Designated Balance Discussion Thread - Page 473

On April 30 2013 22:58 Grumbels wrote:

That sounds very metaphysical, but please continue...

On April 30 2013 23:01 TheDwf wrote:

Head over here.

On April 30 2013 22:36 OneRedBeard wrote:


You do not have to increase the power of mech units per se to compensate for their slow production - The deal with gas-heavy, high-tech armies was always that you have to keep them alive to be viable using them. What breaks the deal is the increased power of strategies against mech; if you can trade cost-effectively against a mech army, the meching player is at a huge disadvantage. This used to be only the case if you cought the mech army in a bad spot, due to mistakes by the meching player. Of which there were many, because it is not easy to position your mech army well; as it should not be.

Yet with the current tools available against mech - especially the viper - the high-tech army does not have to make any mistakes to be eliminated completely; a couple of abducts and blinding clouds will do that for you. I just don't get what was wrong with mech in WoL to necessitate putting in brand new counters to it into HotS.

On April 30 2013 23:26 Grumbels wrote:

I'm familiar with that post, I was wondering if that was what you were talking about. In any case, the gist of that blog is simply that Brood War was awesome, it's mainly about nostalgia and less about any useful lessons for Starcraft 2. There is less potential for positional play in this game, you could give the factory the exact same units that could be built in Brood War and it probably wouldn't have the results you desired. There does exist some positional play, it includes units like tanks, banshees, medivacs and widow mines, but those can all be utilized by bio as well (and in fact see more play because of this). This contradicts the obsession this community has with pure mech, since positional play with bio that utilizes these units is never deemed acceptable by them.

In fact, the pure factory builds are usually a lot less interesting to watch than the bio styles, but still there are calls to make mech even more viable. All because of one unit composition in Brood War. This is a different game, there is no vulture and no goliath in SC2, so there is not actually a need to make the comparison and to try and force factory units in Starcraft 2 to do the same things that Brood War units could. Because SC2 is so different you already lost the 'mech play style', it's actually arbitrary to try and force this specific play style onto 'mech' instead of trying to reward positional play that already exists (bio with mines/tanks).

On April 30 2013 23:26 Grumbels wrote:
I'm familiar with that post, I was wondering if that was what you were talking about. In any case, the gist of that blog is simply that Brood War was awesome, it's mainly about nostalgia and less about any useful lessons for Starcraft 2.

This is a different game, there is no vulture and no goliath in SC2

On May 01 2013 00:14 TheDwf wrote:

This summary is both simplistic and incorrect. There are a lot of useful lessons for SC2 in that post, in particular that mech revolves around the Tank; therefore, improving anything but the Tank in order to make mech viable—for TvP—is inevitably bound to fail (or it will give birth to horribly uninteresting things such as Hellbats/Thors i. e. 1a mechanical armies without any positioning involved) because the original trade (mobility vs firepower) just isn't there anymore.


So? Hellions-Hellbats/Tanks/Vikings works fine for mech in TvT. You don't need an exact copy/paste from the BW units to make a viable mech style.

On May 01 2013 20:24 Ghanburighan wrote:
Great first post, crawlert. Always interesting to see these figures. Looks like there's a ton of fluctuation still from tournament to tournament.

On May 01 2013 00:48 Grumbels wrote:

My main point is that a style revolving around utilizing the positional play that the tank offers with a factory based composition is a really arbitrary thing to obsess about. It's a new game with different pathfinding, macro mechanics, units, interface etc. Starcraft 2 does not have the same potential to showcase positional play, so by trying to force an arbitrary selection of factory units to fulfill a certain role, with nostalgia as prime motivation, you have a chance to sabotage interesting play styles because they don't fit your preconceived notions of how people should play. If one takes bio play styles as a base, then all factory units are useful and can often reward positional play, but instead of making factory units more accessible to bio or otherwise strengthening the more interesting play styles that terran has, the community largely complains about how 'mech' does not work on its own and so risks constraining design. Mech in WoL was a failure, disregarding balance issues, it was still mostly maxout->deathball gameplay. If one takes a logical approach then the goal should not be to make mech more viable.

Even Falling's blog was nostalgia: although he articulated that the community didn't just want mech, but desired the play style associated with it* there is actually no evidence that this was the best approach to take to improve terran.

*and it's only partly true, since many people are happy enough just using factory units without the interesting play style

On May 01 2013 20:40 convention wrote:

Each tournament has a low number of games, so there will be large statistical fluctuations. The best way to look at balance is to average over the tournaments over the time period in which you care about the balance (i.e., over the last X months, the game is balanced, or over the last years...).

On May 01 2013 20:24 Ghanburighan wrote:
Great first post, crawlert. Always interesting to see these figures. Looks like there's a ton of fluctuation still from tournament to tournament.

On April 30 2013 23:26 Grumbels wrote:

I'm familiar with that post, I was wondering if that was what you were talking about. In any case, the gist of that blog is simply that Brood War was awesome, it's mainly about nostalgia and less about any useful lessons for Starcraft 2. There is less potential for positional play in this game, you could give the factory the exact same units that could be built in Brood War and it probably wouldn't have the results you desired. There does exist some positional play, it includes units like tanks, banshees, medivacs and widow mines, but those can all be utilized by bio as well (and in fact see more play because of this). This contradicts the obsession this community has with pure mech, since positional play with bio that utilizes these units is never deemed acceptable by them.

In fact, the pure factory builds are usually a lot less interesting to watch than the bio styles, but still there are calls to make mech even more viable. All because of one unit composition in Brood War. This is a different game, there is no vulture and no goliath in SC2, so there is not actually a need to make the comparison and to try and force factory units in Starcraft 2 to do the same things that Brood War units could. Because SC2 is so different you already lost the 'mech play style', it's actually arbitrary to try and force this specific play style onto 'mech' instead of trying to reward positional play that already exists (bio with mines/tanks).

On May 02 2013 01:29 Markwerf wrote:


It would be interesting to see more different styles from terran though. Almost every game is focussed about some MMM core with just a few units splashed in (tanks in TvT, mines in TvZ, ghost/viking in TvP). Terran as a result plays out quite the same in most matchups, it all being about the kiting and splitting of your MMM mostly.
It is quite an active style and interesting at that but it would be cool to see other styles. Not even so much because I think mech is super flashy to see, but because it's interesting to see the other race take on a different role completely as well.
Mech TvZ is interesting to me because zerg suddenly needs to use roach/hydra, vipers, spawn hosts etc.
Mech TvP is cool because blink harass, actual carrier use for toss, lots of immortals all become good suddenly.
Basically I want 'some other' style then the infranty upgrade based style for terran to be good as it's more interesting to play with and against for variation.
If blizzard actually focussed on this it wouldn't be hard at all to achieve it, balancing in itself is really not that hard as some make it out to be. Blizzard basically wasted beta on a bunch of crappy designs way too much, focussing mostly on reaper, oracle etc. They gave up very quickly on the getting mech to work and basically reinforced the MMM style only by having all new units be anti-mech in a way..

Still a decent game but it could have been so much better... If T had more options all T matchups would vastly improve because the opponent suddenly get's more options too. The P deathball problem would not be as apparant for example as against mech you are automatically forced into different more harassment based styles which we never got see yet because noone plays mech seriously.. The few top level TvP games where it was used were all awkward with protoss not abusing their mobility to the max.

On May 02 2013 05:26 aZealot wrote:
I think you are right, Grumbels. I've also long felt that the demand for Mech (i.e pure Mech) was arbitrary. Sure, it would be nice if it was possible, but I don't believe it necessary for SC2. It certainly should not be some holy grail to be pursued to the exclusion of other play styles for Terran, and especially with regard to its effects on other races and in other match-ups.

On May 02 2013 05:26 aZealot wrote:
I think you are right, Grumbels. I've also long felt that the demand for Mech (i.e pure Mech) was arbitrary. Sure, it would be nice if it was possible, but I don't believe it necessary for SC2. It certainly should not be some holy grail to be pursued to the exclusion of other play styles for Terran, and especially with regard to its effects on other races and in other match-ups.