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I don't see the point in making pure mech viable for it's own sake; it seems like an incredibly arbitrary desire. Should pure robo be made viable too?
Personally I've never been a fan of pure mech to begin with. The dynamic of turtling into an unbeatable deathball has existed several times throughout Starcraft 2. Without exception, it's always made the game worse and spawned outcry from the community. For the majority of players it's simply not fun to watch or play against a guy who does nothing but sit behind unbreakable defences for 20 minutes, and then moves out and rolls you over when the time is right. (Which seems to be how most Terran mech games play out). I can't think of a single point in Sc2 history where the game has benefited from that type of strategy being viable.
Even entertaining the idea of making mech viable, I disagree with Avilo's way of going about it. Making a "turtle --> death ball" type army viable by giving it a counter to the only thing that actually beats it lategame just further encourages long, drawn out 30+ minute stalemate-type games.
Avilo, I don't know how much Brood War you watched, but Goliaths were actually pretty shitty vs Carrier play. They just happened to be a "better than nothing" type unit. Most TvP Carrier games were decided by Terran's ability to punish the carrier transition, and were generally agreed to be over if Protoss ever accumulated a big enough carrier ball.
In my opinion the only way to make mech viable without hurting the game would be to perhaps enhance a mech player’s ability to punish the air transition (either buff mech’s ability to be active on the map and hit timings or make the mass air transition harder).
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On March 08 2016 08:09 TheSubtleArt wrote:
I don't see the point in making pure mech viable for it's own sake; it seems like an incredibly arbitrary desire. Should pure robo be made viable too?
Personally I've never been a fan of pure mech to begin with. The dynamic of turtling into an unbeatable deathball has existed several times throughout Starcraft 2. Without exception, it's always made the game worse and spawned outcry from the community. For the majority of players it's simply not fun to watch or play against a guy who does nothing but sit behind unbreakable defences for 20 minutes, and then moves out and rolls you over when the time is right. (Which seems to be how most Terran mech games play out). I can't think of a single point in Sc2 history where the game has benefited from that type of strategy being viable.
Even entertaining the idea of making mech viable, I disagree with Avilo's way of going about it. Making a "turtle --> death ball" type army viable by giving it a counter to the only thing that actually beats it lategame just further encourages long, drawn out 30+ minute stalemate-type games.
Avilo, I don't know how much Brood War you watched, but Goliaths were actually pretty shitty vs Carrier play. They just happened to be a "better than nothing" type unit. Most TvP Carrier games were decided by Terran's ability to punish the carrier transition, and were generally agreed to be over if Protoss ever accumulated a big enough carrier ball.
In my opinion the only way to make mech viable without hurting the game would be to perhaps enhance a mech player’s ability to punish the air transition (either buff mech’s ability to be active on the map and hit timings or make the mass air transition harder).
Lets be honest--mech play in BW was pretty bad from a form perspective, but was made interesting due to limitation on execution.
For the most part, Mech was OP and essentially perfect. But it had one drawback--it needed to take up a lot of space and in order to maintain its efficiency required a SHIT TONNE of speed and execution (ie it was hard to play). This meant that Mech players would fuck up all the time. They'd either move their army too slow, or too quickly, planted too few mines--or spent too much time on mines, or planted too many mines in the same places. Etc...
As such, there was a "game" to it. The mech would be doing his best to not fail on execution--and most players failed on execution. The opposing player would either force mistakes or be patient and punish mistakes. This leads to a very dynamic game *because* players were never fast enough to execute it properly.
In SC2, its the opposite. There are answers to everything Mech can do. And the controls are so easy, if those answers were nullified then Mech would be OP as shit.
The reason mech worked in BW and almost nowhere else in RTS games is because mech was OP but the controls were hard enough to counteract how OP mech was.
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Avilo should run for US President as a Republican candidate:
His slogan can be "Make Mech Great Again". He'll definitely give Trump a run for his money with such outrageous ideas....
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On March 07 2016 17:04 ArcadePlus wrote:
I mean, making mech viable isn't -just- about AA, right? it's about being able to extend map control, which Mech isn't necessarily bad at but bio or bio-tank or bio-liberator is just better at right now. the mobility-power-cost intersection just seems not to favor mech units and I think the design of the Thor and cyclone are principle
You're able to extend map control more in this mod because you have 20--30 more supply available for mech units instead of 20-30 supply tied up in vikings that are useless against ground units.
By making mech AA good you make it so mech doesn't have to turtle into mass viking/raven/liberators and you can attack + move on the map.
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Actually I think that the cyclone could make mech viable and non turtly. If the cyclone was kind of the mech "footman", being very mobile with hellions, while the bases are defended by some amount of tanks, mech could reach a nice place. But that would need to remove the lock, give the cyclone's attack 6 range, give like 150 hp to the cyclone and lower its price/build time.
For the thor, just giving it back its backcanons for the single target AA would be a first step.
I don't feel like mech lacks anti air that much. Actually the only issue with air playing mech is the revelation/tempest combo. Late game TvZ, you'll just have to transition sky, which is fair.
As a whole I feel like the revelation should be redesigned. If you look at the stats of the spell (60 secs maphack, casted from 6 range, with a gigantic AoE) : it's bullshit, simply stated. Especially since you can regen 50 energy during the 60 secs.
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So update about this mod and such:
I decided i'm not going to push the mod past what was in this one. For now at least. There are a bunch of other changes i feel people would see make the game much healthier such as supply changes to most of the OP air units, invincible nydus reverted but nydus exits cheaper, list goes on...
I do not think blizzard is too willing to listen to any reasoning or feedback when it comes to such changes, as they have a proven track record of not listening and in their last update basically came flat out and said they don't care if mech sucks or not (essentially).
Though, they just did make another update today apparently and mentioned thor aa/cyclone changes...but honestly not going to hold my breath because the way blizzard works and does changes they'll prob do 1 tiny number change to the thor that makes zero impact on gameplay and never touch it again and let mech die.
Or who knows, maybe they have seen this mod and realized "oh so mech really doesn't have to be turtle mech if we just give mech good anti-air capabilities."
I think this initiative accomplished my goal: show that mech does not have to be turtle mech by making literally 1 change by adding in this thor upgrade into the game.
The games i played on it versus mech, against mech, and observed of people playing mech vs p/z...all proved that when mech has a capable AA unit the opponent is dissuaded from just massing air and if they do mass air you can have a reasonable answer to it instead of AUTO-LOSING like you do in the live version of the game.
So despite my pessimism that i think not much will get done from the testing we did with this mod and the thor upgrade change, hopefully blizzard will see the light and give mech a strong anti-air change that means mass air no longer auto-wins and then we'll see some actual good mech games instead of "turtle for 20 more minutes into 30 vikings/liberators."
I hope people appreciate the effort that was put into this idea/initiative, i know there's a ton of fucktards that don't appreciate it and do not understand the goal of the mod was to improve the health of the game by allowing the strategic option of playing mech to be more viable....but i'm sure there's a fuck ton of people that do appreciate the idea/goal behind this mod and the testing and thanks to those people that gave good feedback, and hopefully you guys will continue to channel that feedback to blizzard so that we can have mech games that aren't "boring and stale" by them actually fixing mech anti-air.
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EPT
