Honestly im tired of how mechanically demanding Zerg is to play at a high level. No other race has to deal with injecting let alone spreading creep. Let it auto-spread already and force the other races to clear it, as its easily cleared anyway.
If Zerg didn’t need to inject or manually spread creep, they would never have to look at their base. Many Zerg units don’t require much if any micro either, so they would practically be playing the game on easy-mode compared to the other races.
Terran and Protoss both need to make more buildings, build the right number of buildings and add-ons to support their intended composition, pay close attention to sim-city (both for defense and so that their units can get out of their base), Chronoboost or Mule, and micro a larger proportion of their units in combat.
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Bronze level insights.
Says the guy who wants to remove the few mechanics that Zerg actually has to deal with.
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Those two mechanics are two mechanics neither Toss/Terran have to deal with, what are you talking about? Zerg has every single mechanic for production Terran/Toss has except more steps. End game Zergs micro is also the hardest in the game, involving two spell casters and the constant juggling of units that only attack air/ground. Like I said, bronze level insights. Terran/Toss are easy, very easy. Also, I never said automate injects, I said automate creep spread.
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Ok. But Creep only. Not creep tumor. At the rate of like stukov in coop and its auto spreading from the hatchery. Meaning no more free vision. Sounds good 
Last I checked, Zerg does not need to make 4-8 specialized production structures & add-ons for each of their unit types. They also don’t need to worry nearly as much about sim-city, walls, etc. Creep spread is roughly your equivalent of that.
Terran and Protoss also have Mules and Chronoboosts as their macro mechanics. They don’t work the same as injects, but they do require a similar amount of attention.
The casters do require a lot of attention, but the rest of your units are arguably much easier to use.
There would have to be a way to clear creep, so there would still be tumors, even if they don’t provide vision.
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Another hilariously bad take from RustTank.
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Ironic coming from the person requesting auto creep spread.
The whole point of Zerg is the difficulty of the multitasking with its macro cycles and creep spread. Just go and play an autobattler.
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To be fair, that’s where protoss is right now. Zergs have to have ~30% more screen movements to achieve the same performance rating. Zerg shouldn’t have automatic creep spread but the tumors should cost 25 minerals each and have double the creep range. This makes creep a strategical asset to spend and position wisely. As a free energy ability, it’s a mechanical ability that’s about spamming them as fast as possible. Zergs will literally write macros that they bind to a mouse button. They select creep, hit the mouse button, and it just spams a bunch of clicks randomly on the screen.
I think taking sc2 down the multitasking road was sheer lunacy on the designers’ part. They knew it was impossible to balance the game, so they added multitasking because then the game design doesn’t affect the outcome – the players’ relative multitasking skill does. But that’s equivalent to saying the strategy is irrelevant and the two factors to decide the game outcome are speed and endurance. So it literally doesn’t matter what you do as long as you do it fast. Creep spread is the perfect example of this.
If I were in charge, all abilities would have some kind of cost to them. Scan would cost minerals. Supply drop would cost gas. The lack of costs associated with abilities is a big part of what makes the game mechanical instead of strategical. There is no downside to using the abilities meaning you want to use them as much as possible and the only limiting factor there is your apm.
The irony is that the designers didn’t even achieve their goal of balancing the game. They actually put the game into a permanent state of imbalance. High level protoss can’t beat Serral because he wins through multitasking and racial strength will always be irrelevant to this as long as zerg can survive long enough to play a macro game. In the meantime, the balance counsel doesn’t understand why toss can’t win premiers, so they buff the racial strength not knowing it has nothing to do with the matter. So now we have imbatoss ruining the ladder and multitasking-zerg ruining esports.
It was a colossal design mistake.
The proper way to solve the balance issue, under the realization that balance is impossible, is to do seasonal design remixes to change which race is the strongest. So everyone gets a turn being the OP one. I would’ve automated this via the SC2 battle.net API. Every season it uses a clustering algorithm to generate 10 randomized balance patches. Players can go in and vote on which one is the next one. The most popular one is the remix for that season. Every two weeks, if one race has a win-rate >60% then it dials back the positive changes to that race. Totally automated. No bias. Completely fair and guaranteed to be balanced. No need to pay a balance counsel have all the associated drama.
Idk if i’d want spending and decision making to be added to one of the more taxing mechanics in the game.
The vision range may offset it somewhat, but i’m not convinced it would be enough.
The idea being that it would cut the number of creep tumors in half so it’s easier from a multitasking perspective but harder from a strategic perspective since you have minerals out there that have to be defended. So you’d tune the creep radius to whatever is necessary to get zergs screen movements per minute to roughly the same as protoss while keeping the amount of creep spread the same by tuning the cost. In theory.
Another question being, would you make creep tumours harder to kill aswell? As it is, they’re super easy to kill, but they also cost nothing
Just like the old larvae. An entire 200 supply army can be pounding it loses 1 hp. I am thinking somewhere in the range of 8 or 9 armor. I want to wall a terran into his own main by building creep tumors at the base of his ramp.
The problem with creep spread is that creep tumor costs only 25 energy which allows zergs to spam tumors like crazy. Tumors should have more HP but cost 50 energy - this way it would force zerg to spread creep carefully in the desired direction rather than planting dozens of tumors everywhere like they do now.
That’s a good alternative that would achieve much of the same goal, but I technically consider it a worse option. The reason being that as long as it is something you get for free the only limiting factor on how strong it is is how fast you spam apm. If you add a mineral cost, apm spam ironically makes the tumor worse because you waste money. What makes a tumor good or not depends on the situation and if the cost is justified. That is a strategic question. If you added changes like this to zerg, half the zergs in the pro scene wouldn’t be able to get above masters 1. Their brains are wired to mindlessly spam clicks as fast as possible doing meaningless chore-like tasks such as creep spread and inject. If they actually had to stop and think about what they are doing, their mmr would implode.
High level sc2 pro play seems to select for people with high impulsivity. These are people who like to act immediately and without stopping to think about what they are doing. The design of SC2 rewards that mindset because the game state progresses so fast that it’s impossible to use anything but split second reactions. If you play any slower, the game state simply progresses without your input and that is designed to be the worst case scenario which means if you input any input then it will produce a better outcome. That’s what creates the mindless apm spamming. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you do it fast(er than the other guy).
The reason this isn’t great for esports is because it creates stale gameplay. The way players hone their reactions to the necessary speeds is by simplifying the game. That means doing the same build orders over and over, with the same positioning and same micro. Nobody dares stop to develop something new because that will slow their reactions. That’s how you end up with marine marauder and stim and split micro in literally every terran pro game since 2010. I suppose there are a few rare exceptions when players did mech but that has been very rare in particular as of late.
They tried auto inject once and it turned every player into a SOO clone. It wasn’t good lol.
Perhaps they don’t deserve ranks above M1. You blame protoss players for being bad, but what about fellow zergs ? Are they really skilled in your eyes ? Is spamming creep tumors, injecting and hatching dozens of units in one go with rapid fire, peak of gaming skill ? You’ve already answered that question.
I call them out all the time. I’ve been saying for years they need to straight up delete the roach and the queen from the game and how that would result in professional zergs dropping to diamond league. The issue is that balance is fubar’d and pro zergs fix it by playing faster. This makes the game boring. Remove the ability to play faster to win, even make it detrimental to play faster, and then balance the game by nerfing protoss. This fixes the pro scene and the ladder in one big swoop. A good example is the creep tumor idea. Make it cost minerals. If you mindlessly spam them, you will lose money for no reason. That punishes fast players for being fast. They gotta stop and think about where and when and how many tumors to make. That deletes the mode of winning used by zergs to dominate premier events. From there balance favors toss on an equal effort basis and so you target them by nerfing low skill abilities (battery overcharge) and buffing high skill abilities (disruptors).
I think the balance counsel is following this advice for the most part. They increased the cost of queens for example and buffed the disruptor and removed battery overcharge. They are on the right path but I think they need to be more aggressive towards the queen and the roach. I would seriously consider adding a mineral cost to creep tumors. Not only does it punish apm spammers at the premier level, it will add a trade off vs the nydus which also creates creep spread. They will prefer to use the nydus to place creep strategically rather than spamming it all over the map because it’s free and they have infinity apm so why not get something that is free.
As for the roach, I am note sure what to do about it. The roach is less of a balance issue and more of a game diversity issue. They just aren’t interesting units. They are also zerg’s linchpin for surviving certain allins so it’s hard to change it without fubar’ing balance. The roach is the protoss way of playing zerg. You just ball up a bunch of roaches and f2 them at the opponent. Roaches also lose the same way protoss lose. Protoss lose to high mobility air based harass like medivacs and liberators. That’s exactly how roaches lose games. I strongly dislike the way protoss is played and the way it’s balanced and the roach is the protoss way of playing zerg so of course I don’t like.
I like things that are strategical and units like the nydus are a good example. The nydus is like a Rook in chess. You can hop past the zone control setup by bishops and castles. The rook is my favorite piece in chess and the nydus is my favorite unit in sc2. You use the nydus to get past the lurkers who are entrenched in an impossible to break position on the map. You get past that to attack his soft underbelly and that forces himself to give up the position. So the way you break positions in chess is by making the opponent willingly give them up and that’s how it works with the nydus.
Conversely if you have a good position then you need a method for dealing with the nydus and that’s hard. I will have literally 1/3rd the income of my opponent, in a zvz, and will win a 50 minute macro game because they just don’t know how to play strategically with regards to unit positioning and whatnot. That’s because the spam creep, injects, hold down the “R” key to make roaches, and win, and that’s all they do to get high gm as zerg. It’s like, come on, man. Time to nerf the roach.
Sure, I will bite.
Each race has different matters to focus on that they are designed around. Removing one of zerg’s biggest APM taxes would not only raise the skill floor dramatically but also might for example lower the skill ceiling of being able to decide exactly where to prioritize creep spread, while giving so much more time to focus on macro and micro that nobody would understand where the race ends up or if it even resembles what it was prior to such a change. It would have a butterfly effect on the balance of the race that who knows where would end, although the skill floor of the race would be significantly increased for sure. It would require similar changes to other races in order to maintain a modicum of balance, as good zerg players might actually be able to micro multiprong harass at an increased payoff and abuse zerg’s explosive production without the opportunity cost of the benefits of the creep later in the game. The assault might be relentless.
Short answer: no.
Long answer: of course not.
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