Starbow - Page 293

We'll start at the top of the list and work our way down.

The unit behaviors is a bit of an experiment to see if we can make basic uint interaction a bit more exciting. This will be most visible and prevalent with units before various speed upgrades (metabolic boost, zealots leg speed, stim, hydra speed etc). This will also make it a lot easier for workers to scout early on as long if the opponent try to kill it with a melee unit. Workers will not have these behaviors. These behaviors makes it much more important to micro melee units and makes the auto-surround engine even worse. It also makes it better to micro smaller groups of ranged units instead of trying to studder step the entire ranged army like marines and hydralisks.

If most players find these changes to be more frustrating then interesting we will conciser reverting these changes in the next patch. This is a matter of "getting used to something new" so don't start complaining unless you've played more than 1 game please. The changes are so small, however, that we believe most casual players won't even notice much difference.

The Carrier change is a result of a discovery by UloseTheGame, and makes the carriers slightly easier to micro.

We thought it was a bit much to have two upgrades for such a small and cheap unit like the observer. We also wanted to encourage more usage of the phase shield ability so we combined the two upgrades.

We do want warp-in time for warp gates to be longer than in sc2 due the nature of "instant sudden defense" being bad for Starbow game design. However, the current warp in time is just too long for anything useful offensive or defensive, so we are giving it a buff to encourage more usage. 8 seconds is still quite long for good defensive usage (how many vulture shots will a warping in zealot take before becoming active in 8 sec?)

We nerfed the D-web radius during last patch and it was never tested out as well as we wanted. We are buffing it almost back to it's previous value (it was 2.1 initially). This is a "we messed up, sorry" change.

There has been some discussion about the Archon as of late and why its attack is quite different from the BW attack. We tested a version with BW attack and it felt much better for the game (not necessarily much stronger). This attack has bigger splash and faster fire rate, but the splash damage has been reduced. It only deals 100% of it's damage in a very small area, mostly hitting only one unit with it unless it is a very small unit. In practice this results in Archons being more effective vs Ultraliskes and less effective vs Zerglings than previously.

The scout is a unit which has seen heavy discussion lately and we have thought of several potential changes for it. The mass late-game scout switch in PvT is reminiscent of carrier switch in BW. Sadly, current version of the carrier is not what it was in BW and the scout is almost taking that role for now. The carrier may see some more love in the future but that also depends on blizzard at the moment. We are willing to keep the mass scout meta-game in TvP for now, but the fact that protoss have so many harass options in TvP early game is not too good for game-play. We have therefore moved the scout to fleet beacon requirement.

The pylon power filed is a residue from sc2 nerf to early warp-gate tech. There is no early warp-gate tech in Starbow, and hence we see no point in having a small pylon warp-in field. The new radius is the same as early Wings of Liberty size.

Reactors + overcharge is a very problematic macro situation for Starbow. We could try and balance this by increasing build time of vultures and goliaths and perhaps marines, but this will hurt the early-game of terran. Only having overcharge makes the macro mechanics fairly similar and boring but it makes actual game-play better as it forces the terran to back-to-base macro comparable to the other races with chronoboost and inject. If there was a way to have overcharge affect only one of two units in the construction facility or if there was another elegant way to combine reactors and overcharge in the editor we would have done it, but there seems to be no nice way of doing this that is actually possible in the editor. (My favorite was having a "call-down reactor")

The +5 sec to overcharge is to compensate for reactor being removed. This will make terran stronger in early-game and weaker in mid-game. Terran early game is currently fairly weak and mid.game very strong so we see no problem with this, but we'll keep an eye on it.

Nerve jammer used to have instant set-up, but then it got buffed, so we removed the instant set-up again. Now it was nerfed and we did not have instant setup either, so that is coming back again. Going in circles anyone?

Since huge masses of vultures will be a thing of the past we are very excited to see the introduction of the BW spider mine. Oh, you may have thought that current spider mine is like the BW one. You were wrong. Very wrong! Sure, most of the current mine behavior is fairly similar, but the splash damage on this mine is tiny tiny tiny. New spider mine will have a splash damage radius of 3.15. That is the same as BW and bigger than a dark swarm. This may seem like a huge buff but it is mostly a change in game dynamics. Yes, it will punish a protoss (and other races too) who are not paying attention to what they are doing, but it will also punish a terran mech player who places their mines too close to their siege line a lot. We added the old "detonate on cloaked units" as well to give terran more tools to deal with different threats. Again, this could be scary for terran players who try to defend vs early dark templars by placing mines too close to worker lines with the new BW mine. Also we added detonate on cloaked units because decemberscalm finally found a way to make it work in the editor

Lidar change is due to mines now being able to detonate on cloaked units. We felt terran got better scan a bit too early in the game.

Optical flare will probably never see much use, but it's better than nothing. It will not need research and hence could be a soft counter to early-game drop-harass and other harass involving few hig-priority targets. For those who are unfamiliar with this ability. It permanently makes target unit blind. That is, they have a very short sight range. A blind dropship will not be able to see if the dropship is safe or not and takes much greater risks than a "normal" dropship.

Missile turrets in Starbow was not the way the thought they were. This may have been a good thing but we want to see how the game will be with intended missile turrets. With a nerf to nurture swarm, it may be in order to do this as well.

The baneling is not a well-designed unit for any other match up than zvz, and even there it could be a better designed unit. We are working on a lot of potential re-designe and we may have found one that could get implemented soon, but for now we'll remove the unit since we feel it does not fit in Starbow. We are quite certain that a modified baneling will be added to the zerg arsenal at some point not too far away. If not, then zerg will get another new unit in the future.

Inject now gives +1 larva after 15 sec instead of boosting up larva production. This is mostly to make it more clear to new players that they "see" and "feel" that the ability actually does something, but it also opens up for some interesting timings with 8 larva on 2 hatcheries instead of 6 while not giving a zerg player more larva per minute than they used to have before. This is also a step away from "all macro mechanics are chorno-boosts".

Tasteless pointed out that lurker spikes and sound is a bit weak and especially for protoss players where their units do not die instantly it may be hard to spot what is happening in the heat of battle. I think more players agree, so we have visually made the lurker spikes more clear and defined.

Nurturing swarm is according to many good zerg players THE queen ability. It is so much better than the others that it does not feel like a choice. We feel that this change is quite nice, as the total effect is not changed much but it makes "stacking up nurturing swarms" a lot weaker than it is now. This way you can boost out tech a bit more, but hopefully not save up a ton of energy for super-fast and weird tech timings.