Toss hits 43% in GM

General Discussion
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Protoss open stargate in PvZ because it’s a catch all. It invalidates all forms of pre lair aggression & gives you scouting to know what he’s doing with his lair tech. Mutas really don’t have anything to do with it per se. Twilight counters mutas even harder than stargate does. Blink+archon+zealot is an extreme hard counter to muta ling bane.

Parting used to fly 4 blink-less stalkers around in a prism all the time. Sometimes he’d hit the main with a single immortal, sometimes two, and do a zealot warp in. I remember showtime copying his build in a tournament and completely messing it up. The problem in the pro scene isn’t that this build is better than that build, it’s that protoss don’t know how to leverage advantages.

To explain this concept I was laddering the other night and someone asks me to do mass swarm hosts. I haven’t done this style in awhile. So I get to lair on 3 base and get a double nydus and put 100% of my excess minerals into spines. I get overlord speed. I start popping nyduses left and right. Once I am almost maxed & have a hundred or so spines, I invest into 2 infestors. He finally maxes but is losing bases and does a big tank thor push. I nydus behind him, send a giant wave of locusts and sandwich him between the spines and the locusts. I fungal any retreating units to keep them in range of swarm hosts. You also have to make about 20 banes and use them to clear out his hellbats. So while he is distracted by a nydus you ram the banes into the hellbats. Now they can’t shield vs the locust. It made this GM mech terran look like a total bronze league noob.

A pro level player would never try this because it requires more strategic thinking than “max, f2, aclick, deny a base, back off, remax, f2 aclick and win.” I was watching reynor fight a parade push on crimson court, and he’s so frustrated that he can’t get a surround. “HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO ENGAGE THIS! HE DIDN’T EVEN PLAY THAT WELL! WHAT A JOKE!”. The answers are painfully obvious. His push paths are limited by the terrain as much as yours. Put some burrowed banes for the initial move-out and collect your win. It’s not rocket science. It’s very basic strategy. “What tools do I have available at this timing which could punish this move out.” Burrow is available from the 1 base 1 gas mark. It’s literally one of the most accessible upgrades in the game. APM spammers are just used to spamming drones, maxing, f2+aclicking. If they can’t do that, “ItS ImBa PlS nErF”.

Pro level starcraft is incredibly bad at the moment and the issue is the players aren’t creative. Parting put immortals into warp prisms and went after addons. What can I say except that it worked. If they don’t do it now, it’s a skill issue. “tHiS iSnT HotS AnyMorE” yeah you sure are right about that one. :rofl:

That’s because it’s off meta. If it were on-meta, terrans would 1/1/1 and pump liberators non stop off their starport.

Giving away free pro consulting be like:

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62

See, if you want to balance a race, a suggestion has to do 2 things:

  1. not make the race inviable
  2. be possible without accessing source code, which we cannot.

first off, this would be either impossible or very hard to do (you could use the repair mechanic from Terran to get the resource drain, but that would be clunky and buggy.)

secondly, that wouldn’t fix anything; all it would do is make Protoss completely unplayable against cheeses. Ling floods would be extremely difficult; 2 racks marauder would be completely uncounterable, and Protoss would lose capability for their own cheeses/counter-cheeses. This MIGHT fix late game carrier problems, but Protoss would never even get that late into the game anymore for it to matter. PvP would also lose its volatiility, and would likely be limited to a few builds. Balance suggestions are fine, but if they completely change the game by making a race unplayable or implementing a mechanic that was never used that way, they are more harm than good. The best way to fix skytoss would be to nerf SPECIFICALLY skytoss, while also buffing alternative playstyles.

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See, I’m not sure how bad it’d actually be. I personally think that Protoss cannon rushes and zealot floods are harder to hold. Who knows how hard Protoss would have it with less resources. Is it not a matter of scouting more? Playing more defensively?

Edit: I’d propose trialing out Protoss losing 1 mineral per second of building time. So plyons lose less minerals than a nexus. Either that, or tie the probe to the structure it’s warping in, like Terran. That seems fair to me.

If these changes are too radical, I believe that both zealots and cannons need an early game nerf. They should be at least 30% weaker in the first 5 minutes.

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I don’t buy this argument. Sure, being unable to change the code is a big restriction because it means you can’t change the fundamental unit AI. You can only tune existing parameters. But, there are hundreds of parameters that can be tuned, and you want me to believe there is no combination of these parameters that could fix PvZ? As a computer scientist, I know that is 100% false.

Let’s imagine one simple change:

  1. Interceptor HP set to 1,000.
  2. Interceptor HP set to 1.

Obviously, #1 will favor protoss and #2 will favor zerg. That means somewhere inbetween, there is a value for interceptor HP that would help to equalize the win-rates. Let’s repeat this thought experiment:

  1. Parasitic Bomb does +1000 damage to shields.
  2. Parasitic Bomb does +0 damage to shields.

Somewhere in-between this range of values there is something that could fix the carrier deathball. In this case I’d also couple it with not just a damage increase but a duration increase so that protoss have time to micro, which rewards good players.

Let’s do this again:

  1. Interceptor cost set to 1,000 minerals.
  2. Interceptor cost set to 1 mineral.

Etc. You get the point. Because there are so many possible parameter combinations, the probability there is some combination of parameters that can balance PvZ is extremely high. Fixing the issue just isn’t a priority for the “balance” counsel.

The best way to tune a parameter like this is to mass download replays and calculate a correlation between trading efficiency and win-rate. Protoss will have a certain trading efficiency that correlates with their win-rate. Reduce the trading efficiency and the win-rate will reduce proportionally, and you verify it in the replays. Linear approximations are fine as long as you are willing to do iterative updates to tune the value.

I think it’s funny that the focus is to not make protoss unviable when it’s protoss making other races unviable at this exact moment. It’s an inversion of priorities. Clearly preference is given to protoss.

There are some that would argue that chronoboost is the issue. Protoss win “max out” challenges for example. Their macro is the strongest in the game, assuming it isn’t interrupted some how. But, interrupting it is predicated on the idea that the Protoss doesn’t scout and adapt, aka the game defaults to the protoss being ahead and that default outcome changes only if the protoss makes a mistake.

For a race with insanely strong late game, having stronger macro is problematic. If chronoboost is going to be this strong, protoss defense needs to be less reliable (hello mutalisk buffs).

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65

Stop responding to this thread as well as the second one “so many coincidences”. That’s exactly what he wants you to do. You’re just feeding the troll.

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I wasn’t refering to carrier; I agree they may be IMBA. I wouldn’t know since I’m a Protoss who finds skytoss frankly boring, and my opponents are never really able to play it in my mirrors.

I was referring to someone else suggesting making Protoss buildings cost 50 more minerals with a trickle.

In other words, I’m not disagreeing with you, I have no room to say anything on a matter I rarely encounter. However, I was stating, when someone else made a really bad balance suggestion, why it would be inviable.

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So your plan to rebalance a race is to. . . fix zealots, which aren’t as much of a problem, fix cannons, which isn’t entirely a bad idea, but I digress. Again, how do you suppose Protoss is supposed to defend early stim pushes? It’s already insanely difficult, requiring good scouting and a near perfect defense in order to beat it without being extremely behind. I’m 98% certain if you weakened Protoss early game like that, it would make Protoss 1. lose aggressive capability and 2. have a barely passable defensive capability.

And the probe tether is just dumb, you can’t just completely change a race’s primary mechanic that’s been here since 1998 for poorly thought through rebalance.

The final issue with that is that nobody is complaining about Protoss early game? The issue with Protoss balance is carriers and cannons, with some blame for IMBA going to storms. Why would you fix a unit that primarily is used in cheese and runbys? Nerfing zealots would also make charge-lot comps really bad. Once again, a balance fix has to handle a problem.

in addition to this, you mention protoss having too many resources, but, last time I checked, we can’t produce multiple workers at once from a single structure nor do we have a 0 supply free worker that is more efficient than normal workers. Protoss is also usually considered the gas race, meaning it loses even more mineral mining since gas is such an important resource.

We get chrono and warp gate to make up for the slower macro, and I can see an argument for nerfing chrono, and maybe even warp-in time or something, but, once again, you are discussing something that isn’t even the primary issue with toss. How would nerfing zealots, a 100 mineral supply heavy melee unit, fix the carrier, a long range capital ship that produces extremely cheap small units and thus has siege capabilities, as well as requiring little micro?

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Stim pushes aren’t hitting for five minutes, I believe Protoss has the tools to defend that, I mean you are a Protoss player, so I believe there may be a bit of bias here.

Nerfing Zealots indirectly nerfs carriers because it gives Toss less good options early-game, and less for the opponent to think about.

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I think he’s talking about three rax. There are many openers to hold it but it comes down to execution. Something as simple as a stasis ward or a well timed forcefield can wreck that push.

Part of the issue with skytoss is that zealot attacks on the opposite side of the map are absolutely viscous. You basically can’t stop them without lurkers, but the lurkers aren’t the best vs skytoss. You really want ultras or broods and tons of corruptors. So you have to go down a secondary tech path (hydra/lurker) and that basically means you are guaranteed to be giga-behind in upgrades and are very tight in being able to afford enough gas for corruptors to adequately defend his air pushes. Toss gains all that advantage from warping in a few zealots on the side of the map opposite of his army.

Carriers are the worst kind of imba. They are the imba that is boring, and make games long. So long and boring imba is the worst kind of imba in the game.

There’s some credence in what he’s saying because part of what makes toss late game so strong is that their static defense is very inexpensive and highly effective. The zerg has basically no choice except to throw massive amounts of gas at it (banes) and can’t compete with it until hive (adrenal). Really, the skytoss issue is an amalgam of strengths that make win-conditions roughly twice as common as lose-conditions. That’s what happens if you do the math on ladder data & see that GM PvZ win-rates are ~70%/30% in Protoss’ favor.

It depends on who you talk to. Part of what makes skytoss so strong is that a protoss has such a fast economy that they can leap to carrier tech on 2 or 3 bases. Carriers then trade so efficiently that they can pause carrier production, bank gas, and go into templar/storm. This style can beat 6000 mmr zergs with literally zero effort from the protoss. We’re talking about protoss who are so lazy they can’t even bother to hotkey their army.

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71

I think Starcraft might be getting beat for strategy games these days. For pure base defense, there’s promising indie games on Steam. I recently played Plants vs. Zombies, and it’s pretty easy, but still interesting.

IMO Starcraft would be alot better as a pure defense/attack game. One player assigned to each.

Starcrafts design is beautiful in theory, but actually playing it is hell.

I guess the arcade mode would have some stuff that’s better.

Edit: Another game I love is Desktop Tower Defence, a free, simple browser game. It’s witty, yet deep.

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To be honest, I still find it the best one so far.

Every RTS I play, I keep thinking to myself “Why am I playing this when I could be playing sc2”.

There are some that are pretty okay. I liked what Stormgate had to offer so far (can’t speak on that much cause NDA). I liked They Are Billions.

I can’t stand AOE. To slow, to clunky and everything takes a literal age to respond.

Haven’t played Zerospace, but from what I’ve seen of it it looks promising but not for me. And there’s a few others as well, but I just keep going back to sc2 because of numerous reasons.

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You know what else would be sick, if SC was a team game, but each team only controlled the same faction. Kind of like archon mode, but each time you took a new base, a new player would control it, so each person would eventually have their own smaller army.

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I have it on good authority that an indie rts is being designed that is MMORPG, so it’s RTS in a giant online universe that is inter-connected. It is a slower paced RTS merely due to the computation requirements for simulating a large MMO universe. It puts a lot more emphasis on the quality of decisions and a lot less emphasis on the quantity. Allegiances and trading are also very important because it’s easy to get wiped off the map and it essentially respawns you somewhere else in the universe.

Another one is a traditional RTS, but with deformable terrain – resources are harvested out of the terrain, and the terrain itself can be manipulated by mining it, placing detonation charges, building bridges, barriers, etc. There are two workers. One is the harvester and the other is the collector. The harvester is big and bulky, likes flat terrain, and converts resource deposits into resource crates. The collector grabs the crates and carries them back to base, and it also has detonation charges used to get rid of terrain obstacles that block the harvesters. The collector also has some basic attacks and defensive abilities. So one of the hilarious moves is that you can use several collectors to team-lift a large boulder and drop it off in the middle of an enemy resource patch. It has a full physics engine including fluids, so liquids actually flow and this includes lava and water. Flooding enemy bases with water, or cutting off a retreat path with lava, are totally valid strategies depending on the map design.

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75

That’s so sick. The whole post is interesting, honestly.

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It’s an asteroid mining game. The premise of the story is that humanity has started mining asteroids around black holes because they are resource rich. But they aren’t the only ones who show up for the resources. It’s post apocalyptic, so the story is set after humanity encounters something hostile in one of these asteroid belts, and it resets humanity. Lots of human technology is scattered across the galaxy, but it requires government access codes that nobody has. So the story is about figuring out what happened and relearning how to activate the old technology. One of the characters is called SLAMMER, he is a chaotic neutral, and he’s the main antagonist for act 2.

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77

Wow. I’m about to try out a cheap factory/base building game called Mindustry. It was like 5 bucks on sale.

78

Nice. Looks similar to Factorio at first glance.

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79

ok at this point you just want to turn SC into a tower defense (a genre that was, ironically, first created through SC custom games, just like MOBA)

Also you JUST started playing PVZ? I grew up on that game lol. Still one of my favorite games of all time.

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I played the Plants vs. Zombies demo years ago, last night I bought it and clocked it in one sitting. Brilliant game :stuck_out_tongue:

About Starcraft, I’m just spitballing.

Mindustry is pretty cool btw

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EZ PZ lemon squeezy. :pinching_hand: :lemon:

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