EPTUnit Clumping in SC2 - Good or Bad - Page 2
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Dante08
Singapore4119 Posts
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sluggaslamoo
Australia4494 Posts
On December 29 2011 11:57 mrtomjones wrote: It is intended. It is also something that could force micro in ways that brood war didn't need. More micro avoiding your units clumping up is something those with the highest APM can take advantage of. My head really hurts right now. Broodwar has every form of micro SC2 has, including splitting (bio vs lurkers, muta vs irradiate), plus 10x more micro techniques, it even has an advanced form of splitting known as cloning to make scourge more efficient (scourge vs vessel/corsair). Also read this if you wanna know the advantages/disadvantages of clumping http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=132171 and split up armies are worse against clumped armies WTF o_O Its half the reason mutalisks are so bad against marines, and the Protoss deathball is so powerful. Why do you think in BW Terran always tried to ball up their army as close together as possible? Even though this meant a lurker flank could 1 shot the entire Terran army. So Terran had to constantly be on guard and split like crazy as soon as he sees lurkers. | ||
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deadmau
960 Posts
User was temp banned for this post. | ||
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jellyjello
Korea (South)664 Posts
On December 29 2011 12:07 Leviance wrote: The first true SC2 bonjwa will actually train and be able to de-clump his units, everyone is gonna be shocked how one-sided battles will go in his favour. I don't get how even now, a year after release, the majority of the pros (Koreans included) only use 1-2 hotkeys for their armies. The best Zergs in the world still run all their lings clumped into a siege line instead of separating a few at the start to completely negate splash, Collossi attacks are still devastating because everyone is too lazy to split intelligently so that most of the splash is avoided, far too often a group of 4-6 templars get hit by ONE emp because lazy players (pros!!!) keep them so vulnerably together. The new UI allows for being more lazy, and the pros atm are showing just that: being lazy (on their level) I know it'd be fucking hard to constantly de-clump and so on, but that's exactly the work a wannabe-bonjwa has to do, if it wasn't hard as shit, everyone could do it. But right now everyone (GSL winners included) just keeps suffering from the 1-2 control group syndrome and the many disadvantages that come with it. frustrating to watch, but leaves hope for Jaedong, Flash etc. switching and showing the rest how it's done. Well, the problem is that SC2 leaves a very little room for a mistake in your game and limits strategies that can be deployed to win the match because of the power of one giant death ball. I don't believe that successful unclumped units will always hard counter a giant death ball (I've seen it many times especially in PvZ). The problem is that if you lose a center battle in SC2, all of certain you are really far behind because it's that much harder to stop the remaining death ball. There is not much of a way to "buy time" after you lose a center battle. | ||
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Hinanawi
United States2250 Posts
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MavercK
Australia2181 Posts
On December 29 2011 12:14 Leviance wrote: It actually rises the skill cap, but nobody has noticed yet because no one is consistently trying to de-clump in battles and use more than 2 control groups for his army. If a death ball a-moved into a perfectly de-clumped and microed army the death ball would melt and leave you O_O this goes both ways, is purely speculation and might be completely wrong. stop stating it as fact. one of the main reasons people say it raises skill cap in brood war is because your army is spread out along a thin line most of the time. like lambs to the slaughterhouse. you have to constantly pull the front ones back and the middle ones to the side and make your own arc. you can't 1a and let them do it themselves. even if 12 unit group was removed. your right tho. clumped units adds micro because you want to seperate them to mitigate splash damage. but just now thinking about it. one of the reasons people love using the ball. is the concentrated damage effect. for example a protoss army with colossus. the death ball. the damage output from that army is incredible and because the units are so stacked. it can't be flanked or caught off guard. from the moment an enemy unit engages 50-70% of the army can start firing immediately (this ignores long range units like broodlords etc) why would you want to declump that army. you could argue the zerg would want to which is true in that regard. but still. it works both ways. | ||
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stokes17
United States1411 Posts
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CursOr
United States6335 Posts
In SC1 space was much easier to control because of the ease of defending passes/ramps with a few units *Lurkers/SiegeTanks* Day9 has a great talk about this. In SC1 you're more of an Architect building a structure, in SC2 you're more of an Alchemist, trying to make the correct mix. It, to me, is inferior in a lot of ways. Mix this with the smaller armies, the need for more drones/scv/probes, and better pathing, you're seriously limiting the available diversity for MU's. Anyone who followed BroodWar a lot would not disagree I'm sure. With all that said, SC2 is a great game. Stand alone, its freaking amazing. Think if it that way. It's just a shame it has to follow after Broodwar. | ||
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Zarahtra
Iceland4053 Posts
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varint
Canada87 Posts
On December 29 2011 12:07 Leviance wrote: The first true SC2 bonjwa will actually train and be able to de-clump his units, everyone is gonna be shocked how one-sided battles will go in his favour. I don't get how even now, a year after release, the majority of the pros (Koreans included) only use 1-2 hotkeys for their armies. The best Zergs in the world still run all their lings clumped into a siege line instead of separating a few at the start to completely negate splash, Collossi attacks are still devastating because everyone is too lazy to split intelligently so that most of the splash is avoided, far too often a group of 4-6 templars get hit by ONE emp because lazy players (pros!!!) keep them so vulnerably together. The new UI allows for being more lazy, and the pros atm are showing just that: being lazy (on their level) I know it'd be fucking hard to constantly de-clump and so on, but that's exactly the work a wannabe-bonjwa has to do, if it wasn't hard as shit, everyone could do it. But right now everyone (GSL winners included) just keeps suffering from the 1-2 control group syndrome and the many disadvantages that come with it. frustrating to watch, but leaves hope for Jaedong, Flash etc. switching and showing the rest how it's done. do you really think with so much at stake and practicing 10+ hours a day that the only reason pros don't spread their armies is because they're lazy? | ||
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Telcontar
United Kingdom16710 Posts
I personally want to see the unit spacing increased a little just to make the standard quality games a little less unattractive without being too forgiving to those with subpar multitasking and micromanagement. | ||
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LilClinkin
Australia667 Posts
For a simple experiment, clump up a group of 24 marines in SC2 and in BW. 1a the marines in SC2 to take out a building, and 1a2a the same marines to do it in BW. The marines in SC2 will automatically fan-out and surround the building quite efficiently. Not as efficient as if you manually split parts of the army before engaging, but it does hold your hand to some degree. Compare this to BW: The marines will spaz out completely and it is entirely up to the player to manually place them into an effective formation. As a byproduct of this clumping and path-finding, blizz has had to nerf every single AOE ability compared to BW. Siege tanks do less damage (and cost more resources and supply), storm is less potent with reduced AOE, ditto for EMP, and lurkers were completely scrapped due to an inability to meaningfully place them into the game (blizz tried extremely hard but eventually gave up). Massive damage abilites like reaver and spider mines are completely gone. In HoTS, blizz is experimenting with the swarm lord, a poor-mans lurker. If blizz made the path-finding a little bit stupider, and didn't make units clump so much unless you manually put them into a clump formation, I feel a lot of these previously nerfed AOE abilities could be restored to their former glory, and abilities which completely deprive your opponent of micro (force field, fungal) can be buried in the dust. BW units and strategy involved exerting map control. Many (not all) of SC2 unit compositions are basically 1a and smash your opponent (provided you established some economic lead earlier on). The classic example of this is the colossus-stalker-sentry death ball pvz, but there are many other examples too. Such an approach to victory in BW would never work; even with an early advantage, 1a2a3a4a would always be punished by a superior player's use of abilities and unit positioning even if the defending army was vastly inferior in terms of cost. I could go off on many other tangents, such as how the supply cap of SC2 makes things feel 'small' in comparison to BW, the diminished importance of defenders advantage (in terms of high ground mechanic and warpin for mu involving protoss). One of the only changes in SC2 compared to BW which I feel was for the better (but still contentious in regard that it "wastes" supply) is the presence of 2 geysers per base instead of 1. It's good because it diversifies the economic decisions that you make, however it's bad because it means more workers are 'wasted' to collect gas, hence less supply is available for an army. | ||
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Golgotha
Korea (South)8418 Posts
On December 29 2011 12:14 Leviance wrote: It actually rises the skill cap, but nobody has noticed yet because no one is consistently trying to de-clump in battles and use more than 2 control groups for his army. If a death ball a-moved into a perfectly de-clumped and microed army the death ball would melt and leave you O_O stop. this is nonsense. the reason why clumped up units are SO good is because the concentration of units provide maximum firepower at a given point and time. Take for example a group of marines that are tightly packed together. More marines can fire at a given target because everyone is in range to fire their gun. On the other hand we de-clump them so that an invisible marine stands between every marine. This increases the firing range at which some marines can or cannot fire because of their distance apart. Thus, decreasing their DPS at that given time. If you still don't get it, why do you think force fields are used and why do you think they are so powerful in this game? Because it spreads apart the enemy force so that half the force is holding their dicks and the other half is pew pewing. | ||
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Leviance
Germany4079 Posts
On December 29 2011 12:18 jellyjello wrote: Well, the problem is that SC2 leaves a very little room for a mistake in your game and limits strategies that can be deployed to win the match because of the power of one giant death ball. I don't believe that successful unclumped units will always hard counter a giant death ball (I've seen it many times especially in PvZ). The problem is that if you lose a center battle in SC2, all of certain you are really far behind because it's that much harder to stop the remaining death ball. There is not much of a way to "buy time" after you lose a center battle. It is very much true that there is not much of a way to buy time after you lose a center battle, that's why you have to win it or at least trade equally. And players will fight more efficiently if they start to minimize the splash, minimize the effectiveness of opponent's spells and get your fucking basic army positioning right - god I hate watching GSL where zealots are stuck behind stalkers and don't get to the enemy while 5 templars are emp'd at once and half of the death ball is already destroyed by siege splash....it still happens all the fucking time because it is so convenient to just put everything in one control group. I'm convinced better army control would make the game AS IT IS RIGHT NOW feel ten times more exciting suddenly. Another factor of why the first big battle often decides the outcome of the game is because players have the whole army in one control group and therefore either overcommits everything into death or tries to run away with everything at once and in the same fucking direction resulting in just getting raped bit by bit. | ||
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Azzur
Australia6250 Posts
On December 29 2011 12:22 varint wrote: do you really think with so much at stake and practicing 10+ hours a day that the only reason pros don't spread their armies is because they're lazy? Not lazy, but not good enough. For instance, one of the latest defensive techniques in TvP in holding early allins is a concave formation with bunkers protecting the centre of the army. This is more effective than the previous technique of making many bunkers. This concave technique only really came to about 3 months ago, showing that many pros don't have the skill to implement many advanced formations. | ||
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Leviance
Germany4079 Posts
On December 29 2011 12:27 Golgotha wrote: stop. this is nonsense. the reason why clumped up units are SO good is because the concentration of units provide maximum firepower at a given point and time. Take for example a group of marines that are tightly packed together. More marines can fire at a given target because everyone is in range to fire their gun. On the other hand we de-clump them so that an invisible marine stands between every marine. This increases the firing range at which some marines can or cannot fire because of their distance apart. Thus, decreasing their DPS at that given time. If you still don't get it, why do you think force fields are used and why do you think they are so powerful in this game? Because it spreads apart the enemy force so that half the force is holding their dicks and the other half is pew pewing. Of course your marine example is right. I apologize that I have spoken too generally. It of course depends on what units are actually used against each other and in the situation where you want to maximize your damage output it's beneficial to clump marines, not if you face for example templars or banes though. My general complaint is that pros currently don't do everything they could do to work against the auto-clumping in situations in which it would be very useful and have still poor army control in general. This can not be applied to all situations, again, sorry for my over-generalization. | ||
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jellyjello
Korea (South)664 Posts
On December 29 2011 12:28 Leviance wrote: It is very much true that there is not much of a way to buy time after you lose a center battle, that's why you have to win it or at least trade equally. And players will fight more efficiently if they start to minimize the splash, minimize the effectiveness of opponent's spells and get your fucking basic army positioning right - god I hate watching GSL where zealots are stuck behind stalkers and don't get to the enemy while 5 templars are emp'd at once and half of the death ball is already destroyed by siege splash....it still happens all the fucking time because it is so convenient to just put everything in one control group. I'm convinced better army control would make the game AS IT IS RIGHT NOW feel ten times more exciting suddenly. Another factor of why the first big battle often decides the outcome of the game is because players have the whole army in one control group and therefore either overcommits everything into death or tries to run away with everything at once and in the same fucking direction resulting in just getting raped bit by bit. Two things. 1) You can't always maintain your army composition the way you want it to because the game clumps all your units so easy and everytime your army 1a moves. The only way this can be done is if your entire focus is on your army movement all the time. But it doesn't work like that. The game requires you to a great deal of multitasking - building supplies, controlling workers...etc. The game must allow some room for mistakes and allow other players to get back in with clever use of strategy (this is a RTS, you know) or else the outcome becomes too random. 2) The one center battle must not decide the complete outcome of the game, or else the game becomes too dull and stale. This game cannot be all about one giant battle. It has to be about overall game play and strategy vs strategy, not micro vs micro. | ||
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Flamingo777
United States1190 Posts
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varint
Canada87 Posts
On December 29 2011 12:32 Azzur wrote: Not lazy, but not good enough. For instance, one of the latest defensive techniques in TvP in holding early allins is a concave formation with bunkers protecting the centre of the army. This is more effective than the previous technique of making many bunkers. This concave technique only really came to about 3 months ago, showing that many pros don't have the skill to implement many advanced formations. but if it were effective players would still be implementing formations to try make their armies more effective (even if by just a little bit), then some players would be better at it than others and they would win the battle | ||
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jellyjello
Korea (South)664 Posts
On December 29 2011 12:43 Flamingo777 wrote: I don't think it's intended, but rather the result, or side-effect of Blizzard's pathing decision toward having units surround their targeted opponents, which as a result involves "clumping". Agree, but also think about how the game went from 2D to 3D which adds to the clumping as well. | ||
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