Swann: the problem with supply

Nobody will whine if Swann gets to build 12 depos instead of 23 lol.
Everything in co-op is more improved than in ladder. But Swann’s depos are the rare example where co-op race has something WORSE than usual one. Because terran in ladder has no need to build that much supply, he can use enlargement.

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Exactly.

I don’t think HH getting an anti ground turret - say like Novas turrets - would be so bad. It is expensive enough to make it hard to mass. I think it would be fine. Same for karax getting a new ground anti air unit - like the purifier version of the stalker.

Raynor is fine without detection though, since you really should be making more than 2 orbital commands with him, to have more mules.

Vorazun is pretty fine i think. She may not have as much dmg AoE, but she does have excellent ground CC - between black holes, corsairs disruption web and archons confuse spell she rarely has much trouble.

Zeratul - not sure if making it easier to find artifacts would be much of a difference. He already has the trivial micro and basically 0 macro. Not having to search for artifacts as much wont change that.

It’s just unnecessary, change for the sake of change disguised as innovation isn’t true convenience.

Having to pay attention to your supply is part of the fun and skill to hone. It isn’t an “inconvenience” and certainly not comparable to other commanders. It’s one thing to say it needs change because 16/17 commanders all don’t have to spend resource on supply. This isn’t the case and frankly Swann’s supposedly “poor ramp up” is only seen in players lacking experience.

Ironically, all they have to do is just play some more.

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Where do you draw the line? When is something fun? Is it really fun building supply depots? Cause you could say the exact same thing about any changes done to the game since day 1… be it good or bad. You could say it was fun the way it was.

You should also keep in mind that coop is not a training camp for ladder play. I have played 1 season on ladder many years ago and haven’t touched it since. I am however level 960 in coop. Cause its fun. Much more than ladder… at least for me it is.

In coop you can have ridiculous sh!t like timestop that would break every ladder game out there… but in coop they are fine.

Lets face it: Swann is one of the least played commanders. He is unpopular for a reason (or many). If we don’t do nothing on Swann, he will get played less and less with ongoing power creep.

I like playing as Swann and i love playing with Swann as ally… the additional gas allows for new and fresh ways to play the other commanders… but good luck finding one.

Swann needs to be good. He needs to be sexy and fun.

I never thought about Raynors depots to be anything inconvenient, nor did i with H&H. I do however with Swann.

Not saying that all of Swanns problems would be solved with this…but orbital depot drops would benefit Swann in more than one way.

Another problem i see with Swann is his early game weakness on maps where you can’t utilize static defences much.

Depot drops would save Swann 200 or 300 early game minerals - which is huge. On the other hand, nobody cares if you can save 500 minerals late game by calling down a bunch of depots, so it wouldn’t change his late game much.

This also means that even if you never get supply blocked, you still benefit from the saved early game minerals.

In my opinion, all that moves Swann in a direction where he needs to be, in order to be more appealing and fun.

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Even building supply depot troubles you, how are you playing StarCraft?

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Lol no. People really hate supply. Bloggers often damn supply block. It’s borring and useless part of gameplay which gives you 0 fun and 0 game experience. Making depos actually steals the fun out of the game, it strikes you again and again, it interrupts you, it tears you off from a game. It’s anachronism like in early strategies you had 1 worker on the start and you had to build your base from zero wasting 15 minutes for this and then you had to kill your enemy till the last unit and that could last for 10 hours (KKND 2, Warcraft 2, Earth 2150). I see depos exactly like this. Meaningless restriction, shackles. Not fun.
And Bliz understand that! That’s why they made some payed commanders free from this.

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Sure, you are welcome to your opinion that ‘you don’t enjoy worrying about supply’ but don’t pretend repeatedly building supply depot is any different than repeated building Goliath/Tank/Cyclone or any unit.

If your entire reason for “supply depot construction is obsolete” is “it is repetitive” then I got some bad news for you :roll_eyes:. Moreover, if you are at A900+ and still complaining about building supply is “inconvenient”, then maybe spend some time to watch some games.

Ultimately here is the bottom line:

  1. I respect your opinion but strongly disagree the need to remove building supply.
  2. You never see people who are good at a particular commander complaining about supply mechanism (this include and was discussed, Abathur, Kerrigan, Vorazun, Karax, Alarak, etc. - should they all change then based on this reasoning? Rhetorical)
  3. I can guarantee any pro Swann player reading the language that you used to describe him as “weak early game” would disagree. He is by no means strong but definitely not weak during early game. Resource management is a skill, if poorly done on a less forgiving commander like Swann, you’ll have this ‘inconvenience’.
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I only play Nova, Artanis and Zeratul :smile:

Btw. I’m not trying to eliminate the need to build supply depots… if you think about it, orbital depot drops can at most remove the need to build half of the depots required. That’s it.

In the most extreme case, you still have to build 12 depots and can drop 11 on top of those. And that is even optimistic, since drops are energy limited, and nobody is going to build additional CCs just for depot drops.

Chances are, you drop a handful of depots during a regular game and still build the majority of depots using SCVs.

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I don’t want any more hand-holding than there already is in Co-Op. Some players like the extra thought and attention some commanders require, I think it’s fine like that. There’s something here for everybody.

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See my above post. You cannot remove the need to build supply depots with orbital depot drops… they can only drop on top of existing depots.

What makes you think i am not good? Is everyone a bad player who likes the idea?

Here is some food for thought: the next time you watch pro games, keep an eye open whether supply drop is used or not… I know i have seen it being used… by the likes of Maru for example.

So we disagree. But its an objective question. It should be addressable scientifically.

So I suggest the following:

Lets do a bunch of games… playing Swann and various other commanders, playing solo or 100% carrying an ally who provides no passive bonus (like zagara).

I suggest doing Scythe of Amon, which is a particularly hard offensive map.

Then from the replays we measure how long it takes to…

a) clear 1st objective
b) clear 1st bonus area
c) clear 2nd objective / expansion area

And then we compare Swann with the other commanders.

You may provide the Swann replays.

I can provide one replay for each of the other commanders (except dehaka).

Then we can compare objectively. You can retry as often as you want and play whatever build you want. And so can I.

My feeling on this is that Swann would take longer than most other commanders on every objective and bonus.

So what do you think? Sounds like a fun friendly challenge :smile:

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You mentioned we can have Time Stop b/c Coop is fine with such a thing. The reverse is also true. That’s b/c something is in Ladder/Versus, doesn’t mean it “has to” be in Coop.

So with all of those suggestions, I’m adding YOUR suggestion to that list… “it’d be nice to address some of those issues…”, and I’d probably welcome them, "… but I’d also be fine with not including them.

Raynor has no unit detector… it’d be nice, but it’s fine as is
HH has no AG tower… it’d be nice, but it’s fine as is
Swann has no Orbital supply drop spell… it’d be nice, but it’s fine as is

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Then by all means, stick with them.

I can see you’re trying to turn Swann into them b/c it suits your preference, and I can see where you’re coming from. However, it’s a tough sell.

Swann’s slower “ramp up” is part of who he is. I don’t find it to be THAT excessive. On the flipside, Zagara gets up and going VERY FAST. Her late game is inferior. That’s just who she is.

This again is subjective. TBH, there are times where I find gathering minerals and gas to be tedious at times. Even though they’ve streamlined a lot of it (e.g. automatically setting workers to min lines, starting off with 12 of them). To that end, I’ve enjoyed some of the campaign missions where you start off with everything you need. You can’t build anymore stuff, but have a sizeable force off the bat

Somebody can be even more extreme and say he doesn’t want to use his mouse and keyboard to play the game :roll_eyes:

Keeping things “more realistic”, I wouldn’t mind if they reverted Stukov’s Bunkerlisks to 300/0/4, even though deep down, I know this was waay too good of a deal.

As a Karax fan, I also wish they could reduce the cost of Orbital Strikes to 2.5 SoA energy instead of it currently at 5. I could REALLY SPAM the heck out of that! :sunglasses: But that would be… far too different

Swann is one of the most powerful commanders, his firepower is insane, his ability to defend and to spawn camp is insane, the amount of gas he can give is insane. There’s a reason why most mutations can easily be beaten with Swann. Swann is in a good place, always has been, don’t confuse a high skill requirement with not being good.

As for being sexy and fun, this is subjective. If you don’t find doing macro fun and sexy, then fine. But some people enjoy macroing and seeing the fruits of their build order, and mind you, these build orders have been painstakingly developed over time and over many failures. Swann isn’t flashy, and even a good Swann player will admit that you won’t really notice Swann being there, but you’ll just be surprised that he’s already outdamaged and and outkilled you.

If you feel so strongly that Swann is too difficult to play or is a lackluster commander, you can either keep playing him until you see why there people out there who enjoy and find much success with him, or just move on and go back to commanders that don’t require a lot of macro.

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Exactly! ^

I don’t get this whining about Swann. True, he’s not the easiest to play well, but that’s the whole point! He’s powerful, fun, and varied, and many people like him just how he is now!

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Your entire order of approach on Scythe of Amon is not efficient.

No offence but by that measure (and your approach). I (or any pro Swann) would beat 1st objective time 2nd objective and 1st bonus time every single time.

This is because Swann does just fine going expansion sliver -> north of main sliver -> then 1st bonus with no issue -> finish map in 17-19min. And on a side note, I am not assuming or judging you (or anyone) as “having poor skill or a bad player”, but that clearly there is a lack of experience. I’ve seen many stuck in their way despite being 1k.

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regarding using orbital command to drop supply depots:

you lose minerals that way. energy needed to call down supply is same as energy for mule. one mule gives around 250 minerals. one scv mines around 60 minerals per minute and one depot takes 21 seconds to build. So you waste around 230 minerals if you use the calldown supply ability. in early game, that’s brutal. when you see pros to it, it’s because they were too busy with other stuff and didn’t get chance to do it. in that situation, getting one round of production is much better than saving the 220 minerals because you might lose in that 21 seconds.

i pretty much always play swann and if you gave me orbital command, i’d use it for mule in early game to get more goliaths or hellbats out faster or scan in later stages when minerals is no longer an issue.

I’m assuming this topic is to give Swann’s CC Orbital Drop. Just that. Not the whole “multiplayer package”, so MULE would NOT be included in that.

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On the side topic of giving Orbital Drop to Swann “as a solution”. Here are some realistic things to consider:

  1. To change Command Centre to Orbital Command (or whatever new name), it’ll cost resource and time - neither of which are things that help Swann’s early game (especially when you can complete a Supply Depot with multiple SCV; even 2 makes it extremely fast).
  2. The choice between no MULE ability versus having it. The former is simple but has 1) as a great barrier. Meanwhile the latter means a wasted cast… I mean unless… Orbital Drop gives a lot of supply like 30+.
  3. Tech locked behind such a thing. Even Raynor’s OC is locked behind Barracks. So presumably Swann’s will be Factory. This means the player will still have to make that 1st Supply Depot. Since late game supply block isn’t an issue, this doesn’t actually help early game.
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I don’t actually find supply a big problem during early game, I don’t have that much to do anyway, so it’s manageable. But constantly making depos through entire mission is annoying and ability to dump all accumulated energy to gain instant supply would help that. Even if it would cost minerals.

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Listen to my advice and sacrifice 1 SCV so that he can build depots for 12 minutes and steadily increase your supply without your need to care about him.

There is nothing wrong with Swann Supply. Wake up! He is fine. He does not need to change.

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