I have some questions about the fact that so many people think in SC2 worker harassment is more punishing than in Brood War. I play a ton of SC2 but also played many games of BW in the past. I don't understand the argument that in SC 2 worker harassment is more punishing.
Lets compare both games.
Harassment Options in Brood War
Terran: Vultures (including Drops), Marine Drops, Wraiths (i know its a huge investment), Siege Tank Drops (Boxer did them in the good old days), Since Vessel (irradiate against Zerg)
Zerg: Zergling run-by, Lurker Drops (where really dangerous could be game ending), Mutas, Zergling Drops.
Protoss; Reaver Drops, Goon Drops, Dark Templar, Storm Drops, Zealot Drops, Arbiter (extremely hard to counter in late-game), Scout (i know not effective but an option)
Zerg: Mutas, ling run-by, drops (mostly ling and baneling lurkers come too late), sometimes burrowed roaches
Protoss: Warp Prism, Oracle, Phoenix, DTs (not really effective because they come later than in Brood War), many kind of drops (Archon, immortal....), Disruptor (not really a good Option because really late)
I think these are the most important ways to cripple the economy of your opponent in SC II and SC I Brood War
I don't understand why people complain about harassment in SC II and say it was better in BW. A reaver drop could be game ending like an Oracle in SC II (and its about the same reaction time). Mines from vultures do a ton of damage if they hit your workers..... Boxer won games with one base marine harassment and many people say these are the most fun games to watch. Storm drops from protoss destroyed complete worker lines and came earlier in BW...Oh and by the way if you compare the Arbiter with the Warp Prism i think the Arbiter was more punishing. I know Arbiter came later but they were so hard to defend (no ghost for lock down all workers are dead and your expansions). DT harassment was more often game ending than in SC II because they came earlier (at least against terran). Also the argument against the liberator about a harassment tool is quite idiotic for me. It takes so long to get in siege position that anybody has enough reaction time to counter it. Also its an Investment for Terran to send a liberator like it is for protoss to send an oracle. The unfair thing is that there are map spots where you can hide a liberator and your opponent cant hit it. This needs to be addressed but not the potential risk of a liberator harassment.
I really don't understand why so many people think that worker harassment is a problem in SC II. It was never a problem in BW and you had also different tools to cripple the economy of your opponent. You also needed the same reaction time to defend it.
Economy damage is an important aspect in any good war strategy game. It doesn't matter if its turn-based or rts. Its a strategy and should stay as viable as it is. There are enough options to counter harassment and no you are not behind if you use some defense. Even pros have to accept that they cant just play too greedy. You don't lose a game if you have some defenses.
Worker harassment is also a comeback mechanic. Many comebacks in SC:BW and SC2 came from worker harassment. Also they bring some more diversity in the game. Its boring to just play the early game without threads.
Bw had a lot of worker harassment, but sc2 has more units, which can worker harass. Nonetheless bw was more punishing, because any distraction put you behind. You could not build workers and send them to minerals as easy as in sc2. You had no macro mechanics to close the gap after a worker loss. Also bases were not close and were hard to defend.
Most of the player in bw preferred team games or arcade games (ums games), where they could share the pressure and help each other out. The 1vs1 community was small. It is the opposite in sc2, 1vs1 has a lot of players.
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.
In BW, the macro player was the one who spent extra clicks making sure workers got to the mineral line. The non-macro player could often get behind in workers just because he made some dudes and scouted.
As such, killing a few workers would often be backbreaking since most players physically could not keep up with continual worker production. Not "forgets to make workers" issues, but that they were too slow to click on the "build worker" button, do things for 16 seconds, go back and click the newly made worker, and then right-click on a patch.
In BW, two players could have the exact same strategy, and the exact same game sense, and the exact same game awareness--but if one person clicked a little bit slower than the other guy then he could be almost 10 workers behind the opponent by the midgame even if they did NR20. Oftentimes just forcing the opponent to chase your mutas around for 10-20 seconds is enough for them to not have time to move the latest batch of workers from their rally points to a mineral patch, causing severe damage without killing a single worker.
The same is not true in SC2, where the automation of worker production allows a more forgiving economic build up phase. As such, small amounts of damage is almost meaningless in SC2--you need bigger hits to affect the opponent. The same muta harass will often simply result with mutas getting chased away without any slowdown to the player's economy.
I haven't played BW in a long time, but from my experience even if someone successfully killed a bunch of workers, you still rarely died to the economical factor because it's much easier to turtle up in BW and the static defense is much stronger, which lead to longer games where with 1-2 good engages you can actually claw back into the game.
In SC2 for example if a drop kills 10-15 workers and you haven't done any damage to offset that loss, you're practically dead. I think Terran is possibly the only race in SC2, that can win playing from behind, due to it's ability to turtle up and the power of mules. Because even if you have the stronger army pushing into Liberators and Siege Tanks is always hard.
Just compare the concluded ASL with the current GSL. I would much rather have one long epic game than 2 disappointing short ones. BW just has the goods to make crazy things happen, while in SC2 you just die.
I don't think a lot of people view it as a problem, more as the main way to play the game.
There are a lot of things that go into winning in SC2 (and SC1), but a lot of the units seem to be built around extreme mobility & harassment options.
Mutas are fast and able to get in & out very quickly. Liberators & Banshees are able to get in and deal massive amounts of damage to workers very quickly.
Oracles & DTs can dismantle a player who is unprepared.
A lot of these units do a terrible job in fights alone (Liberators are great additions to armies, Mutas in big stacks can crush things, but you rarely see mass oracle play).
It's just an enormous focus of SC2, and can feel extremely frustrating to play against if you don't account for every possible angle that harassment can be flung into your face. Oftentimes it's one miss step before you have to have a make-or-break decision.
All in all, I think worker harass is a completely fine and valid point to the game. Basically it's two people trying to build their own towers (ideal army comp) while at the same time trying to upset the foundation of the other player's building.
On February 10 2017 00:29 Thieving Magpie wrote: In BW, the macro player was the one who spent extra clicks making sure workers got to the mineral line. The non-macro player could often get behind in workers just because he made some dudes and scouted.
As such, killing a few workers would often be backbreaking since most players physically could not keep up with continual worker production. Not "forgets to make workers" issues, but that they were too slow to click on the "build worker" button, do things for 16 seconds, go back and click the newly made worker, and then right-click on a patch.
In BW, two players could have the exact same strategy, and the exact same game sense, and the exact same game awareness--but if one person clicked a little bit slower than the other guy then he could be almost 10 workers behind the opponent by the midgame even if they did NR20. Oftentimes just forcing the opponent to chase your mutas around for 10-20 seconds is enough for them to not have time to move the latest batch of workers from their rally points to a mineral patch, causing severe damage without killing a single worker.
The same is not true in SC2, where the automation of worker production allows a more forgiving economic build up phase. As such, small amounts of damage is almost meaningless in SC2--you need bigger hits to affect the opponent. The same muta harass will often simply result with mutas getting chased away without any slowdown to the player's economy.
This doesn't add up in today's Brood War stages. Making workers and putting them on the mineral line is something that becomes second nature to even D+ ranked players. So you can't blame that task for being a game changer. And by mid game you can one player can have 50 workers on 3 bases and another can have 60, but that 10 worker difference isn't big at all. In fact, if players remain equal in everything else including bases, then the player with 60 workers is over mining on three bases and actually hurts themselves in the long run. The automation of workers just isn't a strong enough argument.
I totally understand your arguments. But if you look at BW games from boxer. There are manygames which he won only because of worker harrasment. Protoss players stomped terrans with Arbiter harrass in lategame....
I think you are underestimating how long it took to get equivalent harassment options to work in BW.
For example, a Reaver drop needed a Shuttle and Robotics Bay in addition to the Reaver itself. It's the same tech that you need for Disruptors, yet you claim that Disruptors are not effective because they come out so late. Storm drops also take a long time to come out since they need a Citadel of Adun, Templar Archives, storm research, Robotics Facility, and Shuttle in addition to the High Templar themselves, so they're not an early game option either.
In comparison, Phoenixes and Oracles just need a Stargate to be pumped out quickly, with an Oracle being functional the instant it pops out of the Stargate. Adepts are low tech, cheap, tanky, and slippery, and their effectiveness are leveraged by warp-ins under Warp Prisms.
Marine drops in both games need tech up to Starport to get the Dropship/Medivac, in addition to a sizable Marine/Medic force. That's reasonable. You needed more time to build up 3 or 4 Wraiths to 2-shot workers, whereas you can more quickly build a single Banshee to 2-shot workers. Liberators take few actions to use and are quick to be cost-effective if the response is even slightly delayed or sloppy, so they can be deadly in any situation that draws away the opponent's multitasking. Widow Mines don't even give a warning before they fire, so it's more difficult to react before damage is done.
So in general, harassment in SC2 is more powerful and comes out much faster than their equivalents in BW, so they are much more difficult to defend against in the early game since the small early-game income and army need to be stretched thin, sometimes even be preemptively prepared to adequately defend.
In addition, BW had a much stronger defender's advantage due to high ground advantage and various unit designs, especially more easily accessible space control options, so being hurt by harassment doesn't mean an instant death and can be stabilized from.
On February 10 2017 00:43 AlphaAeffchen wrote: @ Kaewins
I totally understand your arguments. But if you look at BW games from boxer. There are manygames which he won only because of worker harrasment. Protoss players stomped terrans with Arbiter harrass in lategame....
That was 15+ years ago. The meta has changed since then. Arbiter harassment is still a thing, but too a much lesser degree. Find Mong vs Hint on circuit breaker in the ro16 of the ASL. Rush did a hallucination recall into terran's base. Mong lost all of his supply depots and lots of factores. But Mong got 2-1 on his tanks, turtled up until he got a third gas base and then death pushed his opponent in what was a miraculous comeback over the following 15 minutes since that recall.
On February 10 2017 00:43 AlphaAeffchen wrote: @ Kaewins
I totally understand your arguments. But if you look at BW games from boxer. There are manygames which he won only because of worker harrasment. Protoss players stomped terrans with Arbiter harrass in lategame....
Here's the thing though, in BW worker harassment is a viable strategy and one aspect of the game, in SC2 worker harassment and killing bases is 95% of the game.
How many times since the launch of LotV had pro games been decided by massive army engagements? I can't remember very many. I guess Neeb in PvP comes to mind, which I must admit is quite exciting to watch, but outside of that games are decided way before we get to a stage where big battles are fought.
I feel I hear Koreans say 사기 (scam) when talking/complaining about SC2 [harassment]. It feels you're cheated out of the game and is just frustrating to play against. As someone said above, "you just die", if you have not already somewhat prepared for it. In BW, you are given more of a chance to deal with the situation before all is lost. There are just a lot more all or nothing situations in SC2.
Amazing game. I know what you mean. You are right that the strategies i mentioned are 15 years ago. But the BW strategies i mentioned happened and evereyone was entertained when someone get harrased to death in a pro game. I also liked to watch it. Again evereyone can prepare for harrass in SC II its an investment but you dont lose the game if you do slight prepares for it. At least not against earlygamee harrass.
@ Kaewins
I agree to some points of your arguments, but have you watched playing Scarltet in GSL round of 32. There were really good games. Especially TvZ can be really entertaining in SC II.
On February 10 2017 02:24 DieuCure wrote: Sc2 multitasking is higher.
I saw asl1 and 2 you can't compare.
And lotv is way more fast and intense, that's why some people can get frustrated about harass.
When bw is a slow game
Uh...wut? BW is by it's very nature (bad pathing, no auto mining, 12 unit select) a more multitask heavy game then SC2 imo, unless I miss read something here.
And I'm no BW fan, the 1v1 is straight up not fun to play so not sticking up for it, it's just ludicrously hard to play and thats why the upper levels of play were more "balanced" because racist strengths aside BW rewarded the better player more then SC2 does.
On February 10 2017 02:24 DieuCure wrote: Sc2 multitasking is higher.
I saw asl1 and 2 you can't compare.
And lotv is way more fast and intense, that's why some people can get frustrated about harass.
When bw is a slow game
Uh...wut? BW is by it's very nature (bad pathing, no auto mining, 12 unit select) a more multitask heavy game then SC2 imo, unless I miss read something here.
There are two different things being argued here.
BW is slower, not because the player has less to do, but because of the nature of the game: individuals actions and events are less impactful. As other people have mentioned, you can lose a fight, turtle, and then make a comeback in BW while in LOTV, if you lose a fight badly, the game is over because now you can't secure the next base you need as your mineral lines are drying up.
As for the multitasking required, BW require more overall due the things you mentioned. However, the spike in multitasking necessary during battles due to the micro certain units require to be effective, the burst damage in the game, the duration of battles (much shorter than in BW), and sheer number of abilities meant that big fights in LOTV take much more multitasking than they did in BW. There was too much to do and the window to do it was tiny.
And that caused control issues that leave players feeling powerless.
There was a reason the Koreans professional players complained about LOTV being too fast. We never heard that criticism from them of BW, and it is important to understand those differences between the games to understand why they were critical of LOTV.
On February 10 2017 02:24 DieuCure wrote: Sc2 multitasking is higher.
I saw asl1 and 2 you can't compare.
And lotv is way more fast and intense, that's why some people can get frustrated about harass.
When bw is a slow game
Uh...wut? BW is by it's very nature (bad pathing, no auto mining, 12 unit select) a more multitask heavy game then SC2 imo, unless I miss read something here.
There are two different things being argued here.
BW is slower, not because the player has less to do, but because of the nature of the game: individuals actions and events are less impactful. As other people have mentioned, you can lose a fight, turtle, and then make a comeback in BW while in LOTV, if you lose a fight badly, the game is over because now you can't secure the next base you need as your mineral lines are drying up.
As for the multitasking required, BW require more overall due the things you mentioned. However, the spike in multitasking necessary during battles due to the micro certain units require to be effective, the burst damage in the game, the duration of battles (much shorter than in BW), and sheer number of abilities meant that big fights in LOTV take much more multitasking than they did in BW. There was too much to do and the window to do it was tiny.
And that caused control issues that leave players feeling powerless.
There was a reason the Koreans professional players complained about LOTV being too fast. We never heard that criticism from them of BW, and it is important to understand those differences between the games to understand why they were critical of LOTV.
Just to preface as I go down this road, I've enjoyed both games since their releases and have a record of fair judgment on TL.
Above is a great point. Other then defensive advantages like high ground, SC1 gameplay is much slower. The overall SC@ DPS is extremely high compared to SC1. As an example of the faster pace and this is what I disliked most about the WOL era. The death balls were epic, but the fights themselves didn't last long enough for a viewer to see the micro of every individual unit (group of units). I've always been big on slowing down the damage output across the board for SC2.
Let's take storm as an example: In SC2: Storm has a smaller surface area, is shorter in time, and does more damage per second because of it's shortened time. By the time you see a Terran pull SCVs from a storm drop the storm is already over. Not cause the Terran reacts poorly but storm doesn't last long enough.
In SC1: Storm has a larger area and while it does great damage, you can see players react to each individual one because of the slower rate of damage.
edit: big fights in LOTV take much more multitasking than they did in BW. I do greatly disagree with this. I think this could be argued to death on both sides. Higher dps means a lot must be done in a short amount of time. But it also means that action is down quick. Meanwhile, SC1 fights last longer requiring a more exhausting level of effort over time versus in the moment. This is simply a SC1vsSC2 argument that no one can win.
"big fights in LOTV take much more multitasking than they did in BW"
Thanks for the laugh. Hahaha
No smart cast, 12 units per hotkey, insane DPS on units (hydras, marines, lurkers, zerglings, archons, reavers, siege tanks, spider mines,...), insane spells, pathing making all your units run in a straight line,... the list goes on.
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.
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.
Also in BW you make more workers in general and you can super saturate bases. There is no point having more than 16 workers in sc2 mineral line, but in BW you can have many many more. So when I lose 10 out of 30 probes at one base to a reaver I still have some economy, but if you lose 10 workers out of 16 to an oracle you are kinda screwed.
One more thing to mention about how you can "still recover" in BW is partly due to the difficulty of the game design. The longer the gane goes on the person with the advantage becomes disadvantaged because the game gets harder for them to control. More units, bases, etc. It all creates more oppurtunity for mistakes to be made.
On February 10 2017 03:12 B-royal wrote: "big fights in LOTV take much more multitasking than they did in BW"
Thanks for the laugh. Hahaha
No smart cast, 12 units per hotkey, insane DPS on units (hydras, marines, lurkers, zerglings, archons, reavers, siege tanks, spider mines,...), insane spells, pathing making all your units run in a straight line,... the list goes on.
I think there is a lot to do in SC2 fights, but the fights themselves happen so fast that there is not a lot of that that can realistically be done before it's all over.
I believe this was one argument against LotV Protoss having so many activated abilities. They're all interesting in a vacuum, but when the big fight happens between large armies, it's just not practical to use them all fast enough. When the power of a unit is tied to how well a player uses its active ability, there can be balance problems when its difficult to utilize enough of these abilities in a fight.
In Brood War, the UI limitations, bad pathing, and terrain advantages at least slow down fights enough that there is more room to do micro and multitasking.
I think you guys are really overanalyzing this. I read the OP and the list of harassment units seems way more potent in sc2. Yes in bw you could also drop marines and stuff but without medivac boost it's not anywhere as strong as in sc2. For protoss adept/wp/oracle harass is way stronger than the harassment options in bw. Reavers are a huge investment and recall is only available in lategame. Only for zerg the harassment options seem similarly strong but speedlings are way faster in sc2 and banelings exist.
But when people complain about harassment units I think they are mostly complaining about those units that can instantly kill 10+ workers because you were looking away for a few seconds, I don't think many people have a problem with marine drops/ling runbys/warpprism harass. In that aspect the problematic units are widow mines, banelings and oracles (also disruptors and hts but those aren't used as often for harassment) The only bw units that work similar are reavers and hts but those are a huge investment so even if you lose 10 or so workers you aren't instantly dead. Oracles, widow mines and banelings are all available super early, aren't a big investment and if you lose 10+ workers to them because you weren't paying attention you are almost 100% dead. I believe that's the reason why so many people complain about harassment units in sc2.
On February 10 2017 04:30 Charoisaur wrote: I think you guys are really overanalyzing this. I read the OP and the list of harassment units seems way more potent in sc2. Yes in bw you could also drop marines and stuff but without medivac boost it's not anywhere as strong as in sc2. For protoss adept/wp/oracle harass is way stronger than the harassment options in bw. Reavers are a huge investment and recall is only available in lategame. Only for zerg the harassment options seem similarly strong but speedlings are way faster in sc2 and banelings exist.
But when people complain about harassment units I think they are mostly complaining about those units that can instantly kill 10+ workers because you were looking away for a few seconds, I don't think many people have a problem with marine drops/ling runbys/warpprism harass. In that aspect the problematic units are widow mines, banelings and oracles (also disruptors and hts but those aren't used as often for harassment) The only bw units that work similar are reavers and hts but those are a huge investment so even if you lose 10 or so workers you aren't instantly dead. Oracles, widow mines and banelings are all available super early, aren't a big investment and if you lose 10+ workers to them because you weren't paying attention you are almost 100% dead. I believe that's the reason why so many people complain about harassment units in sc2.
Lurkers are very potent worker harassment in BW. Reavers not so much because they are unreliable.Yes, when a Reaver hit it *could* kill up to 10 workers at once, but its more likely it will kill nothing at all or maybe 1 or 2 workers. And a reaver is a huge investment.
Lurkers drops on the other hand are absolutely deadly.
On February 10 2017 03:53 BisuDagger wrote: All I have to say is great post Uvantak ! ^^ You put into words what I would not have been able to do so gracefully.
Thanks.
The thing that bothers me is that, when these "Harassment too stronk" threads pop up, everyone is quick to talk about the flashy things like Reaver drops, or Widow Mine drops, but not about the underlying mechanics like the economy, or Worker Pairing creating "income cushions", which allowed players to survive the strong harassment options BW had.
Flashy things are an easy way to become blinded to the real mechanics at work in the game.
On February 10 2017 04:30 Charoisaur wrote: I think you guys are really overanalyzing this. I read the OP and the list of harassment units seems way more potent in sc2. Yes in bw you could also drop marines and stuff but without medivac boost it's not anywhere as strong as in sc2. For protoss adept/wp/oracle harass is way stronger than the harassment options in bw. Reavers are a huge investment and recall is only available in lategame. Only for zerg the harassment options seem similarly strong but speedlings are way faster in sc2 and banelings exist.
But when people complain about harassment units I think they are mostly complaining about those units that can instantly kill 10+ workers because you were looking away for a few seconds, I don't think many people have a problem with marine drops/ling runbys/warpprism harass. In that aspect the problematic units are widow mines, banelings and oracles (also disruptors and hts but those aren't used as often for harassment) The only bw units that work similar are reavers and hts but those are a huge investment so even if you lose 10 or so workers you aren't instantly dead. Oracles, widow mines and banelings are all available super early, aren't a big investment and if you lose 10+ workers to them because you weren't paying attention you are almost 100% dead. I believe that's the reason why so many people complain about harassment units in sc2.
Lurkers are very potent worker harassment in BW. Reavers not so much because they are unreliable.Yes, when a Reaver hit it *could* kill up to 10 workers at once, but its more likely it will kill nothing at all or maybe 1 or 2 workers. And a reaver is a huge investment.
Lurkers drops on the other hand are absolutely deadly.
I would argue that Lurker drops are also fairly costly to tech to, mainly due to needing to research the Overlord drop upgrade and probably the speed upgrade too.
On February 10 2017 04:30 Charoisaur wrote: I think you guys are really overanalyzing this. I read the OP and the list of harassment units seems way more potent in sc2. Yes in bw you could also drop marines and stuff but without medivac boost it's not anywhere as strong as in sc2. For protoss adept/wp/oracle harass is way stronger than the harassment options in bw. Reavers are a huge investment and recall is only available in lategame. Only for zerg the harassment options seem similarly strong but speedlings are way faster in sc2 and banelings exist.
But when people complain about harassment units I think they are mostly complaining about those units that can instantly kill 10+ workers because you were looking away for a few seconds, I don't think many people have a problem with marine drops/ling runbys/warpprism harass. In that aspect the problematic units are widow mines, banelings and oracles (also disruptors and hts but those aren't used as often for harassment) The only bw units that work similar are reavers and hts but those are a huge investment so even if you lose 10 or so workers you aren't instantly dead. Oracles, widow mines and banelings are all available super early, aren't a big investment and if you lose 10+ workers to them because you weren't paying attention you are almost 100% dead. I believe that's the reason why so many people complain about harassment units in sc2.
Lurkers are very potent worker harassment in BW. Reavers not so much because they are unreliable.Yes, when a Reaver hit it *could* kill up to 10 workers at once, but its more likely it will kill nothing at all or maybe 1 or 2 workers. And a reaver is a huge investment.
Lurkers drops on the other hand are absolutely deadly.
I would argue that Lurker drops are also fairly costly to tech to, mainly due to needing to research the Overlord drop upgrade and probably the speed upgrade too.
What are you guys talking about?
Any decent player knows how the scarab dud works, as long as your placing them in between the main and nat your fine.
AFAIK nobody opens with lurker drops besides that rare time when they get them before mutas in ZvT. (Excluding late game scenarios).
Also thanks for uvantak for bringing up the econemy behind it all.
I think the main difference is the comeback mechanic in sc2 vs brood war. I remember Artosis saying during ASL that it is actually very hard to kill your opponent in brood war and the more units the harder it is to micro them without them dying. So even though your behind in workers in sc2 the snowball effect is more significant than in brood war.
On February 10 2017 04:30 Charoisaur wrote: I think you guys are really overanalyzing this. I read the OP and the list of harassment units seems way more potent in sc2. Yes in bw you could also drop marines and stuff but without medivac boost it's not anywhere as strong as in sc2. For protoss adept/wp/oracle harass is way stronger than the harassment options in bw. Reavers are a huge investment and recall is only available in lategame. Only for zerg the harassment options seem similarly strong but speedlings are way faster in sc2 and banelings exist.
But when people complain about harassment units I think they are mostly complaining about those units that can instantly kill 10+ workers because you were looking away for a few seconds, I don't think many people have a problem with marine drops/ling runbys/warpprism harass. In that aspect the problematic units are widow mines, banelings and oracles (also disruptors and hts but those aren't used as often for harassment) The only bw units that work similar are reavers and hts but those are a huge investment so even if you lose 10 or so workers you aren't instantly dead. Oracles, widow mines and banelings are all available super early, aren't a big investment and if you lose 10+ workers to them because you weren't paying attention you are almost 100% dead. I believe that's the reason why so many people complain about harassment units in sc2.
Lurkers are very potent worker harassment in BW. Reavers not so much because they are unreliable.Yes, when a Reaver hit it *could* kill up to 10 workers at once, but its more likely it will kill nothing at all or maybe 1 or 2 workers. And a reaver is a huge investment.
Lurkers drops on the other hand are absolutely deadly.
I would argue that Lurker drops are also fairly costly to tech to, mainly due to needing to research the Overlord drop upgrade and probably the speed upgrade too.
What are you guys talking about?
Any decent player knows how the scarab dud works, as long as your placing them in between the main and nat your fine.
AFAIK nobody opens with lurker drops besides that rare time when they get them before mutas in ZvT. (Excluding late game scenarios).
Also thanks for uvantak for bringing up the econemy behind it all.
Thanks to JD in the ASL, lurker openings are become much more common. And JD showed vs Flash in the ASL that drop tech early can be strong on large 4-player macro maps like eye of the storm.
When nerchio quand frontal + nydus + drop in the same time, or major harass 3 bases in same time/maru/byun.
Sc2 is naturally a difficult game
BW was full of artificial difficulty in useless busywork that detracts from the real focus of Starcraft, which is army and economy management. That you can only have 12 units in a group, that you manually have to place workers on minerals, that you cannot have multiple buildings on a hotkey simply detracts from the overall experience the game should be focused on delivering.
these threads always derail. Its not about bw vs sc2.
uvantak had a great post, and the only one that was backed up with legitimate data. most of this thread is people talking about things without really knowing both sides.
There was harassment in WOL, but it wasn't as game-ending as it is in LOTV.
LOTV seems to put such a big focus on harassment. DK himself said that he creams his pants over workers dying, but is that really good design? That does really make the game fun? Has anyone wondered that maybe this is one of the primary reasons the game is seeing the playerbase and viewerbase shrink?
On February 10 2017 06:06 ihatevideogames wrote: There was harassment in WOL, but it wasn't as game-ending as it is in LOTV.
LOTV seems to put such a big focus on harassment. DK himself said that he creams his pants over workers dying, but is that really good design? That does really make the game fun? Has anyone wondered that maybe this is one of the primary reasons the game is seeing the playerbase and viewerbase shrink?
Trust me thats not a new idea. people have been saying that since at least 2013.
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.
I think SC2 its just much easier to harass workers.
Further in Bdub, the ability for fewer units to hold choke points, made for situations where the harasser couldn't destroy your front line defenses at the same time as they were harassing (well, they could, but it was much harder). This means that in SC2 you have to defend more places equally or you will lose while in Bdub being out of position didn't mean you lose instantly.
On February 10 2017 06:19 AlphaAeffchen wrote: Thx for the great responses and that you explain your thoughts about harrasment in BW and SC 2.
But i think you missunderstand some of my arguments. Let me give you one more example. Dt´s in TvP are stronger in broodwar because they come earlier and are harder to defend (scanstation can be destroyed). Its really long ago but i saw games from boxer and he lost because there were Dt´s and he was not prepared. Nobody was complaining about it. Because this things happen. And i heavily disagree that 95% of pro games are over before the big fights begin (allins like 3 eax reaper are a problem but this is an allin and not harrasment)
I know that worker harrasment is in nearly everey SC II game but i think its not bad.
I saw it in Broodwar in nearly everey game in TvZ. You cant let a zerg drone up in both games. Its a problem so you have to harras them.
Against protoss in Lotv you have only 2 real options as terran. Widowminedrop or liberator. The other options are too expensive in early game (cloaked banshee). Or die against pylon cannon. Harrasment in midgame is good in both games (drops, warpprism, arbiter......).Yes there are speed medivacs which lead to problems. But pls keep in mind that they create many skirmishes on the map which is really fun to see for me as a viewer.
I agree that earlygame harrasment can be really fustrating and that this is a problem in SC II but in general its a good thing for the game.
Please double check your spelling before posting in the future. If you are unsure if something is right or not, ask around and many people on TL will be happy to help you out
On February 10 2017 00:43 AlphaAeffchen wrote: @ Kaewins
I totally understand your arguments. But if you look at BW games from boxer. There are manygames which he won only because of worker harrasment. Protoss players stomped terrans with Arbiter harrass in lategame....
Here's the thing though, in BW worker harassment is a viable strategy and one aspect of the game, in SC2 worker harassment and killing bases is 95% of the game.
How many times since the launch of LotV had pro games been decided by massive army engagements? I can't remember very many. I guess Neeb in PvP comes to mind, which I must admit is quite exciting to watch, but outside of that games are decided way before we get to a stage where big battles are fought.
I find 90% of games vs zerg is all about creep control and map management
I also find that 90% of vs terran matches are all about vision supremacy as it is super important to be able to position defenses to bat off medivac incursions, banshees, and liberators as their main force prevents you from just pulling back your troops in fear of losing bases.
I also find 90% of vs protoss matches are exclusively about gaining an army position to allow you to circumvent their aoe of choice.
So I don't understand the criticism you have at all.
On February 10 2017 00:18 BisuDagger wrote: Honestly, I think this was a bigger issue in LOTV. With the new fast paced economy and quick extra bases this feels less of an issue. But still in SC2 workers can be obliterated at such a faster level and it is a combination of harrasment units doing damage very fast and the defensive structure of sc2 vs sc1.
Vultures for instance are great harassment units but are not strong enough to win a game outright even with good attacks.
Vultures: TvZ Not as common early game vs zerg. By the time mech switch comes out zerg should have two things 1. Good sim cities to help prevent runbys 2. The remacro from multiple hatcheries across many base location + nydus canals to quickly defend each base make the zerg fierce defenders. Plus at this point defensive lurkers and sunkens will make it hard for 4 vultures to kill many workers before the vultures are killed.
TvP 1. Vultures don't get inside the base easily because a pylons plus rallied dragoons are usually blocking the natural 2. Vulture drops are deflected by good scouting pylon placements and macro dragoons pop out to kill of 4 vultures. 3. Protoss should always be out expanding Terran. So even if an exposed third nexus takes tons of probe kills, the protoss should be able to play defense and remacro workers.
So let's assume that vultures do harass at a level of significant damage in a TvP. Now protoss can expect a tank+vulture follow up and they do not have the economy to face Terran head on. Well Brood War has HUGE defensive advantages. High ground areas and cliffs can be used to cause missed tank shots or lower dmg attack. The bridges and choke points are major too because BW units are larger. You cannot stack them up in bundles as effectively as SC2. So you have dragoons hitting tanks from a high ground, zealots dropping on tanks, and all the while your Protoss army has it's back against 8-12 gateways bringing more units into the battle.
Another way too look at it though: On a broader scope every harrasment investment has it's drawbacks. Going for reavers and killing lots of SCVs doesn't mean that Terran loses outright. Terran off two bases can still defend Protoss armies for a very very very long time with a much smaller army of tanks and turrets.And teching to reavers may mean protoss took obs later, so then Terran responds with spider mine harassment. Reavers also mean less gas for goons, so now the protoss player cannot defend and two base timing push from Terran as easily. Especially if Terran can pull their 4 marines out of their bunker and pick of the shuttle containing the reaver. Then protoss is suddenly behind even after killing 10 workers.
The TLDR, is that all 3 races have ways to defend or comeback from heavy damage. It's tough, but smart players take risks and change tech paths that allow them to overcome the harassment.
I think you are seeing this from the wrong angle regarding the defensiveness of BW Bisu, yes, cliffs and such help, but on direct harassment drops or wherever they matter very little, instead I would look at the economy.
On my eyes, it is very simple what is happening on the case of SC2 Harassment being considerably stronger than in BW on its potential to cripple a player, and that is caused by Worker Pairing.
On BW, where worker pairing does not exist, and instead the efficiency threshold for saturated Mineral lines is 8, as long as a player's mineral line does not go below those 8 workers, the overall income of the mineral line is rather stable. What I mean is that, because in BW when you go beyond 8 workers per mineral line, the efficiency of these new workers is less than the efficiency of the first 8. This creates kinda of a cushion effect on the mineral line. As long as you have 8 workers mining on it, you will still be receiving a "considerable" part of the total income a mineral line gives.
On SC2 meanwhile, because a mineral line requires 16 workers to be efficiently mined, when you are losing any of said 16 workers, you are losing workers mining at 100% efficiency, meaning that your income is being severely affected, which in BW is not the case as the efficiency threshold there is 8 instead of 16. So in BW you need to basically lose all workers in a mineral line for your income to become obliterated, meanwhile on SC2, because of the linear relation on the first 16 workers, if you lose say, half of those your income will become halved, on BW, if you lose half of your first 16 workers, your income will decrease by ~40%.
Here's a pic to illustrate the issue.
As such, on SC2, when you lose workers from your vital 16, you are losing your important 100% efficiency workers, meanwhile in BW, the golden number of 100% efficient mining workers is 8 not 16.
This also means that in BW it is easier to bounce back into a decent economy after heavy harassment rather easily, for you "only" need to transfer around 8 to 10 workers from your other bases into the harassed base and you will more or less have a similar economy you had previously (still damaged, only not bleeding to death). In the case of SC2, because you need 16 workers per mineral line, if your main has 22 workers and the workers in your nat are all dead, if you decide to transfer 8 from your main to you natural, your overall income will still be screwed, because your natural will still need 8 extra workers for it to be working at 100% efficiency once again, while now your main will also be in need of refilling those 2 missing mining workers until it reaches 16 again.
There are a lot of other things that I didn't bothered to mention like how worker bouncing creates sweet spots on the mining curves, or went in detail about the nitty gritty mining rates for workers on BW vs SC2
So if anyone got interested on this, I highly suggest to go read other articles on Worker Pairing, and how it affects the game.
From a personal standpoint, often in low level play in BW, the harasser usually lost a good amount of his econ progression managing the harass instead of managing his workers. So they could kill 8 of your workers, but it would also turn out that he could have made 6 workers but failed to do so, making it so he's only at a net 2 workers ahead. This made a lot of non-pro matches in BW seem so even and back and forth even when one player is successfully harassing over and over.
On February 10 2017 00:17 todespolka wrote: Bw had a lot of worker harassment, but sc2 has more units, which can worker harass. Nonetheless bw was more punishing, because any distraction put you behind. You could not build workers and send them to minerals as easy as in sc2. You had no macro mechanics to close the gap after a worker loss. Also bases were not close and were hard to defend.
Most of the player in bw preferred team games or arcade games (ums games), where they could share the pressure and help each other out. The 1vs1 community was small. It is the opposite in sc2, 1vs1 has a lot of players.
1v1 community was not in small brood war, its just the 1v1 players didn't use the battle.net servers
On February 10 2017 06:06 ihatevideogames wrote: There was harassment in WOL, but it wasn't as game-ending as it is in LOTV.
LOTV seems to put such a big focus on harassment. DK himself said that he creams his pants over workers dying, but is that really good design? That does really make the game fun? Has anyone wondered that maybe this is one of the primary reasons the game is seeing the playerbase and viewerbase shrink?
nope, RTS games are all going down. a decreasing tide lowers all boats. let's see how long Halo Wars 2 lasts... it has a big time RTS studio behind it with a giant brand. i say it goes down faster than the hindenburg. it did make for the most awesome album cover in the history of the rock genre though.
considering how quickly RTS games die these days SC2 has done a great job of hanging on. i still enjoy the GSL and grassroots guys like TotalBiscuit and Rifkin are succeeding with their SC2 content.
On February 10 2017 03:35 Uvantak wrote: I think you are seeing this from the wrong angle regarding the defensiveness of BW Bisu, yes, cliffs and such help, but on direct harassment drops or wherever they matter very little, instead I would look at the economy.
On my eyes, it is very simple what is happening on the case of SC2 Harassment being considerably stronger than in BW on its potential to cripple a player, and that is caused by Worker Pairing.
On BW, where worker pairing does not exist, and instead the efficiency threshold for saturated Mineral lines is 8, as long as a player's mineral line does not go below those 8 workers, the overall income of the mineral line is rather stable.
good point. thanks for this. killing workers 9-16 means more in SC2 than it does in BW.
On February 10 2017 00:21 todespolka wrote: The biggest mistake people do is comparing specific aspects of the game isolated. You have to look at the big picture! In bw any distraction put you behind, because you could not send workers to minerals! The faster player had a bigger advantage.
true, auto-mining makes a big difference. as a C&C-er i'm really glad this housekeeping duty/chore was removed from SC2.
The reason why people call LotV Harasscraft, is not only because they added additional harassment tools, but most importantly because the very low economy system of LotV makes it harder to comeback.
In BW and earlier SC2 versions you had much more ressources per base available than in lotv. You could rebuild workers without getting completey behind.
If you lose too many workers in lotv, you can only come back by counter harassing and dealing atleast equal damage. Your main base runs out so incredibly fast, especially if you're terran and use mules.
This means you only have very limited options, you often can't afford to rebuild workers while also being able to produce just as much units as your opponent does.
In hots and wol macro mechanics were also stronger which means that you had higher spikes in ressource collection. Another reason why it was easier to recover.
RTS games aren't going down, please. We have Age of Empires 2 HD tournaments for gods sake.
The games aren't dying, there just aren't any good ones left.
StarCraft 2 is fading because it is frustrating to play, stop making excuses for the game. It has too much frustrating things in it and they keep adding more frustrating things, instead of removing those already in the game.
The game is becoming more and more depending on execution rather than strategy, but this genre is strategy so you can't blame strategy players for not wanting to deal with all the bullcrap in SC2. I'd play a moba if I was interested in all that.
Brood War and Age of Empires 2 are just superior real time strategy games and they are immensely enjoyable to play, because instead of dying to something that I had 5 seconds to react to, I can actually win my games with good long and short term strategic choices.
I don't mean to hate, but I think David Kim would do better in the HotS team as he is simply unable to make SC2 fun to play.
On February 10 2017 08:10 Kaewins wrote: The games aren't dying, there just aren't any good ones left.
true, because the longer orgs work on making a certain type of game the worse they get. Their best efforts are always their initial efforts at the dawn of the new medium. then they just keep getting worse and worse. Reductio Ad absurdum. increased consumer choice when it comes to crazy-action big-army fights has watered down the demand for games that used to require a desktop PC.
AoE2 generates almost zero revenue for its creators and thus there is almost zero incentive to sink money into creating another RTS game.
Try and raise some money to make an RTS game. PM me the results.
On February 10 2017 08:10 Kaewins wrote: The games aren't dying, there just aren't any good ones left.
true, because the longer orgs work on making a certain type of game the worse they get. Their best efforts are always their initial efforts at the dawn of the new medium. then they just keep getting worse and worse. Reductio Ad absurdum. increased consumer choice when it comes to crazy-action big-army fights has watered down the demand for games that used to require a desktop PC.
All boils down to a simple question. Is the game fun to play? It doesn't matter how big of a budget its got or how many fancy developers work on it, or how shiny the graphics are. Is the game fun to play or not?
There is a reason we still play older games like BW and AoE2 instead of their newer shinier counterparts. Sorry, it's not nostalgia, it's because they're damn good games.
Obviously devs back in the day had less good tech to work with so instead they used their passion and imagination to create the iconic games people grew to love. Today games have much higher production values, but little soul and instead we get to listen to some smug developer explain why his game doesn't suck.
Age of Empires 2 just had it's newest expansion launched, it's more alive than SC2 prolly.
On February 10 2017 00:18 BisuDagger wrote: Honestly, I think this was a bigger issue in LOTV. With the new fast paced economy and quick extra bases this feels less of an issue. But still in SC2 workers can be obliterated at such a faster level and it is a combination of harrasment units doing damage very fast and the defensive structure of sc2 vs sc1.
Vultures for instance are great harassment units but are not strong enough to win a game outright even with good attacks.
Vultures: TvZ Not as common early game vs zerg. By the time mech switch comes out zerg should have two things 1. Good sim cities to help prevent runbys 2. The remacro from multiple hatcheries across many base location + nydus canals to quickly defend each base make the zerg fierce defenders. Plus at this point defensive lurkers and sunkens will make it hard for 4 vultures to kill many workers before the vultures are killed.
TvP 1. Vultures don't get inside the base easily because a pylons plus rallied dragoons are usually blocking the natural 2. Vulture drops are deflected by good scouting pylon placements and macro dragoons pop out to kill of 4 vultures. 3. Protoss should always be out expanding Terran. So even if an exposed third nexus takes tons of probe kills, the protoss should be able to play defense and remacro workers.
So let's assume that vultures do harass at a level of significant damage in a TvP. Now protoss can expect a tank+vulture follow up and they do not have the economy to face Terran head on. Well Brood War has HUGE defensive advantages. High ground areas and cliffs can be used to cause missed tank shots or lower dmg attack. The bridges and choke points are major too because BW units are larger. You cannot stack them up in bundles as effectively as SC2. So you have dragoons hitting tanks from a high ground, zealots dropping on tanks, and all the while your Protoss army has it's back against 8-12 gateways bringing more units into the battle.
Another way too look at it though: On a broader scope every harrasment investment has it's drawbacks. Going for reavers and killing lots of SCVs doesn't mean that Terran loses outright. Terran off two bases can still defend Protoss armies for a very very very long time with a much smaller army of tanks and turrets.And teching to reavers may mean protoss took obs later, so then Terran responds with spider mine harassment. Reavers also mean less gas for goons, so now the protoss player cannot defend and two base timing push from Terran as easily. Especially if Terran can pull their 4 marines out of their bunker and pick of the shuttle containing the reaver. Then protoss is suddenly behind even after killing 10 workers.
The TLDR, is that all 3 races have ways to defend or comeback from heavy damage. It's tough, but smart players take risks and change tech paths that allow them to overcome the harassment.
I think you are seeing this from the wrong angle regarding the defensiveness of BW Bisu, yes, cliffs and such help, but on direct harassment drops or wherever they matter very little, instead I would look at the economy.
On my eyes, it is very simple what is happening on the case of SC2 Harassment being considerably stronger than in BW on its potential to cripple a player, and that is caused by Worker Pairing.
On BW, where worker pairing does not exist, and instead the efficiency threshold for saturated Mineral lines is 8, as long as a player's mineral line does not go below those 8 workers, the overall income of the mineral line is rather stable. What I mean is that, because in BW when you go beyond 8 workers per mineral line, the efficiency of these new workers is less than the efficiency of the first 8. This creates kinda of a cushion effect on the mineral line. As long as you have 8 workers mining on it, you will still be receiving a "considerable" part of the total income a mineral line gives.
On SC2 meanwhile, because a mineral line requires 16 workers to be efficiently mined, when you are losing any of said 16 workers, you are losing workers mining at 100% efficiency, meaning that your income is being severely affected, which in BW is not the case as the efficiency threshold there is 8 instead of 16. So in BW you need to basically lose all workers in a mineral line for your income to become obliterated, meanwhile on SC2, because of the linear relation on the first 16 workers, if you lose say, half of those your income will become halved, on BW, if you lose half of your first 16 workers, your income will decrease by ~40%.
Here's a pic to illustrate the issue.
As such, on SC2, when you lose workers from your vital 16, you are losing your important 100% efficiency workers, meanwhile in BW, the golden number of 100% efficient mining workers is 8 not 16.
This also means that in BW it is easier to bounce back into a decent economy after heavy harassment rather easily, for you "only" need to transfer around 8 to 10 workers from your other bases into the harassed base and you will more or less have a similar economy you had previously (still damaged, only not bleeding to death). In the case of SC2, because you need 16 workers per mineral line, if your main has 22 workers and the workers in your nat are all dead, if you decide to transfer 8 from your main to you natural, your overall income will still be screwed, because your natural will still need 8 extra workers for it to be working at 100% efficiency once again, while now your main will also be in need of refilling those 2 missing mining workers until it reaches 16 again.
There are a lot of other things that I didn't bothered to mention like how worker bouncing creates sweet spots on the mining curves, or went in detail about the nitty gritty mining rates for workers on BW vs SC2
So if anyone got interested on this, I highly suggest to go read other articles on Worker Pairing, and how it affects the game.
♦♦ From a personal standpoint, often in low level play in BW, the harasser usually lost a good amount of his econ progression managing the harass instead of managing his workers. So they could kill 8 of your workers, but it would also turn out that he could have made 6 workers but failed to do so, making it so he's only at a net 2 workers ahead. This made a lot of non-pro matches in BW seem so even and back and forth even when one player is successfully harassing over and over.
♦ No, what I wrote is based on math alone, which even when it might seem similar to pro-play, in the sense that pro-players try to get as close as possible to playing "perfectly", it is still different, because as I mentioned at the end, there are several other things which I'm not mentioning. And being honest, even the numbers I wrote on the graphs are simply an approximation to the real income rates, a BW base with 16 workers does not mine the same as a SC2 base with 16, from the top of my head they had like a ~7% difference on income.
♦♦ Yeah, that's a fair assessment I think, tho I would throw HighGround Advantage +BW Pathing in there too, as these two mechanics make it harder for the player that's ahead to achieve the killing blow to the defensive (behind) player.
On February 10 2017 08:27 Kaewins wrote: Age of Empires 2 just had it's newest expansion launched, it's more alive than SC2 prolly.
your view that the entire RTS genre is not declining is based on a single $10 expansion for 1 RTS game that sold less than 100,000 copies while ATVI just made $2+ billion in 3 months....thanks for proving my point.
it is really cool that strategy/action games of all types develop cult like followings that allow them to last far longer than standard action only video games. but its not like that started with AoE or the RTS genre. It started with games like M.U.L.E. and Utopia.
On February 10 2017 00:18 BisuDagger wrote: Honestly, I think this was a bigger issue in LOTV. With the new fast paced economy and quick extra bases this feels less of an issue. But still in SC2 workers can be obliterated at such a faster level and it is a combination of harrasment units doing damage very fast and the defensive structure of sc2 vs sc1.
Vultures for instance are great harassment units but are not strong enough to win a game outright even with good attacks.
Vultures: TvZ Not as common early game vs zerg. By the time mech switch comes out zerg should have two things 1. Good sim cities to help prevent runbys 2. The remacro from multiple hatcheries across many base location + nydus canals to quickly defend each base make the zerg fierce defenders. Plus at this point defensive lurkers and sunkens will make it hard for 4 vultures to kill many workers before the vultures are killed.
TvP 1. Vultures don't get inside the base easily because a pylons plus rallied dragoons are usually blocking the natural 2. Vulture drops are deflected by good scouting pylon placements and macro dragoons pop out to kill of 4 vultures. 3. Protoss should always be out expanding Terran. So even if an exposed third nexus takes tons of probe kills, the protoss should be able to play defense and remacro workers.
So let's assume that vultures do harass at a level of significant damage in a TvP. Now protoss can expect a tank+vulture follow up and they do not have the economy to face Terran head on. Well Brood War has HUGE defensive advantages. High ground areas and cliffs can be used to cause missed tank shots or lower dmg attack. The bridges and choke points are major too because BW units are larger. You cannot stack them up in bundles as effectively as SC2. So you have dragoons hitting tanks from a high ground, zealots dropping on tanks, and all the while your Protoss army has it's back against 8-12 gateways bringing more units into the battle.
Another way too look at it though: On a broader scope every harrasment investment has it's drawbacks. Going for reavers and killing lots of SCVs doesn't mean that Terran loses outright. Terran off two bases can still defend Protoss armies for a very very very long time with a much smaller army of tanks and turrets.And teching to reavers may mean protoss took obs later, so then Terran responds with spider mine harassment. Reavers also mean less gas for goons, so now the protoss player cannot defend and two base timing push from Terran as easily. Especially if Terran can pull their 4 marines out of their bunker and pick of the shuttle containing the reaver. Then protoss is suddenly behind even after killing 10 workers.
The TLDR, is that all 3 races have ways to defend or comeback from heavy damage. It's tough, but smart players take risks and change tech paths that allow them to overcome the harassment.
I think you are seeing this from the wrong angle regarding the defensiveness of BW Bisu, yes, cliffs and such help, but on direct harassment drops or wherever they matter very little, instead I would look at the economy.
On my eyes, it is very simple what is happening on the case of SC2 Harassment being considerably stronger than in BW on its potential to cripple a player, and that is caused by Worker Pairing.
On BW, where worker pairing does not exist, and instead the efficiency threshold for saturated Mineral lines is 8, as long as a player's mineral line does not go below those 8 workers, the overall income of the mineral line is rather stable. What I mean is that, because in BW when you go beyond 8 workers per mineral line, the efficiency of these new workers is less than the efficiency of the first 8. This creates kinda of a cushion effect on the mineral line. As long as you have 8 workers mining on it, you will still be receiving a "considerable" part of the total income a mineral line gives.
On SC2 meanwhile, because a mineral line requires 16 workers to be efficiently mined, when you are losing any of said 16 workers, you are losing workers mining at 100% efficiency, meaning that your income is being severely affected, which in BW is not the case as the efficiency threshold there is 8 instead of 16. So in BW you need to basically lose all workers in a mineral line for your income to become obliterated, meanwhile on SC2, because of the linear relation on the first 16 workers, if you lose say, half of those your income will become halved, on BW, if you lose half of your first 16 workers, your income will decrease by ~40%.
Here's a pic to illustrate the issue.
As such, on SC2, when you lose workers from your vital 16, you are losing your important 100% efficiency workers, meanwhile in BW, the golden number of 100% efficient mining workers is 8 not 16.
This also means that in BW it is easier to bounce back into a decent economy after heavy harassment rather easily, for you "only" need to transfer around 8 to 10 workers from your other bases into the harassed base and you will more or less have a similar economy you had previously (still damaged, only not bleeding to death). In the case of SC2, because you need 16 workers per mineral line, if your main has 22 workers and the workers in your nat are all dead, if you decide to transfer 8 from your main to you natural, your overall income will still be screwed, because your natural will still need 8 extra workers for it to be working at 100% efficiency once again, while now your main will also be in need of refilling those 2 missing mining workers until it reaches 16 again.
There are a lot of other things that I didn't bothered to mention like how worker bouncing creates sweet spots on the mining curves, or went in detail about the nitty gritty mining rates for workers on BW vs SC2
So if anyone got interested on this, I highly suggest to go read other articles on Worker Pairing, and how it affects the game.
♦♦ From a personal standpoint, often in low level play in BW, the harasser usually lost a good amount of his econ progression managing the harass instead of managing his workers. So they could kill 8 of your workers, but it would also turn out that he could have made 6 workers but failed to do so, making it so he's only at a net 2 workers ahead. This made a lot of non-pro matches in BW seem so even and back and forth even when one player is successfully harassing over and over.
♦ No, what I wrote is based on math alone, which even when it might seem similar to pro-play, in the sense that pro-players try to get as close as possible to playing "perfectly", it is still different, because as I mentioned at the end, there are several other things which I'm not mentioning. And being honest, even the numbers I wrote on the graphs are simply an approximation to the real income rates, a BW base with 16 workers does not mine the same as a SC2 base with 16, from the top of my head they had like a ~7% difference on income.
♦♦ Yeah, that's a fair assessment I think, tho I would throw HighGround Advantage +BW Pathing in there too, as these two mechanics make it harder for the player that's ahead to achieve the killing blow to the defensive (behind) player.
Both points are one and the same to me. I'm saying that most "players" don't actually get to leverage those aspects of the game at the timings where it actually matters. However, in SC2, econ is easy enough to maximize that we don't have the "oh shit I forgot to make workers while I managed the drop, and the workers I had in cue are all just piled 5 deep in each of my 4 bases resulting 20 workers sitting idle" that BW has when you're playing. In SC2, you can just cue a bunch of workers, do your harass, and when its done continue making workers.
Add the math on top of that and you can definitely see the differences in both games when it comes to harass. In SC2, since econ is easy to replenish, harass needs to almost wipe out a mineral line to really feel a difference. Killing 1-2 isn't enough. In BW, often times the threat of killing things in BW was enough to get people behind just by forcing them to make economic mistakes. As such, even if you "only killed a few workers" you could often deal economic damage.
The true strong macro players would face the same harass, lose the same amount of workers as most players, and somehow still come out ahead in econ. That's what was truly beautiful about BW harass. Stronger players literally produced stronger results despite being given the same amount of damage because they were able to keep up with all the clicks needed to be the best.
I opened this topic because i wanted to discuss worker harassment in SC II and BW. Now you discuss if SC II/RTS games are dead. Its idiotic. We have a scene. We have GSL. We have tournaments. SC BW and SC II are both hardcore games. Yes our player base is not the biggest. Sc II had more players than BW ever had at the beginning of Wol and Hots. Most people started to play Starcraft II casual. They played it for years and moved on. This happens. We still have a game that is alive and will stay alive. Starcraft 2 was number 1 on twitch for many years. Most young people like mobas more because they are easier and they dont want to play more complicated games. The same thing happens with strategy board games (i love Axis and Alllies). Most young people hate to play complicated games and want to play easier games. Its a fact. But we have enough people who play this game and care about it. Its fine.
We had 35000 people watching GSL when Scarlett played. SC II is alive. Its ok.
SC II is an excelent game and Blizzard did evereything to make it good. Yes there are big problems in SC II. But many people wanted to have BW 2.0. That would be the worst thing that could have happened. I remember that people complained about unlimited unit selection and unlimited building selection in SC II. If these things would not have been in the game, we would have never reached number 1 on twitch because the game would be unplayable for modern standards in RTS and people would have said 6 months after the release of SC II/Wol that the game is to hard to play and outdated!
Age of Empires II is a casual game and will never be an E-sport.
The only 2 games in the genre RTS which are a real E-sport are SC BW and SC II thats it.
Oh and Jimmy JRaynor RTS games are not dead. They are still in development and have a solid market.
-Total war warhammer series
- Dawn of War 3
- Halo 2
Ohh and by the way Jimmy also pls stop spreading misinformation about Blizzard not making a new RTS in other topics. There will be Warcraft 4. The only question is when. Mike Morhain said that he is interested in WC 4. The only question is when it will come. And your argument about Blizzard not making enough profit with RTS games is completely wrong.
- Blizzard makes money with RTS games. LotV sold 1 million copies at release day (this is enough return of invest)!
- Warcraft 4 would sell many copies because of the lore behind it and so on............
Oh and by the way Blizzard still makes some games just because their fanbase wants to see them!
I'm so sick of this negativity here. I wanted to discuss worker harassment in Starcraft 1 and 2 and not the dead game StarCraft/RTS bullshit which is totally wrong!
I'm speaking from a Zerg perspective, at 5400 mmr.
I don't find worker harassment to be prevalent, a problem, or game ending.
There are 2 options for worker harassment, in my eyes. Your opponent's opening, and everything else. A harass focused opening like an oracle, or a widow mine drop, is pure strategy. Executing it is trivial, and defending it is trivial, given you both know how to execute/defend it. Since it's entirely based on knowledge, and less on execution, this cannot be what people complain about.
That leaves everything else. Meaning at some point in the game, your opponent kills some workers outside of his build order. At this point in the game, you're usually going to be done worker production. For a zerg, this means all your money is going into tech/units, and you're sitting on somewhere in the vicinity of 80 drones.
In this situation, you can lose upwards of 16 drones and still be rolling in 3 base sat income. Meaning your opponent can kill all the drones at one of your base, and you're still going to be okay. That's a pretty big window of forgiveness, and if you're in a situation where losing drones is going to put you under the worker count of your opponent - you're probably losing anyway, and your opponent is just capitalizing on that.
I'm probably out of touch, being zerg and all, but I've never been able to connect the complaints about worker harass to the game. Defending workers is probably one of the easier things for a zerg to do, and even if you don't, you should have a large drone count buffer to compensate.
On February 10 2017 10:41 InfCereal wrote: I'm speaking from a Zerg perspective, at 5400 mmr.
I don't find worker harassment to be prevalent, a problem, or game ending.
There are 2 options for worker harassment, in my eyes. Your opponent's opening, and everything else. A harass focused opening like an oracle, or a widow mine drop, is pure strategy. Executing it is trivial, and defending it is trivial, given you both know how to execute/defend it. Since it's entirely based on knowledge, and less on execution, this cannot be what people complain about.
That leaves everything else. Meaning at some point in the game, your opponent kills some workers outside of his build order. At this point in the game, you're usually going to be done worker production. For a zerg, this means all your money is going into tech/units, and you're sitting on somewhere in the vicinity of 80 drones.
In this situation, you can lose upwards of 16 drones and still be rolling in 3 base sat income. Meaning your opponent can kill all the drones at one of your base, and you're still going to be okay. That's a pretty big window of forgiveness, and if you're in a situation where losing drones is going to put you under the worker count of your opponent - you're probably losing anyway, and your opponent is just capitalizing on that.
I'm probably out of touch, being zerg and all, but I've never been able to connect the complaints about worker harass to the game. Defending workers is probably one of the easier things for a zerg to do, and even if you don't, you should have a large drone count buffer to compensate.
If you read between the lines it usually means "BW was obviously so much better than SC2 because I dislikes the axioms set forth by SC2 and I will state my opinion as fact"
On February 10 2017 00:18 BisuDagger wrote: Honestly, I think this was a bigger issue in LOTV. With the new fast paced economy and quick extra bases this feels less of an issue. But still in SC2 workers can be obliterated at such a faster level and it is a combination of harrasment units doing damage very fast and the defensive structure of sc2 vs sc1.
Vultures for instance are great harassment units but are not strong enough to win a game outright even with good attacks.
Vultures: TvZ Not as common early game vs zerg. By the time mech switch comes out zerg should have two things 1. Good sim cities to help prevent runbys 2. The remacro from multiple hatcheries across many base location + nydus canals to quickly defend each base make the zerg fierce defenders. Plus at this point defensive lurkers and sunkens will make it hard for 4 vultures to kill many workers before the vultures are killed.
TvP 1. Vultures don't get inside the base easily because a pylons plus rallied dragoons are usually blocking the natural 2. Vulture drops are deflected by good scouting pylon placements and macro dragoons pop out to kill of 4 vultures. 3. Protoss should always be out expanding Terran. So even if an exposed third nexus takes tons of probe kills, the protoss should be able to play defense and remacro workers.
So let's assume that vultures do harass at a level of significant damage in a TvP. Now protoss can expect a tank+vulture follow up and they do not have the economy to face Terran head on. Well Brood War has HUGE defensive advantages. High ground areas and cliffs can be used to cause missed tank shots or lower dmg attack. The bridges and choke points are major too because BW units are larger. You cannot stack them up in bundles as effectively as SC2. So you have dragoons hitting tanks from a high ground, zealots dropping on tanks, and all the while your Protoss army has it's back against 8-12 gateways bringing more units into the battle.
Another way too look at it though: On a broader scope every harrasment investment has it's drawbacks. Going for reavers and killing lots of SCVs doesn't mean that Terran loses outright. Terran off two bases can still defend Protoss armies for a very very very long time with a much smaller army of tanks and turrets.And teching to reavers may mean protoss took obs later, so then Terran responds with spider mine harassment. Reavers also mean less gas for goons, so now the protoss player cannot defend and two base timing push from Terran as easily. Especially if Terran can pull their 4 marines out of their bunker and pick of the shuttle containing the reaver. Then protoss is suddenly behind even after killing 10 workers.
The TLDR, is that all 3 races have ways to defend or comeback from heavy damage. It's tough, but smart players take risks and change tech paths that allow them to overcome the harassment.
I think you are seeing this from the wrong angle regarding the defensiveness of BW Bisu, yes, cliffs and such help, but on direct harassment drops or wherever they matter very little, instead I would look at the economy.
On my eyes, it is very simple what is happening on the case of SC2 Harassment being considerably stronger than in BW on its potential to cripple a player, and that is caused by Worker Pairing.
On BW, where worker pairing does not exist, and instead the efficiency threshold for saturated Mineral lines is 8, as long as a player's mineral line does not go below those 8 workers, the overall income of the mineral line is rather stable. What I mean is that, because in BW when you go beyond 8 workers per mineral line, the efficiency of these new workers is less than the efficiency of the first 8. This creates kinda of a cushion effect on the mineral line. As long as you have 8 workers mining on it, you will still be receiving a "considerable" part of the total income a mineral line gives.
On SC2 meanwhile, because a mineral line requires 16 workers to be efficiently mined, when you are losing any of said 16 workers, you are losing workers mining at 100% efficiency, meaning that your income is being severely affected, which in BW is not the case as the efficiency threshold there is 8 instead of 16. So in BW you need to basically lose all workers in a mineral line for your income to become obliterated, meanwhile on SC2, because of the linear relation on the first 16 workers, if you lose say, half of those your income will become halved, on BW, if you lose half of your first 16 workers, your income will decrease by ~40%.
Here's a pic to illustrate the issue.
As such, on SC2, when you lose workers from your vital 16, you are losing your important 100% efficiency workers, meanwhile in BW, the golden number of 100% efficient mining workers is 8 not 16.
This also means that in BW it is easier to bounce back into a decent economy after heavy harassment rather easily, for you "only" need to transfer around 8 to 10 workers from your other bases into the harassed base and you will more or less have a similar economy you had previously (still damaged, only not bleeding to death). In the case of SC2, because you need 16 workers per mineral line, if your main has 22 workers and the workers in your nat are all dead, if you decide to transfer 8 from your main to you natural, your overall income will still be screwed, because your natural will still need 8 extra workers for it to be working at 100% efficiency once again, while now your main will also be in need of refilling those 2 missing mining workers until it reaches 16 again.
There are a lot of other things that I didn't bothered to mention like how worker bouncing creates sweet spots on the mining curves, or went in detail about the nitty gritty mining rates for workers on BW vs SC2
So if anyone got interested on this, I highly suggest to go read other articles on Worker Pairing, and how it affects the game.
♦♦ From a personal standpoint, often in low level play in BW, the harasser usually lost a good amount of his econ progression managing the harass instead of managing his workers. So they could kill 8 of your workers, but it would also turn out that he could have made 6 workers but failed to do so, making it so he's only at a net 2 workers ahead. This made a lot of non-pro matches in BW seem so even and back and forth even when one player is successfully harassing over and over.
♦ No, what I wrote is based on math alone, which even when it might seem similar to pro-play, in the sense that pro-players try to get as close as possible to playing "perfectly", it is still different, because as I mentioned at the end, there are several other things which I'm not mentioning. And being honest, even the numbers I wrote on the graphs are simply an approximation to the real income rates, a BW base with 16 workers does not mine the same as a SC2 base with 16, from the top of my head they had like a ~7% difference on income.
♦♦ Yeah, that's a fair assessment I think, tho I would throw HighGround Advantage +BW Pathing in there too, as these two mechanics make it harder for the player that's ahead to achieve the killing blow to the defensive (behind) player.
Both points are one and the same to me. I'm saying that most "players" don't actually get to leverage those aspects of the game at the timings where it actually matters. However, in SC2, econ is easy enough to maximize that we don't have the "oh shit I forgot to make workers while I managed the drop, and the workers I had in cue are all just piled 5 deep in each of my 4 bases resulting 20 workers sitting idle" that BW has when you're playing. In SC2, you can just cue a bunch of workers, do your harass, and when its done continue making workers.
Add the math on top of that and you can definitely see the differences in both games when it comes to harass. In SC2, since econ is easy to replenish, harass needs to almost wipe out a mineral line to really feel a difference. Killing 1-2 isn't enough. In BW, often times the threat of killing things in BW was enough to get people behind just by forcing them to make economic mistakes. As such, even if you "only killed a few workers" you could often deal economic damage.
Thing is, that what you say is "necessary" is actually pretty freaking exasperating for most of the playerbase, there is absolutely no need for the SC2 economy to be this punishing, and if Lalush's investigations are correct, the only reason why there is Worker Pairing in the first place is because someone somewhere while developing SC2 WoL on ~2008 decided that having workers bounce around sometimes looked "messy", so they changed the mining rate of workers in order to have them "not bounce as much".
When talking about these things, one must be very careful to not rationalize things, where there was no strong rationale to begin with. I still remember a friend of mine who was convinced that the reason why there are two vespene geysers per base instead of one, was because he thought that the DevTeam was trying to "fix" gas stealing, where as the real reason, is because on Pre-Alpha they were playing with back to base mechanics/macro-mechanics and they had an iteration where vespene geysers had a very reduced amount of gas in them, and every X time you needed to "buy extra vespene", but this process needed a wind-up time, and they couldn't leave players without gas during that time, so they added two geysers. And sure, the gas stealing thing might have played a part, maybe, but that's not the true reason, and simply looking at things without context of the Development of SC2, it is very easy to fall into those logical pitfalls.
As I mentioned at the beginning, there is no specific & logical reason as to why the SC2 Worker Pairing system needs to be in the game, harass is just one out of many ways in which this mechanic inherently damages the stability of the game.
Sure you can argue that SC2 UX and streamlined commands allows for players to make more workers, and Worker Pairing might be a good way to "balance" said new mechanic, yet, this is not logically sound, as there are several less damaging systems which can be tweaked and used to balance that instead of using the very economical core of the game. Which as I have mentioned several times, affects many more other systems than just "harassment". Not to mention that it outright destroys the Blizzard Design & Balance Axiom of "Doing small changes".
On February 10 2017 06:27 My_Fake_Plastic_Luv wrote: I think SC2 its just much easier to harass workers.
/thread, pretty much.
It's not about which game is harder/better or whatever other thing you want to bring up, it's simply easier to do in SC2 and less risk/higher reward. Honestly, the risk/reward is rather skewed on a number of things in SC2, even though it's still a great game.
Although the uvantak discussion is relavant to realizing why it's harder to recover from harass in SC2. To some degree harass would happen a bit less if the recovery was easier due to a better designed economy, but I think it would still happen a ton because the risk/reward is just soo far from ideal atm.
The main design difference is that in BW there were units that were good at harass, but they were also good at other things. In SC2 there are units (Oracle, Banshee, Reaper, etc) whose sole purpose is to kill workers, which is just bad design IMO.
On February 10 2017 12:31 Solar424 wrote: The main design difference is that in BW there were units that were good at harass, but they were also good at other things. In SC2 there are units (Oracle, Banshee, Reaper, etc) whose sole purpose is to kill workers, which is just bad design IMO.
Actually, the Oracle has a lot of purposes outside of worker harass. Arguably its most important function is revelation, which is enables the Protoss to have an unblockable scan on the army.
Additionally, the Oracle's stasis ward is not used at much as it should, but it enables defensive blocking as well as positional play.
And on rare occasions, the oracle can be used en masse to provoke massive rage.
And the reaper's main purpose is really to scout the opponent, and worker kills are a bonus. Also, when used correctly, reapers work well with early pushes with their grenades (though this is a bit more variable).
And the banshee, yeah is pretty much for killing workers.
So yes, there are some units design solely for killing workers, but the reaper and the oracle are pretty bad examples.
On February 10 2017 00:18 BisuDagger wrote: Honestly, I think this was a bigger issue in LOTV. With the new fast paced economy and quick extra bases this feels less of an issue. But still in SC2 workers can be obliterated at such a faster level and it is a combination of harrasment units doing damage very fast and the defensive structure of sc2 vs sc1.
Vultures for instance are great harassment units but are not strong enough to win a game outright even with good attacks.
Vultures: TvZ Not as common early game vs zerg. By the time mech switch comes out zerg should have two things 1. Good sim cities to help prevent runbys 2. The remacro from multiple hatcheries across many base location + nydus canals to quickly defend each base make the zerg fierce defenders. Plus at this point defensive lurkers and sunkens will make it hard for 4 vultures to kill many workers before the vultures are killed.
TvP 1. Vultures don't get inside the base easily because a pylons plus rallied dragoons are usually blocking the natural 2. Vulture drops are deflected by good scouting pylon placements and macro dragoons pop out to kill of 4 vultures. 3. Protoss should always be out expanding Terran. So even if an exposed third nexus takes tons of probe kills, the protoss should be able to play defense and remacro workers.
So let's assume that vultures do harass at a level of significant damage in a TvP. Now protoss can expect a tank+vulture follow up and they do not have the economy to face Terran head on. Well Brood War has HUGE defensive advantages. High ground areas and cliffs can be used to cause missed tank shots or lower dmg attack. The bridges and choke points are major too because BW units are larger. You cannot stack them up in bundles as effectively as SC2. So you have dragoons hitting tanks from a high ground, zealots dropping on tanks, and all the while your Protoss army has it's back against 8-12 gateways bringing more units into the battle.
Another way too look at it though: On a broader scope every harrasment investment has it's drawbacks. Going for reavers and killing lots of SCVs doesn't mean that Terran loses outright. Terran off two bases can still defend Protoss armies for a very very very long time with a much smaller army of tanks and turrets.And teching to reavers may mean protoss took obs later, so then Terran responds with spider mine harassment. Reavers also mean less gas for goons, so now the protoss player cannot defend and two base timing push from Terran as easily. Especially if Terran can pull their 4 marines out of their bunker and pick of the shuttle containing the reaver. Then protoss is suddenly behind even after killing 10 workers.
The TLDR, is that all 3 races have ways to defend or comeback from heavy damage. It's tough, but smart players take risks and change tech paths that allow them to overcome the harassment.
I think you are seeing this from the wrong angle regarding the defensiveness of BW Bisu, yes, cliffs and such help, but on direct harassment drops or wherever they matter very little, instead I would look at the economy.
On my eyes, it is very simple what is happening on the case of SC2 Harassment being considerably stronger than in BW on its potential to cripple a player, and that is caused by Worker Pairing.
On BW, where worker pairing does not exist, and instead the efficiency threshold for saturated Mineral lines is 8, as long as a player's mineral line does not go below those 8 workers, the overall income of the mineral line is rather stable. What I mean is that, because in BW when you go beyond 8 workers per mineral line, the efficiency of these new workers is less than the efficiency of the first 8. This creates kinda of a cushion effect on the mineral line. As long as you have 8 workers mining on it, you will still be receiving a "considerable" part of the total income a mineral line gives.
On SC2 meanwhile, because a mineral line requires 16 workers to be efficiently mined, when you are losing any of said 16 workers, you are losing workers mining at 100% efficiency, meaning that your income is being severely affected, which in BW is not the case as the efficiency threshold there is 8 instead of 16. So in BW you need to basically lose all workers in a mineral line for your income to become obliterated, meanwhile on SC2, because of the linear relation on the first 16 workers, if you lose say, half of those your income will become halved, on BW, if you lose half of your first 16 workers, your income will decrease by ~40%.
Here's a pic to illustrate the issue.
As such, on SC2, when you lose workers from your vital 16, you are losing your important 100% efficiency workers, meanwhile in BW, the golden number of 100% efficient mining workers is 8 not 16.
This also means that in BW it is easier to bounce back into a decent economy after heavy harassment rather easily, for you "only" need to transfer around 8 to 10 workers from your other bases into the harassed base and you will more or less have a similar economy you had previously (still damaged, only not bleeding to death). In the case of SC2, because you need 16 workers per mineral line, if your main has 22 workers and the workers in your nat are all dead, if you decide to transfer 8 from your main to you natural, your overall income will still be screwed, because your natural will still need 8 extra workers for it to be working at 100% efficiency once again, while now your main will also be in need of refilling those 2 missing mining workers until it reaches 16 again.
There are a lot of other things that I didn't bothered to mention like how worker bouncing creates sweet spots on the mining curves, or went in detail about the nitty gritty mining rates for workers on BW vs SC2
So if anyone got interested on this, I highly suggest to go read other articles on Worker Pairing, and how it affects the game.
♦♦ From a personal standpoint, often in low level play in BW, the harasser usually lost a good amount of his econ progression managing the harass instead of managing his workers. So they could kill 8 of your workers, but it would also turn out that he could have made 6 workers but failed to do so, making it so he's only at a net 2 workers ahead. This made a lot of non-pro matches in BW seem so even and back and forth even when one player is successfully harassing over and over.
♦ No, what I wrote is based on math alone, which even when it might seem similar to pro-play, in the sense that pro-players try to get as close as possible to playing "perfectly", it is still different, because as I mentioned at the end, there are several other things which I'm not mentioning. And being honest, even the numbers I wrote on the graphs are simply an approximation to the real income rates, a BW base with 16 workers does not mine the same as a SC2 base with 16, from the top of my head they had like a ~7% difference on income.
♦♦ Yeah, that's a fair assessment I think, tho I would throw HighGround Advantage +BW Pathing in there too, as these two mechanics make it harder for the player that's ahead to achieve the killing blow to the defensive (behind) player.
Both points are one and the same to me. I'm saying that most "players" don't actually get to leverage those aspects of the game at the timings where it actually matters. However, in SC2, econ is easy enough to maximize that we don't have the "oh shit I forgot to make workers while I managed the drop, and the workers I had in cue are all just piled 5 deep in each of my 4 bases resulting 20 workers sitting idle" that BW has when you're playing. In SC2, you can just cue a bunch of workers, do your harass, and when its done continue making workers.
Add the math on top of that and you can definitely see the differences in both games when it comes to harass. In SC2, since econ is easy to replenish, harass needs to almost wipe out a mineral line to really feel a difference. Killing 1-2 isn't enough. In BW, often times the threat of killing things in BW was enough to get people behind just by forcing them to make economic mistakes. As such, even if you "only killed a few workers" you could often deal economic damage.
Thing is, that what you say is "necessary" is actually pretty freaking exasperating for most of the playerbase, there is absolutely no need for the SC2 economy to be this punishing, and if Lalush's investigations are correct, the only reason why there is Worker Pairing in the first place is because someone somewhere while developing SC2 WoL on ~2008 decided that having workers bounce around sometimes looked "messy", so they changed the mining rate of workers in order to have them "not bounce as much".
When talking about these things, one must be very careful to not rationalize things, where there was no strong rationale to begin with. I still remember a friend of mine who was convinced that the reason why there are two vespene geysers per base instead of one, was because he thought that the DevTeam was trying to "fix" gas stealing, where as the real reason, is because on Pre-Alpha they were playing with back to base mechanics/macro-mechanics and they had an iteration where vespene geysers had a very reduced amount of gas in them, and every X time you needed to "buy extra vespene", but this process needed a wind-up time, and they couldn't leave players without gas during that time, so they added two geysers. And sure, the gas stealing thing might have played a part, maybe, but that's not the true reason, and simply looking at things without context of the Development of SC2, it is very easy to fall into those logical pitfalls.
As I mentioned at the beginning, there is no specific & logical reason as to why the SC2 Worker Pairing system needs to be in the game, harass is just one out of many ways in which this mechanic inherently damages the stability of the game.
Sure you can argue that SC2 UX and streamlined commands allows for players to make more workers, and Worker Pairing might be a good way to "balance" said new mechanic, yet, this is not logically sound, as there are several less damaging systems which can be tweaked and used to balance that instead of using the very economical core of the game. Which as I have mentioned several times, affects many more other systems than just "harassment". Not to mention that it outright destroys the Blizzard Design & Balance Axiom of "Doing small changes".
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.
On February 10 2017 00:18 BisuDagger wrote: Honestly, I think this was a bigger issue in LOTV. With the new fast paced economy and quick extra bases this feels less of an issue. But still in SC2 workers can be obliterated at such a faster level and it is a combination of harrasment units doing damage very fast and the defensive structure of sc2 vs sc1.
Vultures for instance are great harassment units but are not strong enough to win a game outright even with good attacks.
Vultures: TvZ Not as common early game vs zerg. By the time mech switch comes out zerg should have two things 1. Good sim cities to help prevent runbys 2. The remacro from multiple hatcheries across many base location + nydus canals to quickly defend each base make the zerg fierce defenders. Plus at this point defensive lurkers and sunkens will make it hard for 4 vultures to kill many workers before the vultures are killed.
TvP 1. Vultures don't get inside the base easily because a pylons plus rallied dragoons are usually blocking the natural 2. Vulture drops are deflected by good scouting pylon placements and macro dragoons pop out to kill of 4 vultures. 3. Protoss should always be out expanding Terran. So even if an exposed third nexus takes tons of probe kills, the protoss should be able to play defense and remacro workers.
So let's assume that vultures do harass at a level of significant damage in a TvP. Now protoss can expect a tank+vulture follow up and they do not have the economy to face Terran head on. Well Brood War has HUGE defensive advantages. High ground areas and cliffs can be used to cause missed tank shots or lower dmg attack. The bridges and choke points are major too because BW units are larger. You cannot stack them up in bundles as effectively as SC2. So you have dragoons hitting tanks from a high ground, zealots dropping on tanks, and all the while your Protoss army has it's back against 8-12 gateways bringing more units into the battle.
Another way too look at it though: On a broader scope every harrasment investment has it's drawbacks. Going for reavers and killing lots of SCVs doesn't mean that Terran loses outright. Terran off two bases can still defend Protoss armies for a very very very long time with a much smaller army of tanks and turrets.And teching to reavers may mean protoss took obs later, so then Terran responds with spider mine harassment. Reavers also mean less gas for goons, so now the protoss player cannot defend and two base timing push from Terran as easily. Especially if Terran can pull their 4 marines out of their bunker and pick of the shuttle containing the reaver. Then protoss is suddenly behind even after killing 10 workers.
The TLDR, is that all 3 races have ways to defend or comeback from heavy damage. It's tough, but smart players take risks and change tech paths that allow them to overcome the harassment.
I think you are seeing this from the wrong angle regarding the defensiveness of BW Bisu, yes, cliffs and such help, but on direct harassment drops or wherever they matter very little, instead I would look at the economy.
On my eyes, it is very simple what is happening on the case of SC2 Harassment being considerably stronger than in BW on its potential to cripple a player, and that is caused by Worker Pairing.
On BW, where worker pairing does not exist, and instead the efficiency threshold for saturated Mineral lines is 8, as long as a player's mineral line does not go below those 8 workers, the overall income of the mineral line is rather stable. What I mean is that, because in BW when you go beyond 8 workers per mineral line, the efficiency of these new workers is less than the efficiency of the first 8. This creates kinda of a cushion effect on the mineral line. As long as you have 8 workers mining on it, you will still be receiving a "considerable" part of the total income a mineral line gives.
On SC2 meanwhile, because a mineral line requires 16 workers to be efficiently mined, when you are losing any of said 16 workers, you are losing workers mining at 100% efficiency, meaning that your income is being severely affected, which in BW is not the case as the efficiency threshold there is 8 instead of 16. So in BW you need to basically lose all workers in a mineral line for your income to become obliterated, meanwhile on SC2, because of the linear relation on the first 16 workers, if you lose say, half of those your income will become halved, on BW, if you lose half of your first 16 workers, your income will decrease by ~40%.
Here's a pic to illustrate the issue.
As such, on SC2, when you lose workers from your vital 16, you are losing your important 100% efficiency workers, meanwhile in BW, the golden number of 100% efficient mining workers is 8 not 16.
This also means that in BW it is easier to bounce back into a decent economy after heavy harassment rather easily, for you "only" need to transfer around 8 to 10 workers from your other bases into the harassed base and you will more or less have a similar economy you had previously (still damaged, only not bleeding to death). In the case of SC2, because you need 16 workers per mineral line, if your main has 22 workers and the workers in your nat are all dead, if you decide to transfer 8 from your main to you natural, your overall income will still be screwed, because your natural will still need 8 extra workers for it to be working at 100% efficiency once again, while now your main will also be in need of refilling those 2 missing mining workers until it reaches 16 again.
There are a lot of other things that I didn't bothered to mention like how worker bouncing creates sweet spots on the mining curves, or went in detail about the nitty gritty mining rates for workers on BW vs SC2
So if anyone got interested on this, I highly suggest to go read other articles on Worker Pairing, and how it affects the game.
♦♦ From a personal standpoint, often in low level play in BW, the harasser usually lost a good amount of his econ progression managing the harass instead of managing his workers. So they could kill 8 of your workers, but it would also turn out that he could have made 6 workers but failed to do so, making it so he's only at a net 2 workers ahead. This made a lot of non-pro matches in BW seem so even and back and forth even when one player is successfully harassing over and over.
♦ No, what I wrote is based on math alone, which even when it might seem similar to pro-play, in the sense that pro-players try to get as close as possible to playing "perfectly", it is still different, because as I mentioned at the end, there are several other things which I'm not mentioning. And being honest, even the numbers I wrote on the graphs are simply an approximation to the real income rates, a BW base with 16 workers does not mine the same as a SC2 base with 16, from the top of my head they had like a ~7% difference on income.
♦♦ Yeah, that's a fair assessment I think, tho I would throw HighGround Advantage +BW Pathing in there too, as these two mechanics make it harder for the player that's ahead to achieve the killing blow to the defensive (behind) player.
Both points are one and the same to me. I'm saying that most "players" don't actually get to leverage those aspects of the game at the timings where it actually matters. However, in SC2, econ is easy enough to maximize that we don't have the "oh shit I forgot to make workers while I managed the drop, and the workers I had in cue are all just piled 5 deep in each of my 4 bases resulting 20 workers sitting idle" that BW has when you're playing. In SC2, you can just cue a bunch of workers, do your harass, and when its done continue making workers.
Add the math on top of that and you can definitely see the differences in both games when it comes to harass. In SC2, since econ is easy to replenish, harass needs to almost wipe out a mineral line to really feel a difference. Killing 1-2 isn't enough. In BW, often times the threat of killing things in BW was enough to get people behind just by forcing them to make economic mistakes. As such, even if you "only killed a few workers" you could often deal economic damage.
Thing is, that what you say is "necessary" is actually pretty freaking exasperating for most of the playerbase, there is absolutely no need for the SC2 economy to be this punishing, and if Lalush's investigations are correct, the only reason why there is Worker Pairing in the first place is because someone somewhere while developing SC2 WoL on ~2008 decided that having workers bounce around sometimes looked "messy", so they changed the mining rate of workers in order to have them "not bounce as much".
When talking about these things, one must be very careful to not rationalize things, where there was no strong rationale to begin with. I still remember a friend of mine who was convinced that the reason why there are two vespene geysers per base instead of one, was because he thought that the DevTeam was trying to "fix" gas stealing, where as the real reason, is because on Pre-Alpha they were playing with back to base mechanics/macro-mechanics and they had an iteration where vespene geysers had a very reduced amount of gas in them, and every X time you needed to "buy extra vespene", but this process needed a wind-up time, and they couldn't leave players without gas during that time, so they added two geysers. And sure, the gas stealing thing might have played a part, maybe, but that's not the true reason, and simply looking at things without context of the Development of SC2, it is very easy to fall into those logical pitfalls.
As I mentioned at the beginning, there is no specific & logical reason as to why the SC2 Worker Pairing system needs to be in the game, harass is just one out of many ways in which this mechanic inherently damages the stability of the game.
Sure you can argue that SC2 UX and streamlined commands allows for players to make more workers, and Worker Pairing might be a good way to "balance" said new mechanic, yet, this is not logically sound, as there are several less damaging systems which can be tweaked and used to balance that instead of using the very economical core of the game. Which as I have mentioned several times, affects many more other systems than just "harassment". Not to mention that it outright destroys the Blizzard Design & Balance Axiom of "Doing small changes".
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
EPT
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