The units absolutely make a big difference. Playing zerg, lurkers+defilers are absolutely critical for map control. You think that a group of hydras can hold a ramp against m&m? Good luck. These units are what separate the zerg playstyles in both games, combined with the lack of muta micro in sc2. Hydras and lings are very fluid in BW as well so it's not the pathfinding. In ZvP lurkers need to be spread around and offer great positional control but are not easy to attack with, in ZvT lurker+defiler are used to push Terrans back slowly around the map and defend bases. This is in contrast to the all or nothing a-move ling-bane-muta attacks in sc2.
For terran, the synergy of medivac-marine-marauder encourages deathballing, whereas in BW with stronger tanks, and vultures and their mines, along with a lack of mech counter units like immortals promotes mech play. Stronger AOE units and overkill favour spreading out tank lines and pushing methodically towards the opponent, and fast and microable vultures promote harassment.
When I re-watch BW VODs today I often notice how slow players were at re-inforcing attacks. And how zerg players many times would not be attackign with their entire armies. Often a huge chunk of it would stand idle with all the newly hatched units. I keep thinking: "If this was SC2 UI and pathing, the defending player would die to the reinforcements".
They changed the economy. They changed how fast the economy developed. They changed pathing. They made the game feel more fast paced. They made all these changes, but they made them without putting any real thought as to whether they would still fit within a 200 supply game or within the same size/scale map designs.
But where they botched SC2's design I think was in uncritically copying all those other design parameters from Brood War while simultaneously changing the pace of the game.
The most evident way of spotting this phenomenon in pro games is in viking micro vs colossus. When players fire backwards with 4-6 perfectly separated vikings, they will keep their gliding motion while firing. But when the vikings are clumped before firing, they just halt at a stand still and fire.
De-stacking is made to take precedence over gliding in SC2 engine. If this was just an isolated example of lack of attention to detail I'd be more accepting of Blizzard. But really it's a pattern in SC2's entire design.
Pathing finding is only a small part of the story.
For one, unit design between the two games are so staggeringly different. HP creep, super mobile base destroyers, cliff walking, complete lack of turn rate, attack start up time, standing in place to finish your attack animation, gliding shots on the drone, archon.
What comes most to my mind is how excellent units are in SC2 are at base busting. Immortals, marauders, roaches, and banelings come to mind.
Next we come to some fundamental decisions.
Take a look at Z. Would you ever see SC2 zerg building a nydus canal to transport units for defence?
No, you just a-move some super speed lings and mutas anywhere you want as long as you have creep spread.
Fundamental difference in defence strategies
What about general base layouts?
SC2 bases are defended by jockeying your army and make sure he isn't able to attack any of your bases when your army isn't there to intercept.
What encourages things like storm drops more?
What encourages just a-moving a few zealots?
To at least give you a very brief example. Compare zealots vs roaches to zealots vs hydras in BW.
How much micro is there in both of these examples?
In sc2 you simply kite backwards, the zealots have no input given to them to make them more effective.
Now compare this to Zealots and hydras in BW.
Lets assume we have sc2 pathing.
If you are doing it correctly you probably are doing something more akin to blink micro for the hydras, while manually targetting weak units (or switching targets for zealots that are chasing hydras running away forever).
Both sides are HEAVILY encouraged to make a wide flank, for ease of micro is to counter the opponents ability to outmaneuver you.
This micro is similar to that awkward phase at the start of a tvp, 2 marines vs 1 zealot, except played out in a grander scale with much more micro required.
Blizz changed the fundamental nature of how melee vs ranged units work in Starcraft.
In bw you had speedzealots. A slow hydralisk being pulled backwards would never get hit by that speedzealot. You would need to actually micro to kill it.
In sc2, ranged units that are slower than a melee unit WILL get hit 100% of the time, constantly. They cannot retreat.
So blizz did things like, make the zealot slower but give it charge so it at least hits some of the time.
But does that encourage micro or nullify it?
Now imagine a pack of speedlings trying to chase a probe. In BW they will never kill the probe unless the probe runs towards the lings. The player must actually micro the lings to run past it, then confirm the kill. Of course the probe can juke that sort of attempt and get away.
Even with SC2's pathfinding, there were a lot of things they could have done differently in SC2. They could have made units bigger or decreased the range of ranged units. That would have lessened the lethality of massed clumps of ranged units. They could have strengthened positional play by introducing more units like siege tanks, lurkers and widow mines. They could have reduced the dps of all the mobile, fast moving units that all of SC2's most dominant compositions rely on. Like another poster said, they could have given melee units a pause before they attack, meaning they have to get in front of a retreating unit before they could do damage. They could have reduced to speed of ranged units to compensate.
The new pathfinding is here to stay. But there are still many other variables Blizzard could have tinkered with to bring back the tactical battles that we loved from BW. They might have to start by toning down the dps of huge clumps of ranged units.
Saying that you need BW pathing for a lot of micro things you could do in BW is downright false.
Moving shots for the vulture, archon, drone. SC2 is physically hardcoded to NOT let you do that with ground units.
Me and Maverick use an insane work around to do it.
Air units? Most air units are tweaked so moving shot isn't very effective or rewarding.
There is even a bug Lalush just found where if air units are slightly overlapping they will go to a dead stop. You see this often with vikings.
The air units themselves have no qualms with the inefficiencies of ground pathing. They way they are set up in BW encourages air dancing and micro. SC2 not so much.
Now lets see, dragoons and how they must stand in place to take a shot. This adds in some really nicely paced micro. Sure it is just stutter stepping but the degree of difficulty in it is amped up.
Zealots vs hydras. Hydralisks would have to stand in place to get a shot off, just like the zealot had to. Of course a zealot had to stand still long enough to attack, so if a hydralisk was retreating he couldn't get a shot off.
This led to absolutely beautiful micro between both parties and had absolutely NOTHING to do with pathing.
Yes, both SC2 and BW are entirely different games due to many differences, but pathing isn't some huge barrier, blizzard literally did not look into how each unit in BW had a degree of weight and different control.
Compare a vulture to a marine. The vulture accelerated, and flew across the terrain. And then the marine was obviously more grounded with instant acceleration.
Compare this to SC2 marine hellion. Hellions turn on a dime, acelerate on a dime, decelerate on a dime.
If you look carefully you will see just how much attention blizz payed to how units actually moved and fought in BW.
A tank would keep tracking its target in BW. All it took to shoot was a stop or attack command.
In SC2 a tank quickly swivels its turret to the default position even in the middle of combat. Same with the immortal.
In BW a marine would ready its gun, fire, lower its weapon, and then start moving.
In SC2 a marine will ready its gun, fire (you can immediately order a move command) and it will start moving despite it looking like it is shooting all of his allies.
Its this sort of inattention to micro detail that has a huge impact on the game.
In BW most weapons have a period in which the unit must complete their attack animation before being able to move again.
This is literally non existant in sc2, the field to modify this does not exist.
Moving shots? Bugged, and implemented poorly compared to the beautiful mutalisk dancing we saw in BW.
Even then, the worst offender is probably the insane movement speed sc2 units have compared to BW.
That itself hurts melee micro much more worse than any improvement in pathing.
It isn't just pathfinding.
Yes they are different games, but blizzard downright didn't pay very much attention to the small details that made BW micro so amazing.
Yeah, I do agree with decembercalm that it isn't just pathfinding/ isometric view imposed over grid that created microbility.
For my
A-move by Design, I tested the hellion and the vulture and few other units. And the biggest difference in micro handling is that the the vulture has a much shorter burst shot whereas the Hellion has to pause to ge off its entire flame cannon. In fact overall, BW has far more units that have frontloaded damage. Whereas many SC2 units have very long attacks that deal damage over time. (The biggest culprit is of course the collosus.)
Unit acceleration and deceleration into shooting combined with burst shot damage is a huge deal in creating micro opportunities and I do not think it is limited to the old BW engine.
I feel like some of the successes of BW can be adapted into SC2 without fundamentally changing the game. A slight boost to the unit radii of marines and marauders would reduce the dps density of that composition, and having small terrain irregularities that discourage movement over specific types of ground would help units move more herky-jerky.
As much as I prefer playing SC2 to BW, the constant army positioning and repositioning isn't nearly as fun to watch as constant fighting and mid-battle micro.
BW default unit movement was highly suboptimal in terms of:
- Time taken to get an army across the map
- Time taken to bring concentrated DPS to bear
- Time taken to negotiate chokes or other difficult terrain
This created windows of opportunity for player input and positioning to influence the outcome of an engagement.
By those same metrics, default unit movement in SC2 is almost optimal. The only thing SC2 units are bad at is dodging splash damage. And what do we see? Right: the only meaningful examples of player micro involve the mitigation of splash damage. Lings vs Widow mines. Marines/Lings vs banelings. Viper vs Colossus. Bio vs Storm. Drops vs Tanks. In every other situation it's macro or preset unit counters that determine the outcome.
Imagine a racing game where the car automatically takes the perfect racing line, and all the driver needs to do is manage the accelerator and brake. We could talk all we wanted about how there's still an unattainable skill cap in doing that perfectly, or how there are still challenges to be appreciated in the pit lane or the team's R&D department, but it's still less fun for the driver, and (for most people) less varied and fun to watch.
So if unit pathing is off the table, what else could we make units less good at?
More fundamental issues are that the SC2 eco just doesn't reward taking more bases than you really need. If that was fixed then you still couldn't defend these bases due to defenders advantage and the need to intercept the enemy army to defend, sim city and powerful defensive units don't mean much in SC2 beyond a plantary fortress/nexus.
I'm not saying its better or worse, but starcraft2 doesn't feel like the successor to bw, it feels like a new series. I think I wouldn't have the issues with it as a game if it was just a new series. I'm not one to judge better or worse, but it just feels so different, and when the first game was as good at bw was, different is bad in a sequel. That being said this is a great blog, despite my disagreement over bw units not being better designed.
Almost every unit in BW is interesting, barring scouts and staple flying units(wraith/muta), which are straightforward.
Some people may think anachronistically, but... BW devs were the one who actually came up with marine + medic, MECH idea (catapults? artillary etc, thats the biggest close relation you've seen in RTS), scourge, vulture reaver, dark archon, DT, detectors, ghost +nuke etc.
Some emerged from playstyles some of the utility increased with "bad pathfinding", but all of them wouldn't work without their hardcoded aspects.
I think the idea of detector vs stealth unit is still to my thinking the best idea anyone ever put in RTS in terms of unit roles. And BW to this day has probably the most in depth detector/stealth unit graph (didnt check).
detector:
mine
observer
overlord
spore
scan
spells+splash(being pedantic)
Stealthed:
DT
wraith
lurker
ghost
kinda arbiter
observermine The last one two is imo brilliant, a detector/killer that is stealthed. Now give 1 race detector in flying supply and other with maphack. Madness.
Ah and i forgot about an actual assymetrical race design, you cannot describe in words how weird it was to play first mission as zerg after playing games Dune2/C&C95/RA/TA/KKND/WAR2 (all before SC1 i believe) this was assymetry as its core, *click on eggs* "eeeewww, gross".
Credits where its due, devs did their job
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/x32pIHu.jpg)
I guess I'll have to wait for Sayle to sum this all up for me
