure against eco-only builds, but due to Zerg not having any options, even the eco-only builds have to be able to hold every attack. Also due to how Terran and Protoss harass works, it's very hard to give it them a "safe" amount of damage: -) reapers (if you could mass them fast like the old days) and hellions are fast with very high worker damage: you get them in the zergs base and you kill everything, not just a small amount -) Banshee's and Voidrays (or voidray pheonix comobos) are either countered with enough antiair very early, or the long producing, slow early antiair (queens/spores) won't get up at all anymore and then it's again a straight up loss and not just a "safe amount of damage" -) There is no reason to stop a Warpgate attack ever, if you are doing damage. On a side note, this is not the case in ZvZ. Due to the opponent having larva as well, you need quite some investments in army/defense all the time. But without walls and longranged units that shoot from behind walls those invested units are actually very useful and straight up playing aggressive is often times a stronger strategy than defensive/ mass drone play. I think the basic idea to counteract this should be to force Zerg into more units earlier (so in the 5-12min time), but make those units also better at dishing out some damage. I think the core of this problem is that blizzard made a unit for such a purpose --> roaches with their high life regeneration capabilities that could be reused again and again - but out of certain reasons it was changed(was it balancing? I'm not sure. I thought I read once that they scrapped this concept because it was too random and too hard to read. You would have to focusfire roaches, but sometimes they would still survive, and other times they would just go down one by one very quickly. But not sure where I got this from or whether it was just something someone told me) And even at the time it was changed, it wasn't too terrible, because 2armor, 1 supply 3range roaches were still quite a good deal for the zerg early on and basically everybody did put down a roach warren in the first 5mins. The problem with 1armor 2supply 4range roaches however ist that the change has made them more expensive (so more commited early on), less durable (so less longterm capabilities of the early roaches) very potent at a timing where you can produce them nonstop (because of the strongly increased costefficientness in big balls of 4range) and completly useless when you have other choices in a maxed scenario. (ultras more durable, zerglings more costefficient and mobile, infestors - a thousand times more universal etc etc) So as I see it, for WoL their/our best hope should be, that they find a sweet spot in which the MUs are balanced and macrogames are possible with neither race having a big advantage by deafault after something like 20min. (BCs/Ravens take to long to get up and to upgrade, Carriers as well, but the Protoss situation with the mothership and warpgate-archons and warpgate-templar is quite better and the transition way smoother) For HotS from what we have seen, I hope that they see the concepts/potential of the units the way I see them and make at least a bunch of those strategies against zerg possible: -) early gateway pressure, due to no forge required to expand (mothershipcore) and due to the safety of not losing units if the zerg is prepared, because of recall -) reactored widow mine openings being able to snipe queens, slowing down the zerg production, while not "killing X drones to get even", and maybe blocking 3rd base spots with burrow and deactivated autodetonate -) Mech play allowing for more passive Terran play, that the other races have to put pressure against -) better capitalship transitions for T/P (redline reactor maybe making earlier BC harass possible, Tempest being useful because it forces engagements, even if you don't have a lot of them. Also less upgrade dependend than the Carrier) -) Oracle harass slowing down zerg and on the zerg flip side: -) hydras and swarm hosts being useful midgame units, that might even work when produced from 2base economy (or even transitionable 1base Swarm Host cheese against Protoss, because he needs obs and an army to kill it?), so no need to balance everything around 10min 60+ drones on 3bases for zerg. -) earlier hive play with viper/hydra upgrade/ling upgrade that does slow down the zerg eco and basecount, but allows to be more aggressive in the midgame (10min hive for vipersupport anyone?) and one last hope: -) plz rework the roach. It's not the unit that it was designed to be. I absolutly hope that your unwillingness to show the roach in the battlereports until now and the fact that you hide most unit stats in them (hydralisks seem quite stronger) means that there is some major changes coming for the roach. Your early game unit the zergling is so good at dishing out damage that it's the sole reason both terran and protoss wall against zerg. Zerglings are useful in nearly any stage of the game vs terran and are only useless against enough colossi or zealot/archon compositions against protoss. Against Zerg the ling/bling/roach/infestor are the most used units. So your early game units are the units you build throughout the whole game. And you complain that they don't have utility? A lot of Terrans don't even wall in the early game, because kiting marines or a bunker can hold any non allin attack. But that's not the point I was trying to make. Terran and Protoss wall and deny Zergs any ability to do damage.
Not true at all. When I play Zerg some of the easiest ways to beat Terrans for free is to just make 10 early lings. If they don't wall it's pretty much an auto-win.
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On July 16 2012 22:02 Charon1979 wrote:Show nested quote +
Your early game unit the zergling is so good at dishing out damage that it's the sole reason both terran and protoss wall against zerg. Zerglings are useful in nearly any stage of the game vs terran and are only useless against enough colossi or zealot/archon compositions against protoss. Against Zerg the ling/bling/roach/infestor are the most used units.
So your early game units are the units you build throughout the whole game. And you complain that they don't have utility?
sorry but thats not true. The zergling is not good at dishing out damage (at least not if they have no upgrade advantage). The reason why you wall against zerg is that Lings are easily massed in early game (if you cut drones entirely). If it was the terrible terrible damage, 6 pool would be standard in ZvZ as it would be impossible to fight lings with workers only. You wall against the potential 10000000 speedlings that could come when zerg decides to stop worker production entirely.
After watching Nani vs DRG and MC vs Ret it seems like zerglings DO alot of damage, at least to protoss. Unless the toss has +1 it seems like pure speedling own zealot+stalker pushes with little problems and for lower cost. (and no, i don't consider speed a upgrade advantage when one race is using a much more expensive army). An added bonus is that if the zerg is decently good no stalkers will ever make it back to the P base when the push is thwarted.
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Some master friends and I were discussing some possible buffs to the game, and these were what we came up with:
Terran
-Removed Thor Energy and Strike Cannons
-Battlecruiser/Thor build time reduced
The problem with terran is not that their T3 units are not strong enough-In fact, Terran T3 are probably the most imba units in sc2. However, the problem lies within the transition to T3. Because of Terran's macro mechanics, it is near impossible to access these units w/upgrades.
Protoss
-Stalkers gain an additional +1 attack on 2 and 3 weapons upgrades
As an early game unit, stalkers are awesome. However, as the game drags on, stalker ugprades do not scale as good as other units', making them next to useless.
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On July 16 2012 23:17 Aeroxe wrote:
As an early game unit, stalkers are awesome. However, as the game drags on, stalker ugprades do not scale as good as other units', making them next to useless.
The Protoss is (very) comfortable late game, so I don't see the reason behind that buff. You also have to consider that stalkers have very high total life points for the cost, are fast, and when blink upgraded are absurdly mobile. If Protoss wants more damage they have a very capable T3.
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On July 16 2012 23:17 Aeroxe wrote:
Protoss
-Stalkers gain an additional +1 attack on 2 and 3 weapons upgrades
As an early game unit, stalkers are awesome. However, as the game drags on, stalker ugprades do not scale as good as other units', making them next to useless.
Stalkers... Next to useless in the late game?
The hell am I reading?
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On July 16 2012 23:31 Bagi wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 23:17 Aeroxe wrote:
Protoss
-Stalkers gain an additional +1 attack on 2 and 3 weapons upgrades
As an early game unit, stalkers are awesome. However, as the game drags on, stalker ugprades do not scale as good as other units', making them next to useless. Stalkers... Next to useless in the late game? The hell am I reading?
It's true. If stalkers weren't out only source of anti air, we wouldn't use them. They're absolutely shocking.
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On July 16 2012 23:28 DemigodcelpH wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 23:17 Aeroxe wrote:
As an early game unit, stalkers are awesome. However, as the game drags on, stalker ugprades do not scale as good as other units', making them next to useless. The Protoss is (very) comfortable late game, so I don't see the reason behind that buff. You also have to consider that stalkers have very high total life points for the cost, are fast, and when blink upgraded are absurdly mobile. If Protoss wants more damage they have a very capable T3.
My overall point is that you just can't look at numbers and draw conclusions, but, for the sake of argument, you're wrong. Even counting gas and minerals as the same (which is generous), stalkers have a lower health per cost ratio than marines, marauders and roaches.
Also, every single relevant upgraded zerg unit is faster than the stalker. THE FUCKING HYDRALISK ON CREEP IS FASTER THAN A STALKER.
Their strength in the early game is that you can build a very expensive, if less efficient, army quickly.
Again, my point is you can't just look at numbers. Protoss players complain about stalkers because they teeter precipitously between awesome and horrible.
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On July 16 2012 22:31 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 21:51 Thrombozyt wrote:On July 16 2012 20:39 Big J wrote:On July 16 2012 18:46 Iamyournoob wrote:On July 16 2012 18:23 iky43210 wrote:On July 16 2012 17:56 Charon1979 wrote:NP, larvae inject now only gives 2 larvae, it's about time that you guys started spending money on production. Which leads to T and P all-inning you early and midgame because you cant keep up with their production and your units are not cost effective at this point of game. make larva not stack like currently to 20. So zerg actually have to invest on more and more hatcheries later into the game I believe there is a lot of truth to this. The art of Zerg in BW was to decide when to drone and when to build army units. Also back then larvae was a very scarce and limiting ressource for Zergs. It also was in the earlier stages of SC2. There is a reason why Zerg was perceived to be weak at that time. P and T had various early game timings (coupled with small maps and bad scouting possibilities) which required a near perfect response from Z in terms of how many drones to make and when to stop doing so. However this was really hard to figure out and without any balance changes it might have taken several months for Zerg players to understand these timings and find an answer to it. The way the game appears to me these days is that: - The amount of early to midgame pushes and their potential vs Zerg has been severely limited - Due to Queens being able to thwart off pressure quite well and Zerg getting 3 bases very early, Zergs are allowed to drone until they have a good saturation, i. e. the trade-off between economy and army is not such a crucial decision variable anymore - Due to mass Queens and many hatches early on larvae is not a scarce ressource anymore, further diminishing the importance of larvae management which was a huge determinant of skill back in the days. Thoughts? The problem with Zerg right now is, that they straight up don't have a good unit to invest into in the early game and early midgame, that allows them to hold in low economy games if the opponent attacks while being good in putting on pressure on the opponent. So you either waste money on ling/roach/bling or you drone up. ZvT and ZvP have both been balanced around exactly one Zerg strategy: Drone to 60+ on 3base in around 10min, then start interacting with your opponent. On the other hand especially Terran and also Protoss (due to production design) kind of have to go for more units and therefore less economy and therefore some pressure against eco-only builds, but due to Zerg not having any options, even the eco-only builds have to be able to hold every attack. Also due to how Terran and Protoss harass works, it's very hard to give it them a "safe" amount of damage: -) reapers (if you could mass them fast like the old days) and hellions are fast with very high worker damage: you get them in the zergs base and you kill everything, not just a small amount -) Banshee's and Voidrays (or voidray pheonix comobos) are either countered with enough antiair very early, or the long producing, slow early antiair (queens/spores) won't get up at all anymore and then it's again a straight up loss and not just a "safe amount of damage" -) There is no reason to stop a Warpgate attack ever, if you are doing damage. On a side note, this is not the case in ZvZ. Due to the opponent having larva as well, you need quite some investments in army/defense all the time. But without walls and longranged units that shoot from behind walls those invested units are actually very useful and straight up playing aggressive is often times a stronger strategy than defensive/ mass drone play. I think the basic idea to counteract this should be to force Zerg into more units earlier (so in the 5-12min time), but make those units also better at dishing out some damage. I think the core of this problem is that blizzard made a unit for such a purpose --> roaches with their high life regeneration capabilities that could be reused again and again - but out of certain reasons it was changed(was it balancing? I'm not sure. I thought I read once that they scrapped this concept because it was too random and too hard to read. You would have to focusfire roaches, but sometimes they would still survive, and other times they would just go down one by one very quickly. But not sure where I got this from or whether it was just something someone told me) And even at the time it was changed, it wasn't too terrible, because 2armor, 1 supply 3range roaches were still quite a good deal for the zerg early on and basically everybody did put down a roach warren in the first 5mins. The problem with 1armor 2supply 4range roaches however ist that the change has made them more expensive (so more commited early on), less durable (so less longterm capabilities of the early roaches) very potent at a timing where you can produce them nonstop (because of the strongly increased costefficientness in big balls of 4range) and completly useless when you have other choices in a maxed scenario. (ultras more durable, zerglings more costefficient and mobile, infestors - a thousand times more universal etc etc) So as I see it, for WoL their/our best hope should be, that they find a sweet spot in which the MUs are balanced and macrogames are possible with neither race having a big advantage by deafault after something like 20min. (BCs/Ravens take to long to get up and to upgrade, Carriers as well, but the Protoss situation with the mothership and warpgate-archons and warpgate-templar is quite better and the transition way smoother) For HotS from what we have seen, I hope that they see the concepts/potential of the units the way I see them and make at least a bunch of those strategies against zerg possible: -) early gateway pressure, due to no forge required to expand (mothershipcore) and due to the safety of not losing units if the zerg is prepared, because of recall -) reactored widow mine openings being able to snipe queens, slowing down the zerg production, while not "killing X drones to get even", and maybe blocking 3rd base spots with burrow and deactivated autodetonate -) Mech play allowing for more passive Terran play, that the other races have to put pressure against -) better capitalship transitions for T/P (redline reactor maybe making earlier BC harass possible, Tempest being useful because it forces engagements, even if you don't have a lot of them. Also less upgrade dependend than the Carrier) -) Oracle harass slowing down zerg and on the zerg flip side: -) hydras and swarm hosts being useful midgame units, that might even work when produced from 2base economy (or even transitionable 1base Swarm Host cheese against Protoss, because he needs obs and an army to kill it?), so no need to balance everything around 10min 60+ drones on 3bases for zerg. -) earlier hive play with viper/hydra upgrade/ling upgrade that does slow down the zerg eco and basecount, but allows to be more aggressive in the midgame (10min hive for vipersupport anyone?) and one last hope: -) plz rework the roach. It's not the unit that it was designed to be. I absolutly hope that your unwillingness to show the roach in the battlereports until now and the fact that you hide most unit stats in them (hydralisks seem quite stronger) means that there is some major changes coming for the roach. Your early game unit the zergling is so good at dishing out damage that it's the sole reason both terran and protoss wall against zerg. Zerglings are useful in nearly any stage of the game vs terran and are only useless against enough colossi or zealot/archon compositions against protoss. Against Zerg the ling/bling/roach/infestor are the most used units. So your early game units are the units you build throughout the whole game. And you complain that they don't have utility? A lot of Terrans don't even wall in the early game, because kiting marines or a bunker can hold any non allin attack. But that's not the point I was trying to make. Terran and Protoss wall and deny Zergs any ability to do damage. So producing units is just a bad decision when your production is shared between drones and units, unless you need them for defence. The game is balanced around people making good decisions, so in any scenario in which T/P don't commit to an early attack, zergs only good decision is to make drones. If however some zerg units could grant safeness and were not a bad decision to go for early on, than the whole game could be balanced around zergs making those units and therefore cutting eco early.
You are basically saying that 'granting safeness' is nothing that is worth cutting economy for. Uhm.. lol? So you want the game to be that if a Terran/Toss fakes out the Zerg and cause an overreaction in units, that the Zerg can turn around and inflict terrible terrible damage with the produced units?
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On July 16 2012 22:31 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 21:51 Thrombozyt wrote:On July 16 2012 20:39 Big J wrote:On July 16 2012 18:46 Iamyournoob wrote:On July 16 2012 18:23 iky43210 wrote:On July 16 2012 17:56 Charon1979 wrote:NP, larvae inject now only gives 2 larvae, it's about time that you guys started spending money on production. Which leads to T and P all-inning you early and midgame because you cant keep up with their production and your units are not cost effective at this point of game. make larva not stack like currently to 20. So zerg actually have to invest on more and more hatcheries later into the game I believe there is a lot of truth to this. The art of Zerg in BW was to decide when to drone and when to build army units. Also back then larvae was a very scarce and limiting ressource for Zergs. It also was in the earlier stages of SC2. There is a reason why Zerg was perceived to be weak at that time. P and T had various early game timings (coupled with small maps and bad scouting possibilities) which required a near perfect response from Z in terms of how many drones to make and when to stop doing so. However this was really hard to figure out and without any balance changes it might have taken several months for Zerg players to understand these timings and find an answer to it. The way the game appears to me these days is that: - The amount of early to midgame pushes and their potential vs Zerg has been severely limited - Due to Queens being able to thwart off pressure quite well and Zerg getting 3 bases very early, Zergs are allowed to drone until they have a good saturation, i. e. the trade-off between economy and army is not such a crucial decision variable anymore - Due to mass Queens and many hatches early on larvae is not a scarce ressource anymore, further diminishing the importance of larvae management which was a huge determinant of skill back in the days. Thoughts? The problem with Zerg right now is, that they straight up don't have a good unit to invest into in the early game and early midgame, that allows them to hold in low economy games if the opponent attacks while being good in putting on pressure on the opponent. So you either waste money on ling/roach/bling or you drone up. ZvT and ZvP have both been balanced around exactly one Zerg strategy: Drone to 60+ on 3base in around 10min, then start interacting with your opponent. On the other hand especially Terran and also Protoss (due to production design) kind of have to go for more units and therefore less economy and therefore some pressure against eco-only builds, but due to Zerg not having any options, even the eco-only builds have to be able to hold every attack. Also due to how Terran and Protoss harass works, it's very hard to give it them a "safe" amount of damage: -) reapers (if you could mass them fast like the old days) and hellions are fast with very high worker damage: you get them in the zergs base and you kill everything, not just a small amount -) Banshee's and Voidrays (or voidray pheonix comobos) are either countered with enough antiair very early, or the long producing, slow early antiair (queens/spores) won't get up at all anymore and then it's again a straight up loss and not just a "safe amount of damage" -) There is no reason to stop a Warpgate attack ever, if you are doing damage. On a side note, this is not the case in ZvZ. Due to the opponent having larva as well, you need quite some investments in army/defense all the time. But without walls and longranged units that shoot from behind walls those invested units are actually very useful and straight up playing aggressive is often times a stronger strategy than defensive/ mass drone play. I think the basic idea to counteract this should be to force Zerg into more units earlier (so in the 5-12min time), but make those units also better at dishing out some damage. I think the core of this problem is that blizzard made a unit for such a purpose --> roaches with their high life regeneration capabilities that could be reused again and again - but out of certain reasons it was changed(was it balancing? I'm not sure. I thought I read once that they scrapped this concept because it was too random and too hard to read. You would have to focusfire roaches, but sometimes they would still survive, and other times they would just go down one by one very quickly. But not sure where I got this from or whether it was just something someone told me) And even at the time it was changed, it wasn't too terrible, because 2armor, 1 supply 3range roaches were still quite a good deal for the zerg early on and basically everybody did put down a roach warren in the first 5mins. The problem with 1armor 2supply 4range roaches however ist that the change has made them more expensive (so more commited early on), less durable (so less longterm capabilities of the early roaches) very potent at a timing where you can produce them nonstop (because of the strongly increased costefficientness in big balls of 4range) and completly useless when you have other choices in a maxed scenario. (ultras more durable, zerglings more costefficient and mobile, infestors - a thousand times more universal etc etc) So as I see it, for WoL their/our best hope should be, that they find a sweet spot in which the MUs are balanced and macrogames are possible with neither race having a big advantage by deafault after something like 20min. (BCs/Ravens take to long to get up and to upgrade, Carriers as well, but the Protoss situation with the mothership and warpgate-archons and warpgate-templar is quite better and the transition way smoother) For HotS from what we have seen, I hope that they see the concepts/potential of the units the way I see them and make at least a bunch of those strategies against zerg possible: -) early gateway pressure, due to no forge required to expand (mothershipcore) and due to the safety of not losing units if the zerg is prepared, because of recall -) reactored widow mine openings being able to snipe queens, slowing down the zerg production, while not "killing X drones to get even", and maybe blocking 3rd base spots with burrow and deactivated autodetonate -) Mech play allowing for more passive Terran play, that the other races have to put pressure against -) better capitalship transitions for T/P (redline reactor maybe making earlier BC harass possible, Tempest being useful because it forces engagements, even if you don't have a lot of them. Also less upgrade dependend than the Carrier) -) Oracle harass slowing down zerg and on the zerg flip side: -) hydras and swarm hosts being useful midgame units, that might even work when produced from 2base economy (or even transitionable 1base Swarm Host cheese against Protoss, because he needs obs and an army to kill it?), so no need to balance everything around 10min 60+ drones on 3bases for zerg. -) earlier hive play with viper/hydra upgrade/ling upgrade that does slow down the zerg eco and basecount, but allows to be more aggressive in the midgame (10min hive for vipersupport anyone?) and one last hope: -) plz rework the roach. It's not the unit that it was designed to be. I absolutly hope that your unwillingness to show the roach in the battlereports until now and the fact that you hide most unit stats in them (hydralisks seem quite stronger) means that there is some major changes coming for the roach. Your early game unit the zergling is so good at dishing out damage that it's the sole reason both terran and protoss wall against zerg. Zerglings are useful in nearly any stage of the game vs terran and are only useless against enough colossi or zealot/archon compositions against protoss. Against Zerg the ling/bling/roach/infestor are the most used units. So your early game units are the units you build throughout the whole game. And you complain that they don't have utility? A lot of Terrans don't even wall in the early game, because kiting marines or a bunker can hold any non allin attack. But that's not the point I was trying to make. Terran and Protoss wall and deny Zergs any ability to do damage. So producing units is just a bad decision when your production is shared between drones and units, unless you need them for defence. The game is balanced around people making good decisions, so in any scenario in which T/P don't commit to an early attack, zergs only good decision is to make drones. If however some zerg units could grant safeness and were not a bad decision to go for early on, than the whole game could be balanced around zergs making those units and therefore cutting eco early.
Droning up to 60 isn't much different than what the other races have to do in order to be effective. 60 workers is basically 3 base saturation.
Your complaint about early game Zerg being too weak is fucking mind blowing. You are in a good position by default. You don't need to pressure, not because your pressures are weak (see Terrans losing to Roach all-ins now that they've been forced to open 3OC post-Queen buff) but because your economy is already stronger than everyone elses. NOBODY, not even a 3OC Terran or a purely Probe-Chronoing Protoss can match a Zerg's economy with Larva Inject. You will have early lategame units unless the P/T player does some sort of aggression. All of these pressures are extremely easy to stop if scouted, and all of them leave the P/T player behind if they fail utterly. The problem is that even if your pressure succeeds, you're merely even with the Zerg player, because fucking idiots have managed to convince Blizzard that making the Zerg player make 6 Lings is somehow "damage" but teching to some useless tech which cuts into the P/T economy is just fine.
You actually think Mothership Toileting is a solution to Infestor/BL? Are you high? It's only a solution if the Zerg hands you the game. Like always, the onus is on the Zerg player to fuck up. This is not good for balance, and I'm actually amazed that even in a period where Zerg is winning everything, you think we need to be trading buffs for nerfs on Zerg, rather than giving them straight nerfs. Zerg needs nerfs, not buffs. Not ANY buffs.
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On July 16 2012 23:55 Thrombozyt wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 22:31 Big J wrote:On July 16 2012 21:51 Thrombozyt wrote:On July 16 2012 20:39 Big J wrote:On July 16 2012 18:46 Iamyournoob wrote:On July 16 2012 18:23 iky43210 wrote:On July 16 2012 17:56 Charon1979 wrote:NP, larvae inject now only gives 2 larvae, it's about time that you guys started spending money on production. Which leads to T and P all-inning you early and midgame because you cant keep up with their production and your units are not cost effective at this point of game. make larva not stack like currently to 20. So zerg actually have to invest on more and more hatcheries later into the game I believe there is a lot of truth to this. The art of Zerg in BW was to decide when to drone and when to build army units. Also back then larvae was a very scarce and limiting ressource for Zergs. It also was in the earlier stages of SC2. There is a reason why Zerg was perceived to be weak at that time. P and T had various early game timings (coupled with small maps and bad scouting possibilities) which required a near perfect response from Z in terms of how many drones to make and when to stop doing so. However this was really hard to figure out and without any balance changes it might have taken several months for Zerg players to understand these timings and find an answer to it. The way the game appears to me these days is that: - The amount of early to midgame pushes and their potential vs Zerg has been severely limited - Due to Queens being able to thwart off pressure quite well and Zerg getting 3 bases very early, Zergs are allowed to drone until they have a good saturation, i. e. the trade-off between economy and army is not such a crucial decision variable anymore - Due to mass Queens and many hatches early on larvae is not a scarce ressource anymore, further diminishing the importance of larvae management which was a huge determinant of skill back in the days. Thoughts? The problem with Zerg right now is, that they straight up don't have a good unit to invest into in the early game and early midgame, that allows them to hold in low economy games if the opponent attacks while being good in putting on pressure on the opponent. So you either waste money on ling/roach/bling or you drone up. ZvT and ZvP have both been balanced around exactly one Zerg strategy: Drone to 60+ on 3base in around 10min, then start interacting with your opponent. On the other hand especially Terran and also Protoss (due to production design) kind of have to go for more units and therefore less economy and therefore some pressure against eco-only builds, but due to Zerg not having any options, even the eco-only builds have to be able to hold every attack. Also due to how Terran and Protoss harass works, it's very hard to give it them a "safe" amount of damage: -) reapers (if you could mass them fast like the old days) and hellions are fast with very high worker damage: you get them in the zergs base and you kill everything, not just a small amount -) Banshee's and Voidrays (or voidray pheonix comobos) are either countered with enough antiair very early, or the long producing, slow early antiair (queens/spores) won't get up at all anymore and then it's again a straight up loss and not just a "safe amount of damage" -) There is no reason to stop a Warpgate attack ever, if you are doing damage. On a side note, this is not the case in ZvZ. Due to the opponent having larva as well, you need quite some investments in army/defense all the time. But without walls and longranged units that shoot from behind walls those invested units are actually very useful and straight up playing aggressive is often times a stronger strategy than defensive/ mass drone play. I think the basic idea to counteract this should be to force Zerg into more units earlier (so in the 5-12min time), but make those units also better at dishing out some damage. I think the core of this problem is that blizzard made a unit for such a purpose --> roaches with their high life regeneration capabilities that could be reused again and again - but out of certain reasons it was changed(was it balancing? I'm not sure. I thought I read once that they scrapped this concept because it was too random and too hard to read. You would have to focusfire roaches, but sometimes they would still survive, and other times they would just go down one by one very quickly. But not sure where I got this from or whether it was just something someone told me) And even at the time it was changed, it wasn't too terrible, because 2armor, 1 supply 3range roaches were still quite a good deal for the zerg early on and basically everybody did put down a roach warren in the first 5mins. The problem with 1armor 2supply 4range roaches however ist that the change has made them more expensive (so more commited early on), less durable (so less longterm capabilities of the early roaches) very potent at a timing where you can produce them nonstop (because of the strongly increased costefficientness in big balls of 4range) and completly useless when you have other choices in a maxed scenario. (ultras more durable, zerglings more costefficient and mobile, infestors - a thousand times more universal etc etc) So as I see it, for WoL their/our best hope should be, that they find a sweet spot in which the MUs are balanced and macrogames are possible with neither race having a big advantage by deafault after something like 20min. (BCs/Ravens take to long to get up and to upgrade, Carriers as well, but the Protoss situation with the mothership and warpgate-archons and warpgate-templar is quite better and the transition way smoother) For HotS from what we have seen, I hope that they see the concepts/potential of the units the way I see them and make at least a bunch of those strategies against zerg possible: -) early gateway pressure, due to no forge required to expand (mothershipcore) and due to the safety of not losing units if the zerg is prepared, because of recall -) reactored widow mine openings being able to snipe queens, slowing down the zerg production, while not "killing X drones to get even", and maybe blocking 3rd base spots with burrow and deactivated autodetonate -) Mech play allowing for more passive Terran play, that the other races have to put pressure against -) better capitalship transitions for T/P (redline reactor maybe making earlier BC harass possible, Tempest being useful because it forces engagements, even if you don't have a lot of them. Also less upgrade dependend than the Carrier) -) Oracle harass slowing down zerg and on the zerg flip side: -) hydras and swarm hosts being useful midgame units, that might even work when produced from 2base economy (or even transitionable 1base Swarm Host cheese against Protoss, because he needs obs and an army to kill it?), so no need to balance everything around 10min 60+ drones on 3bases for zerg. -) earlier hive play with viper/hydra upgrade/ling upgrade that does slow down the zerg eco and basecount, but allows to be more aggressive in the midgame (10min hive for vipersupport anyone?) and one last hope: -) plz rework the roach. It's not the unit that it was designed to be. I absolutly hope that your unwillingness to show the roach in the battlereports until now and the fact that you hide most unit stats in them (hydralisks seem quite stronger) means that there is some major changes coming for the roach. Your early game unit the zergling is so good at dishing out damage that it's the sole reason both terran and protoss wall against zerg. Zerglings are useful in nearly any stage of the game vs terran and are only useless against enough colossi or zealot/archon compositions against protoss. Against Zerg the ling/bling/roach/infestor are the most used units. So your early game units are the units you build throughout the whole game. And you complain that they don't have utility? A lot of Terrans don't even wall in the early game, because kiting marines or a bunker can hold any non allin attack. But that's not the point I was trying to make. Terran and Protoss wall and deny Zergs any ability to do damage. So producing units is just a bad decision when your production is shared between drones and units, unless you need them for defence. The game is balanced around people making good decisions, so in any scenario in which T/P don't commit to an early attack, zergs only good decision is to make drones. If however some zerg units could grant safeness and were not a bad decision to go for early on, than the whole game could be balanced around zergs making those units and therefore cutting eco early. You are basically saying that 'granting safeness' is nothing that is worth cutting economy for. Uhm.. lol? So you want the game to be that if a Terran/Toss fakes out the Zerg and cause an overreaction in units, that the Zerg can turn around and inflict terrible terrible damage with the produced units?
This is actually the way the game is right now, by the way. Almost half of the NASL PvZs were openings which forced units and subsequently died to a counter attack. Ling/Roach is actually the counter to any Protoss aggression, and Ling/Bane/Queen does a fine job of handling any Terran aggression until the midgame. I have no idea what Big J is talking about.
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Some thoughts on TvZ, take a look :D
I've been thinking a lot about TvZ late game and I was trying to think of what could be changed to make the late game a bit more managable for Terran.
+ Show Spoiler [A Short Preamble] +Recently a ton of Terrans have been having problems dealing with Zerg late game because they generally will have more bases then you leading into the late game and frankly Infestor/Brood/Ultra "death ball" style armies are remarkably versatile, flexible, and strong. It requires the Terran to be extremely consistent in both their micro and macro or else they will die. One bad engagement will cost the Terran the entire game. If your opponent makes a lot of Ultras and you have too many Vikings, you just die and if you have too many Marauders and your opponent makes a lot of Broods, similarly, you just die. In the past, Terrans have solved this problem with a few different ways: - Ghosts: Before Snipe nerfs, Ghosts were a unit that countered Infestors and with proper support could dismantle the core units of the Zerg deathball, the Ultralisk and the Broodlord. This was decided to be too strong and therefore Ghosts now are a ridiculously expensive unit that will only work if the Zerg doesn't realize you have Ghosts or they do not know how to play against Ghosts.
- Just go kill them: The other way Zergs mitigated Zerg late game potential was to do a ridiculous amount of damage to them early game and just constantly apply pressure to the Zerg to stop the Zerg from getting to the late game. This has been done in various ways, Reapers, 11/11, SlayerS Blue Flame Hellion timing, various Hellion timings, etc. Due to various nerfs/buffs, these builds have basically all become next to worthless. Mass Queen openings have proven that they are extremely effective against these builds.
In late game engagements, Vikings are essential to killing Brood Lords. However, they are incredibly ineffective against a fast Ultralisk switch and if they ever get fungaled while clumped, the Terran actually just dies to Brood Lords. Sadly, Vikings clumping up is a common occurance due to the fact that that is what air units do in this game. There are ways to control against this, but trying to constantly split up your Vikings against Corruptor/Infestor generally results in one of the following outcomes: - The Vikings clump up to kill the Corruptors (which are able to clump up due since Zerg does not have to account for Fungal Growth) and a chain of Fungal Growths kills every single Viking. The Brood Lords now have no answer and the Terran dies.
- The Vikings spread out, any clumps get fungaled, and the Corruptors are able to properly target fire the Vikings while the Terran player is forced to split up his Vikings. The Corruptors kill the Vikings and the Brood Lords now have no answer.
- (Keep in mind, this is actually the "best" outcome for Terran) The Vikings--due to upgrades, higher count, Seeker Missile, or some other reason--kill the Corruptors. At this point here is the outcome: the Vikings take too long to kill the Corruptors, the Broods kill all the Tanks of the Terran army, and even while the Zerg's broods are getting slaughtered by the now uncontested Vikings, the Terran's ground army is in shambles and they die to the next swarm of Zerg units, whether it is Ultralisks, Banelings, or whatever else the Zerg feels like maxing out on. Remember, the Vikings won the air battle for one of these reasons:
- Terran air upgrades > Zerg air upgrades
- Viking count is much higher than the Corruptor count (you need a big advantage because Corruptors actually are somewhat effective and fungals deal so much damage).
- Ravens with Seeker Missile
Sadly, all of these are huge investments and are bad against an Ultralisk tech switch.
With none of these outcomes being good for Terran, Terran must rely on one of two things: - Expanding more, out macroing the Zerg, constantly harassing, and winning the Zerg by having a better economy and abusing their immobility. This can be done and when there is a large difference in the skill of the Zerg and the Terran + Show Spoiler [IPLTAC spoiler, Idk if anybody cares] +
for example, watch Polt vs Scarlett, IPL TAC match TSL vs Acer This can be done, but for the most part it relies on the Terran having far better mutlitasking and then even in the big engagements at the end of the game, Polt still had trouble beating Scarlett's death ball and only beat it due to the fact that he won a war of attrition. He slowly wittled down the Zerg eco and army and managed to win, but you have to remember that this this was played on literally the best map possible for this strategy. Atlantis Spaceship's huge distance means that the Zerg cannot commit to a real attack without being dropped, but on a map like Antiga Shipyard, Ohana, or other smaller maps this strategy is not nearly as good with less space to abuse.
- The Zerg makes a mistake.
TL;DR: Zerg is really good late game, Terran late game is super weak. Terran's army requires Terran commit heavily to beat Brood Lords and then they get smashed by the follow-up attack because they committed so much to "anti-Broodlord units" that are ineffective against everything else Zerg has. Terran can win in the late game, but it can often be heavily dependant on the map and the multitasking ability of the Zerg opponent.
+ Show Spoiler [Solution, what does Terran late game n…] ++ Show Spoiler +But not actually the Ghost. What Terran needs is what the Ghost used to provide: a unit that can support the standard Marine/Tank/Medivac Terran army that is effective against both Broodlords and Ultralisks. However, I think it is fair to say that giving LG-IMMvp Ghosts with 45 damage snipes is actually too good; we don't want that (ok maybe I do, but clearly not everybody wants that). But what we do need to add is a unit that is an effective anchor for the Terran army to help fight both Broodlords and Ultralisks. So now we get to my actual proposal on what should be changed: + Show Spoiler +The Thor![[image loading]](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/images2/4/49/ThorN.jpg) That's right, the most bad ass, hulking 6 supply mech warrior to ever walk. Right now, the Thor is a good unit to use against Brood/Infestor/Ultra because it tanks Ultralisk attacks, fungal growths, Broodlord shots, banelings, and any other Zerg thing while dealing a decent amount of damage to Ultras and Infestors. However, Thors are actually dreadful at killing Broodlords. I have massed Thors in TvZ before and when the Zerg clumps up their Broodlords like it's nobody's business and I have 3/3 Thors against their unupgraded Zerg air, the Thors decimate the Zerg air. However, once a Zerg has experienced this once, they realize that spreading out their Brood Lords (similar to how Terran spreads their Vikings) makes Thors practically worthless against Broods. Also, any armor upgrades makes it so that Thors barely touch the Broods even if the Terran has Vehicle Weapon upgrades. So now I get to what should actually be changed: Change Thor damage to air from: Air Attack: 6(+1)(x4) (Splash)
Bonus: +6(+1) vs Light Airto
Air Attack: 12(+2)(x4) (Splash)Essentially, this gives the Thor's damage to Light Air units (like Mutalisks or Phoenix) when they attack Broodlords and Corruptors. The change would make Thors better at killing Broodlords and would force the Zerg to be more conscious of splitting their own air units. Also, unlike the Viking, the Thor can actually help when fighting a sudden change to Ultralisks. The numbers could obviously be changed (so please do not write this entire post off because you think that that would be too much), but the essential idea of this entire post is that if you make the Thor's attack vs non-Light air actually deal damage, then suddenly large engagements would be more even, come down more to upgrades, and possibly make mech more viable in TvZ. You don't need Widow Mines or Battle Hellions, just take what Terran already has and make it better.
+ Show Spoiler [Aftermath: how this could affect other…] +
Any sort of balance change can and probably will have unintended effects on at least one other match-up. This is something that can prove to be very problematic.
TvP: Nobody uses Thors anyways. Sure they might be better against Void Rays and Carriers, but the reason why Thors are not used in TvP actually has nothing to do with their ineffectiveness against Protoss air, it's because they are so incredibly weak against everything else Protoss has.
TvT: While this could affect TvT in multiple ways, I think that it would be for the better. Maybe it's because I love the idea of TvT being a massive war with huge tank lines, sneaky harassment, and having it be a lot like BW TvT, but making mech more viable in TvT is not a bad thing. Thors would become better in TvT such that they would still probably lose out to Vikings as far as effective anti-air goes (since there is no Fungal Growth for the Vikings to contend with) but Bio/Tank would become weaker than pure mech. With "new" Thors, you would be able to kill off your opponent's Vikings and take the lead in the air, therefore making your tanks better. Bio would still be good because Marauders are super good and mech is still incredibly immobile, but it would give the pure mech player an advantage in the Tank wars regarding vision. It would also cut down on the massive Viking on Viking battle late game, but I think that Battlecruiser/Raven would still wind up beating Thors regardless.
I hope that I can get some feedback on this idea, I would love to hear what other people think about it. I also was unsure as far as where to post this, as I did not think that TL would want me creating a new thread soley devoted to a Theorycrafting idea about balance. I think that this is an interesting idea that could help give Terran a good unit against Brood/Corruptor/Infestor that is a bit more forgiving in your control and is not completely worthless once your opponent switches out of his air army into Ultralisks.
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On July 16 2012 20:39 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 18:46 Iamyournoob wrote:On July 16 2012 18:23 iky43210 wrote:On July 16 2012 17:56 Charon1979 wrote:NP, larvae inject now only gives 2 larvae, it's about time that you guys started spending money on production. Which leads to T and P all-inning you early and midgame because you cant keep up with their production and your units are not cost effective at this point of game. make larva not stack like currently to 20. So zerg actually have to invest on more and more hatcheries later into the game I believe there is a lot of truth to this. The art of Zerg in BW was to decide when to drone and when to build army units. Also back then larvae was a very scarce and limiting ressource for Zergs. It also was in the earlier stages of SC2. There is a reason why Zerg was perceived to be weak at that time. P and T had various early game timings (coupled with small maps and bad scouting possibilities) which required a near perfect response from Z in terms of how many drones to make and when to stop doing so. However this was really hard to figure out and without any balance changes it might have taken several months for Zerg players to understand these timings and find an answer to it. The way the game appears to me these days is that: - The amount of early to midgame pushes and their potential vs Zerg has been severely limited - Due to Queens being able to thwart off pressure quite well and Zerg getting 3 bases very early, Zergs are allowed to drone until they have a good saturation, i. e. the trade-off between economy and army is not such a crucial decision variable anymore - Due to mass Queens and many hatches early on larvae is not a scarce ressource anymore, further diminishing the importance of larvae management which was a huge determinant of skill back in the days. Thoughts? The problem with Zerg right now is, that they straight up don't have a good unit to invest into in the early game and early midgame, that allows them to hold in low economy games if the opponent attacks while being good in putting on pressure on the opponent. So you either waste money on ling/roach/bling or you drone up. ZvT and ZvP have both been balanced around exactly one Zerg strategy: Drone to 60+ on 3base in around 10min, then start interacting with your opponent. On the other hand especially Terran and also Protoss (due to production design) kind of have to go for more units and therefore less economy and therefore some pressure against eco-only builds, but due to Zerg not having any options, even the eco-only builds have to be able to hold every attack. Also due to how Terran and Protoss harass works, it's very hard to give it them a "safe" amount of damage: -) reapers (if you could mass them fast like the old days) and hellions are fast with very high worker damage: you get them in the zergs base and you kill everything, not just a small amount -) Banshee's and Voidrays (or voidray pheonix comobos) are either countered with enough antiair very early, or the long producing, slow early antiair (queens/spores) won't get up at all anymore and then it's again a straight up loss and not just a "safe amount of damage" -) There is no reason to stop a Warpgate attack ever, if you are doing damage. On a side note, this is not the case in ZvZ. Due to the opponent having larva as well, you need quite some investments in army/defense all the time. But without walls and longranged units that shoot from behind walls those invested units are actually very useful and straight up playing aggressive is often times a stronger strategy than defensive/ mass drone play. I think the basic idea to counteract this should be to force Zerg into more units earlier (so in the 5-12min time), but make those units also better at dishing out some damage. I think the core of this problem is that blizzard made a unit for such a purpose --> roaches with their high life regeneration capabilities that could be reused again and again - but out of certain reasons it was changed(was it balancing? I'm not sure. I thought I read once that they scrapped this concept because it was too random and too hard to read. You would have to focusfire roaches, but sometimes they would still survive, and other times they would just go down one by one very quickly. But not sure where I got this from or whether it was just something someone told me) And even at the time it was changed, it wasn't too terrible, because 2armor, 1 supply 3range roaches were still quite a good deal for the zerg early on and basically everybody did put down a roach warren in the first 5mins. The problem with 1armor 2supply 4range roaches however ist that the change has made them more expensive (so more commited early on), less durable (so less longterm capabilities of the early roaches) very potent at a timing where you can produce them nonstop (because of the strongly increased costefficientness in big balls of 4range) and completly useless when you have other choices in a maxed scenario. (ultras more durable, zerglings more costefficient and mobile, infestors - a thousand times more universal etc etc) So as I see it, for WoL their/our best hope should be, that they find a sweet spot in which the MUs are balanced and macrogames are possible with neither race having a big advantage by deafault after something like 20min. (BCs/Ravens take to long to get up and to upgrade, Carriers as well, but the Protoss situation with the mothership and warpgate-archons and warpgate-templar is quite better and the transition way smoother) For HotS from what we have seen, I hope that they see the concepts/potential of the units the way I see them and make at least a bunch of those strategies against zerg possible: -) early gateway pressure, due to no forge required to expand (mothershipcore) and due to the safety of not losing units if the zerg is prepared, because of recall -) reactored widow mine openings being able to snipe queens, slowing down the zerg production, while not "killing X drones to get even", and maybe blocking 3rd base spots with burrow and deactivated autodetonate -) Mech play allowing for more passive Terran play, that the other races have to put pressure against -) better capitalship transitions for T/P (redline reactor maybe making earlier BC harass possible, Tempest being useful because it forces engagements, even if you don't have a lot of them. Also less upgrade dependend than the Carrier) -) Oracle harass slowing down zerg and on the zerg flip side: -) hydras and swarm hosts being useful midgame units, that might even work when produced from 2base economy (or even transitionable 1base Swarm Host cheese against Protoss, because he needs obs and an army to kill it?), so no need to balance everything around 10min 60+ drones on 3bases for zerg. -) earlier hive play with viper/hydra upgrade/ling upgrade that does slow down the zerg eco and basecount, but allows to be more aggressive in the midgame (10min hive for vipersupport anyone?) and one last hope: -) plz rework the roach. It's not the unit that it was designed to be. I absolutly hope that your unwillingness to show the roach in the battlereports until now and the fact that you hide most unit stats in them (hydralisks seem quite stronger) means that there is some major changes coming for the roach.
What would be different, if Zerg had that unit? If there is no potential thread for me for the first 10 minutes in the game, why for god's sake should I as a Zerg not drone up? Just because I have an awesome unit that is worth investing? Aren't roaches and lings good units? I mean all the roach pushes and baneling busts show that making them early on in huge numbers is worthwhile. Sure, you have to deal a ton of damage. But let us just assume that Zerg had a unit that would be equal to Terran and Protoss Tier 1 when facing off against each other in equal numbers/supply. Why should Zerg build them and sit around and preserve them for later in the game, when they can just drone?
I agree on the part however that Zerg lacks a unit which scales well with micro and player skill. Protoss can use forcefields/blink, Terrans have marines which scale very well with a player's ability to micro. Lings and Roaches are mostly 1a. I think it would be way better if there was more room for control dependant defense and reaction for Zerg rather than "I need to scout that push or I am dead" - defense.
The latter we had for quite some time so that by now all pressure builds are nerfed to the point (btw Speedoverlords helped a lot too) where Zergs can sit in their base and macro whilst having the option to be aggressive themselves.
In ZvP I feel Zergs lose if they play too greedy and fail to scout timing attacks. Then they are dead. But the art of survival is not to control units better in the actual engagement, but to not miss injects, spread your creep and start producing roaches at the right time. Because if you started early enough with Roach production you can keep flooding your opponent with them, snipe sentries or make them run out of FF and then just overwhelm them with this rediculously cost-efficient unit.
To put it simple: If Zerg makes the right calls and knows how to macro (in PvZ), he has great chances to take the game, regardless of how well they control units in a fight, because Zerg units do not offer much micro potential and FF prevents micro of Zerg units to a huge degree.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/index.php?title=File:Ghost.png&filetimestamp=20100220124254)
