On February 02 2013 09:24 NukeD wrote: While this change is a step in the right direction, it will hardly do anything to save SC2.
Didn't know it needed to be saved.
Guess you have not played PvP in the past 2 years, or ZvZ at that.
Anyway, I always thought the terrain advantages in BW were so great due to how they could be strategically used - especially with map positioning and Tanks. (Ridges behind bases that have ramps on the other side) this encourages small skirmishes, but can also be used to great affect like in Flash vs Bisu on Neo ChainReaction SPL finals; seemingly one person is in an unbeatable position but the quick thinking and risk taking of another player triumphs in this example. Really, it just makes the game more interesting and intense overall.
I don't like the idea of damage reduction or anything else really suggested, but I do think high ground should be reverted to something similar to BW since there really is not a reason for it to remain the way it is now.
I could definitely get behind a cliff high ground advantage, but ramps strike me as a bit problematic. How could you ever hope to attack up the ramp at the natural on entombed for example? It could certainly work, but would require some rebalancing of certain maps.
On February 02 2013 10:55 Tachion wrote: I could definitely get behind a cliff high ground advantage, but ramps strike me as a bit problematic. How could you ever hope to attack up the ramp at the natural on entombed for example? It could certainly work, but would require some rebalancing of certain maps.
Yup a rebalance would be necessary of popular maps, but Imagine cloud kingdom, holding that mid section would be such a tactical boost it would be untrue.
Lower leagues will turtle a lot more, but the high league play opportunites would be amazing. All I would say is with this to work, they NEED to remove watch towers off high ground, otherwise Seige tanks will be disgusting.
It's a save for TvX and I can't understand why you are all so blind to see it o.o
The more you increase defender's advantage, especially in TvT, the harder it becomes to break turtlers. Everyone will just stay on tanks until they can go air. At least with the current situation, there is a constant flux on control, where one person has it, and the other person attempts to gain it, and then we attempt to go for Sky Terran once the other person tries to huddle themselves up (when they give up attempting to try to swing the game into their favor and try to take minimal losses). In TvP, this is a wasted mechanic (forcefields are your defender's advantage and you don't need one after the early game). TvZ, not so sure, because Zerg has no units that can seige while on ground, so the only thing it affects is marines, but we're transitioning into a game where mech is heavily preferred to bio (HoTS), so there's no need to worry about that.
It's a good thing that defender's advantage is only early game and mid game, because that's when you need it for the game to progress beyond the 8 min mark. But after that, it's just a "don't touch me, don't touch me!" mechanic, and that's not why anyone plays strategy games (at least, I've never heard of anyone that plays strategy games just to sit in their base all game).
On February 02 2013 10:47 MCXD wrote: I think I agree that this would only encourage turtling and death ball play more, which is not what's needed. If the defenders advantage is greater then people simply won't attack. If they won't attack, the game becomes boring (and results in long games with a single 200/200 battle that decides it when one player eventually gets impatient)
Well, one of the reasons that SC2 is deathball-y is because you can't really defend using a significant smaller force cost effectively. If you split you army is half, you just get run over. High ground advantage might help with that.
However, maps and maybe units themselves would all probably need to be rebalanced. Because comps are ling bane mutas aren't affected much while thinks like marine tank are nerfed significantly when on the low ground.
Some people are being a bit narrow minded on how this could potentially lead to better game and map design.
For example, everyone saying people would just turtle are assuming that your 2nd or 3rd base are always a high ground base. Well think of maps where essentially your main is high ground, natural is "even ground" and then ur 3rd is actually low ground. In those cases you could actually have a situation where trying to turtle on your 3rd would be easier to break since your defense could be below while the offensive units are actually on higher ground.
I'm not saying the idea is good or bad, but everyone saying it just leads to more and more turtling and defender advantage isn't thinking about the way maps could really be set up. So it is something to consider although I think anything more than -1 range or a slight damage reduction(15-20%) would be to extreme.
One thing I really miss from SC and BW was the use of the terrain. Putting tanks on ledges, dropping hydras on high ground, and cannoning ledges were all a fun part of BW although sometimes abusive. But it was something you had to prepare for and led to some cool play and strategy.
On February 02 2013 11:10 furerkip wrote: The more you increase defender's advantage, especially in TvT, the harder it becomes to break turtlers. Everyone will just stay on tanks until they can go air. At least with the current situation, there is a constant flux on control, where one person has it, and the other person attempts to gain it, and then we attempt to go for Sky Terran once the other person tries to huddle themselves up (when they give up attempting to try to swing the game into their favor and try to take minimal losses). In TvP, this is a wasted mechanic (forcefields are your defender's advantage and you don't need one after the early game). TvZ, not so sure, because Zerg has no units that can seige while on ground, so the only thing it affects is marines, but we're transitioning into a game where mech is heavily preferred to bio (HoTS), so there's no need to worry about that.
It's a good thing that defender's advantage is only early game and mid game, because that's when you need it for the game to progress beyond the 8 min mark. But after that, it's just a "don't touch me, don't touch me!" mechanic, and that's not why anyone plays strategy games (at least, I've never heard of anyone that plays strategy games just to sit in their base all game).
Your post, to me at least, seems to be under the impression that all maps are tight enough together that you CAN sit there and say "Don't touch me"
However, this is becoming less and less true with just one season of Kespa maps. Not perfect obviously, but a step in the right direction with everything being more spread out. If you can't abuse the fact someone is sitting in one spot on maps like that then you have no right to complain about people "camping", especially in an RTS. I think a better high ground mechanic would only supplement these new maps.
On February 02 2013 10:47 MCXD wrote: I think I agree that this would only encourage turtling and death ball play more, which is not what's needed. If the defenders advantage is greater then people simply won't attack. If they won't attack, the game becomes boring (and results in long games with a single 200/200 battle that decides it when one player eventually gets impatient)
Well, one of the reasons that SC2 is deathball-y is because you can't really defend using a significant smaller force cost effectively. If you split you army is half, you just get run over. High ground advantage might help with that.
However, maps and maybe units themselves would all probably need to be rebalanced. Because comps are ling bane mutas aren't affected much while thinks like marine tank are nerfed significantly when on the low ground.
Agreed - if the high ground advantage was increased, maps should be changed so the bases are more spread out, BW style. This would force more map awareness and control and encourage the use of small harassment squads to attack far expansions while still preventing the expansions from being steamrolled by the full army due to the increased ability to defend.
This is something I've been mulling over myself. The problem, as we see is, some people think the high ground (defenders, usually)advantage(in sc2) is fine, too great, or not enough. It is something that is still up for debate, and I'm not 100% sure if there is a right answer. Ramps also need to be taken into consideration, as this is really where the defenders advantage plays out in sc2(terrible terrible splash damage).
I'm currently thinking high-ground should be slightly better, by giving a flat damage reduction (somewhere in the 5-10% range), but I could be convinced otherwise.
As an aside, it is worth mentioning that in BW, being on high ground gave you a 30% chance to be missed by an attack from the low ground (random). I don't think that is the correct way to go about this (even though it averages out to about a 30% damage reduction in the long-term).
On February 02 2013 11:15 FLuE wrote: Some people are being a bit narrow minded on how this could potentially lead to better game and map design.
For example, everyone saying people would just turtle are assuming that your 2nd or 3rd base are always a high ground base. Well think of maps where essentially your main is high ground, natural is "even ground" and then ur 3rd is actually low ground. In those cases you could actually have a situation where trying to turtle on your 3rd would be easier to break since your defense could be below while the offensive units are actually on higher ground.
I'm not saying the idea is good or bad, but everyone saying it just leads to more and more turtling and defender advantage isn't thinking about the way maps could really be set up. So it is something to consider although I think anything more than -1 range or a slight damage reduction(15-20%) would be to extreme.
One thing I really miss from SC and BW was the use of the terrain. Putting tanks on ledges, dropping hydras on high ground, and cannoning ledges were all a fun part of BW although sometimes abusive. But it was something you had to prepare for and led to some cool play and strategy.
It's also worth noting that without actual terrain with actual effects means the only tool left is really the choke, which means traversibility is tied to terrain advantages always, and can be used by attacker and defender alike. With actual terrain that grants actual effects, you can have wide, uneven plains and small hills that are important for cover and so on. You could design terrain so that it was pretty unilaterally in either the defender's or attacker's favor. It'd free up mapmakers to experiement landforms in a much more nuanced way than is possible in current SC2.
The defenders advantage isn't "too good" in SC2 at present, it's more the properties of zerg that allows them to be insanely greedy. There are only a couple of builds that can punish the map control and economical advantage zerg gets by default now and they are extremely risky all-ins.
On February 02 2013 11:46 dirtydurb82 wrote: Great for every match except Mirrors. And may encourage a lot more bio in TvT now that I think about it... Huh.
I think this would help mirrors the most... at least it would help pvp for sure.
On February 02 2013 09:28 Pufftrees wrote: I am glad Blizzard is thinking about trying new things. When I first got WoL beta and even before that when we played at Blizzcon, the lack of high ground advantage really irked me. Like many things I moved on and I honestly never really thought about revisiting this mechanic... so props to Blizzard in that regard.
I wouldn't be worried about "Saving" Sc2 lol. It will pretty much dominate the RTS market for a while. There will always be a desire for competitive rts and as long as it has no competition it doesn't need saving. Now trying to compete with Mobas or another genre... well that is another story.
Let's all just focus on helping Blizzard making SC2 the best it can be!
Maybe I missed something, but I was under the impression that Blizzard has been ignoring these type of threads.
I'm going to play a little bit of devil's advocate, and argue a little against some of the suggestions. First, for a range reduction, my concern is that this affects high range units less than low range units in the sense that the % reduction of their range is less. I would prefer that a high ground advantage have a more flat % effect on ground range units. It keeps the purpose of the strategic terrain clear, instead of adding an element of "if I have the right composition to attack that hill, I can faceroll."
Second, the argument that random effects in Sc2 "average out" to something predictable gives me pause. The Law of Large Numbers does not apply here. A game of Sc is not a series of independent trials. Any kind of swing could potentially have great effect on the later stages of the game. This is especially true with my next concern with this argument, the baneling.
A couple banelings surviving can have a great effect on the outcome of the fight. A 5 health baneling does as much damage as a full health baneling. Of course, the 5 health baneling has less chance of survival to make its optimal detonation, but I feel like it needs testing to see how large the variance in gameplay could be.
I can't think of any argument against a flat damage reduction. Before people start arguing about decimals, remember that they could internally multiply all of the damage/health in the game by N allowing "fractional" values by 1/N. Of course, they would keep the health displays the same (just divide by N).
Edit: The other problem with % chance to miss ideas is Sc2's smart fire. I feel like their interaction would severely affect something like marines. They would intentionally spread their fire too thin against stuff on the high ground.
On February 02 2013 09:24 NukeD wrote: While this change is a step in the right direction, it will hardly do anything to save SC2.
Didn't know it needed to be saved.
Guess you have not played PvP in the past 2 years, or ZvZ at that.
I've played both. The only thing that sucked about PvP was 4-gate and now that's null and void, and ZvZ only sucks now that people go BL/Festor every time. Ling/bane wars aren't that bad and PvP openings can be pretty diverse.
On February 02 2013 09:24 NukeD wrote: While this change is a step in the right direction, it will hardly do anything to save SC2.
not sure if its a "step in the right direction" or not but sc2 isnt the skill fest BW was i just wonder when we give up on blizzard games. its not just sc2 guys all blizzard games are horrible these days
To all of the opposer of this ideal. Think about it logically. If you are aiming at something from a lower platform, it is only obvious that the exact energy utilized to launch the shot as equal level will travel less. This, not only will improve SC2's gameplay but also enhance our suspension of disbelief.
EPT
