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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?
No. I'd like a scenario, in which (just an example) the Terran could go for the old reactor expand (so queen buff reversed) and have all the advantages of it (like map control, like scouting, like creep and third delaying), but a zerg can go for a cheap unit investment (like roaches) as well that can push them away and maybe snipe one or two with them and push a Terrans natural and softly contain him, maybe force some repair on a bunker or snipe a repairing scv or a lone marine.
Basically what the original concept of the roach was like: you push with it a bunker, do damage to it, maybe pick something off and retreat/heal up and repeat.
But as it was, roach openings were not able to do that. If you relied on them to push away hellions, you couldn't move out without further investing into defenses, else the hellions only ran past and you could not really contain a Terran for longer than 30sec to 1min, because then he would just be able to overpower them.
What I want, is that there would be some "balance of power" in form of tug of war like pushings and more small exchanges, instead of onesided contains and longplanned build-up timing attacks.
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On July 17 2012 00:13 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 23:55 Thrombozyt wrote: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? No. I'd like a scenario, in which (just an example) the Terran could go for the old reactor expand (so queen buff reversed) and have all the advantages of it (like map control, like scouting, like creep and third delaying), but a zerg can go for a cheap unit investment (like roaches) as well that can push them away and maybe snipe one or two with them and push a Terrans natural and softly contain him, maybe force some repair on a bunker or snipe a repairing scv or a lone marine. Basically what the original concept of the roach was like: you push with it a bunker, do damage to it, maybe pick something off and retreat/heal up and repeat. But as it was, roach openings were not able to do that. If you relied on them to push away hellions, you couldn't move out without further investing into defenses, else the hellions only ran past and you could not really contain a Terran for longer than 30sec to 1min, because then he would just be able to overpower them. What I want, is that there would be some "balance of power" in form of tug of war like pushings and more small exchanges, instead of onesided contains and longplanned build-up timing attacks.
You already have this with Ling/Roach against Toss, or even pure Ling into Infestor styles. You get total map control, deny any proxy Pylons, and basically force the Toss to delay his third. I don't see the problem. You don't need to do a 200/200 Roach max to contain a Protoss with Roach/Ling. Delaying the third is huge because every Protoss wants to do a Sentry expand at 8 minutes. Pure Ling will counter this and burn FF energy, making any followup that much better. Yeah, you have to cut Drones, but who cares? Protoss is on 2 bases and was planning to expand. Now he has to either delay the expansion or all-in. Either way, you're in a better position because you're making units and have more production to begin with.
The reason there are no skirmishes is because the other races can't open economically and pump out units. When a Protoss is Sentry expanding or a Terran 3OCing, they have nothing to push out with, so they need to wait. It has nothing to do with the Zerg units, but instead has to do with the fact that Zerg can do a Roach/Ling pressure that isn't all-in and still Drone up behind it or even expand and be ahead due to Inject.
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On July 17 2012 00:13 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 23:55 Thrombozyt wrote: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? No. I'd like a scenario, in which (just an example) the Terran could go for the old reactor expand (so queen buff reversed) and have all the advantages of it (like map control, like scouting, like creep and third delaying), but a zerg can go for a cheap unit investment (like roaches) as well that can push them away and maybe snipe one or two with them and push a Terrans natural and softly contain him, maybe force some repair on a bunker or snipe a repairing scv or a lone marine. Basically what the original concept of the roach was like: you push with it a bunker, do damage to it, maybe pick something off and retreat/heal up and repeat. But as it was, roach openings were not able to do that. If you relied on them to push away hellions, you couldn't move out without further investing into defenses, else the hellions only ran past and you could not really contain a Terran for longer than 30sec to 1min, because then he would just be able to overpower them. What I want, is that there would be some "balance of power" in form of tug of war like pushings and more small exchanges, instead of onesided contains and longplanned build-up timing attacks.
So you basically want the current roach to be built? Then go ahead and do it. The old roach wasn't faster - just stronger. If you don't like run-bys, then don't make roaches, but a drove of speedlings. 20 speedlings will regain mapcontrol over 6 hellions.
If you make roaches, how about making 8, attacking with 6 and keeping 2 at home? Maybe.. hm... maybe even in 2 separate control groups?
The old roach was just silly. Especially with a 20 hp/sec regen rate meaning that it outheals a marauder firing on it while burrowed.
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On July 17 2012 00:09 Iamyournoob 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. 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?
The thing that would be different would be, that the Queen would not have been buffed, and the reaper proabably not been nerfed that hard (if roaches could have actually defended them). Some of the Protoss changes (or things that were discussed from time to time) that were not PvP specific, like faster stalker/zealot build time all might not have occured and we might have a metagame in which zergs open 2base and take a third at 7,8 or 9mins, when they already have a small army out.
Sure zergs would still want to go for 60+drones in the first minutes, but unlike now they would not have the tools to do so that easily, because T/Ps could again force units, but unlike before they would also have to deal with the consequences that is an opponent that has early units.
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Bosnia-Herzegovina261 Posts
On July 17 2012 00:13 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On July 16 2012 23:55 Thrombozyt wrote: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? No. I'd like a scenario, in which (just an example) the Terran could go for the old reactor expand (so queen buff reversed) and have all the advantages of it (like map control, like scouting, like creep and third delaying), but a zerg can go for a cheap unit investment (like roaches) as well that can push them away and maybe snipe one or two with them and push a Terrans natural and softly contain him, maybe force some repair on a bunker or snipe a repairing scv or a lone marine. Basically what the original concept of the roach was like: you push with it a bunker, do damage to it, maybe pick something off and retreat/heal up and repeat. But as it was, roach openings were not able to do that. If you relied on them to push away hellions, you couldn't move out without further investing into defenses, else the hellions only ran past and you could not really contain a Terran for longer than 30sec to 1min, because then he would just be able to overpower them. What I want, is that there would be some "balance of power" in form of tug of war like pushings and more small exchanges, instead of onesided contains and longplanned build-up timing attacks.
Basically, your posts are the only ones worth reading in this thread as you are being as objective as you can, but the problem with your solution is the fact that you'd need to change the metagame and award skirmishing.
That's one thing I hope they bring in HotS, skirmishing. For example, compare it to CoH, it has a much different AI and combat is very much different, but skirmishes are all over the place, fighting for this road, fighting for this high ground, fighting for this resource flag etc etc, in Starcraft 2, there is no such thing, there is nothing worth fighting for.
I hate to play Zerg with the mentality of "ok, how do I get to 5 bases, survive everything and get Brood Lords out?", but that's the only way for Zerg to break any front now aside from doing an allin, and I only do allins in ZvZ maybe 1 out of 10 games, simply because 80% of my last 50 games are ZvZ.
Some Terrans on EU ladder (diamond/masters) have picked up some Korean tactics which are dumb but quite rewarding. Double Starport Banshees and Marines/Reactored Hellions (this is off of 2 base and expanding to third upon having 5+ banshees). This forces ANY Zerg to either straight out die to Banshees because they don't have enough Queens to kill it (1v1 Banshee kills a Queen), you force Spore Crawlers, at least 6 of them (assuming Zerg is on 3 base), that's 6 less Drones and 900 Minerals less for Zerg, you force Roaches and Zerglings to deal with mass Hellions and Zerg is pretty much in panic mode.
This is not a QQ post, I am saying there are unconventional ways to really cripple the Zerg, my worst MU is TvZ simply because I have no idea what to expect from the Terran.
Back to the problem, although, I swore I'll never post in this thread again (even though I avidly read it), but your posts are worth quoting. Skirmishes do not pay off in SC2 simply because of how fast the game is and how fast the units die. Zerg's macro mechanics do not need reworking (ultimate Terran and Protoss composition shit on Zerg force), but the problem is getting there. Quite frankly, all races except Zerg have good beefy T2 units, while Zerg has none (Infestor, Mutalisk, Hydralisk, Corruptor), and T1 units are just horrible against Colossi/Immortal/Thor/Siege Tank. If Zerg wants to keep up with their opponent they need to be able to shit out a huge force again because they do not have units to deal with other units, and don't start complaining that Zerg can remax their entire T3 army because that's one of the most expensive armies in SC2, if a Zerg can remax their ENTIRE T3 army, you deserve to lose, you obviously let him have 7+ bases and such a huge bank that you never engaged him.
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On July 17 2012 00:09 Iamyournoob 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. 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.
I actually feel that the existence of Stephano invalidates your point about Zerg not benefitting from good unit control. Stephano isn't that good mechanically, he delays injects and gets supply blocked on a fairly regular basis. What separates him from other Zerg players is the attention he gives to his units, and the care with which he sets up his engagements. Ret plays with the mentality you're describing ("I'm just going to macro so well that I can simply a-move over the Protoss"), and it has obvious limits, looking at his performance at NASL finals.
I mean, look at g4 of Stephano vs Alicia, you think Stephano was macroing better than any other Zerg? No, he was simply constantly repositioning his units so his lings would fight Stalkers, and his roaches would fight the zealots, and he completely crushed the 4gate. Honestly, I think one of the reasons a lot of Zergs feel ZvP is difficult, is that they focus too much on their macro, and how many drones they need to defend all-in X, when controlling their army better would provide a much greater benefit than having 5 more drones mining minerals.
One of the reasons the Immortal/Sentry all-in is so effective, is that it's nigh impossible to a-move over with superior numbers. You need to actually pick a good place to fight, set up a flank, bait out FFs and disengage, and just make your army do some work.
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On July 17 2012 00:05 The Final Boss wrote:Some thoughts on TvZ, take a look :DI'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.
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.
This thread seems very relevant 
The thought process is sound, and it certainly is helpful to have an anti-air option that makes approaching broodlord/infestor more doable without making it a clear win (thors have 0.5 more range than broodlords, I think). Maybe not the exact numbers, but the idea seems to be there, and it does more than just dismiss the thor as a terrible unit by gameplay and design.
Change is probably not relevant TvP, agree there.
Regarding TvT, I think the only change is that while air dominance is still important in mech vs mech, it doesn't get into a situation where one person will forever hold it because they have more vikings (for vikings to see thors, they get within air attack range). This is definitely more appealing stylistically, though the mech vs bio battle doesn't actually change at all except for medivacs overstepping their bounds.
The biggest issue I can see right now is that bio and thor vs infestor/broodlord has potential to be extremely boring to watch.
As an aside, I still think ghosts should have stronger snipe than they do now (not enough to be like LOLOLOL MASS SNIPE).
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On July 17 2012 00:28 ysnake wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2012 00:13 Big J wrote:On July 16 2012 23:55 Thrombozyt wrote: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? No. I'd like a scenario, in which (just an example) the Terran could go for the old reactor expand (so queen buff reversed) and have all the advantages of it (like map control, like scouting, like creep and third delaying), but a zerg can go for a cheap unit investment (like roaches) as well that can push them away and maybe snipe one or two with them and push a Terrans natural and softly contain him, maybe force some repair on a bunker or snipe a repairing scv or a lone marine. Basically what the original concept of the roach was like: you push with it a bunker, do damage to it, maybe pick something off and retreat/heal up and repeat. But as it was, roach openings were not able to do that. If you relied on them to push away hellions, you couldn't move out without further investing into defenses, else the hellions only ran past and you could not really contain a Terran for longer than 30sec to 1min, because then he would just be able to overpower them. What I want, is that there would be some "balance of power" in form of tug of war like pushings and more small exchanges, instead of onesided contains and longplanned build-up timing attacks. (ultimate Terran and Protoss composition shit on Zerg force), but the problem is getting there. Quite frankly, all races except Zerg have good beefy T2 units, while Zerg has none (Infestor, Mutalisk, Hydralisk, Corruptor), and T1 units are just horrible against Colossi/Immortal/Thor/Siege Tank. If Zerg wants to keep up with their opponent they need to be able to shit out a huge force again because they do not have units to deal with other units, and don't start complaining that Zerg can remax their entire T3 army because that's one of the most expensive armies in SC2, if a Zerg can remax their ENTIRE T3 army, you deserve to lose, you obviously let him have 7+ bases and such a huge bank that you never engaged him.
This part of your post is dead false. I am really sick of reading your posts in any thread because they are biased garbage (you've actually argued that Terran is fine in TvZ rofl) but this is flat out lying. Your T2 units are amazing because they contain the Infestor. It's good against everything. BL's can be acquired very quickly in the current meta because every P/T pressure has been neutered to the point of being an all-in or being useless, so you can take an extremely greedy Hive and just mass Spines to defend. Once BLs are out, the other race basically is playing from behind. And no, no ultimate P/T composition is better than the Zerg counterpart. Infestor/BL is hands down the most cost-efficient composition in the game, and since Zerg will always be ahead economically, it's dishonest to say it's somehow the P/T's fault when Zerg can remax.
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On July 17 2012 00:35 Toadvine wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2012 00:09 Iamyournoob 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. 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. I actually feel that the existence of Stephano invalidates your point about Zerg not benefitting from good unit control. Stephano isn't that good mechanically, he delays injects and gets supply blocked on a fairly regular basis. What separates him from other Zerg players is the attention he gives to his units, and the care with which he sets up his engagements. Ret plays with the mentality you're describing ("I'm just going to macro so well that I can simply a-move over the Protoss"), and it has obvious limits, looking at his performance at NASL finals. I mean, look at g4 of Stephano vs Alicia, you think Stephano was macroing better than any other Zerg? No, he was simply constantly repositioning his units so his lings would fight Stalkers, and his roaches would fight the zealots, and he completely crushed the 4gate. Honestly, I think one of the reasons a lot of Zergs feel ZvP is difficult, is that they focus too much on their macro, and how many drones they need to defend all-in X, when controlling their army better would provide a much greater benefit than having 5 more drones mining minerals. One of the reasons the Immortal/Sentry all-in is so effective, is that it's nigh impossible to a-move over with superior numbers. You need to actually pick a good place to fight, set up a flank, bait out FFs and disengage, and just make your army do some work.
Interesting, should take a closer look at that.
But, still, the more I read this thread and the more I follow it, I just come to the conclusion that it is not only a balance, but also a design issue. Even at quite high level play I see players having "stupid losses", because the game is so fast, because there is stuff like FF and fungal growth... I don't want to derail this thread, but I believe that a lot of balance issues are closely related to design issues.
I sometimes wonder: What if Zealots had leg speed instead of charge? It would give Protoss an incentive to split forces, to do run-bys, to drop them and sniper workers/buildings and may be even to retreat again. It would also give them better chances to react to run-bys themselves. May be resulting in an overall more dynamic gameplay. That is just what I want after-all.
Compared to PvT, I think PvZ is not fun to watch  And that is not because I feel Zerg is too strong or whatever. I mean look at the way Protosses win games... it is retarded.
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On July 17 2012 00:45 Iamyournoob wrote:
I sometimes wonder: What if Zealots had leg speed instead of charge? It would give Protoss an incentive to split forces, to do run-bys, to drop them and sniper workers/buildings and may be even to retreat again. It would also give them better chances to react to run-bys themselves. May be resulting in an overall more dynamic gameplay. That is just what I want after-all.
With speed warp prisms, this is actually one of the suggested methods for dealing with infestor broodlord currently, alongside the archon toilet (imo, speed prisms are superior as long as you have the multitasking to pull it off), and charge vs leg speed may not make that much of a difference. Charge also gives a passive speed upgrade, but with speedlings around, I think most Protoss players tend to opt to just let the zealots do more damage rather than try to run away.
Zerg probably defends handily unless Protoss has control of enough of the map though, and it is pretty hard for Protoss to get enough control since the roach ling style is so effective. It's quite map dependent.
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Bosnia-Herzegovina261 Posts
On July 17 2012 00:38 Shiori wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2012 00:28 ysnake wrote:On July 17 2012 00:13 Big J wrote:On July 16 2012 23:55 Thrombozyt wrote: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:
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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? No. I'd like a scenario, in which (just an example) the Terran could go for the old reactor expand (so queen buff reversed) and have all the advantages of it (like map control, like scouting, like creep and third delaying), but a zerg can go for a cheap unit investment (like roaches) as well that can push them away and maybe snipe one or two with them and push a Terrans natural and softly contain him, maybe force some repair on a bunker or snipe a repairing scv or a lone marine. Basically what the original concept of the roach was like: you push with it a bunker, do damage to it, maybe pick something off and retreat/heal up and repeat. But as it was, roach openings were not able to do that. If you relied on them to push away hellions, you couldn't move out without further investing into defenses, else the hellions only ran past and you could not really contain a Terran for longer than 30sec to 1min, because then he would just be able to overpower them. What I want, is that there would be some "balance of power" in form of tug of war like pushings and more small exchanges, instead of onesided contains and longplanned build-up timing attacks. (ultimate Terran and Protoss composition shit on Zerg force), but the problem is getting there. Quite frankly, all races except Zerg have good beefy T2 units, while Zerg has none (Infestor, Mutalisk, Hydralisk, Corruptor), and T1 units are just horrible against Colossi/Immortal/Thor/Siege Tank. If Zerg wants to keep up with their opponent they need to be able to shit out a huge force again because they do not have units to deal with other units, and don't start complaining that Zerg can remax their entire T3 army because that's one of the most expensive armies in SC2, if a Zerg can remax their ENTIRE T3 army, you deserve to lose, you obviously let him have 7+ bases and such a huge bank that you never engaged him. This part of your post is dead false. I am really sick of reading your posts in any thread because they are biased garbage (you've actually argued that Terran is fine in TvZ rofl) but this is flat out lying. Your T2 units are amazing because they contain the Infestor. It's good against everything. BL's can be acquired very quickly in the current meta because every P/T pressure has been neutered to the point of being an all-in or being useless, so you can take an extremely greedy Hive and just mass Spines to defend. Once BLs are out, the other race basically is playing from behind. And no, no ultimate P/T composition is better than the Zerg counterpart. Infestor/BL is hands down the most cost-efficient composition in the game, and since Zerg will always be ahead economically, it's dishonest to say it's somehow the P/T's fault when Zerg can remax.
Terran is almost fine in ZvZ. The metagame that shifted is not, I play Zerg at a decent level so I know when I get outplayed by Terran (the other day I faced top 8 Masters Terran, he completely crushed me). How did he do this? We had a split map on Shakuras and I had gglords out while he had a shitton of Marines/Vikings/Tanks, negating any forward pushing with my gglords (lol, just a-move), oh he had only 4 Medivacs. None of which were with his army. What were those Medivacs doing? Dropping all my bases, even the Spined ones. snipe whatever there is to snipe there (at one point, I had 3 Greater Spires, he sniped 5-6 of them already). He had around 10 OCs and was constantly scanning me to see a tech switch to Ultras, once I did, he ramped up Marauder production and won.
I have played all races at Diamond and Zerg almost to Masters, my mechanics aren't quite good enough to reach that (I've actually fell down to Platinum since I tried to ladder with all races). I couldn't break out of turtle Terran mentality so I abandoned that, same happened with Protoss, although, I've won most of the games I made a timing attack when Hive is starting (and losing to stim timings).
Let me re-state what a Diamond Terran did to me the other, he went mech on close-spawn Antiga. Pushed out as soon as he scanned Hive being morphed. What did he push out with? 10+ Hellions, 5-6 Siege Tanks, 5-6 Thors and 5 Ravens full on energy (later added more Thors). How much damage I did with my first wave of Roaches? 0. He also had a harassing non-cloak Banshee there for giggles (primary purpose was denying Creep Spread with 1 Raven).
Terran may need some buffs, but I strongly disagree that Zerg needs a nerf to their macro mechanics. Techtractor or whatever you call it would be good (researched with Fusion Core), so that it makes it a little easier for Terran to tech switch, but that could pose a problem in TvP (imagine Reactored Marauders).
I agree that Zerg has an upper hand in the current game, but in a couple of months we will recieve HotS with new meta-game, new units and whatnot. Zergs get the possibility to finish off an opponent they got an advantage over (currently, it is nearly impossible unless allin), Terrans get mech units and that annoying mine (we might see Reaper openings again due to Reaper buff), Protoss stay Protoss with their gimmicky abilities.
You make it sound like Terran has absolutely ZERO chance of winning in TvZ (don't start that "if Zerg makes no mistakes" bullshit, everyone makes mistakes, even top pro players), they have a harder time indeed, but it is not impossible.
Back to the point. Infestors are an amazing unit indeed, but they are a spell caster. Did I say that Zerg T2 units suck? No, I said they have no beefy T2 units which is 100% true. They have to switch from T1 to T3, while other races can gradually switch from a certain Tier onto next one. (except maybe Terran, but their T1 is superior to all other T1 units)
I have to go anyhow now, would continue this shitstorm but I'd rather just abandon this thread and hope that no Blizzard employee ever reads it.
Edit: As much as you claim I am biased, you are even more sir.
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Basically, in both TvZ and PvZ, the biggest and most obvious problem is infestor. It's not roach, baneling, and broodlord. And maybe it's not the macro mechanics. It's just the infestor.
In PvZ, it's not that roach is too strong or force field is too strong. Zerg will max out when Protoss is in about 140-150 supply, but with good force field, Protoss can win without doubt. But when infestors come to the scene, the whole balance is lean toward Zerg where the usage of fungal can prevent blink play and kill sentries in a few shots, infested terran can force an engagement in front of your base and add 20-30 supply to the Zerg army, and in the OSL Dual yesterday, DRG shows us that the mid-game infestor can use Neural Parasite against immortal.
It's just simply too powerful and with extremely long range.
Fungal, range: 9 + 2 =11
Infested Terran, range: 9 + 5 = 14
Neural Parasite, range: 7
In comparison
EMP, range: 10 + 1.5 = 11.5 (with a launch animation and fungal is an instant hit)
Snipe. range: 10
Feedback, range: 9
Storm, range: 9 + 1.5 = 10.5
The nerfs should be applied to infestor include one or more than one of the following nerfs:
1. Fungal growth now has a projectile
2. Instead of stun the unit, Fungal growth now slows down the movement speed of the unit to 10%.
3. Infested Terran casting range reduced to 5, down from 9
4. The HP of Infested Terran morphing egg reduced to 50, down from 100
5. Neural Parasite casting range reduced to 5, down from 7
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On July 17 2012 03:33 larse wrote:
Basically, in both TvZ and PvZ, the biggest and most obvious problem is infestor. It's not roach, baneling, and broodlord. And maybe it's not the macro mechanics. It's just the infestor.
In PvZ, it's not that roach is too strong or force field is too strong. Zerg will max out when Protoss is in about 140-150 supply, but with good force field, Protoss can win without doubt. But when infestors come to the scene, the whole balance is lean toward Zerg where the usage of fungal can prevent blink play and kill sentries in a few shots, infested terran can force an engagement in front of your base and add 20-30 supply to the Zerg army, and in the OSL Dual yesterday, DRG shows us that the mid-game infestor can use Neural Parasite against immortal.
It's just simply too powerful and with extremely long range.
Fungal, range: 9 + 2 =11
Infested Terran, range: 9 + 5 = 14
Neural Parasite, range: 7
In comparison
EMP, range: 10 + 1.5 = 11.5 (with a launch animation and fungal is an instant hit)
Snipe. range: 10
Feedback, range: 9
Storm, range: 9 + 1.5 = 10.5
The nerfs should be applied to infestor include one or more than one of the following nerfs:
1. Fungal growth now has a projectile
2. Instead of stun the unit, Fungal growth now slows down the movement speed of the unit to 10%.
3. Infested Terran casting range reduced to 5, down from 9
4. The HP of Infested Terran morphing egg reduced to 50, down from 100
5. Neural Parasite casting range reduced to 5, down from 7
Or... terrans could just start using HSM. Which is their version of fungal. That's how the late game was obviously designed. High HP siege/long-range units (broodlords, thors, tanks, collosus, etc.), AOE (infestor, raven, tank, templar). Now, maybe HSM needs another buff--perhaps range. It's just tiresome to see terrans hang on to mass T1 25 minutes into a game against an opponent with T2/T3 siege/aoe.
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Neural at 7 is fine, 5 is way to useless. Otherwise I agree with you larse.
The problem is that most Zerg units are just so situational and easily hardcountered that there has to be a "god" like unit like the infestor to balance it out. Zerg doesn't have a marine or a stalker that's pretty good to have at all time that can deal with lots of stuff with good usage.
As Iamyournoob said, lots of these issues come from design of the game and not just balance.
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On July 17 2012 04:15 RavenLoud wrote:
Neural at 7 is fine, 5 is way to useless. Otherwise I agree with you larse.
The problem is that most Zerg units are just so situational and easily hardcountered that there has to be a "god" like unit like the infestor to balance it out. Zerg doesn't have a marine or a stalker that's pretty good to have at all time that can deal with lots of stuff with good usage.
As Iamyournoob said, lots of these issues come from design of the game and not just balance.
Yeah, I saw Iamyournoob and Big J's arguments. I think placing hydra to the some place in BW and replaces roach will solve the problem. But of course, hydra needs to be buffed with speed upgrade and maybe +10 HP buff. Because if hydra replaces the roach tech, hydra can fend off early harassment with long range, and it's worth preserving them into the late-game. And it will solve the boredom of stalker - roach battle, since you can't rely on pure hydra and force field is not good against hydra.
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On July 17 2012 04:11 jdsowa wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2012 03:33 larse wrote:
Basically, in both TvZ and PvZ, the biggest and most obvious problem is infestor. It's not roach, baneling, and broodlord. And maybe it's not the macro mechanics. It's just the infestor.
In PvZ, it's not that roach is too strong or force field is too strong. Zerg will max out when Protoss is in about 140-150 supply, but with good force field, Protoss can win without doubt. But when infestors come to the scene, the whole balance is lean toward Zerg where the usage of fungal can prevent blink play and kill sentries in a few shots, infested terran can force an engagement in front of your base and add 20-30 supply to the Zerg army, and in the OSL Dual yesterday, DRG shows us that the mid-game infestor can use Neural Parasite against immortal.
It's just simply too powerful and with extremely long range.
Fungal, range: 9 + 2 =11
Infested Terran, range: 9 + 5 = 14
Neural Parasite, range: 7
In comparison
EMP, range: 10 + 1.5 = 11.5 (with a launch animation and fungal is an instant hit)
Snipe. range: 10
Feedback, range: 9
Storm, range: 9 + 1.5 = 10.5
The nerfs should be applied to infestor include one or more than one of the following nerfs:
1. Fungal growth now has a projectile
2. Instead of stun the unit, Fungal growth now slows down the movement speed of the unit to 10%.
3. Infested Terran casting range reduced to 5, down from 9
4. The HP of Infested Terran morphing egg reduced to 50, down from 100
5. Neural Parasite casting range reduced to 5, down from 7 Or... terrans could just start using HSM. Which is their version of fungal. That's how the late game was obviously designed. High HP siege/long-range units (broodlords, thors, tanks, collosus, etc.), AOE (infestor, raven, tank, templar). Now, maybe HSM needs another buff--perhaps range. It's just tiresome to see terrans hang on to mass T1 25 minutes into a game against an opponent with T2/T3 siege/aoe.
HSM doesn't have the range and stun of fungal, so the comparison is a bit weird. I do agree that Terrans should be transitioning (battlecruiser raven has been mentioned quite a few times by now), though I'd rather not see essentially the same game play out at slightly different skill levels a bunch of times every few weeks if this turns out to be the only method (it feels like there aren't that many ways to go about battlecruiser raven). I guess this particular point comes down not to balance, but to game design.
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On July 17 2012 04:11 jdsowa wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2012 03:33 larse wrote:
Basically, in both TvZ and PvZ, the biggest and most obvious problem is infestor. It's not roach, baneling, and broodlord. And maybe it's not the macro mechanics. It's just the infestor.
In PvZ, it's not that roach is too strong or force field is too strong. Zerg will max out when Protoss is in about 140-150 supply, but with good force field, Protoss can win without doubt. But when infestors come to the scene, the whole balance is lean toward Zerg where the usage of fungal can prevent blink play and kill sentries in a few shots, infested terran can force an engagement in front of your base and add 20-30 supply to the Zerg army, and in the OSL Dual yesterday, DRG shows us that the mid-game infestor can use Neural Parasite against immortal.
It's just simply too powerful and with extremely long range.
Fungal, range: 9 + 2 =11
Infested Terran, range: 9 + 5 = 14
Neural Parasite, range: 7
In comparison
EMP, range: 10 + 1.5 = 11.5 (with a launch animation and fungal is an instant hit)
Snipe. range: 10
Feedback, range: 9
Storm, range: 9 + 1.5 = 10.5
The nerfs should be applied to infestor include one or more than one of the following nerfs:
1. Fungal growth now has a projectile
2. Instead of stun the unit, Fungal growth now slows down the movement speed of the unit to 10%.
3. Infested Terran casting range reduced to 5, down from 9
4. The HP of Infested Terran morphing egg reduced to 50, down from 100
5. Neural Parasite casting range reduced to 5, down from 7 Or... terrans could just start using HSM. Which is their version of fungal. That's how the late game was obviously designed. High HP siege/long-range units (broodlords, thors, tanks, collosus, etc.), AOE (infestor, raven, tank, templar). Now, maybe HSM needs another buff--perhaps range. It's just tiresome to see terrans hang on to mass T1 25 minutes into a game against an opponent with T2/T3 siege/aoe.
This tier argument has been shot down over a hundred times in this thread. It doesn't actually matter what tier any unit is because that's not the way the game was designed. Terrans don't use HSM because it's horrible in 99% of situations and because losing Ravens is extremely costly.
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GM TERRANS: could this be a TvZ revolution??
ive been working on a TvZ build that i think incoorporates an idea that has never been tried before
you start making your QXC style bunker the moment your barracks finishes, meaning its very hard for the zerg to stop since its so fast and far away
off 1rax you get some marines in the QXC bunker
then you put a factory at the qxc bunker (this is very fast) and your pumping tanks at the fortified location before queens spine crawlers can stop you
then you expand after you start pumping tanks. a delayed expansion against 2base zerg imo isnt that bad if you already have a fortified sieged position
imo GM terrans you have much better mechanics than me. Possibly i think this idea could transform into something very strong if someone with better mechanics tries it out. something like this wouldnt be effected by the queen buff. im thinking maybe you should open 2gas (for more tanks) and a delayed expansion but the extra tanks is worth it
essentially you just open 1rax into gxc bunker then you get tanks at the bunker before roaches can stop you
heres the replay
http://drop.sc/222997
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I know this does not really belong to the discussion from above or something, but I just thought about some ideas to make the roach more interesting and though they will not make it into the game and are just theorycraft (that's what this thread is for) I thought I would share them (exact numbers might have to be changed for balancing):
Number 1:
Roach - life from 145 to 125
"Tunneling Claws" changed:
-) Regeneration bonus removed (so roach only has the "standard rapid regeneration" of 5HP/sec)
-) Heal bonus added: anytime the roach burrows, it immidiatly regains 15HP
+ Show Spoiler +The way burrow works, is that you it takes some time to burrow (0.55sec + a rnd number from 0.00 to 0.10sec for the roach)
and it takes some time to unburrow (0.44sec+ a rnd number from 0.00 to 0.10sec for the roach).
This means that burrowing and unburrowing takes 0.99-1.19sec for a roach.
If you do this perfectly, it means that the roach regenerates 15+(2 to 3 for the 0.44-0.54 time it takes to uburrow)=17 to 18HP everytime you do this.
To make roaches as efficient as they are right now, you have to burrow them at least once in a combat in a way, that it doesn't lose an attack. So statistically speaking, you really should try to make them burrow more than once.
Numbers are kind of arbitrary and would have to be balanced of course. (125HP roaches might be too bad before the upgrade and have too many problems against very high damage dealers, 15-20HP regeneration for some double clicking might be too much in certain situations etc) It will also depend on how well a good player can really micro them in the end - so how precise you can burrow single or few injured roaches without burrowing noninjured, how many shots you statistically lose etc...
Number 2:
(Queen buff reverted)
Preroach (this name is not discussable! :D )
Requires: Spawning Pool
Cost: 150-50, proably longer build time than the normal roach (so maybe like 35-40 instead of 27)
Stats: Those of the Roach right now or slightly lower and slower
Roach (replaces Preroach)
Requires: Roach Warren (Lairtech!)
Cost: 75-25
Stats: Those of the Roach right now
Preroaches and Roaches start with burrow or burrow now only requires a spawning pool (though I think in this variant the preroach is too expensive and should be like 125-50 or 150-25).
+ Show Spoiler +weakens/removes early roach allins, because they are not affordable anymore. Gives the Zerg the opportunity to get very few preroaches for defensive measures out or to maybe micro down a bunker or a canon with them. As a comparison: 7RR costs (150 Warren+50drone+7*75roaches+7*25gas roaches = ) 725/175 4 Preroach rush costs: 600/200 And I mean, who would not love to see the single preroach running across the map when a Protoss goes for a gateway expand, and the Protoss desperatly trying to snipe or block it, so that it can't block the Nexus
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EPT![[image loading]](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/index.php?title=File:Ghost.png&filetimestamp=20100220124254)
