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(warning: a lot of abstract theory here, along with examples that are not true in every circumstance, instead of picking apart when/why they aren't true, please look at the broad analysis I'm trying to make)
Flux Time
While watching some BW games it struck me at the almost complete lack of flux time in SC2.
First I'll explain what I mean by 'flux time'
In BW, there were a lot of points in the game, where one race had undisputed map control, while the other had nearly impenetrable defence. What this lead to was a period of the game where both players knew they couldn't realistically do a push. This then gave a window of time to do interesting strategies, from fast tech, to mass econ, to harass based play.
A few examples of this timing in BW:
PvT after T gets 1-2 tanks with siege mode, P has map control, and can decide to take a large number of routes from that point, as he is not scared of the T moving out for a little while
ZvP after P has their FE up and running, and P scouts Z not doing a hydra-bust, both players get a window where no push either does has a high chance of working, and thus both can branch out into a number of different strats
Now, these are just generalizations, as each game is different, but in BW you could get to a point where you were able to do what you wanted in relative safety, with your minimal defence. The game then came down to cutting it as close as possible on these defences, and capitalizing on when your opponent misjudges.
Now, to bring this to how it relates to SC2.
Currently in SC2 we hardly see this at all, people are finding themselves limited in what they can do, due to the fear of being overrun by a push. Unable to spend resources on a harass, when it means the enemy can just push and kill you due to less money spent on defence.
The race we see that can spend the most on harass is Terran, able to invest in banshees and blue-flame helions due to the defensive power of the rest of their army. They however have the same problem in the early game, where, while reapers are actually an excellent harass unit, if anyone scouts a terran with them, they realize they can just push in and likely win, as reapers are almost useless in any stand-up fight.
Where we see this most present however is in PvP, where due to warp-gates, there is very little defensive advantage for either player, forcing both players into a very narrow pigeon-hole of possible builds. If you don't match your opponent's production, you simply lose.
This is partially true for ZvZ, but the fast production rate gives enough of a defenders advantage, at least once you make it past the very volatile early game.
Again with T though, the dynamic of siege mode makes their defences very hard to break, which is why TvT has become one of the more interesting mirror matchups, despite the requirement to be entirely tank+viking focused.
In ZvP or ZvT there is a growing window of flux time in the early game, where speedlings still retain map control. As players find out more about the game, and where they are able to cut corners, I think this time period will continue to grow. A few months ago even, in these matchups, zergs were getting crushed by early timing attacks, or tricked into making too many units while the opponent econed. Now however we are seeing zergs being a lot better at reading the situation and being prepared for those early pushes if they come, which in turn is shifting the meta-game away from seeing those early pushes in every game, and instead into a more macro style. Thus that window of flux time is formed.
If we look back at BW it happened in the same way. The reason we see such econ/macro based games these days is because those aggressive plays were getting more and more figured out, leaving key timing attacks to exploit a greedy player.
From all this, I can propose the statement that more flux time makes for more interesting games over-all, as it allows both players a chance to deviate to what they want to do, instead of being forced to fight for their life the entire time.
The Defensive Advantage
I touched on this second bit in my last blog about deathballs, but I find it is even more important here.
Without any defensive advantage, players would be forced to always do the exact same build every game. Fortunately everybody has a defensive advantage, however small.
Here are a few simple defensive advantages:
Unit transit time: the time it takes for attacking units to get to the enemy base is time he can make more units in.
Reinforcement time: different then initial transit time, this is how fast new units can join the attack
Terrain advantage: high ground/chokes/etc, this includes walling and sim city
Having your workers there: pulling workers to defend
Defensive structures: by the numbers they are better then units on a cost to effectiveness ratio, this also includes zerg creep
Unit positioning: most obvious with tanks with siege mode, but is also true for any army, combines with terrain well.
Now, we can see off the bat a few of these that don't come into effect in some situations, lowering defensive advantage:
Proxy production facilities reduces transit and reinforcement time
warpgates negates reinforcement time and possibly transit time
creep spread reduces transit time and reinforcement time, Nydus worm removes both
Many units negate or lessen terrain benefit, for example air units allow you vision on cliffs, blink, wall walking or flying allows you to ignore chokes
Drops negate positioning, terrain, and most of defensive structure's advantage
The list goes on, but essentially the more of them you have, the more effective your army will be at attacking, whereas if you are not able to bypass many/any of the defensive advantages, the enemy can repel your attack with a much smaller force, being able to do what he wants with the rest of his money/time.
This brings us back to flux time. As we can see, more defensive advantage = more flux time.
This makes it simple for mirror matchups, you can spend a certain amount of resources on non-army/defence as is appropriate for your defensive advantage. Where it becomes more complicated however is in non-mirrors, or mirrors where both players go radically different builds.
Relative Strength vs Game-Time
What this means is how strong your current army makup is vs your opponent's at different points in the game.
An example:
ZvT, early game, once Z gets speedlings, T's army is extremely weak in relation to the Z's, requiring a strong defensive advantage to survive (wall-in)
Progressing on, if both players theoretically just went pure ling/marine, there's a point where critical mass for T is reached, and they have a much stronger relative army strength.
Now, this is a poor example, as it would never get to that point, as both players would begin making other units, which very much complicates things. At any point in the game however, if you were to clash your armies in the middle of an open field (no defensive or terrain advantage) you would see their relative strengths at that time.
This is where we enter abstracts, where nothing is set in stone due to how complex the game is at this point, but the principles can still apply.
The goal of the game is then to attack when your relative strength is greater then his by an amount greater then his defensive advantage (after you've done what you can to reduce that)
In ZvP it has been said there is "an hourglass that's started at the beginning of the game, and when it runs out, zerg loses" (paraphrased slightly) This is due to an extreme differential in relative army strength when P hits 200/200, this strength difference combined with the low defensive advantage for zerg at this point in the game, forces the zerg to end it before it gets to that point.
4-warpgate is entirely based off this, where you reduce his defensive advantage so low that you only need a tiny bit stronger of an army to win the game, which can be made up for with good micro.
Final Thoughts
I feel that players are moving more and more towards extending these flux times, where neither player's relative strength is greater then the other player's relative strength+defensive advantage. Which in turn is making for better games. This is helped along by the larger maps, which obviously increase the transit and reinforcement time. What I would like to see in the future however, is a bigger defensive advantage (along with interesting investments to bypass it), not because I like seeing people turtle up, but because it allows for more interesting play due to higher amounts of flux time.
 
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Nydus almost entirely eliminates defensive advantage, but is expensive, and unreliable, I feel that the game would be benefited if it was either made more reliable, or less expensive, allowing it to be less of an all-in strategy, and more something that T or P should be scouting for whether Z is building it or not.
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USA5860 Posts
I have had this gripe about 4 warp gate pushes since the beta. Proxy pylon = instant reinforcements defeats a defenders advantage.
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I agree with this. I stopped doing fast expands against protoss as terran because you can't be safe. In bw someone could bulldog me or fuck me up with speed shuttles but I could hold with good play but in sc2 I can't hold certain things so I expand late now days
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Great point about the flux time. I hadn't thought of that before.
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I noticed the exact same thing when I started playing SC2.
I'm not good by any means but I at least have BW experience to back me up. Doesn't seem to help lol
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I love your two blogs. I always had a feeling that SC2 had a different "feel" (duh) to it then BW, but I never thought deeply about the reasons behind this. Your blogs are well-written, transcend the analysis of the game by just numbers or single units/unit compositions and most of all, don't necessarily end up in a balance discussion.
Make more please, your thoughts are greatly appreciated.
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And is this fixable?
I think the game has inherent design problems that would be too drastic to change, such as the warp-in insta reinforcment or the colossus 'blandness'.
In my point of view SC2 is not going to have anything close to that BW feeling as these design issues aren't fixed, and by the looks of it, they will never be fixed.
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Please give the game some time to grow. BW has been out for over a decade.
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As people get more experienced, they will get better at finding these timings, and nailing down the exact moment the window opens and closes. Hell, we already have made huge progress in this regard.
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On March 17 2011 05:15 Spekulatius wrote:
I love your two blogs. I always had a feeling that SC2 had a different "feel" (duh) to it then BW, but I never thought deeply about the reasons behind this. Your blogs are well-written, transcend the analysis of the game by just numbers or single units/unit compositions and most of all, don't necessarily end up in a balance discussion.
Make more please, your thoughts are greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
I'll see what I'll write about next, I try to avoid direct balance discussion, more focusing on the larger game trends.
On March 17 2011 05:28 fabiano wrote:
And is this fixable?
I think the game has inherent design problems that would be too drastic to change, such as the warp-in insta reinforcment or the colossus 'blandness'.
In my point of view SC2 is not going to have anything close to that BW feeling as these design issues aren't fixed, and by the looks of it, they will never be fixed.
I think stronger defensive play will evolve over time, as people are saying BW had a long time to evolve to the point it did. I'm not saying SC2 can or can't evolve to that point on it's own, but I do think blizzard can help it along by adding in more defensive options in the next 2 expansions.
On March 17 2011 05:35 Lite.wasalreadytaken wrote:
Please give the game some time to grow. BW has been out for over a decade.
On March 17 2011 05:36 Weasel- wrote:
As people get more experienced, they will get better at finding these timings, and nailing down the exact moment the window opens and closes. Hell, we already have made huge progress in this regard.
Exactly, I'm pointing out how a game that has been found out almost entirely (BW) has evolved to be very focused on these flux times, which is why I think that is where we should be expecting the trends to go towards in SC2. I also think BW is currently a better spectator game due to that exact reason, which is why I'm hoping SC2 goes more in that direction.
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"The goal of the game is then to attack when your relative strength is greater then his by an amount greater then his defensive advantage"
I think this is the absolute clearest way I've ever heard anyone describe Starcraft. Nice blog.
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I think giving back the miss chance when attacking up a ledge will help with the defensive advantage problem.
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AI has a lot to do with it. 100 dragoons would die to a few siege tanks if they're trying to get up a ramp in BW.
pretty good read man.
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Well I think you overlooked the fact that there is an actual damage reduction when fighting low vs high in BW. You miss something like 25 percent of your damage.
They don't have this in SC2.
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Please give the game some time to grow. BW has been out for over a decade.
I don't think that's the best way to look at this situation at all. While it is certainly true that the game will evolve, and that the issue being addressed in the OP might just dissipate as builds and game-plans are more thoroughly explored, that doesn't mean that deliberate tweaking of the game (or the way people play it) with specific goals in mind would negatively effect it's evolution.
I realize that an argument against this might be that changing game design, aside from clear balance issues, would just extend the time it takes for the game becomes stable: changing the game forces the players to rethink their strategies. In my opinion this is be worth it at this point if it has a chance of improving the strategy aspect of the game.
As you said, BW has been out for a very long time, and therefore is vastly more strategically stable than SC2 is right now (although changes still occur to the way BW is played). Also, there are almost unarguably a lot of great aspects (with respect to game-play and strategy) in Brood War which would make SC2 a more enjoyable game. Longer "flux times", and a greater situational defender's advantage are two such aspects brought up in the OP.
Lastly, it seems fairly easy to pinpoint some of the reasons that BW ended up being the way it is. Why are there higher "flux times"? As the OP argues, a more significant defender's advantage could easily is probably an important factor. Why is the defenders advantage more significant? Some obvious reasons are the miss percentage on high ground and the difficulty of making some units attack up a ramp effectively in mass (lol dragoons).
So here is my flow of logic:
1. BW is more stable than SC2.
2. Some aspects of BW, flux time in this case, would be beneficial to SC2.
3. We can see some pieces of BW that caused it to evolve those favorable characteristics.
Therefore 4: We might be able to replicate the desired characteristics of BW in SC2 by carefully implementing pieces of BW.
To those of you who would respond with "Get your BW out of my SC2", or anything stemming from that logic, I honestly don't know how to argue against you. How similar a sequel should be to the original is, of course, almost entirely subjective and you are entitled to your opinion. I think that if BW mechanics make SC2 a more interesting game, "SC2 is a different game" is absolutely not a good enough reason to leave it out. In my opinion, the ideal sequel keeps positive aspects of the game, improves negative aspects of the game, while at the same time adding in new aspects entirely. SC2 seems to be doing a decent job in improving negative aspects and adding new aspects, but whenever a positive aspect from BW is being suggested, it seems like there is an outcry of unnecessary criticism.
Assuming that one doesn't just want to let the game become more standard and hope that it evolves into what we want it to, there are two solutions. Either take an idea from BW, whether modified or left unaltered, and implant it into SC2, or come up with new ideas which would probably produce desired effects. When the changes which we want in SC2 are exemplified by BW, the best option is to just use what worked before. I recognize that with all of the changes made from BW to SC2 many mechanics that worked in BW would not work in SC2, but mechanics do not need to be copy pasted. They can be altered to better fulfill their role in SC2.
tl;dr: I think we shouldn't be afraid of implementing aspects from BW in order to increase the defenders advantage of SC2 and therefore increase the "flux time". I agreee with the OP.
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