Some issues with turtle playstyles in Starcraft 2 - Page 2

On February 10 2014 22:14 vthree wrote:


Well, by the same token, turtle mech is kind of the only choice when facing someone with muta ling bling control of Soulkey. The chances of beating SK with 4M is pretty low after the nerfs.

On February 10 2014 22:21 DooMDash wrote:
Remove swarm hosts, give Zerg 30 unit higher supply cap. Still swarmy, and more powerful late game.

On February 10 2014 22:08 MasterOfPuppets wrote:
As usual a good and accurate post on what lies beneath the units and the builds (which most people seem to focus exclusively on). I do however have a point of contention with something you said:



Is this really true? We have always talked about how it takes an entire army to deal with an entire army, that zoning and area control units are far less effective (compared to lurkers, old tanks, storm, etc) in SC2. And indeed when you look at most of the strategies considered game-breakingly strong, what were they? Pushes and timing attacks that would almost always cost the defender the game if he didn't properly defend. Bunkers rushes, 5rax reapers (which I'm sure you're familiar with ), 4gate, 7 roach rush, blue flame hellion drops, Polt's 1/1/1 marine-tank-raven shenanigans and every derivative timing attack, Stephano's quick mass Roach max into attack, PartinG's soul train immortal push, hellbat drops, widow mine parade pushes, and now we have the Blink attack in PvT which isn't even an all-in to boot.

I'd love to see your reasoning as to why the defender's advantage is huge in SC2. Or perhaps I misunderstood and you meant in late game specifically.

On February 10 2014 22:28 MorroW wrote:

im sorry for not being very clear in my post. i meant defender advantage in split map is very huge by the fact that if you have your zerg army attack into PFs tanks pdds raven hsm etc you lose everything. and if terran moves out on creep their units get abducted into spore crawlers and swarm hosts are difficult to get through and getting chain fungeled is hard to deal with. thats what i meant with defender advantage. in broodwar the mech army didnt get weaker by moving outside planetary turret range because you could easily set up mines and stuff to push forward. also there was no creep speed advantage (which makes units like ultralisks almost useless as an aggressive unit)

On February 10 2014 22:07 bo1b wrote:

How can you be so unbelievably biased as to believe that building pfs turrets ravens and vikings then sitting in your base for 1.5 hours before moving out, losing half your army and then still having an army zerg can't beat is a strat worthy of winning? That strat is fucking stupid, sh are the only way zerg has a chance, and that map is awful.

The combined apm in that game must have been like 150.

On February 10 2014 21:55 MorroW wrote:
The goal to split the map quickly and zergs need to prevent it in broodwar
if the mech player managed to split the map he pretty much won the game. terran had the strongest late game army by a large margin. defender advantage was a big thing in broodwar however it didnt stop terran from attacking in late game to be cost effective anyway.

zerg always had the job to prevent the split map situation from happening against terran because of this. in result there would be natural incentive to constantly attack to fight over position and never sit back.

in starcraft 2 every race has a strong late game army and the defender advantage is pretty huge. whoever attacks in late game usually ends up losing the game.


One race having a stronger late game army in starcraft 2 is problematic
having this in starcraft 2 sounds imbalanced and we already been through WoL having zerg broodlord infestor army simply being stronger than protoss late game. the concept itself is not bad because it worked in broodwar but there are a few key reasons why this concept of design doesnt work well in staracraft 2.


1) the way economy works have been talked about a lot so i wont go into it too much in detail. basically mining from over 4 bases at a time doesnt give you an economical advantage where as in broodwar it was crucial for a player to keep expanding at a rapid rate. this created the dynamic of the terran player stretching out as much and as fast as possible while still being able to hold attacks. this allowed the zerg to find wholes in his defense and be successful by attacking to delay the terran. zerg could expand much more and waste more resources during this battle because he has a higher income.

the need for rapid expanding beyond 3 bases in starcraft 2 is not needed so zerg struggle to find the ways to be aggressive against a meching player.


2) the incentive to attack at all is lower because zerg isnt guaranteed death in a split map situation the same way they were in brood war. one could argue a spore crawler swarm host viper infestor army is just as strong as a mech late game army where attacking for either one of them means getting ineffective trades.



Final thoughts
you can blame units like ravens, swarm hosts, siege tanks and broodlords all you want but i think the roots of the problems are at a much more basic level.

you watch proleague and think this is a minor issue because it almost never happens but in regions like europe this is not too uncommon that games end up with both players benefit from not attacking, or rather attacking means death.

im one of those guys who love mech and have been trying to make it work at many occasions, however because of the problems ive mentioned is a main reason why i dont like playing or watching it so much. i want mech to work but this is not the way i want it to play out.

i believe similar issues exists in every matchup in starcraft 2 and i think these problems will always be around and we will be reminded of them once in a while in games where split map games does happen.

i just wanted to share my view on why we see stalemates in starcraft 2 more often than broodwar and why turtle playstyles are much less action packed and uninteresting than they were in broodwar.

On February 10 2014 22:43 Noocta wrote:
I don't really know how much shit people need to endure to finally accept that SC2 isn't a really good competitive game.
It drives from player stories and got its start from the Starcraft Brood war reputation.

On February 10 2014 22:51 bokchoi wrote:
let's just drop hots and play starbow competitively

On February 10 2014 22:56 MasterOfPuppets wrote:


I'm feeling kinda sorry for Blizzard to be honest, because while they finally wised up and started taking more feedback and taking it more seriously, the changes that they're considering and employing are still far too limited and narrow in scope and focus, and while it's fantastic that they're finally giving things more time and more carefully examining the issues, at the end of the day some small tweaks in terms of a couple of units' spell cost, hitpoints, damage bonus or build time will not change anything in the long run, when the problems seem to be deeply rooted in the core game mechanics.

Honestly, I was gonna say that the fact that the game "drives from player stories" isn't a bad thing, considering many of these stories are created in game (from the in-game chat we used to see at some early MLG events, to even players' specific playstyles and the way they influence strategies and the meta), but then again I am reminded how many people seem to only care for the out-of-game drama rather than any facet of the game itself.

On February 10 2014 23:03 goody153 wrote:

i'm curious. How is the popularity of starbow their S. Korea ?

do pro players try the game ? or have BW stars tried the game yet ? never heard any news or opinions about starbow from S. Korea

On February 10 2014 23:03 Noocta wrote:


Blizzard is a fossil. It's way too big to be the reactive power it needs to be, and the people in charge are way too scared of consequences if they fuck up.
David Kim isn't a lead designer at this point, he's a fucking statistician that doesn't want to shake anything up in case numbers starts to look wrong in his monthly report to Bobby Kottik.