On January 18 2012 23:04 shubcraft wrote: Op/Ppl tend to forget that we are in 2011. Noone new to StarCraft universe (possible 80%+ of the ppl) just do NOT want to control 12 units only, they do NOT want to send workers to minerals manualy. What "oldschool" bw ppl consider great mechanics etc. is considered quite outdated nowadays. So ppl look for lower physical requirements to control the game and faster gaming speed as they are used to frag enemys at a rate of 3 headshots per second. So the games tend to be quicker. Blz just does not want to have zone units as it will slow down the pace of the game. They want a huge deceiding fight as hollywood movies have 1 big engagement at the end of action movies as well.
My post is not ment to hate you ppl, of course does bw rely on better mechanics and is the "harder" game, but thats just not what average joe wants to see and play today.
I still think bw and sc2 have something in common tho, they are, in relation to the time they were released, easy to play but very hard to master.
You are putting words in the OP's mouth. What you brought up is not what he was pushing for; rather he was mainly asking for a look at the balance and design of the units, NOT to revert unit control and mechanics back to BW.
People need to stop comparing SC2 to BW. BW has had years to develop it's metagame. People used to believe that mutalisks were nowhere near as good as they actually are, until muta stacking was discovered.
There will be discoveries of tricks, micro or otherwise, that change the face of the game over the years, and people need to give the game the time to develop these things.
Someone earlier mentioned that SC2 is much "faster" than BW as though it was a problem. I'd say that the faster pace of combat in SC2 gives faster players the advantage to be able to micro things when slower players may not be able to, creating a skill gap between players. This is a good thing, and something people need to recognize.
You cannot compare BW to SC2, because they are wildly different in many different aspects. AOE too strong? Learn to split properly. In BW your units automatically kept distance from each other, making moving around the map harder, and making AOE spells weaker. In SC2 they clump, making AOE stronger, and movement easier. However, it IS possible to pre-split your forces and have them move in formation. It IS still possible to use multiple hotkeys for your army just as they do in BW.
In some ways I think that BW's limitations took away the need to do certain things manually (such as spreading your army out to prevent AOE from doing too much damage), while it made other things artificially harder (Macro requiring 1 hotkey per building.)
While I agree that things which prevent micro change the face of the game, we need to think of HOW they change the game. Straight micro in battle is only one skill a player needs. The player also needs to understand when they can attack, and when it is best not to, or how to engage to reduce the effectiveness of these things.
For example, a zerg may chose to engage a sentry heavy mix with roaches only after burrow so they can force the use of force fields and safely retreat, wasting massive amounts of entry energy. A terran can use medivacs to pull back over the forcefields and drop behind them again. In PvP forcefields have a bit less effectiveness anyway due to how often colossus are out (or archons).
Fungle is a bit harder to render ineffective, but my major suggestion is that people loo into pre-spreading their army, or working on attacking from multiple angles.
These elements people commonly consider harmful to the game simply require more time to be overcome, and the answers may be something people have discounted as not a viable option simply because not enough time and effort has been spent attempting to make it work.
Remember in the beta and early days when expanding as toss before you had 4 gates up was considered to be extremely risky? Now nexus first is not uncommon, and some players are convinced that FFE can work on nearly any map.
The biggest thing this game needs is people supporting the game itself and exploring various options instead of simply complaining that the game needs to change because XYZ is hurting the game. Explore ways in-game to get around the "problem", rather than crying that blizzard needs to make changes.
And I should point out that most players here do not have the skill to truly determine whether something is actually hurting the game. If you are a terran player and are simply not fast enough to split marines against banelings, then banelings feel like they completely shut down bio play, but that doesn't mean banelings need to be removed, it means you need to find a way to get around banelings without spltting. Maybe you play a more mech oriented TvZ, or maybe you get good with positioning marauders between the banelings and marines.
The lack of back and forth with players main army is a real let down, basically it's meet armies, one army wins while the other tries desperately to rebuild units for the ensuing push. Where is the back and forth with 1 army ? There is none. It just insta-kill battles...
I loved Dawn of War 1 for this, you could keep 1 squad of infantry for the whole game if you used them correctly, I loved that game (and still play it).
In SC2 it's just disposable units, make and die , make and die or make and die then make and win ... hmmm
I wish SC2 had more respect for unit longevity throughout the whole game. SC2 feels like a young RTS game to me with lots of balance/design work ahead.
Yeah make Turrets, Cannons and Spine/Spore Crawler stronger so 1 Spine Crawler can defend 1 medivac with 8 Marines and 1 Cannon can kill a small army and 1 Turret would defend against 15 Mutalisks that would be totally okay...
I think if static defenses were made stronger the game would actually break. If they get for example twice as strong as they are now nobody would build units if he could just slow push with static defenses and some far range units. (Tanks,Colossi etc.) Static defenses are ok the way it is right now if you want to hold 1 medivac with 8 marines (500Mins/100Gas) you should at least have to build 3 Spine Crawler to defend it.I would say static defenses are great for early/mid game because they are strong but in the late game they get kind of useless since they cat hold any attack of an army. (Except PF) That´s the way it should be in my opinion.
Zone Control can be applied by good building placement + good placement of some units and/or static defenses.Few examples Protoss walls off his Natural, Zerg wants to do some Runby but hmn there is 1 zealot blocking the last open space to get into the Natural and 2 Cannons behind that.I don´t know but that would actually need many lings to get through.Another example 1 Bunker behind a depot wall with 2 tanks behind that.What could easily break this? You would have to invest much more ressources to get through the defense of a player that defenses the space really good. Zone Control isn´t the way it was in BW that´s for sure but it´s because those 2 Games are really different.The comparing between those two games should be stopped.It really annoyes me.
On January 18 2012 23:34 Bobbias wrote: Someone earlier mentioned that SC2 is much "faster" than BW as though it was a problem. I'd say that the faster pace of combat in SC2 gives faster players the advantage to be able to micro things when slower players may not be able to, creating a skill gap between players. This is a good thing, and something people need to recognize.
Not at all. Look at the absolute best bonjwa BW players. Not even they can micro perfectly in BW, there is an upper limit. It's just WAY LOWER in SC2 because the game is so fast. Think about blink micro. It's the only thing close to much of the micro of BW, but to get to that point, it is instant, it wouldn't work otherwise. In a big battle, a unit goes down in half a second, no matter how good of a player you are, you can't micro that, it's impossible.
In BW, there is basically no situation where you won't do better if you micro, in SC2, there are many sitautions where you MUST a-move and microing will lower your efficiency greatly.
The "hard counters" thing is pretty inaccurate. BW had some very hard counters as well, some of which were possibly harder than SC2 counters. The issue is what units are being hard countered. Let's take PvT, for example. The Immortal is a hard counter to the Siege Tank and the Thor: such a hard counter, in fact, that it makes mech completely unviable in TvP outside of a few all-ins. Being able to counter units and indeed playstyles like that is fine: look at the Corsair, for example. It hard counters Mutalisks, and makes Zerg air play pretty much worthless outside of a few timing windows. The difference is what units are being countered. The Mutalisk is not a core unit. It is a way for the Zerg to generate map control while they're trying to expand. It is actually for the best that the Mutalisk gets hard countered, because it means that the game will shift out of the Mutalisk phase. On the other hand, Siege Tanks are the backbone of the mech army. The fact that Immortals can counter them so brutally means that the heart of that style of play is completely cut out. That's completely unacceptable.
If you take, on the other hand, the Marauder, you'll see that there really is no hard counter for it. Sure, you can say that Immortals or Colossi or Chargelots hard counter it, but the very standard addition of Marines and Medivacs and Vikings allows the Marauders to stand up and still be a core army component. That's how core army units should work. If they can ever get hard countered, it's a sign that the core army in question is fundamentally flawed. There's the entire issue of whether the Marauder should BE a core army unit, but I'll ignore that for now.
Just to ward off the inevitable, Ghosts are not a viable counter to Immortals in Mech play. The build doesn't flow to allow the Terran to get a reasonable Ghost and Tank count up at the same time. If it was viable, we would see it happening.
On January 18 2012 19:06 GeOnoSis wrote: very interesting, but I don't agree with your static defense... cannons would be just to strong! Just imagine A cannon going up behind the zerg expansion or behind a wall, making it impossible to attack. Also all this changes would make Mutas pretty useless. If Turrets would do even more damage, Mutas would be stupid to play. You already need like 18+ Mutas to kill 1 Turret, when the terran repairs it and often time you still lose one. And if there is any Zerg unit, which can't get really hardcountered, it's the Mutalisk. With proper micro you can dodge storms, magic box against thors and so on...
But that leads to a problem, you already mentioned: Too much firepower, or at least to hard counters. Like you said it's just a joke to fight with Stalkers or Roaches against Marauders or sth like that. But also, did you ever fight with an army of just stalkers and sentries against a Roach Ling army and completely got crushed? Probably yes, but did you fight against one with the same size and completely crushes him just because of forcefields? Probably YES! I think something like forcefields is sooo hard to balance. In the early game, they can just prevent any aggression in many situations and in other, nearly completely useless. I know I might wrote some weird things :D but well in the end I just think that there are too many hardcounters and the DPS against certain Unit types is obviously a huge factor.
Thors vs Muta overall is just dumb as crap. One minor mistake, such as flying 1 milimeter too close to a thor you haven't seen, and he gets one shot off. Boom, 20 mutas brought to orange HP. The idea that you have to micro mutas against Thors is a good thing, it's a counter which can be overcome by skill. Problem again being firepower and speed, there's NO margin for error. A ½ second is enough to go from a good position to a bad position just because of the insane firepower of a single thor. Like OP said, this fight would also benefit from a 50% balance. Lower the damage by 50%, but increase the splash range, or something like that. Encourange micro, while not making minor mistakes cost too much.
Thors being killed by 2/3 mutas when magic boxed isnt silly?
coming right from the unit tester.
no muta ever took a single point of splashdamage in these tests. for reference, thor max hp is 400, muta max hp is 120 edit:fixed thor max hp
1 thor vs 2 mutas : thor wins and has 296 hp left 1 thor vs 3 mutas : thor wins and has 176 hp left 1 thor vs 4 mutas : thor wins and has 8 hp left (this scenario can probably go either way, as its a matter of which side gets their last volley of first) 1 thor vs 5 mutas : mutas win and 2 have full health, 1 have 72 hp left
I tried 6 mutas v 2 thors. Prespread mutas. Slightly spread thors (no glaive dmg). Only 2 mutas died. *BALANCE*
this time I tried 2 clumped thors that took glaive bounce damage vs 6 mutas that took no splash damage, both sides focusfired, the thors won with 1 thor left which had 60 hp.
I believe in your test the focusfiring was biased for zerg, am i correct? .
I believe in your test the focusfiring was biased for terran, am i correct? Since when i am focusfiring with 2 thors against 6 mutas, i can kill all mutas without losing a single thor. Im pretty sure you just let them focusfire the mutas without including the factor that thors only need 3 shots to kill a muta, thus completely botching one shot out of 4, decreasing their dps by 33%.
However you should stop to test muta vs thor anyways since in a normal game that wont occur. The point of thor in tvz is to disallow mutas to be microed efficiently (since they cant be stacked) and magic boxed mutas actually melt to marines in AN INSTANT. Just watch idra vs taeja game 2 where the casters say "wow those thors did sooo much damage to the mutas". In actuality what happens is that the thors dont even manage to fire off a single shot because the mutas that are flying in with magic box melt to the marines since they are flying in spreaded. They die so fast that the thors cant target fast enough because they are always trying to search for a new target, which ofcourse also melts in an instant.
Its like a tap (mutas) that very slowly trickles water onto a hot stone with a heat source below (marines). Like that the stone is never able to be cooled down at all before it heats up again from the heat source below. If all of the water was put on the stone at once, it would cool down easily. Thats exactly how spreaded mutas vs stacked mutas work vs marines.
Thors make it so mutas cant be stacked, thus they are completely ineffective against marines. Ofcourse zerg can combat this by bringing zerglings, since the marines wont be able to melt the mutas as easily because the AI will target zerglings first, but the thors still disallow the zerg player to stack his mutas, therefore their mission is accomplished. Thats also why you see terrans only get 1 or maybe 2 thors, because thats enough to disallow a zerg player to stack his mutas.
Thors definitely have their role in tvz, its just that their role isnt to kill mutas but rather restrict their movement, thus making the mutas that much more inefficient.
Btw i just tested 20 mutas vs 5 thors. The thors were spreaded but i didnt micro them (since microing them will just lead to overkill damage). The mutas i did micro to target 1 thor at a time while still keeping the magic box intact. Guess what, the thors managed to kill 11 mutas. 20 mutas are a 2000 gas investment, while thors are a 1000 gas investment, and even though the thors were basically outnumbered (regarding gas investment) they still managed to deal 1100 worth of gas damage to the mutalisks.
Thors arent bad against mutas, even if you just build thors to deal with mutas.
There is a reason why TvT and TvZ are the best matchups -> tanks. Proper zone control is so much more interesting than 1a deathballs. So yeah I agree with your factor 2!
On January 19 2012 00:03 AdrianHealey wrote: Can a ghost snipe an immortal? That would be cool.
Yes. Also they have a 99.9% chance of getting a 'headshot' when they snipe, this makes the unit that was sniped explode and implode at the same time, destroying everything in an 10 range radius.
Don't forget sc2 macro has steroids. Between chronos, larvae, mules, reactors, etc there is way more production faster, which results in bigger armies faster. Combine that with souped up firepower and you have this issue of pace
Something that wasn't mentioned (or maybe it was, I just failed at reading the details) is the higher ground advantage. A major component of map control is the control of higher grounds - cliffs, ridges, etc. The sight advantage/disadvantage relationship holds same in SC2 (as SCBW), but the damage relationship doesn't (in BW, ranged attacks attempted from lower to higher ground are penalized). This is why there is far less 'defender's advantage' and 'zone control/holding' in SC2. Whether Blizzard will see this as a critical issue and address it is another story, but for us... I guess we just have to accept it for what it is.
On January 19 2012 00:22 Ragoo wrote: There is a reason why TvT and TvZ are the best matchups -> tanks. Proper zone control is so much more interesting than 1a deathballs. So yeah I agree with your factor 2!
ZvZ has so much micro involved with ling baneling wars. A lot of mindgames and a lot of cool timings. Its a very unexplored matchup. And in ZvZ zoning is kinda done with banelings.
If you watch code S play, 1a deathballs are quite a rarity. In fact, 1a deathballs never form, the games are determined by multiple small clashes and drops.
I think TvZ is all about units that kill and die very fast but I like that matchup the most and I think many people do.
If you could micro the hell out of every single unit like in wc3 that would be fun but sc2 just isnt about that after the early game and thats fine with me, when you have many units and can reproduce fast the importance of a few units just isnt that high.
EPT
