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On February 12 2014 10:12 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2014 09:48 sluggaslamoo wrote:On February 12 2014 09:08 pure.Wasted wrote:On February 11 2014 21:00 Grumbels wrote:
Banelings aren't universally hated for ZvZ in SC2. Effort vs DRG on Tal'darim was one of the best games ever. I would even be okay with Starbow outright copying early-game ZvZ, while making banelings useless in the rest of the match-ups.
Friendly fire is a good concept in general, but for units like banelings and hellions it's simply too user-unfriendly. If you have one baneling in your army and a cloaked ghost walks up and snipes the baneling, your entire army will explode. And if someone drops a Zealot in the middle of a clump of Siege Tanks, your entire army will explode. I don't see any difference. On February 11 2014 21:08 Ramiz1989 wrote:On February 11 2014 18:34 Gnots wrote:
The problem with banelings as I understand it is not necessarily whether they are over or underpowered. We get a patch almost every week that could tweak the numbers if they were found to be one way or another. The problem is that the unit just does not fit into the brood war "style".
It overlaps with the lurker as zergs general splash damage anti-bio unit; the main difference between the two besides debatably efficiency is that the lurker requires positioning, counter play, and has an overall higher skill cap to use while the baneling is for the vast majority of the time just 1a-ed into the bioball with your lings.
Starbow is aiming to remove these deathball clashes from sc2 and bring the game closer to BW with smaller skirmishes and smaller amounts of units spread across the map.Thus, they are considering just removing the unit from the game entirely along with the other deathball-inspiring units like the collosus and sentry.
However, the baneling has established itself in the hearts of many zerg players as one of the most morbidly satisfying units brought into the game by sc2, so it would be a shame to see it go. Instead, I propose a simple yet massive nerf that would remove the unit from any zerg players "standard" army and turn it into more of a niche speciality unit more inline with the brood war philosophy.
The baneling should be changed to do 100% friendly splash damage.
This would essentially remove it from the ling/bling 1a composition and turn the universally hated ZvZ matchup away from the sc2 style it still resembles, but keep the unit in the game as a burrowed land mine, overlord carpet bomb munition, or a hard to pull off but rewarding flank attacker. The unit will then be much more inline with the starbow philosophy in its new role as a niche skirmisher and will be justifiably able to stay and still be usable. That also Means that Banelings would be pretty bad with Zerglings and Ultras, and they are made that way, they should have something to tank for them so they could suicide and not get wasted. So this change is bad on the grounds that Banelings are intrinsically a 1A unit? Lol OK. Ignoring for the moment that you're not painting the unit in a very positive light, there is such a thing as flanking, you know. Not to say that this suggestion is fantastic, but these are some shoddy counter-arguments you guys are dishing out. If "100% splash" is no good, though, here are some alternate suggestions in a similar vein. Give Banelings a new ability, "Combustion On/Off." Then either a Baneling with Combustion Off will deal 0 damage when it dies while Combustion On deals higher-than-current damage with FF, or a Baneling with Combustion Off will deal less-than-current damage with no FF while a Baneling with Combustion On will deal higher-than-current damage with FF. Either way, split-second micro by the Zerg is encouraged to maximize damage output/minimize casualties. Just throwing these out there. I think the biggest mistake that many game designers make is not thinking about "problem domains". This mentality is completely evident in the current designers of SC2 and most if not all RTS games. Most units are designed from a bottom-up approach, come up with a cool design, and then see where it fits in. This is great for marketing, but its terrible for gameplay. BW used a top-down approach for a lot of their units (maybe not all). This is obvious from the fact that each race has a unit for every role, unlike SC2. Within each units design you could see that there was a specific role-oriented design process. Each race is not so different that there isn't a unit that can fill a role, they just have their own unique flavour. In SC2 there are clear gaps where there are no units that can fill a particular role, and instead uses racial traits such as Zerg attrition to make up for it instead, unfortunately this makes the game flow very haphazard, and very difficult if not impossible to balance. Obviously they were going for something but weren't able to achieve it, its like a GO game where every 30 seconds you can put down an extra white piece, but black can kill two pieces at once, looks cool, impossible to balance and doesn't actually improve the game. The biggest fear for the designers of using a top-down approach, is that the baneling may actually be completely worthless from this perspective. This issue would harp all the way back from the initial design process of WoL and we would have to start from back there. Maybe people should have a think about whether the baneling should actually be a unit that should actually be in the game, rather than trying to fix something that may be completely broke no matter what. Sure we may find something for the baneling model, but if anything I think we should consider completely remaking it and fulfilling a problem domain that actually exists for the zerg. I respect your non-partisan attitude and frank approach to the Baneling (and presumably other units), but you give the SC1 designers way too much credit. Each race absolutely did not have a unit for every role even in BW, let alone SC1 vanilla which was seriously broken. Zerg had no effective way to deal with Bio (which was fine because Bio was unusable without Medics!), Terran had no way of dealing with Carriers, Terran and Protoss had no good AtG harass/pressure unit, Protoss and Zerg had very rudimentary area control tools compared to Terran (Protoss never did get one), Protoss early game aggression was very limited, Zerg/Protoss ability to break Terran contains was always pretty limited. So I think it's wrong to raise SC1's unit design onto a pedestal, because a lot of the result was accidental or incidental. This doesn't tell us that it's right to keep the Baneling, but it doesn't tell us that it's wrong to, either. Surely more tinkering with a unit is called for to see if it's capable of finding a home in the roster, especially given that this is a SC2 unit and there are so few of those in SB already.
I don't think I'm giving them credit so much as outlining the fact that they had a completely different approach to the design of the game, which is very apparent.
What you say doesn't invalidate the fact that they used a top down approach or that every unit didn't have a role. BW is tantamount to the fact that they were able to fix issues easily due to a strong foundation (e.g balance carriers with goliath range only).
Compare this to the wacky fixes made in SC2, due to the fact that many units are so gimmicky/specialised and aren't easily balanced, you get very strange fixes like the hellion/hellbat + medic fix, which to me is just an abomination of design.
I disagree with all of those sentiments, I won't go into it too far but SC1 was also more or less held back by resources, they didn't have balance testers and they also just simply just ran out of time. There were units made in SC1 that got held back for the expansion such as the DT.
There could be no balance testing until the game got into the hands of the consumer, SC1 was really like a Beta, and BW was the real game. As for Protoss not having area control, try getting up a walled ramp with 2 reavers and a high templar perched on highground. I've seen ZerO waste multiple 150pop armies just trying to kill a base with that.
Terran and Protoss had no good AtG harass/pressure unit
You need to watch more BW 
Wraiths are an amazing AtG harass/pressure unit. Wraiths are almost a core unit in TvT for this reason, and Leta's wraiths against Zerg are almost unstoppable.
Carriers are used almost primarily for harassment until a critical number has been reached, and are a great pressure unit as well. They aren't just a-moved into enemy armies, they skirt around the edges of the map picking off bases and units where they can't be reached.
Role creation comes from discovering problem domains. "each race has a unit for every role" was probably not the best way to phrase it. However, from a top down approach you consider what problem domains exist for a race and then design units with a role that will fulfil that problem domain.
This damn wall of text needs its own pages :<
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The problem with the current baneling I see is this. What is it supposed to achieve?
The "AoE Infantry Crowd Control" role is effectively already taken by the Lurker. The problem domain is that the Zerg couldn't efficiently handle large numbers of infantry, it was very easy for a Terran to just hit a critical mass of infantry and just stampede into the enemy Zerg base.
The Lurker has a risk/reward factor, it is costly, it has a setup time which can be abused and if left unprotected or out of position can be killed quite easily.
Now as far as I'm concerned the Baneling does the exact same thing. The only issue is that the risk/reward is much less, less risk (mobile), less reward (less efficiency). Most if not all the solutions on the board are basically considering increase the risk/reward factor (e.g make it do more damage, but friendly fire, or use of a baneling "mine"). This doesn't really change anything, there's no strategical difference between a powerful baneling mine, and a "stopped" lurker. Regardless the Lurker doesn't die while effectively being a "mine", which makes that feature a bit of gimmick at best.
You could just increase the damage and have friendly fire. Unfortunately it will never be used until you make it so powerful to cause the Baneling to completely overtake the Lurker, and you will never see the Lurker in game. If you don't make it powerful enough, Lurker flanks are simply just... better.
I think what the designers need to do is discover a problem domain for Zerg (much like Scourge for anti-air), and then figure out what effectively will be how we can use the Baneling model to create a new unit for Zerg. Now I don't know what that is, BW has shown that Zerg can cope fine with its current arsenal already.
I think ZvZ and late game TvZ mech might be a bit of an issue, and I can see something being done there with the baneling which will positively affect other matchups. I think after lots of play testing we might be able to see gaps where Zerg could fare much better and lead to a more interesting game, time based racial-imbalance is never fun (absurdly prevalent in SC2) and I believe the designers should work to mitigate that as much as possible.
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On February 12 2014 09:31 Vejita00 wrote:
What are the odds of bringing back 200/200 cost nukes that can actually kill units? Current nukes feel so weak. I know they don't get used much, but it'd be nice to at least make them worth the trouble to use.
Maybe it is possible to make a nuke radius increase but also increase the cost of nukes to compensate. A nuke that clears most of the screen would be quite badass
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On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:On February 12 2014 03:54 Whanhee wrote:
I think that one of the problems with banelings, as Gnots says, is that they don't really fit into the BW style and they're just simple attack move units that are just included into your zergling mass.
A change that would make them more microable and interesting is to make their detonation an activated ability with a cast time. A zerg player would have to tell the baneling to detonate and after a second(?) of charging up, then it explodes.
This adds more micro and dynamics to both the zerg player and their opponent. Instead of attack moving, zerg would have to intelligently position them to deny space. The opponent needs to then be careful about movement and needs to focus banelings that can cause significant damage.
This change should make banelings much more interesting to play with while still keeping their ability to bust down fortifications. I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. I feel like the Baneling is one of if not the best designed unit unique to SC2, and that the design has a lot to add to Starbow / RTS games in general. I have to agree, Just to clame they should be remove because they are "just an attack move unit that overlaps," We can say that about fierbats. You just add them to your Marines and A-move them, Also they have a similar role with vultures that overlaps as anti light. So should we just remove them as well? No, no we should not as Fierbats and vultures have different compositions, nor should we remove banelings as it adds a different composition and more varied game play. The logic is bogus and you just don't want to micro against them. Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge.
So to continue from my last post with an example here is why the Firebat is important and the Baneling is not.
The problem domain is the infamous Zerg rush. Without Firebats Terran would simply just die to ling-allins every time (not so much new maps but the old maps). This was a racial imbalance that needed to be solved some how, now you could just nerf zergling dps but that would complicate things down the line, so the Firebat was invented. The Firebat effectively stops ling-allins and making the game unfun, while not being too powerful in other aspects of combat.
The other problem domain is that cracklings under dark-swarm kill your entire bio army without losing a single zergling. Which means as soon as Zerg gets darkswarm, the game is over, and that's no fun is it?
Now Terran can do either of two things, make siege tanks, make firebats, and in the more modern meta, plant mines all over the map with late-mech. However if we got rid of Firebats, then every TvZ would devolve into bionic play (bio + mech). This would make the game boring.
Firebats allows the SK_Terran strategy of pure bio units and science vessels which means Terran isn't stuck into having to make factories for Tanks and can instead transition into a heavy bio tempo game. Such a simple unit that significantly improves the game by allowing for more strategies.
Zerg does not have this problem, Zerg does not have to deal with darkswarm and cracklings, if they did, then the baneling would actually be useful, but they already have the lurker, so maybe not. I am still struggling to find an answer for the Baneling.
And when you are looking for a reason to have two units that fulfil the same role you have this problem... grasping for straws
On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:
Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge.
The reason I say this is grasping for straws is that the gas that could have been used to force the terran to back up with banelings, could have just been used to make more lurkers meaning the terran couldn't snipe the lurkers in the first place. You can just leap frog the lurkers, which is the same as moving banelings back and forth and shifting lurkers.
On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:
I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them.
Any tactic that you can think of with baneling/lurker can be done with just lurkers, because they fufil the same role. You can send lurkers around one way to force terran into a bunch of baneling mines, or you can do the same thing and force them into a lurker wall which achieves the same thing and visa-versa.
Lurker drops were common in BW, its not like Banelings suddenly make drops viable again. Drop 2 lurkers into a mineral line and watch the SCV train just simply evaporate, best part is the lurkers are still alive so you can continue to kill buildings and stop the workers from mining. Or you can hide them at the 3rd with hold fire, and as soon as the CC lands and the SCV train comes in, BOOM goodbye all your workers.
Right now anything the Baneling can do, the Lurker can do more efficiently, its as if you only make Banelings if you do not have the skill to maneuver Lurkers well, because if you could, they would do more damage than Banelings. You would need such a radical change like if the Baneling instead of doing damage could be eaten to heal/buff their own units, before it would be something that the Zerg actually needed.
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On February 12 2014 11:37 sluggaslamoo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:On February 12 2014 03:54 Whanhee wrote:
I think that one of the problems with banelings, as Gnots says, is that they don't really fit into the BW style and they're just simple attack move units that are just included into your zergling mass.
A change that would make them more microable and interesting is to make their detonation an activated ability with a cast time. A zerg player would have to tell the baneling to detonate and after a second(?) of charging up, then it explodes.
This adds more micro and dynamics to both the zerg player and their opponent. Instead of attack moving, zerg would have to intelligently position them to deny space. The opponent needs to then be careful about movement and needs to focus banelings that can cause significant damage.
This change should make banelings much more interesting to play with while still keeping their ability to bust down fortifications. I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. I feel like the Baneling is one of if not the best designed unit unique to SC2, and that the design has a lot to add to Starbow / RTS games in general. I have to agree, Just to clame they should be remove because they are "just an attack move unit that overlaps," We can say that about fierbats. You just add them to your Marines and A-move them, Also they have a similar role with vultures that overlaps as anti light. So should we just remove them as well? No, no we should not as Fierbats and vultures have different compositions, nor should we remove banelings as it adds a different composition and more varied game play. The logic is bogus and you just don't want to micro against them. Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge. So to continue from my last post with an example here is why the Firebat is important and the Baneling is not. The problem domain is the infamous Zerg rush. Without Firebats Terran would simply just die to ling-allins every time (not so much new maps but the old maps). This was a racial imbalance that needed to be solved some how, now you could just nerf zergling dps but that would complicate things down the line, so the Firebat was invented. The Firebat effectively stops ling-allins and making the game unfun, while not being too powerful in other aspects of combat. The other problem domain is that cracklings under dark-swarm kill your entire bio army without losing a single zergling. Which means as soon as Zerg gets darkswarm, the game is over, and that's no fun is it? Now Terran can do either of two things, make siege tanks, make firebats, and in the more modern meta, plant mines all over the map with late-mech. However if we got rid of Firebats, then every TvZ would devolve into bionic play (bio + mech). This would make the game boring. Firebats allows the SK_Terran strategy of pure bio units and science vessels which means Terran isn't stuck into having to make factories for Tanks and can instead transition into a heavy bio tempo game. Such a simple unit that significantly improves the game by allowing for more strategies. Zerg does not have this problem, Zerg does not have to deal with darkswarm and cracklings, if they did, then the baneling would actually be useful, but they already have the lurker, so maybe not. I am still struggling to find an answer for the Baneling. And when you are looking for a reason to have two units that fulfil the same role you have this problem... grasping for straws Show nested quote +On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:
Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge.
The reason I say this is grasping for straws is that the gas that could have been used to force the terran to back up with banelings, could have just been used to make more lurkers meaning the terran couldn't snipe the lurkers in the first place. You can just leap frog the lurkers, which is the same as moving banelings back and forth and shifting lurkers. Show nested quote +On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:
I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. Any tactic that you can think of with baneling/lurker can be done with just lurkers, because they fufil the same role. You can send lurkers around one way to force terran into a bunch of baneling mines, or you can do the same thing and force them into a lurker wall which achieves the same thing and visa-versa. Lurker drops were common in BW, its not like Banelings suddenly make drops viable again. Drop 2 lurkers into a mineral line and watch the SCV train just simply evaporate, best part is the lurkers are still alive so you can continue to kill buildings and stop the workers from mining. Or you can hide them at the 3rd with hold fire, and as soon as the CC lands and the SCV train comes in, BOOM goodbye all your workers. Right now anything the Baneling can do, the Lurker can do more efficiently, its as if you only make Banelings if you do not have the skill to maneuver Lurkers well, because if you could, they would do more damage than Banelings. You would need such a radical change like if the Baneling instead of doing damage could be eaten to heal/buff their own units, before it would be something that the Zerg actually needed.
You just made my point, Fierbats let you have a new unit comp.
Banelings do the same. Muta ling baneling.. It has it's own play style that is micro intensive and fragile. It plays compliantly different from ling lurker. Muta ling bane is something you can't do with out the banelings.
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Has Python been fixed yet? The last time I played, I can get to the close by air base through the narrow ground corridor that used to be just a wall of impassable doodads.
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Banelings have a plethora of uses in Starbow..
ZvT: Zergling/Baneling to take a third base before Lair tech. Otherwise you have to wait until your Lair tech is rolling before you can defend an expansion.
ZvP: Ling/Bane to defend +1 Zealot attacks. In BW it was normal to sim city with hatches, tech buildings and spines to defend such attacks. In Starbow Banelings are a very inexpensive way to defend Zealot/Archon, etc.
Also I would disagree with the idea that Lurkers and Banelings overlap. Lurkers are great for holding ground and ramps. Banelings are great for attacking armies. In BW ZvT you don't attack a Marine/Tank/Medic army with Lurker/Ling, you leapfrog back, perhaps trying to snipe Tanks, as you tech to Defilers. With a Ling/Bane/Mutalisk or Ling/Bane/Viper army you can take straight fights with the Terran. Banelings give Zerg a lot of options
The problem domain is the infamous Zerg rush. Without Firebats Terran would simply just die to ling-allins every time (not so much new maps but the old maps). This was a racial imbalance that needed to be solved some how, now you could just nerf zergling dps but that would complicate things down the line, so the Firebat was invented. The Firebat effectively stops ling-allins and making the game unfun, while not being too powerful in other aspects of combat.
This idea that a unit needs a specific role is a bit iffy to me. In Starbow Terran can easily defend ling allins (compared to BW) solely due the fact buildings wall together tightly. Should we remove the Firebat?
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One question concerning the upcoming ladder:
- how will it look like/work?
Is there a way to implement a match making system?
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On February 12 2014 10:04 Jermman wrote:
After playing like 15 matches of sb, I really want the sb ladder to be out. I dont really want to play sc2 anymore.
The feels...
On February 12 2014 12:18 Schopenhauer17 wrote:
One question concerning the upcoming ladder:
- how will it look like/work?
Is there a way to implement a match making system?
I am also curious about this; whether there will be some kind of auto-launcher which puts you into your mm game or whether finding games will be manually done through the website etc.
Maybe even a 3rd-party program of some kind?
Anyways really really hype for the ladder, cannot wait to sink all my free time into it and destroy what remains of my fragile artist hands :D
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On February 12 2014 11:58 WarpTV wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2014 11:37 sluggaslamoo wrote:On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:On February 12 2014 03:54 Whanhee wrote:
I think that one of the problems with banelings, as Gnots says, is that they don't really fit into the BW style and they're just simple attack move units that are just included into your zergling mass.
A change that would make them more microable and interesting is to make their detonation an activated ability with a cast time. A zerg player would have to tell the baneling to detonate and after a second(?) of charging up, then it explodes.
This adds more micro and dynamics to both the zerg player and their opponent. Instead of attack moving, zerg would have to intelligently position them to deny space. The opponent needs to then be careful about movement and needs to focus banelings that can cause significant damage.
This change should make banelings much more interesting to play with while still keeping their ability to bust down fortifications. I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. I feel like the Baneling is one of if not the best designed unit unique to SC2, and that the design has a lot to add to Starbow / RTS games in general. I have to agree, Just to clame they should be remove because they are "just an attack move unit that overlaps," We can say that about fierbats. You just add them to your Marines and A-move them, Also they have a similar role with vultures that overlaps as anti light. So should we just remove them as well? No, no we should not as Fierbats and vultures have different compositions, nor should we remove banelings as it adds a different composition and more varied game play. The logic is bogus and you just don't want to micro against them. Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge. So to continue from my last post with an example here is why the Firebat is important and the Baneling is not. The problem domain is the infamous Zerg rush. Without Firebats Terran would simply just die to ling-allins every time (not so much new maps but the old maps). This was a racial imbalance that needed to be solved some how, now you could just nerf zergling dps but that would complicate things down the line, so the Firebat was invented. The Firebat effectively stops ling-allins and making the game unfun, while not being too powerful in other aspects of combat. The other problem domain is that cracklings under dark-swarm kill your entire bio army without losing a single zergling. Which means as soon as Zerg gets darkswarm, the game is over, and that's no fun is it? Now Terran can do either of two things, make siege tanks, make firebats, and in the more modern meta, plant mines all over the map with late-mech. However if we got rid of Firebats, then every TvZ would devolve into bionic play (bio + mech). This would make the game boring. Firebats allows the SK_Terran strategy of pure bio units and science vessels which means Terran isn't stuck into having to make factories for Tanks and can instead transition into a heavy bio tempo game. Such a simple unit that significantly improves the game by allowing for more strategies. Zerg does not have this problem, Zerg does not have to deal with darkswarm and cracklings, if they did, then the baneling would actually be useful, but they already have the lurker, so maybe not. I am still struggling to find an answer for the Baneling. And when you are looking for a reason to have two units that fulfil the same role you have this problem... grasping for straws On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:
Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge.
The reason I say this is grasping for straws is that the gas that could have been used to force the terran to back up with banelings, could have just been used to make more lurkers meaning the terran couldn't snipe the lurkers in the first place. You can just leap frog the lurkers, which is the same as moving banelings back and forth and shifting lurkers. On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:
I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. Any tactic that you can think of with baneling/lurker can be done with just lurkers, because they fufil the same role. You can send lurkers around one way to force terran into a bunch of baneling mines, or you can do the same thing and force them into a lurker wall which achieves the same thing and visa-versa. Lurker drops were common in BW, its not like Banelings suddenly make drops viable again. Drop 2 lurkers into a mineral line and watch the SCV train just simply evaporate, best part is the lurkers are still alive so you can continue to kill buildings and stop the workers from mining. Or you can hide them at the 3rd with hold fire, and as soon as the CC lands and the SCV train comes in, BOOM goodbye all your workers. Right now anything the Baneling can do, the Lurker can do more efficiently, its as if you only make Banelings if you do not have the skill to maneuver Lurkers well, because if you could, they would do more damage than Banelings. You would need such a radical change like if the Baneling instead of doing damage could be eaten to heal/buff their own units, before it would be something that the Zerg actually needed. You just made my point, Fierbats let you have a new unit comp. Banelings do the same. Muta ling baneling.. It has it's own play style that is micro intensive and fragile. It plays compliantly different from ling lurker. Muta ling bane is something you can't do with out the banelings.
I think you are getting confused it is not a new composition, it the same composition only with banelings added.
Without Banelings you would still have Muta Ling, that doesn't change anything except now you have Banelings in the mix. Muta/Ling behaves almost exactly the same as Muta/Ling/Bane, there's also barely any improvement, I could link you to some of Jaedongs ZvZ's and adding Banelings would have not have improved it, even though there is a lot of ground to be made in the matchup design wise.
Firebats enable you to put down 8 raxes and 2 starports, instead of having 5 raxes 2 factories and 1 starport. They enable you to NOT have to build tanks and build science vessels instead. They enable a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT composition and COMPLETELY DIFFERENT gameplay.
This would be like saying without Banelings, Muta/Ling would be impossible and you could ONLY play Lurker/Ling. That's how much difference this unit makes.
Bionic = Methodical positional play with harassment
SKTerran = Aggressive tempo game
If the baneling could somehow do that I wouldn't have a problem with it. At the moment the baneling fulfils a need much like the widow mine did for Terran.
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On February 12 2014 08:26 Daumen wrote:
Whats up with Starbow Arena btw? so many ppl are excited for the upcoming Starbow Ladder but they show no interest with the Ladder that we already have, how come?
It's not like it's hard to get games, and what's the point of playing an unofficial ladder when there's an official one coming out soon? That's not a slight to the makers of StarbowArena but there's not much of an incentive to play it when the points won't even matter when the official ladder comes out.
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On February 12 2014 13:33 sluggaslamoo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2014 11:58 WarpTV wrote:On February 12 2014 11:37 sluggaslamoo wrote:On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:On February 12 2014 03:54 Whanhee wrote:
I think that one of the problems with banelings, as Gnots says, is that they don't really fit into the BW style and they're just simple attack move units that are just included into your zergling mass.
A change that would make them more microable and interesting is to make their detonation an activated ability with a cast time. A zerg player would have to tell the baneling to detonate and after a second(?) of charging up, then it explodes.
This adds more micro and dynamics to both the zerg player and their opponent. Instead of attack moving, zerg would have to intelligently position them to deny space. The opponent needs to then be careful about movement and needs to focus banelings that can cause significant damage.
This change should make banelings much more interesting to play with while still keeping their ability to bust down fortifications. I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. I feel like the Baneling is one of if not the best designed unit unique to SC2, and that the design has a lot to add to Starbow / RTS games in general. I have to agree, Just to clame they should be remove because they are "just an attack move unit that overlaps," We can say that about fierbats. You just add them to your Marines and A-move them, Also they have a similar role with vultures that overlaps as anti light. So should we just remove them as well? No, no we should not as Fierbats and vultures have different compositions, nor should we remove banelings as it adds a different composition and more varied game play. The logic is bogus and you just don't want to micro against them. Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge. So to continue from my last post with an example here is why the Firebat is important and the Baneling is not. The problem domain is the infamous Zerg rush. Without Firebats Terran would simply just die to ling-allins every time (not so much new maps but the old maps). This was a racial imbalance that needed to be solved some how, now you could just nerf zergling dps but that would complicate things down the line, so the Firebat was invented. The Firebat effectively stops ling-allins and making the game unfun, while not being too powerful in other aspects of combat. The other problem domain is that cracklings under dark-swarm kill your entire bio army without losing a single zergling. Which means as soon as Zerg gets darkswarm, the game is over, and that's no fun is it? Now Terran can do either of two things, make siege tanks, make firebats, and in the more modern meta, plant mines all over the map with late-mech. However if we got rid of Firebats, then every TvZ would devolve into bionic play (bio + mech). This would make the game boring. Firebats allows the SK_Terran strategy of pure bio units and science vessels which means Terran isn't stuck into having to make factories for Tanks and can instead transition into a heavy bio tempo game. Such a simple unit that significantly improves the game by allowing for more strategies. Zerg does not have this problem, Zerg does not have to deal with darkswarm and cracklings, if they did, then the baneling would actually be useful, but they already have the lurker, so maybe not. I am still struggling to find an answer for the Baneling. And when you are looking for a reason to have two units that fulfil the same role you have this problem... grasping for straws On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:
Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge.
The reason I say this is grasping for straws is that the gas that could have been used to force the terran to back up with banelings, could have just been used to make more lurkers meaning the terran couldn't snipe the lurkers in the first place. You can just leap frog the lurkers, which is the same as moving banelings back and forth and shifting lurkers. On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:
I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. Any tactic that you can think of with baneling/lurker can be done with just lurkers, because they fufil the same role. You can send lurkers around one way to force terran into a bunch of baneling mines, or you can do the same thing and force them into a lurker wall which achieves the same thing and visa-versa. Lurker drops were common in BW, its not like Banelings suddenly make drops viable again. Drop 2 lurkers into a mineral line and watch the SCV train just simply evaporate, best part is the lurkers are still alive so you can continue to kill buildings and stop the workers from mining. Or you can hide them at the 3rd with hold fire, and as soon as the CC lands and the SCV train comes in, BOOM goodbye all your workers. Right now anything the Baneling can do, the Lurker can do more efficiently, its as if you only make Banelings if you do not have the skill to maneuver Lurkers well, because if you could, they would do more damage than Banelings. You would need such a radical change like if the Baneling instead of doing damage could be eaten to heal/buff their own units, before it would be something that the Zerg actually needed. You just made my point, Fierbats let you have a new unit comp. Banelings do the same. Muta ling baneling.. It has it's own play style that is micro intensive and fragile. It plays compliantly different from ling lurker. Muta ling bane is something you can't do with out the banelings. I think you are getting confused it is not a new composition, it the same composition only with banelings added. Without Banelings you would still have Muta Ling, that doesn't change anything except now you have Banelings in the mix. Muta/Ling behaves almost exactly the same as Muta/Ling/Bane, there's also barely any improvement, I could link you to some of Jaedongs ZvZ's and adding Banelings would have not have improved it, even though there is a lot of ground to be made in the matchup design wise. Firebats enable you to put down 8 raxes and 2 starports, instead of having 5 raxes 2 factories and 1 starport. They enable you to NOT have to build tanks and build science vessels instead. They enable a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT composition and COMPLETELY DIFFERENT gameplay.
So if SB broke off into two different versions for one year, exactly the same except one has Banelings in it and the other doesn't, you're saying that you're one hundred percent confident that after one year, nothing at all would be different between the TvZs of those two versions except that where one would have the Muta/Ling, the other would have the more effective Muta/Ling/Bane. You are certain that the existence of the Baneling would not allow the Zerg to do anything at all that he can't already with that single exception. You are also certain that Muta/Ling will be effective enough to be standard, and will not need the boost of Banes to function in SB's updated MUs.
Am I reading you correctly?
If you're not perfectly confident, then it's way too early to say that Banelings won't open up options for Z the way Firebats do for T. If you are, then I gotta say that's some pretty impressive Nostradamusing at work.
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On February 12 2014 13:41 GoShox wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2014 08:26 Daumen wrote:
Whats up with Starbow Arena btw? so many ppl are excited for the upcoming Starbow Ladder but they show no interest with the Ladder that we already have, how come? It's not like it's hard to get games, and what's the point of playing an unofficial ladder when there's an official one coming out soon? That's not a slight to the makers of StarbowArena but there's not much of an incentive to play it when the points won't even matter when the official ladder comes out.
I think its hard to get games, on EU at least. Tried US today but the delay is annoying ;<
I can only play Starbow atm at midnight (gmt+1) :x
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On February 12 2014 13:46 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2014 13:33 sluggaslamoo wrote:On February 12 2014 11:58 WarpTV wrote:On February 12 2014 11:37 sluggaslamoo wrote:On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:On February 12 2014 03:54 Whanhee wrote:
I think that one of the problems with banelings, as Gnots says, is that they don't really fit into the BW style and they're just simple attack move units that are just included into your zergling mass.
A change that would make them more microable and interesting is to make their detonation an activated ability with a cast time. A zerg player would have to tell the baneling to detonate and after a second(?) of charging up, then it explodes.
This adds more micro and dynamics to both the zerg player and their opponent. Instead of attack moving, zerg would have to intelligently position them to deny space. The opponent needs to then be careful about movement and needs to focus banelings that can cause significant damage.
This change should make banelings much more interesting to play with while still keeping their ability to bust down fortifications. I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. I feel like the Baneling is one of if not the best designed unit unique to SC2, and that the design has a lot to add to Starbow / RTS games in general. I have to agree, Just to clame they should be remove because they are "just an attack move unit that overlaps," We can say that about fierbats. You just add them to your Marines and A-move them, Also they have a similar role with vultures that overlaps as anti light. So should we just remove them as well? No, no we should not as Fierbats and vultures have different compositions, nor should we remove banelings as it adds a different composition and more varied game play. The logic is bogus and you just don't want to micro against them. Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge. So to continue from my last post with an example here is why the Firebat is important and the Baneling is not. The problem domain is the infamous Zerg rush. Without Firebats Terran would simply just die to ling-allins every time (not so much new maps but the old maps). This was a racial imbalance that needed to be solved some how, now you could just nerf zergling dps but that would complicate things down the line, so the Firebat was invented. The Firebat effectively stops ling-allins and making the game unfun, while not being too powerful in other aspects of combat. The other problem domain is that cracklings under dark-swarm kill your entire bio army without losing a single zergling. Which means as soon as Zerg gets darkswarm, the game is over, and that's no fun is it? Now Terran can do either of two things, make siege tanks, make firebats, and in the more modern meta, plant mines all over the map with late-mech. However if we got rid of Firebats, then every TvZ would devolve into bionic play (bio + mech). This would make the game boring. Firebats allows the SK_Terran strategy of pure bio units and science vessels which means Terran isn't stuck into having to make factories for Tanks and can instead transition into a heavy bio tempo game. Such a simple unit that significantly improves the game by allowing for more strategies. Zerg does not have this problem, Zerg does not have to deal with darkswarm and cracklings, if they did, then the baneling would actually be useful, but they already have the lurker, so maybe not. I am still struggling to find an answer for the Baneling. And when you are looking for a reason to have two units that fulfil the same role you have this problem... grasping for straws On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:
Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge.
The reason I say this is grasping for straws is that the gas that could have been used to force the terran to back up with banelings, could have just been used to make more lurkers meaning the terran couldn't snipe the lurkers in the first place. You can just leap frog the lurkers, which is the same as moving banelings back and forth and shifting lurkers. On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:
I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. Any tactic that you can think of with baneling/lurker can be done with just lurkers, because they fufil the same role. You can send lurkers around one way to force terran into a bunch of baneling mines, or you can do the same thing and force them into a lurker wall which achieves the same thing and visa-versa. Lurker drops were common in BW, its not like Banelings suddenly make drops viable again. Drop 2 lurkers into a mineral line and watch the SCV train just simply evaporate, best part is the lurkers are still alive so you can continue to kill buildings and stop the workers from mining. Or you can hide them at the 3rd with hold fire, and as soon as the CC lands and the SCV train comes in, BOOM goodbye all your workers. Right now anything the Baneling can do, the Lurker can do more efficiently, its as if you only make Banelings if you do not have the skill to maneuver Lurkers well, because if you could, they would do more damage than Banelings. You would need such a radical change like if the Baneling instead of doing damage could be eaten to heal/buff their own units, before it would be something that the Zerg actually needed. You just made my point, Fierbats let you have a new unit comp. Banelings do the same. Muta ling baneling.. It has it's own play style that is micro intensive and fragile. It plays compliantly different from ling lurker. Muta ling bane is something you can't do with out the banelings. I think you are getting confused it is not a new composition, it the same composition only with banelings added. Without Banelings you would still have Muta Ling, that doesn't change anything except now you have Banelings in the mix. Muta/Ling behaves almost exactly the same as Muta/Ling/Bane, there's also barely any improvement, I could link you to some of Jaedongs ZvZ's and adding Banelings would have not have improved it, even though there is a lot of ground to be made in the matchup design wise. Firebats enable you to put down 8 raxes and 2 starports, instead of having 5 raxes 2 factories and 1 starport. They enable you to NOT have to build tanks and build science vessels instead. They enable a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT composition and COMPLETELY DIFFERENT gameplay. So if SB broke off into two different versions for one year, exactly the same except one has Banelings in it and the other doesn't, you're saying that you're one hundred percent confident that after one year, nothing at all would be different between the TvZs of those two versions except that where one would have the Muta/Ling, the other would have the more effective Muta/Ling/Bane. You are certain that the existence of the Baneling would not allow the Zerg to do anything at all that he can't already with that single exception. You are also certain that Muta/Ling will be effective enough to be standard, and will not need the boost of Banes to function in SB's updated MUs. Am I reading you correctly? If you're not perfectly confident, then it's way too early to say that Banelings won't open up options for Z the way Firebats do for T. If you are, then I gotta say that's some pretty impressive Nostradamusing at work.
Yea I am not going to feed the troll on this any more. He really just does not want to deal with banes. micro is hard after all.
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On February 12 2014 14:34 WarpTV wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2014 13:46 pure.Wasted wrote:On February 12 2014 13:33 sluggaslamoo wrote:On February 12 2014 11:58 WarpTV wrote:On February 12 2014 11:37 sluggaslamoo wrote:On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:On February 12 2014 03:54 Whanhee wrote:
I think that one of the problems with banelings, as Gnots says, is that they don't really fit into the BW style and they're just simple attack move units that are just included into your zergling mass.
A change that would make them more microable and interesting is to make their detonation an activated ability with a cast time. A zerg player would have to tell the baneling to detonate and after a second(?) of charging up, then it explodes.
This adds more micro and dynamics to both the zerg player and their opponent. Instead of attack moving, zerg would have to intelligently position them to deny space. The opponent needs to then be careful about movement and needs to focus banelings that can cause significant damage.
This change should make banelings much more interesting to play with while still keeping their ability to bust down fortifications. I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. I feel like the Baneling is one of if not the best designed unit unique to SC2, and that the design has a lot to add to Starbow / RTS games in general. I have to agree, Just to clame they should be remove because they are "just an attack move unit that overlaps," We can say that about fierbats. You just add them to your Marines and A-move them, Also they have a similar role with vultures that overlaps as anti light. So should we just remove them as well? No, no we should not as Fierbats and vultures have different compositions, nor should we remove banelings as it adds a different composition and more varied game play. The logic is bogus and you just don't want to micro against them. Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge. So to continue from my last post with an example here is why the Firebat is important and the Baneling is not. The problem domain is the infamous Zerg rush. Without Firebats Terran would simply just die to ling-allins every time (not so much new maps but the old maps). This was a racial imbalance that needed to be solved some how, now you could just nerf zergling dps but that would complicate things down the line, so the Firebat was invented. The Firebat effectively stops ling-allins and making the game unfun, while not being too powerful in other aspects of combat. The other problem domain is that cracklings under dark-swarm kill your entire bio army without losing a single zergling. Which means as soon as Zerg gets darkswarm, the game is over, and that's no fun is it? Now Terran can do either of two things, make siege tanks, make firebats, and in the more modern meta, plant mines all over the map with late-mech. However if we got rid of Firebats, then every TvZ would devolve into bionic play (bio + mech). This would make the game boring. Firebats allows the SK_Terran strategy of pure bio units and science vessels which means Terran isn't stuck into having to make factories for Tanks and can instead transition into a heavy bio tempo game. Such a simple unit that significantly improves the game by allowing for more strategies. Zerg does not have this problem, Zerg does not have to deal with darkswarm and cracklings, if they did, then the baneling would actually be useful, but they already have the lurker, so maybe not. I am still struggling to find an answer for the Baneling. And when you are looking for a reason to have two units that fulfil the same role you have this problem... grasping for straws On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:
Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge.
The reason I say this is grasping for straws is that the gas that could have been used to force the terran to back up with banelings, could have just been used to make more lurkers meaning the terran couldn't snipe the lurkers in the first place. You can just leap frog the lurkers, which is the same as moving banelings back and forth and shifting lurkers. On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:
I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. Any tactic that you can think of with baneling/lurker can be done with just lurkers, because they fufil the same role. You can send lurkers around one way to force terran into a bunch of baneling mines, or you can do the same thing and force them into a lurker wall which achieves the same thing and visa-versa. Lurker drops were common in BW, its not like Banelings suddenly make drops viable again. Drop 2 lurkers into a mineral line and watch the SCV train just simply evaporate, best part is the lurkers are still alive so you can continue to kill buildings and stop the workers from mining. Or you can hide them at the 3rd with hold fire, and as soon as the CC lands and the SCV train comes in, BOOM goodbye all your workers. Right now anything the Baneling can do, the Lurker can do more efficiently, its as if you only make Banelings if you do not have the skill to maneuver Lurkers well, because if you could, they would do more damage than Banelings. You would need such a radical change like if the Baneling instead of doing damage could be eaten to heal/buff their own units, before it would be something that the Zerg actually needed. You just made my point, Fierbats let you have a new unit comp. Banelings do the same. Muta ling baneling.. It has it's own play style that is micro intensive and fragile. It plays compliantly different from ling lurker. Muta ling bane is something you can't do with out the banelings. I think you are getting confused it is not a new composition, it the same composition only with banelings added. Without Banelings you would still have Muta Ling, that doesn't change anything except now you have Banelings in the mix. Muta/Ling behaves almost exactly the same as Muta/Ling/Bane, there's also barely any improvement, I could link you to some of Jaedongs ZvZ's and adding Banelings would have not have improved it, even though there is a lot of ground to be made in the matchup design wise. Firebats enable you to put down 8 raxes and 2 starports, instead of having 5 raxes 2 factories and 1 starport. They enable you to NOT have to build tanks and build science vessels instead. They enable a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT composition and COMPLETELY DIFFERENT gameplay. So if SB broke off into two different versions for one year, exactly the same except one has Banelings in it and the other doesn't, you're saying that you're one hundred percent confident that after one year, nothing at all would be different between the TvZs of those two versions except that where one would have the Muta/Ling, the other would have the more effective Muta/Ling/Bane. You are certain that the existence of the Baneling would not allow the Zerg to do anything at all that he can't already with that single exception. You are also certain that Muta/Ling will be effective enough to be standard, and will not need the boost of Banes to function in SB's updated MUs. Am I reading you correctly? If you're not perfectly confident, then it's way too early to say that Banelings won't open up options for Z the way Firebats do for T. If you are, then I gotta say that's some pretty impressive Nostradamusing at work. Yea I am not going to feed the troll on this any more. He really just does not want to deal with banes. micro is hard after all.
Is there really a need to call anyone a troll here? We're having a nice discussion about non-concrete concepts, I think there's room for a lot of different perspectives. Especially one so intimately versed in BW.
Anyway, it's not as if Lurkers are pushovers compared to Banes.
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On February 12 2014 13:46 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2014 13:33 sluggaslamoo wrote:On February 12 2014 11:58 WarpTV wrote:On February 12 2014 11:37 sluggaslamoo wrote:On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:On February 12 2014 03:54 Whanhee wrote:
I think that one of the problems with banelings, as Gnots says, is that they don't really fit into the BW style and they're just simple attack move units that are just included into your zergling mass.
A change that would make them more microable and interesting is to make their detonation an activated ability with a cast time. A zerg player would have to tell the baneling to detonate and after a second(?) of charging up, then it explodes.
This adds more micro and dynamics to both the zerg player and their opponent. Instead of attack moving, zerg would have to intelligently position them to deny space. The opponent needs to then be careful about movement and needs to focus banelings that can cause significant damage.
This change should make banelings much more interesting to play with while still keeping their ability to bust down fortifications. I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. I feel like the Baneling is one of if not the best designed unit unique to SC2, and that the design has a lot to add to Starbow / RTS games in general. I have to agree, Just to clame they should be remove because they are "just an attack move unit that overlaps," We can say that about fierbats. You just add them to your Marines and A-move them, Also they have a similar role with vultures that overlaps as anti light. So should we just remove them as well? No, no we should not as Fierbats and vultures have different compositions, nor should we remove banelings as it adds a different composition and more varied game play. The logic is bogus and you just don't want to micro against them. Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge. So to continue from my last post with an example here is why the Firebat is important and the Baneling is not. The problem domain is the infamous Zerg rush. Without Firebats Terran would simply just die to ling-allins every time (not so much new maps but the old maps). This was a racial imbalance that needed to be solved some how, now you could just nerf zergling dps but that would complicate things down the line, so the Firebat was invented. The Firebat effectively stops ling-allins and making the game unfun, while not being too powerful in other aspects of combat. The other problem domain is that cracklings under dark-swarm kill your entire bio army without losing a single zergling. Which means as soon as Zerg gets darkswarm, the game is over, and that's no fun is it? Now Terran can do either of two things, make siege tanks, make firebats, and in the more modern meta, plant mines all over the map with late-mech. However if we got rid of Firebats, then every TvZ would devolve into bionic play (bio + mech). This would make the game boring. Firebats allows the SK_Terran strategy of pure bio units and science vessels which means Terran isn't stuck into having to make factories for Tanks and can instead transition into a heavy bio tempo game. Such a simple unit that significantly improves the game by allowing for more strategies. Zerg does not have this problem, Zerg does not have to deal with darkswarm and cracklings, if they did, then the baneling would actually be useful, but they already have the lurker, so maybe not. I am still struggling to find an answer for the Baneling. And when you are looking for a reason to have two units that fulfil the same role you have this problem... grasping for straws On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:
Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge.
The reason I say this is grasping for straws is that the gas that could have been used to force the terran to back up with banelings, could have just been used to make more lurkers meaning the terran couldn't snipe the lurkers in the first place. You can just leap frog the lurkers, which is the same as moving banelings back and forth and shifting lurkers. On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:
I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. Any tactic that you can think of with baneling/lurker can be done with just lurkers, because they fufil the same role. You can send lurkers around one way to force terran into a bunch of baneling mines, or you can do the same thing and force them into a lurker wall which achieves the same thing and visa-versa. Lurker drops were common in BW, its not like Banelings suddenly make drops viable again. Drop 2 lurkers into a mineral line and watch the SCV train just simply evaporate, best part is the lurkers are still alive so you can continue to kill buildings and stop the workers from mining. Or you can hide them at the 3rd with hold fire, and as soon as the CC lands and the SCV train comes in, BOOM goodbye all your workers. Right now anything the Baneling can do, the Lurker can do more efficiently, its as if you only make Banelings if you do not have the skill to maneuver Lurkers well, because if you could, they would do more damage than Banelings. You would need such a radical change like if the Baneling instead of doing damage could be eaten to heal/buff their own units, before it would be something that the Zerg actually needed. You just made my point, Fierbats let you have a new unit comp. Banelings do the same. Muta ling baneling.. It has it's own play style that is micro intensive and fragile. It plays compliantly different from ling lurker. Muta ling bane is something you can't do with out the banelings. I think you are getting confused it is not a new composition, it the same composition only with banelings added. Without Banelings you would still have Muta Ling, that doesn't change anything except now you have Banelings in the mix. Muta/Ling behaves almost exactly the same as Muta/Ling/Bane, there's also barely any improvement, I could link you to some of Jaedongs ZvZ's and adding Banelings would have not have improved it, even though there is a lot of ground to be made in the matchup design wise. Firebats enable you to put down 8 raxes and 2 starports, instead of having 5 raxes 2 factories and 1 starport. They enable you to NOT have to build tanks and build science vessels instead. They enable a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT composition and COMPLETELY DIFFERENT gameplay. So if SB broke off into two different versions for one year, exactly the same except one has Banelings in it and the other doesn't, you're saying that you're one hundred percent confident that after one year, nothing at all would be different between the TvZs of those two versions except that where one would have the Muta/Ling, the other would have the more effective Muta/Ling/Bane. You are certain that the existence of the Baneling would not allow the Zerg to do anything at all that he can't already with that single exception. You are also certain that Muta/Ling will be effective enough to be standard, and will not need the boost of Banes to function in SB's updated MUs. Am I reading you correctly? If you're not perfectly confident, then it's way too early to say that Banelings won't open up options for Z the way Firebats do for T. If you are, then I gotta say that's some pretty impressive Nostradamusing at work.
This is pretty much how we wasted 4 years of SC2 and look what happened. Some people complained that the Colossus was boring and had no micro potential, other people labelled them as "trolls" and said the Colossus "could be microed", that there was "potential", and there was no way to predict the future.
In the end look what happened, the Colossus hasn't changed, its still as boring as it was in Beta. No we didn't develop leet micro skills and it didn't evolve gameplay. This is how I perceive the baneling when the Lurker is already in existence.
People will deny and say look the baneling is doing all these wonderful things, and I say yeah... wonderful things that could have been done better with the Lurker. Its like comparing Colossus drops to Reaver drops.
I'm not saying I don't want the Baneling, I'm saying the current ideas that people have to improve the baneling are looking at it in the wrong way. You are just thinking of making the Baneling better at doing the Lurkers role than the Lurker.
Trust me anything I've seen with the Baneling so far its not like it can't be done better and more interestingly with the Lurker, the only thing the Baneling has going for it is the fact that it doesn't need Lair. I'm sure you wouldn't be seeing many Banelings if you put the Lurker at Hatchery tech.
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The thing i like about the baneling is zerg can choose a different strategy in the opening.
Fast third into speedlings/banes and delay lair. Terran goes bio pressure, zerg well adds banes and can also add static defence.
Now, could this be done with pure lings and static defence?
How if that is so?
1) Lings/melee units move alot better here, and attack alot better
2) Zerg can root his static defence.
3) Doesnt delay Lair that much->adds lurkers when its done or mutas/deponding on how much pressure terr do
I dont know if it can work. So banes might be useful here.
Its fun to play against banes when its small numbers, and they dont have their movementspeed
You can target fire easier. Dodge them somewhat. All in all, the micro becomes more relevant for the terran, but not so much for zerg.
In bigger battles, and when they have speed. Its not very fun imo, lurkers are funnier to play against and watch in the long run.
When terran pressures zerg when he goes mass lings/banes, its more or less about numbers imo
If we imagine zerg stays on lair and goes mass lings/lurks +scourge. Maybe some mutas.
The fights are more intensive and the micro is more relevant for both.
Imo if baneling should stay i want much more relevant micro for him as zerg.
Yes, i know he can flank. Move command so let his death do the damage, to let him get closer to the marines(the light units when he die).
Lings can block, banelings can crush.
There are still micro, iam not saying it aint but degree wise its not as much as the lurker.
@Warptv
Please stay away from comments like that. Seriously.
He made some really good points.
I wrote some balance concerns about the baneling on a few pages back.
The post about "widowmines" , i have a spoilertag down there.
I feel its balance concerns to about the baneling.
But ofcourse, more testing is needed, but i brought up some good points imo
EDIT:
When i say it opens up a new strategy for zerg in the opening, what it also do is makes terran react in a different way(which is good).
He can delay his tech->goe more rax macro.
To quote slug
I'm sure you wouldn't be seeing many Banelings if you put the Lurker at Hatchery tech.
Good point again
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On February 12 2014 14:47 sluggaslamoo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2014 13:46 pure.Wasted wrote:On February 12 2014 13:33 sluggaslamoo wrote:On February 12 2014 11:58 WarpTV wrote:On February 12 2014 11:37 sluggaslamoo wrote:On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:On February 12 2014 03:54 Whanhee wrote:
I think that one of the problems with banelings, as Gnots says, is that they don't really fit into the BW style and they're just simple attack move units that are just included into your zergling mass.
A change that would make them more microable and interesting is to make their detonation an activated ability with a cast time. A zerg player would have to tell the baneling to detonate and after a second(?) of charging up, then it explodes.
This adds more micro and dynamics to both the zerg player and their opponent. Instead of attack moving, zerg would have to intelligently position them to deny space. The opponent needs to then be careful about movement and needs to focus banelings that can cause significant damage.
This change should make banelings much more interesting to play with while still keeping their ability to bust down fortifications. I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. I feel like the Baneling is one of if not the best designed unit unique to SC2, and that the design has a lot to add to Starbow / RTS games in general. I have to agree, Just to clame they should be remove because they are "just an attack move unit that overlaps," We can say that about fierbats. You just add them to your Marines and A-move them, Also they have a similar role with vultures that overlaps as anti light. So should we just remove them as well? No, no we should not as Fierbats and vultures have different compositions, nor should we remove banelings as it adds a different composition and more varied game play. The logic is bogus and you just don't want to micro against them. Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge. So to continue from my last post with an example here is why the Firebat is important and the Baneling is not. The problem domain is the infamous Zerg rush. Without Firebats Terran would simply just die to ling-allins every time (not so much new maps but the old maps). This was a racial imbalance that needed to be solved some how, now you could just nerf zergling dps but that would complicate things down the line, so the Firebat was invented. The Firebat effectively stops ling-allins and making the game unfun, while not being too powerful in other aspects of combat. The other problem domain is that cracklings under dark-swarm kill your entire bio army without losing a single zergling. Which means as soon as Zerg gets darkswarm, the game is over, and that's no fun is it? Now Terran can do either of two things, make siege tanks, make firebats, and in the more modern meta, plant mines all over the map with late-mech. However if we got rid of Firebats, then every TvZ would devolve into bionic play (bio + mech). This would make the game boring. Firebats allows the SK_Terran strategy of pure bio units and science vessels which means Terran isn't stuck into having to make factories for Tanks and can instead transition into a heavy bio tempo game. Such a simple unit that significantly improves the game by allowing for more strategies. Zerg does not have this problem, Zerg does not have to deal with darkswarm and cracklings, if they did, then the baneling would actually be useful, but they already have the lurker, so maybe not. I am still struggling to find an answer for the Baneling. And when you are looking for a reason to have two units that fulfil the same role you have this problem... grasping for straws On February 12 2014 10:50 WarpTV wrote:
Lurkers even work well with banelings. Ling bane can force a terrain to back up when they try a snipe off lurkers. Lurker, ling, bane, scourge mid games, have a ton more micro out of both players than just Luker/ling or ling/bane with scourge.
The reason I say this is grasping for straws is that the gas that could have been used to force the terran to back up with banelings, could have just been used to make more lurkers meaning the terran couldn't snipe the lurkers in the first place. You can just leap frog the lurkers, which is the same as moving banelings back and forth and shifting lurkers. On February 12 2014 04:24 Pursuit_ wrote:
I feel like Banelings have a ton of versatility beyond just an a-move unit, they can be dropped into mineral lines / onto armies and burrowed to be used as land mines, and they force really interesting / unique counter micro out of their opponent (splitting zerglings / marine / zealots ect vs banelings is very different from how you split vs other forms of AoE). Not to mention they are extremely vulnerable to AoE (tanks / vulture mines / storms / reavers / lurkers / other banelings ect), so you want to keep them well spread in most situations, not a-move them. Any tactic that you can think of with baneling/lurker can be done with just lurkers, because they fufil the same role. You can send lurkers around one way to force terran into a bunch of baneling mines, or you can do the same thing and force them into a lurker wall which achieves the same thing and visa-versa. Lurker drops were common in BW, its not like Banelings suddenly make drops viable again. Drop 2 lurkers into a mineral line and watch the SCV train just simply evaporate, best part is the lurkers are still alive so you can continue to kill buildings and stop the workers from mining. Or you can hide them at the 3rd with hold fire, and as soon as the CC lands and the SCV train comes in, BOOM goodbye all your workers. Right now anything the Baneling can do, the Lurker can do more efficiently, its as if you only make Banelings if you do not have the skill to maneuver Lurkers well, because if you could, they would do more damage than Banelings. You would need such a radical change like if the Baneling instead of doing damage could be eaten to heal/buff their own units, before it would be something that the Zerg actually needed. You just made my point, Fierbats let you have a new unit comp. Banelings do the same. Muta ling baneling.. It has it's own play style that is micro intensive and fragile. It plays compliantly different from ling lurker. Muta ling bane is something you can't do with out the banelings. I think you are getting confused it is not a new composition, it the same composition only with banelings added. Without Banelings you would still have Muta Ling, that doesn't change anything except now you have Banelings in the mix. Muta/Ling behaves almost exactly the same as Muta/Ling/Bane, there's also barely any improvement, I could link you to some of Jaedongs ZvZ's and adding Banelings would have not have improved it, even though there is a lot of ground to be made in the matchup design wise. Firebats enable you to put down 8 raxes and 2 starports, instead of having 5 raxes 2 factories and 1 starport. They enable you to NOT have to build tanks and build science vessels instead. They enable a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT composition and COMPLETELY DIFFERENT gameplay. So if SB broke off into two different versions for one year, exactly the same except one has Banelings in it and the other doesn't, you're saying that you're one hundred percent confident that after one year, nothing at all would be different between the TvZs of those two versions except that where one would have the Muta/Ling, the other would have the more effective Muta/Ling/Bane. You are certain that the existence of the Baneling would not allow the Zerg to do anything at all that he can't already with that single exception. You are also certain that Muta/Ling will be effective enough to be standard, and will not need the boost of Banes to function in SB's updated MUs. Am I reading you correctly? If you're not perfectly confident, then it's way too early to say that Banelings won't open up options for Z the way Firebats do for T. If you are, then I gotta say that's some pretty impressive Nostradamusing at work. This is pretty much how we wasted 4 years of SC2 and look what happened. Some people complained that the Colossus was boring and had no micro potential, other people labelled them as "trolls" and said the Colossus "could be microed", that there was "potential", and there was no way to predict the future. In the end look what happened, the Colossus hasn't changed, its still as boring as it was in Beta. No we didn't develop leet micro skills and it didn't evolve gameplay. This is how I perceive the baneling when the Lurker is already in existence. People will deny and say look the baneling is doing all these wonderful things, and I say yeah... wonderful things that could have been done better with the Lurker. Its like comparing Colossus drops to Reaver drops. I'm not saying I don't want the Baneling, I'm saying the current ideas that people have to improve the baneling are looking at it in the wrong way. You are just thinking of making the Baneling better at doing the Lurkers role than the Lurker. Trust me anything I've seen with the Baneling so far its not like it can't be done better and more interestingly with the Lurker, the only thing the Baneling has going for it is the fact that it doesn't need Lair. I'm sure you wouldn't be seeing many Banelings if you put the Lurker at Hatchery tech.
I get your dissatisfaction, but I think you're comparing apples and oranges. Colossus is a terrible unit because it has no skill floor and a very low skill ceiling. Banes have a moderate skill floor (especially around Spider Mines) and an equal or higher skill ceiling to plenty of other units that make SB's cut, including Zerglings, Roaches, Goliaths, Zealots, and Dragoons, off the top of my head.
Banes have the potential to introduce new dynamics into SB (because they're not shut down by Science Vessels but are shut down by Mines/Tanks, because they come out early without requiring Hydra tech, because they're good at busting down doors), so unless you have a great idea for a role they could be filling right now, which I'd love to hear if you do, I think that the best plan is just to leave them be. Once a need presents itself, they can be retooled to help Zerg deal with that issue. Until then they can at least make ZvZ look exciting, even if it isn't.
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imo, more units = more options = less stale.
if one in a hundred games, someone goes for a baneling timing instead of straight into Lurkers, that's a net positive for longevity.
if sc2 has taught me one thing, it's that I HATE how stale a meta can be.
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On February 11 2014 21:00 Grumbels wrote:
The "AoE Infantry Crowd Control" role is effectively already taken by the Lurker. The problem domain is that the Zerg couldn't efficiently handle large numbers of infantry, it was very easy for a Terran to just hit a critical mass of infantry and just stampede into the enemy Zerg base.
Having two solutions to such a problem is not a bad thing, in fact it allows for different styles to develop, which is a good thing. Take PvZ for an example:
You forge expand, a big threat here is a big hydralisk army. In BW you had 2 inevitable options: reavers or remplar tech.
With reavers you had the opportunity to harass with corsairs and shuttles, keep the Zerg defensive, while you expanded and macro'd a large army. Zerg can't break reavers/cannons with hydralisks. Take Bisu vs Savior on Reverse Temple as a good example.
With templars you can apply some pressure with speed zealots first before getting storm, or go straight to a zealot/high templar army. Either way, you use storm as the "crowd control" spell to keep the hydras at bay.
Clearly templars and reavers overlap a lot here; they keep mass hydras at bay, they are extremely potent in the Protoss blob, and they are both very powerful for harass with shuttles. Is that a bad thing? No. It gives Protoss a lot of variety in their strategies.
I think banelings can provide a similar variety.- some Zergs may defend with spines whilst teching to lurkers asap and play a very defensive style that revolves around defilers/lurkers. Some Zergs may use zergling/baneling to take a quicker third, and fight for map control with a big muta/ling/bane army. The banes here gives muta/ling the efficiency to fight the bio ball head on.
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EPT
