Getting more out of your units. - Page 6

On January 01 2012 06:28 Ares[Effort] wrote:
100% agreed with Day[9]

On January 02 2012 00:24 MorroW wrote:
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

On January 02 2012 04:17 CptCutter wrote:
the game mechanics of protoss as a race and the warp mechanic in specific was ill-thought out. tbh, i dont put much hope on any strategy game developer out there at the moment. with the command & conquer series that went in completely the wrong direction with #4, and dawn of war having done the same with DOW2. perhaps generals 2 will bring new hope as it should probably not have any instant reinforcement/teleporter mechanic for super strong units. also, protoss only have to 1a tttttttttttttt to win. end of rant.

On January 02 2012 04:26 Schnullerbacke13 wrote:
i don't agree completely. While the microed units in BW could be up to 10 times better, microed units in SC2 may get up to 2-3 times better (not 1.5 as day9 says). The downside of a micro heavy game is, that mechanics get more important than strategies. So players peaked in skill when being 15-18, rarely a player older than 20 was successful.

On January 02 2012 04:32 AndreiDaGiant wrote:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQnGSenR4fQ

not sure if you could count this as micro or a tactic however you can see here storms are made about 100x more effective

On January 02 2012 00:24 MorroW wrote:
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

On January 02 2012 06:05 Akta wrote:
You know this but for those that don't I'll spell it out:
Big reason we don't see anywhere close to perfect micro(or what it could be called) in sc2 when the armies grow right now is because it requires extreme reaction times and apm.

Ironically, sc2 would probably be more BW like when it comes to top players getting more out of their units than others if the game speed was for example 30% of what it is now.


These things should change some as people get better and expansions could change things as well. And there are other areas that probably have huge potential gains, I doubt it will be possible to compete at a high level using the default keyboard layout in a couple of years for example.

On January 01 2012 18:59 Masayume wrote:
What day[9] meant was the following:

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.

~Masa