On February 10 2017 06:19 AlphaAeffchen wrote: Thx for the great responses and that you explain your thoughts about harrasment in BW and SC 2.
But i think you missunderstand some of my arguments. Let me give you one more example. Dt´s in TvP are stronger in broodwar because they come earlier and are harder to defend (scanstation can be destroyed). Its really long ago but i saw games from boxer and he lost because there were Dt´s and he was not prepared. Nobody was complaining about it. Because this things happen. And i heavily disagree that 95% of pro games are over before the big fights begin (allins like 3 eax reaper are a problem but this is an allin and not harrasment)
I know that worker harrasment is in nearly everey SC II game but i think its not bad.
I saw it in Broodwar in nearly everey game in TvZ. You cant let a zerg drone up in both games. Its a problem so you have to harras them.
Against protoss in Lotv you have only 2 real options as terran. Widowminedrop or liberator. The other options are too expensive in early game (cloaked banshee). Or die against pylon cannon. Harrasment in midgame is good in both games (drops, warpprism, arbiter......).Yes there are speed medivacs which lead to problems. But pls keep in mind that they create many skirmishes on the map which is really fun to see for me as a viewer.
I agree that earlygame harrasment can be really fustrating and that this is a problem in SC II but in general its a good thing for the game.
Please double check your spelling before posting in the future. If you are unsure if something is right or not, ask around and many people on TL will be happy to help you out
On February 10 2017 00:43 AlphaAeffchen wrote: @ Kaewins
I totally understand your arguments. But if you look at BW games from boxer. There are manygames which he won only because of worker harrasment. Protoss players stomped terrans with Arbiter harrass in lategame....
Here's the thing though, in BW worker harassment is a viable strategy and one aspect of the game, in SC2 worker harassment and killing bases is 95% of the game.
How many times since the launch of LotV had pro games been decided by massive army engagements? I can't remember very many. I guess Neeb in PvP comes to mind, which I must admit is quite exciting to watch, but outside of that games are decided way before we get to a stage where big battles are fought.
I find 90% of games vs zerg is all about creep control and map management
I also find that 90% of vs terran matches are all about vision supremacy as it is super important to be able to position defenses to bat off medivac incursions, banshees, and liberators as their main force prevents you from just pulling back your troops in fear of losing bases.
I also find 90% of vs protoss matches are exclusively about gaining an army position to allow you to circumvent their aoe of choice.
So I don't understand the criticism you have at all.
On February 10 2017 00:18 BisuDagger wrote: Honestly, I think this was a bigger issue in LOTV. With the new fast paced economy and quick extra bases this feels less of an issue. But still in SC2 workers can be obliterated at such a faster level and it is a combination of harrasment units doing damage very fast and the defensive structure of sc2 vs sc1.
Vultures for instance are great harassment units but are not strong enough to win a game outright even with good attacks.
Vultures: TvZ Not as common early game vs zerg. By the time mech switch comes out zerg should have two things 1. Good sim cities to help prevent runbys 2. The remacro from multiple hatcheries across many base location + nydus canals to quickly defend each base make the zerg fierce defenders. Plus at this point defensive lurkers and sunkens will make it hard for 4 vultures to kill many workers before the vultures are killed.
TvP 1. Vultures don't get inside the base easily because a pylons plus rallied dragoons are usually blocking the natural 2. Vulture drops are deflected by good scouting pylon placements and macro dragoons pop out to kill of 4 vultures. 3. Protoss should always be out expanding Terran. So even if an exposed third nexus takes tons of probe kills, the protoss should be able to play defense and remacro workers.
So let's assume that vultures do harass at a level of significant damage in a TvP. Now protoss can expect a tank+vulture follow up and they do not have the economy to face Terran head on. Well Brood War has HUGE defensive advantages. High ground areas and cliffs can be used to cause missed tank shots or lower dmg attack. The bridges and choke points are major too because BW units are larger. You cannot stack them up in bundles as effectively as SC2. So you have dragoons hitting tanks from a high ground, zealots dropping on tanks, and all the while your Protoss army has it's back against 8-12 gateways bringing more units into the battle.
Another way too look at it though: On a broader scope every harrasment investment has it's drawbacks. Going for reavers and killing lots of SCVs doesn't mean that Terran loses outright. Terran off two bases can still defend Protoss armies for a very very very long time with a much smaller army of tanks and turrets.And teching to reavers may mean protoss took obs later, so then Terran responds with spider mine harassment. Reavers also mean less gas for goons, so now the protoss player cannot defend and two base timing push from Terran as easily. Especially if Terran can pull their 4 marines out of their bunker and pick of the shuttle containing the reaver. Then protoss is suddenly behind even after killing 10 workers.
The TLDR, is that all 3 races have ways to defend or comeback from heavy damage. It's tough, but smart players take risks and change tech paths that allow them to overcome the harassment.
I think you are seeing this from the wrong angle regarding the defensiveness of BW Bisu, yes, cliffs and such help, but on direct harassment drops or wherever they matter very little, instead I would look at the economy.
On my eyes, it is very simple what is happening on the case of SC2 Harassment being considerably stronger than in BW on its potential to cripple a player, and that is caused by Worker Pairing.
On BW, where worker pairing does not exist, and instead the efficiency threshold for saturated Mineral lines is 8, as long as a player's mineral line does not go below those 8 workers, the overall income of the mineral line is rather stable. What I mean is that, because in BW when you go beyond 8 workers per mineral line, the efficiency of these new workers is less than the efficiency of the first 8. This creates kinda of a cushion effect on the mineral line. As long as you have 8 workers mining on it, you will still be receiving a "considerable" part of the total income a mineral line gives.
On SC2 meanwhile, because a mineral line requires 16 workers to be efficiently mined, when you are losing any of said 16 workers, you are losing workers mining at 100% efficiency, meaning that your income is being severely affected, which in BW is not the case as the efficiency threshold there is 8 instead of 16. So in BW you need to basically lose all workers in a mineral line for your income to become obliterated, meanwhile on SC2, because of the linear relation on the first 16 workers, if you lose say, half of those your income will become halved, on BW, if you lose half of your first 16 workers, your income will decrease by ~40%.
Here's a pic to illustrate the issue.
As such, on SC2, when you lose workers from your vital 16, you are losing your important 100% efficiency workers, meanwhile in BW, the golden number of 100% efficient mining workers is 8 not 16.
This also means that in BW it is easier to bounce back into a decent economy after heavy harassment rather easily, for you "only" need to transfer around 8 to 10 workers from your other bases into the harassed base and you will more or less have a similar economy you had previously (still damaged, only not bleeding to death). In the case of SC2, because you need 16 workers per mineral line, if your main has 22 workers and the workers in your nat are all dead, if you decide to transfer 8 from your main to you natural, your overall income will still be screwed, because your natural will still need 8 extra workers for it to be working at 100% efficiency once again, while now your main will also be in need of refilling those 2 missing mining workers until it reaches 16 again.
There are a lot of other things that I didn't bothered to mention like how worker bouncing creates sweet spots on the mining curves, or went in detail about the nitty gritty mining rates for workers on BW vs SC2
So if anyone got interested on this, I highly suggest to go read other articles on Worker Pairing, and how it affects the game.
From a personal standpoint, often in low level play in BW, the harasser usually lost a good amount of his econ progression managing the harass instead of managing his workers. So they could kill 8 of your workers, but it would also turn out that he could have made 6 workers but failed to do so, making it so he's only at a net 2 workers ahead. This made a lot of non-pro matches in BW seem so even and back and forth even when one player is successfully harassing over and over.
On February 10 2017 00:17 todespolka wrote: Bw had a lot of worker harassment, but sc2 has more units, which can worker harass. Nonetheless bw was more punishing, because any distraction put you behind. You could not build workers and send them to minerals as easy as in sc2. You had no macro mechanics to close the gap after a worker loss. Also bases were not close and were hard to defend.
Most of the player in bw preferred team games or arcade games (ums games), where they could share the pressure and help each other out. The 1vs1 community was small. It is the opposite in sc2, 1vs1 has a lot of players.
1v1 community was not in small brood war, its just the 1v1 players didn't use the battle.net servers
On February 10 2017 06:06 ihatevideogames wrote: There was harassment in WOL, but it wasn't as game-ending as it is in LOTV.
LOTV seems to put such a big focus on harassment. DK himself said that he creams his pants over workers dying, but is that really good design? That does really make the game fun? Has anyone wondered that maybe this is one of the primary reasons the game is seeing the playerbase and viewerbase shrink?
nope, RTS games are all going down. a decreasing tide lowers all boats. let's see how long Halo Wars 2 lasts... it has a big time RTS studio behind it with a giant brand. i say it goes down faster than the hindenburg. it did make for the most awesome album cover in the history of the rock genre though.
considering how quickly RTS games die these days SC2 has done a great job of hanging on. i still enjoy the GSL and grassroots guys like TotalBiscuit and Rifkin are succeeding with their SC2 content.
On February 10 2017 03:35 Uvantak wrote: I think you are seeing this from the wrong angle regarding the defensiveness of BW Bisu, yes, cliffs and such help, but on direct harassment drops or wherever they matter very little, instead I would look at the economy.
On my eyes, it is very simple what is happening on the case of SC2 Harassment being considerably stronger than in BW on its potential to cripple a player, and that is caused by Worker Pairing.
On BW, where worker pairing does not exist, and instead the efficiency threshold for saturated Mineral lines is 8, as long as a player's mineral line does not go below those 8 workers, the overall income of the mineral line is rather stable.
good point. thanks for this. killing workers 9-16 means more in SC2 than it does in BW.
On February 10 2017 00:21 todespolka wrote: The biggest mistake people do is comparing specific aspects of the game isolated. You have to look at the big picture! In bw any distraction put you behind, because you could not send workers to minerals! The faster player had a bigger advantage.
true, auto-mining makes a big difference. as a C&C-er i'm really glad this housekeeping duty/chore was removed from SC2.
The reason why people call LotV Harasscraft, is not only because they added additional harassment tools, but most importantly because the very low economy system of LotV makes it harder to comeback.
In BW and earlier SC2 versions you had much more ressources per base available than in lotv. You could rebuild workers without getting completey behind.
If you lose too many workers in lotv, you can only come back by counter harassing and dealing atleast equal damage. Your main base runs out so incredibly fast, especially if you're terran and use mules.
This means you only have very limited options, you often can't afford to rebuild workers while also being able to produce just as much units as your opponent does.
In hots and wol macro mechanics were also stronger which means that you had higher spikes in ressource collection. Another reason why it was easier to recover.
RTS games aren't going down, please. We have Age of Empires 2 HD tournaments for gods sake.
The games aren't dying, there just aren't any good ones left.
StarCraft 2 is fading because it is frustrating to play, stop making excuses for the game. It has too much frustrating things in it and they keep adding more frustrating things, instead of removing those already in the game.
The game is becoming more and more depending on execution rather than strategy, but this genre is strategy so you can't blame strategy players for not wanting to deal with all the bullcrap in SC2. I'd play a moba if I was interested in all that.
Brood War and Age of Empires 2 are just superior real time strategy games and they are immensely enjoyable to play, because instead of dying to something that I had 5 seconds to react to, I can actually win my games with good long and short term strategic choices.
I don't mean to hate, but I think David Kim would do better in the HotS team as he is simply unable to make SC2 fun to play.
On February 10 2017 08:10 Kaewins wrote: The games aren't dying, there just aren't any good ones left.
true, because the longer orgs work on making a certain type of game the worse they get. Their best efforts are always their initial efforts at the dawn of the new medium. then they just keep getting worse and worse. Reductio Ad absurdum. increased consumer choice when it comes to crazy-action big-army fights has watered down the demand for games that used to require a desktop PC.
AoE2 generates almost zero revenue for its creators and thus there is almost zero incentive to sink money into creating another RTS game.
Try and raise some money to make an RTS game. PM me the results.
On February 10 2017 08:10 Kaewins wrote: The games aren't dying, there just aren't any good ones left.
true, because the longer orgs work on making a certain type of game the worse they get. Their best efforts are always their initial efforts at the dawn of the new medium. then they just keep getting worse and worse. Reductio Ad absurdum. increased consumer choice when it comes to crazy-action big-army fights has watered down the demand for games that used to require a desktop PC.
All boils down to a simple question. Is the game fun to play? It doesn't matter how big of a budget its got or how many fancy developers work on it, or how shiny the graphics are. Is the game fun to play or not?
There is a reason we still play older games like BW and AoE2 instead of their newer shinier counterparts. Sorry, it's not nostalgia, it's because they're damn good games.
Obviously devs back in the day had less good tech to work with so instead they used their passion and imagination to create the iconic games people grew to love. Today games have much higher production values, but little soul and instead we get to listen to some smug developer explain why his game doesn't suck.
Age of Empires 2 just had it's newest expansion launched, it's more alive than SC2 prolly.
On February 10 2017 00:18 BisuDagger wrote: Honestly, I think this was a bigger issue in LOTV. With the new fast paced economy and quick extra bases this feels less of an issue. But still in SC2 workers can be obliterated at such a faster level and it is a combination of harrasment units doing damage very fast and the defensive structure of sc2 vs sc1.
Vultures for instance are great harassment units but are not strong enough to win a game outright even with good attacks.
Vultures: TvZ Not as common early game vs zerg. By the time mech switch comes out zerg should have two things 1. Good sim cities to help prevent runbys 2. The remacro from multiple hatcheries across many base location + nydus canals to quickly defend each base make the zerg fierce defenders. Plus at this point defensive lurkers and sunkens will make it hard for 4 vultures to kill many workers before the vultures are killed.
TvP 1. Vultures don't get inside the base easily because a pylons plus rallied dragoons are usually blocking the natural 2. Vulture drops are deflected by good scouting pylon placements and macro dragoons pop out to kill of 4 vultures. 3. Protoss should always be out expanding Terran. So even if an exposed third nexus takes tons of probe kills, the protoss should be able to play defense and remacro workers.
So let's assume that vultures do harass at a level of significant damage in a TvP. Now protoss can expect a tank+vulture follow up and they do not have the economy to face Terran head on. Well Brood War has HUGE defensive advantages. High ground areas and cliffs can be used to cause missed tank shots or lower dmg attack. The bridges and choke points are major too because BW units are larger. You cannot stack them up in bundles as effectively as SC2. So you have dragoons hitting tanks from a high ground, zealots dropping on tanks, and all the while your Protoss army has it's back against 8-12 gateways bringing more units into the battle.
Another way too look at it though: On a broader scope every harrasment investment has it's drawbacks. Going for reavers and killing lots of SCVs doesn't mean that Terran loses outright. Terran off two bases can still defend Protoss armies for a very very very long time with a much smaller army of tanks and turrets.And teching to reavers may mean protoss took obs later, so then Terran responds with spider mine harassment. Reavers also mean less gas for goons, so now the protoss player cannot defend and two base timing push from Terran as easily. Especially if Terran can pull their 4 marines out of their bunker and pick of the shuttle containing the reaver. Then protoss is suddenly behind even after killing 10 workers.
The TLDR, is that all 3 races have ways to defend or comeback from heavy damage. It's tough, but smart players take risks and change tech paths that allow them to overcome the harassment.
I think you are seeing this from the wrong angle regarding the defensiveness of BW Bisu, yes, cliffs and such help, but on direct harassment drops or wherever they matter very little, instead I would look at the economy.
On my eyes, it is very simple what is happening on the case of SC2 Harassment being considerably stronger than in BW on its potential to cripple a player, and that is caused by Worker Pairing.
On BW, where worker pairing does not exist, and instead the efficiency threshold for saturated Mineral lines is 8, as long as a player's mineral line does not go below those 8 workers, the overall income of the mineral line is rather stable. What I mean is that, because in BW when you go beyond 8 workers per mineral line, the efficiency of these new workers is less than the efficiency of the first 8. This creates kinda of a cushion effect on the mineral line. As long as you have 8 workers mining on it, you will still be receiving a "considerable" part of the total income a mineral line gives.
On SC2 meanwhile, because a mineral line requires 16 workers to be efficiently mined, when you are losing any of said 16 workers, you are losing workers mining at 100% efficiency, meaning that your income is being severely affected, which in BW is not the case as the efficiency threshold there is 8 instead of 16. So in BW you need to basically lose all workers in a mineral line for your income to become obliterated, meanwhile on SC2, because of the linear relation on the first 16 workers, if you lose say, half of those your income will become halved, on BW, if you lose half of your first 16 workers, your income will decrease by ~40%.
Here's a pic to illustrate the issue.
As such, on SC2, when you lose workers from your vital 16, you are losing your important 100% efficiency workers, meanwhile in BW, the golden number of 100% efficient mining workers is 8 not 16.
This also means that in BW it is easier to bounce back into a decent economy after heavy harassment rather easily, for you "only" need to transfer around 8 to 10 workers from your other bases into the harassed base and you will more or less have a similar economy you had previously (still damaged, only not bleeding to death). In the case of SC2, because you need 16 workers per mineral line, if your main has 22 workers and the workers in your nat are all dead, if you decide to transfer 8 from your main to you natural, your overall income will still be screwed, because your natural will still need 8 extra workers for it to be working at 100% efficiency once again, while now your main will also be in need of refilling those 2 missing mining workers until it reaches 16 again.
There are a lot of other things that I didn't bothered to mention like how worker bouncing creates sweet spots on the mining curves, or went in detail about the nitty gritty mining rates for workers on BW vs SC2
So if anyone got interested on this, I highly suggest to go read other articles on Worker Pairing, and how it affects the game.
♦♦ From a personal standpoint, often in low level play in BW, the harasser usually lost a good amount of his econ progression managing the harass instead of managing his workers. So they could kill 8 of your workers, but it would also turn out that he could have made 6 workers but failed to do so, making it so he's only at a net 2 workers ahead. This made a lot of non-pro matches in BW seem so even and back and forth even when one player is successfully harassing over and over.
♦ No, what I wrote is based on math alone, which even when it might seem similar to pro-play, in the sense that pro-players try to get as close as possible to playing "perfectly", it is still different, because as I mentioned at the end, there are several other things which I'm not mentioning. And being honest, even the numbers I wrote on the graphs are simply an approximation to the real income rates, a BW base with 16 workers does not mine the same as a SC2 base with 16, from the top of my head they had like a ~7% difference on income.
♦♦ Yeah, that's a fair assessment I think, tho I would throw HighGround Advantage +BW Pathing in there too, as these two mechanics make it harder for the player that's ahead to achieve the killing blow to the defensive (behind) player.
On February 10 2017 08:27 Kaewins wrote: Age of Empires 2 just had it's newest expansion launched, it's more alive than SC2 prolly.
your view that the entire RTS genre is not declining is based on a single $10 expansion for 1 RTS game that sold less than 100,000 copies while ATVI just made $2+ billion in 3 months....thanks for proving my point.
it is really cool that strategy/action games of all types develop cult like followings that allow them to last far longer than standard action only video games. but its not like that started with AoE or the RTS genre. It started with games like M.U.L.E. and Utopia.
On February 10 2017 00:18 BisuDagger wrote: Honestly, I think this was a bigger issue in LOTV. With the new fast paced economy and quick extra bases this feels less of an issue. But still in SC2 workers can be obliterated at such a faster level and it is a combination of harrasment units doing damage very fast and the defensive structure of sc2 vs sc1.
Vultures for instance are great harassment units but are not strong enough to win a game outright even with good attacks.
Vultures: TvZ Not as common early game vs zerg. By the time mech switch comes out zerg should have two things 1. Good sim cities to help prevent runbys 2. The remacro from multiple hatcheries across many base location + nydus canals to quickly defend each base make the zerg fierce defenders. Plus at this point defensive lurkers and sunkens will make it hard for 4 vultures to kill many workers before the vultures are killed.
TvP 1. Vultures don't get inside the base easily because a pylons plus rallied dragoons are usually blocking the natural 2. Vulture drops are deflected by good scouting pylon placements and macro dragoons pop out to kill of 4 vultures. 3. Protoss should always be out expanding Terran. So even if an exposed third nexus takes tons of probe kills, the protoss should be able to play defense and remacro workers.
So let's assume that vultures do harass at a level of significant damage in a TvP. Now protoss can expect a tank+vulture follow up and they do not have the economy to face Terran head on. Well Brood War has HUGE defensive advantages. High ground areas and cliffs can be used to cause missed tank shots or lower dmg attack. The bridges and choke points are major too because BW units are larger. You cannot stack them up in bundles as effectively as SC2. So you have dragoons hitting tanks from a high ground, zealots dropping on tanks, and all the while your Protoss army has it's back against 8-12 gateways bringing more units into the battle.
Another way too look at it though: On a broader scope every harrasment investment has it's drawbacks. Going for reavers and killing lots of SCVs doesn't mean that Terran loses outright. Terran off two bases can still defend Protoss armies for a very very very long time with a much smaller army of tanks and turrets.And teching to reavers may mean protoss took obs later, so then Terran responds with spider mine harassment. Reavers also mean less gas for goons, so now the protoss player cannot defend and two base timing push from Terran as easily. Especially if Terran can pull their 4 marines out of their bunker and pick of the shuttle containing the reaver. Then protoss is suddenly behind even after killing 10 workers.
The TLDR, is that all 3 races have ways to defend or comeback from heavy damage. It's tough, but smart players take risks and change tech paths that allow them to overcome the harassment.
I think you are seeing this from the wrong angle regarding the defensiveness of BW Bisu, yes, cliffs and such help, but on direct harassment drops or wherever they matter very little, instead I would look at the economy.
On my eyes, it is very simple what is happening on the case of SC2 Harassment being considerably stronger than in BW on its potential to cripple a player, and that is caused by Worker Pairing.
On BW, where worker pairing does not exist, and instead the efficiency threshold for saturated Mineral lines is 8, as long as a player's mineral line does not go below those 8 workers, the overall income of the mineral line is rather stable. What I mean is that, because in BW when you go beyond 8 workers per mineral line, the efficiency of these new workers is less than the efficiency of the first 8. This creates kinda of a cushion effect on the mineral line. As long as you have 8 workers mining on it, you will still be receiving a "considerable" part of the total income a mineral line gives.
On SC2 meanwhile, because a mineral line requires 16 workers to be efficiently mined, when you are losing any of said 16 workers, you are losing workers mining at 100% efficiency, meaning that your income is being severely affected, which in BW is not the case as the efficiency threshold there is 8 instead of 16. So in BW you need to basically lose all workers in a mineral line for your income to become obliterated, meanwhile on SC2, because of the linear relation on the first 16 workers, if you lose say, half of those your income will become halved, on BW, if you lose half of your first 16 workers, your income will decrease by ~40%.
Here's a pic to illustrate the issue.
As such, on SC2, when you lose workers from your vital 16, you are losing your important 100% efficiency workers, meanwhile in BW, the golden number of 100% efficient mining workers is 8 not 16.
This also means that in BW it is easier to bounce back into a decent economy after heavy harassment rather easily, for you "only" need to transfer around 8 to 10 workers from your other bases into the harassed base and you will more or less have a similar economy you had previously (still damaged, only not bleeding to death). In the case of SC2, because you need 16 workers per mineral line, if your main has 22 workers and the workers in your nat are all dead, if you decide to transfer 8 from your main to you natural, your overall income will still be screwed, because your natural will still need 8 extra workers for it to be working at 100% efficiency once again, while now your main will also be in need of refilling those 2 missing mining workers until it reaches 16 again.
There are a lot of other things that I didn't bothered to mention like how worker bouncing creates sweet spots on the mining curves, or went in detail about the nitty gritty mining rates for workers on BW vs SC2
So if anyone got interested on this, I highly suggest to go read other articles on Worker Pairing, and how it affects the game.
♦♦ From a personal standpoint, often in low level play in BW, the harasser usually lost a good amount of his econ progression managing the harass instead of managing his workers. So they could kill 8 of your workers, but it would also turn out that he could have made 6 workers but failed to do so, making it so he's only at a net 2 workers ahead. This made a lot of non-pro matches in BW seem so even and back and forth even when one player is successfully harassing over and over.
♦ No, what I wrote is based on math alone, which even when it might seem similar to pro-play, in the sense that pro-players try to get as close as possible to playing "perfectly", it is still different, because as I mentioned at the end, there are several other things which I'm not mentioning. And being honest, even the numbers I wrote on the graphs are simply an approximation to the real income rates, a BW base with 16 workers does not mine the same as a SC2 base with 16, from the top of my head they had like a ~7% difference on income.
♦♦ Yeah, that's a fair assessment I think, tho I would throw HighGround Advantage +BW Pathing in there too, as these two mechanics make it harder for the player that's ahead to achieve the killing blow to the defensive (behind) player.
Both points are one and the same to me. I'm saying that most "players" don't actually get to leverage those aspects of the game at the timings where it actually matters. However, in SC2, econ is easy enough to maximize that we don't have the "oh shit I forgot to make workers while I managed the drop, and the workers I had in cue are all just piled 5 deep in each of my 4 bases resulting 20 workers sitting idle" that BW has when you're playing. In SC2, you can just cue a bunch of workers, do your harass, and when its done continue making workers.
Add the math on top of that and you can definitely see the differences in both games when it comes to harass. In SC2, since econ is easy to replenish, harass needs to almost wipe out a mineral line to really feel a difference. Killing 1-2 isn't enough. In BW, often times the threat of killing things in BW was enough to get people behind just by forcing them to make economic mistakes. As such, even if you "only killed a few workers" you could often deal economic damage.
The true strong macro players would face the same harass, lose the same amount of workers as most players, and somehow still come out ahead in econ. That's what was truly beautiful about BW harass. Stronger players literally produced stronger results despite being given the same amount of damage because they were able to keep up with all the clicks needed to be the best.
I opened this topic because i wanted to discuss worker harassment in SC II and BW. Now you discuss if SC II/RTS games are dead. Its idiotic. We have a scene. We have GSL. We have tournaments. SC BW and SC II are both hardcore games. Yes our player base is not the biggest. Sc II had more players than BW ever had at the beginning of Wol and Hots. Most people started to play Starcraft II casual. They played it for years and moved on. This happens. We still have a game that is alive and will stay alive. Starcraft 2 was number 1 on twitch for many years. Most young people like mobas more because they are easier and they dont want to play more complicated games. The same thing happens with strategy board games (i love Axis and Alllies). Most young people hate to play complicated games and want to play easier games. Its a fact. But we have enough people who play this game and care about it. Its fine.
We had 35000 people watching GSL when Scarlett played. SC II is alive. Its ok.
SC II is an excelent game and Blizzard did evereything to make it good. Yes there are big problems in SC II. But many people wanted to have BW 2.0. That would be the worst thing that could have happened. I remember that people complained about unlimited unit selection and unlimited building selection in SC II. If these things would not have been in the game, we would have never reached number 1 on twitch because the game would be unplayable for modern standards in RTS and people would have said 6 months after the release of SC II/Wol that the game is to hard to play and outdated!
Age of Empires II is a casual game and will never be an E-sport.
The only 2 games in the genre RTS which are a real E-sport are SC BW and SC II thats it.
Oh and Jimmy JRaynor RTS games are not dead. They are still in development and have a solid market.
-Total war warhammer series
- Dawn of War 3
- Halo 2
Ohh and by the way Jimmy also pls stop spreading misinformation about Blizzard not making a new RTS in other topics. There will be Warcraft 4. The only question is when. Mike Morhain said that he is interested in WC 4. The only question is when it will come. And your argument about Blizzard not making enough profit with RTS games is completely wrong.
- Blizzard makes money with RTS games. LotV sold 1 million copies at release day (this is enough return of invest)!
- Warcraft 4 would sell many copies because of the lore behind it and so on............
Oh and by the way Blizzard still makes some games just because their fanbase wants to see them!
I'm so sick of this negativity here. I wanted to discuss worker harassment in Starcraft 1 and 2 and not the dead game StarCraft/RTS bullshit which is totally wrong!
I'm speaking from a Zerg perspective, at 5400 mmr.
I don't find worker harassment to be prevalent, a problem, or game ending.
There are 2 options for worker harassment, in my eyes. Your opponent's opening, and everything else. A harass focused opening like an oracle, or a widow mine drop, is pure strategy. Executing it is trivial, and defending it is trivial, given you both know how to execute/defend it. Since it's entirely based on knowledge, and less on execution, this cannot be what people complain about.
That leaves everything else. Meaning at some point in the game, your opponent kills some workers outside of his build order. At this point in the game, you're usually going to be done worker production. For a zerg, this means all your money is going into tech/units, and you're sitting on somewhere in the vicinity of 80 drones.
In this situation, you can lose upwards of 16 drones and still be rolling in 3 base sat income. Meaning your opponent can kill all the drones at one of your base, and you're still going to be okay. That's a pretty big window of forgiveness, and if you're in a situation where losing drones is going to put you under the worker count of your opponent - you're probably losing anyway, and your opponent is just capitalizing on that.
I'm probably out of touch, being zerg and all, but I've never been able to connect the complaints about worker harass to the game. Defending workers is probably one of the easier things for a zerg to do, and even if you don't, you should have a large drone count buffer to compensate.
On February 10 2017 10:41 InfCereal wrote: I'm speaking from a Zerg perspective, at 5400 mmr.
I don't find worker harassment to be prevalent, a problem, or game ending.
There are 2 options for worker harassment, in my eyes. Your opponent's opening, and everything else. A harass focused opening like an oracle, or a widow mine drop, is pure strategy. Executing it is trivial, and defending it is trivial, given you both know how to execute/defend it. Since it's entirely based on knowledge, and less on execution, this cannot be what people complain about.
That leaves everything else. Meaning at some point in the game, your opponent kills some workers outside of his build order. At this point in the game, you're usually going to be done worker production. For a zerg, this means all your money is going into tech/units, and you're sitting on somewhere in the vicinity of 80 drones.
In this situation, you can lose upwards of 16 drones and still be rolling in 3 base sat income. Meaning your opponent can kill all the drones at one of your base, and you're still going to be okay. That's a pretty big window of forgiveness, and if you're in a situation where losing drones is going to put you under the worker count of your opponent - you're probably losing anyway, and your opponent is just capitalizing on that.
I'm probably out of touch, being zerg and all, but I've never been able to connect the complaints about worker harass to the game. Defending workers is probably one of the easier things for a zerg to do, and even if you don't, you should have a large drone count buffer to compensate.
If you read between the lines it usually means "BW was obviously so much better than SC2 because I dislikes the axioms set forth by SC2 and I will state my opinion as fact"
On February 10 2017 00:18 BisuDagger wrote: Honestly, I think this was a bigger issue in LOTV. With the new fast paced economy and quick extra bases this feels less of an issue. But still in SC2 workers can be obliterated at such a faster level and it is a combination of harrasment units doing damage very fast and the defensive structure of sc2 vs sc1.
Vultures for instance are great harassment units but are not strong enough to win a game outright even with good attacks.
Vultures: TvZ Not as common early game vs zerg. By the time mech switch comes out zerg should have two things 1. Good sim cities to help prevent runbys 2. The remacro from multiple hatcheries across many base location + nydus canals to quickly defend each base make the zerg fierce defenders. Plus at this point defensive lurkers and sunkens will make it hard for 4 vultures to kill many workers before the vultures are killed.
TvP 1. Vultures don't get inside the base easily because a pylons plus rallied dragoons are usually blocking the natural 2. Vulture drops are deflected by good scouting pylon placements and macro dragoons pop out to kill of 4 vultures. 3. Protoss should always be out expanding Terran. So even if an exposed third nexus takes tons of probe kills, the protoss should be able to play defense and remacro workers.
So let's assume that vultures do harass at a level of significant damage in a TvP. Now protoss can expect a tank+vulture follow up and they do not have the economy to face Terran head on. Well Brood War has HUGE defensive advantages. High ground areas and cliffs can be used to cause missed tank shots or lower dmg attack. The bridges and choke points are major too because BW units are larger. You cannot stack them up in bundles as effectively as SC2. So you have dragoons hitting tanks from a high ground, zealots dropping on tanks, and all the while your Protoss army has it's back against 8-12 gateways bringing more units into the battle.
Another way too look at it though: On a broader scope every harrasment investment has it's drawbacks. Going for reavers and killing lots of SCVs doesn't mean that Terran loses outright. Terran off two bases can still defend Protoss armies for a very very very long time with a much smaller army of tanks and turrets.And teching to reavers may mean protoss took obs later, so then Terran responds with spider mine harassment. Reavers also mean less gas for goons, so now the protoss player cannot defend and two base timing push from Terran as easily. Especially if Terran can pull their 4 marines out of their bunker and pick of the shuttle containing the reaver. Then protoss is suddenly behind even after killing 10 workers.
The TLDR, is that all 3 races have ways to defend or comeback from heavy damage. It's tough, but smart players take risks and change tech paths that allow them to overcome the harassment.
I think you are seeing this from the wrong angle regarding the defensiveness of BW Bisu, yes, cliffs and such help, but on direct harassment drops or wherever they matter very little, instead I would look at the economy.
On my eyes, it is very simple what is happening on the case of SC2 Harassment being considerably stronger than in BW on its potential to cripple a player, and that is caused by Worker Pairing.
On BW, where worker pairing does not exist, and instead the efficiency threshold for saturated Mineral lines is 8, as long as a player's mineral line does not go below those 8 workers, the overall income of the mineral line is rather stable. What I mean is that, because in BW when you go beyond 8 workers per mineral line, the efficiency of these new workers is less than the efficiency of the first 8. This creates kinda of a cushion effect on the mineral line. As long as you have 8 workers mining on it, you will still be receiving a "considerable" part of the total income a mineral line gives.
On SC2 meanwhile, because a mineral line requires 16 workers to be efficiently mined, when you are losing any of said 16 workers, you are losing workers mining at 100% efficiency, meaning that your income is being severely affected, which in BW is not the case as the efficiency threshold there is 8 instead of 16. So in BW you need to basically lose all workers in a mineral line for your income to become obliterated, meanwhile on SC2, because of the linear relation on the first 16 workers, if you lose say, half of those your income will become halved, on BW, if you lose half of your first 16 workers, your income will decrease by ~40%.
Here's a pic to illustrate the issue.
As such, on SC2, when you lose workers from your vital 16, you are losing your important 100% efficiency workers, meanwhile in BW, the golden number of 100% efficient mining workers is 8 not 16.
This also means that in BW it is easier to bounce back into a decent economy after heavy harassment rather easily, for you "only" need to transfer around 8 to 10 workers from your other bases into the harassed base and you will more or less have a similar economy you had previously (still damaged, only not bleeding to death). In the case of SC2, because you need 16 workers per mineral line, if your main has 22 workers and the workers in your nat are all dead, if you decide to transfer 8 from your main to you natural, your overall income will still be screwed, because your natural will still need 8 extra workers for it to be working at 100% efficiency once again, while now your main will also be in need of refilling those 2 missing mining workers until it reaches 16 again.
There are a lot of other things that I didn't bothered to mention like how worker bouncing creates sweet spots on the mining curves, or went in detail about the nitty gritty mining rates for workers on BW vs SC2
So if anyone got interested on this, I highly suggest to go read other articles on Worker Pairing, and how it affects the game.
♦♦ From a personal standpoint, often in low level play in BW, the harasser usually lost a good amount of his econ progression managing the harass instead of managing his workers. So they could kill 8 of your workers, but it would also turn out that he could have made 6 workers but failed to do so, making it so he's only at a net 2 workers ahead. This made a lot of non-pro matches in BW seem so even and back and forth even when one player is successfully harassing over and over.
♦ No, what I wrote is based on math alone, which even when it might seem similar to pro-play, in the sense that pro-players try to get as close as possible to playing "perfectly", it is still different, because as I mentioned at the end, there are several other things which I'm not mentioning. And being honest, even the numbers I wrote on the graphs are simply an approximation to the real income rates, a BW base with 16 workers does not mine the same as a SC2 base with 16, from the top of my head they had like a ~7% difference on income.
♦♦ Yeah, that's a fair assessment I think, tho I would throw HighGround Advantage +BW Pathing in there too, as these two mechanics make it harder for the player that's ahead to achieve the killing blow to the defensive (behind) player.
Both points are one and the same to me. I'm saying that most "players" don't actually get to leverage those aspects of the game at the timings where it actually matters. However, in SC2, econ is easy enough to maximize that we don't have the "oh shit I forgot to make workers while I managed the drop, and the workers I had in cue are all just piled 5 deep in each of my 4 bases resulting 20 workers sitting idle" that BW has when you're playing. In SC2, you can just cue a bunch of workers, do your harass, and when its done continue making workers.
Add the math on top of that and you can definitely see the differences in both games when it comes to harass. In SC2, since econ is easy to replenish, harass needs to almost wipe out a mineral line to really feel a difference. Killing 1-2 isn't enough. In BW, often times the threat of killing things in BW was enough to get people behind just by forcing them to make economic mistakes. As such, even if you "only killed a few workers" you could often deal economic damage.
Thing is, that what you say is "necessary" is actually pretty freaking exasperating for most of the playerbase, there is absolutely no need for the SC2 economy to be this punishing, and if Lalush's investigations are correct, the only reason why there is Worker Pairing in the first place is because someone somewhere while developing SC2 WoL on ~2008 decided that having workers bounce around sometimes looked "messy", so they changed the mining rate of workers in order to have them "not bounce as much".
When talking about these things, one must be very careful to not rationalize things, where there was no strong rationale to begin with. I still remember a friend of mine who was convinced that the reason why there are two vespene geysers per base instead of one, was because he thought that the DevTeam was trying to "fix" gas stealing, where as the real reason, is because on Pre-Alpha they were playing with back to base mechanics/macro-mechanics and they had an iteration where vespene geysers had a very reduced amount of gas in them, and every X time you needed to "buy extra vespene", but this process needed a wind-up time, and they couldn't leave players without gas during that time, so they added two geysers. And sure, the gas stealing thing might have played a part, maybe, but that's not the true reason, and simply looking at things without context of the Development of SC2, it is very easy to fall into those logical pitfalls.
As I mentioned at the beginning, there is no specific & logical reason as to why the SC2 Worker Pairing system needs to be in the game, harass is just one out of many ways in which this mechanic inherently damages the stability of the game.
Sure you can argue that SC2 UX and streamlined commands allows for players to make more workers, and Worker Pairing might be a good way to "balance" said new mechanic, yet, this is not logically sound, as there are several less damaging systems which can be tweaked and used to balance that instead of using the very economical core of the game. Which as I have mentioned several times, affects many more other systems than just "harassment". Not to mention that it outright destroys the Blizzard Design & Balance Axiom of "Doing small changes".
On February 10 2017 06:27 My_Fake_Plastic_Luv wrote: I think SC2 its just much easier to harass workers.
/thread, pretty much.
It's not about which game is harder/better or whatever other thing you want to bring up, it's simply easier to do in SC2 and less risk/higher reward. Honestly, the risk/reward is rather skewed on a number of things in SC2, even though it's still a great game.
Although the uvantak discussion is relavant to realizing why it's harder to recover from harass in SC2. To some degree harass would happen a bit less if the recovery was easier due to a better designed economy, but I think it would still happen a ton because the risk/reward is just soo far from ideal atm.
The main design difference is that in BW there were units that were good at harass, but they were also good at other things. In SC2 there are units (Oracle, Banshee, Reaper, etc) whose sole purpose is to kill workers, which is just bad design IMO.
On February 10 2017 12:31 Solar424 wrote: The main design difference is that in BW there were units that were good at harass, but they were also good at other things. In SC2 there are units (Oracle, Banshee, Reaper, etc) whose sole purpose is to kill workers, which is just bad design IMO.
Actually, the Oracle has a lot of purposes outside of worker harass. Arguably its most important function is revelation, which is enables the Protoss to have an unblockable scan on the army.
Additionally, the Oracle's stasis ward is not used at much as it should, but it enables defensive blocking as well as positional play.
And on rare occasions, the oracle can be used en masse to provoke massive rage.
And the reaper's main purpose is really to scout the opponent, and worker kills are a bonus. Also, when used correctly, reapers work well with early pushes with their grenades (though this is a bit more variable).
And the banshee, yeah is pretty much for killing workers.
So yes, there are some units design solely for killing workers, but the reaper and the oracle are pretty bad examples.
EPT
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/iH4KYu9.jpg)
