I believe they are screaming use fungal in conjunction with anti air troops like hydras corruptors etc… God forbid you dont have one magic wand to stop one strategy that like previous poster said you should have been able to bust them before getting critical mass of BC. And again BC are suppose to be powerful they are a late game unit. But i will add the teleport of BC is strong just dont if its to strong
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Battlecruisers are fine considering their cost and supply; and considering that every faction can reasonably deal with them.
I don’t like Tactical Jump much either, but the current Battlecruiser requires that ability to be viable. I strongly doubt that you would be ok with the kinds of direct buffs needed to make Battlecruisers viable without it.
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Oh, what, I thought I posted this yesterday! Terranic said half of it way better, but as I already had typed this:
400m / 300g / 6f for 550 HP and 2 armor.
An unfair comparison would be to the Ultralisk, which costs 275m / 200g / 6f and has 500 HP and 4 armor. This comparison is unfair because
The Battlecruiser, per-unit, does boast a fairly meaty 31.1 dps vs Air and 49.8 vs Ground. However, it is also a final tier tech unit, extremely expensive, and takes 64 seconds to build.
The Ultralisk is in a similar situation with its availability, but it is a ground unit therefore more efficient, and is a melee unit, therefore more efficient, and has splash damage, therefore should be less efficient. It has 57.38 DPS against its primary target.
Four marines and a medivac cost 300m / 100g / 6f and boast around 58.8 DPS. I think it’s common knowledge that Marines do too much damage, but they have that crippling weakness of only having 55 HP.
Now, while I’m happy to agree that map folding abilities are obnoxious and that I would not be upset if all the current ones were gone, even after receiving Tactical Jump, the Battlecruiser was still bad. Being unable to move and shoot while also having almost no speed made the unit simply unable to be in a fight - so the unit was basically never used.
Sure, Yamato Cannon is a spell that is dumb since it lets the Battlecruiser do huge burst to anything that it otherwise fears due to its basic attack not dealing that much damage; but the only reason this is an issue is because of the combination it makes with Tac-Jump where you Yamato something and then teleport away.
And if you’re spending all that investment on a unit that can’t actually take a fight because you’re focusing on incremental value like that, your opponent can easily take over the whole map; so that strategy is a bit self-defeating if noticed.
Without abilities, one Battlecruiser can lose to two Corruptors (300m/200g/4f) or four Stalkers (500m/200g/8f). Yamato Cannon means you do need 3 Corruptors instead, and its presence means the Void Ray isn’t able to counter them well.
How could you be offended at a unit that’s so bad that it got, arguably, three of the most powerful reasonable buffs in the game engine, and is still not game-defining?
(“Global teleport”, “no energy cost abilities”, and “shoot while moving”)
Seriously, imagine if Hallucination, Psionic Storm, Fungal Growth, or Abduct were transposed from costing 75 Energy to having a 53 second cooldown. I’m pretty confident in saying that’d get a lot of salt; since these abilities are all fundamentally extremely powerful at gaining value and if the cost to use them was lowered like this it’d be way harder to know when to hit the targets.
Plus they’d be EMP resistant with that; big values.
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Also you forgot yamato cannon damage was nerfed:
300 → 260 → 240 over several years.
Yeah, but you should tell that to Stryker!
ok Eliwan so you admit it has INSANE life even compared to the ultralisk? Also corrupters are worthless against them unless you have a lot of them.
In any case BC is a unit that actually has more range than a queen…and people have been complaining for years about the queen’s range.
You talk about how you THINK it’s “insanely expensive” and yet multiple widow mines can hit them and they STILL don’t die.
I don’t know it’s still crazy OP …nothing any of you have said really negates that fact…and I think all of you admitted more or less that tactical jump is an unfair ability.
lol you bring ultras into mix outside minerals base units everything else counters them.
Problem bc we have one unit that counters them and throw any other units Zerg kinda screwed.
Which Terran can hide real numbers since blocking intel super easy unlike Zerg can’t stop Terran from any info gathering.
And once bc reach certain amount its gg.
Plus there no counter play if Terran plays heavy defensive float in Yamato and tech jump. Zerg can’t do anything just doing that Zerg lose by expending its gas. To point direct engagement no longer possible.
Its ability to move and shoot makes hydras and queens and ravagers useless.
Its high health makes spells fg and parasite bomb useless.
Well if say you combined fg with those problem with that if Terran engaging to be fg. That is mainly Terran picking a fight not Zerg and win or loss is Terran choice since fg and try kill bc at best Zerg can do kill half before bc gone but Zerg would usually lose about half as well.
Bc gives Terran control of game that Zerg has very hard time to go around if that’s even possible.
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Maybe in your crappy gold league.
In diamond+ you make 2-3 BCs mainly for drone harassment and you have to keep them alive at all cost. You lose them - game over. BCs openers are extremely vulnerable to roach/ravager counter attacks. If you teleport your BC you’re left with nothing but few hellions and a bunker which stand no chance against roach/ravager.
LMAO - corruptor/infestor easily dominates pure BCs. That’s why mass BC is not viable vs zerg at all. 2 corruptors beat BC in 2 vs 1 fight and a single BC is more expensive than 2 corruptors. 300/200 vs 400/300.
Parasitic bomb is doing quite well vs BCs or carriers assuming you’re not just standing and watching but doing some dmg with hydras or corruptors. Against low health units parabomb (especially with fungal) is the most overpowered ability in the game and hard counters units like vikings/phoenix or mutas. Do you ever see vikings vs zerg late game ?
This is what happens when gold players like you talk about balance. Please leave and get at least diamond before you make dumb comments/threads.
Abs u need realize how long can u keep bc lock down fungle it’s 3 seconds and you have time it right since doesn’t stack.
Pro game different I shouldn’t bust brain vessels when someone can float in or warp in. I have to use 3 units just beat one and can easily escape before fungle takes root.
Then parasite bomb you know Vikings go to ground remove it. Bc can tactical jump removes it. It’s kinda useless spell and it cost 120.
Problem is Terran can play defensive and if Zerg economy gets comprised then be able to fight. Terran so many options to small raids that can hurt Zerg.
Which even point try to 2 to 1 might become too difficult. Because remember it’s not 2 to 1 you have spend extra one so 2 can live.
How many times can you fight bc that Zerg has spend 450 mins 300 gas. To beat 400 mineral and 300 gas
So say 10 bc how many do I have aid me to fight that. Plus’s on some maps you got dead space where infestor can’t help.
If bring 30 would win but right off bat I lose 10. Then they all click tj I might be luckily to kill 2. I lost 1500 mins and 1000 gas. Terran lost 800 mins and 600 gas. With thoughs number I don’t think Zerg can keep trading that.
If add infestor problem Zerg has time it perfect not to waste fg. I was fighting another Zerg he went mass mutas I though I go infestor I got with perfect shot but I panicked so spammed it. I wasted all my energy and mutas lived. I panicked because gold lvl . Point is if there window open he gets jump off. Then all energy I wasted
Terran can play sloppy come out on top. Zerg has play flawless even then might not work.
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You seem to misunderstand what “doesn’t stack” means.
You can reapply Fungal before it expires to refresh the duration. You will just lose some of the damage output that the previous Fungal “would have inflicted” if it wasn’t refreshed.
However, Fungal’s damage isn’t important in this case. You are using the spell to keep the Battlecruisers trapped until Neural Parasite or other units like Corruptors can finish them off.
Parasitic Bomb is one of the game’s hardest counters to squishy air units like Mutalisks and Vikings. It is certainly not “useless”.
Even though Vikings can attempt to avoid the damage by landing, this means that they aren’t able to continue fighting your air units. such as Brood Lords.
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Ultras are 275/200, have 500 HP and 7 armour at max. A BC is 400/300, has 550 HP and 6 armour at max.
It doesn’t. BCs have 6 attack range at both ground and air, a queen has 7 (post range nerf). Queens also come out much earlier than BCs do. Queen anti-air range is fine.
It is literally the most expensive unit in the game.
But being able to recall an entire army when it’s out of position on a 2 minute cooldown, or as a get out of jail free card isn’t? That’s available from the start of the game.
Or what about having your entire army teleport into the opponent’s base with Nydus worms on a 15 second cool down?
Map folding abilities of any kind are stupid, regardless of the race they’re on, but I guess it’s only a problem for people if it’s Terran has one unit that can do it. The double standard is real.
They really don’t lmao. Ultras counter everything on the ground that isn’t an immortal, thor or ghost, and the latter is hit and miss due to the nature of Steady Targeting.
Literally every single one of the Infestor’s abilities is a direct counter to the BC in some way.
Neural steals the BC and allows you to use and teleport it so it can’t escape. Fungal roots BCs in place so they can’t teleport, and Microbial shroud drastically reduces the damage that any ground unit takes from them, outside of Yamato specifically. That’s important given it’s got a stronger AtG attack.
Fungal isn’t a damage spell, it’s a utility spell to lock down BCs. You keep making that mistake. Yes, you need other units there to kill the BC. You can still chain fungal BCs and prevent them from escaping.
And before you say that you should never lose a BC - even professionals like Gumiho lose them from time to time. Attention is a resource too.
Corruptors just straight up wreck BCs in an engagement. Equal supply of corruptors will pretty much always win out against equal supply of BCs even with yamato taking a chunk of them out - this only changes if there is a significant upgrade difference between BCs and Corruptors.
It’s 3 seconds per fungal. While the damage doesn’t stack, you can still fungal again and refresh the time that the BC is locked down for, with minimal damage loss.
In this case, the viking has already served its purpose as anti-air then. If you’re taking the viking to ground and there are still air units, then the viking can’t attack the air units either.
It is, unequivocally, the best anti-air spell in the game, all the more when combined with fungal. Vipers can also consume to regen energy faster than any other unit in the game too, so the cost of the ability isn’t an issue either.
Zerg literally has the best units, spells and abilities in the game to be able to deal with a turtle player.
Blinding cloud works on anything on the ground - that means turrets, tanks, PFs, thors, etc.
Swarm hosts/nydus literally allows you to trade for free. Broodlords are great at sieging positions too, though where you fight is extremely important.
Already addressed this, but to add to what I said earlier;
Facing a turtle player means you get free reign over the map 100% of the time. You can afford to lose money, and they cannot. Any trade against BCs will always work in your favour at that point (because they must repair the damage, or even potentially replace the BC outright if they lose it) unless you haven’t taken the map - in which case that’s player error.
For a turtle player to win, they effectively have to trade at a 15-1 ratio, since they’re not just giving up map control, but also giving up the ability to mine bases on their side since you have map control, and therefore the ability to mine off their bases.
This is why whenever we see Maru play, casters make such a huge deal over the resources lost; Maru trades so well and so consistently that he’s effectively made up an entire base’s worth of minerals and gas. He’s one of the only players that are capable of doing that, with the other maybe being Clem.
Incorrect; Terran loses more than that because of repair, so it’s somewhat dependent on how much damage was done to other BCs in the process. If they’re not repairing, then it’s much easier to kill them on the follow up.
Speaking from experience on both sides, I’ve found that it’s usually the other way around. It’s far from easy on both sides, sure, but A Zerg player facing off against a turtle player can play far more sloppy than the Terran player can because the Terran player can’t afford to punish a Zerg player without significantly exposing themselves or putting their entire defense at risk.
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Give me Ultra, and you can take your Broken BC with TP and Yamato and keep it forever.
I will destroy your BCs with Thors and Vikings any time.
please play nydus and enjoy how long it takes to load and unload an army.
for harass it is quite nice, but even here the opponent gets a warning + reaction time, longer than with WM…
the problem is that BC have move attack.
and what are queens → clunky and slow even on creep.
If BC now flies between the bases, or terrain.
problem with BC opening is what follows.
and with BC-Turtle zerg is in a dilemma again, corruptors are strong but don’t help against towers/ PF/ tank/ thor etc… maybe rework “Caustic Spray” so it fits in fast game.
maybe T stops after 1,2,3 BC and goes to bio or mech … or does it timing push right away?
if you are too greedy you will get a push, if you are too safe you can no longer break Turtle.
I think yamatoo/ Tp comp is stupid, it’s bad design.
good option spred ovi → get BC use neural use TP on spore/ corruptors.
true
It works, but I find it much worse when there are phases in which everyone plays Terra BC.
What’s worse is that there’s hardly any risk for T, because zerg can’t punish T very well. (possibly cheeses)
And if it goes bad for T, just turtle… +15min game time “wow”
and again people complain about queen, but if you don’t have ~6+ you can’t stop BC in the early game. → nerf queen → need air unit change. hydra can´t…
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No. It doesn’t.
The Ultralisk is almost a full 33% fewer resources and not only has 91% of its vitals, but boasts an extra two points of armor. This makes it practically impervious to any number of small-damage units.
Where the Battlecruiser, you know, flies and is ranged; the Ultralisk is a grounded melee unit. This means any comparison between the two is automatically flawed.
No…? I’m happy to agree that the Corruptor vs Yamato interaction is a bit disappointing and feels really bad to play as Zerg. My only argument is that it’s pretty fair.
The Battlecruiser has 6 range and the thing that people complained about the Queen was that it had 8 anti-air range for over three years. It currently has 7 - still more than the BC.
It costs 700 resources. For a single unit, that’s a lot! For 6 supply, that’s a lot! There’s… ten? units in the game that cost more than 100 resources per supply.
The Battlecruiser is a unit that shines when it gets incremental slow value, and itself is a unit that is not easy to ‘just build’ the way that a Marine is, even once you unlock the ability to.
The unit that specializes in dealing splash damage to light and medium targets
Doesn’t do great damage against the ultra heavyweight?
This is the game working as intended!! Widow Mines should not counter Battlecruisers! Widow Mines shouldn’t even really counter Void Rays but they sort of do because of the shield bonus!
Half of everything that has been said is a direct counterargument the thread title that the battlecruiser is overpowered. The unit’s DPS is not impressive considering its cost and supply, the unit’s mobility is not particularly impressive, the unit’s
Unfun. The ability’s presence is actually quite balanced and technically fair due to the rest of the unit’s flaws, difficulty to get out, awkward nature, otherwise fairly immobile, etc.
But it sure isn’t fun to deal with, and the threat of Tac-Jump makes playing the game awkward because you can’t build a turret ring to prevent BCs, since they can a. jump over it, or b. tank it if it isn’t dense enough, or c. yamato cannon to flatten them.
And then there’s the 20-Mine 10-BC type builds which are really obnoxious because of how they stop momentum and getting killing blows in, basically mandating the Ultralisk to linebreak so you can get Zerglings in.
Tac-Jump enables many unfun things. Just like Strategic Recall lets Protoss do some pretty stupid things, just like Nydus Worms create so much annoyance that they were required to have the global scream to draw attention.
If Terran is playing this cowardly - only really moving out when Yamato is available and tac-jumping away quickly - You have two particular options.
First, you can fast expand multiple directions. The BCs can only be in one place. You can then afford to build a large blob of Hydralisks or Corruptors - and snap the BCs out of the sky during the Yamato or Tac-Jump windups.
Second, you can build an extra Hatchery to help pump Queens and Spores, so that you aren’t investing your gas too heavily but still are able to mine in peace.
Battlecruiser 2.62 speed, Hydralisk has 4.09 speed on-creep without its speed upgrade. You can in fact just right-click Hydras on BCs and fast-stutter - 5.0.11? 12? made this work extremely well because of the damage point / projectile launch time reduction.
Queens have 3.5 speed on-creep and 7 range - their DPS is lower but their ability to shoot the BC isn’t.
If you Fungal Growth first you can just… kill the BCs by locking them in place. If you Parasitic Bomb, the 120 damage should be enough threat of damage that they either disengage or you can kill them.
Yes, you have to combine your casters with other units to finish the job, I just can’t see this as an issue.
To be fair, though, Yamato instantly kills a Corruptor. I don’t remember the exact ratio, but it’s a bit less than 3 Corruptors per Battlecruiser to consistently win the fights after Yamato Cannon.
Pulling rank is equivalent to saying you have no argument - but you have one. Just lean on it instead.
There’s been multiple times when great insights come out from mid levels of play; when design problems mostly affecting low-level play are the forefront of development concerns. The job of a game is to be fun.
It does refresh, though. This isn’t … was it DotA?, units don’t gain resistance to crowd control effects while already afflicted by one.
If your opponent crawls their way to 10 BCs, you had on the order of three minutes while they were building them to do something; such as expand if they’re playing passive besides those BCs, or dig into their infrastructure.
Not that these are particularly easy things, mind.
If the BCs are floating in dead space, just don’t engage them. Any seconds that they are not doing something is fine - if you trade remotely equally Terran will have to keep expanding out and this will make them easier to dismantle especially the more of their supply is tied up in BCs - whereas you can morph some Spore Crawlers and switch some Corruptors for Brood Lords.
Miro’s “15-1 ratio” is born of this same thought. Suppose the map has 16 bases - For most hyper-turtling builds, it’s really hard to take your fourth base, because of the physical space, the distance, and the low number of units to cover that much space.
But when playing against a BC build, Zerg and Protoss don’t actually have much difficulty taking their fourth or fifth base, because if Terran moves out to attack they actually lack immediate force to punish that very effectively because of how much the Battlecruiser costs, how slow it is, and importantly, how not impressive its damage output per resource or per supply actually is.
This means that you can somewhat easily shut the Terran out from mining from what should be their own bases, while also being able to mine out your own side just fine - While it sounds unrealistic, I have witnessed multiple streams with turtle BC-Terrans being unable to take their fourth until the Zerg or Protoss is taking a seventh or even eighth base.
You’d want to be target-firing, though; so you wouldn’t get much spread damage.
I have watched so many Corruptor balls sniping planetary fortresses that have turret rings.
Just so many.
This is the difficulty, yeah. My experience has been that it’s not too hard to tell with some Zergling scouting, but it’s also the case that most players near my rank are overwhelmingly a bit leaning on the turtle half.
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Problem with these arguments is paper.
People can argue but I know I tried and spread bc need a lot infestor just hold them.
So u can argue do this either way it lot harder then saying. Because landing shots then why not add ravagers 10 shot will kill.
Try land fg and fire ravagers shot. It plays Terran favor it’s not easy task and just knowing unit in game force your hand.
So to do this and unless u have exact number and works 90% time then argument holds but I know for fact it doesn’t need lot more skill. Even more skill do it consistently and that case you might be able to compete in tournaments.
That’s probably why I stay gold because controlling multi groups with multi spells is way harder then controlling one unit.
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Miro you misunderstood me LOL…why you assume I am anti-terran?? I hate recall and nydus just as much as you do. I am a 1v1 random player. I play all 3 races. But I think BCs just get away with more BS than any other single unit in the game…the tactical jump…zap a couple things with yamato cannon and then jump back out that’s so RIDICULOUS…imagine if that thing was in LOL or AOE4 or Stormgate the amount of people who would be raging.
That’s okay, I’m a total nerd and did this test in the Unit Tester months ago with a friend and the unit tester’s pause features -
For any initial number of Corruptors up to 50 at +0, or 42 at +3, ie. even after Yamato losses the Corruptor blob one-shots the Battlecruisers so above that number shots get wasted, the Corruptors win when both sides target-fire.
Like, 50 Corruptors at +0 beat 17 Battlecruisers at +0 with Yamato. 28 Corruptors at +3 beat like 16 Battlecruisers at +3 if they don’t have Yamato.
With a scan or spotter and my particular rapid-fire, it takes about 1 second to issue 15 Yamatos, but Yamato has a cast range of 10 and wind-up of just over 2 seconds.
So ~2.8 seconds and ~3.6 seconds? The extra Corruptors may sometimes get a shot in.
Anyone suggesting that Infestor-Ravager is a reasonable answer to the BC is trolling. That’s absolutely silly as a suggestion, wow.
But I have done this particular thing in the tester before - if the BCs clump it actually works. If the BCs don’t clump so tight that you hit like half with each bile, it’s absolute trash, and the Ravagers have no guarantee of getting you value like a Corruptor or Hydralisk would.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me with this one, I’m sorry.
You don’t need to hit a magic breakpoint of corruptors post-yamato and you don’t need to actually do much with the Corruptors at all, since they usually will all attack the same target because attack priority factors in distance and air units don’t like to stay stacked while shooting.
Eh, it wasn’t really a dig at you personally - I’m sorry if it came off that way. Just the general double standard that a lot of people seem to have around this particular subject.
Is it though? Consider the resource cost and time investment needed to do that build - particularly as an opener. For it to actually be effective, the unit has to not just trade, but trade extremely well. Alternatively, it has to get incremental value over time to make up for the sheer cost and time invested in a BC opening, which necessitates the ability to stay alive for long periods of time to make up those resources - particularly more scarce resources like gas - and often even more since you also have to repair the unit to keep making those necessary trades.
I do 100% agree that it’s frustrating and unfun to play against. Without a doubt. But it’s not imbalanced by any means.
Speaking from personal experience, usually when a player goes early BCs against me (assuming I’m playing Zerg) I’ll generally just laugh most of the time.
By the time BCs get into numbers, they’re definitely more problematic, but I almost never have issues with them at that point anyway outside of team games where I’ve also had to deal with 1-3 other people simultaneously. In 1v1 it’s basically an instant win for me.
Widow mines have high single target damage in addition to the shield bonus. I actually used them just the other day to kill a player who Tac-jumped his BCs into my main (if they do this even once, they’ll do it again and again, so I just set a trap every time they show this). 10 BCs died over the space of about 3 seconds to some 30 widow mines.
The main downside to mines is that they have a 30 second CD each time they fire, and they take a reasonable chunk of supply while they’re inactive.
True, yes. Though it is somewhat dependent on how fast you target fire and where you’re fighting (IE over turrets/spores, queens or anything else that might do AA) - even incremental damage will add up over time.
I have. It’s kinda fun if you can make it work - fungal’s radius is pretty huge so if you tag anything they’re basically dead units no matter what it is. Nobody’s suggesting this as a counter to BCs outside of simple opportunistic sniping though.
Effectively, if they have Yamato you need a 3-1 ratio. Otherwise a 2-1 ratio will win every time. Less if Parabomb/fungal are in the equation.
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Totally agree on that.
BCs are super slow, even if they TP back home, Corrupters are super fast and you can come back and kill all the BCs.
There is no reason why a zerg should loose to BCs until they are maxed on BCs.
I’ve seen back in the day when BCs didn’t have the 3 strong nerfs, pro players used to win against with hydras (when they didn’t even have the movement speed buff) and even mutas, in tournaments (people should remember that).
Nowdays BCs with yamato 2 nerfs and TP nerf are terrible, you need a lot of them to work, until then you can:
- Build Corrupters, counters them very good.
- Go either ling bane or ultra ling and destroy their bases and eco (with some queens and spores home).
- Late game infestors counter BCs.
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uhh…it’s imbalanced enough not to deserve a place in the game. Just remove tactical jump and I will let this argument die.
They also need to make build times slower or have it behind an upgrade or something…for a tier 3 unit scrubs shouldn’t be able to get it out so fast.