Is Cyclone being nerfed back to old version? What was wrong with the new version? They still largely have a niche role backing a toss rush… Or maybe you throw one in if you have enough Hellbats…
It’s quite possible for toss to defend against a terran rush. You know… you do something like have a battery. Or build the flying units that can make ground units float.
It used to be that I built cyclones mostly for early anti-air against liberators/banshees etc. They were gas expensive and made of paper.
Frankly? A lot of things. It’s extremely limiting for openings in both PvT and TvT, for one thing.
For another, it quite literally drops off a cliff in terms of effectiveness once you pass a certain stage of the game, much like the reaper does. This is usually around the 5 minute mark.
They were 50 gas - the same as a reaper. For one or two cyclones, that’s not particularly gas heavy - which, IMO, is something that should stay relatively similar for the reverted cyclone since the cyclone’s reversion can still act as an early form of AA particularly for mech, which generally struggles with both AA, and gas early on.
How can you redesign a unit 4-5 times in the span of 10 years ?
Intially when cyclone was introduced it was exactly the same way as it is going to get in this patch
Then from 2017-2019 it was sturdy with 180 hp and very fast attack rate
then they reverted it back to original state. Later they removed bonus from armored units to all units.
Then they made it 2 supply -no tech lab with reduced lock-on range and experimented with that on few patches.
Now they’re bringing it back to original state.
All above shows complete lack of competence and at this point absolutely nobody should have any doubts balance council are just random folks from the street.
RTS games have an issue with turtling and multitasking. Both suck but you can’t make the game less multitasking intensive without making it more turtly and visa versa. They are opposites. Throughout history, designers have had a preference for multitasking because it makes the game more action packed.
There’s a better way to solve it though. Buff zone control and buff splash. Basically zone control allows players to spread out to control territories and this increases the probability that the player’s interact aka it reduces turtling. But the zone control then is used to deathball, which is its own form of turtling. That’s where splash comes in. You add absolutely vicious splash that will annihilate anyone who deathballs. Now the only option is to use the zone control to spread out.
You get the best of both worlds. The players interact more, meaning more action, and you removed turtling from the game.
The way this applies to the cyclone is that mech is the most turtly unit comp in the game and they are trying to find a way to make the cyclone create an action packed version of mech. But as I mentioned above, that’s created through zone control and splash, which the cyclone doesn’t do. They keep reworking it to fix a problem it can’t fix. The way the cyclone is designed ironically creates deathballing and that’s exactly how cyclone based unit comps are used.
If they really wanted to fix this issue, “lock on” would be a line-based splash ability. If a terran turtles with thors and tanks, the cyclone will annihilate it. If a terran turtles with mass cyclone, those cyclones will be annihilated by a couple of cyclones from the opponent. The TvT turtling problem would be fixed.
Reminds me of Spider Mines in BW. They have a ridiculous amount of splash damage over a very large radius (converted to SC2, we are talking 100%/50%/25% at 1.5625/2.34375/3.125 radii), but they also killed each-other if you put too many near each-other.
While units in Brood War don’t stack up as well as in SC2 thanks to the pathing, many of the splash damage units and AOE spells would still incentivize players to spread out more to avoid heavy losses.
I doubt that particular suggestion would pan out the way that you think.
The combination of mobility and line splash directly limit how powerful you can make a
unit in combat. Things like worker harassment or the effectiveness against Zerglings, Banelings, etc would become a problem before you could actually give the unit enough power to be a threat to other units. This is one of the reasons why Hellions were given the Hellbat morph, as the Hellion form generally isn’t powerful enough to work as a combat unit alongside Tanks and Thors.
Line-splash Cyclones certainly couldn’t be balanced with strong enough stats to counter Tanks/Thors outright, so I am hoping that you are just referencing harassment to pick apart gaps in the other player’s defenses.
I just find it hilarious that the Cyclone has been redesigned so many times, only for it to keep going back to the way it was when Lotv was released. It’s the new bunker build time.
Yeah so the idea is that RTS has an issue that moba solved. The game’s too complicated for the average gamer. MOBA solved it by reducing attack vectors into lanes, and giving each player a single unit to control. Base-building RTS by contrast could solve the same issue with zone control. Zone control simplifies the map down to a center lane fight, but there is still strategy in positioning the zone control to shape the center lane. That’s the basic idea that I am getting at.
What you say about spider mines is very interesting and it sounds like it would do something very similar to what I am aiming at doing. You can’t turtle or deathball because their self splash is too detrimental and this incentivizes spreading out.
It would do bonus damage to mechanical and armored, and would have a normal attack for dealing with zerglings and banes and things of that nature. Alternatively, the splash can be an anti air splash which would be interesting because it could knock out lines of void rays from the side, which would incentivize flanking maneuvers.
Hellions are one of the units I am most disappointed with in modern SC2. They are a transitioning unit and that’s it. You make a few of them to not die to ling bane allins and that’s all they really do.
It would be tuned to where a cluster of cyclones costing 1,000 gas could one-shot a cluster of thors costing 1,000 gas, but only if the thors are in a perfect line. If even a couple thors survive, they easily deal with the cyclones. So whether or not the cyclones win depends on if the cyclone player can jockey on the map to get the thors into lines. Medivac pickup micro would be insanely good here because you just move the thors. The splash ability would have a delay that allowed for counter micro.
The net result is that putting groups of >5 thors in the same place is simply very risky. You’d have to keep the thors split across more locations. The same would apply for tanks. Terran turtlers put a giant cluster of tanks in one spot and that makes it impossible to attack and that leads to non interaction. There has to be an incentive to spread out or the game stalemates.