Too Much Firepower, Not Enough Stalkers - Page 5

On January 18 2012 21:30 Noocta wrote:
Static defence are so bad zerg lategame strategy in ZvP and ZvT is mass spine with army support and it's hard as hell to deal with it.
Did you ever play a TvZ and ned up seing the expand have 5 spine ? Yeah, good luck killing anything but a spine or two before the lings come.

On January 18 2012 21:14 Mentalizor wrote:


I tried 6 mutas v 2 thors. Prespread mutas. Slightly spread thors (no glaive dmg). Only 2 mutas died. *BALANCE*

On January 18 2012 21:52 dream-_- wrote:
I haven't played that much SC2, but for some reason this thread interested me. I think that what people are seeing is not so much a problem, as it is a difference. Yes it is true we did not have the "hard counters" in BW that we do in SC2, but I think that makes the game better as opposed to worse. It creates a situation where players are no longer able to play blind and still maintain a strong position in the game. If I am blindly massing roaches while my opponent has an observer over my army and makes 15 immortals to counter that while I build corrupters to counter his colo that I think are coming, I die. Period. As harsh as that can seem in specific instances and certain games (ESPECIALLY, I might add, to the lower or mid tier level player), I think it is vital to the game play as a whole.

On January 18 2012 21:46 Tobberoth wrote:

"I once played against a toss. My marines came to his ramp at the 6 minute mark and he had 20 cannons!! I COULDN'T BREAK HIM, cannons OP!"

Seriously, 5 spines at an expansion is a buttload, it's even more than you use to hold a 4gate. Of course static defense is strong if you spend your whole economy on it.

On January 18 2012 18:28 Filter wrote:
Starcraft 2 has become a game of extreme firepower. Almost all units seem to have an extremely strong damage output and become unstopable in certain situations. The heavy splash damage units are able to absolutely crush certain kinds of units with very little ability to micro out of the situation. There's even spells in the game to lock units in place until they get crushed. We've all been in a situation where FF come down and you're units all get roasted by the backup storms or colli, fungals hold you up for the banes to crush past or even for broods to smash your army from range. If you get hit by these spells your options to escape don't exist and the game is essentially over.

This problem doesn't just exist with crushing AoE though, it happens with most of the low tier units too. Zerglings with a couple of upgrades can rip apart almost any ground unit in a small clump making and their pure speed makes it impossible to fight without being balled up, or behind a wall. This leads to pure frustration when you get caught out of position by some lings and lose 1/3 or half your army and at that point there's nothing you can do about the situation. 4 Zealots can hold off a 2mara, 4 rines drop if you don't stutter micro it (makes having a second engagement elsewhere on the map hard as hell). Marines are by far the most powerful unit in the game if you don't have AoE around to deal with them. A group of stimmed marines can crush any army that doesn't have Banes, Infestors, Templar, Colli or Tanks in it.

I bet 75%+ of the games I watch or play in end very, very decisively with a big engagement going to one player or the other. Very few games are decided with slow, sweeping gameplay where each player deals and receives multiple blows. This is because of four factors that I'm really started to get fed up with in the game and I'm going to list them off here.

Factor #1: Too much firepower.
As I described in the opening the game has way, way too much firepower. It's not just the big AoE units that are the problem though, literally every unit has a huge amount of firepower against certain kinds of units, or just in general. Marauders crush stalkers and roaches so hard it's not even funny. Lings with favorable numbers eat through almost everything. Zealots themselves can do insane amounts of damage to forces that can't escape them. Give any unit in the game a slight advantage and favourable matchup in a fight and there's very little the other player can do about it. Immortals crunch anything that hits hard and has armor, like tanks, thors, roaches and Stalkers. If all of a sudden all the units in the game lost some of their damage, or had more room for micro (and micro doesn't mean speed, it means micro. Blink micro doesn't take a lot of speed but a good player can make some amazing plays with it.) things would be a lot more interesting.

Factor #2: No units that can zone, no true "siege" units.
This one of fairly straight forward. Tanks can't zone anything without support. If you leave 3 or 4 tanks at an expansion and the opponent sends 10 chargelots you lose, or if they send 30 lings in you lose. Give those tanks 10 marines though and things change, they can hold off runbys and small armies with ease. Zerg can't zone anything, if they take a ling runby in ZvZ they lose a lot of drones, Toss can leave a few blink stalkers around to fend off drops and use their warpin mechanic to bring units to the fight but if gates are on cd or the toss is maxed then they're going to lose a lot of probes.

Simply put, no race can zone out expansions properly, or even zone areas of the map without aggressively positioning their army. If a protoss has his army where your third and forth are located you can't send your army to go kill one of his bases or he'll move in and crush yours so you end up with two big armies dancing back and forth until one player makes a mistake and get crushed. If the Terran could use a few tanks to zone their third/forth expansion and make attacking it a risky idea then the toss would have to be backed up, or risk having one of his bases taken out. This would lead to move interesting engagements and games in general where you can run away from the toss in a big fight, but right now if that fight happens at your doorstep and you lose the games over, his reinforcements will get there before yours do if he has a pylon around.

Factor #3: Static defenses are god awful. Spine crawlers can't even kill a marine with medivac support, same thing with cannons and turrets get rolled by a pack of muta's once it gets reasonably sized. The only static defense that works well is the PF and thats a huge investment for Terrans. If you made static defenses twice as powerful as they are now (PF excluded) things would be a lot more interesting, especially if races had the ability to zone out and siege better. If zerg could put down a couple of spines and a lurker and know that ling runbys would be totally useless imagine how different zvz would look. If there were no banelings things would be a lot more stable in that matchup.

If static defense was more powerful then we'd see people not trying to all in nearly as much, and in turn players playing a lot less greedy than they are now. The threat of a bunker rush would go up if bunkers had more hp or armor, and the threat of a cannon rush would go way up if they hit twice as hard however by simply getting that second barracks before expanding and scouting your own main you'd be able to hold them off no problem, better spines would make going for a six gate useless and make playing safe and slowly expanding more of a viable option for zerg. If they could use their army to hold a position for awhile while they got their third up and then dropping a couple of spines there to protect it from smaller forces things would be more interesting.

Factor #4: Units that are amazing against one thing, but garbage against another.
There's way too many units that are terrible against some things and amazing against others. This makes it almost impossible to have creative compositions. If we took a 50% cut on the effectiveness of these units against what they roll right now and made them better against what they can't kill it would be very interesting to see.

Hellions either wipe the floor with lings or get smashed by roaches. They also fire way too slowly. Let them get in your mineral line though and all hopes lost. If hellions did 50% less to lings and 50% more to roaches imagine how the game would look. Yeah they'd still be able to mop up lings, but at the same time lings would be a reasonable way to play against them, however those early roach all ins would be a lot less acceptable and the game would be a lot more based on who was the better player than a simple coin flip.

Immortals are the same story, 1 immortal can easily kill 3 presieged up tanks. How is that reasonable at all? 2v1 tanks should be able to kill an immortal without a loss(but near death), but 1v1 an immortal should mop up a tank. Give immortals a bit faster fire rate and all of a sudden they become viable against marines too.

Conclusion: Stalkers
I personally feel that Stalkers are one of the most well designed units in the entire game. They don't kill things exceptionally fast, really gain a heavy edge in terms of your ability to micro them and even have an upgrade that lets them become extremely strong in the hands of a skilled player. Have you ever lost to a player using a lot of stalkers (outside of allins) where it felt awful and terrible? Where it felt like there was nothing you could do he just clicked a couple of buttons and autowon? I haven't. The problem is so many units destroy stalkers in the right conditions. A reasonable number of lings in a ling roach situation allows the zerg player to a-move the stalkers and there's nothing they can do, blink only helps so much. What about if they get fungled? gg. Terran has marauders? gg. Toss made immortals? gg. Each of those situations requires the stalker player to micro his ass off to survive, but the Marauder, Immortal, Ling/Roach or Infestor player has to do almost nothing to smash the stalkers to pieces. This needs to change.

Disclaimer: Take this thread for what it is. I only wrote it to vent some of my own frustrations with my own games, as well as games I watch in various tourneys. I want sc2 to be the best it can be and while some of my idea's are a bit crack potted and probably wrong I do feel that the general theme of this thread is solid, Too much damage, No Zoning, Crap Static Defenses, Hard Counters and of course Stalkers.

On January 18 2012 22:11 Noocta wrote:


I'm talking about lategame and drop. I think my keyboard bugged out because i had more thing in this sentence.

The thing is, static defense are good. Period.They wont kill a freaking army for you, of course, what did you expect from them ?

On January 18 2012 21:14 Mentalizor wrote:


I tried 6 mutas v 2 thors. Prespread mutas. Slightly spread thors (no glaive dmg). Only 2 mutas died. *BALANCE*

On January 18 2012 18:44 Tobberoth wrote:
It's true. I went back and played some brood war for the first time in a long time, and it amazed me how SLOW it is compared to SC2. Not in the sense that you want to speed it up, but in the sense that you have time to react and micro. Doing a 10/15 gate dragoon pressure vs a terran, it's amazing how the micro feels. You have ample time to react to what dragoon is being damaged and move it back, focus on getting a good concave etc. This isn't really possible in SC2 since units die so ridiculously fast, and units close distances so quickly. In SC2, you're often discouraged from microing at all since it's all about critical firepower for a second or two. Losing just one second firing can leave your army decimated, and then you'll do no damage.

UPDATE:
What we really need, is a custom map for SC2 which explores this. Similar to SC2BW, but pure SC2 with more BW like balance, trying to implement what you mention in your post: stronger static defenses, more equalized counters, maybe the classic complaint about ball pathing. Just to see how it would actually work out in practice.

On January 18 2012 18:44 Tobberoth wrote:
It's true. I went back and played some brood war for the first time in a long time, and it amazed me how SLOW it is compared to SC2. Not in the sense that you want to speed it up, but in the sense that you have time to react and micro. Doing a 10/15 gate dragoon pressure vs a terran, it's amazing how the micro feels. You have ample time to react to what dragoon is being damaged and move it back, focus on getting a good concave etc. This isn't really possible in SC2 since units die so ridiculously fast, and units close distances so quickly. In SC2, you're often discouraged from microing at all since it's all about critical firepower for a second or two. Losing just one second firing can leave your army decimated, and then you'll do no damage.

UPDATE:
What we really need, is a custom map for SC2 which explores this. Similar to SC2BW, but pure SC2 with more BW like balance, trying to implement what you mention in your post: stronger static defenses, more equalized counters, maybe the classic complaint about ball pathing. Just to see how it would actually work out in practice.

On January 18 2012 21:46 Tobberoth wrote:

"I once played against a toss. My marines came to his ramp at the 6 minute mark and he had 20 cannons!! I COULDN'T BREAK HIM, cannons OP!"

Seriously, 5 spines at an expansion is a buttload, it's even more than you use to hold a 4gate. Of course static defense is strong if you spend your whole economy on it.