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On March 09 2016 08:00 Big J wrote:
The rather plain variant of an answer would be that Starcraft 2 was designed for it and taking that aspect away at this point, or basically any point of Starcraft 2 after Wings of Liberty release, would have caused insurmountable balance problems and very poor gameplay, without massive design changes.
In all honesty, I think one of the main reasons why CnC never succeeded was the very bad economy model in all the games. You start with tons of money which means you get free boom, tech or rush choices. But after that unless you have chosen boom the game becomes incredibly slow and boring and you never can create your fantasy armies.
Serious games get stuck in early game unit spams and sometimes even hilarious base sell strategies to afford more units before you are dry.
The way the SC2 economy works - which includes easy access to second and somewhat easy access to third bases - is that you have to mix tech, economy and production regardless of what you plan to do later on in the early game. This guarantees a certain build-up in the game, which brings the game closer to the RTS-fantasy of creating bases and sending armies to battles.
Ah, this confirms what I had always suspected. Blizzard was unwilling to make drastic changes to the game. Status quo was god. Suddenly, all the changes that made the game harder for the sake of making it harder make sense now. I feel that their stubbornness killed off Starcraft 2's mainstream appeal.
I agree with you about C&C's economy, but the bigger issue that franchise faced was that it was owned by EA. EA has the reverse Midas touch on video games: everything it touches turns to crap. Every gaming company it absorbed died out. Westwood is dead. None of the original, pre-EA Bioware employees still work for Bioware.
Anyway, my friends and I actually tried playing custom C&C games with the money set to the minimum amount (2500 credits in most games). You have enough cash to build a power plant and a refinery. The first return gives you enough to create a barracks to build infantry to scout and skirmish with. The game had a much more fluid feel because you can't simply blow all your money on units, only for production to completely halt when you run out of money. The low starting money actually made expanding more viable because your opponent will likely not have enough money to overrun you for not blowing your starting 10000 credits on units.
Have you played Warcraft 2? The intended build order was to build a town hall, gather resources, and then build a barracks and units and other tech. However, you could build a barracks without building a town hall first. If you did this, you could spend all of your starting resources on footmen/grunts and rush the enemy. There was no counter to this.
In Starcraft, you started with a town hall, several workers, and enough cash to train a single worker. You started with comparable resources as in Warcraft 2, but most of it was tied up in your starting town hall and 4 workers. Only 50 minerals was available to spend.
Basically, Warcraft 2 and C&C had you start with a lot of resources that you can dump into military production with no care about future development and win the game right then and there. However, Blizzard learned from this mistake, while EA did not. They didn't even care. If C&C were in the hands of a different developer, maybe later C&C games would've had the game start with much fewer credits.
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Seeker
Where dat snitch at?37041 Posts
Honestly I love StarCraft the way it is so much that I think I'd freak out if they removed natural expansions. The existence of natural expansions is what allows for so much diversity in SC2 strategies.
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Mineral patches could grow (randomly) as the game progressed, creating a new
axis of battle: scouting for new patches, fighting other scouts who are scouting,
sieging new patch areas, etc...
Directly attacking simply the other base sometimes leaves me thinking
something is missing. I am surprised at how crude the game is sometimes.
Blizzard has mentioned that they are exploring new map ideas.
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On March 09 2016 08:13 andrewlt wrote:
It makes for better gameplay. Starcraft is a game of expanding and defending expansions. Expansions need to only have a finite amount of resources to force players to continually expand and find new resources as they deplete older ones. However, a main base that has the same amount of resources as a standard expansion runs out too quick and makes the early game last too long. A natural expansion is a dynamic way of making a bigger "main" base that is not totally risk free.
You could see this better in BW, where Korean mapmakers were freer to make nonstandard expansion sizes. You had mineral only expansions, smaller expansions, bigger expansions, two expansions close together that can almost be defended like one (usually with at least one of them being smaller than average), double geysers.. Blizzard made SC2 worse in this regard by designing the game around even safer naturals and attempting to homogenize expansion sizes and yields (other than gold bases).
I played the games you mentioned and many of them frequently ended because one side gets to secure an expansion first. It's easier to come back down 2 bases to 3 compared to down 1 base to 2.
They could do the same thing by making a bigger main but natural expansion is what the Koreans decided on.
Also, several posters already mentioned the zerg. Their economy and unit producing works out differently and this is a necessary balancing factor to let them expand faster.
Wow, thank you for reminding me about SC1's nonstandard maps. I remember now why I stuck to SC2 for so long despite having no friends to play with in my last few months of playing the game. I remember seeing those nonstandard maps and they made up for what I didn't like (what I see as "freebie" expos). When Blizzard took over SC2 esports, maps started becoming homogenized, like you said, and things became less interesting.
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It seems to me this is just how the game was designed, and I like it more than 1 base play all day long. A tech/rush/eco trifecta is more interesting to me than just an army/tech duality.
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1-Base plays are still pretty popular in things like PvP(2 gate stargate/proxy robo) or ZvZ (13/12 anyone?) The reason we really like natural expansions is that if everything was done off one base, there would only be so many builds you could do(and zerg would be a nightmare)
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Early WoL it was pretty much 1base with hard to get naturals. BW fanatics whined and maps were changed accordingly. No one expanded unless they had units to defend. Even zerg.
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On March 09 2016 07:15 cactus555 wrote:
learn to macro
This guy should get a warning....completely unwarranted and useless post.
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On March 09 2016 08:31 Eternal Dalek wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2016 08:00 Big J wrote:
The rather plain variant of an answer would be that Starcraft 2 was designed for it and taking that aspect away at this point, or basically any point of Starcraft 2 after Wings of Liberty release, would have caused insurmountable balance problems and very poor gameplay, without massive design changes.
In all honesty, I think one of the main reasons why CnC never succeeded was the very bad economy model in all the games. You start with tons of money which means you get free boom, tech or rush choices. But after that unless you have chosen boom the game becomes incredibly slow and boring and you never can create your fantasy armies.
Serious games get stuck in early game unit spams and sometimes even hilarious base sell strategies to afford more units before you are dry.
The way the SC2 economy works - which includes easy access to second and somewhat easy access to third bases - is that you have to mix tech, economy and production regardless of what you plan to do later on in the early game. This guarantees a certain build-up in the game, which brings the game closer to the RTS-fantasy of creating bases and sending armies to battles. Ah, this confirms what I had always suspected. Blizzard was unwilling to make drastic changes to the game. Status quo was god. Suddenly, all the changes that made the game harder for the sake of making it harder make sense now. I feel that their stubbornness killed off Starcraft 2's mainstream appeal. I agree with you about C&C's economy, but the bigger issue that franchise faced was that it was owned by EA. EA has the reverse Midas touch on video games: everything it touches turns to crap. Every gaming company it absorbed died out. Westwood is dead. None of the original, pre-EA Bioware employees still work for Bioware. Anyway, my friends and I actually tried playing custom C&C games with the money set to the minimum amount (2500 credits in most games). You have enough cash to build a power plant and a refinery. The first return gives you enough to create a barracks to build infantry to scout and skirmish with. The game had a much more fluid feel because you can't simply blow all your money on units, only for production to completely halt when you run out of money. The low starting money actually made expanding more viable because your opponent will likely not have enough money to overrun you for not blowing your starting 10000 credits on units. Have you played Warcraft 2? The intended build order was to build a town hall, gather resources, and then build a barracks and units and other tech. However, you could build a barracks without building a town hall first. If you did this, you could spend all of your starting resources on footmen/grunts and rush the enemy. There was no counter to this. In Starcraft, you started with a town hall, several workers, and enough cash to train a single worker. You started with comparable resources as in Warcraft 2, but most of it was tied up in your starting town hall and 4 workers. Only 50 minerals was available to spend. Basically, Warcraft 2 and C&C had you start with a lot of resources that you can dump into military production with no care about future development and win the game right then and there. However, Blizzard learned from this mistake, while EA did not. They didn't even care. If C&C were in the hands of a different developer, maybe later C&C games would've had the game start with much fewer credits.
Actually Blizzard did try your approach for too long. It made sc2 a horrible game and a lot less fun. At first it was fun and ok because the whole game was new. Then it was just 1 base all day everyday which ruined the game. They tried experimentation that failed and just made the game not as fun. Close positions metalopolis, steppes of war, etc.
That is why the maps are designed the way they are, the provide the most strategies and a lot more fun then staying on 1 base forever.
What they should have done however, is have 2 separate ladder systems. The competitive ladder system with Tournament maps only and a Casual ladder system with funky maps such as island maps, 1 base, etc. That would have been a good decision imo as I know a lot of casual players prefer those kind of things.
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On March 09 2016 09:26 blade55555 wrote:
What they should have done however, is have 2 separate ladder systems. The competitive ladder system with Tournament maps only and a Casual ladder system with funky maps such as island maps, 1 base, etc. That would have been a good decision imo as I know a lot of casual players prefer those kind of things.
This would be a great way to try out new ideas; a lot of players
would more likely get exposed to new designs.
David Kim recently said that they were throwing around new map style ideas.
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SC2 has been moving away from RTS with each expansion. LoTV plays more like a MOBA than traditional RTS genres.
Pick units and finely crafting pendants and controlling that army is the order of the day rather than making choices.
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On March 09 2016 09:26 blade55555 wrote:
Actually Blizzard did try your approach for too long. It made sc2 a horrible game and a lot less fun. At first it was fun and ok because the whole game was new. Then it was just 1 base all day everyday which ruined the game. They tried experimentation that failed and just made the game not as fun. Close positions metalopolis, steppes of war, etc.
That is why the maps are designed the way they are, the provide the most strategies and a lot more fun then staying on 1 base forever.
What they should have done however, is have 2 separate ladder systems. The competitive ladder system with Tournament maps only and a Casual ladder system with funky maps such as island maps, 1 base, etc. That would have been a good decision imo as I know a lot of casual players prefer those kind of things.
None of those qualify as "drastic" in my book. When I say drastic, I mean changes that completely change how the game works. The last drastic change I remember that was received well by the community was the complete removal of macro boosters in the LotV beta. For the first time in many years, we had a clearly-defined early game, mid game, and late game. Building units first wasn't an automatic loss. Expanding first was actually risky and not easily held off by what few units you had when the enemy came knocking on your door.
One of the earliest and most drastic changes I encountered in Starcraft 1 was in 1.02, when Photon Cannons were changed from explosive damage to normal damage. Suddenly, Photon Cannons could now hold off early game infantry instead being dead weight. This simple change doubled the amount of DPS cannons dealt to zerglings, marines, and zealots.
A drastic change I'd like to see would be a rework of zerglings so maps no longer require mandatory chokepoints so that Zerg doesn't automatically win. Some maps should have the aforementioned chokepoints, but not all of them should have it, and the natural expansions that always come with them.
I also really miss island maps. If you read old, old strategy guides and forums back in the day, people talked about Terran's easy access to expansions on island maps as a real advantage. That was what the flying buildings were made for; in fact, in one mission, you started with your buildings in space and had to land on a space station and take over the place.
Anyway, to the other poster in this thread. It's good to hear that King David is open to different types of maps. It's been a long time since I've seen anything other than the standard SC2 map.
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If there's one classic RTS element that has always been missing from SC2 it's been scarcity.
Scarcity of resources and a scarcity of free attention.
As an anecdotal example: consider the relationship between Protoss and Zerg early build orders in BW PvZ. 2 gateways at the natural making zealots suddenly puts strain on the precious few resources Zerg has to make choices with; in addition to the little amount of money Zerg has that must invest into zerglings every larvae forced to make zerglings is drones that cannot be created. choosing to make zerglings puts a strain on the players ability to manage precious larva as Protoss players must continue to pressure or break Zerg or control his ramp.
This kind of scenario is fairly easy to deal with in SC2 as players quickly gather a lot of resources at the very start of the game, eliminating the economic strain. Queens provide a ranged solution, as well as eliminating the larva dilemma. The AI and UI allow players to easily navigate through the pressure as long as they know it's coming.
BW scouting as Zerg is expensive to begin with and even seeing it coming it hits like a truck and immediately forces players to make hard decisions.
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Well many people seem to have not played early WoL.
Go check Xel'Naga Caverns to refresh your memory.
Easy natural base was not a thing in the beginning sc2, it only became such not simply because of Blizzard, but also because of players (both pro and casual) pressure. Cause nobody liked 1-1-1 or 3 gates robo winning every games. When everybody vetoes a map, it gets out of the map pool pretty quick in general.
Just remember people's reaction to Dreampool ("open natural? this gets my veto!") or Inferno Pools.
It's still the case nowadays : what are the two favorite maps according to this poll?
Answer : maps with pocket natural with easy third.
People just want their full economy macro games.
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Sweden33719 Posts
It was a slow development in competitive Starcraft that lead to this, it wasn't just the maps changed and suddenly everyone fast expanded. Rather, for a very long time you had zerg opening with mostly fast expand builds, while terran and protoss would open with various 1 base builds into either trying to kill the opponent or pressure into a slower expansion (all the different 2 gate variations pvz, with various levels of commitment to the rush).
Slowly, presumably as the other side got better at defending, people started expanding faster and faster themselves, until finally both sides were mostly fast expanding while mixing in all-ins etc. Even as someone who had liked the forge first expansions and no-gate nexus builds in BW before they were even popular, I remember being a bit sad when the 1 gate/corsair/dt/expansion builds died (and became forge first nexus -> corsair -> dt instead :D) because it was a really fun way of playing with a ton of finesse.
I don't, however, think that this is a problem that should be solved by removing natural expansions. It's like how in Go most of the early game is spent securing territory and extending along the sides, you don't hear people complain that this is the superior way of playing (generally) to opening in the middle of the board. It's just part of what makes the game what it is.
Island maps were fun tho, if really hard to balance (zerg's reliance on an expansion).
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On March 09 2016 10:16 BeStFAN wrote:
If there's one classic RTS element that has always been missing from SC2 it's been scarcity.
Scarcity of resources and a scarcity of free attention.
As an anecdotal example: consider the relationship between Protoss and Zerg early build orders in BW PvZ. 2 gateways at the natural making zealots suddenly puts strain on the precious few resources Zerg has to make choices with; in addition to the little amount of money Zerg has that must invest into zerglings every larvae forced to make zerglings is drones that cannot be created. choosing to make zerglings puts a strain on the players ability to manage precious larva as Protoss players must continue to pressure or break Zerg or control his ramp.
This kind of scenario is fairly easy to deal with in SC2 as players quickly gather a lot of resources at the very start of the game, eliminating the economic strain. Queens provide a ranged solution, as well as eliminating the larva dilemma. The AI and UI allow players to easily navigate through the pressure as long as they know it's coming.
BW scouting as Zerg is expensive to begin with and even seeing it coming it hits like a truck and immediately forces players to make hard decisions.
Scarcity of free attention is something that has been present throughout SC2 and is all the more present since LotV arrived. As for scarcity of resources, it may not be obvious (and is perhaps irrelevant at lower levels when players float minerals anyway) but it's a huge factor in nearly all games. There are many situations similar to that which you described that force players to decide how to use their limited amount of resources to respond to pressure. I'm not quite sure how you could say scarcity in SC2 is missing.
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Well, I guess that's simply because the game's designed that way. During the early WoL era, there were lots of 1-base games induced by the map pool, and it sucked. With a single base, you can't really build up your composition, so you either expand, or all-in. Someone might find 4-gating, 2-rax cheesing, and defending against those all-ins every game quite interesting, but not many. So they changed the maps and balanced game accordingly to weaken such 1-base plays.
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On March 09 2016 11:11 Liquid`Jinro wrote:
It was a slow development in competitive Starcraft that lead to this, it wasn't just the maps changed and suddenly everyone fast expanded. Rather, for a very long time you had zerg opening with mostly fast expand builds, while terran and protoss would open with various 1 base builds into either trying to kill the opponent or pressure into a slower expansion (all the different 2 gate variations pvz, with various levels of commitment to the rush).
Slowly, presumably as the other side got better at defending, people started expanding faster and faster themselves, until finally both sides were mostly fast expanding while mixing in all-ins etc. Even as someone who had liked the forge first expansions and no-gate nexus builds in BW before they were even popular, I remember being a bit sad when the 1 gate/corsair/dt/expansion builds died (and became forge first nexus -> corsair -> dt instead :D) because it was a really fun way of playing with a ton of finesse.
I don't, however, think that this is a problem that should be solved by removing natural expansions. It's like how in Go most of the early game is spent securing territory and extending along the sides, you don't hear people complain that this is the superior way of playing (generally) to opening in the middle of the board. It's just part of what makes the game what it is.
Island maps were fun tho, if really hard to balance (zerg's reliance on an expansion).
Senpai noticed meeee! *blush*
Anyway, I'm not advocating removing natural expansions. Their removal would be just as bad as the current map situation where every map is mostly the same (from my perspective). However, I am glad that there is at least a progamer who actually shares my opinions on map design.
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I think natural expansions will definitely stay as there's a good reason for them. However, I do feel like the SC2 community is very narrow-minded when it comes to map design. And maybe Blizzard balanced SC2 on eggshells, it seems any nonstandard map features break this game way too easily compared to BW.
I remember a Flash vs Fantasy TvT in BW that went into the very, very late game. Fantasy ended up winning because he managed to secure the center expansion, which had around double the number of mineral patches and gas geysers than a normal one. I miss those types of maps. I think Blizzard's current stance is a bit silly in that they want more map experimentation in SC2 but are very rigid in enforcing the same amount of resources in every expansion.
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Starcraft only has 2 resources so bases are pretty straightforward. AoE2, for example, has 4 resources.
The fact that there's not neutral units you have to fight is a good thing as long as the early game can be dynamic - the point is that threats, or the possibility of threats (if that isn't redundant), are supposed to come from the enemy, and you balance your economy, tech, and military based totally on the opponent rather than needing to make some army units as a ritual so your villagers don't die to a boar or something. I think it's better that way, including matchups bigger than 1v1. It'd be like saying you can't take the center of the chessboard until you kill the neutral green pawns.
And when you say "natural expansion" it's mostly a semantic thing. It's the closest base to you so it's "natural" that you would take it first. Like in AoE2 you still don't go halfway across the map to get your first stone (I presume). You take what's close. And SC map design favors symmetry for various reasons (I don't think that's a factor in AoE).
On March 09 2016 11:11 Liquid`Jinro wrote:
It was a slow development in competitive Starcraft that lead to this, it wasn't just the maps changed and suddenly everyone fast expanded. Rather, for a very long time you had zerg opening with mostly fast expand builds, while terran and protoss would open with various 1 base builds into either trying to kill the opponent or pressure into a slower expansion (all the different 2 gate variations pvz, with various levels of commitment to the rush).
Slowly, presumably as the other side got better at defending, people started expanding faster and faster themselves, until finally both sides were mostly fast expanding while mixing in all-ins etc. Even as someone who had liked the forge first expansions and no-gate nexus builds in BW before they were even popular, I remember being a bit sad when the 1 gate/corsair/dt/expansion builds died (and became forge first nexus -> corsair -> dt instead :D) because it was a really fun way of playing with a ton of finesse.
I don't, however, think that this is a problem that should be solved by removing natural expansions. It's like how in Go most of the early game is spent securing territory and extending along the sides, you don't hear people complain that this is the superior way of playing (generally) to opening in the middle of the board. It's just part of what makes the game what it is.
Island maps were fun tho, if really hard to balance (zerg's reliance on an expansion).
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EPT
