I’m not going to say 3 armor from upgrade wasn’t too much (for zerg), and still got a complaint from a lower level zerg, but planatary fortress is of questionable value these days.
250 is a steep price increase compared with orbital command, which increases economy. Should only really take them for an extremely remote outpost, last ditch defense, or cheese I guess.
If you don’t get hit by a skirmish, they don’t do anything, and will later get killed by bane or hydra snipe, or even just marines.
against a concerted early tank push, at my current level, I’d have been better off lifting. suffice to say I’ve dropped third base planatary despite saving me when I was noober.
for minor skirmish I’d be better off just learning to load my workers and flee the rest. Or keep minor defense.
Suggest something like; decrease cost by 50 minerals or gas; preferably add a little hitpoint or add half an armor;
or something crazier. add the ability to switch with orbital or at least cc once paid (not repeated payments).
Ask maru why he likes to build 2 planetaries at key locations/expansions.
Ask every terran pro player why they currently Camp so hard. Especially with 2 supply ghosts. If you think planetaries are bad, then its a you problem.
No, genuinely, the PF is very good, even with the nerfs it received in 5.0.15. How do you reconcile this statement with reality?
It’s the same total cost as it was in 5.0.15.
That said, it does make it marginally more difficult to get as your natural simply due to the worker count and slower economy scaling.
4th base onwards, yes. As they’ve always been, since your army can defend 3 bases relatively easily and the distance between 3rd and natural generally isn’t that huge.
It forces your opponents to commit exorbitant amounts of units to killing the PF, which may still survive depending on how quickly you repair and react. It’s not meant to be immortal, just buy you time to rotate over.
Skill issue.
PF at your third is objectively a mistake every single time. Why were you making them as a third base in the first place, unless you’re in a late-game (4-5 bases at least ) situation and are setting up sim-city defensively to make it harder for them to crack your bases?
Before 4th base, this is basically always what you want because you don’t have the econ to support anything else, and the first 3 base orbitals are more important for keeping up economically (and offsetting your scv construction time).
Completely unnecessary, especially since one of the goals of the last two patches was to reduce turtling capacity, of which the PF was a gargantuan component.
I mean, it still functions well defensively, but the benefits of the orbital are completely necessary to keep up with the other races early on due to the nature of how Terran produces.
I saw your suggestion, but you have yet to actually explain with any form of logic and reasoning why you think that needs to happen.
Saying “it’s not worth the cost” is, objectively, simply not true when the total cost is unchanged from 5.0.15. It’s certainly an opinion you can hold, but it’s just that, an opinion, that at this point in time really isn’t substantiated by… well, anything.
If it had 0 armour, and Neosteel + hi-sec didn’t exist, I might have agreed because the cost and stats of the turret wouldn’t offset the total cost necessary to make it a half decent defense at that point.
But that isn’t the case; currently, it’s arguably the strongest static defense in the game, and it has the cost to match.
A 50 mineral reduction would feel right as the Planetary Fortress still feels a bit overpriced, especially with only 1 armor. I think a bigger discussion should be on the viability of bunkers after 5 minutes into the game. Bunkers obviously cost supply, but multiple Planetary Fortresses per expansion are especially necessary because it is too easy for Zerg to just roll banelings in and kill your Planetary and all of your SCV’s before you can do anything because even if you focus fire the banelings with your Planetary Fortress, most of them still die and blow up next to the Planetary doing damage. Also, a dozen or more stalkers blinking into your mineral line and focus firing the Planetary while a few sentries force field the perimeter to prevent repair is too easy to do and make Planetary Fortresses not the greatest defensive armament if you build only one of them. Against a baneling abusing zerg you actually will want at least three per expansion in the late game.
If bunkers were more useful throughout the game then the Planetary Fortress meta would not be such a big discussion. The Neosteel armor upgrade would be cool if it had three upgrades and each upgrade added additional health and capacity to each bunker so level 1 would add 1 armor and 100 health to each building and 2 capacity to bunkers and so by level 3 you have 4 armor bunkers with 700 health and a capacity of 10. The three upgrades would apply to all other Terran buildings as well, though you would probably have to nerf the initial Planetary Fortress stats (without upgrades) for this idea to be fair.
No, the armor for the Planetary Fortress was nerfed to 1 several years ago. Don’t remember which patch exactly did that. Both Planetary Fortresses and Thors going back to 2 armor would make a lot of Terran’s happy and not complain as much.
I will also add that one of the main complaint about Terran players is that Blizzard/Balance Council/whoever is responsible for balancing the game has a pattern of doing a huge nerf to a particular terran unit in a PTR or a patch, then the unit is buffed a little bit but with stats less than the original values, and then non-Terran players say the unit was buffed when it took an overall nerf. This has been done more than any other race by far so now Terran has crappy casters (Ghost and Raven) and now mech is crap again because tanks can be abducted with impunity by Vipers. In theory if you mass a bunch of siege tanks, there is nothing Zerg can do against you on the ground but due to poor mobility and huge maps, this is not viable really. Zerg’s can hit and run and whenever you engage with your tanks, the leading ones get pulled by Vipers if the Zerg player went for any hydra/lurker setup. Mass ling can be dealt with by just making three to 4 planetary expansions per base and going air. And of course you can go bio, but that is just too fragile against late game zerg as you need a lot of liberators to support them and they get dealt with easily by vipers as well.
I am going a bit off on a tangent here, but the point is that the overall direction of Terran units the last 4 years or so has been endless nerfs that Terran is now restricted to very two-dimensional play because caster units are often the glue that makes innovative strategies and terran casters are garbage right now.
Oddly, the the page shows that the PF costs 150/150, (plus CC cost) but going into the source code to update it shows it as the correct amount. How peculiar.
“Morphs” use the actual cost of the target unit and account for the difference. The Planetary Fortress didn’t need to be changed at all for the cost to update.
As for Liquipedia, it hasn’t been updated with the latest patch notes.
I am pretty sure Planetary Fortresses have 1 base armor at the moment. I can’t go in and check at the moment because I received a 2 week ban for talking about America’s greatest ally and the genocide in Gaza in Public Chat as well as the history of the Blue Jays in America. No hate speech just inconvenient speech. I don’t know if it is selective enforcement or just anyone can report anyone for anything and people just get banned if the right inconvenient words/topics are discussed. You can bash America nonstop and bash pretty much any other ethnicity or religion in General Chat without fear, but you can’t really talk about this one group of people and their country in the middle east without getting banned. It kinda makes you wonder who actually is making the patches these days and why they are so incompetent as well.
They do not. I know this for a fact. They have 2 base armour, 4 with Neosteel.
Have you tried just not interacting with the cancer that is general chat?
No. Just no. On both accounts. Raven might be niche but that doesn’t make it bad. And calling the Ghost “crappy” is genuinely hilarious, especially in its current state.
Oh no, you need to actively protect the backbone of your army!
Tanks shouldn’t ever have been unabductable, and them being abductable doesn’t make mech bad.
We’re not playing monobattles here, compositions are important. Ghosts and Vikings both stop this through either EMP or simply killing the viper before it can abduct.
Picking off mech while they’re unsieged is how you beat mech, yes. Positioning and map awareness matters, mech is slow and immobile, but incredibly powerful.
Mate, you shouldn’t need that many. Good sim-city makes all the difference here, especially with sensor towers to help you position.
