EPTAnyway, it's pretty much all good. The only concern would be that possibly, with a showmatch, the games could turn out really terrible or imbalanced-seeming and then everyone would hate the idea. I guess the way to stop that from happening is to make sure the players had played it a decent amount beforehand, and that they were sure not to try to play it like 8m (which could cause problems like the Cecil game.)
Breadth of Gameplay in SC2 - Page 57
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Gfire
United States1699 Posts
Anyway, it's pretty much all good. The only concern would be that possibly, with a showmatch, the games could turn out really terrible or imbalanced-seeming and then everyone would hate the idea. I guess the way to stop that from happening is to make sure the players had played it a decent amount beforehand, and that they were sure not to try to play it like 8m (which could cause problems like the Cecil game.) | ||
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MNdakota
United States512 Posts
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Deadeight
United Kingdom1629 Posts
I don't think it's an issue for casuals either. People will still be able to do whatever they want down in bronze or whatever, they already do. I don't think this would affect casuals that much, but maybe I'm wrong. | ||
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Gfire
United States1699 Posts
On March 22 2012 07:28 MNdakota wrote: Was spectating a game when all of a sudden the Terran was building a lot of factories! + Show Spoiler + http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzCCR-mkPIE Interestingly, the Terran was on three gas bases and a mineral only, with low gas income. Even with 2 geysers per base, that would be the exact equivalent of 3 bases on 8m, where mech is never used. It seems to me that a mech player would want to keep taking gas expos, and in that case I think that mech has the potential to become reasonably strong TvP depending on how the map is designed. Of course we wouldn't want bio to be completely useless, either, so it's something to keep in mind. | ||
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Champi
1422 Posts
im sure a lot of people would be really interested to hear his point of view on all of this. great thread man, i support it 100% | ||
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Gfire
United States1699 Posts
On March 22 2012 08:09 Champi wrote: Someone go grab day[9] and tell him to devote a daily to this. im sure a lot of people would be really interested to hear his point of view on all of this. great thread man, i support it 100% OH, that's actually exactly what it needs, a daily for thousands of replays to be sent in to. | ||
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herberdotcom
7 Posts
On March 21 2012 13:18 Barrin wrote: There's a bunch of differences between 1hyg and 2g (other than total).
A lot of this is a matter of opinion, but I really do like 2g overall. I see a bunch of others agreeing. In short, 2g gives more options (lets you manage gas more accurately, higher gas potential) and makes scouting more interesting. Again, I really don't want to keep changing it around. I want to pick one and stick with it. It's not set in stone yet (or even published), but I'm feeling very good about 6m2g with 2000 gas. As far as I can see this is the best we can do and shouldn't need to be changed for a very long time. TBH from most people's viewpoint, we're not "switching to 2g" we're "staying at 2g". I didn't really mean to give impression that 6m1hyg was gonna be permanent (though I hoped it would be, alas). These small bumps happen early, I think we're over them with 6m2g 2000 gas On March 21 2012 15:26 OldManSenex wrote: I have to agree that I'm not entirely sold on the two gasses just yet. Unless you reduce the amount of return per trip to 3 the gas to mineral ratio per base is skewed from what it is in ordinary Starcraft 2, and it also dramatically increases the number of workers needed to saturate a base. One of the problems with Starcraft 2 as is is that full saturation on 3 bases takes 48 workers mining minerals with 18 on gas, for a total of 66. That makes full saturation beyond four bases problematic, as it directly eats into your army supply. If you're playing a very late game on the reduced resources maps you could be as high as six or seven mining bases, so needing those three extra workers per base for the gas income translates into 18-21 supply. On March 21 2012 15:26 OldManSenex wrote: A random side thought, maybe the main has two 3 return gas geysers while most of the rest of the bases have one high yield (with maybe one or two of the expansions featuring the 2 gas instead of 1)? No idea how the balance there would pan out, but I don't think we're yet in a situation were we can or should declare that one gas style is the correct way. More games and more strategies need to be explored while we see what's possible on these maps! First of all, Barrin, a massive thank you for starting this movement. It seems clear to me that pursuing this 6m/7m change could have a strong positive effect on the game. I also think that using 2g per base will lead to less of an improvement than 1hyg per base will. Here are my reasons. In my opinion, your Fewer Resources per Base (FRB as you're saying now) change improves SC2 in two critical ways. The first is that like you said in the OP, it makes makes each base less valuable, but encourages more bases to be taken, and faster, resulting in more dynamic games. I argue that this effect is diminished by going back to 2g, because 3 more workers are required per base, slowing the saturation rate, and increasing the commitment needed per base. The second (and more important, imo) reason that FRB SC2 is more interesting to me is that reducing the number of workers needed to saturate a base effectively increases the supply cap. Seeing a player mine from 5 bases while having a standing army and still being at only 140 supply gave me a lot of faith in where this FRB trend is taking the game. It already truly has expanded the game's breadth. That effect will be diminished with 2g per base, because a 5 base player will be encouraged to have another 15 workers, decreasing his ability to use his supply more interestingly. I also understand that having 2g in your main early game results in some cool scouting / build opportunities, which we don't want to eliminate from the game. I ask you to reconsider the solution that Senex posed, where there are 2g in each main, but only 1hyg at every other base. It's an elegant solution imo, because it allows for the strengths of both systems to shine through. Of course, the amount of gas in each geyser could still be tweaked. | ||
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Gfire
United States1699 Posts
When it comes to encouraging more bases to be taken, I think with 1hyg the difference is almost too extreme. There is a point at which you are over-correcting and it is no longer beneficial. 2g doesn't necessarily decrease the improvement, it just decreases the change. It's still a pretty extreme change. | ||
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Umpteen
United Kingdom1570 Posts
On March 22 2012 02:06 Elldar wrote: You are missing the point, the 1-base player can now simply take his nat and have a comeback chance since he got the same amount of resources at his nat The reward of expanding is greater with more minerals at nat of course. But it is the effect that the 1-base will lose production if the nat has less resources that makes a difference. This force his 1-base play to be all-in, he can't expand to his nat and keep up his production if it has less resources. So in fact it makes 1-base plays more all-in if it fails, just because the reward of expanding is less. This puts a clock on the 1-base play. Maybe I am missing something, but you seem to only be thinking about the effect of reduced nat resources on the one-base aggressor here, and forgetting that it also applies to the early expander. What matters is the relative advantage of expanding early. If expanding early gives me access to just one extra mineral patch, my income can only be a few percent higher than yours during the time between me putting down the expansion and you putting it down after failed aggression. Thus the economic gap between us can only widen very slightly over that period. If, on the other hand, my natural has the same number of resources as my main, then in the same period of time I could potentially double my economy compared to yours. Yes, you then get to double your economy too, but the damage has been done: I've pulled a long way ahead. The difference between 6m and 8m is this: by the time your attack hits, instead of being on (say) 10 patches to your 8, I'm on 8 or 9 patches to your 6. Cost and balance of units haven't changed, so it still costs me the same to defend your attack. But my economy exceeds yours by a greater percentage - and will do for longer, so my advantage snowballs. | ||
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MNdakota
United States512 Posts
I enjoy 6m1hyg the most, love it. Keep it up Barrin! | ||
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See.Blue
United States2673 Posts
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=145494¤tpage=2126 to get some more discussion of it. Of all the ways to get changes like these, this has the best shot if people drum up some support. | ||
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Gfire
United States1699 Posts
On March 22 2012 09:04 MNdakota wrote: Although I'm the highest league player, I still had some interesting games with a diamond player (I'm platinum). If you're interested in watching the replay, here you go: http://drop.sc/139708 I enjoy 6m1hyg the most, love it. Keep it up Barrin! Nevermind. | ||
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DoDonPachi
Canada69 Posts
I'm ok to have 2g on the main for every reason that you have come up, barrin. Diverse strategy, scouting possibility, etc etc. It keep a diverse play on one base ( as standart SC2 have demonstrate that one base can be VERY diverse) and help players by putting them in a situation that they know, at the least for one base. But i dont see a point to make expansion have 2g. It's not like 3g on two base will make a totally different build than 4g on two base. It doesn't add up to the game, it is just for the sake of repetition. And also, 1hyg once you begin to fully use the macro, is very fun and simple. | ||
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GPThunder
Canada53 Posts
On March 22 2012 08:09 Champi wrote: Someone go grab day[9] and tell him to devote a daily to this. im sure a lot of people would be really interested to hear his point of view on all of this. great thread man, i support it 100% Seriously, that is an awesome idea. The publicity from a daily or two would be unreal. Also to be clear, is the new standard now 2g instead of 1hyg per expo? | ||
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Gfire
United States1699 Posts
Nice to hear their thoughts on it since they haven't really been posting about it much around here, that I've noticed. Most notably in the show, though, is that Ironman did talk to Blizzard a little and got an email back regarding these changes. This is at around 50 minutes. It's a fairly typical response and the guy hadn't talked to the mapping team, but it seems at least hopeful in terms of their acceptance of something like this. I'm actually pretty confident these days that Blizzard will do whatever the community wants. The fact that they cancelled Blizzcon for a tournament shows that they really care about esports and the competetive communities and not just casuals these days. | ||
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Randomaccount#77123
United States5003 Posts
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MNdakota
United States512 Posts
On March 22 2012 09:58 Barrin wrote: IronManSC talks about Blizzard email at 49:50 Yeah I'm watching it right now, it's really interesting so far. | ||
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HypertonicHydroponic
437 Posts
And here is the root cause: There is no [good] way to force an expansion to require the building placement of the base to have the gasses sit an extra tile (25%) away. Before we explore this, let's quickly discuss how resource spacing works. The gas geyser is a 3x3 object. That object has a footprint of 9x9. In that footprint, all but the four corner hexes disallow the building of a base. What does that mean? That means that there is nothing inherent in the geyser object that will force you to build your base 4 tiles away. At expansions, you can place your base 3 tiles away. At the main, if you are Terran, you can lift at the beginning and make sure you are closer to the geyser. Are there ways to force this? Yes: you could change the geyser footprint in the editor; you could arrange the minerals such that they use their footprints to impose where the base can be in relation to the gas; you could use other doodads, trees, rocks, etc. to force the positioning of the base. However, in each of these cases, you get less simple, less elegant, and there may be significant drawbacks. But regardless of the method used, in changing the distance of the geyser you begin to limit the arrangement of the bases. We already know that the positioning of the gas at the very edge of its footprint can still vary the actual rate of gas return, depending on where exactly it is located. If you put the gas exactly centered to one side of the base, you are at exactly three tiles distance. If you put the gas exactly at the corner, you are 2.828 (2 * 2^.5) tiles away (but the roundness of the building corners makes it closer to 3). If you put the gas anywhere in between those two spots you get slightly further than 3 tiles because of both the angle and the building roundness. At 4 tiles distance, you will get an exaggerated effect. Let's just consider the difference between the centered and corner positions. The centered position will be 4 tiles away (which may or may not even be truly enough to make 4 workers fully efficient). The corner position however will be 4.243 tiles away; add the building roundness factor and you are probably sitting at around 4.4 tiles. This is quite a significant difference. And even though you now have more positions to choose from, the mining efficiency variance is greater between each position -- only some of those positions are going to be desirable to keep optimal mining for 4 workers (if any actually do). Plus, if you do something like boxing the base in with the mineral footprints, you will further complicate things by having the minerals pretty significantly spread out. And since minerals are not square, and cannot be rotated (yet... c'mon blizz....), this means that your mineral spread difference between "horizonal" and "vertical" will be even more exaggerated. This can be seen as more base variety, but really just adds one more notch in the belt of positional imbalance considerations. And if we use doodads, well, then you needlessly cramp and obstruct buildings and pathing (unless you use pathable but not buildable doodads like I do in Xel'Naga's Folly... but I digress). Now with 2 gas, it becomes easier to force without resorting to something funky since you can simply have the gases on opposite sides of the base. But Terran can still deside to harvest one side with three, and the other with 4 (with the possibility of lifting and harvesting the other side with only three after the one side mines out) and maybe overall mine both more efficiently than the other two races. This is somewhat theorycraft, but the point is that even with 2 geysers there are problems. But HypertonicHydroponic! Why are you dissing this idea when all your maps are f'ed up as all get out and do the kind of crazy s..tuff in your maps that make this idea seem standard? The reason I disagree with this design approach is because it does not follow the mantra of the OP: to change as little as possible. If, no, When this idea takes off, Blizzard official adopts the change, and everyone is playing whatever this "variant" becomes as standard, then I will start F'ing with it again to see what funky elements are possible to explore. But when dealing with the legitimazation of the 6m?g movement, things need to be as clean and "new standard" crisp as possible. It cannot afford bad design decisions or extra funkiness before it gets off the ground. ---------------------------------------------- Also, I just wanted to toss a note in here about raising the mineral cap to 2000 to increase base longevity... despite my liking of the ideas that would make this aspect of the game closer to BW than not, I think that the current dynamic (1500 minerals per patch) actually leads to that BW-esque feeling of needing to expand more frequently given the worker A.I. Since the worker A.I. is so efficient, the most optimal way to make constant worker production worth it is to take more bases. Once full saturation occurs on X bases, the only way to be more efficient is to take another base (in which case you are actually improving efficiency). This is discouraged if bases were to be restored to the standard amount, and, compared to now, last 25% longer. Instead, you are more prone to simply hit three bases and max saturation instead of keeping it optimal. Thus, the two base all-in becomes the three base all-in, and you haven't really changed quite as much as you had hoped. Since optimal saturation happens ~40% faster on one base (6 workers opposed to 10) and ~33% faster to max saturation (12 workers opposed to 18), your mine-out time is significantly decreased. The reason I think this is a good thing is it forces you to start to consider taking a 4th base just to keep up 3 base mining efficiency (transferring workers) which in this variant is the equivalent of 2 base 8m2g. Then you need to take a fifth to start to approach the "full three base" 8m2g status... and a sixth to keep that up. And a 7th & 8th to sustain that as the 2nd & 3rd go dry. It is this quick/efficient mine-out factor that I think really makes this whole project great. I think it would be a mistake and a step back to increase the total resources back to 12000 minerals per base. You then go back to more of a turtling-viable scenario where Protoss and Terran are comfortable with 3 base all-ins and zerg sits on 4-5 base. While you've still managed to slow down the early and mid game a bit and encouraged slightly more expanding, you've increased the ability and likelihood of an "early" deathball. I was under the impression that you were looking to reduce the deathball viability to the 5-7 base part of the game. Remember, there are only some ways that we want this game to be more like Broodwar, and those ways are the ways that make this game better. The goal is not to recreate Broodwar per se, but to make this game "just work" like Broodwar eventually came to do. I think 6m?g does this. I think adding +500 minerals per patch does not. ---------------------------------------------- Btw, I just thought I'd mention, this whole project/issue/discussion made me inexplicably nostalgic for some Low Resources Plains of Snow... but then, now I've gone and dated myself. *\_(``7)_/* ---------------------------------------------- Also, final note -- promise! -- Barrin, do not get too impatient about the standard. You have dropped a huge bomb on the community, AND are getting a lot of support. But now that you've harnessed some of the power of the community into testing your theories, you are going to have to allow a little more than 5 days to work out these somewhat minor (though important) details. I don't think you are going to lose momentum just because the posts have slowed down -- that just means more people are out there playing your maps to see if they live up to the hype. If you are still concerned about the different options, you should start another thread to organize a testing regiment. Have one of each seriously considered map variant out there: 6m@1500 1hyg@4000, 6m@1500 2g@2000, 6m@2000 1hyg@5000, etc. and collect the opinions from the testers. Obviously, that's a lot of variations and a lot of testing but I think you will find you have enough people to go through it all somewhat efficiently. It may not be perfect, but right now you are just looking for the right feel -- something that the majority of players like and can get Blizzard's attention about. They may decide to do their own research and find some tweak they like better, the point is to get it "good enough" right now. ---------------------------------------------- TL;DR -- 1) Increasing gas distance to +25% is bad. 2) Increasing minerals to 2000 is counterproductive to the Ferby Revolution. 3) We need WC2 style variable resources -- JK! 4) Don't rush the decision, give due testing, the Ferby Revolution is here to stay. | ||
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Gfire
United States1699 Posts
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jpak
United States5045 Posts
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I'm down with change.
