This one. Flash plants spider mines everywhere (125 splash damage, also called "mini nukes"). Bisu defuses almost every single one and prevents his army getting demolished, eventually taking the game. Flash's push would have demolished any other player but Bisu is something different.
Then, in another game (can't find VOD), JD went 9 pool, and Flash 14cc (is exactly what it sounds like). 9pool completely demolishes 14cc. And still, Flash won.
oh, and the most epic of em all: the 32 kill dragoon.
watch the whole thing
I remember watching that for the first time, it's just the way he micros his probes WHILE controlling the dragoon in the beginning of the hold is just incredible, not to mention the entire thing. I wouldn't necessarily call it a trick though, it took so many years of play to develop that level of control and awareness, he's constantly thinking of possible marine paths and checking his surroundings to make sure he won't be backed into a wall, SC2 isn't at that point yet, and it's unfair to compare them on that front.
I understand where day[9]'s coming from, and yeah, we're barely scratching the surface a year in, but give it more time. These things will come, they're will always be epic control clips, just give 'em a chance to get there first ^^
SC2 is still very young and we have seen many micro tricks. I think there will be more to come. Looking automatoc 2000 and I think it's safe to say that Pro can do much better with their micro eventhough they can never reach automaton 2000's level. lol
On January 01 2012 06:04 Gl!tch wrote: But what if the protoss player wanted to get more out of his units? I would suggest that this is entirely possible, simply by removing them from battle. Lets say the same battle occured, but with 6 less zealots. Instead, a warp prism droped 4 zealots in the Terrans newly saturated third base during the battle. Those 4 zealots are worth more to the protoss now than the original 6 in the battle. Alot more, I would argue.
Splitting your army in a major engagement can be disastrous. The smallest of differences in army strength become exponential because the larger army kills the smaller one faster. Much like how 10 marines can kill 10 zerglings with minimal losses, or 30 zerglings can kill 10 marines with minimal losses.
Besides, that's not even relevant to what Day9 was arguing, lest you forget that you can drop 4 zealots in BW as well.
On January 01 2012 06:17 Kluey wrote: Credits to LiquidHerO for this one:
Load up 1-3 speed prisms with zealots. Run them over the terran army pressing "d + click" on each one OR drop them behind the terran army. You basically get a flank without having to set up one. The only downside is that you waste supply on warp prisms. Don't know how effective it is but it's a good idea.
Credits to NEXSickness to this one:
Load an immortal, let it hit the roaches and then load it up. The projectile is faster for an immortal so you will dodge the roach shots while hitting them.
Well, Hero practices the game 10 hours a day. Why doesn't he actually practice that and then say how it works out? :S Sure it sounds like like a good idea, but until it's really worked at and empirically proven, it's theory crafting.
On January 01 2012 06:04 Gl!tch wrote: But what if the protoss player wanted to get more out of his units? I would suggest that this is entirely possible, simply by removing them from battle. Lets say the same battle occured, but with 6 less zealots. Instead, a warp prism droped 4 zealots in the Terrans newly saturated third base during the battle. Those 4 zealots are worth more to the protoss now than the original 6 in the battle. Alot more, I would argue.
Splitting your army in a major engagement can be disastrous. The smallest of differences in army strength become exponential because the larger army kills the smaller one faster. Much like how 10 marines can kill 10 zerglings with minimal losses, or 30 zerglings can kill 10 marines with minimal losses.
Besides, that's not even relevant to what Day9 was arguing, lest you forget that you can drop 4 zealots in BW as well.
Even within what you just said, can you not see the obvious point?
30 Zerglings destroy those 10 marines, but with 20 it is close, but those 10 you saved, rather than kill the marines have damaged the economy of the opponent. If you'd won the battle and be left with 20, would they of reached his base before he had regrouped? Who knows. It is often a knife edge in battles, but also sometimes losing the battle, but winning the war, is far more important, especially at the top.
On January 01 2012 06:52 Xlancer wrote: I know I get way more out of my roaches than the average play just from doing burrow micro on hurt roaches. Usually it causes a rage quit from the other player
EDIT: Also I wouldn't say that sc2 has a lower skill ceiling just because the sc2 UI makes it easier to perform the same actions that only pros could do in sc1. At the very least the ceiling would be equal because pros can still do those same actions in sc2, but I would say that sc2 has a much higher potential ceiling because of how much higher the sc2 UI raised baseline skill level.
I don't think you understand the term "skill ceiling". What SC2 raised is skill floor (what you said), which has a priori nothing to do with skill ceiling.
what I'm saying is that with a higher floor on which to stand, that it should be possible to push the ceiling even higher. Just look at the insane things that Automaton 2000 micro is capable of. So with less time needed to macro, more time can be spent learning how to do insane micro.
You are aware that the Automaton 2000 assigns 300APM to each marine/unit, and is physically impossible for a human to do?
On January 01 2012 09:24 blubbdavid wrote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqsSrWZciY0 This one. Flash plants spider mines everywhere (125 splash damage, also called "mini nukes"). Bisu defuses almost every single one and prevents his army getting demolished, eventually taking the game. Flash's push would have demolished any other player but Bisu is something different.
Then, in another game (can't find VOD), JD went 9 pool, and Flash 14cc (is exactly what it sounds like). 9pool completely demolishes 14cc. And still, Flash won.
I remember watching that for the first time, it's just the way he micros his probes WHILE controlling the dragoon in the beginning of the hold is just incredible, not to mention the entire thing. I wouldn't necessarily call it a trick though, it took so many years of play to develop that level of control and awareness, he's constantly thinking of possible marine paths and checking his surroundings to make sure he won't be backed into a wall, SC2 isn't at that point yet, and it's unfair to compare them on that front.
I understand where day[9]'s coming from, and yeah, we're barely scratching the surface a year in, but give it more time. These things will come, they're will always be epic control clips, just give 'em a chance to get there first ^^
Hasn't losira or something hatch firsted and then defended a 6pool? People's bias o.O
On January 01 2012 06:40 phyren wrote: The issue, at least currently, is that most end game battles tend to be quite one sided depending on how effective a few skills wind up being. Whoever takes the big maxed battle usually has a good clump of units left over and can proceed to gather up some reinforcements and just win. In this scenario, the 6 zealots in the main battle are much more important than any harassment.
To put it another way, nuking 3 bases with all the probes is awesome and effectively brings your opponents economy to 0. However, if those nukes come at the expense of not having enough emps in the main fight, you will lose your entire army while doing minimal damage to theirs, and they will proceed to walk all over you.
edit: to address your proposed discussion, stalker micro and focus firing is perhaps the clearest example. You can focus fire the anti air or the enemy casters and thus allow your own casters or collosi to be extremely effective. This messes with the enemies composition. If they overinvest in antiair, then you focus casters and your ground army with casters wins. Otherwise, you focus fire the anti air and you air army/collosi win.
Still, I think this is a poor example when compared to bw. A little thing like mine placement patterns before battles, which certainly isn't considered micro, would be game changing and could effectively move you up from d/d+ to c-.
I think you are correct that the ease of sc2 unit control means we will need to see players show their superior skill by doing more tasks at once rather than doing a particular task very well. (in day9's analogy this would be equivalent to throwing several baseballs at once to make up for the comparative simplicity of the baseball as compared to the frisbee.) Still, I don't think you example is correct, and I dislike this aspect as multitask and control were almost 2 separate skills to develop in bw.
If you have a battle in Brood War, each individual unit has a baseline a.i. In this old game the a.i. had some bugs, but these bugs created opportunities for a better player to increase the value of each unit through good control. A good example would be mutalisks against scourge. Scourge was a fast flying unit, that would suicide and explode on other air units to kill them. Now a lesser player would perhaps be able to get a shot off with hold position micro and kill 1 or 2 scourge with any luck, but then lose his mutalisks to the remaining scourge.
A mediocre player could use patrol commands moving in a certain degree, away from the scourge, to sometimes dodge a scourge and get a free shot off at the same time.
A great player (Jaedong), would be able to use Patrol micro to first patrol away from a scourge in a certain angle, immediately issue another command to another angle upward, and then patrol command behind scourge to completely dodge the scourge, and hit them at the same time. The mutalisks would never get hit and just survive.
This means that a mutalisk can dramatically increase in value through very precise control, partly caused due to old and bugged A.I.
Now let's go to Starcraft 2 shall we, and let's take Phoenix vs Mutalisk as an example. The Phoenix is faster than the mutalisk, and shoots automatically while moving. This would allow for some good kiting micro you'd think. I will explain how that is impossible due to the nature of SC2 A.I.
If a pack of mutalisk chases you and you fly away from them, kiting, you will get further and further away from the muta pack. This means you have to fly closer to them again to resume kiting and damaging these mutalisks. The player using the mutalisk can abuse this fact by turning around, forcing you to follow them to do damage, and then when you get closer they turn around randomly and get some good shots off at you.
In BW, with good control, you can prevent this, but here is the deal with SC2 A.I. Air units always glide a little bit in the same direction as their attack, this is extremely problematic when it comes to phoenix, because it's a feature of the A.I. that prevents air unit stacking (viking flower) and is also caused because of the *shoot* animation. When the Phoenix fires his attack, he will glide until the animation finishes.
So when you want to outperform mutalisks, you'd want to move in, get a shot and turn back immediately to avoid taking damage from the mutalisk to increase the value of your Phoenixes. But in SC2, you get punished for trying to do so. When you move in and your Phoenixes shoot, you click them away from the mutalisks, but they all glide for a short amount of time. In this time, a mutalisk pack can gain exactly enough ground to hit your Phoenixes, and actually do more damage than you did if the pack is at a medium size. In this case you actually decrease the value of your units if you try to micro more than just moving away.
Another good example is the Stalker. In BW, you could kite marines with dragoons because their attack was instant. You could shoot and move away in time just before the marine could get in range to hit you once. In Starcraft 2, Stalkers have 1 more range than marines. You would think you would be able to kite marines then, right? Sorry to dissapoint you, but this is not the case, due to the following:
In Starcraft 2, some units can fire instantly in every angle, 360 degrees around them. The marine is one of these units, which makes stutterstep what it is today, while that's actually one of the easiest micro moves to learn. Some units, have to turn around and face the target before they shoot, and some even have an attack animation that has to finish. Stalkers are one of these units.
The scenario will be the following, you move and see a marine pack heading your way. You start using attack move toward them, and move away from them right when the Stalkers fire their shots. Unfortunately, the Stalkers have to turn to face the location that you issued the move command in. Now the marines get to fire their shots and do some good damage to your stalkers. Your micro now makes Stalkers slightly better against marines (10% approx), where it could have been much more. Due to the way the A.I. and attack animations work in SC2 (this is partially due to 3D), you lose all these possibilities to increase your unit value and turn battles around with less.
Lastly we have units such as the Marauder, Infestor, Sentry, Mothership. What do these units have in common? Answer: They all prevent the other player from microing their units by restricting or halting their movement.
The Marauder gets concussive shells for a measly 50/50 in cost. Now they can do even half-assed stutterstep and kite pretty much everything except speedlings. So the Terran player has to only do a bit of stutterstep, to have vastly more efficient units than you (think of roach vs marauder, roaches cannot ever connect).
The Infestors fungal most of your army, and the Zerg proceeds to surround you and destroy you. What can you do about it in the battle? Exactly, nothing at all. Pre battle you can spread your units and continue to split them a bit while in battle but these are things you could do in BW as well. But what you did not have in BW were spells and abilities that prevented movement in such a way that it became detrimental to the opposing player. Fungal does damage and roots units, force fields completely block movement in an area, concussive shells snare you for 0% extra effort.
In BW you had Stasis, that could freeze units in an area, and do aoe unit nullifying you say? Well due to the nature of BW, the armies were much more spread out, and larger. Stasis and maelstrom were the only spells that could do an aoe lockdown, but the trick was that if you damaged a stasised unit, it would come out of it. Maelstrom did root biological units only (which makes it very niche right off the bat), but did no damage to them. In order to get maelstrom, you had to research a completely different tree of spells, for a unit that was completely niche for fighting massive bio armies. You would only see Dark Archons in PvZ late game.
But again, this wasnt as powerful because BW had more spread out armies, and because of the nature of micro possibilities to increase unit value + some A.I. bugs, there were fights all over the map instead of one big battle, because this further increased your efficiency, and you could hold against vastly bigger armies due to the micro possibilities + highground advantages (low to highground attacks only had a 70% chance to hit in BW).
In conclusion, I agree with Day9 100% and hope we can get some kind of superb control reward back into SC2, instead of only gaining tiny benefits or even getting PUNISHED for trying to micro. This combined with a smoother A.I. means that the correct action in a lot of situations is to invest your apm into other actions than micro, because these other actions give you a bigger reward.
I think the reason we haven't seen as much exploitation of micro in SC2 is because of how volatile the metagame is, there is a much greater incentive to learn new abusive build orders than there is micro. The metagame is still so young and players are nowhere near experienced enough to handle every possible build or strategy in their matchups. Just think about how successful the discovery of builds like the 4 gate, roach ling all-in, baneling bust, colossus void ray deathball, 1/1/1, SlayerS hellion opener, and Hero's hard counter 1/1/1 phoenix build have been. There's also evidence to this when you note that the most developed metagame matchup at the moment, TvZ, is also the one matchup with the highest level of micro we've seen so far. The position battles of bio siege vs. muta, marine splits vs banelings, target firing of baneling and muta, using siege tanks as baneling walls. In my opinion the sheer amount of micro involved in the TvZ matchup is the closest we've seen to what we expect from BW, and gives weight to the idea that once the metagame is more refined players will have more incentive to eek out an advantage by working specifically on their micro.
The only way to get more out of your units is to nerf the effective power of AoE attacks/spells. For example baneling roach busts on a 1 rax expand is extremely effective, where as if you went for a bust on a tank expand its a complete failure. This is because all of the units cram up a tiny ramp and thus a siege tank is 1026180680 times more effective. However if we nerfed the power of fungal/emp/storm/banelings/tanks/collusi/archons much more of the end game battle would depend on macro situations rather than "well he has 101 banes everything on the ground is dead no matter how well the other person plays."
Actually wondering who, out of all those who disagree with day9, have played bw for years & years as what he says is quite correct (even though it's more like an opinion).
But, he also says he's not implying sc2 is a bad game ect... but it's just not frisbee-ish like bw & I agree 100% about this, maybe because the game is still quite young, like he said himself he might have to take those words back within a few months if people prove him wrong but still.. right now I agree with him 100%
+ it's still mostly opinion based so you can't really say he's right or wrong.
And about the skill ceiling I think that's more of a fact than just an opinion & what day9 says regarding this, is completely true & only someone who's not familiar with how bw works/worked will disagree on this but then again, I wouldn't be happy either if someone would say that the game I play requires less and whatnot than the previous game so I guess it's a bit understandable for people not to agree with this.
But who knows, maybe sc2 will go through some major changes but still, I can't see it become as hard & demanding as bw (unfortunately).
On January 01 2012 06:04 Gl!tch wrote: But what if the protoss player wanted to get more out of his units? I would suggest that this is entirely possible, simply by removing them from battle. Lets say the same battle occured, but with 6 less zealots. Instead, a warp prism droped 4 zealots in the Terrans newly saturated third base during the battle. Those 4 zealots are worth more to the protoss now than the original 6 in the battle. Alot more, I would argue.
As for the discussion, try to come up with ways to get more out of a unit. Preferably not along the lines of "well, I will stutter step my marines". Think about compositions that would get more out of certain units that support eachother, think about positioning, flanks, multi-pronged attacks, timing, the surprise factor of a hidden tech path. Get more out of your units.
Funny. You could do the same thing in Brood War except you could also position your zealot/dragoon line, micro your shuttle/reavers, etc, etc.
well the ai in sc2 is better yes, but there are still flaws in it and added features like the magic box. A good example is blinking up and down cliffs. Waypoint the blink and you units and you will get them all out, don't do it and you will most likely have a few stay on the highground left dying. Have you seen top leagues where players that had enough time to retreat with the que blink simply blink down and lose stalkers ? Yes we have. (up and downs recently) In bw such moves would be already standard and everyone would use them. If such a simple 3 clicker isn't used, how should people find out some better micro, if they don't have to. I mean the more complex version will probably look like this, blink the stalkers you know for sure will make it down, then shift que the rest so the lining up at the waypoint will be reduced, so the stalkers escape even faster, so you might give one more burst of shots before leaving. Another thing is the terran sieging the zerg, with marine tank and medivacs. Medivacs can now be a clicked so they heal, but when kiting, they kite their constant heal wave, which reduces the heal alot. On the other hand the ai heals the weakest units so your marines will get healed equally. having the heal spread sometimes is a good idea, for example against fungal, but with the medivac being fungaled it will only heal one marine up. A medivac can actually save 6 unstimmed marines from a fungal if you micro it, otherwise it will be only 1. Medivac micro would also make them use more energy for heal ... so you run dry really fast, so maybe medivac energy will become more popular. I mean if you have them separated in an group and behind you army, and a click them into the kiting direction of your units after the stim, they will heal so much more. And once they are on top of your army, you can kite with them as well to not lose them to the anti air units chasing.
Well back to the sieged by terran zerg. The terran is all nicely split marines almost immune to baneling splash etc, the zerg retreated to wait for their chance. Now the terran attacks with marines a nice a click all marines used are stacked again. Instead of using magic box to keep them spread, so if they kite back baneling hits wouldn't matter all to much.
But what can a zerg do, all their banelings will die to a few siege tank hits and after the banes are gone the terran will clump up to make a wall against the lings and mutas. The zerg himself could magic box the banes so the target fire of tanks wouldn't work. And the target fire by marines is way way more risky for the terran. But both can work out to get the banelings. But a baneling clumb and some banes scattered would really mess up the terrans, because he would have to targetfire with the marines and the siege tanks. Anyway every unit can be optimized by player micro ... and its really sad to see an immortal range buff, because people can't micro a range 5 units that is slower then the players range 6 unit, because the attack command will block units. (we see that happen to zerg with roaches often as well). And then there are people that say the ai is more clever and make a mediocre player be able to use their units as effective... Sure a mediocre player can put his stalkers on autofollow on the immortals, that way the stalkers will be behind the immortals if you engage and there won't be no issue that the immortal had an shorter range. But a good player would be able to have the same effect without reducing the damage output of his stalkers. Just because he would leave holes for the immortals to slip through, sentries that are in the front for forcefield could also retreat and gather up energy for more instead of getting focused.
There are tons and tons of examples where the ai is ineffective, autoturrets being the high priority target for siege tanks for another example, players can get so much more out of their units and at some point mediocre players can't keep up anymore. The best example is terran on ladder i would say. Pros do fine gm does fine and master, the rest gets destroyed, by units you can hardly call controlled by the player, since even the pros don't really control them better.
So while the ai doesn't mess up so heavily anymore like in bw, and for example turning tricks to outrun lings and stuff has been removed. Its still far far away from replacing player control, that being said i think Blizzard did an awesome job with the ai, it allows casuals to play a good game, without being frustrated like in bw. But at the same time the ai does so horrible things if a few different units are together. That a good player can do it 100 times better. And if they say it isn't worth it, then i hope they never meet someone who thing it is worth to do it. The skill ceiling of sc2 is really high maybe higher then bw, because the benefits of good micro aren't as strong, so microing a shuttle with a reaver really well isn't enough, but 2 should do the trick. But surely micoring even one is harder because sc2 is way faster then bw.
We might have to bear with sc2 being called easy mode and looking like it until the last expansion is out and blizzard stopped their patching, as i bet alot will face a strong strategy with blizzard will fix it. Or even be in fear that blizzard will nerf something if they run over everyone with it for around 2 weeks. But maybe after this time and if sc2 survived this time, there will be people that want to win and never be pushed away from their throne and they might find micro moves that will heavily benefit them over other players.
PS: I don't think good sc2 players aren't trying or holding back or something, but it seems there aren't many that will do research on stuff that has lead to the archon toilet or magic boxing mutas. Or that you can stack marines.
the reason u dont see more micro or more cute moves is not because it doesnt exist. its because this game is fucking hard, i want to do so much more stuff with my units and builds, and use so many timing windows to do stuff but its very hard.
wait for players to become better and im sure youll find that awesome :p
just look back on micro control or games in general 1 year ago, they just amoved their armies and walked around in a death ball all game long. where as now its alot better, but its far from perfect, trust me
EPT
