Starbow - Page 14

On January 13 2014 09:03 Cheerio wrote:

So let me break it down. What Cheren did was quoting somebody else's words that they made some tests and stim effect is around 72% (no proofs are given there). Zlefin did essentially the same, he just quoted himself, but he also relied on his own work, for which the praise is due since it is correct. And you are praising Cheren, BUT NOT zlefin. Ok.

On January 13 2014 10:18 SoleSteeler wrote:
Watched a couple games. PvT is definitely cool. TvZ didn't seem too impressive, so far. It seems there's a lot of upgrades... Like the dropship picking up sieged siege tanks, chrono boost for terran, call-down SCV, having to research chrono boost for protoss... that all seem a bit off for this game. Too many upgrades/abilities kinda makes the game feel less fluid to me. I like how you delayed warp-in until almost the late game, though. Dragoons look good too!

On January 13 2014 09:47 superpanda27 wrote:


But there is work there in that, all we had was zlefin's word that he was sure that Blizzard/Liquipedia was wrong. If he had shown that thread in the beginning people probably would not have hounded him. I don't understand why you don't understand why people were understandably skeptical of zlefin.

The siege tank/dropship ability just seems way too specialized. I can't think of any other unit interactions similar to that in either BW/SC2.

I was also confused by what the queens were doing with the hatchery... one ability was to make it spawn larva quicker (but still a max of 3) and there were a couple others?

On January 13 2014 10:41 Cheerio wrote:

this is exactly the problem, that people are hounding others not knowing whether they are right or wrong (a type of bullying behavior). A person has the right to state an opinion with or without the hard proofs, if you are flaming him for it you are implying you know he is wrong or you are just being an ass.

On January 13 2014 11:13 Piy wrote:
I would say it's too early for anyone to get really up in arms about anything in the mod tbh. I'll sit down and break the game the coming few days and see what happens.

A few things I noticed that make the game quite different, some bad, some good. I'd be interested in the thought process behind most of these:

- Dropships being able to boost means that scourge can't hit them, which prevents the ability to defend drops zvt with scourge. Makes it mighty hard for the zerg if they're playing a good terran,
- The casting range on defiler spells seems a little off. They seem to need to be quite close in to cast dark swarm, much much closer than bw at any rate.
- Spider mines don't work in the same way as bw, they seem to take much longer to burrow and it seems much easier for protoss to defuse them with goons and zealots. It is also much harder to mine up goons and kill them with groups of vultures. Also, do vultures die faster?
- Reavers are incredibly strong. They have less delay from dropping to shooting, the scarabs don't dud as often and even if they do, they do way more splash damage. Must be a nightmare to code though, and it isn't impossible, but seriously, reavers are very strong right now. You also can't prevent damage by move commanding back from a scarab.
- Mutalisks, since they can stack unlimited, are very hard to deal with for terran. Terran probably has to revert to 1 fac, CC, science vessel rushes for the time being to deal with the muta cloud.
- Medics require a tech lab now. Is there any reason for getting rid of the Academy, or is it just for variety?
- EMP has a much larger aoe, which makes it good for using on the whole protoss army rather than just arbiters. It also casts very fast now, so Arbiters are much weaker late game PvT.

I'll need to play around with the timings of protoss tech rushes PvT to see what happens, but currently it seems that having scan on the orbital makes DT's a bit worse and having the ability to chrono out certain units makes reavers a little stronger. I think 10 gate 15 gate might also be a bit too good on unramped maps, but I still need to test. We'll find out if Kwark starts playing and Longinus gets into the map pool at any rate.

Another interesting thing I've noticed is that information is a bit harder to gather vs zerg for protoss. Zerg will be one two hatcheries and 2 queens rather than building a third hatchery right away. So zerg can mind game Protoss and to a far lesser extent Terran, by altering their gas timing and having only two hatcheries. Again, will need to test further before I can even comment. Queens do seem to be worth getting, but maybe not as early, same with the orbital perhaps. Will have to see if there are good reasons to use all the abilities tomorrow.

Dropships being able to boost means that scourge can't hit them, which prevents the ability to defend drops zvt with scourge. Makes it mighty hard for the zerg if they're playing a good terran,

- The casting range on defiler spells seems a little off. They seem to need to be quite close in to cast dark swarm, much much closer than bw at any rate.

- Spider mines don't work in the same way as bw, they seem to take much longer to burrow and it seems much easier for protoss to defuse them with goons and zealots. It is also much harder to mine up goons and kill them with groups of vultures. Also, do vultures die faster?

- Reavers are incredibly strong. They have less delay from dropping to shooting, the scarabs don't dud as often and even if they do, they do way more splash damage. Must be a nightmare to code though, and it isn't impossible, but seriously, reavers are very strong right now. You also can't prevent damage by move commanding back from a scarab.

- Mutalisks, since they can stack unlimited, are very hard to deal with for terran. Terran probably has to revert to 1 fac, CC, science vessel rushes for the time being to deal with the muta cloud.

- EMP has a much larger aoe, which makes it good for using on the whole protoss army rather than just arbiters. It also casts very fast now, so Arbiters are much weaker late game PvT.

I'll need to play around with the timings of protoss tech rushes PvT to see what happens, but currently it seems that having scan on the orbital makes DT's a bit worse and having the ability to chrono out certain units makes reavers a little stronger. I think 10 gate 15 gate might also be a bit too good on unramped maps, but I still need to test. We'll find out if Kwark starts playing and Longinus gets into the map pool at any rate.

Another interesting thing I've noticed is that information is a bit harder to gather vs zerg for protoss. Zerg will be one two hatcheries and 2 queens rather than building a third hatchery right away. So zerg can mind game Protoss and to a far lesser extent Terran, by altering their gas timing and having only two hatcheries. Again, will need to test further before I can even comment. Queens do seem to be worth getting, but maybe not as early, same with the orbital perhaps. Will have to see if there are good reasons to use all the abilities tomorrow.

On January 13 2014 11:30 Hider wrote:


Yes but is that a bad thing, balance aside?

On January 13 2014 11:52 Beef Noodles wrote:

I think so for a couple of reasons -- a minor gameplay reason and a major spectating reason.

Minor Gameplay reason: it takes away one of the two main reasons for scourge in ZvT. While yes, scourge can still kill Sci Vessels, it is always when units fill more than just one VERY specific role.

Major Spectating reason: scourge vs dropship moments are some of the most tense moments in mid game ZvT from Broodwar, and if they could always boost away, I feel like that would be much less interesting. I liked that dropships were still fast enough that you could run a decent distance toward your army so that you didn't definitely lose the dropship to scourge.