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On November 12 2014 00:24 Hider wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2014 23:41 Big J wrote:On November 11 2014 23:31 OtherWorld wrote:On November 11 2014 23:09 Eiltonn wrote:On November 11 2014 22:33 custombuild wrote:
The old broodwar players do not seem to like the changes. Personally, I like the changes and I am willing to try a new styles. Yes because they can´t accept that SC2 ain´t BW :D The idea behind lowering the base saturation is awesome, but we also need to decrease the patches to something like 6. If we stick with 8 patches (and don´t change mining efficiency etc.) we will still have the optimal 3 base saturation where having 4 mining bases is not worth it. If Blizzard does something like we have to expand more often and have more bases at the same time. The thing is that the economic system should not force players to expand more often, it should encourage players to do so, while still making playstyles with less bases viable. That way we would have assymetric matchups and exciting matches ; while what you think Blizzard should do would just make the game almost identical to what we have, with players trying to have 4 bases instead of 3. I disagree. I think people should be forced into expanding to a reasonable high count to make for good games. That is a count that allows your opponent to attack you. Starcrafts supertight main and natural bases leave little room for attacking. Forcing players into at least 3bases* makes for better games. It is not reasonable to have counterattacks or lots of harass on less bases and more would probably be even better. *3bases is just the number that is currently reasonable on most maps. With gameplay/map changes this could change. Well that's only the case if you realistically can defend/protect your bases while attacking simultaneously. For that to be the case, Starcraft must be completely overhauled, and it's incredibly difficult to do that.
Any form of economic change will require an overhaul. Something like the 1000minerals thing might be one of the easiest ones still. Though it might just not have such a big impact and in the end just ruin what we have without improving the game.
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But why is the Hellion trying to kill a cannon? Vultures, the closest kin to hellions we have, didn't try and take on static defense either. They ran by, slaughtered a mineral line and left. Generally into a lightly defended freshly taken expansion.
I also disagree mech players can't harass. Hellbats still exist to drop into mineral lines, we already went over hellions and now they've added lightspeed banshees. Sure mech may not have the all-purpose harass of upgraded bio but they have some great tools.
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I don't see the siege tank medivac thing as a super strong harass tool. Seems very expensive and gimmicky. However, siege tank pushes with a medivac will be much stronger as you can leap frog your tanks more easily.
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On November 12 2014 00:17 custombuild wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2014 23:59 Thieving Magpie wrote:On November 11 2014 18:29 knyttym wrote:On November 11 2014 15:56 FabledIntegral wrote:On November 11 2014 15:16 knyttym wrote:On November 11 2014 14:33 pure.Wasted wrote:On November 11 2014 14:30 FabledIntegral wrote:On November 11 2014 13:45 pure.Wasted wrote:On some date iamcaustic wrote on Reddit:
Even if I were to back away from my concerns about separating economy acquisition from a player's strategic game plan, I'm still left with the worry about racial design.
To make forced 6+ bases a viable thing for all three races, you'd need to make all three races equally mobile to protect those bases. Thinking back even to WoL and Protoss, they needed thirds to be really close so they could actually acquire them because otherwise T and Z would give them the run around.
If equal mobility is a key design concept for Blizzard going into LotV, that's their choice, but I think it'd destroy a lot of the uniqueness of each race and what we've been shown thus far doesn't seem to imply it. More realistically, I think we're going to see certain races suffer in different match ups similarly to how Protoss suffered in WoL, OR we're going to see fortress-style maps (think team maps, but 1v1).
Saw this post on Reddit, figured it'd be better to discuss it here. I must admit to some confusion. Isn't forced 6 bases the "BW way"? And isn't the OP all about how to make SC2 more like BW and less like WOL? HOTS certainly made Protoss more mobile, and it's no surprise every single Protoss MU became more interesting as a result. The best PvTs of the year came at the height of Chargelot/Templar which is the most mobile Protoss comp. I would certainly hope that's the way LOTV progresses... No, BW had tons of 2 base allin play. You'd be on two base for extremely long periods of time, nowhere near the rate you'd expand in SC2, with the exception of ZvP if the Protoss went forge FE. Even in thsoe games, P went 2 base forever. So why change anything in HOTS, then? HOTS has 2 base plays for Protoss in all three MUs, and plenty more 3 base plays (which is only one base up from 2). The reason we are discussing options is because blizzard has for the first time acknowledged publicly that the current system may not be optimal. This is a big step forward from them and one many people are extremely excited about. As for the previous poster's comment, I'd have to disagree and say it's not about 2 base all-ins. It's about the rigid structure that is currently in place for macro play styles. As a rule, players must gain access to 24 mineral patches to play macro styles. This is because 24 patches have such an exceptional advantage over 16. The result is turtling and deathballs. Yes, this is not always the case but it occurs often enough that blizzard has decided to take some action. That is why the OP has put forth the gradient economy system. It fixes this rule. Blizzard's method does not. I'd contest I said it's about 2 base allins, just that BW wasn't all about pure macro up to tons of bases. If anything, BW was the opposite feel. Extra bases helped but not to the degree in SC2. I preferred the BW econ system far over SC2. Starbow already implemented it and it felt good. That's fair. His response mentioned 2 bases in sc2, which has become almost synonymous with all-ins, so I assumed your post meant the same. On November 11 2014 17:07 Thieving Magpie wrote:On November 11 2014 16:41 AndAgain wrote:On November 11 2014 16:34 RampancyTW wrote:
Seriously, can anybody explain to me why ANYBODY CARES about not having a mineral advantage while being the mass-expanding player when every non-bio player in the history of ever floats 3000 minerals while being starved for gas about 10x more than they ever run out of minerals before gas? The fact is that players rarely mine off of more than 3 bases. So your point is moot. He's saying that maybe they're focusing mining minerals efficiently when they should focus more on gas efficiency and hence should expand to gain more gas geysers. Of course this would require a tech tree that made it so that the late game shock troops are gas heavy units or gas based spammable units which SC2 does not support except for Archons and Mutalisks. Any other unit comp needs the minerals too much. He's not wrong. If 24mineral nodes is the most you'd want, then tech trees in late game should be made to almost ignore minerals and emphasize gas (moreso than now) so late game is all about mining all the gas geysers you can (with a cap of only 6 miners per expansion) Its an interesting and bold idea that I like that requires no changing of the econ system. But I think BW purists won't like the idea. Shifting focus to gas runs into 2 issues I can think of. Firstly, there is still no backup plan when you lose a base. It's exactly like losing your 3rd mining base and being relegated to 2 base mineral income. The snow ball effect still occurs which limits the back and forth action that we desire. Secondly, deathballs will be even more expensive and the game is more likely to come down to one single fight. As mentioned before, losing your precious base means a huge dent in your income. This fear promotes turtling which in turn promotes the creation of deathballs. As your lower tier units become more useless, you throw them away slowly while replacing them with your high tech gas units. Because this late game army cannot be replenished easily, armies will sit and wait until they achieve perfect compositions before risking a fight at all. We can already see this in PvZ swarm host vs tempest/void ray (zest vs life on nimbus). No no, you're not understanding me. I said gas based shock troops or gas based troops that become your main unit. In BW these were siege tanks, Dragoons, hydralisks, etc... Units the races built en masse, as the main workhorse, and not just specialty units protected by fodder--they were the fodder. Right now in SC2 the only gas units people want to mass are colossus/Templar, Swarm Hosts/Muta, and medivacs. Except for the muta, all those are these over specialized non-front line troop that you use to engage enemy forces with. It's also no surprise that muta/ling/bling is damn sexy to watch but collossus deathball are boring. Heck, storm play is "okay" to watch bu archon/zealout is exciting. And it's exciting because archons don't actually trump anything, they're this general purpose tanky melee unit, almost like an improved zealot. For his comment about switching to gas based tech in the upper tiers we need to change how units are designed in sc2 where gas is what the base front line units need moreso than minerals. A good example is the economic system of the Age of ____ series where food is what is most important early, but once you get to the midgame food slowly becomes irrelevant and the game becomes about gold which you can't just farm in your base. This made it so you had to expand to reach the important resources, but still had access and some use for the base resource. If you think of minerals as food and think of gas as gold it's a similar thing. Food does not become "slowly irrelevant" but rather the player is able to auto produce it from other sources. On AOE series, food is made different ways as the game moves into mid/late game as seen by berries, hunts, Mills, farms, factories, fishing, creating livestock and sending shipments. So in a way, you could say that resources become extremely important as the game advances but it is just not the main focus of the player because automatic resources allowed the players to focus on killing each other. The game created a system that makes the player want to seek out other resources not by force but as a "reward" like other users on this forum were suggesting that LOTV should implement.
Don't use dishonest descriptions please.
Food became less useful when gold became the stopgap of higher tier units. Both food and wood were still farmed plenty, bu since they were easily accessible you always had a high influx of wood/food but were always starved for gold.
The same thing also happens with BW where players eventually bank minerals because the stopgap was gas moreso than minerals.
It's arbitrary what the system used to create that disjunction. If you, for example, made it so each mineral patch had 15,000 minerals but designed the baseline units to a all want to use gas, you'd still be forced to expand a lot to get gas geysers because minerals is essentially infinite.
Going back to the age of series, even their base infantry needed "gas" could you imagine if marines and zerglings cost 50min/10gas? No one would give a dam about mining efficiency and 90% of the game would be constant expanding to get gas because would be the bottleneck.
This is what I mean when I say that the Econ system is arbitrary. You can change the Econ just as much by just change unit cost instead of mining time/rate. What is more important is that we pick a system (any system) and adapt the game to that system.
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On November 12 2014 01:09 mishimaBeef wrote:
I don't see the siege tank medivac thing as a super strong harass tool. Seems very expensive and gimmicky. However, siege tank pushes with a medivac will be much stronger as you can leap frog your tanks more easily.
Agreed on both counts. Siege tank harass feels pretty similar to Colossus harass. Sounds fun and cool on paper but doesn't
really work in practice.
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On November 12 2014 00:58 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2014 00:24 Hider wrote:On November 11 2014 23:41 Big J wrote:On November 11 2014 23:31 OtherWorld wrote:On November 11 2014 23:09 Eiltonn wrote:On November 11 2014 22:33 custombuild wrote:
The old broodwar players do not seem to like the changes. Personally, I like the changes and I am willing to try a new styles. Yes because they can´t accept that SC2 ain´t BW :D The idea behind lowering the base saturation is awesome, but we also need to decrease the patches to something like 6. If we stick with 8 patches (and don´t change mining efficiency etc.) we will still have the optimal 3 base saturation where having 4 mining bases is not worth it. If Blizzard does something like we have to expand more often and have more bases at the same time. The thing is that the economic system should not force players to expand more often, it should encourage players to do so, while still making playstyles with less bases viable. That way we would have assymetric matchups and exciting matches ; while what you think Blizzard should do would just make the game almost identical to what we have, with players trying to have 4 bases instead of 3. I disagree. I think people should be forced into expanding to a reasonable high count to make for good games. That is a count that allows your opponent to attack you. Starcrafts supertight main and natural bases leave little room for attacking. Forcing players into at least 3bases* makes for better games. It is not reasonable to have counterattacks or lots of harass on less bases and more would probably be even better. *3bases is just the number that is currently reasonable on most maps. With gameplay/map changes this could change. Well that's only the case if you realistically can defend/protect your bases while attacking simultaneously. For that to be the case, Starcraft must be completely overhauled, and it's incredibly difficult to do that. Any form of economic change will require an overhaul. Something like the 1000minerals thing might be one of the easiest ones still. Though it might just not have such a big impact and in the end just ruin what we have without improving the game.
Well if 1k mineral patches forces player to defend more bases as well, that will - ceteris paribus - makes it harder to invest into offensive actions simultaenously. So whether more or less aggression occurs depends on what weights the most:
Factor 1: Enemy being slightly more spread out --> Makes your harass play stronger (ceteris paribus)
Factor 2: You being forced to invest more into defensive options --> Makes your harass play weaker (ceteris paribus)
How can we know which one of the two factors weights the most? The answer is that the race which benefits from scaling will choose the strategy that results in the highest army value (assuming cost-efficiency in both options are the same). That will mean that mech/protoss will focus on defensive options and is less likely to invest into harass.
Therefore, you are much more likely to see less aggression when you have mobile vs immobile as the latter typically benefits from scale and therefore will attempt to "stale" the game. The reason you see that mech-players invests into harass today is that an increase in offensive investments only reduces the Siege tank count in periods where it's not very important to have a high siege tank count. If on the other hand, they need to take bases much faster, it is much more vital to have a higher siege tank count faster.
In mobile vs mobile, we may see a bit more aggression, but we will also see a stronger snowball-effect since there is less economy to fall back on.
@ buffing harass options as alternative
I think you underestimate how much easier this solution is, especially since alot of units needs a redesign anyway, and you can redesign the units while adding more multitask opportunities to them simultaneously. Collosus and Immortal are poorly designed? Ok, let's redesign them and give them better synergy with warp prism --> More fun micro interaction + More multitasking.
Or let's look at overlord drops. What if you made this upgrade 50/50 and perhaps even buffed the speed of overlords slightly. and/or allow them to pick units up outside range (as the warp prism can in LOTV)?
Would that be completley game-changing and would it require changes to all units as a 6 mineral path/12 max saturation + tower-econ would?
I highly doubt it, but it would reward more multitasking.
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United States7483 Posts
On November 12 2014 01:11 Tenks wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2014 01:09 mishimaBeef wrote:
I don't see the siege tank medivac thing as a super strong harass tool. Seems very expensive and gimmicky. However, siege tank pushes with a medivac will be much stronger as you can leap frog your tanks more easily. Agreed on both counts. Siege tank harass feels pretty similar to Colossus harass. Sounds fun and cool on paper but doesn't really work in practice.
Yeah, but elevator strategies are going to be NASTY. Siege tanks on low ground, put marines on high ground, poke. Enemy doesn't crush it immediately? Start moving tanks to high ground. He comes to defend? Just put the tanks back on the low ground again.
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On November 11 2014 21:17 Meavis wrote:
the thing is that exact same thing can be done by taking maps with fewer bases, there is little to no good reason for the reduced resources per patch.
No, these are two different things. Less minerals per base means you need to expand more often, less bases with same minerals just means they will not expand more but games will last as long as with proposed changes if both sides mine out the whole map.
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On November 12 2014 01:11 Tenks wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2014 01:09 mishimaBeef wrote:
I don't see the siege tank medivac thing as a super strong harass tool. Seems very expensive and gimmicky. However, siege tank pushes with a medivac will be much stronger as you can leap frog your tanks more easily. Agreed on both counts. Siege tank harass feels pretty similar to Colossus harass. Sounds fun and cool on paper but doesn't really work in practice.
Colossus harass is 500/200 worth of units +200/200 upgrade (lance)
Tank harass is 250/225 worth of units with +0/+0 in upgrades
Tank harass hits farther, and deals higher damage per "hit" which is important since drop harass is not about sustained dps, but is instead about iterative dps.
It also takes 5 supply instead of 8 (which is a big difference)
It's also a comp interaction thing. Protoss deathball makes 3-4 colossus and supports them with units. Mech players make 8-10 siege tanks. Pulling out 10% of your siege tanks for harass hurts less than taking out 33% of your colossi.
They aren't really comparable.
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Well tank harass is new reaver harass. I guess zergs will need to build mutas every game vs mech.
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Except now we have queens.
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Agreed on both counts. Siege tank harass feels pretty similar to Colossus harass. Sounds fun and cool on paper but doesn't
really work in practice.
Depends if your enemy has air units or not. Vs mass mutalisks, it's not very efficient, just like Collosus drop isn't efficient per se since enemy always get Viper/Corrupter or Vikings vs it.
Morever, this also depends on whether you are forced to use tanks to defend bases. Protoss is very realiant on their unit count throughout all stages of the game, so having 1 Collosus away from the army from a period of time is a big deal. With Siege tanks on HOTS/BW-econ, you can afford to "waste" 1-3 and still be in fine shape. But with new LOTV economy, your more inclined to get more Siege tanks out for defensive purposes in order to secure bases.
Yeah, but elevator strategies are going to be NASTY. Siege tanks on low ground, put marines on high ground, poke. Enemy doesn't crush it immediately? Start moving tanks to high ground. He comes to defend? Just put the tanks back on the low ground again.
Yeh Siege Tank pick-up is 100% awesome. I am still surprised it was never implemented in HOTS beta, and I remember going on battlenet forums and suggesting it as a counteroption to blinding cloud. A shame Blizzard didn't listen back then 
But, I am more sceptical of dropping off in Siege mode. I think that's more of a hardcounter-thing as most units cannot actually kill the medivac or Siege tank as long as the terran micro decently. E.g. If you only have Roach/Hydra vs this, your in a really bad position.
It will therefore force Mutalisks/Phoenix/Mass blink stalkers/abduct, and these counteroptions are more of a guaranteed thing, which doesn't have any fun interaction with the Siege tank + medivac combo.
If we compare it to Medivac marine speed boost vs Mutas, that's an awesome interaction as a group of Mutalisks can kill a Medivac drop, but terran can boost away while dropping of Marines and target fire Mutas. The zerg player can then respond by pulling the injured Mutalisks away, and it's just super fun to play and watch.
With the Reaver drop in BW, you also had a cool little interaction against the Siege Tankd and turrets that wasn't black and white, but depended more on micro from both sides.
I fear that when you can land siege tanks, then the interaction is more black and white. Either the enemy has composition to shut it down or the terran can get infinitely cost-effective.
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On November 12 2014 01:11 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2014 00:17 custombuild wrote:On November 11 2014 23:59 Thieving Magpie wrote:On November 11 2014 18:29 knyttym wrote:On November 11 2014 15:56 FabledIntegral wrote:On November 11 2014 15:16 knyttym wrote:On November 11 2014 14:33 pure.Wasted wrote:On November 11 2014 14:30 FabledIntegral wrote:On November 11 2014 13:45 pure.Wasted wrote:On some date iamcaustic wrote on Reddit:
Even if I were to back away from my concerns about separating economy acquisition from a player's strategic game plan, I'm still left with the worry about racial design.
To make forced 6+ bases a viable thing for all three races, you'd need to make all three races equally mobile to protect those bases. Thinking back even to WoL and Protoss, they needed thirds to be really close so they could actually acquire them because otherwise T and Z would give them the run around.
If equal mobility is a key design concept for Blizzard going into LotV, that's their choice, but I think it'd destroy a lot of the uniqueness of each race and what we've been shown thus far doesn't seem to imply it. More realistically, I think we're going to see certain races suffer in different match ups similarly to how Protoss suffered in WoL, OR we're going to see fortress-style maps (think team maps, but 1v1).
Saw this post on Reddit, figured it'd be better to discuss it here. I must admit to some confusion. Isn't forced 6 bases the "BW way"? And isn't the OP all about how to make SC2 more like BW and less like WOL? HOTS certainly made Protoss more mobile, and it's no surprise every single Protoss MU became more interesting as a result. The best PvTs of the year came at the height of Chargelot/Templar which is the most mobile Protoss comp. I would certainly hope that's the way LOTV progresses... No, BW had tons of 2 base allin play. You'd be on two base for extremely long periods of time, nowhere near the rate you'd expand in SC2, with the exception of ZvP if the Protoss went forge FE. Even in thsoe games, P went 2 base forever. So why change anything in HOTS, then? HOTS has 2 base plays for Protoss in all three MUs, and plenty more 3 base plays (which is only one base up from 2). The reason we are discussing options is because blizzard has for the first time acknowledged publicly that the current system may not be optimal. This is a big step forward from them and one many people are extremely excited about. As for the previous poster's comment, I'd have to disagree and say it's not about 2 base all-ins. It's about the rigid structure that is currently in place for macro play styles. As a rule, players must gain access to 24 mineral patches to play macro styles. This is because 24 patches have such an exceptional advantage over 16. The result is turtling and deathballs. Yes, this is not always the case but it occurs often enough that blizzard has decided to take some action. That is why the OP has put forth the gradient economy system. It fixes this rule. Blizzard's method does not. I'd contest I said it's about 2 base allins, just that BW wasn't all about pure macro up to tons of bases. If anything, BW was the opposite feel. Extra bases helped but not to the degree in SC2. I preferred the BW econ system far over SC2. Starbow already implemented it and it felt good. That's fair. His response mentioned 2 bases in sc2, which has become almost synonymous with all-ins, so I assumed your post meant the same. On November 11 2014 17:07 Thieving Magpie wrote:On November 11 2014 16:41 AndAgain wrote:On November 11 2014 16:34 RampancyTW wrote:
Seriously, can anybody explain to me why ANYBODY CARES about not having a mineral advantage while being the mass-expanding player when every non-bio player in the history of ever floats 3000 minerals while being starved for gas about 10x more than they ever run out of minerals before gas? The fact is that players rarely mine off of more than 3 bases. So your point is moot. He's saying that maybe they're focusing mining minerals efficiently when they should focus more on gas efficiency and hence should expand to gain more gas geysers. Of course this would require a tech tree that made it so that the late game shock troops are gas heavy units or gas based spammable units which SC2 does not support except for Archons and Mutalisks. Any other unit comp needs the minerals too much. He's not wrong. If 24mineral nodes is the most you'd want, then tech trees in late game should be made to almost ignore minerals and emphasize gas (moreso than now) so late game is all about mining all the gas geysers you can (with a cap of only 6 miners per expansion) Its an interesting and bold idea that I like that requires no changing of the econ system. But I think BW purists won't like the idea. Shifting focus to gas runs into 2 issues I can think of. Firstly, there is still no backup plan when you lose a base. It's exactly like losing your 3rd mining base and being relegated to 2 base mineral income. The snow ball effect still occurs which limits the back and forth action that we desire. Secondly, deathballs will be even more expensive and the game is more likely to come down to one single fight. As mentioned before, losing your precious base means a huge dent in your income. This fear promotes turtling which in turn promotes the creation of deathballs. As your lower tier units become more useless, you throw them away slowly while replacing them with your high tech gas units. Because this late game army cannot be replenished easily, armies will sit and wait until they achieve perfect compositions before risking a fight at all. We can already see this in PvZ swarm host vs tempest/void ray (zest vs life on nimbus). No no, you're not understanding me. I said gas based shock troops or gas based troops that become your main unit. In BW these were siege tanks, Dragoons, hydralisks, etc... Units the races built en masse, as the main workhorse, and not just specialty units protected by fodder--they were the fodder. Right now in SC2 the only gas units people want to mass are colossus/Templar, Swarm Hosts/Muta, and medivacs. Except for the muta, all those are these over specialized non-front line troop that you use to engage enemy forces with. It's also no surprise that muta/ling/bling is damn sexy to watch but collossus deathball are boring. Heck, storm play is "okay" to watch bu archon/zealout is exciting. And it's exciting because archons don't actually trump anything, they're this general purpose tanky melee unit, almost like an improved zealot. For his comment about switching to gas based tech in the upper tiers we need to change how units are designed in sc2 where gas is what the base front line units need moreso than minerals. A good example is the economic system of the Age of ____ series where food is what is most important early, but once you get to the midgame food slowly becomes irrelevant and the game becomes about gold which you can't just farm in your base. This made it so you had to expand to reach the important resources, but still had access and some use for the base resource. If you think of minerals as food and think of gas as gold it's a similar thing. Food does not become "slowly irrelevant" but rather the player is able to auto produce it from other sources. On AOE series, food is made different ways as the game moves into mid/late game as seen by berries, hunts, Mills, farms, factories, fishing, creating livestock and sending shipments. So in a way, you could say that resources become extremely important as the game advances but it is just not the main focus of the player because automatic resources allowed the players to focus on killing each other. The game created a system that makes the player want to seek out other resources not by force but as a "reward" like other users on this forum were suggesting that LOTV should implement. Don't use dishonest descriptions please. Food became less useful when gold became the stopgap of higher tier units. Both food and wood were still farmed plenty, bu since they were easily accessible you always had a high influx of wood/food but were always starved for gold. The same thing also happens with BW where players eventually bank minerals because the stopgap was gas moreso than minerals. It's arbitrary what the system used to create that disjunction. If you, for example, made it so each mineral patch had 15,000 minerals but designed the baseline units to a all want to use gas, you'd still be forced to expand a lot to get gas geysers because minerals is essentially infinite. Going back to the age of series, even their base infantry needed "gas" could you imagine if marines and zerglings cost 50min/10gas? No one would give a dam about mining efficiency and 90% of the game would be constant expanding to get gas because would be the bottleneck. This is what I mean when I say that the Econ system is arbitrary. You can change the Econ just as much by just change unit cost instead of mining time/rate. What is more important is that we pick a system (any system) and adapt the game to that system.
I think you are confusing your arguments. Allow me to help you a little bit.
In AOE series resources did not become "less useful." As the game progressed, resource gathering became extremely important. AOE resources were not unlimited but rather limited. Limited as defined by being in short supply. One of the ways that AOE allowed the players to focus on the battle rather than on economy was to create automatic resource gathering such as the ones that I explained in my previous post.
"Both food and wood were still farmed plenty, bu since they were easily accessible you always had a high influx of wood/food but were always starved for gold" is an erroneous statement. Gold was able to be gathered by fishing, plantations, resource trading at the market, shipments and factories. Food and wood were also limited but were fixed by the solution named in the above paragraph.
"Could you imagine if marines and zerglings cost 50min/10gas?" Yes, but the game would have to be redesigned and that is not a possible alternative at the moment.
"No one would give a dam about mining efficiency and 90% of the game would be constant expanding to get gas because would be the bottleneck." This is an erroneous statement as well because the best players always try to mine resources the most efficient way. If we were to change the unit cost to "50 min / 10 gas" as you propose, we would have to find a different way to gather resources more efficient to adapt to the changes.
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I would challenge a couple assumptions, the biggest one being "People are still going to be focused on 3 effective bases at any given time, and therefore the problem hasn't changed".
I think this is incorrect, because Gas (as others have noted) are the most important thing for Protoss and Zerg. There is an inherent advantage in having more bases and therefore more gas consumption, especially when your main is going to mine out within 10 minutes (no real numbers in front of me). You will want to maintain your main + 3 bases because your main is where the production is, the gas is, etc. I think this will make the game 4 base centric to 5 bases rather than 3 base centric to 4 bases, which is a very healthy economical system. The advantage is that LotV pressures players to have more gas earlier, and run on basically one extra bases worth of gas earlier on.
Now, let's talk about Protoss/Terran 4 base play growing to 5 bases:
4 bases growing to 5 bases means there are quite a few avenues of attack, and it dances the line very well of "barely enough places to defend without being stretched too thin". I too would love to explore the idea of a saturation gradient of 100-80-60 but I think people are overstating the issue.
The bigger issue might be with a 4-5 base centric play, and with more harassment units, the game may be forced away from immobile compositions. However, in general, it might be possible for Blzzard to dance the line of making immobile forces + mega harass units plausible. You have to remember, becaues it is so easy to rebuild workers in SC2, you can afford to have harass units that decimate worker lines more efficiently. I mean, consider how many times Life brought down Taeja's workercount to sub 20, had a +30 worker advantage, and Taeja still clawed his way to worker parity. It can and will happen in SC2.
The final point i'd make--if your patches are worth less, players are going to preemptively expand so they aren't forced into the terrible situation of being down a base and needing to secure a new one when your opponent has the large amount of units to stretch you thin. Terran, for example, may not be as gas starved, but they eat minerals extremely fast. They'll have a built in non-gas incentive to expand early and often because it will be preferable to drop a mule hammer further away at a harder to hold expansion earlier, than one of your safer expansions that puts you in a more dangerous position later on.
Basically, i'm excited. I agree there can be better systems, but I don't think this is a bad one. I definitely think its an improvement, and the only way it can be worse is that spreading yourself thin can mean you lose some unit diversity in immobile units not being viable. On the other hand, I think Blizzard is incredible at balancing their units within the stubborn frameworks they invent, so I could see this being the incentive to megabuff things like the Siege Tank and more immobile units. Anyhow, this fear about immobile units being phased out would have existed in any economic model that involves more and more bases.
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On November 11 2014 18:44 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2014 16:34 RampancyTW wrote:
Seriously, can anybody explain to me why ANYBODY CARES about not having a mineral advantage while being the mass-expanding player when every non-bio player in the history of ever floats 3000 minerals while being starved for gas about 10x more than they ever run out of minerals before gas? Thats just not right. Modern zerg strategies against Terran often only take 6-8gases. If you float minerals you are just macroing badly. That's because taking additional bases means more difficulty defending drop harrass etc.
Also because players start massing spines/spores because what the hell else are they going to do with all of the minerals?
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On November 12 2014 01:12 Hider wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2014 00:58 Big J wrote:On November 12 2014 00:24 Hider wrote:On November 11 2014 23:41 Big J wrote:On November 11 2014 23:31 OtherWorld wrote:On November 11 2014 23:09 Eiltonn wrote:On November 11 2014 22:33 custombuild wrote:
The old broodwar players do not seem to like the changes. Personally, I like the changes and I am willing to try a new styles. Yes because they can´t accept that SC2 ain´t BW :D The idea behind lowering the base saturation is awesome, but we also need to decrease the patches to something like 6. If we stick with 8 patches (and don´t change mining efficiency etc.) we will still have the optimal 3 base saturation where having 4 mining bases is not worth it. If Blizzard does something like we have to expand more often and have more bases at the same time. The thing is that the economic system should not force players to expand more often, it should encourage players to do so, while still making playstyles with less bases viable. That way we would have assymetric matchups and exciting matches ; while what you think Blizzard should do would just make the game almost identical to what we have, with players trying to have 4 bases instead of 3. I disagree. I think people should be forced into expanding to a reasonable high count to make for good games. That is a count that allows your opponent to attack you. Starcrafts supertight main and natural bases leave little room for attacking. Forcing players into at least 3bases* makes for better games. It is not reasonable to have counterattacks or lots of harass on less bases and more would probably be even better. *3bases is just the number that is currently reasonable on most maps. With gameplay/map changes this could change. Well that's only the case if you realistically can defend/protect your bases while attacking simultaneously. For that to be the case, Starcraft must be completely overhauled, and it's incredibly difficult to do that. Any form of economic change will require an overhaul. Something like the 1000minerals thing might be one of the easiest ones still. Though it might just not have such a big impact and in the end just ruin what we have without improving the game. Well if 1k mineral patches forces player to defend more bases as well, that will - ceteris paribus - makes it harder to invest into offensive actions simultaenously. So whether more or less aggression occurs depends on what weights the most: Factor 1: Enemy being slightly more spread out --> Makes your harass play stronger (ceteris paribus) Factor 2: You being forced to invest more into defensive options --> Makes your harass play weaker (ceteris paribus) How can we know which one of the two factors weights the most? The answer is that the race which benefits from scaling will choose the strategy that results in the highest army value (assuming cost-efficiency in both options are the same). That will mean that mech/protoss will focus on defensive options and is less likely to invest into harass. Therefore, you are much more likely to see less aggression when you have mobile vs immobile as the latter typically benefits from scale and therefore will attempt to "stale" the game. The reason you see that mech-players invests into harass today is that an increase in offensive investments only reduces the Siege tank count in periods where it's not very important to have a high siege tank count. If on the other hand, they need to take bases much faster, it is much more vital to have a higher siege tank count faster. In mobile vs mobile, we may see a bit more aggression, but we will also see a stronger snowball-effect since there is less economy to fall back on.
@ buffing harass options as alternative
I think you underestimate how much easier this solution is, especially since alot of units needs a redesign anyway, and you can redesign the units while adding more multitask opportunities to them simultaneously. Collosus and Immortal are poorly designed? Ok, let's redesign them and give them better synergy with warp prism --> More fun micro interaction + More multitasking. Or let's look at overlord drops. What if you made this upgrade 50/50 and perhaps even buffed the speed of overlords slightly. and/or allow them to pick units up outside range (as the warp prism can in LOTV)? Would that be completley game-changing and would it require changes to all units as a 6 mineral path/12 max saturation + tower-econ would? I highly doubt it, but it would reward more multitasking.
I don't disagree with buffing underused harass options as alternative. Yet, players tend to player their strongest harass tools like medivacs, prisms and mutalisks anyways. I think at the end of the day buffing other options than those named can ultimately only level them with the mentioned. If they become even better, it's going to be a balance issue one-way or another. But leveling them also means that ultimately if you can get safe vs mutalisks, you can also get safe vs drops in a similar manner. And therefore the harasspotential overall won't increase that much.
Also increasing harass often backfires, e.g. in PvT where the Protoss has to make heavy investments into antidrop tools and thus has to sit very tight. Which then leads to drops often becoming rare because the Protoss didn't open up early and later he has a bigger toolbox to deal with them.
Or the Protoss has to go stargates eventually vs mutas, etc.
I think if they want to change something they should rather have a second look at some harass options currently and tone down some speed values a little bit and then balance from there. More mapcontrol against Zerg, less 50supply armies flying into your base and faster expanding needed.
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I don't disagree with buffing underused harass options as alternative. Yet, players tend to player their strongest harass tools like medivacs, prisms and mutalisks anyways. I think at the end of the day buffing other options than those named can ultimately only level them with the mentioned. If they become even better, it's going to be a balance issue one-way or another. But leveling them also means that ultimately if you can get safe vs mutalisks, you can also get safe vs drops in a similar manner. And therefore the harasspotential overall won't increase that much.
Also increasing harass often backfires, e.g. in PvT where the Protoss has to make heavy investments into antidrop tools and thus has to sit very tight. Which then leads to drops often becoming rare because the Protoss didn't open up early and later he has a bigger toolbox to deal with them.
Or the Protoss has to go stargates eventually vs mutas, etc.
I actually consider this the advantage of buffing harass-units. When you force players to spread out, you have no control over what gets buffed. Instead, all forms of aggression just gets buffed. In both scenarios, it can backfire. If you buff the wrong harass-units, then it is indeed possible that it will force the enemy to invest more into defense as a response. But unlike the "more spread out"-options you can choose to only buff the options that really need it.
I mentioned Immortal/Collosus + Warp prism, late-game Banshee's and overlord drops as forms of harassment that I think are relatively easy to change in order to reward more multitasking. On the other hand, buffing the offensive options of terran bio play in the midgame vs protoss, is more likely to backfire, and that's unfortunately what a more spread-economy indirectly accomplishes.
So from my perspective, I really don't see any advantages with a LOTV economy (or one that is more extreme) that cannot easily be replicated in a better way by changing the stats of units.
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+ Show Spoiler +On November 12 2014 01:37 People_0f_Color wrote:
I would challenge a couple assumptions, the biggest one being "People are still going to be focused on 3 effective bases at any given time, and therefore the problem hasn't changed".
I think this is incorrect, because Gas (as others have noted) are the most important thing for Protoss and Zerg. There is an inherent advantage in having more bases and therefore more gas consumption, especially when your main is going to mine out within 10 minutes (no real numbers in front of me). You will want to maintain your main + 3 bases because your main is where the production is, the gas is, etc. I think this will make the game 4 base centric to 5 bases rather than 3 base centric to 4 bases, which is a very healthy economical system. The advantage is that LotV pressures players to have more gas earlier, and run on basically one extra bases worth of gas earlier on.
Now, let's talk about Protoss/Terran 4 base play growing to 5 bases:
4 bases growing to 5 bases means there are quite a few avenues of attack, and it dances the line very well of "barely enough places to defend without being stretched too thin". I too would love to explore the idea of a saturation gradient of 100-80-60 but I think people are overstating the issue.
The bigger issue might be with a 4-5 base centric play, and with more harassment units, the game may be forced away from immobile compositions. However, in general, it might be possible for Blzzard to dance the line of making immobile forces + mega harass units plausible. You have to remember, becaues it is so easy to rebuild workers in SC2, you can afford to have harass units that decimate worker lines more efficiently. I mean, consider how many times Life brought down Taeja's workercount to sub 20, had a +30 worker advantage, and Taeja still clawed his way to worker parity. It can and will happen in SC2.
The final point i'd make--if your patches are worth less, players are going to preemptively expand so they aren't forced into the terrible situation of being down a base and needing to secure a new one when your opponent has the large amount of units to stretch you thin. Terran, for example, may not be as gas starved, but they eat minerals extremely fast. They'll have a built in non-gas incentive to expand early and often because it will be preferable to drop a mule hammer further away at a harder to hold expansion earlier, than one of your safer expansions that puts you in a more dangerous position later on.
Basically, i'm excited. I agree there can be better systems, but I don't think this is a bad one. I definitely think its an improvement, and the only way it can be worse is that spreading yourself thin can mean you lose some unit diversity in immobile units not being viable. On the other hand, I think Blizzard is incredible at balancing their units within the stubborn frameworks they invent, so I could see this being the incentive to megabuff things like the Siege Tank and more immobile units. Anyhow, this fear about immobile units being phased out would have existed in any economic model that involves more and more bases.
I am excited now too! :D
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I believe Blizzard wants more focus on a series rather than a single game. The removal of start-of-game downtime seems to make the games move rapidly if they are short, aggressive, low-econ games. Total resources per base being decreased makes an early-mid game advantage (I'm thinking stalker sentry contain at bottom of ramp) that much stronger since the other player is on a faster clock and less resources to reply. Interesting thing about that example is that dropping double mule in the main might be troublesome.
Edit: Also there are many options in play after the additions to LoTV, making each series potentially fresh and innovative.
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EPT
