Getting more out of your units. - Page 7

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.

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).

On January 02 2012 08:41 DoubleReed wrote:


Why do people always leave out zergling surrounds in this argument? I never understand it. Zerg has the ability to completely surround your units. If this succeeds, then you can't micro. It's the same thing, but it isn't an "ability." Yet everybody seems perfectly okay with this. Then when the other races getting equivalent trapping mechanisms and everyone is complaining.

On January 02 2012 08:51 Excludos wrote:


Difference is that a pack of lings trying to surround your units can be avoided with foreseeing. And even so, afterwards you can shoot your way free. Your ability to micro has been reduced but not completely taken away from you. A fungal can't really be microed against. Once it hits, your units are stuck there until he doesn't have more infestors left or you die. In BW, the equivalent ability would be plaguuuu, which instead of completely taking away micro, simply reduced it.

I agree with Day9. The problem that not many people have touched on yet, tho, is that this has the indirect effect of progamers not being able to pull away from mediocre players. If you make a buildorder mistake in sc2, a player below your skill level can easily suddenly outright kill you (Idra vs cruncher in TSL comes to mind. Altough I'll admit that the game was younger back then, and the skill ceiling has risen a bit since). In bw, however, a progamer could work such magic with his units, that he could come back from a potential bad situation. Thats why certain progamers back then could have over 90% winrate.

On January 02 2012 09:01 DoubleReed wrote:


FF and Concussive work the exact same way. All of them mean that if you try to attack in a bad position, you can't run away or do anything. Micro is "reduced."

Fungal (and maybe vortex) is the only thing in the game that is stronger in those terms than a zergling surround. And saying that fungal can't be foreseen obviously wrong. Look at the crazy micro involved with muta vs infestor! It's fucking awesome, and it's only a matter of time before we see that in the other matchups.

Edit: I don't necessarily disagree with Day9. But these comments about "abilities that remove micro" and stuff is just bullshit. It has absolutely no merit. It really makes sight and information a stronger part of the game. If anything it makes the game much more difficult in terms of micro, because it forces players to figure out how not be put into those bad positions.

On January 02 2012 09:47 Shiori wrote:

What you're basically advocating is that Sc2 devolves into even more of an elaborate guessing game and nothing else. Just because you'd rather play Risk without ever having to pick up the pieces doesn't mean that's the direction the game wants to go. For all the people clamoring about Sc2 being a "strategy" game as if this aspect should trump everything by miles, what you're essentially asking for is a glorified, 3D board game. That's not what makes Sc2 good. The strategies are cool and innovative, but they're nothing if they aren't executed well. What I, day9, and others wants is a bigger emphasis on execution to the point that strategies are good half for their innovation and half for their execution. The flipside is that the defending player can take advantage of poor execution and win. You can't do that with stalker vs marauder, for instance, no matter what the situation is.

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.

On January 02 2012 09:50 aTnClouD wrote:
no offense but op is clueless and this thread doesn't make any sense

On January 02 2012 10:50 althaz wrote:
Broodwar units start out at 20% of effectiveness. SC2 units start out at 95%. 100% = doing what you tell them to do.

You can increase BW units to about the same level as SC2 units (110-200% depending on the unit, eg: Colossi or marines) - it's just WAY harder in Broodwar because the units start out so bad.

In Broodwar it was easy for your opponent to make micro mistakes by being inattentive, in SC2 they need to actually misclick or make a bad decision. This makes it seem like the better player is able to win a battle by being a better player - when in fact the other guy just turned out to be shit (even if it's just temporarily).

Positioning, focus fire, juggling units in and out of fire, flanking moving between firing cooldowns, etc are things that people are saying you could do in Broodwar, guess what? I do the exact same shit in SC2 (I'm worse at it, but whatever).

Now, this last point is the most important, so pay attention: I've mentioned how BW and SC2 are basically the same if nobody fucks up, right? Well now ignore all that because really good micro in SC2 is WAY FUCKING HARDER. Why? Because units die SO fast and any mistakes are amplified by the fact that it's unlikely your opponent will make any if he decisively wins the battle (you often see frantic micro in close battles, but then just an a-move to finish off a weakened army because that way you can't make any mistakes if you don't do anything).

People are saying that what made BW better than SC2 is the mechanical micro you could do - but guess what, that's almost exactly what DIDN'T make it better - even if you agree that it was (I do, btw and not just because I was better at Broodwar than SC2 ) .

What made it better was the effectiveness of smaller army chunks, the better defender's advantage, the years-long refined strategy and mechanics, the amazing unit voices (seriously, SC1 sounds > SC2 sounds x100) and the ease with which you could control space. These things don't exist in SC2 but the micro DOES exist. It's easier to get it going decently but to do it brilliantly is much harder.

People way in with the same stupid nonsense in every BW vs SC2 thread I see, but rarely do they actually get it RIGHT. It's got nothing to do with micro (unless you mean purely in terms of feel, in which case that's just personal preference and not an argument that makes any sense, even though it was way more awesome). It's actually just due to unit design - which is good because that CAN be fixed if the developers are clever enough (it's harder to do in SC2 though due to movement AI, current crappy units and bronze league having to be balanced).

P.S. I love the shit out of both of these games but BW rewards skill more than SC2 and more difficult to control units won't solve the problems with clever builds being better than perfect mechanics in a lot of circumstances.

On January 02 2012 13:41 boxman22 wrote:
I've read many people say top BW pros won at a much higher rate, yet I've never once seen the stats to back it up. I wonder why. Oh ya. Because it's bs. Check the win rates in these two links: http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/korean/players, http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/sc2-korean/players

The ONLY outlier is flash. And he's not even THAT much of an outlier.

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.