I agree. People are baselessly concluding that this is imbalanced much too early.
People do that for everything nowadays. I'd rather Blizzard didn't touch the balance in any way, shape or form, including fixing this.
Why? Seems like a pretty arbitrary line. Dont fix any bugs! Huh?
The game is fine as is, we don't need any fix. There is a ton of stuff like BD mentioned regarding the client and such that can be fixed without playing with the game's code and Blizzard need to keep their hands off of that. Lucky for us, they seem to understand this and likely woudl not touch it.
You can say its fine, but that doesnt mean it is; people can now make units for half the cost on ladder or tourny, that isnt acceptable, whether or not bigfan claims so.
Archons are useful against Zerg, but it seems like zerg still have numerous ways of ending the game before this even comes in to play
Yes zerg often can beat protoss before late game, no, protoss reaching archon tech is not rare or all together challenging, and so half cost archons arent acceptable just because zerg can bust a toss earlier than that.
as can people use burrowed lurkers and all the other bug abuses, its fine
sometimes i fell its always fine until its something P has then it needs to be fixed xD if u remove it why not remove dragoon movebugs ? no u wont do that so dont fix it either
not all bugs are fine. producing units for half cost for instance, is not fine. Any late game scenario where a protoss is mineral low and has some gas banked, now hes double the threat. That situation isnt really all together rare...a lot of pvz's are going to come down to a few archons battling z over a key location. Only now that number will be doubled for nothing more than the guy researched hallucination and put like...thirty seconds of effort into doubling his best late game unit?
There are bugs that arguably add to the games skill set and increase the strategy-- mutalisk micro for instance-- and then there are glitches that give people free units. That is not acceptable. Unless this is something that is truly fucking hard to pull off, it will eventually be figured out, the skill set regularized, and even random noobs like me will use it with regularity in ladder games. People power boost workers, they do every little inane and difficult thing they possibly can to take an advantage. How could anyone think that this isnt something people are going to learn to do reliably? And once they do it reliably, pvz is fucked.
Air unit stacking is not a bug. It is clever usage of intended unit behaviour. Units aren't supposed to maintain formation when they are too spread out, because then they would remain at opposite sides of the map when ordered to move somewhere. To fix that, Blizzard made units attempt to move to the exact same point, instead of staying in formation, when they are too far away from each other. You use this by selecting a unit from far away with your group.
This archon technique is not as easy as you claim. Because the hallucinations must be older than the templars used, and hallucinations expire with time, this is difficult to do while also doing other things. It also uses up control groups.
Most maps are statistically somewhat Zerg favoured in ZvP. A little boost to Protoss is not going to be a problem on those maps. If a small boost to Terran emerged, on the other hand, then that would perhaps be a problem.
Its not clever usage of intended unit behaviour, its glitching a poorly thought out unit movement process, because no one thought of unit stacking. No one thought of it until almost seven years after the game was out. That isnt clever use, its figuring out how to glitch a poorly designed element of the game. And it happened to add a lot to the game, in terms of micro, builds, hell its the only thing that even makes zvt viable. Take out muta stacking and the zvt win rate would bottom out real fucking fast, so we keep it. Theres no fair comparison between muta stacking and spawning units for half cost-- incredibly powerful, matchup defining units, at that.
This archon technique is not as easy as you claim. Because the hallucinations must be older than the templars used, and hallucinations expire with time, this is difficult to do while also doing other things. It also uses up control groups.
Everything in bw is difficult, and all of it is learnable to a second nature degree. Its not exactly difficult to research hallucination, then time out your rotation of high templars in a game. It might take some doing, yes, but people will sit there and reload the same parts of the game till they get the timing and movement down. This is an imminently learnable and reproducible glitch.
They literally hard coded units to move to the same exact point if they are far away from each other, and to stay in formation if they are close to each other. They wanted a formation feature, but they had to put an area limit on it. The solution was to make spread out units move to the exact same point. It was intended. You can make use of this by keeping a unit far away in your group. Intended behaviour, unforeseen consequence of that behaviour. It's not a compile error. It's not even a logical error. It's not a bug in any sense of the word.
Again, you can debate semantics as to whether its a bug or not, I dont really care. It means nothing to me. It was not an intended feature of the game. Yes, that element of unit movement was intended, but its logical consequences were not thought of. Muta/corsair/wraith stacking was not intended to work this way.
On March 13 2019 03:10 ProMeTheus112 wrote: is it really hard to patch it so that when a HT morphes with a halu HT, instead of just taking the index of the later one to decide whether the resulting archon is going to be real or halu, it will check both index and if one is halu then the archon is halu or the morph impossible???? did the muta trick actually improve BW or worsen it? zvt would be too hard on modern maps without it, so i hear, but maybe the maps would be different, and maybe this match up would not so repeatedly open itself with 3hatch muta stuff. Quite likely 1base pvz would be playable, at the very least more playable, because you wouldn't need the corsairs to deal with muta like you pretty much do now. Whatever^^ (if it comes up that 1base opening in pvz becomes more viable because of this "half free archon" bug, i would probably just start doing it but what happens when you play lan and such? its just messy isn't it. Also wouldn't want a situation where you'd actually nearly have to use this every game if you do 1base opening for example. I guess we will see if tourney organisers decide that this is a forbidden bug or not [you lose the game if you used it]. And then, can you report a ladder opponent to get win if he did like on Iccup. I guess let's see what comes up of it for a while. . . Also : can it be fixed without messing 1.16 replays working on SC:R. I guess yes because it would not actually impact any replays that don't use the bug, depending how it is fixed. But then new 1.16 replays using the bug are going to bug. If not, can SC:R load a alternate code to play old version replays, suggested it before imo would be ideal for a developped RTS like Starcraft to be able to patch it without losing older replays)
150/150 cost for halu research, and you can already get a full free archon out of producing 2 more HTs after the 1st of your first two HTs has accumulated 100 energy (quite soon since they start at 50). That's already 100/300 worth of generation using bug, so you're at -50/+150, not to mention you didn't need to have extra gate production time to produce 2 extra HT for making an extra archon. Do it one more time using 2nd HT energy and you got another free archon and you're at +50/+450. Very soon you'd be able to do it with more templars, and start accumulating energy in your base and get that counter up to +450/+1950 and counting. Fair? Usable, but depends on lat? How annoying to do? just my thoughts as I have not actually tried to do it so far other than offline which doesn't work apparently. ps: ok it works on slowest speed on 1.16, pretty annoying to do CTRL1-1-R as fast as possible it looks like^^
I feel like the real tragedy is the way muta stacking killed one base tvz, which means we need very easy FE maps, terran grows in a more dangerous way than zerg and zerg requires defilers + muta stacking and pretty generically made maps [close third gas blah blah] in order to survive.
It is arguable i would say, if we really should of stuck with muta stacking or if we should still keep with it. Personally, I think broodwar is actually a better game when its confined to a bit of a slower pace and naturals and thirds a bit harder to take, but the community seems not to. I will say that without modern muta stacking zvz would become even sketchier than it already is.
Another update as I go through stuff. Even though you can't hallucinate interceptors you can hallucinate spider mines. Also you can hallucinate reavers and they will fire scarabs if they had scarabs prior to hallucinating.
I don't see any reason to patch this out, just explicitly allow or disallow it in competitive rulesets, just like with hold lurkers, gas stack etc. I don't see it having much impact on the game, just like the Total Recall. I think the Total Recall was only used in 1 pro game since it was discovered, by Horang2 when he was already really far ahead and his opponent was crippled. Both tricks require a decent amount of attention and setup during which you're not macroing or controlling your army. So barring Bisu-level multitask to squeeze out some extra value while not falling behind in other aspects, it's not too intimidating.
I don't think Hallucination before Storm is viable at all, against normal Zerg macro builds without Storm you just die to pure hydra in the 8:00-9:30 range.
That 5 Zealot, 2 Archon timing attack sounds like a joke. You'd have to make 2 templar to let them accumulate energy, research hallucinate, wait for 100 energy, hallucinate, make 2 more high templar, make the half priced Archons, and go. That's WAY slower and 150/150 more expensive than just making 4 High Templar and morphing 2 Archons! Now do all that while surviving 5 hatch hydra knocking at your door with no storm. Even if you skipped Stargate to get it out faster and relied on Archons, Mutas would run you ragged. And with only +0 or +1 weapons, Archons get eaten alive by speedlings. If the attack itself is that strong, people would do it without the bug, but they don't.
Morphing Archons in PvZ is a way of getting residual value out of High Templars that have already used their storms before they get sniped, or a reactionary counter to mutas. The gosu move would be to use the storms during a push while saving energy on a final HT, make hallucinations, and morph half-price archons mid-fight.
Making them back at base for a timing seems counter-productive. If I'm facing a 12:30 push, I'm much happier seeing 3 Templar and 3 Archons coming my way, as opposed to 6 Templar with Khaydarin Amulet. The former may eventually die to reinforcements from other bases and leaves fewer storms in reserve if you have to clear lurker fields. They're exactly the same price, and every 2 half-price Archons cost you more than a storm in energy (100 energy for halluc, 75 for storm).
On March 11 2019 23:01 BigFan wrote: [quote] People do that for everything nowadays. I'd rather Blizzard didn't touch the balance in any way, shape or form, including fixing this.
Why? Seems like a pretty arbitrary line. Dont fix any bugs! Huh?
The game is fine as is, we don't need any fix. There is a ton of stuff like BD mentioned regarding the client and such that can be fixed without playing with the game's code and Blizzard need to keep their hands off of that. Lucky for us, they seem to understand this and likely woudl not touch it.
You can say its fine, but that doesnt mean it is; people can now make units for half the cost on ladder or tourny, that isnt acceptable, whether or not bigfan claims so.
Archons are useful against Zerg, but it seems like zerg still have numerous ways of ending the game before this even comes in to play
Yes zerg often can beat protoss before late game, no, protoss reaching archon tech is not rare or all together challenging, and so half cost archons arent acceptable just because zerg can bust a toss earlier than that.
as can people use burrowed lurkers and all the other bug abuses, its fine
sometimes i fell its always fine until its something P has then it needs to be fixed xD if u remove it why not remove dragoon movebugs ? no u wont do that so dont fix it either
not all bugs are fine. producing units for half cost for instance, is not fine. Any late game scenario where a protoss is mineral low and has some gas banked, now hes double the threat. That situation isnt really all together rare...a lot of pvz's are going to come down to a few archons battling z over a key location. Only now that number will be doubled for nothing more than the guy researched hallucination and put like...thirty seconds of effort into doubling his best late game unit?
There are bugs that arguably add to the games skill set and increase the strategy-- mutalisk micro for instance-- and then there are glitches that give people free units. That is not acceptable. Unless this is something that is truly fucking hard to pull off, it will eventually be figured out, the skill set regularized, and even random noobs like me will use it with regularity in ladder games. People power boost workers, they do every little inane and difficult thing they possibly can to take an advantage. How could anyone think that this isnt something people are going to learn to do reliably? And once they do it reliably, pvz is fucked.
Air unit stacking is not a bug. It is clever usage of intended unit behaviour. Units aren't supposed to maintain formation when they are too spread out, because then they would remain at opposite sides of the map when ordered to move somewhere. To fix that, Blizzard made units attempt to move to the exact same point, instead of staying in formation, when they are too far away from each other. You use this by selecting a unit from far away with your group.
This archon technique is not as easy as you claim. Because the hallucinations must be older than the templars used, and hallucinations expire with time, this is difficult to do while also doing other things. It also uses up control groups.
Most maps are statistically somewhat Zerg favoured in ZvP. A little boost to Protoss is not going to be a problem on those maps. If a small boost to Terran emerged, on the other hand, then that would perhaps be a problem.
Its not clever usage of intended unit behaviour, its glitching a poorly thought out unit movement process, because no one thought of unit stacking. No one thought of it until almost seven years after the game was out. That isnt clever use, its figuring out how to glitch a poorly designed element of the game. And it happened to add a lot to the game, in terms of micro, builds, hell its the only thing that even makes zvt viable. Take out muta stacking and the zvt win rate would bottom out real fucking fast, so we keep it. Theres no fair comparison between muta stacking and spawning units for half cost-- incredibly powerful, matchup defining units, at that.
This archon technique is not as easy as you claim. Because the hallucinations must be older than the templars used, and hallucinations expire with time, this is difficult to do while also doing other things. It also uses up control groups.
Everything in bw is difficult, and all of it is learnable to a second nature degree. Its not exactly difficult to research hallucination, then time out your rotation of high templars in a game. It might take some doing, yes, but people will sit there and reload the same parts of the game till they get the timing and movement down. This is an imminently learnable and reproducible glitch.
They literally hard coded units to move to the same exact point if they are far away from each other, and to stay in formation if they are close to each other. They wanted a formation feature, but they had to put an area limit on it. The solution was to make spread out units move to the exact same point. It was intended. You can make use of this by keeping a unit far away in your group. Intended behaviour, unforeseen consequence of that behaviour. It's not a compile error. It's not even a logical error. It's not a bug in any sense of the word.
Again, you can debate semantics as to whether its a bug or not, I dont really care. It means nothing to me. It was not an intended feature of the game. Yes, that element of unit movement was intended, but its logical consequences were not thought of. Muta/corsair/wraith stacking was not intended to work this way.
On March 13 2019 03:10 ProMeTheus112 wrote: is it really hard to patch it so that when a HT morphes with a halu HT, instead of just taking the index of the later one to decide whether the resulting archon is going to be real or halu, it will check both index and if one is halu then the archon is halu or the morph impossible???? did the muta trick actually improve BW or worsen it? zvt would be too hard on modern maps without it, so i hear, but maybe the maps would be different, and maybe this match up would not so repeatedly open itself with 3hatch muta stuff. Quite likely 1base pvz would be playable, at the very least more playable, because you wouldn't need the corsairs to deal with muta like you pretty much do now. Whatever^^ (if it comes up that 1base opening in pvz becomes more viable because of this "half free archon" bug, i would probably just start doing it but what happens when you play lan and such? its just messy isn't it. Also wouldn't want a situation where you'd actually nearly have to use this every game if you do 1base opening for example. I guess we will see if tourney organisers decide that this is a forbidden bug or not [you lose the game if you used it]. And then, can you report a ladder opponent to get win if he did like on Iccup. I guess let's see what comes up of it for a while. . . Also : can it be fixed without messing 1.16 replays working on SC:R. I guess yes because it would not actually impact any replays that don't use the bug, depending how it is fixed. But then new 1.16 replays using the bug are going to bug. If not, can SC:R load a alternate code to play old version replays, suggested it before imo would be ideal for a developped RTS like Starcraft to be able to patch it without losing older replays)
150/150 cost for halu research, and you can already get a full free archon out of producing 2 more HTs after the 1st of your first two HTs has accumulated 100 energy (quite soon since they start at 50). That's already 100/300 worth of generation using bug, so you're at -50/+150, not to mention you didn't need to have extra gate production time to produce 2 extra HT for making an extra archon. Do it one more time using 2nd HT energy and you got another free archon and you're at +50/+450. Very soon you'd be able to do it with more templars, and start accumulating energy in your base and get that counter up to +450/+1950 and counting. Fair? Usable, but depends on lat? How annoying to do? just my thoughts as I have not actually tried to do it so far other than offline which doesn't work apparently. ps: ok it works on slowest speed on 1.16, pretty annoying to do CTRL1-1-R as fast as possible it looks like^^
I feel like the real tragedy is the way muta stacking killed one base tvz, which means we need very easy FE maps, terran grows in a more dangerous way than zerg and zerg requires defilers + muta stacking and pretty generically made maps [close third gas blah blah] in order to survive.
It is arguable i would say, if we really should of stuck with muta stacking or if we should still keep with it. Personally, I think broodwar is actually a better game when its confined to a bit of a slower pace and naturals and thirds a bit harder to take, but the community seems not to. I will say that without modern muta stacking zvz would become even sketchier than it already is.
One base TvZ would return if maps had difficult expansions. Easy expansions are to help Zerg vs Terran, not the other way around.
Again, you can debate semantics as to whether its a bug or not, I dont really care. It means nothing to me. It was not an intended feature of the game. Yes, that element of unit movement was intended, but its logical consequences were not thought of. Muta/corsair/wraith stacking was not intended to work this way.
Only scrubs care about what was intended. Real men care about what's good for the game. Reaver shuttle micro probably wasn't intended or foreseen either. It's a creative game, and the creators obviously didn't think of every possibility. None the less, unintended strategies using intended unit behaviour, and unintended unit behaviour (logical programming errors, also known as bugs) are of different categories, and for you to call muta stacking a bug as an argument against it, is intellectually dishonest, because it isn't. Half priced archons are a bug. Air unit stacking isn't. Air units behaving as they do was an intended feature of the game. Did Blizzard have to foresee the use of every unit for it to be valid? Is attacking by laying mines next to an enemy not valid, if they didn't think of it? Is it valid if they did? Ridiculous. They gave us the tool on purpose, and we can use it how we want. Stacking air units is no different than microing to prevent units from walking in a line, or using the magic box, or smart hotkeys to make scourge or queen cloning easier.
Does this archon bug let you go over the 200 supply limit somehow? Since you can keep doing the hallucinations with the same templars and merge with new ones.
Anyway even if a rush doesn't work, you can still make a bunch of real archons out of nowhere by accumulating templars, then merge those templars as well.
One base TvZ would return if maps had difficult expansions. Easy expansions are to help Zerg vs Terran, not the other way around.
Only on extremeist cases like neo requiem are one base builds actually viable independent of mutalisk control [and even then...]. Once mutalisks rendered one base builds obsolete, the only choice was to go forward into macro based maps, and in a framework where naturals were already easy to take, maps became larger so that zergs could afford to put sunkens down in time.
Again, you can debate semantics as to whether its a bug or not, I dont really care. It means nothing to me. It was not an intended feature of the game. Yes, that element of unit movement was intended, but its logical consequences were not thought of. Muta/corsair/wraith stacking was not intended to work this way.
Only scrubs care about what was intended. Real men care about what's good for the game.
So brash. Lots of words saying nothing. I already made the case that glitches should be fixed based on how they impact the game. Why are you even replying to me at this point? You've nothing to say.
On March 15 2019 00:33 LG)Sabbath wrote: Does this archon bug let you go over the 200 supply limit somehow? Since you can keep doing the hallucinations with the same templars and merge with new ones.
Anyway even if a rush doesn't work, you can still make a bunch of real archons out of nowhere by accumulating templars, then merge those templars as well.
Merging archons does add supply. But when you are maxed out this 100% puts you over max. In this screen shot I did two at once. This is insane!
PvT You know how in some lategame PvT Protoss players sometimes make mass Archons out of desperation because they have so much extra gas? What’s to stop them from making Hallucination to double their amount of Archons? I think this will effect lategame PvT as well as PvZ.
On March 15 2019 02:30 Alpha-NP- wrote: PvT You know how in some lategame PvT Protoss players sometimes make mass Archons out of desperation because they have so much extra gas? What’s to stop them from making Hallucination to double their amount of Archons? I think this will effect lategame PvT as well as PvZ.
Maybe this is something that finally makes Hallucination viable for something. In a long game I think a Protoss could wait 2 minutes for enough energy to effectively double the amount of Archons he has.
The more I think about this, the more it seems like the main limiting factor is that the the hallucinations have to be made first, and then you have to merge them with the HT you made last.
You can exceed the supply cap a little, but not infinitely, because once you're over you can't make more HT anymore. At best, you can exceed it by 2 for every gateway you have building a HT all at once.
You can't do it with leftover HT after a battle. You have to do it with freshly-made HT, which have at least 50 energy and would normally have enough to storm before a big battle starts.
You have to use up 100 energy for the hallucination first, and then you can't merge that HT (because it was made first). Well, you can merge it normally, but the half-price trick won't work on it. So you're giving up at least 150 energy to make these archons, which could have been two storms. The HT that you "save" using this trick is probably left with near 0 energy.
Because of all that, and the necessary micro, it just doesn't seem very practical except maybe some very specific late-game situations. Most of the time you'd rather just have the HT energy, not to mention the money spent on hallucination.
I wonder if this might be more practical with dark archons though? At least that way, the real DT that you sacrifice to make the DA isn't losing his energy. You'd break on the cost of HT + hallucination after making 3 dark archons, and then they'd all be cheaper for the rest of the game.
On March 15 2019 03:28 Alpha-NP- wrote: Maybe this is something that finally makes Hallucination viable for something. In a long game I think a Protoss could wait 2 minutes for enough energy to effectively double the amount of Archons he has.
That 5 Zealot, 2 Archon timing attack sounds like a joke. You'd have to make 2 templar to let them accumulate energy, research hallucinate, wait for 100 energy, hallucinate, make 2 more high templar, make the half priced Archons, and go. That's WAY slower and 150/150 more expensive than just making 4 High Templar and morphing 2 Archons! Now do all that while surviving 5 hatch hydra knocking at your door with no storm. Even if you skipped Stargate to get it out faster and relied on Archons, Mutas would run you ragged. And with only +0 or +1 weapons, Archons get eaten alive by speedlings. If the attack itself is that strong, people would do it without the bug, but they don't.
What about a FIVE archon timing attack .
Two gateways make two HT, research hallucination (skip storm) while waiting for them to gain energy and research hallucination, build zealots and two more gateways (save gas) hallucinate with each of them (4 hallucination HTs total), then build 4 HT all at once half price trick with all the new HT, then regular morph your old HT
Go attack with your five archons and five zealots.
We are going to see some games using this in the future. The crowd that keeps saying that because this is unorthodox it won’t work will be proven wrong.
Two gateways make two HT, research hallucination (skip storm) while waiting for them to gain energy and research hallucination, build zealots and two more gateways (save gas) hallucinate with each of them (4 hallucination HTs total), then build 4 HT all at once half price trick with all the new HT, then regular morph your old HT
Go attack with your five archons and five zealots.
That's a lotta Archons.
I'd like to try it and see if you could still afford a Stargate and Zealot legs, maybe even more than 5 Zealots. I still think that if you skip Stargate and Storm for an Archon timing attack, you'd have to leave the Archons at home to deflect Mutalisks, which defeats the purpose. You'd also need to deny scouting somehow. Archons are significantly slower than speed Zealots and the attack can only travel at the speed of the Archons, if the Archons are separated from the Zealots they get picked off fairly quickly. But I can see it working, it just requires testing of the different variations.
On March 15 2019 07:00 Alpha-NP- wrote: We are going to see some games using this in the future. The crowd that keeps saying that because this is unorthodox it won’t work will be proven wrong.
Best uses half priced Archons in PvZ
its honestly a pretty egregious example I think of cognitive dissonance. anyone can see that this is a glitch that can be reproduced, and given how narrow broodwars balance is and the strength of archons, anyone should see how a simple task generating more or less free troops isnt acceptable. And yet here we are, having a debate about it? The lengths people will go to in order to justify having an unfair advantage over others. Truly some scumbags within this community.
May not be the right thread to ask but does any one know the answer to these 2 things?: if you hallucinate a shuttle full of units will it make a hallucinated units as well in that shuttle? Also can a shuttle carry hallucinated units?