EPT[T] Potential Solutions to Automine - Page 19
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Chef
10810 Posts
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Augury
United States758 Posts
On November 26 2008 10:51 Chef wrote: IMO MBS and automine and shit like that should just be disabled in ladder matches, the same way non-ladder maps are disabled in ladder matches... This sounds like a really round-about solution to a simple problem. Casual gamers will play non-ladder, the same way casual gamers played BGH and and FMP instead of playing ladder. It suits their preference for a less competitive game, so let it be in a less competitive atmosphere. Both parties are pleased. You need to take into account the AMM. It's not going to be that simple with the new BNET. | ||
Liquid`Jinro
Sweden33719 Posts
On November 26 2008 10:51 Chef wrote: IMO MBS and automine and shit like that should just be disabled in ladder matches, the same way non-ladder maps are disabled in ladder matches... This sounds like a really round-about solution to a simple problem. Casual gamers will play non-ladder, the same way casual gamers played BGH and and FMP instead of playing ladder. It suits their preference for a less competitive game, so let it be in a less competitive atmosphere. Both parties are pleased. I'm pretty sure that not only has this been brought up before (it's not really a good solution btw, splitting communities like that, especially when both parties will be competitive, is not good) but it's also a bit off-topic. | ||
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eshlow
United States5210 Posts
Take off the cap of 1 worker mining per mineral patch. This would allow multiple workers to mine the same mineral possibly capped at anywhere from 2-5 per mineral patch. Subject to balance. ---------------------------------- Advantages (for those interested in manually assigning workers to their own patch): 1. Workers sent to the same mineral patches (through automine) are easier to harrass especially with area of effect abilities (storms, banelings, reapers, etc.). This is in light of especially effective harrassment that Blizzard is pushing. In my opinion, it doesn't necessarily “hurt” people for using automine, but it does reward those who make the effort to spread out their units more making them less susceptible to losing most of their economy at once. This is much like spreading out dragoons out in a line so that they can all fire at once instead of having them clumped (except this is economically instead of militarily). 2. Mineral patch that a lot of workers are focusing on is mined out at a much faster rate. This has no effect early game; however, if the workers are not spread out, some patches get mined out faster. Thus leaving less “available” mining space for the masses of workers to mine which may effectively decrease mining rate later in the game. Though this is somewhat of a "negative" for those using automining I do think it is acceptable because the advantage doesn't show up until later AND for the two following reasons: A. It rewards maynarding workers and then splitting them per patch. This is ESPECIALLY in conjunction with #1 when setting up a new expansion. B. For those who harrass effectively the defenders who run/clump their workers away from the battle will have a disadvantage (and have to spend a little bit of time redistributing workers). For an experienced player it's the same as "remaynarding" but if there's already enough workers it wouldn't even matter anyway. 3. Pretty much NO effect on BGH or high money maps. Thus, newbies are happy. I think this is an important in actuality because this will probably be a large majority of those who play. Most non-competitive people like money maps anyway where multi-task isn't as important (a.k.a. expanding and macroing). ---------------------------------- Possible criticisms 1. The game operates faster. Since the saturation point is reached much later, there is a linear increase in the amount of minerals per extra worker past the about ~16-20 per main base it is now. This may in part be solved by reducing the amount of minerals in the main base to something like 6 patches. In effect, if 3 workers can mine per patch at the same time, there are only “18” slots available to mine at once making it much like having an expansion right off the bat. Saturation would probably occur around ~40 workers or so. Why this is not necessarily bad A. It will revitalize one base play making it not "necessary" to expand although the downside is you run out of minerals quicker. This also has the added side effect of (1) reducing the importance of golden minerals especially if they are at a third expansion and (2) the benefit of obtaining golden minerals if they are in a risky position and it succeeds. B. It should theorectically make rushes stronger by allowing you to get more military units to be able to harrass more effectively. From what I've heard the early game worker defense is super strong so this would help counteract it to some extent. A quicker differentiation in economy, tech, and military earlier in the game (through faster gathering because saturation rate is hit slower) should lead to a wider array of economy vs. tech builds. C. Those who choose not to expand are more susceptible to worker harrass killing them permanently off quickly D. Makes multitasking harder. Since saturation is reached slower, you're going to have more minerals to deal with quicker. This increases the need to be quick to anticipate to make extra production facilities, macro some, maintain your army, and defend against the probable harrass. It is similar to artificially boosting game speed, but IMO is a bit more elegant in doing so. Possible solutions for balance (if SC should be more about expanding and base management) 1. Decreasing the number of minerals in each mineral patch in the main base. For example, if each mineral patch in the main contained only 1500 minerals, it would be in the best interest to expand ASAP so you don't have to worry about running out of minerals in your main in under ~7-10 minutes. If this was implemented, it would may be smart to possible increase the number of patches in the base, but decrease the available minerals. So 12 patches with maybe 1500 minerals (or something subject to map makers and playtesting obviously..) would be more effective. There's low enough minerals that expanding earlier is a good idea, but enough patches so that 1 base play is still effective 2. The ability to "strip mine." I believe this ability should be a researchable ability that drones, probes and SVCs can use maybe at like tier2 or something. This way those that are waaay too greedy economically may not have enough tech to do this, but those who go for tech builds may be rewarded with the ability to possibly catch up if they fail (of course, it makes it harder because they must expand much sooner than anticipated so it's not without it's tradeoffs). This will IMO prevent mirrors from being boring. For example, PvP if you decided to go 1gate reavers and the other person decided to go 2gate goon into like fast expand... you're screwed if you can't break him with your reavers. (I hope that was a decent example). Plus, it can lead for some interesting mind games if you see your opponents workers (with say an aura on them) mining faster to go for a timing push. Subject to balance of course. ---------------------------------- Other thoughts 1. I like the ability to speed up building construction with use of extra workers. 2. The alignment of crystals seems interesting... but it does feel a bit contrived I suppose. It's probably the best “alternative” IMO beyond the stimming/speed boosting workers. 3. Autocasting needs to go. Or manually casted psistorm and other spells need to be stronger IMO. | ||
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stenole
Norway868 Posts
On November 26 2008 12:43 eshlow wrote: Simple solutions are the easiest. Take off the cap of 1 worker mining per mineral patch. This would allow multiple workers to mine the same mineral possibly capped at anywhere from 2-5 per mineral patch. Subject to balance. The effect on play would be minimal if you also scaled number of mineral stacks, mining time, worker build time and worker cost to give about the same mineral flow as before. If you have very few mineral patches with many workers, you might see more devastating effects of AOE, like you see on fastest maps right now. This does not really make the game harder though. Having a base mine out gradually or all at one time would not pose a huge difference and does not shift the importance of base management from army management. Also, changing the distribution of workers is not a task that is time critical. It doesn't need to happen at a specific time in order to be effective, unlike sending workers to mine which will hurt you every second you fail to do it. A game that seeks to force a player to do more than focus on his army needs to have important tasks to be done in the base that can't be done remotely with hotkeys. This is what is so great about the non-automining part of BW and running out of hotkeys for lategame macro. Failing to do the base tasks in BW will hurt immediately and terribly. Looking away from your army groups only hurts you a little but is also immediate. I wish I could add something positive to this thread, but I have no good ideas that are less artificial than suggestions mentioned here already. T_T | ||
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eshlow
United States5210 Posts
On November 26 2008 21:12 stenole wrote: The effect on play would be minimal if you also scaled number of mineral stacks, mining time, worker build time and worker cost to give about the same mineral flow as before. If you have very few mineral patches with many workers, you might see more devastating effects of AOE, like you see on fastest maps right now. This does not really make the game harder though. Having a base mine out gradually or all at one time would not pose a huge difference and does not shift the importance of base management from army management. Also, changing the distribution of workers is not a task that is time critical. It doesn't need to happen at a specific time in order to be effective, unlike sending workers to mine which will hurt you every second you fail to do it. A game that seeks to force a player to do more than focus on his army needs to have important tasks to be done in the base that can't be done remotely with hotkeys. This is what is so great about the non-automining part of BW and running out of hotkeys for lategame macro. Failing to do the base tasks in BW will hurt immediately and terribly. Looking away from your army groups only hurts you a little but is also immediate. I wish I could add something positive to this thread, but I have no good ideas that are less artificial than suggestions mentioned here already. T_T Hmm, yeah. That's true. It would bring at least back as much "attention" to base management as not having automine.. maybe a bit more. But you're right... it does do nothing about the negative effect of MBS + hotkeys. | ||
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Archerofaiur
United States4101 Posts
When a hatchery is morphed into a lair it gains five fleshy orifices. A Zerg player can order a drone to embed itself into an orifice. After a morphing period the drone's tail erupts into a tentacle sucker (think squid). The player can now order this tentacle to mine from a nearby mineral patch or extractor. The tentacle mining rate is more efficient than a saturated drone line. The Zerg player can use the displaced drones for buildings or transfer them to an expo that has not yet upgraded to lair. Oh and keep the innuendos to a minimum. | ||
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bottomtier
United States23 Posts
BRILLIANT. | ||
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pure.Wasted
Canada4701 Posts
1. Why not throw "Power Mode" onto your CC? You were talking about abilities working in a very common sense fashion, in the way that they're meant to, and I see this as being contradictory with that message. I can't imagine a time when a player would want some of his SCVs mining one way, and some, another way, which means there's absolutely no reason, other than that the purpose of this solution being made irrelevant, not to throw this ability on the CC instead.* 2. Why does it start in the "wrong" mode? This is more of a continuation on point #1, and you yourself said you had some problems with this idea. If we start it in the right mode for early game, by the late game, you're not really building many SCVs, which means even if it's on your workers when you finally need to do it, you can just select all of them, click one button, and there's not really any macro to it. So obviously that's off the table, and we're back to setting it in the "wrong" mode on purpose -- and that doesn't sit too well with me, because it seems inconsistent with Blizz's (and your) policy of keeping things straight-forward. This is backwards, and seems to be a complication for the sake of it being a complication -- because the solution (starting in the right mode) is so simple. 3. Would players really do it that often? We're looking for a viable attention sink that has to contend with other actions in the game, such as microing during a battle. I have trouble imagining a player deciding that he'd rather go back to his base to tell an SCV to mine 2 minerals more (at a cost, no less) for two trips while the battle lasts instead of seeing the battle through and maybe saving a couple of units that cost 50+ minerals each and getting the SCV afterward. And even when he isn't battling, the difference is so minute (2 minerals), it's not out of the realm of possibility that players would simply leave every second or even third SCV and come back and get a couple in one go, maximizing their time spent. I think the idea (in its current version) kind of falls apart once you really put it through its paces. It does add depth to the gameplay (or would if we figured out some really interesting modes that would rival for the #1 spot continuously throughout the match), but if we're looking for a real substitute for something as intrusive as telling workers to mine when they're doing absolutely nothing, we have to dig deeper. *The additional problem with this is that, say we agree to do it in SCII, but eventually SCIII is going to come out, and a feature like this, which is already pushing the envelope now as far as "not entirely common sense" functionality that is there to promote clicking -- in four, or six, or ten, or twenty years, it's going to be very outdated. This just screams, to me, "temporary solution to problem that will be here for a while until we really get to the bottom of it." | ||
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maybenexttime
Poland5546 Posts
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Ghastly
United States32 Posts
I really don't see how automine is a huge game-breaker. Macroing in Starcraft 1 is already pretty easy, it's just things like this make it easier on noobs without any real downside to good players. Personally, I've lost quite a few small skirmishes, early-game in matches because I've had to go off micro to assign some fresh probes to my expansion's mineral lines, or lost the advantage of my early expansion because I was microing too much and forgot to assign my probes. | ||
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Showtime!
Canada2938 Posts
The game developers cannot see these developments were clearly wrong and killed the game play in their games. This is why the RTS genre is frowned upon. A.I. isn't at that level yet. H.I. is. | ||
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Fzero
United States1503 Posts
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Ghastly
United States32 Posts
On December 08 2008 01:49 Showtime! wrote: I don't get why the RTS genre has to set bad trends like automated mining. The game developers cannot see these developments were clearly wrong and killed the game play in their games. This is why the RTS genre is frowned upon. You mean like "Aw damn, that worker just went to work by himself. This game doesn't seem fun anymore"? It seems like everyone's against automining because it's a feature that wasn't in Starcraft 1, and there's a whole lot of bigger changes, too, like the new high-ground changes, creep speed bonuses, and reapers/collossi's cliff-jumping. About the new gas mechanic, I agree it seems annoying and unneccisary. | ||
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tomatriedes
New Zealand5356 Posts
This would solve the problem of cumulatively massing up much more minerals than the opponent while still creating enough of an 'edge' to be worth doing. There could be three colors then- one for a worker that has not been sped up yet, one for a worker that is currently in speed up mode and one for a worker that has exhausted its speed up potential. Anything that can help make macro an important part of SC2 is worth trying IMO. | ||
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Shadowfury333
Canada314 Posts
BTW I'm sure my suggestion has been mentioned before, though I haven't seen it in this thread. | ||
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pure.Wasted
Canada4701 Posts
On December 07 2008 19:40 maybenexttime wrote: Just a question, did you read my posts explaining FA's mechanic further? I've answered some of your questions there already. When I was pointed toward this thread I was only told of FA's posts to look for, without the need for any supplemental material, so thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I'm not sure I understood the part of the explanation that puts the "mode 2 stage 1/2" qualifier onto the MINERAL instead of the SCV (and if I did understand it correctly, I'm not sure how that would work out in-game). Apart from that, the mechanic seems to be a shoe-in in every respect that the suggestion originally wasn't. I'm a little concerned that the new suggestion is of the "hard to explain" variety, and would require an entire section in the tutorial just to get across. It doesn't strike me as straight-forward enough for somebody to pick up just by playing a game, unlike most of SC's mechanics. Could you provide an example of a player going through all the stages, starting with pumping out the SCV and then whatever it is he would do to it, including what buttons he would need to press and where they would be located? That would be a big help. But first impressions are definitely more positive on this than on the original. | ||
TheYango
United States47024 Posts
On December 09 2008 05:48 Shadowfury333 wrote: I'm going to agree more with eshlow(2-5 workers per patch). That seems the most natural way of balancing out automining with multitasking. However, I would almost like to see a change to make the rally worker AI like regular SC AI, that is it doesn't autosplit out of the gate. This with the standard "1 worker per patch" setup would waste mining time if someone doesn't pay attention, but their worker still mines eventually. For more attentive players this plays out very much like manual mining. BTW I'm sure my suggestion has been mentioned before, though I haven't seen it in this thread. The most immediately apparent negative side effect of this is that it discourages expanding, since mineral saturation will occur much later at a base. Given that fast-expanding already looks like its much less viable than it used to be, I'm not sure this is a good change. | ||
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Klockan3
Sweden2866 Posts
On December 07 2008 18:35 pure.Wasted wrote: + Show Spoiler + I was linked to this thread from elsewheres for the purpose of reading your suggestion, FA, and decided it was high time I registered and did my thing. Anyway, I wanted to start by saying I agree with everything you said "in principle," that providing benefits is better than punishing, that promoting depth is better than something you'd never NOT want to do, going through the bullshit straight to the point of the abilities, all that jazz. Except one point, but I'll get to that in a sec. On to the problems I see with your suggestion: 1. Why not throw "Power Mode" onto your CC? You were talking about abilities working in a very common sense fashion, in the way that they're meant to, and I see this as being contradictory with that message. I can't imagine a time when a player would want some of his SCVs mining one way, and some, another way, which means there's absolutely no reason, other than that the purpose of this solution being made irrelevant, not to throw this ability on the CC instead.* 2. Why does it start in the "wrong" mode? This is more of a continuation on point #1, and you yourself said you had some problems with this idea. If we start it in the right mode for early game, by the late game, you're not really building many SCVs, which means even if it's on your workers when you finally need to do it, you can just select all of them, click one button, and there's not really any macro to it. So obviously that's off the table, and we're back to setting it in the "wrong" mode on purpose -- and that doesn't sit too well with me, because it seems inconsistent with Blizz's (and your) policy of keeping things straight-forward. This is backwards, and seems to be a complication for the sake of it being a complication -- because the solution (starting in the right mode) is so simple. 3. Would players really do it that often? We're looking for a viable attention sink that has to contend with other actions in the game, such as microing during a battle. I have trouble imagining a player deciding that he'd rather go back to his base to tell an SCV to mine 2 minerals more (at a cost, no less) for two trips while the battle lasts instead of seeing the battle through and maybe saving a couple of units that cost 50+ minerals each and getting the SCV afterward. And even when he isn't battling, the difference is so minute (2 minerals), it's not out of the realm of possibility that players would simply leave every second or even third SCV and come back and get a couple in one go, maximizing their time spent. I think the idea (in its current version) kind of falls apart once you really put it through its paces. It does add depth to the gameplay (or would if we figured out some really interesting modes that would rival for the #1 spot continuously throughout the match), but if we're looking for a real substitute for something as intrusive as telling workers to mine when they're doing absolutely nothing, we have to dig deeper. *The additional problem with this is that, say we agree to do it in SCII, but eventually SCIII is going to come out, and a feature like this, which is already pushing the envelope now as far as "not entirely common sense" functionality that is there to promote clicking -- in four, or six, or ten, or twenty years, it's going to be very outdated. This just screams, to me, "temporary solution to problem that will be here for a while until we really get to the bottom of it." My solution of adding a buildable "mineral extractor" which basically doubles the mineral output of one patch until its destroyed for 50 minerals. It will with a 100% certainty be used lategame to free up population cap, it will be used in boom builds early since you can't build workers as fast as you like and it gives a way to increase the mineral output above the normal maximum for a fully exploited field. However you wont want to use it all the time and you can certainly play the game just fine without it, and best of all the whole thing feels 100% intuitive. | ||
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Shadowfury333
Canada314 Posts
On December 13 2008 00:24 TheYango wrote: The most immediately apparent negative side effect of this is that it discourages expanding, since mineral saturation will occur much later at a base. Given that fast-expanding already looks like its much less viable than it used to be, I'm not sure this is a good change. You're right, which I why I then suggested making rallied workers not auto-split immediately, and instead risk delaying at a mineral patch, which would make manual worker control rewarded while still allowing players to not pay attention, but have a slower economy. | ||
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