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On February 10 2017 11:44 Uvantak wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 09:55 Thieving Magpie wrote:On February 10 2017 08:31 Uvantak wrote:On February 10 2017 06:59 Thieving Magpie wrote:On February 10 2017 03:35 Uvantak wrote: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. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/iH4KYu9.jpg) 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. https://ktvmaps.wordpress.com/portfolio/lotv-economy-worker-pairing/http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-maps/471776-mod-double-harvesting-better-saturation-curvehttp://www.teamliquid.net/forum/legacy-of-the-void/482775-a-treatise-on-the-economy-of-scii ♦ This is also only assuming pro play. ♦♦ 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".
I'm not trying to discuss which economy is better--just that each are different. And the differences allows for there to be different experiences between games.
In SC2, because econ maxes out quickly, without heavy worker damage the turtle+deathball becomes normalized. To account for that, harass does heavy worker damage. The side effect of this is that SC2 becomes a very vision based game where map vision is almost the most important thing you fight over in the game. Revelation, scans, creep, etc... The moment you don't play to the entire map you lose your entire econ.
BW, because its as hard to saturate bases as it is to micro armies, allows for lighter harass to still be effective at "distracting" a player from optimizing his econ. It also means that killing a few workers is both recoverable and devastating at the same time--since it takes a lot of work to keep the BW econ humming. This shifts emphasis to smaller scale moments in combat, where being able to do something on one part of the map without losing too much efficiency in another part of the map can very much decide games.
Arguing which one is "better" does not interest me. Just wanting to point out why it's happening.
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On February 10 2017 13:10 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 11:44 Uvantak wrote:On February 10 2017 09:55 Thieving Magpie wrote:On February 10 2017 08:31 Uvantak wrote:On February 10 2017 06:59 Thieving Magpie wrote:On February 10 2017 03:35 Uvantak wrote: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. https://ktvmaps.wordpress.com/portfolio/lotv-economy-worker-pairing/http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-maps/471776-mod-double-harvesting-better-saturation-curvehttp://www.teamliquid.net/forum/legacy-of-the-void/482775-a-treatise-on-the-economy-of-scii ♦ This is also only assuming pro play. ♦♦ 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". I'm not trying to discuss which economy is better--just that each are different. And the differences allows for there to be different experiences between games. In SC2, because econ maxes out quickly, without heavy worker damage the turtle+deathball becomes normalized. To account for that, harass does heavy worker damage. The side effect of this is that SC2 becomes a very vision based game where map vision is almost the most important thing you fight over in the game. Revelation, scans, creep, etc... The moment you don't play to the entire map you lose your entire econ. BW, because its as hard to saturate bases as it is to micro armies, allows for lighter harass to still be effective at "distracting" a player from optimizing his econ. It also means that killing a few workers is both recoverable and devastating at the same time--since it takes a lot of work to keep the BW econ humming. This shifts emphasis to smaller scale moments in combat, where being able to do something on one part of the map without losing too much efficiency in another part of the map can very much decide games. Arguing which one is "better" does not interest me. Just wanting to point out why it's happening.
But you werent though. Like, I agree with what you just wrote, except for some tidbits here and there, but we weren't talking about how economy affects the games on a grand scale, but talking about harassment on specific and how worker pairing effected that:
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......
For anyone that has read the LotV Economy Worker Pairing blog is given the tools to realize how Worker Pairing affects the game on a grand scale.
But yeah, idk, I think it would be fun for me to point out the minutia of the things I disagree with what you wrote, because even when it overall it paints a good picture there is details that I disagree with like implying that (efficient?) base saturation on BW is harder than SC2's, even when the entire idea of removing Worker Pairing is to for SC2 be as simple to reach the efficient saturation threshold than BW had (8 vs 16 workers), in order to correct for all these strange economic aberrations the game shows. But I don't want to derail the thread.
But yeah, idk, ^2 As I said, I do agree with the overall things you said in the last post, I just disagree on the minutia.
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On February 10 2017 03:52 JackONeill wrote:
Y'all forgot the BC. Best harass unit in the game.
Actually the issue with LOTV is that it relies on worker harass and on free damage as design choices.
Basically, worker harass and unit mobility got extremely buffed since WOL. Wether it relies on APM (impossible to loose a medivac in most cases if you don't screw up, impossible to shoot down a speedprism), or on design and balance (muta speed and regen buff, liberator sieging mineral lines, mines being able to target workers, etc.).
And simultaneously, a lot of units rely on "free, unavoidable damage" not only to perform worker harass, but also in army interactions. Like the BC with jump, speed mutas with regen, pylon overcharge, SHs, raven unavoidable seekers and 24 damage turrets, viper abducts and parasitic bomb, tempest with 15 range with revelation, low cost interceptors, liberator with range, disruptors in some regards, etc. Blizzard chose to screw up the risk/reward ratio of a lot of units in the game to reward execution instead of strategy.
A good exemple would be WOL muta vs HOTS/LOTV muta. In WOL TvZ, going muta against marine tanks meant that the terran, at some point, would build thors. Which meant that without regen, each thor volley you managed to land on a muta pack was a "cooldown" on the mutas. Damaging mutalisks meant something because they'd be weaker in the next fight, or that they wouldn't be able to fight 2 turrets for a while.
With muta regen, this is completely gone. Dealing damage to a ground of mutas if you don't kill any is utterly worthless. So not only can zerg players be way more agressive with their mutas (worker harass increase), but the damage mutas can deal becomes free (because of regen), and unavoidable (because of their speed).
On the one hand, execution, APM and multitask are way more rewarding than before, but the strategical aspect of the game took a big hit. Therefore that's why LOTV feels so frustrating. You often end up in situations where you can't avoid taking damage and loosing stuff, and because harass is much harder to defend than to perform, it quickly gets very annoying.
A zerg player won't think anymore when flying his first 10 mutas in the terran base. There's no risk (if he has an overseer). You don't say to yourself "hm he could have a thor, if he's preparing a push behind this and that i eat 2 volleys while harassing his production i may be in a rough spot", you just fly in because it'll always be worth it and you don't risk anything to deal damage. I'm taking the mutas as an exemple, every race suffers from such dynamics : prism with 6 pickup range making drops completely safe all the time or raven autoturrets in mineral lines for instance.
Muta regen and speed was directly caused by introducing Medivac Boost and Widomines. It is still very risky to fly blind into Terran base, as there are widomines, repaired forever turrets and stimmed marines. You clarly underestimate how rounded Terran units can be. To be honest i watch almost every tournament and stream aviable in sc2 and it's rather rare to see muta harrasment being effective in ZvT. Especially that mules prevent all harras damage compansating worker loss (if u don't kill for example 30 SCV's)
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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.
Sorry to tell u that, but the main reason 3 racks reapers are concidered OP and broken is that it's not an allin. Most common follow up from 3 racks reapers is fast 3rd CC and Orbital next. It gives Terran 3 mules at same time and fast scv production, while Zerg must produce fighting units. If u have good reaper control, after this opening even if Zerg not die, is definitely behind. And in ZvT it snowballs very, very quickly. To be honest it;s a big problem of Zerg in LOTV.
Zerg's strenght supposed to be in bigger economy and ability to make more units than your opponent with that better economy. That's why Zerg's untis are overall weaker. In LOTV, this fragile balance was broken. Zerg got his macro nerf with 3 larva instead of 4. But the biggest problem is that Harras became much more powerfu. With more workers at the start, Terran and Toss get access to strong harras much earlier. I often see and feel on my own skin that with early non stoping agression, Zerg is almost every time behind in economy. You are forced to take very big risks to even try to be even as u skip larva cycle of unit to remake drones. That means u don't produce army and die from follow up. It's rather common scenario. Sad but true.
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On February 10 2017 03:35 Uvantak wrote:Show nested quote +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. https://ktvmaps.wordpress.com/portfolio/lotv-economy-worker-pairing/http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-maps/471776-mod-double-harvesting-better-saturation-curvehttp://www.teamliquid.net/forum/legacy-of-the-void/482775-a-treatise-on-the-economy-of-scii
Its important to bring in the macroboosters for the races here because just looking at the effiency of mining doesnt give a fair picture.
Zerg/toss can build workers faster while zerg can have alot of larvas stacked up and protoss can have several chronoboost available while terran have mules.
These things are super relevant if you want to have an accurate picture with gain/loss/replenish workers
Also what is important to note is that the units you defended the harass with in BW was the ones you used as your core units.
In sc2, this is not always the case.
Also teching in broodwar was more costly/took time to get which made it easier to react for the opponent. Many units which are great at killing workers in sc2 comes quickly and/or doesnt require a high/costly tech.
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On February 10 2017 16:40 Foxxan wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 03:35 Uvantak wrote: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. https://ktvmaps.wordpress.com/portfolio/lotv-economy-worker-pairing/http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-maps/471776-mod-double-harvesting-better-saturation-curvehttp://www.teamliquid.net/forum/legacy-of-the-void/482775-a-treatise-on-the-economy-of-scii Its important to bring in the macroboosters for the races here because just looking at the effiency of mining doesnt give a fair picture. Zerg/toss can build workers faster while zerg can have alot of larvas as its disposal. Terran have mules. These things are super relevant if you want to have an accurate picture. Also what is important to note is that the units you defended the harass with in BW was the ones you used as your core units. In sc2, this is not always the case.
Neither is really that important overall is it? Complaining that there's 3 bases instead of 8 bases is purely qualitative in nature instead of quantitative. Some people like 3-4 bases at a time, some like 7-8 bases. Some like dumb workers, some like macro boosters. It doesn't really matter which is used, let's stick with just showing what happens because of them.
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Basically Uvantak answered what I wanted to shed light on and a thousand times better than I ever could've.
I want to mention that super strong worker harassment was an important relic of the past. It has been one of Team 1's methods of solving the death ball issue. While it comes with the negative side of being frustrating to deal with, it helps slow down the economy tremendously. Meaning getting to a 200 army supply happens less. In LotV I don't think there's too much of this issue anymore, but is still incredibly frustrating to deal with, so I wouldn't mind them tinkering with some harassment options a bit.
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On February 10 2017 16:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 16:40 Foxxan wrote:On February 10 2017 03:35 Uvantak wrote: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. https://ktvmaps.wordpress.com/portfolio/lotv-economy-worker-pairing/http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-maps/471776-mod-double-harvesting-better-saturation-curvehttp://www.teamliquid.net/forum/legacy-of-the-void/482775-a-treatise-on-the-economy-of-scii Its important to bring in the macroboosters for the races here because just looking at the effiency of mining doesnt give a fair picture. Zerg/toss can build workers faster while zerg can have alot of larvas as its disposal. Terran have mules. These things are super relevant if you want to have an accurate picture. Also what is important to note is that the units you defended the harass with in BW was the ones you used as your core units. In sc2, this is not always the case. Neither is really that important overall is it? Complaining that there's 3 bases instead of 8 bases is purely qualitative in nature instead of quantitative. Some people like 3-4 bases at a time, some like 7-8 bases. Some like dumb workers, some like macro boosters. It doesn't really matter which is used, let's stick with just showing what happens because of them.
I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. If you are gonna use math then you need to use logic, iam just telling the person i quoted that you need to add in the macroboosters in the equation.
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On February 10 2017 18:19 Foxxan wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 16:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:On February 10 2017 16:40 Foxxan wrote:On February 10 2017 03:35 Uvantak wrote: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. https://ktvmaps.wordpress.com/portfolio/lotv-economy-worker-pairing/http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-maps/471776-mod-double-harvesting-better-saturation-curvehttp://www.teamliquid.net/forum/legacy-of-the-void/482775-a-treatise-on-the-economy-of-scii Its important to bring in the macroboosters for the races here because just looking at the effiency of mining doesnt give a fair picture. Zerg/toss can build workers faster while zerg can have alot of larvas as its disposal. Terran have mules. These things are super relevant if you want to have an accurate picture. Also what is important to note is that the units you defended the harass with in BW was the ones you used as your core units. In sc2, this is not always the case. Neither is really that important overall is it? Complaining that there's 3 bases instead of 8 bases is purely qualitative in nature instead of quantitative. Some people like 3-4 bases at a time, some like 7-8 bases. Some like dumb workers, some like macro boosters. It doesn't really matter which is used, let's stick with just showing what happens because of them. I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. If you are gonna use math then you need to use logic, iam just telling the person i quoted that you need to add in the macroboosters in the equation.
Being that the topic is:
"Worker harassment in SC2 compared to BW"
and not
"What is the optimal amount of econ for SC2"
The actual numbers are meaningless.
His link shows why SC2, at the time of its publishing, was in a 3base paradigm, and how stifling worker efficiency will increase the gains from having more bases, as each base becomes less efficient with the overall worker growth. This was assuming 80~ worker efficiency in a 200 cap game.
The fact that you can chronoboost your forge does not change the number of bases workers can mine from. It changes timings (meta dependent) and it changes tempo (mules mine things out faster require faster expansion rates than without mules), but the article's core point of number of bases being optimal based on worker efficiency remains the same.
My point being, getting trapped in the minutia of "what about mules, what about 5 bases vs 4 bases" does not address the core of topic of the thread--which is the differences between BW and SC2 when it comes to harass. That comes less from the math of exactly how many minerals per second per game a player gets and hinges more on "what are the physical limitations preventing me from having a good economy," and "what are the physical limitations I have to prevent my opponent from getting an economy."
Getting trapped in the weeds of exactly what thing does what will simply degenerate the thread into SC2 bashing and "It was so much better in that other game I played" bull-crap that I hate.
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Bisutopia19143 Posts
On February 11 2017 01:34 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 18:19 Foxxan wrote:On February 10 2017 16:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:On February 10 2017 16:40 Foxxan wrote:On February 10 2017 03:35 Uvantak wrote: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. https://ktvmaps.wordpress.com/portfolio/lotv-economy-worker-pairing/http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-maps/471776-mod-double-harvesting-better-saturation-curvehttp://www.teamliquid.net/forum/legacy-of-the-void/482775-a-treatise-on-the-economy-of-scii Its important to bring in the macroboosters for the races here because just looking at the effiency of mining doesnt give a fair picture. Zerg/toss can build workers faster while zerg can have alot of larvas as its disposal. Terran have mules. These things are super relevant if you want to have an accurate picture. Also what is important to note is that the units you defended the harass with in BW was the ones you used as your core units. In sc2, this is not always the case. Neither is really that important overall is it? Complaining that there's 3 bases instead of 8 bases is purely qualitative in nature instead of quantitative. Some people like 3-4 bases at a time, some like 7-8 bases. Some like dumb workers, some like macro boosters. It doesn't really matter which is used, let's stick with just showing what happens because of them. I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. If you are gonna use math then you need to use logic, iam just telling the person i quoted that you need to add in the macroboosters in the equation. Being that the topic is: "Worker harassment in SC2 compared to BW" and not "What is the optimal amount of econ for SC2" The actual numbers are meaningless. His link shows why SC2, at the time of its publishing, was in a 3base paradigm, and how stifling worker efficiency will increase the gains from having more bases, as each base becomes less efficient with the overall worker growth. This was assuming 80~ worker efficiency in a 200 cap game. The fact that you can chronoboost your forge does not change the number of bases workers can mine from. It changes timings (meta dependent) and it changes tempo (mules mine things out faster require faster expansion rates than without mules), but the article's core point of number of bases being optimal based on worker efficiency remains the same. My point being, getting trapped in the minutia of "what about mules, what about 5 bases vs 4 bases" does not address the core of topic of the thread--which is the differences between BW and SC2 when it comes to harass. That comes less from the math of exactly how many minerals per second per game a player gets and hinges more on "what are the physical limitations preventing me from having a good economy," and "what are the physical limitations I have to prevent my opponent from getting an economy." Getting trapped in the weeds of exactly what thing does what will simply degenerate the thread into SC2 bashing and "It was so much better in that other game I played" bull-crap that I hate.
The problem from your end is that you are saying things that you perceive are limitations, but are not.
BW, because its as hard to saturate bases as it is to micro armies, allows for lighter harass to still be effective at "distracting" a player from optimizing his econ. It also means that killing a few workers is both recoverable and devastating at the same time--since it takes a lot of work to keep the BW econ humming.
In Brood War it is not hard to saturate bases and managing the economy. This is literally drilled into your core even at the lowest level. I would argue only zergs in Brood War have a truly challenging time managing workers because turning a larva into an army unit over a drone is a very big decision. And the timings for zergs to saturate their bases is very important. But once you hit like "C' level zerg then at that point you have a good rhythm for that too.
Watch http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/bw-tournaments/519100-rookie-teamleague when it gets started. I'm sure most of these low level players will speak about everything else other then having to send a worker to the mineral line manually.
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for the love of god stop comparing sc2 to bw please, half of you didnt even play it anyway
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On February 11 2017 01:34 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 18:19 Foxxan wrote:On February 10 2017 16:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:On February 10 2017 16:40 Foxxan wrote:On February 10 2017 03:35 Uvantak wrote: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. https://ktvmaps.wordpress.com/portfolio/lotv-economy-worker-pairing/http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-maps/471776-mod-double-harvesting-better-saturation-curvehttp://www.teamliquid.net/forum/legacy-of-the-void/482775-a-treatise-on-the-economy-of-scii Its important to bring in the macroboosters for the races here because just looking at the effiency of mining doesnt give a fair picture. Zerg/toss can build workers faster while zerg can have alot of larvas as its disposal. Terran have mules. These things are super relevant if you want to have an accurate picture. Also what is important to note is that the units you defended the harass with in BW was the ones you used as your core units. In sc2, this is not always the case. Neither is really that important overall is it? Complaining that there's 3 bases instead of 8 bases is purely qualitative in nature instead of quantitative. Some people like 3-4 bases at a time, some like 7-8 bases. Some like dumb workers, some like macro boosters. It doesn't really matter which is used, let's stick with just showing what happens because of them. I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. If you are gonna use math then you need to use logic, iam just telling the person i quoted that you need to add in the macroboosters in the equation. Being that the topic is: "Worker harassment in SC2 compared to BW" and not "What is the optimal amount of econ for SC2" The actual numbers are meaningless. His link shows why SC2, at the time of its publishing, was in a 3base paradigm, and how stifling worker efficiency will increase the gains from having more bases, as each base becomes less efficient with the overall worker growth. This was assuming 80~ worker efficiency in a 200 cap game. The fact that you can chronoboost your forge does not change the number of bases workers can mine from. It changes timings (meta dependent) and it changes tempo (mules mine things out faster require faster expansion rates than without mules), but the article's core point of number of bases being optimal based on worker efficiency remains the same. My point being, getting trapped in the minutia of "what about mules, what about 5 bases vs 4 bases" does not address the core of topic of the thread--which is the differences between BW and SC2 when it comes to harass. That comes less from the math of exactly how many minerals per second per game a player gets and hinges more on "what are the physical limitations preventing me from having a good economy," and "what are the physical limitations I have to prevent my opponent from getting an economy." Getting trapped in the weeds of exactly what thing does what will simply degenerate the thread into SC2 bashing and "It was so much better in that other game I played" bull-crap that I hate.
You missed the point entirely.
The person that showed that pharagraph was comparing how killing a worker in sc2 is a much bigger deal compared to killing a worker in bw when 16 workers are mining.
Since in broodwar, the first 8 workers have 100% mining rate as in sc2. However, the second worker in broodwar has roughly 50% mining rate compared to the second worker in sc2 which has around 90-100% effeciency.
Since the person that wrote that used math, i just added that it would be important to add macroboosters in the "equation" to give a better/more accurate picture since getting workers back faster to losing more mining kinda counteracts. Especially zerg with inject+stacking of many larvas and protoss that can stack many chronoboost.
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On February 11 2017 02:27 Foxxan wrote:Show nested quote +On February 11 2017 01:34 Thieving Magpie wrote:On February 10 2017 18:19 Foxxan wrote:On February 10 2017 16:45 Thieving Magpie wrote:On February 10 2017 16:40 Foxxan wrote:On February 10 2017 03:35 Uvantak wrote: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. https://ktvmaps.wordpress.com/portfolio/lotv-economy-worker-pairing/http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-maps/471776-mod-double-harvesting-better-saturation-curvehttp://www.teamliquid.net/forum/legacy-of-the-void/482775-a-treatise-on-the-economy-of-scii Its important to bring in the macroboosters for the races here because just looking at the effiency of mining doesnt give a fair picture. Zerg/toss can build workers faster while zerg can have alot of larvas as its disposal. Terran have mules. These things are super relevant if you want to have an accurate picture. Also what is important to note is that the units you defended the harass with in BW was the ones you used as your core units. In sc2, this is not always the case. Neither is really that important overall is it? Complaining that there's 3 bases instead of 8 bases is purely qualitative in nature instead of quantitative. Some people like 3-4 bases at a time, some like 7-8 bases. Some like dumb workers, some like macro boosters. It doesn't really matter which is used, let's stick with just showing what happens because of them. I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. If you are gonna use math then you need to use logic, iam just telling the person i quoted that you need to add in the macroboosters in the equation. Being that the topic is: "Worker harassment in SC2 compared to BW" and not "What is the optimal amount of econ for SC2" The actual numbers are meaningless. His link shows why SC2, at the time of its publishing, was in a 3base paradigm, and how stifling worker efficiency will increase the gains from having more bases, as each base becomes less efficient with the overall worker growth. This was assuming 80~ worker efficiency in a 200 cap game. The fact that you can chronoboost your forge does not change the number of bases workers can mine from. It changes timings (meta dependent) and it changes tempo (mules mine things out faster require faster expansion rates than without mules), but the article's core point of number of bases being optimal based on worker efficiency remains the same. My point being, getting trapped in the minutia of "what about mules, what about 5 bases vs 4 bases" does not address the core of topic of the thread--which is the differences between BW and SC2 when it comes to harass. That comes less from the math of exactly how many minerals per second per game a player gets and hinges more on "what are the physical limitations preventing me from having a good economy," and "what are the physical limitations I have to prevent my opponent from getting an economy." Getting trapped in the weeds of exactly what thing does what will simply degenerate the thread into SC2 bashing and "It was so much better in that other game I played" bull-crap that I hate. You missed the point entirely. The person that showed that pharagraph was comparing how killing a worker in sc2 is a much bigger deal compared to killing a worker in bw when 16 workers are mining. Since in broodwar, the first 8 workers have 100% mining rate as in sc2. However, the second worker in broodwar has roughly 50% mining rate compared to the second worker in sc2 which has around 90-100% effeciency. Since the person that wrote that used math, i just added that it would be important to add macroboosters in the "equation" to give a better/more accurate picture since getting workers back faster to losing more mining kinda counteracts. Especially zerg with inject+stacking of many larvas and protoss that can stack many chronoboost.
Thing with not including macroboosters, is three fold:
1.- Every race has them, meaning that all races behave "more or less" equally-ish, partially normalizing worker/income production, for all.
2.- They are asymmetric in nature.
3.- Even if macromechanics where overall positive to the game from a harassment recovery point of view, the fact that we see these kind of threads poping up about how "exasperating" harassment is often enough, shows that they by themselves are not enough to address the exasperation side of harassment for a decent % of the player population.
Without going too deep into this, it is not my intent to be all encompassing on harassment and how Worker Pairing mechanics or Macromechanics affect that part of the game, because I simply lack the time to write more about it, and being honest I also lack the motivation for also doing so, mainly because when you write about these issues, and at the end you don't really get answers from the people you are writings these things to, it is back breaking, and in the past I have had my back broken by them more than a couple times, if I saw that they are willing to change, I would probably write about this more, but until then I'm not on a position to invest the time into it.
But yeah, regarding macro mechanics and harassment, you make a very good point, but remember that your opponent has them too. And this kinda goes back to what Magpie was talking at the start, a "non-ideal player" would while harassing sometimes miss the Macromechanic production cycle meaning that he gets behind relative to the amount of time and mental effort put into the harass. Which translates to both players getting behind from the harassment party. One directly, and the other indirectly.
Anyways, this is like, "the one" thing among many others Worker Pairing affects the game, just thought that it would be interesting for people to know how these hidden mechanics affect harassment in SC2, as seeing all these threads talk about unit design all the time forever when you have these interesting hidden mechanics working in the shadows is to me at least, a much more curious and fun angle to look at things.
Sorry if some phrases don't make sense here and there, I just, just woke up.
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You are also misunderstanding me. I might be vague.
Killing a worker in both sc2 and bw makes it roughly a 40% more lose in sc2 because of the mining effeciency.
But this gets even lower overall because in sc2, the races there can get workers back faster(and sometimes alot faster) with the macro boosters.
That was what i wanted to say and imo have said all along.
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Besides what has been said, I find that both games have the same exponential element. That is why skipping a worker early (or losing a worker) mathematically hurts more than it is obvious. In Sc2 there are tools which make it easier to archieve the optimal growth (buildings on hks, automine, cc-spell for double depot?, shift-building, autosplitting). In BW it is alot harder to secure an optimal growth (non perfect worker split, 1 worker per building, stupid units block buildings, workers don't automine). Everything what contributes to the perfect growth is a little bit harder and needs more manual, partially annoying actions. This gives the opportunity that extra effort brings extra growth.
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It's about what players feel when they play the game.
To use your analogy :
Say they play SC2, an oracle shows up, it's a fast unit, enemy A moves it, it does a ton of damage very quickly if you're unprepared, which punishes you really hard, no matter how much you micro your scvs against it.
Then you play broodwar. A reaver drop comes. Even if you're unprepared, good defensive micro stops reaver without taking damage, and attacker has actual stuff to do besides A-moving.
So when you lose, it's not only because you did not scout, the game gave you a chance to micro your way out of the situation, which lets you play instead of autolosing.
Most harass units are like that. Controlling mutas isn't automatic, planting minefields in mineral line requires defender to fuck up + tons of APM, etc...
So to sum up, even when you are caught with your pants down, the game gives you a way out of your shitty situation.
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On February 11 2017 06:11 Foxxan wrote:
You are also misunderstanding me. I might be vague.
Killing a worker in both sc2 and bw makes it roughly a 40% more lose in sc2 because of the mining effeciency.
But this gets even lower overall because in sc2, the races there can get workers back faster(and sometimes alot faster) with the macro boosters.
That was what i wanted to say and imo have said all along.
Oh yeah, I understood you, and what you say is correct, though on my eyes it misses the point that your opponent also has the same tools and is also producing workers at an increased rate compared to BW. Which on rough terms means that any advantage derived from macromechanics, is moot, as both players, harasser and harassed have the same worker producing rate/potential to increase their mineral income.
In short, in a game where both players are producing workers as fast as they can, and one gets harassed, macromechanics play a very small role on bouncing back, because macromechanics were being used to produce workers before hand. Here's a small misleading as hell made in 5min graph
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/eheRFMf.jpg)
Misleading, graph is misleading, but I think it kinda gets the point across, what I'm talking about is not per se the amount of workers, but the fact that both players have overall the same worker production rate. if a player's worker count is kicked down, its worker production rate still hasn't changed, and in the case its opponent continues worker production, the harasser player will continue to be ahead simply because they both still have the same worker production rate.
Now this brings the interesting point that on SC2, the income rate of a base with less than 16 workers is Number of Workers * Constant = Income
And from there on, any worker up to 24, will add 18 Minerals/Minute, or work at 42% efficiency, compared to the first 16.
On BW, only the first 8 worked at 100% efficiency, while the rest worked at lesser ones.
And the way that this ties together is that on SC2, up to 16 workers per base, the income a player receives from its workers works on a linear relationship against the Income rate, where as on BW, if a player loses workers, his income is not affected on a direct and linear way, at least, not until said mineral line has less than 8 workers,
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Ol3SGjw.jpg)
The thing as I mentioned with those graphs and looking at this from a mathematical perspective is that, is that it can be misleading, the numbers are there and show something, but as you said, MacroMechanics on a real game do help players bounce back towards a more stable income, specifically Zerg players, who have the larvae mechanic to basically "use barracks & gateway production time to make workers" at least until they have jumped back into that ~ 16 workers per mineral line threshold. The thing is that, two of the three races don't really have this possibility, and Protoss Nexii, unlike Orbital Commands, don't have an assured income rate simply by existing. But there we get into the murky world of balance talk.
But to end this, as you say, yes, Macromechanics can indeed help bounce back workers lost to harassment, yet, macromechanics, does not correct the linear relationship of Number of Workers * Constant = Income problem SC2 income faces, nor does it correct it enough so that Harassment doesn't become too exasperating for players, which is the entire reason this thread was created. And I think that's the key here, make a game which is not too exasperating to those who play it.
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To add, defending harass in BW was also just as hard as SC2, but the options in micro more varied.
Little things like not being able to select your entire mineral line and have them all retreat in a nice and smooth manner is huge when it comes to designing harass units. You don't need terrible terrible damage from your Vultures and Wraiths when the opponent could only run them away 12 at a time, and often each new batch of retreating workers glitches the prior batch with collisions.
Trying to get vultures to do damage in SC2 would be laughable. It would kill what, 1 or 2 workers before the drop is dead?
SC2 harass has to deal the damage within seconds because it takes only slightly more than that for a full scale retreat to be made. Which is why if your opponent doesn't see the drop, you lose the entire mineral line instantly.
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On February 11 2017 08:14 Uvantak wrote:Show nested quote +On February 11 2017 06:11 Foxxan wrote:
You are also misunderstanding me. I might be vague.
Killing a worker in both sc2 and bw makes it roughly a 40% more lose in sc2 because of the mining effeciency.
But this gets even lower overall because in sc2, the races there can get workers back faster(and sometimes alot faster) with the macro boosters.
That was what i wanted to say and imo have said all along.
Oh yeah, I understood you, and what you say is correct, though on my eyes it misses the point that your opponent also has the same tools and is also producing workers at an increased rate compared to BW. Which on rough terms means that any advantage derived from macromechanics, is moot, as both players, harasser and harassed have the same worker producing rate/potential to increase their mineral income. In short, in a game where both players are producing workers as fast as they can, and one gets harassed, macromechanics play a very small role on bouncing back, because macromechanics were being used to produce workers before hand. Here's a small misleading as hell made in 5min graph Misleading, graph is misleading, but I think it kinda gets the point across, what I'm talking about is not per se the amount of workers, but the fact that both players have overall the same worker production rate. if a player's worker count is kicked down, its worker production rate still hasn't changed, and in the case its opponent continues worker production, the harasser player will continue to be ahead simply because they both still have the same worker production rate. Now this brings the interesting point that on SC2, the income rate of a base with less than 16 workers is Number of Workers * Constant = Income And from there on, any worker up to 24, will add 18 Minerals/Minute, or work at 42% efficiency, compared to the first 16. On BW, only the first 8 worked at 100% efficiency, while the rest worked at lesser ones. And the way that this ties together is that on SC2, up to 16 workers per base, the income a player receives from its workers works on a linear relationship against the Income rate, where as on BW, if a player loses workers, his income is not affected on a direct and linear way, at least, not until said mineral line has less than 8 workers,
The thing as I mentioned with those graphs and looking at this from a mathematical perspective is that, is that it can be misleading, the numbers are there and show something, but as you said, MacroMechanics on a real game do help players bounce back towards a more stable income, specifically Zerg players, who have the larvae mechanic to basically "use barracks & gateway production time to make workers" at least until they have jumped back into that ~ 16 workers per mineral line threshold. The thing is that, two of the three races don't really have this possibility, and Protoss Nexii, unlike Orbital Commands, don't have an assured income rate simply by existing. But there we get into the murky world of balance talk. But to end this, as you say, yes, Macromechanics can indeed help bounce back workers lost to harassment, yet, macromechanics, does not correct the linear relationship of Number of Workers * Constant = Income problem SC2 income faces, nor does it correct it enough so that Harassment doesn't become too exasperating for players, which is the entire reason this thread was created. And I think that's the key here, make a game which is not too exasperating to those who play it.
Ah yeah this post gave me a wider perspective. And when i wrote that you might have misunderstood me, it was me that didnt understand your post, I realise that now.
So killing workers in sc2 has more impact to bw, its pretty much a fact by now. Thats one factor why i like broodwar more but there are several more. Micro is one that was said on this page, like when you face a reaver unprepared as terran you are not fucked over, you can stabilise with good control(not always, but its still not rare).
Also your mech units that you defend with is also used in your armee, they are your units and not "units that only defend".
Which matters, gives a better feeling.
Something which hasnt been said yet i think, is that the openings in broodwar is way more fair and have less rng feel to them overall.
Also, i think i found it a bit different when in broodwar you gets harassed by your opponent but you also harass your opponent.
Its like so different compared to when this happens in sc2, more control and decisions in bw it feels like.
Well, other than that i dont have much to add iam afraid but i kinda got your misleading pharahraph
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EPT
