EPTFungals, FF, Storms, and Smart-casting - Page 2
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league
Peru58 Posts
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Ryder.
1117 Posts
But making the game more difficult doesn't just make things better by default, otherwise you would still see single building selection and limited unit selection. Ideally you want to make the game more difficult by adding greater scope for control to the units whilst keeping the UI simple and intuitive. I didn't grow up with BW so maybe I'm just 'missing something', but IMO when you have a group of units and you click to storm once in a single place, it is much more natural and intuitive to only have a single templar drop a storm, instead of all of them storming the same place at the same time, in much the same way as it feels more intuitive to be able to select multiple buildings and have no limit on unit selection. I agree with you that by making casters/spells harder to use you can then buff them which adds more of a 'wow' factor, but I think you are better off making it difficult to use by using concepts like the Reaver, which requires a lot of control to make work because the are so slow. Or just simply changing/removing spells that reduce micro, which IMO makes much more sense than artificially making spells more frustrating and difficult to use, or by increasing damage but also increasing energy costs to solve the problem of too many spells happening at the same time. Edit: When I say 'difficult to use' I mean difficult to master, not difficult to just pick up and play and have the unit do what you want. | ||
Falling
Canada11258 Posts
On November 21 2012 15:09 league wrote: What if a player has the skill to cast efficiently even without smart-casting? Efficient as in with or without smart-casting, his speed/precision/skill in casting is the same? Then it doesn't solve the FF and Fungal problem at all. It may even make the spell too powerful. I'll grant you that. It may be that more changes are needed which is why I mentioned the projectile suggestion. I'm just suggesting that many spells that are too dominant and a large part of this is because of how easy it is to cast so many spells at once. @YyapSsap I hope you don't mind me lifting the cake-icing analogy. It's a decent comparison that I was searching for. @Ryder. No making things more difficult, doesn't necessarily make it better. (For instance, the old Entomb spell- people suggested to make it require more 'skill' it should be an individual mineral patch cast rather than AoE. This is harder, but doesn't change the fundamental problem that the Oracle is interacting with the unmoving ground and you will never get the dynamic back and forth micro of storm drop vs storm dodging for instance.) But based on the game-play implications by getting rid of smart-casting, I think it does make it better. It is for instance way too easy to lockdown or trap entire armies with Fungul or FF with smartcasting. Take that away and suddenly this could potentially become a difficult thing to accomplish. Regardless, movement restricting spells needs to be de-emphasized imo. I'm not sure why selecting ALL your casters and selecting cast and having only ONE caster fire is more intuitive that selecting ALL your casters and having ALL of them fire when you say so. The unintuitive argument is in the eye of the beyolder on this one I think. | ||
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Ryder.
1117 Posts
Granted I don't really know much about magic box casting so maybe you have a point with that, but I think my previous point about intuition remains (depending on how you want to define intuition I guess) | ||
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Falling
Canada11258 Posts
Yes, there is some initial difficulty to learn, but the skill possibilities is sooo much greater. It goes back to my (imperfect) four story house analogy. We filled in the basement because spells were 'too hard'. But that also knocked off all the top stories and left us with only the ground floor. To get the top stories back, we might need to dig up the basement a bit. And on top of that, by making spells easier, Casters have overtaken the game to fill too great a role. There is a good reason to keep them hard so that they remain in a support role and do not become the core army composition. Magic Boxes exist in SC2 as well, but for ground it seems much smaller. It was a crucial tool for being able to separate your units and separate your casters. | ||
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Ryder.
1117 Posts
I did enjoy the write-up btw, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree when it comes to what is an intuitive UI. | ||
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Falling
Canada11258 Posts
 But yeah, I can agree to agree to disagree. | ||
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Gonzo103
Germany220 Posts
SC2 is about Army and Controll - LoL and Dota is about Heros with Spells! pretty simple! | ||
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Kamais Ookin
Canada591 Posts
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Crushgroove
United States793 Posts
I normally don't make a post to just write "I agree" so I'll add this: The quality of your post should serve as an inspiration to others. Unfortunately, there has been a paucity of high-quality argument since star2 came out, and its always nice to read a quality OP like this one. Props. | ||
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Torch33
Canada9 Posts
On November 21 2012 15:31 Ryder. wrote: ^Unintuitive because there is zero reason you would ever want every HT storming the same place at the same time, which is what the UI encourages. The UI is supposed to facilitate the units acting in the way you want them, and there is never a single reason you would want them to act that way. Granted I don't really know much about magic box casting so maybe you have a point with that, but I think my previous point about intuition remains (depending on how you want to define intuition I guess) In a way though the UI encourages the exact opposite of what you are describing. You would never want 12 High Templar on a single control group anyways. The reason being that a single miss click and you lose all your very valuable High Templar. In a very perverse way the UI 'clunkiness' promotes more intuitive play by forcing you to split and pick targets. As Falling stated because of 'smart' casting spells such as storm have to be weakened to compensate for the expectation that you will hit every spell. This thus actually makes it more difficult for newer players to do well because you can no longer do much with little. If we are to assume that newer players have poor mechanics, thus having poor macro, we can also assume that being forced to have more stuff to be effective is more difficult for them to achieve. The biggest strength of Brood War was that Macro and Micro were weighted equally. Clutch storms/plagues/ other spell here could even the game back out if your macro was poor. On the flip side macro based players would have enough stuff back at base to stem the counter attack. And if you could do both great, well holy shit that was impressive. The biggest problem with Brood War was not the mechanics or the "difficulty" of things. The problem was the game never at any point taught you how the game worked. The game never taught you about control groups or camera hot keys or even unit building shortcuts, never mind more advanced tactics. I feel this is where the most frustration with the game comes in to play. Being good at real time strategy games should never be about knowing the mechanics of the game while your opponent doesn't. The skill should come from being able to execute on those mechanics and coming up with clever strategy's to out wit your opponent. Real time strategy games naturally and inherently draw people who appreciate challenge. Knowing this more difficulty and more importantly a more progressive skill curve (versus a liner skill curve) would be well received I feel. This is simply one of many ways to increase that. I will close by simply stating that while I can certainly see where you are coming from I feel that 'smart' casting is the wrong way to approach a problem I think everyone can agree exists and that is getting new players into the scene. EDIT: Just wanted to add this and say thank you for being able to have a civil discussion on the matter. Sadly all too often these types of things just break down into flame fests where nothing useful is done. Double EDIT: When I say "scene" I don't mean eSports specifically, just MP in general. | ||
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D4V3Z02
Germany693 Posts
Sc2 is much more fluid. Microing those units would just feel like a huge car crash. You could make the game have more depth and not feel like a clunky mess of disability. | ||
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Na_Dann_Ma_GoGo
Germany2959 Posts
On November 21 2012 11:59 zlefin wrote: making the interface worse, making units dumber, is NEVER a good way to balance things; it just annoys people; whatever benefits it might allegedly yield; the drawbacks are far worse. find another way. I share this point of view a lot. This is just summed up what others pointed out in more detail. And yes, I cannot support the idea of making a game more difficult to master by making it unintuitive and annoying to play. The UI is supposed to allow the user to translate his ideas into the game via an interface. I'd love that process to be as smooth as possible and not be much of a obstacle. Because in the end, as a player I want the game to do what I have in mind, do not want to play the interface. Overall I'm pretty darn sure that Blizzard has the same stance on it. Whether it's a very competitive or very casual game, it should be as enjoyable as possible to control. So I cannot ever see them changing this, not at all. The idea that when engaging a fight I should now be especially careful just using the UI to not accidentally fuck up fungals/storm etc. is very unappealing. It's play bad gamedesign really. When you told anyone "Hey, so here we make this game harder for the player by denying him better control options, which we could implement without a problem!" they would probably ask you "But why would you do that? That doesn't sound fun at all..." As zlefin said, "find another way". That's really it. If you think there's currently a problem with that stuff, which I don't really agree with but you know, you may be right, then find other ways to solve this. There seen to be plenty other possibilities that do not make it more annoying to play the game. | ||
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Cereb
Denmark3388 Posts
Not having smartcasting would be silly too since I think every game has had it since bw, and I think it could alienate alot of players. Try to explain this to new RTS players: "Oh wow he did so amazing with pulling off all those storms" "Why?" Well you see, you have to select every caster individually to cast the spell.." This just seem like a ridiculous thing having to explain why something that looks simple, and should be simple, isn't because we purposely made the game harder to control by removing something so fundamental in a newer RTS game. And alot of the time we don't know what is best. Too be honest, there was this whole debate about not making units clump up, which was interesting, but looking back, the fact that units clump up is probably one of the more skill demanding aspects of SC2 unit control today.. If your units were presplit for you, you would have to do so very little going into the fights.. This last part is not to be too harsh, cause I like your thread and the way you wrote it, but in general I just wish people could come up with new ideas instead of looking at an old and outdated game for inspiration... | ||
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FakeDeath
Malaysia6060 Posts
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Falling
Canada11258 Posts
But the enjoyability you get out of it is a concentrated, raw power damage spells. Spells that feel viscerally powerful because they do tremendous damage. The fun is the power of the few. This thus actually makes it more difficult for newer players to do well because you can no longer do much with little. This is a nice summary of my point.And the problem with most of the unit restricting spells is precisely because it is so fluid. It's really, really easy to lock an army in place and that is bad game design and very frustrating. There's a reason there are so many thread about FF's and Fungals- it's annoying to play against. People are starting to say "That doesn't sound fun at all" The care in storming is actually a good thing. Good spells that requires thought, not just thoughtlessly spamming spells. But it's worth it due to the sheer power you can unleash. Even as a beginner, one well-placed storm makes you feel powerful. And again unintuitive in this case is in the eye of the beholder. If you tell all your units to cast, they cast. If you tell your casters to spread their damage in any variety of ways, they do. But smart-casting actually disallows you from firing off spells at the same time even if you want to. (Magic Box casting.) The game doesn't allow me to do what I have in mind. I'm going to bed soon, so hopefully things don't turn to pots in the mean-time It has been a reasonable discussion so far and I hope it stays that way.edit Adapting my articles and posting on Blizzard's forums has been a complete waste of time everytime I have tried  Hundreds of threads are created and heavy text article with non-embedded videos/pics sinks down pretty quickly.@Cereb Thing is you don't need to explain that sort of stuff to newbies for them to enjoy the viewing experience. The game becomes much more self-evident. There are less spells needed overall (assuming unit movement becomes more versatile) and less spells are cast over-all. This clears up a lot of the game when most of the micro consists of attack-retreat micro and theoretically multiple front attacks (assuming defender's advantage in combination.) When the spells are cast it's really obvious what they do because the damage is so powerful and there is not a ton of other similar looking spells. And you can easily tell the difference between a regular game when 4-5 storms/ battle are cast and a truly epic battle when 9! storms are cast. The difference is obvious because you can see the impact on the army. No-one needed to tell all those Korean fan-girls all the different key-strokes that Jangbi was doing to cast that giant number of storms. The skill was self-evident because it was so rare. The problem SC2 (especially when all the HotS casters are included) will be running into is needing to explain what all the different, similar looking spells do. (Unless a bunch are nerfed into oblivion, never to be seen again.) I think we're moving even closer to MOBA team fight type battles where the spells are becoming too varied and numerous to truly tell what's going. Beyond- lots of lights and flashing stuff all at once. I mean, we coul also get rid of casters altogether. We are purposefully making units harder to control simply by having them in the game. Games like SupCom2 have moved away from this almost entirely. So in SC2, we are intentionally keeping in something that is more difficult. Why? Because that extra manual control produces better, more varied gameplay. It allows more power to be at a players fingertips balanced around how well they can use it. So also I would argue, casting with that extra manual control produces better, more varied gameplay. It allows even more power to be at a players fingertips balanced around how well they can use it. | ||
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Xanbatou
United States805 Posts
There must be a better way. | ||
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MikeMM
Russian Federation221 Posts
On November 21 2012 17:28 D4V3Z02 wrote: I dont like how it would influence the game flow, its also too late for changes like that. I just doesnt fit in a faster game like sc2. Sc2 is much more fluid. Microing those units would just feel like a huge car crash. You could make the game have more depth and not feel like a clunky mess of disability. Maybe SC2 is more fluid than BW, but it is also less interesting to watch. | ||
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SpeaKEaSY
United States1070 Posts
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YyapSsap
New Zealand1511 Posts
On November 21 2012 15:27 Falling wrote: @YyapSsap I hope you don't mind me lifting the cake-icing analogy. It's a decent comparison that I was searching for. No problem Just wonder if the relevant people could catch your thread. I know some people like to play the "fighting against the UI" card but balancing can be done in many ways, where numbers tweaking is just one of them. This is another. SC2 would be a much more interesting game, especially pro games when players start pulling off things deemed impossible. | ||
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