I’d say that the no.1 complaint about Starcraft 2 is that it’s a spam-fest, where there is no time for attacking, as there is too much going on at home. SC1 had a more natural build up, and I think that the game would be more fun without mule, chronoboost and spawn larvae. Give the players time to think, harass the enemy, and have losses mean something.
Another zerg-specific issue is the creep spread mechanic. It takes too much effort for a non-interesting decision. Also, queen spam sucks. Too much click click.
Nah, current meta Zerg is always ahead of Terran on bases, if you watch Korean zerg they grow like a tumour, they are super strong but you need 300 APM to realize it.
Chronoboost and Mules also do much less than Spawn Larva though.
I’m not sure how much you can defend Warpgate, but the game is balanced around it for better or worse.
Reactors are necessary for Marine production to match Marauder production. You really cannot have units with significant supply differences on Terran production structures without it. Attempting to balance Marines, Hellions, etc without Reactors would result in insanely low build times.
No, it shouldn’t. Marines and Marauders are explicitly balanced around Stimpacks. If you nerfed Stimpacks, you would have to buff the base stats of those units by enough that their overall mobility & DPS with Stimpacks remains the same.
An equivalent to the Twilight Council (Citadel of Adun) has existed since SC1, and it has always been used for at least one Gateway unit upgrade (Charge, Blink, Leg Augmentations, etc), and as a tech requirement before the Twilight Archives.
The Cybernetic’s Core is too early for Blink. If the ability was on that structure, either its research time would need to be greatly increased to keep timing attacks the same, or some corresponding changes would need to be made to significantly improve the other faction’s ability to hold off Blink Satlker pushes.
So looking at macro skills they took basic mechanics and divide and gave each part to race.
Terran economy worker produces minerals the mule.
Zerg production building that builds unit the larva
Protoss is time it takes unit to be build in production, crono boost.
So your wrong when u say larva can do more because your building argument that 250 minerals can only used by certain things. Which not true at all since minerals can be used for anything.
Same thing with crono that it can be applied to anything.
Reactors makes Terran keep up with Zerg which makes it impossible Zerg be swarm when u can keep up production. Which is kinda sad that what ever Zerg destroyed Terran rebuild just as fast Zerg. This why Terran can play aggressor and defender at same time. If production was slower then Terran would play more defensive since even trade would give Zerg advantage . That’s why Thors have difficult time since if Zerg can stop 90% of army then Terran would be down for while but they just switch to marines the advantage would be gone.
Warp unlike reg building that unlike build what economy can support you want to build more then what your economy can support so u would have no down time.
Stim has been broken from sc1 to sc2, stim creates infinite micro potential that thier is no counter against. Its poor mechanics if only way beat it is only when they make mistake.
You can’t say fungle since this also can be easily dodge now if it was instant cast then it would be considered counter.
Just because something in sc1 doesn’t mean it was good ideas. It’s really sad that Protoss don’t have micro abilities till late in game by the time it comes online it’s big battle where it’s micro potential is lowered unlike stim where dominate at large numbers.
This one reason why toss can’t win is in pro league you removing micro ability from toss so they can only A move where it plays right into Terran or Zerg favor.
Yes, they tried to make each macro ability unique. Although if you ask me, the macro abilities were always a bad idea. They are needlessly tedious, and they all have side effects that negatively affect balance.
For instance, a lot of Protoss build times and upgrade times would be better if Protoss didn’t need to balance them against Chronoboost timings.
Terran also wouldn’t be able to use an Orbital bank in the late-game to drop workers and build-up a larger army.
Rebalancing Zerg is more difficult to figure out. Currently, Zerg is the most dependent faction on their macro ability because of its strength, so if Spawn Larva were removed, they would almost certainly need some changes to the Hatchery and changes to plenty of units to balance it out. Another weird option might be to make another production structure that is cheaper, but cannot collect resources or something.
Spawn Larva > Chronoboost > Mules. This can be proven objectively.
Mules are temporary, so the income boost is also temporary. If you spam Mules constantly, then the boosted income from each Orbital adds up to a constant number of 3.5-4 effective workers. This effect does not build up beyond that value over time, although it does give Terran more leeway with their supply because they don’t need quite as many workers.
The production boosts to units from Spawn Larva and Chronoboost are permanent. You keep the units until they are killed, so the effects of spamming these abilities works out to be stronger than Mules over time. Spending this energy to produce workers obviously gives you a worker lead (after 2.4 casts for Chronoboost to exceed Mules or 1.3 casts with Spawn Larva to exceed Mules). Spending this energy on combat units, or to replace lost workers can also give you a lead.
Having established that, proving that Spawn Larva has a stronger effect than Chronoboost is easy. Both affect production. Chronoboost can also boost upgrades, but this is only a temporary advantage for timings that will eventually be lost. This means that the most important difference over the course of a long game is their effect on production:
Chronoboost: 20 seconds with 50% boosted production works out to 10 seconds per use. 50 energy takes 63.49 seconds to generate. This works out to an overall boost of 15.75% to production rate on something per Nexus.
Spawn Larva: 3 Larva over 40 seconds (editor values, real time is 28.571). Effectively 1 Larva per 13.3333 seconds (or 9.5238) if spammed. There are a few different ways to calculate this, but basically casting Spawn Larva on a Hatchery boosts its production rate by 112.5%, and the production rate of a base Hatchery. The Hatchery without spawn larva already spawns Larva about 13.33% faster than most command structures produce workers to account for Overlords.
You clearly don’t understand what Reactors actually do.
Reactors do not exist to give Terran some massive production advantage. They exist to equal out the production capacity of different units from the same structures.
Terran structures are expensive and time-consuming to finish, but the units that they produce vary drastically in supply. Reactors bring the production capacity of the low-supply units (Marines/Reapers for Barracks, Hellions/Mines/Hellbats/Cyclones for Factories) up to par with the production capacity of the Tech Lab units (Tanks, Thors, Marauders, Ghosts, etc).
If Terran did not have Reactors, then either the build times of those smaller units would need to be cut in half (which creates its own problems), or those units would not be viable. Terran simply cannot afford to make twice as many production facilities. Terran production facilities are very expensive (often much more than their Protoss equivalents), they take a lot of time to build and then finish the add-ons, and they require a lot more space than most Protoss or Zerg structures.
No it hasn’t been.
This is absolutely not true. Bio tends to be ripped apart by melee units such as Speedlings and Chargelots until it surpasses a certain critical mass, and after that point you can usually counter it by adding splash to your composition and using that splash properly.
At this point, Banelings, Disruptors, and any other sources of splash that can be affected by speed are balanced around the speed of Bio. That is the main composition they have been tweaked and balanced around all of this time; such that if these units have problems they are related to other compositions.
If you were to remove Stimpacks from Bio, you would need to buff the Bio units to the same speed and similar DPS, or they would be completely unplayable.
Fungal used to be instant-cast, and it was absolutely broken. There was no counterplay to it at all.
The current Fungal is an extremely fast projectile with a massive area. You are very unlikely to miss. Using Chargelots (same speed as Stimmed Bio) as a baseline, a unit that is in the center of Fungal when you cast Fungal isn’t able to avoid it.
Bio is usually disadvantaged against Protoss until both Stimpacks and Medivacs come online. After that, there’s usually some kind of splash which eventually needs some combination of micro and a dedicated counter (Ghosts, Vikings, Liberators, etc).
Protoss has a load of problems that make them difficult to balance at the very top, but the point in time where Blink becomes available is not one of them.
For Stalkers specifically, their tendency to overkill makes them less useful in larger fights. This is a problem with their projectile that is entirely unrelated to blink.
This is highly disingenuous given the way larvae and queens work.
While Chrono is by far the most versatile of the three, being able to be applied to any building for research or production, it A) only has limited time that it’s active and B) can only be applied to a limited number of buildings.
Larvae then follows chrono from versatility, as the larvae production mechanic means that you don’t need to spend any money on additional buildings that aren’t directly tech related. It’s burst production means that you’re able to spend your larvae on any unit you have access to, including drones and your supply mechanic, overlords. The nature of the Larvae mechanic also means that Tech switching for Zerg is, assuming they have the funds for it, almost instant - that is their most powerful feature, such that they are quite literally balanced around it, and such that the entire game in an XvZ revolves around not only slowing down a zerg, but predicting and reacting to what a Zerg player is teching or making, often even before they have done so.
Larvae also don’t require you to delay production on anything, as its production, with or without inject, will continue regardless of whether you’re producing queens or upgrading your hatch/lair/hive or researching anything on it. In fact, while many argue that queens are necessary for production and require strict inject timings, the truth is that queens augment production further - Dark is the perfect example of this; he’s one of the best Zerg players in the world, and yet it’s often commented on that he also has the sloppiest macro of any Zerg pro player - something that he routinely makes up for with additional macro hatcheries to reduce the need for injecting queens. Realistically speaking, if Inject didn’t exist, you legitimately wouldn’t have to look back at your base ever except to place down tech structures, or expand. And we aren’t even touching on Queen’s other functions of Creep Spread, Transfuse, and sheer defensive prowess.
Finally, Mules are unequivocally last in the “do more”. They mine minerals, and in a pinch, they repair, which costs both minerals and time they should be mining. In order to facilitate this, you have to skip multiple worker cycles to be able to use mules each time you upgrade an orbital. Additionally, Mules don’t generate money, they simply mine more. Now, there is the benefit of being able to recover from a low or 0 SCV count with mules, I will admit, but Mules also come with the caveat that you’re also going to mine out faster than your opponents will as well.
Larvae can keep producing if there is no money to acquire on the map. Chronboost can keep boosting production if there is no money, or speed up research. But mules? If there is no money to mine, they cannot give you additional income. It’s that simple.
If neither Protoss nor Terran could ever keep up with Zerg’s extremely versatile production - and their ability to tech switch on a dime - then Zerg players would never lose a game ever. It would be a one-race game, or Terran and Toss both would have to be buffed to absurd degrees across the board to make them even partially viable to play.
At the cost of:
More production costs
More expensive units
Longer production times.
That goes for both Terran and Protoss.
People already hate “Turtle players”, and you want to make them lean into it more. I can’t tell if you’re trolling or if you simply don’t think about what you write before you dump your ridiculous, inane thoughts on screen.
“Bames Nond’s having a stronk, call a Bondulance” - I think I had a stroke reading that sentence you wrote, because I genuinely can’t tell what you’re trying to say with this sentence.
Ah yes, that’s why we see so many people dodge Fungals. Oh wait, we don’t.
It’s got a travel time, yes. But it also has the widest AOE of any damaging spell that isn’t Parasitic Bomb, and can be cast from long range. You can certainly mitigate the damage it does by pre-spreading and/or reacting to it after it’s cast, since it allows extremely limited movement, but given that it effects both Air and ground, it’s not easy to dodge even at the best of times.
There’s always been counter-micro potential. Yes, I’m going to name fungal. But also flanking, vision, stutter stepping, and having a better concave than your opponent in the engagement.
Fun fact for you, Stim in sc1 was literally never researched because of how bad it was, despite being more powerful than it is in the sc2 variation. This is entirely because of the fact that there was no way of healing off the damage it did to your units until they introduced medics in broodwar (after which it started seeing use) - the benefits did not outweigh the negatives.
Firstly, you’re just straight up wrong here on so many levels. Kiting, blink micro, force fields, phoenix pickup, warp prism pickup oracle tagging etc each require micro of some kind. Not necessarily all together either, but still micro. Stalkers outrange (and are faster than) marines early even without blink - proper micro means that they can kite them until Marines do get stim. Adepts can shade around forcing players of both races to react properly to them.
Absolutely incorrect - While stim is powerful and absolutely very strong, to say that micro potential is lowered in big battles is absolutely false. Storms, blink micro, pickup micro, forcefields; all of that serve a huge purpose in not only keeping your army alive but having Zone control, terrain manipulation and most importantly, upkeeping DPS - after all, dead units are units that are no longer firing.
No, at this point it’s purely down to Pro Protoss general skill - barring a select few (namely MaxPax and sometimes Stats), pretty much each and every Protoss player I’ve watched at a pro level regularly makes such colossal mistakes that would be game-ending for other players that it is, frankly, absurd.
This match happened only a couple of days ago. There are further examples in that post as well, this is just one of them. As I said in that post, that’s the equivalent of forgetting combat shields or metabolic boost - remember, this mistake happened for the duration of the entire game. For Both Zerg and Terran, forgetting a key upgrade like that would be game ending within a few minutes. But not for Protoss.
I’ll just point out that Zerg Pros forget Roach speed, baneling speed, and adrenal, and Terran pros forget combat shields/concussive shells all the time. It’s not particularly uncommon for them to be a minute or two late, and those upgrades are far more impactful than colossus range, simply due to how many of the units get produced.
Adrenal is probably the most forgotten upgrade in the entire game, even when the Zerg player is throwing hundreds of lings at the opponent in the late game.
Not having combat shields when your army is 50-70% marines, or roach speed/adrenal when your army is primarily made up of those units is very different from not having thermal lance when you have 2-4 colossus (12-24 supply), out of a 100+ supply army.
A colossus without Thermal lance still has 7 range, which is more than most other ground units, and is also less likely to get distracted on buildings. Colossus also only make up 10-20% of the Protoss army supply, and typically get phased out later anyway in favor of other units, because they’re so easily countered.
While it’s obviously better to get the upgrade than not, there is a slight downside to it as well, which is not the case for actually critical upgrades, and it’s not nearly as important as it was in HoTS/WoL when pre-range colossus had 6 range and Thermal lance was +3.
Forgetting charge or blink is what would be comparable to forgetting combat shield. Forgetting warp gate would be the comparison to ling speed, which is picked up very early in the game from your first tech building as Zerg; it’s practically impossible to forget unless you’re doing a timing that skips the upgrade intentionally.
Ling speed/combat shields also have clear visual changes on the units and are picked up early in the game when little is going on. It’s just silly to compare forgetting colossus range to forgetting ling speed/combat shields.
Sure, however they don’t ever forget them for the entire game like Nightmare did. He literally didn’t research it for the duration of the entire game.
It is, and mistakes like that frequently are the direct reason for losing the game even a couple minutes later.
I mean, not having the additional 2 range and being unable to target anything at the same distance of a viking is pretty telling.
Again, he kept making them the entire game and made at least 5. it’s not a small amount by any means, so he should have noticed; it’s even more important considering it’s a consistent source of splash damage.
There is no downside to getting Thermal Lance.
Unless those buildings are directly attacking the Colossus, they’re not going to get distracted attacking buildings unless there is no other attacking unit in range. Targeting priority specifically dictates that units target whatever is in range, prioritising units that can attack back first before targeting other attacking units that cannot attack back, and then non-attacking units and buildings, though there are a couple exceptions to this rule with the Thor being the most notable one.
Eh. Resources are resources. Money spend on Thermal Lance is money not spent on another colossus. Its a strict upgrade, but it doesn’t change the behavior of the unit, and the only relationship it really meaningfully affects is with vikings. Now as the hard counter thats a pretty important relationship, but its not like charge or blink where its basically necessary for the unit to do its basic job in the mid-late game.
Don’t get me wrong, im not disagreeing with you that genuinely forgetting it is a mistake, but its a “im making the game a bit needlessly harder for myself” mistake, not a “I automatically lose the game from it” mistake.
Those upgrades are also way more important than thermal lance, and it’s more noticeable when they’re missing. Thermal lance isn’t a remotely critical upgrade by comparison. Even if the Protoss player makes 5 colossus over the course of the game, that’s nothing compared to how many lings/roaches/marines/marauders get made. 5 colossus is only 1500/1000 resources. Thermal lance is effectively an extra 10% gas spending on the unit in that case.
Unless you’re entirely dependent on the colossus, which Protoss usually isn’t, the upgrade is not THAT important. It helps, but missing it isn’t the end of the world.
And again, Adrenal. Zerg players very often forget it entirely.
When any nearby friendly unit gets attacked, a unit will change target to the attacker if the attacker has higher priority than its current target. Colossus with thermal lance are more likely to be too far to acquire the attacking unit in such cases, as thermal lance means the colossus is further from both allied and enemy units.