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I do not believe this subject has been discussed much so I would like to bring it up for everyone to see. At the beginning of the beta there were several hate threads regarding high ground advantage and ramp mechanics. People stated it would take away an important defenders advantage that existed in brood war making all-ins very difficult to stop. This has become less and less true as players have figured out how to optimize strategies but I feel Terran has an inherent advantage over the two races in this aspect. This coupled with ridiculously cost efficient units makes Terran's defense almost impenetrable. These four important aspects are repair, salvageable bunkers, walls and mass ranged units. Now wait. aren't many of these in scbw? Yes you are right but several important features in the game have been changed making these components comparatively stronger.
To give some perspective on other races defensive capabilities let us look at the zerg race. Zerg has creep for a speed boost, queen defense, and spine/spore crawlers. Now when you see a decently sized marauder hellion army around your opponents natural and you need some quick defense what do you do? Spread creep? Speed boost helps with flanking and melee attack but if your opponent has a large force the speed will not be game changing. Spine crawlers? They take 50 games seconds to make and are not very durable in the face of marauders. Queens? They also take a long time to build and have minimal damage output. So what is the main defensive advantage zerg has? Increased mobility
The terran defensive capabilities start in the early game with their wall off. They will almost always wall off with some combination of barracks/depot/factory. Alright cool some nice defensive capabilities no real complaints here. Let us say Terran opted for a reactor hellion opening and his zerg opponent went 14pool 15hatch. Both very standard openers and opens up some interesting early game scenarios. The first pair of hellions come knocking at your door and you have a queen, some zerglings, and maybe a spine crawlers on the way. Hellions get to be aggressive even when you have zerglings due to kiting. Terran can run into your mineral line and torch drones because of how slow queens and spine crawlers do damage. On a map like metalopolis, you need many zerglings to defend just a few hellions because 3 hellions will 1 shot your zerglings and he can run behind your mineral line for almost no cost. The creep speed boost has virtually no affect on the ability of hellions to do damage at this stage. So in summary zerg went economical and terran went for a harass opening. The amount of damage terran does is almost solely dependent on how aggressive he wants to be.
Now on the flip side, zerg 10 pools and terran goes 1 rax tech lab. The wall off hold back your zerglings and that is that. There is the possibility of a baneling bust but that is an all in compared to a very safe harass opening like reactor hellions. Another possibility is roach rush against some economical terran build. Hellions actually can kite roaches and a salvageable bunker behind a wall off makes you perfectly capable of defending. The bunker has a build time of 30 and cost 100 minerals as opposed to the 50 build time of a spine crawlers and cost 150 (drone cost added). Now I direct you to the link belowRush distances on blizzard maps
This shows the time it takes for an scv to go from 1 starting location to the next. For the sake of discussion lets say it takes 5 seconds to get to the front of the natural and 2.5 seconds to get to the ramp from both locations. Below is the movement speeds for units I am currently discussing
Lower number is slower movement speed
scv 2.8125
hellion 4.25
roach 2.25
marauder 2.25
On the fastest rush distance map, close positions metalopolis and incineration, the main to main time is 40 seconds for an scv and since I set 5 second to the front of the natural, 37.5 seconds between the ramp of terran (bunker + wall) and the main of zerg. Let us not forget bunkers are almost free in the grand scope of the game. Marauder build time is 30 seconds. So even if terran has no idea roaches are coming until they hatch, they can put down a bunker and make a maruder within time of the roach reaching the ramp. You also have to account for the fact that roaches are slower then scvs and terran can delay with hellions for even more time. If the roaches start attacking up the ramp, you have your third and fourth defenders advantage available. You have all your scvs able to repair if the roaches try to break through. If he does break, you have the range advantage so scv blocking comes into play.
Again let's look at the flip side for a reactor hellion build. Zerg doesn't see it early and only places a spine crawler at the natural while the hellions are moving down their ramp. Spine takes 50 seconds to build and hellion is ~50% faster than a scv so about 25 seconds from ramp to natural. What are the hellions able to do in that time? Kite the queen, kill zerglings and drones. What defenders advantage do you have available? My zerglings can move slightly faster but still die quickly to hellions. Zerg is forced to preemptively build defense because they do not have some significant advantage on their home turf. How do zergs delay hellions? Sacrifice units for 25 seconds while a terran in a pressured situation can keep his hellions alive while delaying roaches.
Yesterday I played a zvt on delta quadrant against an early marauder hellion thor attack off of 1 base. I was well prepared with roach zergling so when he engaged, he lost everything while I had 15 roaches left over. Thinking it was alright to go on the aggressive; I moved out to his base and was met by a single thor on his ramp with some scvs ready to repair. I started hammering away and the thor was taken to red life but all the while my roaches were dying. My dps dwindled to the point where his scvs were repairing faster than the thor was being damaged so I had to back off. Resource wise
1thor = 300 minerals 200 gas
15 roaches = 1125 minerals 375 gas
Terran is capable of fending this off with his 1 reinforcing thor and repair. Now picture this in reverse. Terran is in your base will an army worth 1100 minerals and you have 4 roaches or 12 zerglings or 3 hydras. What defenders advantage can you use to beat this army off? The answer is there isn’t one. Why? The zerg defenders advantage does not compare to the terran. If you want to keep the terran versatile defense, then you must be able to match that strength in the other races.
I don’t know how to fix this completely but I think a good start would be an all around buff to the spine crawler. Currently 2 marauders will kill 1 head on. I propose making the spine crawler not armored so marauder damage is halved. Decrease the build time so you can actually put up an emergency defense in reaction to your opponents army movement. Decrease the root time so you can actually use them against thor drops on LT and not have them die before they can even start attacking. Decrease cooldown slightly between attacks or increase damage. This probably seems excessive but it needs to be if you want to keep all those terran mechanics.
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From the little I know, this is very similar to the way it was in BW. Sure he can one base forever, but if you take the entire map, there's not much he can do. Also, repairing isn't free either, and, more importantly, focusing down the repairers is an important aspect of micro. Sure terran can defend, but that's an aspect of the race that is super important. You can't compare races like that. As the recent article said, this isn't Warcraft in space; all the races are unique.
This isn't broken, this is an aspect of the game.
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1. Protoss can also wall off. Have sentries to force field ramps and can warp in units to any powered area with warpgates.
2. No race can power drones like zerg. Therefore for balance they should have to put more effort into defending early pressure.
I'll speak to TvZ because I play Terran but I would assume this applies to Protoss as well:
The big tension is that the Zerg will get a macro advantage and then win because of the advantage producing out of a hatchery provides them. Therefore it is the Terran's responsibility to either win based on more efficient unit composition (which I haven't seen yet) or to put pressure on the Zerg early to prevent the macro advantage. So making it so the Zerg can't defend easily makes this tension balanced otherwise Zergs will just turtle up, get the macro advantage, and win.
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Very nice post. Good read and couldnt agree more.
On July 31 2010 10:47 Doormat wrote:+ Show Spoiler +
1. Protoss can also wall off. Have sentries to force field ramps and can warp in units to any powered area with warpgates.
2. No race can power drones like zerg. Therefore for balance they should have to put more effort into defending early pressure.
I'll speak to TvZ because I play Terran but I would assume this applies to Protoss as well:
The big tension is that the Zerg will get a macro advantage and then win because of the advantage producing out of a hatchery provides them. Therefore it is the Terran's responsibility to either win based on more efficient unit composition (which I haven't seen yet) or to put pressure on the Zerg early to prevent the macro advantage. So making it so the Zerg can't defend easily makes this tension balanced otherwise Zergs will just turtle up, get the macro advantage, and win.
He is not talking about the racial advantages like MULE instead of larva etc.
And this topic should stay about base defense and defenders advantage else this will totally go out of control into a overall balance topic imo.
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On July 31 2010 11:11 TheDna wrote:
He is not talking about the racial advantages like MULE instead of larva etc.
Then what is he talking about? It's a racial difference.
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It's a feature of the race. Terran has always had the inherent flaw of being less mobile with said strong defending units. Honestly, I would be depressed if this was changed - defining features of the races is what seems to be lacking a bit compared to sc1.
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That wasn't an especially fair comparison for the Thor v Roach battle. You should also count the cost of the SCVs (probably a few hundred minerals), and repairs are far from free. Powering a Thor like that can drain resources impressively fast, and you also need to factor in the opportunity cost of all those SCVs not gathering. All told, the engagement probably wasn't as stacked as you tried to make it look, and the deciding factor was most likely a terrain advantage you neglected to mention because even a full-surround of SCVs can't out-repair focus fire from 15 Roaches.
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The entire OP sounds like a whine from start to finish.
The three races are entirely different by design. As such, tactics that would work with one race might not necessarily work with other races.
Being Zerg, your advantage is that you have the potential to macro harder than any other race and your units are more mobile. The fact that your units are more mobile comes at a price - the Zerg players can't use just a few units to defend attacks. On top of that, due to the way larvae works, you actually have to prepare in advance for any pushes on yourself.
Is it a difficult concept to grasp? Sure
Will you lose a ton of games to people you think are worse than you? Yeah
Is it fair? Who the heck cares? Different race, different concepts, different playstyle. Don't like it? Switch to a different race.
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I don't see why people always bring up how 'mobile' the zerg army is. Roaches and hydras are terrible in movement off creep, and zerglings no longer constitute the majority of the zerg army. Terran bio with medvacs or hellions grant just as much map control as a bunch of roaches, if not more.
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You could write an pretty identical situation for sc:bw by changing a few units names.
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On July 31 2010 11:37 CynanMachae wrote:
You could write an pretty identical situation for sc:bw by changing a few units names.
bw's zerg was way more mobile than sc2 zerg, also bw zerg had darkswarm, which is like ridiculous defence
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In the exemple hes talking about it's quite early game and Dark swarm would be out of question
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On July 31 2010 11:27 FC.Strike wrote:
The entire OP sounds like a whine from start to finish.
The three races are entirely different by design. As such, tactics that would work with one race might not necessarily work with other races.
Being Zerg, your advantage is that you have the potential to macro harder than any other race and your units are more mobile. The fact that your units are more mobile comes at a price - the Zerg players can't use just a few units to defend attacks. On top of that, due to the way larvae works, you actually have to prepare in advance for any pushes on yourself.
Is it a difficult concept to grasp? Sure
Will you lose a ton of games to people you think are worse than you? Yeah
Is it fair? Who the heck cares? Different race, different concepts, different playstyle. Don't like it? Switch to a different race.
criticize the OP all you want, dismissing fairness makes your post absolutely worthless. that's what's great about starcraft: the balance. i personally find this to be balanced, different races inherently have different strengths and weaknesses
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On July 31 2010 11:35 AssuredVacancy wrote:
I don't see why people always bring up how 'mobile' the zerg army is. Roaches and hydras are terrible in movement off creep, and zerglings no longer constitute the majority of the zerg army. Terran bio with medvacs or hellions grant just as much map control as a bunch of roaches, if not more.
At this stage in the metagame, for professional players, not spreading creep is a noob mistake. For this argument, we're talking about defending, which, as you might imagine, is done on creep.
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On July 31 2010 11:27 FC.Strike wrote:
The entire OP sounds like a whine from start to finish.
The three races are entirely different by design. As such, tactics that would work with one race might not necessarily work with other races.
Being Zerg, your advantage is that you have the potential to macro harder than any other race and your units are more mobile. The fact that your units are more mobile comes at a price - the Zerg players can't use just a few units to defend attacks. On top of that, due to the way larvae works, you actually have to prepare in advance for any pushes on yourself.
Is it a difficult concept to grasp? Sure
Will you lose a ton of games to people you think are worse than you? Yeah
Is it fair? Who the heck cares? Different race, different concepts, different playstyle. Don't like it? Switch to a different race.
Whine or not whine the OP raises some could points on defense. In Sc1 Zerg players could easily defend against other races standard play with a couple Zerglings and a Spine Colony or two until he transitioned. As mentioned before me a lot of new units and mechanics give both the Terran and Protoss more mobility.
Now a days with new units in the fray (Namely Marauder) and the overall increase of DPS, the fact that the Spine Crawler's damage is much lower then it's Sc1 counterpart is more glaring.
I do think the Spine Crawler should receive a buff to improve Z's static defense early and late game.
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Zerg are still the most mobile. Terran are still the least. Sure it's a different game, but defending as terran is the same, and it's similar for zerg. Spine crawlers are still pretty good AND you have the queen now AND you can produce more zerglings at a time thanks to that queen.
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On July 31 2010 12:01 MythicalMage wrote:
Sure it's a different game, but defending as terran is the same, and it's similar for zerg. Spine crawlers are still pretty good AND you have the queen now AND you can produce more zerglings at a time thanks to that queen.
I have thought of this for quite some time, and you are focusing on the wrong issue, as is the OP. This isn't a "defenders advantage" problem. The offending unit here is the hellion, and it is only noticable in TvZ due to the lack of zerg defense, but lack of defense from zerg is fine for every other unit out there.
Compare the hellion to the vulture. What is the most notable difference between your first hellion and your first vulture?
Is it the AoE line damage? No, while this is a very nice feature of the hellion, it is hardly noticable when the zerg player has a whole 6 zerglings out.
Is it the lack of spider mines? No, spider mines could never be researched, you gotta get the speed upgrade first... oh wait... speed upgrade...
Hellions come out as fast as speed lings, and you get them faster than zerg can feasibly get speed for his lings...
Think what a 50/50 50 sec speed upgrade from the tech lab would do to early game hellion harass in TvZ.
You either have to pick between 2 mildly quick units or 1 super quick OP early harasser...
Hellion harass in its current state is essentially free damage to the Zerg players economy. Yes it takes good micro, yes you have to practice it, no I can't do anything nearly as effective as walling off in comparison, and that sucks...
Nerf free hellion speed, problem solved.
Compare this to BW vulture harass for 2 seconds and you can easily see how much the free speed breaks everything in this MU. As far as I'm concerned, all the mech complaints would cease to be reasonable if I didn't have to spend 1k minerals defending against 400 min worth of hellions just to get crushed by marauders/thor 4 min later.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't vultures do more damage? Vultures were useful against ALL protoss units, not just zealots, sentries, and templar. There was a game I saw where a player talked about fighting off hellion harass. He said it wasn't about stopping it, it was about absorbing it.
Zerg also didn't have queens in Brood war, and speedlings on creep didn't move at the speed of light in Broodwar. Zerg didn't even have roaches back then, which pretty much end hellions.
I don't like the idea of nerfing their speed. This is, as people have mentioned, a different game. I think perhaps slowing their speed slightly and giving them an ability that increased their speed with an energy bar that started pretty high and regened pretty quickly. Might be nice.
EDIT: To elaborate a bit, once Zerg gets those things, hellions become almost useless. Vultures stayed integral throughout the game.
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Vultures did 20 plasma damage to 1 target per shot.
This comes out to 20 dmg to light (zealots) 10 damage to medium (hydralisks) and 5 damage to heavy (dragoons).
The reason vultures were so generally helpful in TvP was because of spider mines and the fact that protoss shields took full damage from all weapon types (meaning vultures did 20 damage if the dragoon still had shields)
And yes, roaches end hellion harass. But that is no different from a wall-off ending zerlings or a 2rax wall ending banelings, funny how the terran solutions are available before the problem they solve is huh?
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EPT
