I think it would have been cool if in SC2 there was branching upgrades that once you picked one then some other upgrades would have their cost doubled to change. Additionally upgrades that also comes with debuffs. I have 3 ideas for Medivac upgrades. Tell me what you think of the following:
Armored Cockpit.
Medivacs gain +2 armor and 75 extra health, but can no longer use Afterburners and move 35% slower.
EDIT: Changed 20 health to 250 health.
EDIT 2: Changed 250 health to 75 health.
2. Emergency Parachutes.
Units within a medivac donât die if it is destroyed. However medivac healing speed is reduced by 35%.
Refractive mirrors.
Medivacs are now capable of cloaking themselves. However they cannot use afterburners, require energy and can no longer heal nearby units.
Lets say that each upgrade costs 125/125 or 175/175 at the start. You can change these upgrades, but only one can be active at a time and each time someone changes these upgrades during the game the costs increases by 50%.
EDIT: Changed 150/150 to 125/125 or 175/175 mineral cost.
How do you think you would feel if these 3 upgrades were introduced for terran playersâ medivacs?
Nobody would ever take armor and health for no afterbuners and slow speed, blink-stalkers do not care about armor that much.
Absurdly OP. There would be no way to somehow stop the mine drop or any other kind of drop. I am not even asking what would happen if the medivac dies in the area, where ground units canât reach it.
How am I supposed to defend myself from invisible mine drops?
p.s. GhostHydra if you are reading this, this is a perfect example of what would happen with the game, if the community and not the pro players would be working on the balance.
They will not make any changes which can have a big effect on 1v1 balance. Itâs to late for major changes. The ONLY way bigger changes could be made is through releasing another expansion, which will not happen. They will do only tiny tweaks here and there, MAYBE.
Nobody would ever take armor and health for no afterbuners and slow speed, blink-stalkers do not care about armor that much.
Everything can be adjusted. So lets say it gives an extra 250 health. At that point though Iâd just say to make the hercules a playable unit.
Absurdly OP. There would be no way to somehow stop the mine drop or any other kind of drop. I am not even asking what would happen if the medivac dies in the area, where ground units canât reach it.
What if instead what it did was it only prevented units that were also armored from dieing such as siege tanks and thors.
or
Instead of instantly killing it reduces the damage of all units by 75%.
How am I supposed to defend myself from invisible mine drops?
Detection. And donât forget that there is no medivac healing with this.
p.s. GhostHydra if you are reading this, this is a perfect example of what would happen with the game, if the community and not the pro players would be working on the balance.
I am pretty sure that all of these could be made balanced with the right tweaks. It just may be tricky.
The reality is that Terrans make Medivacs in EVERY. SINGLE. GAME. You want them to become some kind OP âGhost Medivacsâ which would SHATTER balance.
Would it really be that broken? I mean late mid to late game people usually have a lot of detection options. Plus terrans do have ghosts, but ghosts arenât really considered op.
If are at the point of Hercules, why not to include the Odin with the red button into the game?
What for do we need changes which make no sense? For the poor sake of changes?
Itâs cool, that you know that detection exist, however noticing a medivac in your mineral line is too late to react to it. As well as seeing the invisible doom drop in your main is too late too.
If are at the point of Hercules, why not to include the Odin with the red button into the game?
I mean. Protoss does have a mothership. Zerg and Terran are lacking a proper heroic unit.
What for do we need changes which make no sense? For the poor sake of changes?
For fun? I think it would be fun at least.
Itâs cool, that you know that detection exist, however noticing a medivac in your mineral line is too late to react to it. As well as seeing the invisible doom drop in your main is too late too.
I am not as incompetent at the game as I may seem. I do make ample detection almost every game. I am not sure that point about the medivac holds weight though. You could make the same argument for banshees.
400 health Medivacs would be insane even if they are slow. That is more than double the health-per-supply of any other unit.
Drops would suffer a bit, but Terran could usually load their army into Medivacs and escape without much fear of losing the units within.
Thatâs another bad idea. Nobody would take decreased healing because it is a major nerf to Bio. Mech players are unlikely to use many Medivacs, but when they do they would probably prefer the healing on Hellbats and Ghosts.
There is no way Terran could take that upgrade without rendering Bio units useless. Bio units would die from attrition with no recourse.
Mech would not be affected as heavily, but it would still be a bad idea to give anyone transports that cloak.
Banshees are explicitly balanced for aerial cloaking. Their in-combat stats are rather low for a Terran unit because cloak is an option. Other Terran units are not balanced for cloak, and your suggestion provides partial cloaking to all ground units.
Terran with cloaking transports could wreak havoc with mech drops.
Widow Mine drops would leave significantly less time to react.
Thor drop micro would become abusive, as the opponent wonât even see the transport in some cases.
Terran could drop Hellions & Tanks in the base unannounced, and it is particularly difficult to dislodge Tanks buffered by Hellbats.
There are probably a number of other problematic cases I am unaware of.
Yes, protoss does have a mothership, ONE mothership, which is huge and moves very slowly. Which is exactly the opposite of medivac.
In order to react to mine drop, you need to see it on the minimap, that the reason, why you build pylons in the corners. Observer or phono cannon can only grant you vision around the mineral line. If you spot the red dot in your mineral line, that is TOO LATE.
I am still not convinced that it would be that OP as compared to a banshee. Mainly because 1. The medivac cannot heal. 2. It requires energy. 3. It cannot attack. 4. No afterburners. In fact part of me thinks it might be even weaker then what we have right now because of these debuffs.
Bio players will never research this upgrade. Bio is completely dependent on Medivacs for sustain, and it will die of self-afflicted attrition if the player is stupid enough to research this upgrade. That is a bad thing. RTS games should not have upgrades that players want to actively avoid researching. The purpose of upgrades is to gate the strength of certain units until after the opponent can reasonably handle them, not to render units useless for their primary purpose.
An energy requirement by itself does not balance cloaking. Without healing, all of the Medivacâs energy will be used for cloak. Cloak is only useful needed when the player is actively dropping, escaping a fight, or harassing, so the player will have plenty of downtime to gather energy.
This point is irrelevant. Transports donât need to attack, they just drop units that can attack. Tanks, Hellbats, and Thors are hardest to deal with inside the main or natural of each player. With stealth, a Terran player could easily doom-drop these units into the opponentâs main or natural without getting spotted. By the time the opponent can react, the Siege Tanks will already be sieged, and the Hellbats will already have morphed. Thor-Medivac micro is also used in a number of instances, and that will be much harder to deal with when the opponent cannot even see the Medivac.
Medivac drops will be weaker when spotted, but that will require detection, meaning that the opponent will have to build a lot more detectors or static defense. The cost of that alone could potentially put the Terran player ahead even if he/she never drops the opponent.
Most of your suggestions make the Medivac weaker in drops and worse with Bio. They all have problems that either render the upgrades themselves pointless (no one would research) or that cause problems (such as making mech doom drops too powerful).
All in all, these are bad suggestions. As I iterated earlier, the purpose of upgrades in StarCraft is to gate the strength of a unit until the opponent can reasonably deal with it, not to completely change how a unit operates.
This sort of dramatic adjustment is almost exclusively something that will either make the unit overpowered (a drop that canât be shot down, thatâs guaranteed to escape, an invincible healer) or useless (a drop that can never land nor escape, a healer that always dies if you retreat).
Legacy of the Void added the ability to pick up sieged Siege Tanks and then removed it for a reason. Neither of these are that, but they have not too dissimilar problems.
The 12.6 HP per second that the Medivac offers Terran bio is a bit of knifeâs-edge balance in multiple matchups, where even stutter-stepping wrong causes bio balls to die in fights they can/should win. Reducing the heal rate will frequently be an Incorrect Decision.
In both cases, the drop is far more likely to land and be able to deal significant damage, however. As a result, these are only significant to non-Hellbat mech-centric strategies when they decide to go for a drop, so I think these might have a chance at being balanced.
150/150 +50% each time - so +75 costs for 225/225, 300/300 etc;
or stacking multiplicatively 150/150 becoming 225 becoming 337.5?
The latter is disgusting and awful since costs in game are always multiples of 5 (and almost always multiples of 25) but the real thing that will happen is that you will almost never be switching the medivac modes because itâs a huge overhead on your mental capacity.
I would wonder why weâre trying to buff mech by giving them drop play access with complicated upgrades when the major thing that makes mech really suck is that itâs gas-intense to produce and to set up its production.
From my point of view, if we want to buff mech focused strategies, reducing the gas cost of the factory and armory - potentially increasing their mineral costs to compensate - is much more straightforward for the general population, easy to wrap your head around, and solves a major issue in that âmoving into building mechâ is comparatively difficult to afford while still producing valuable army units instead of just Hellions.
I think that itâs been really cool in other games to have â+X -Yâ type upgrades, since theyâre interesting strategically - so I donât think itâs totally hopeless to try things like this.
Like, from watching a lot of pro games, Iâm pretty sure thereâs multiple people who would consider âsidegradeâ choices - and having multiple such choices to pick from makes those choices more exciting.
Iâm struggling to come up with something that sounds good even for the theoretical, though, âheal two targets but less efficientlyâ, âheal more HP/s but lose afterburnersâ?
In order to make âside-gradeâ upgrades work, you have to define the game around them in a system that is very different from how StarCraft upgrades work. Grey Goo does it well, but that game doesnât have weapon/armor upgrades or any upgrades that are âessentialâ for the strength/performance any unit. Grey Goo pretty much relies on precise balance where every iteration of a unit is balanced with the precise stats that it needs to function. All of Grey Gooâs upgrades are designed around adding some utility to units that doesnât necessarily (or significantly) buff the unitâs combat strength, and those upgrades are subdivided into 5 groups (tank, artillery, air, stealth, economic) where you can only take one upgrade from each group at a time.
Most of StarCraft IIâs upgrades are designed to gate the strength of units, so those upgrades will be prioritized in any case where players plan to use the units that they affect. There was an attempt to do something like a side-upgrade system with Battlecruisers in WOL alpha, but that was eventually scrapped, as neither of the other abilities could really compete with Yamato.
Anyway, back to the point. It would be much easier to just balance a unit with transformations (similar to Vikings, Thors, Hellions/Hellbats, Tanks, etc) than to try to make exclusive upgrades for some case. That enables the player to specialize their army how they want or need at that point in time. Permanent morphs, like Lurkers, Brood Lords, and the old Guardians/Devourers can also achieve a similar goal, particularly if the morph is beneficial enough to justify a cost increase.
Because banshee can kill 1 probe with a few shots, or 0 probes if there is a battery. A medivac loaded with mines can kill an entire mineral line in a second if you do not react in time. What is so hard to understand there?
Good point. But maybe they could pick a different upgrade? Like in the SC2 campaigns some upgrades are plain useless for certain units and builds.
An energy requirement by itself does not balance cloaking. Without healing, all of the Medivacâs energy will be used for cloak. Cloak is only useful needed when the player is actively dropping, escaping a fight, or harassing, so the player will have plenty of downtime to gather energy.
Also a good point. Well what if it was instead a CD based ability that only gives cloaking for 6 seconds when used?
This point is irrelevant. Transports donât need to attack, they just drop units that can attack. Tanks, Hellbats, and Thors are hardest to deal with inside the main or natural of each player. With stealth, a Terran player could easily doom-drop these units into the opponentâs main or natural without getting spotted. By the time the opponent can react, the Siege Tanks will already be sieged, and the Hellbats will already have morphed. Thor-Medivac micro is also used in a number of instances, and that will be much harder to deal with when the opponent cannot even see the Medivac.
I understand.
Medivac drops will be weaker when spotted, but that will require detection, meaning that the opponent will have to build a lot more detectors or static defense. The cost of that alone could potentially put the Terran player ahead even if he/she never drops the opponent.
I am not sure about this. I often see a lot of detection mid to late game so people are generally building detection. As you often need to build missle turrets, spore and cannons to deal with attacks mid to late game on bases. Of course it was mentioned that if someone notices the rush by the time they are in the base its too late. However I donât know if I agree with this because if you have an army nearby then you can often deal with attacks nearby.
This sort of dramatic adjustment is almost exclusively something that will either make the unit overpowered (a drop that canât be shot down, thatâs guaranteed to escape, an invincible healer) or useless (a drop that can never land nor escape, a healer that always dies if you retreat).
What health change could make it just fine but not OP?
Legacy of the Void added the ability to pick up sieged Siege Tanks and then removed it for a reason. Neither of these are that, but they have not too dissimilar problems.
The 12.6 HP per second that the Medivac offers Terran bio is a bit of knifeâs-edge balance in multiple matchups, where even stutter-stepping wrong causes bio balls to die in fights they can/should win. Reducing the heal rate will frequently be an Incorrect Decision.
In both cases, the drop is far more likely to land and be able to deal significant damage, however. As a result, these are only significant to non-Hellbat mech-centric strategies when they decide to go for a drop, so I think these might have a chance at being balanced.
How do you think these could possibly be properly balanced and work?
150/150 +50% each time - so +75 costs for 225/225, 300/300 etc;
or stacking multiplicatively 150/150 becoming 225 becoming 337.5?
The latter is disgusting and awful since costs in game are always multiples of 5 (and almost always multiples of 25) but the real thing that will happen is that you will almost never be switching the medivac modes because itâs a huge overhead on your mental capacity.
Okay. What about 175/175 or 125/125?
I would wonder why weâre trying to buff mech by giving them drop play access with complicated upgrades when the major thing that makes mech really suck is that itâs gas-intense to produce and to set up its production.
From my point of view, if we want to buff mech focused strategies, reducing the gas cost of the factory and armory - potentially increasing their mineral costs to compensate - is much more straightforward for the general population, easy to wrap your head around, and solves a major issue in that âmoving into building mechâ is comparatively difficult to afford while still producing valuable army units instead of just Hellions.
The vespene cost of building factories is pretty high yes. Especially when compared to getting units that fit similar roles as zerg. We can just morph a single structure and get unit production galore.
I think that itâs been really cool in other games to have â+X -Yâ type upgrades, since theyâre interesting strategically - so I donât think itâs totally hopeless to try things like this.
Like, from watching a lot of pro games, Iâm pretty sure thereâs multiple people who would consider âsidegradeâ choices - and having multiple such choices to pick from makes those choices more exciting.
Iâm struggling to come up with something that sounds good even for the theoretical, though, âheal two targets but less efficientlyâ, âheal more HP/s but lose afterburnersâ?
I think this would make the game far more interesting. However I also realize doing this might make it much harder to balance.
Because banshee can kill 1 probe with a few shots, or 0 probes if there is a battery. A medivac loaded with mines can kill an entire mineral line in a second if you do not react in time. What is so hard to understand there?
I guess, but one thing to consider. The units within medivacs all cost resources. A single banshee is less mineral cost heavy as compared to a medivac full of bio and/or mech. I have seen armies of banshees kill works fairly quickly and bases. They can also delete canons, spores and missile turrets quickly with enough.
They will not make any changes which can have a big effect on 1v1 balance. Itâs to late for major changes. The ONLY way bigger changes could be made is through releasing another expansion, which will not happen. They will do only tiny tweaks here and there, MAYBE.
Yes. I realize that this will likely never happen but it is fun theorize! Makes for an interesting discussion on the mechanics of the game too.
The probability that there isnât one seems pretty high. I have no idea what would be close to appropriate, unfortunately; but I think you could determine one by looking at typical responses and seeing how often they barely die or live calculate how long they had and how long they will end up staying in range and how many shots would get fired to preserve a reasonable state against nonfliers.
The significant speed losses meaning that fliers will always catch up and the drop will be slower and easier to react, so maybe âreasonableâ is even tripled health for a near-guaranteed escape if the defense isnât tight.
At a design level, you still have the same binary state - The dropship got in/out or it didnât. The healer is snipable or it isnât, the healer can escape or it canât.
Changing its stats change how much defenses are necessary for countering drop play very significantly and itâs the fact that itâs a significant difference thatâs what matters. Is there a problem where the medivac, in drops, is too easy to kill with ground units?
Is the idea of the âdoom dropâ too one-way for too many units, are medivacs too easy to snipe from armies, etc
I think the important question for things is âwould it be coolâ and âwhat does this enableâ, and I struggle to see how it would be much of either of these things: If the Medivac is slow itâs hard to use, and if itâs super bulky enough itâs not cool to just watch it always escape.
Okay. What about 175/175 or 125/125?
âŚsure? I do think that if youâre committing to âyou can switch this by paying a feeâ a fixed cost is better than a scaling one.
The basic problem is the same - what does this give - but in this case, âswitch between buffsâ is interesting because when you pick one you can strategize around how it works with your army and then change up how you play when you switch bonuses.
Itâs still a bad idea. The campaign is balanced very differently (upgrades are reseached outside of regular missions), and campaign upgrades donât come with downsides.
I mentioned this before, rather than try to introduce some branching upgrade system for a single unit, it is much better to give the unit the ability to transform into other modes with different abilities or stats, like the Hellion/Hellbat can do. This would allow Medivacs with different specializations (no cloak, but maybe some other changes) to be balanced.
Since we are talking about a transport (not a combat unit), the transformation time can also be made quite long to prevent problems that might occur if the transports could just transform on the fly.
I donât think that a cloaking transport could ever be properly balanced. You would have to nerf or limit every single ground unit that the faction possesses to ensure that none of them could cause problems, and the ability to cloak transports is definitely not worth that.
There is one change that i would like to see with medivacs:
modify A.I. so that medivacs pick units surrounded with melee units.
Currently if your army is surrounded with say zerglings or zealots then instead of picking units medivacs stand in place like idiots and heal units and you have to pick units with some âSHIFTâ gimmicks which is annoying. You can literally lose game because of this.