I mentioned this about 2 years ago. Its an interesting theoretical unit type. Basically Hover units are ground units that can are able to walk through walls, over and up and down cliffs and basically go anywhere that air units can. They are attackable by both ground and air. Think of it like a glorified colossus. If such a unit type had been introduced at the start of SC2, do you think it would have had a good place within SC2 multiplayer? Or would the game be worse off with this kind of unit?
Based on how reapers functioned for most of SC2, I would guess worse.
Edit: I thought about it further. Cliff-walking itself is too broad and difficult to balance around for most units, but there are other ways to develop more interesting maps. There are some map RTS games where certain units (usually infantry, but sometimes other units) can travel through certain terrain that other units cannot.
Some SC1 & SC2 maps have done something similar. SC1 had chokepoints using infrastructure gates that workers could mineral-walk through, and both games have contained the odd map or two with very small chokepoints that only very small units like Marines and Zerglings can pass to cross the map faster.
WarCraft III also added some amphibious units in the expansions which could walk on land and swim through water.
Basically, it is possible to add a specific terrain types that only units with specific movement types or sizes can cross, and still wind up with an interesting and balanced map. However, SC2 is no longer being supported and modified, so it is very unlikely we’ll ever get more than the odd map with a tiny 1-grid choke.
The Colossus, Stalker, Swarm Host, and the Reaper are all very cool because they can somewhat ignore cliffs.
They also totally screw everything up, and it’s directly because they can kind of ignore cliffs. It makes a lot of problems because what “looks” safe has reduced relation to what “is” safe; and RTS is already a hugely difficult to breach genre.
We can also observe how the Reaper got repeatedly adjusted and fiddled and mostly neutered in its effectiveness to see how problematic being able to field lots of these kinds of units is. How the Host got pretty much smacked into the ground when receiving this sort of change. How the Stalker is… kind of bad otherwise to not be broken when accommodating blink. And despite that, it’s incredibly potent when it gets into positions the opponent isn’t ready to block for, but is extremely massable and very good at getting into very annoying places.
Being attackable by both air/ground weapons is a huge liability and going over cliffs and walls makes such a unit have a very powerful niche; but that’d be balanced either by a cost or by it being weak, which makes it frustrating and unrewarding, which is pretty textbook “annoying to have in game”, as opposed to “interesting strategic tool”.
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Hover units are in the original sc though not working as what you said.
All workers, the vulture and archon are hover units in the original starcraft. This attribute only have one purpose: They do not trigger spider mines because these units “do not touch the ground”. You can safely destroy mines with a detector and attack the mines with probe/scv/drone.
This is however removed in sc2, even in co-op.
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I saw the unit type"hover" in the SC2 editor. I had no idea what I meant, but while tinkering around with the SC2 editor to make a custom mod I ran into a bug where grounds units could walk through walls and off cliffs without being destroyed. I rolled with it and then thought to myself. What if this was an actual unit type. Thats basically where this idea sprung from. Good to know what the original purpose of hover units really was though.
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I am not sure, why would you want to use a hover unit, which can be attacked by air and ground forces, instead of air unit which can ignores all of the objects too and can be attacked only by air units?
I think the most close to that is diamondback. One of the most imbalanced things in campaign as well as coop.
Diamondbacks may have appeared to hover, but they moved like normal units and didn’t appear to get any advantages.
Diamondbacks were one of weakest units in the base WOL campaign. They are useful in some of the custom WOL coop campaign missions, but that is because they have been heavily buffed.
Maybe I have a wrong memory but I remember that Diamondbacks destroyed the trains in WOL campaign almost instantly even on brutal, MMM at the same time weren’t that efficient at all.
Marines are “marginally better” than Diamondbacks on The Great Train Robbery.
Despite the Train’s armor and the Marine’s squishiness, you can fit more than 4 Marines in the same area and their comparative cheapness makes it the “most efficient” option for clearing the trains as quickly as possible.
What is important to note between them is that the Diamondback does 19 (+2) damage per second to the Trains (40 - 2 per 2 seconds), while the Marine does a much more sad sounding 6.9767 (+1.7442) DPS; the Diamondback is four supply and costs 150 minerals.
The map, additionally, has multiple features that are very beneficial to Diamondbacks - While the Kill Teams slaughter them; the Marines, Firebats, Hellions, and Ravens are all fairly pathetic to the Diamondback’s base 200 HP, armored tag, and 2.95 movespeed. They have nothing to fear from most of the map; so it’s easy to create a huge blob of them – and they’re high in gas price and slow to build which makes it significantly more affordable due to the mission’s low-economy nature (but you get lots of gas from the train scrap).
None of these advantages are true for almost every other map in the game.
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That mission is explicitly designed to be completed by massing Diamondbacks with at most a few Marines or Missile turrets for anti-air on all difficulty levels. Some of the trains are just fast enough that most units just cannot keep up with them to limit your options, but that is not an indicator that Diamondbacks are any good as a unit. Diamondbacks are nearly useless on every other campaign mission.
Other options such as Siege Tanks can also work on that mission, provided that you place them properly beforehand and that you have enough of them to kill the trains before they escape your range.
To illustrate just how bad Diamondbacks actually are:
- Diamondbacks share the DPS of a stimmed Marauder. A single stimmed Marauder, which costs half the supply and far less gas, and would have a faster speed while stimmed if stimpacks were available for Marauders on campaign.
- Diamondbacks also have the speed of a Stalker (with no blink), so there are plenty of more mobile units. Stimmed Bio is actually faster. That might be fine if Diamondbacks dealt more damage, but they don’t.
- The one thing Diamondbacks do have is health, but even that 200 or 250) is not particularly special for a 4-supply armored unit. The Diamondback’s durability is comparable to Marauders in the absence of splash, and they are much less durable than units intended for durability like Thors.
Frankly, the multiplayer Cyclone is a far superior to the Diamondback despite the fact that it has 120 health compared to the Diamondback’s 200(+50). The Cyclone can effectively kite more units due to its faster speed and higher lock-on range. The Lock-on has more range and higher DPS (with or without the upgrade), and even the basic attack (which Cyclones should only use in emergencies) has slightly more DPS than the Diamondback’s attack in most situations (although it does have less range). Cyclones get those advantages on a lower cost in terms of both resources and supply.
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