I watch Shinn get insurmountable leads against Maru, Maru brushes it off and collects the EZ win, I watch the roach enjoyer Serral make some roaches and it’s like Maru forgets how strong roaches are in ZvT. 
I don’t think roaches are strong, I think maru has a unique weakness to them combined with the fact that Serral is just in another universe in terms of skill. Last IEM, Serral used hydra bane in the final game & won with it on a map that is impossible to break terrans on. It’s the player, not the unit comp.
I still remember the last finals where Maru was in an almost identical situation vs Serral as Innovation was in in the past. It was a similar lair-less roach push. Innovation won it, Maru lost it. If people don’t want to see Serral dominate everything, they’d better fly out to Innovation’s house, get down on their knees, and beg him to come back. Better bring a golden statute of him to erect in front of his house & start worshiping. Dude’s a literal genius, his whole family is because apparently his little brother is a League goat too, he’s probably the only person on the planet that could compete with Serral. The problem is, he’s moved on to bigger & better things. He’s got real life build orders to optimize. Once you get a taste of real problem solving, it’s hard to come back to games. You realize games are designed for kids, kids are practically 0iq compared to adults, games are easy for adults. All the answers are easy, it’s just finding the obsessive vim to vehemently spam games like your life depends on it. That kind of interest can’t be found in video games for someone as smart as Innovation or Idra. The problems are too simple, the answers to obvious. He’s cashed out & moved on.
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Hecate was played first.
It’s super easy to crack terran on hecate. It’s virtually impossible for terran to get a fourth. You just play base denial. It was game 2 I was thinking of. That map is impossible to crack terran on. Terran can easily outlast infinite zerg waves if the terran can achieve a max on a low scv count with lots of ghosts and liberators. That map guaranteed terran had 4 bases, minimum, and that’s more than enough to achieve the max. Terrans could just camp on 4 bases and refuse to ever attack. Serral easily cracked Maru on that map.
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Seems like there’s too many mech player on ladder then. Hecate was a terran’s dream because it had easy defence and easy offence. 2 paths to push from the terran’s fourth, good siege locations in range of hatcheries and the possibility to doom drop the main. Radhuset by contrast, open field, in base third which made hellion runbys weaker and made mutas viable, watchtower positions in abuseable spots, an extra attack path when you mine out the opponents wall. These are all things Zergs could take advantage of.
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Yeah but mech is a free win so don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
5th base was super exposed. The 4th and 3rd were both reasonably exposed. I’d just mass ravager ling, clear out the front line of tanks, and bile down the command center. You just do it over and over until they leave. You just have to get in range of the command center 1 time.
Sounds like problems for someone who camps on creep.
Nah the terran would parade push to the top left & drop the natural and third and main. This automatically covers the mineral wall weakness at the terran’s third. Stim and stutter step micro in an open field means there is literally no way to corner the bio. He can stim away in literally any direction. He also protects the gold in the same fashion. All while denying the Zerg’s access to his gold & denying the top left base.
There’s a lot of talk about the new RTS games. I guess the latest is battle aces. I guess everyone is disappointed that they aren’t quite the same quality as sc2. I forget where I heard it but someone said it would cost 500 million to develop a SC2-quality game. That’s a very silly estimate. If work is remote, hiring college kids and or sent over sees, the cut scenes in any campaign are done comic-book style with voice overlays, an rts game could cost closer to 1 million to develop. The big businesses buy an expensive building and purchase the most expensive labor, give them healthcare and retirement plans, the upper management are promised golden parachutes, and that’s how you get absurd estimates. It’s better to freelance the work, have no office building, and implement a unique graphical style that compensates for the budget graphics. Money is spent strategically instead of being flung into the wind.
There are loads of examples of this. Subnautica and Valheim are both good examples of extremely low budget games that had wild success. Both of these felt unfinished to me and yet they had wild success. Perhaps the most extreme example is Minecraft. People are willing to buy unfinished products as long as the core concepts are good. I think that’s the take away. Anime is also wildly successful so the idea that amazing graphical trailers are required to make the campaign good is also just not true.
About 10 years ago I paid $600 to develop this (https://i.imgur.com/UqFrivr.png) from concept art to an actual game model implemented, finished, in a game. So, uh, with a 500 million dollar budget I could make 800k of these. Yeah, needless to say, the $500 million estimate to make an rts game is simply delusional. On a one million dollar budget, you could make over a thousand such game models. That’s plenty for a 1v1 multiplayer & a very large and robust storyline/campaign.
The point is, the rts genre will live on via indie studios. Big corps probably won’t pursue the SC2 style rts because the game concept isn’t basic enough to make big bucks. Minecraft is the golden hand of midas because even children can play it. SC2 style rts is so complicated most people wouldn’t be interested in it. I think that’s why battle aces clearly has an emphasis on simplifying the game concept. If it is to be mainstream, it has to be simpler. To me, it sounds like David Kim eventually wants to sell his game to a company that would take it mainstream. It doesn’t sound like he wants to target the SC2-style niche. That’s my guestimate on what’s happening there.
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It’s alright though because AAA studios save a truckload by outsourcing their QA testing to the consumers. That’s part of the reason some games are perpetually in alphas and betas, gotta make that release date no matter what.
When it comes to art style I prefer realistic and easy to see. That’s probably why I and many others still run low graphics settings even with a computer that could handle it at a decent frame rate. I tried ultra once and saw that all my units have shadows etc. Nah bruv, if I need to split my units I can’t have their ghosts getting the baneling splash too.
Welcome to my argument against market capitalization.
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When you’re free, we should test out some cheese openings in a custom game. Have some fun seeing what works against Protoss cheese. I’ve got some nasty cannon rush/zealot proxies.
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Yeah, games are being released earlier in their life cycles for a range of reasons. Mainly it’s because they are revamping an old game with new content and there isn’t much bug fixing to be done. That and the users like to find the bugs & create community drama over the bugs.
That’s the fundamental issue of why new rts games are failing. They are simply re-skinning the same game concepts. There’s nothing new under the RTS-sun. You’re just paying for the same games with slightly nuanced features & new skins.
It’s part of the reason why alphastar isn’t playing the same game as human players. Humans have to interpret the soup of information on their screen & exploiting your opponents ability to process visual information is one of the greatest strategies. It’s one of the reasons, for example, it’s so hard to abduct disruptors from inside the middle of a giant toss deathball (especially with air units over-top). Abducting & splitting at the same time is, I think, humanly impossible. If a toss gets that far, kiss your mmr goodbye because not even serral can handle this bs.
But I think the “amazing graphics” era of gaming has come and gone. Minecraft wasn’t the nail in the coffin, it was the nuke. Players care a lot more about the gameplay than anything else, and if done properly the art style can be “charming” and add to the experience. So the idea that you need to spend 500k+/year employing the world’s best graphical artists is just insane. Companies are always looking for ways to cut corners, so you can be certain they are going to try to mimic minecraft going into the future.
https://i.imgur.com/Nz70OXC.mp4
This is what I am talking about. Mech is absolute garbage & the hydralisk is insanely busted. This was a 5300 terran.
It actually makes me kinda mad how bad mech is. Cyclone mech is even worse. I think the reason why bio works is because terran isn’t committed to a bad position (the medivac allows for retreating). Mech is 100% committed to a bad position. Vikings need to be able to pick up cyclones & carry them. I am dead-serious about that. Mech is steaming hot garbage. Why can’t vikings carry tanks too?
I have no idea how people lose to this unit comp.
Got another mecher, LOL:
https://i.imgur.com/dtMBCeH.mp4
It is unbelievably bad. This guy is 4900 mmr for crying out loud. I actually lose to protoss in this mmr range, believe it or not. I lost to a 4600 one on post youth. 
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wow 322 views is someone using a view bot? Must be that streamer celebrity status.
The hydralisk is busted in a way that it can a move through a terran down 50 supply but only if you include spellcasters. The terran is so used to thors steam rolling through everything that he built them from behind into a comp that didn’t warrant it. But yes, something needs to make mech less passive or I’ll fall asleep at the next Byun TvZ.
Hold up. I’m seeing something interesting at 13 seconds in the second clip. Yup. We got a roach boys. Batz has to admit that he’s been a roach enjoyer this entire time.
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Nah I am doing this without spellcasters too. You just counter attack when he moves out with about 12 hydras. You delete the command center at his third. If he stays with the scvs to repair, you delete the scvs and then the command center. You can’t do that vs a turtle terran so in that case you hydra drop his natural or his main. Both good options on that map. Then you delete his third with your main army doing a push. You usually get his nat’s cc in that case. I just played the real and actual Fantasy by the way. You know, the 6500 mmr code s player. He took second place a few times at some premier events. He’s only 4800 mmr now. EZ clap. 
Yes I had to make roaches so he would make tanks which is what makes him vulnerable to the mutas. That kind of tempo play has not worked vs a gm terran in years. It’s the skill regression. Supernova handles it with a thor drop. That’s how gumiho figured out how to take a third in HotS when roach/muta tempo plays made mech non viable. If it’s roach, you send 2 thors across in medivacs and wreck havoc. If it’s muta, you do thor pickup micro. There’s no excuse for a gm terran to be losing this hard to a build that’s been figured out for literally a decade. Oh well rip SC2. 
GM terran didn’t even put his thors in the right attack mode. Lol.
433 Imgur referred it to some people it thought played sc2 and they shared it with their friends & imgur knows who are friends of those friends & shares it with them and so on and so forth. Graph theory. It’s not unusual for an image that is posted on bnet to get 1,000 views. It depends on how interesting it is. I’d say probably 1 in 100 make it that high. I shared a gif showing how to kill a protoss with 8 lings and 1 drone and it had 3k views.
Getting people to watch a 60 second gif is a piece of cake. Getting them to watch an hour long youtube video is very hard.
https://i.imgur.com/yR0YqyA.mp4
Hydras are busted. I’ve literally never had an easier time beating terran. 
I just can’t stop laughing at that gif. GM terran lost 6 command centers in 1 game. He lost 2 right at the end.
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Fun fact, Hydras have more DPS than a stimmed marine at 20.4 while stimmed marines have a dps of 17.3 according to liquipedia.
Just thought that was interesting. Though the density of DPS goes to the marine since the model size is much smaller.
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That’s because terrans have lost their faith in marines by being hyper reliant on mech. The real reason Gumiho did so well was because 30% of the time he mixed in bio and it was good enough to force the Zerg player to respect it.
I was watching a terran player do multiprong while abusing tank spots and the second he lost momentum he packed up and massed viking-thor after seeing broods. Nope, those aren’t ultras champ. You’re meant to dialup the multiprong. Your clips are what terrans should be doing but they’re addicted to the free wins.
The biggest nail in the coffin for terran was the liberator nerf. Can’t stop mass hydra now! Terran kinda sucks all around on this patch. Ultras are great too. Maps favor zerg mostly.
Eh, I’m not sure I agree, personally.
Ultras have always been good, the liberator nerf does hurt, but the maps aren’t that bad compared to some of the past maps we’ve had. It’s definitely playable in TvZ and TvT. From my PoV, it’s mostly just TvP that’s a sh!t-show, and the simultaneous mine nerfs haven’t helped with that - really of all of them, the only one that wasn’t necessary was the splash radius IMO.
That aside, there ARE some great TvX maps (like Crimson Court) and Amphion, both of which are littered with some pretty good choke-points that, if you can take a third base on it, are definitely good for Terran. Amphion and Ghost River both are also short enough that you can do some really solid timing attacks on them too, though I personally don’t like how generally one-dimensional Ghost River is - it feels unfinished to me.
Despite the nerfs I’ve actually gone up some 400 MMR this patch.
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This might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever read. This map pool is 100% Terran favored. Theres been 3 Premiere Terran wins and 5 final placements this year. Terran is so weak! /s