so the idea is simple, everything is the same, amon still does the same timing attacks and everything as he always does, but this time amon has you as an ally and you get to help amon win against the two commanders trying to defeat him. You get your own starting base nested deep in amon’s territory with a unqiue shield protecting your main, granting everything inside of it invulnerability, and it also keeps commanders out.
From there you can expand outside of the shield, build your army, and prepare to help amon win the fight. You can add your own defense around shards to help amon protect, you can push together with amon, launch your own harassment on commander mineral lines, etc.
For starters I think it would be best if the player helping amon just used the default versus mode kit, but the idea could be expanded on even futher by adding characters like Narud, Maar, Ma’lash, Nyon, etc. with unqiue abilities and a different kit to work with.
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There’s a lot of things that will need re-done just to prevent abuse though. Here I assume your idea is that Amon cannot be influenced by the +1 allied anti-player:
- What happens when I steal a bunch of crystals on VP?
- How will players get at infested structures on DoN near my invulnerable base?
- CoD will be near impossible between my harass drop, doom drop, and truck-death squad.
- L&L reclamation will be annoying af, more so than Vorazun TS bug.
- What if I sent units/workers to Malash(?) against J’nara before 1min?
- RtK 3min rush would have a 50% guaranteed win rate against come commander combos.
- Sgt. Hammers or Temple or Survivor Ships from ME not dying to Tactical Jump Yamato x 5 (6, 8, 10?) is unlikely.
The list goes on I think but it’s a lot more changes that need to be reworked. Even if the anti-player doesn’t get any special abilities. Something as simple as a Guardian Shield or Force Field along an unsuspecting wave would annihilate the player’s army, thus putting them far too behind to win. What about a few cheap but unsuspecting Drilling Claws Mines?
I think any real PvP type needs an equal footing standard (relatively speaking). Otherwise, I really don’t even see this as a possible idea.
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it would definitely be massive update almost akin to that of a new expansion in terms of work. It would have lots of bugs and quirks, pretty soon metas would be formed, and it would need constant balance patches after balance patches. every map would need to be reworked a bit and for starters they’d maybe even need to limit the map pool and amon would maybe even need to be set to hard difficulty, but by the end of say a year I think it could work and it could be beautiful.
obviously it will never happen at this point for starcraft 2 but for starcraft 3 it could be nice or it could be a good idea for just a game in general.
I somewhat like it but I can already see early-game commanders to be the king, say Abathur feeding Amon’s units and you’re forced to respect ground army.
For commanders with Amon, Karax comes to mind with orbital+healing beam making the game somewhat a mutation, Artanis as well with guardian shell+shield overcharge, maybe the Orbital archons on P3 as well.
Zagara with Frenzy+banelings would be a sight to witness how she tries to break Mengsk or something.
yea i dunno if it would work if the anti-player also used a commander. I was thinking they just used the versus mode kit or at best if under an very ambitious dev team they had unique amon commanders that were balanced for the game mode. if you wanted to give the amon ally the ability to play as a commander it would probably at least have to be a different version for each commander that is appropriately balanced.
You just can’t give the anti-player any CO-like powers at all.
The lose condition for player is quite straight forward. Any current CO’s powers can easily access player base and terminate at least 1 of the players.
How will the players protect against Mengsk Nuke, BRB, Supercloak Nova Nuke? Who’s base is large enough by 10min mark to survive that? As well as deal with mission objectives and Amon’s waves?
To put it mildly, even if the anti-player can use just a ladder race the fight would be far harder than having B6 mutators. Mutators are predictable in nature, so even though they add difficulty, it remains 1-dimensional where A counters B.
Anti-player intrinsically would do things unpredictably. They can chill for 90% of the game then outta nowhere attack you. Rush you early game or continuously support throughout. Or all of the aforementioned tactics. There are just way too many ways for anti-player even with a basic tool kit to F with the players.
- Oh you’re Raynor and Mengsk? Let me just burrow a Widow Mine here and there or a Baneling or two.
- Wanna expand? Nah, I’m going to shade in 4-5 adepts to your main. Enjoy your new expansion with no workers in either bases.
- Even just a few Tier 1 units to delay you 30sec here, 30sec there, the players will feel the mission exponentially harder. A lot of the “quick and easy” mission progress is entirely based on pre-emptively pushing. So those delays alone would be huge.
On a rudimentary level, I think for this to remotely work, the anti-player would need to be restricted by a lot. And not the opposite of expand their powers to a different set of unique abilities (or using COs).
i personally wouldn’t really want the anti player to be able to use commanders because i think it would require a heavily watered down version of said commanders for it to work.
I also think you overestimate what a player would be capable of accomplishing with a versus mode kit. say the anti player wastes 15 minutes building BCs then they all get taking out by a single Alexander, remember most maps only last 15-25 minutes, or what if they waste the whole game trying to shade adepts, but they end up getting killed off each time by orbitals, spawn broodlings, or overcharged structures. a single nova can pretty much take out entire 200/200 bio Terran army head on by just spamming shotgun.
there’s definitely a lot of variables, but its really impossible to know by just speculating, only way to know for sure if it could be balanced is to just play test and play test.
Yeah, I agree here (for all the reasons I’ve already listed… and more if I’m being honest).
This one I disagree wholeheartedly. When you’re evaluating how a particular system performs, you have to do so against the best, the worst, and the average. So in terms of even the average (ladder player), getting certain builds out at x time is trivial.
What you have to remember is that ladder functions essentially faster than coop. So getting out a small but formidable force is common (and not rare unlike what you’ve implied). You cannot measure these actions using the average (and likely below average coop players).
For example, 3min Voidray is a thing (and they move far faster). And that makes Oracle at 3min a thing. You can basically deduce all the timings of each race (assuming you watch any GSL here) from that. One way to mitigate this is restrict to ladder units but don’t allow them to function on “fastest”. This would still give a lot of advantageous stats towards a ladder-version unit (voidray being one of them since I gave an example). How many commanders can hold their own at 3min in coop against 1-2 voidrays?
Step back for a second, and it isn’t about that 1-2 voidrays at all. It’s about how that delays the players. Let’s say you rush some units out because you can’t be sure the anti-player will rush you or not (since you cannot scout the anti-player unlike on ladder). So you’ll lose any chance at fast expansion build orders. And if they do end up rushing you while you chose to focus macro/tech over army/defence, you might get away with calldown. That still puts you a calldown -1 where you usually would have pushed far ahead.
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the things is co-op players are used to be absolutely as greedy as possible early game, but its not a necessity to always be that greedy, in fact you can easily 1 base any co-op map with most commanders.
so within this gamemode the meta could shift and it could become a normal thing for co-op players to do thing like leaving a siege tank in the main, building early static defense, actually building queens, and all those other types of traditional routines that exist in Versus.
there might be a few timings across the board that need to be worked out and adjusted tho of course, but nothing that i can see that can keep the game mode from being possible.
Like I said, the overhaul would need to change every single mission. To say the least give additional time on everything. Either way, tis but a dream I suppose lol.
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Probably a very bad idea if Amon’s serv ally can play normally.
Maybe a responsibility of “giving suggestions” or “picking units to train” or another limited influence maybe, but making it full Player VS Player, that would bring all the cancer from this kind of play.
Of course one could always try to modify the coop maps to create an Arcade featuring this style of play, but I doubt it can show things that would really convince me it could be inserted in standard co-op.
I mean its not like it could be anymore cancer than just regular versus starcraft. at least in co-op if someone were to harass you with a banshee you can just to blast it into oblivion with an orbital strike or magmines.
Except when you can’t lol. Like say for most of the COs who don’t have magmines or OS.
Imagine as Fenix, Raynor, Kerrigan, etc. babysitting your mineral line despite having an Overseer, Observer, or static for detection. It’s not like the anti-player will send its banshee to death. After all, what else does he/she got to do?
If I was in that situation, I’d just hover back and forth. Delay the economy long enough to make them lose. Want to build outside of mineral line? Better bring your hero + mobile detection, or imma snipe that worker. Lol, let’s see how many 90sec tech structure the player can afford to remake before losing.
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I dont understand what you mean, commanders like fenix and kerrigan can just wipe the floor with anything an anti-player could muster. like even pro players like serral and dark would have a hard time dealing with any hero units, let alone heroes like fenix and kerrigan who can just be anywhere at anytime and smash their army in a blink.
Raynor out of all the commanders might be the most vulnerable, but still even he is essentially just a suuped up version of versus Terran in a sense.
and what do you mean delay the ecomonmy like you are putting way too much stock into this anti-player. Honestly I was thinking the anti-player would need to be buffed and maybe even have the ability to summon mutators, but you are acting like a single anti-player would be able to man handle two commanders and out right deny both of them expansion somehow.
you’re thinking the anti-player would be like a god and im thinking the anti-player would be almost hopeless and probably need buffs like some unqiue topbar abilities such as summoning a void rift or dropping a blizzard somewhere maybe.
I see that. I suggest you take a look at any standard GSL game and really pay attention to the actual timings. I think then you’ll realize that at least half of the COs won’t be able to be at 2 places at once. Those 2 being: home and pushing out.
That’s just the reality of it. Not sure how much more detailed I can be without writing up 20pages explaining everything in detail.
Just a small example:
- by 3min, both GSL players would have generally expanded (which is unlikely for your proposal, leaving far more resource to make army/tech).
- in a simple quick search of most recent Dream vs Trap GSL ST, by 3min Dream lost 4 marines to a single adept + zeal tank.
Put your coop CO in that situation, your hero is 1min out. You think you can sacrifice economy by fending it off without loss but you can’t. You’ll lose quite a bit regardless. Either in economy, actual units, or workers not made. Worse yet, if you didn’t make enough lose to like 4 marine harass.
It’s just one example. I hope you can extrapolate but if you feel that’s no biggie then I guess so. It’s just hard AF to deal with. Cuz the game isn’t about fending off that first harass, it’s continuously doing so while getting enough to objectives.
I mean heck, SoA last sliver is hard enough to push as it is by 15min. Now you gotta go halfway across the map, only to have a massive non-indicated army that breaks your base. Good luck with that.
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Yeah I’m with FearrWhalins on this one. Just because a brutal difficulty game is easy to beat doesn’t mean it’s NOT easy to lose. The thing about co op is that, at a basic level, it’s a series of macro checks. You need to be X developed by Y time, or Amon is going to walk on you. It’s rare for the players to win a scrappy game where they lose units they really shouldn’t have lost only to rebuild and persevere. Most commanders and most players can’t do that; mission timers and Amon’s ramp-up don’t allow it. You either keep hitting benchmarks or fall farther and farther behind.
If you were to introduce an unpredictable player to the map, keeping up with the “dps checks” of the mission would be nearly impossible. Basic early econ harass would trivially doom most commanders. Doubling the size of any given wave could easily wipe out the player’s army, and most commanders can’t recover from that kind of setback.
The amount of tuning this would require is probably not worth the squeeze.
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i dunno man I dont see it, majority of co-op maps can be won by hardly even making units and just using hero units especially if we were to set amon to hard difficult instead of brutal. losing in regular brutal at max accession co-op is a rare occasion(at least for me), but naturally for a pvp setting you would have to expect to lose 50% of the time or else it wouldnt be balanced.
also in versus mode players usually go up to 3-5 bases, but in this I was just thinking two bases max, I dont see anyone being able to get as much done as you expect off just two bases.
also basically every commander in the game is very much capable of being in two places at once, everyone has calldowns or nuke abilities that can easily do away with any sort of harrasment or at the very least stall.
if players can deal with JustDie+VoidRifts at 3 minutes then surely they can deal with any type of simple harrasment ive ever seen done in versus or promatches.
You don’t see it or not looking lol. Let me put it this way. What if I just make a bunch of oracles and stasis wards everywhere?
I don’t have to kill ya, I don’t take damage either, but I sure can delay your army or hero or both by a good 30sec then rinse and repeat.
It’s as Mortis said, and I’ve mentioned this time and time again. In coop, you lose instantly for not reaching x goal by y time. That’s the real issue.
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you’re gonna need a better example than that, stasis wards arent that hard to deal with.
Man, you’re so tunnel visioned lol.
You say the anti-players aren’t that good cuz players just aren’t that good in general.
Then you turn around and say the players are god like. They macro off 1 base perfectly, can defend harass perfectly, carry detection wherever they go.
Double standard man. That’s what I’m telling you. If players can play that well, then anti-player can as well. In equal skill match up, they’ll always lose (as your proposal stand currently).