EPTWhy do natural expansions exist? - Page 3
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SlammerIV
United States526 Posts
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BronzeKnee
United States5219 Posts
On March 09 2016 07:17 BisuDagger wrote: Natural expansions are far from free in Brood War. It is a real test in your ability to read and predict your opponent. Taking a natural at the wrong time has dire consequences. A second base always will be taken, no matter how you design a map a natural is your default best second base. Brood war just designs it so you have a slightly easier to take natural, but still can be rewarded/punished based on what I've said. This was true for chunks of WOL too. There were so many 1 base all-ins. Unfortunately, Blizzard has shown a clear inability to balance 1 base all-ins (1-1-1, 4 Gate, ect) and thus gave everyone bandaids in HOTS (Photon Overcharge, ect) and released maps that made defensive play ridiculously easy, so one basing died. Because one basing died and expansions were essentially free, the first few minutes of the game were boring and predictable in HOTS compared to WOL, so Blizzard removed the early game as we know it in LOTV and speeds us through it. They should have just started everyone on two bases, but that makes things look silly and highlights their inability to balance 1 basing. So they should have just been able to balance 1 base all-ins. | ||
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shin_toss
Philippines2589 Posts
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BeStFAN
483 Posts
On March 09 2016 11:21 PinheadXXXXXX wrote: 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. It's all relative. Consider the example I cited: if you imagine the same type of build being played out against one Zerg player, will it be easier and less strenuous with 4 drones to start and a cap of 3 larva (+ natural depending on how much Protoss delays with probe) and only access to zerglings which cut into drones or 12 drones, a ranged unit with HP, and enough larva to be able to create drones and zerglings at will? Obviously both players are going to receive the same type of scenario and forced to go down similar paths, but the difference in the amount of extra resources available and amount of attention (baby sitting) required is going to make a subsequent difference in the ease and effectiveness of the defensive response and the opposing build order respectively. | ||
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BeStFAN
483 Posts
That is, the basis of my argument: SC2 provides an abundance of in game resources and tools to make management easier and game to game choices/decisions on what strategy to do irrelevant as such it's less about "strategy" and more about "real time" interaction with the opponent, which is to say unit control. less RTS more MOBA there's a reason why most games from ~MidHigh Masters to professional games all look similar and share average game lengths in the midgame centering around 4 bases. There are very subtle nuances once you see once you play at a high enough level and are able to notice small variations at play, but overall? It all gels together | ||
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goody153
44247 Posts
Anyway, my main question is why do natural expansions exist? Dunno Why do Starcraft players get a freebie expansion that's a no-brainer to defend? Not sure but people say zerglings. Why is it okay for town hall first builds (CC first, Nexus first, Hatchery first) to exist? I see it as a greedy approach. Like if you think you can hold early aggression or think the enemy is going greedy as well. I personally think it's nice to have that option. Gives diversity in being aggressive or greedy or just normal. Why aren't there any maps where a one-base build is viable, and taking a second base is not guaranteed? Racial imbalance ? I think zerg doesn't survive without a 2nd base. Why are Starcraft maps so big? I guess so that there would be more chances to showcase skill of a player as there are more chances to outplay the opposition through flanks, taking advantage of terrain or part of the map or tactics. | ||
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Haukinger
Germany131 Posts
If diverse armies with lots of tech are more fun than small armies of one or two unit typesa are more fun, then why not enable all units from the start and reduce teching to upgrades? | ||
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weikor
Austria580 Posts
After several changes to make the early game less effective, for example MSC, then 12 worker start - staying on one base has become pretty crazy. But even today theres a difference between a Nexus first, or a Gas first opening. Without an easy to take natural, half the build orders wouldnt exist. | ||
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FeyFey
Germany10114 Posts
On March 09 2016 07:17 BisuDagger wrote: Natural expansions are far from free in Brood War. It is a real test in your ability to read and predict your opponent. Taking a natural at the wrong time has dire consequences. A second base always will be taken, no matter how you design a map a natural is your default best second base. Brood war just designs it so you have a slightly easier to take natural, but still can be rewarded/punished based on what I've said. Sounds on the spot for BW. And most people expected BW HD instead of Sc2. So they played Sc2 like they would play Sc1 just without being good at it. So everyone was failing horrible despite thinking of themself as being good. As a result lots of elitist qq on the forums and sadly Blizzard thought those people had a point somewhere and went to change a few bits. Those people noticed that screaming loud worked and went on till Sc2 the early game design turned into a boring sim city game. I mean they gave Zerg moving defensive buildings/Queens with super heal/anti air and the creep defenders advantage, so that the race that needs a second base the most can get there even if they are forced to build defensive structures. Every race had a few break contain units on t2 as well. Anyway people didn't use those mechanics, because it required micro to get a reward. So they had a hard time getting into the game against people that did use micro to punish greedy builds. And Blizzard decided to cater to the loud crowd and remodeled the game to fit their playstyle. Same thing happened to the mapmaking community. So two instances worked to make one playstyle easier. End result is Blizzard cutting the early game because it was ruined anyway. And the game is now based around 3 base economy. Makes balancing the game easier. Nothing bad with it, Warcraft 3 is pretty cool and you mostly stay on 1 base. And Sc2 had problems in the eco system from the start. With their initial idea that double vespin could be a choice, that ended up in you now needing 3 additional workers in gas + teching is now more expensive so early game aggression is stronger. Also the mining effectiveness on Minerals. Just to much supply burned in workers to have a race needing more bases. Though every race was given some mechanics to go over supply to make up for to many workers. And Terran was designed to work on a lower base count, so they could do their slow mech thing, without defending to many bases. But yeah Siege Tank nerfed into the ground because people ran head on into 20 sieged tanks. I mean of course its unfun to have that happen. Sigh its painful to think about how good Sc2 could be now, if not for this remove everything unfun from the game approach Blizzard had in early WoL, that just created even more unfun situation. Of course thats just personal preference because I am pretty sure that those people that triggered those changes, find the new unfun things less unfun then before. | ||
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Liox
Germany47 Posts
From my point of view, as a kind of "new" player, in this round of old gamers, StarCraft2 is a really fun game to play right now and it always has been fun since I started playing (which was with the start of HotS). Especially considering the Polt run at IEM Katowice last week, there is a huge variety of plays you can do if you want to try and stop focusing on what the professionals do all the time. I don't want to discourage this discussion or anything, I just thought it might be nice to get the view of a non-ultra sc2 veteran who just looks at the game as a single product instead of an offshot from another game. I can still enjoy the game just for the way it is designed rather then comparing it to an old (nostalgic?) version which gives me a huge advantages here (in other words: You guys are just too old and burned out from the game, get out!  ^^ //this is a joke, do not take it personally or anything (on a serious note: That is what happened to me at some point with WoW, i just could not stand it anymore)).What exactly are you missing that would make the game even more dynamic than it is? I mean, we send out worker scouts every game to see if our opponent plans to deny our natural expansion, right? And we have to react if they decide to do so. So what exactly are we looking for if we are asking for harder-to-take expansions despite the main townhall? | ||
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Dav1oN
Ukraine3164 Posts
Free natural expansion gives u a diversity of builds nd strategies to play with, choose between various builds using greed/agression/standart, imagine u take out the greed on itself than what? Back in WOL days there were a lot of 1 base games which were not rly fun to watch and even play, everything comes down to 4-5 minutes, u should remember that units deal damage times faster than in war3 for example, imagine u will try to kill main building with footmans in war3, and now the same goes with lings which gonna do their job perfectly. sc2, I belive, is a single RTS where u can count everything on your own (damage/armor/reduction/timings/range) and it is very fast pased in comparison to most of RTS's (even in comparison to one base war3 game), and overall slow process in CnC/Age of empires. Such potential speed requires a diversity of choises and strats to make this game entertaining to both play and watch. | ||
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brickrd
United States4894 Posts
-OP wanted an excuse to egotistically claim his weird, specific pet peeve is why the game isn't more popular -OP wants us to know he was playing dune or whatever when maru's dad was cumming User was warned for this post | ||
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Espers
United Kingdom606 Posts
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Aron Times
United States312 Posts
To clarify things, I'm not against natural expansions, or even free expansions (which is really what I don't like), as long as there's some variety in the map pool where some maps favor early rushes while others favor greedy economic plays. The problem is that compared to all other RTS games I've played, including early versions of this game, Starcraft 2 bases are essentially free. They're trivially easy to defend compared to other games, including Warcraft 3 (Blizzard's previous RTS). Also, it seems that I've been conflating pocket expansions with natural expansions. Natural expansions are simply the closest expansion, while pocket expansions are those which are easy to defend. However, the way the game has evolved, the natural expansions of today are almost as easy to hold as the pocket expansions of yesterday. --- Warning, baseless speculation follows: Until very recently, Valve has ignored the competitive aspect of TF2, and as a result, each league imposed its own rules. However, to prevent the esports community from being split, the various leagues stuck to item bans and competitive maps; none of them changed how the game worked because the inability to force consensus would split the community and kill off the scene. Was the move to Lost Temple due to the inability and unwillingness to change ingame stats? Did something similar happen to early SC1 esports? It seems to me that Blizzard had a more hands-off approach to balance patches compared to SC2, and patches were few and far between and focused mostly on technical issues. It seems to me that the community, unable and unwilling to mod the game to make the necessary balance changes, instead focused on making maps that allowed for the three races to work. I speculate that had Blizzard been more active in SC1 development instead of leaving it in the hands of Kespa, which didn't have enough clout to change the game (the balance changes would've been rejected by other leagues and even casual players and spectators), maybe we would've had a radically different game where starting locations don't need chokepoints to prevent an automatic Zerg victory, where island maps would still exist because Zerg wouldn't automatically lose on them, and so on. | ||
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DinoMight
United States3725 Posts
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Aron Times
United States312 Posts
On March 09 2016 20:56 cSc.Dav1oN wrote: So basicly u are wondering why games last longer than it should be Free natural expansion gives u a diversity of builds nd strategies to play with, choose between various builds using greed/agression/standart, imagine u take out the greed on itself than what? Back in WOL days there were a lot of 1 base games which were not rly fun to watch and even play, everything comes down to 4-5 minutes, u should remember that units deal damage times faster than in war3 for example, imagine u will try to kill main building with footmans in war3, and now the same goes with lings which gonna do their job perfectly. sc2, I belive, is a single RTS where u can count everything on your own (damage/armor/reduction/timings/range) and it is very fast pased in comparison to most of RTS's (even in comparison to one base war3 game), and overall slow process in CnC/Age of empires. Such potential speed requires a diversity of choises and strats to make this game entertaining to both play and watch. No, you misunderstood what I was trying to say. Or rather, what I didn't say but implied. SC2 right now skips the early game and goes directly into what would normally be the mid game and the late game. There's no slow buildup of armies and bases and production; you go straight into high production because the early game doesn't exist anymore. The end result is that the game is too fast, too clicky, too quickly, instead of a steady ramp-up of APM and intensity over the course of the game. You mentioned Warcraft 3. Warcraft 3 had clearly defined early, mid, and late games. Early game was when you scouted and got your first hero. You go creeping, skirmishing with the enemy hero, and overall getting gold, wood, XP, and items. Mid game was when you started teching up and getting your caster and anticaster units. You got your second and maybe even your third hero (depending on whether you were fast teching or not), and could potentially end the game there if you won a major battle. Late game was when heroes got their ultimates, and when you got access to tier 3 units, especially the powerful tier 3 flying units (which are more mobile and more cost efficient than early game tech). I think the reason why I liked Warcraft 3 so much was that it didn't feel like it was designed for esports. It was a decent esport in its own right, but it felt like it was designed primarily to be fun to play. Starcraft 2, on the other hand, seems to have been designed as an esport first. It's fun to watch, but as evidenced by the low player counts, it's not necessarily fun to play for everyone. Blizzard's questionable business decisions early in Starcraft 2's life only made it worse. | ||
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Erugua
13 Posts
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Kitai
United States880 Posts
In Starcraft, there are still rush strategies that can punish super early expands. However, I think it is more exciting and difficult when a faster expand allows for more units on the map to be used in interesting ways, and it is more difficult mechanics-wise to manage all of those units and spend the increased income quickly. You do bring up a good point though. Since Blizzard's new philosophy towards maps is to make them interesting and out-of-the-ordinary, they could throw a curve ball and make a map with no obvious natural expansion. I just don't think it would be good for the game if lots of maps were like that, as was already shown with early WoL. | ||
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RKC
2848 Posts
Has viewer taste and expectation changed, and more viewers now expect longer drawn-out games? Maybe, I don't know. But what I do know is that BW early game is a lot a more satisfying to watch than SC2, even if it ends in a 5-minute cheese or fail greedy play. Maybe because the harder mechanics and micro made the games look more exciting, and the outcome more acceptable (a cheese still needs a high level of execution to pull off). Thoughts, Bisu Dagger? | ||
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Aron Times
United States312 Posts
On March 10 2016 00:28 Kitai wrote: Blizzard tried making tiny maps so people couldn't fast expand in early WoL. The spectators found it boring and the players found it frustrating because the best way to win was pure cheese and getting to/figuring out the late game was next to impossible. In Starcraft, there are still rush strategies that can punish super early expands. However, I think it is more exciting and difficult when a faster expand allows for more units on the map to be used in interesting ways, and it is more difficult mechanics-wise to manage all of those units and spend the increased income quickly. You do bring up a good point though. Since Blizzard's new philosophy towards maps is to make them interesting and out-of-the-ordinary, they could throw a curve ball and make a map with no obvious natural expansion. I just don't think it would be good for the game if lots of maps were like that, as was already shown with early WoL. Heck, they could do it the Valve way and have people playtest the maps in exchange for Call it the Uncharted Territories ladder, where anything can happen, i.e. unusual map layouts, lore-breaking space sharks, hats, everything Blizzard may have wanted to try but didn't have the manpower to playtest. | ||
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