This topic may have been discussed on the forum, but I couldn’t find any traces of it. I am talking about increasing the starting number of workers from 5 to 6 (or even 7).
Yes, then we will need to reconsider the starting amount of resources, timings of the regular and tavern heroes. But I think it is worth implementing the change.
(1) The game would start a bit faster and the players could get into action earlier. Count in here thousands games played online every day and do the math on how much time could be saved.
(2) All amateur and pro players would have to review the builds that they’ve used for many many years, explore again and adopt - which is very cool. This is what a new edition of the game should bring in.
What do you guys think? Do you think it is a good idea to change the starting number of workers? Would you welcome such change or not?
if they increase the number of starting workers, they could just increase the food production of the town hall buildings(town hall, great hall, necropolis and tree of life).
Messing with something this impactful will not go down well with the majority of players which is why Blizzard has never tried to change it before. There would have to be a high demand for it from pro players themselves (mainly Chinese) for Blizzard to reconsider it which I doubt will happen.
Also, if they make this change, they will have to balance everything else to make sure a race doesn’t have a window to exploit it over another.
I hope they won’t increase workers number at start, cut when they did it on sc2 lotv, the early game basically died, you are immediately on to mid game with little to no early game rushes or builds
why not just start with all the bases ready, also 2 expancions running, all you have to do is build your army, now the build of the units is instant so you can get into battle as soon as you finish. how cool would that be? imagine all the time saved lol.
RoC was slow as molasses compared to TFT. Your food cap was lower, units were costlier, and production felt slower. There were also less means of increased resource gathering like Shredders and certain racial upgrades. Heck, even expanding bases wasn’t highly promoted, since you can play an entire game without expanding and that was the meta for a long time.
If we increase workers, I think this kind of change is more than just a ‘patch change’. I think this has the impact of an overhaul, considering that the game is paced and balanced very specifically around the starting worker count and attributing time to ease players into production by having to produce more workers and waiting for gold income to trickle in. If we increase the early game starting units, then there are many unforeseen factors such as
Certain races have defense advantage such as Humans who can militia
Less time/money spent on workers could be spent on towering earlier, setting up anti-harass
Do Undead start with 1 ghoul or 2? Would other races have Wood gathering advantage then?
Food costs are more limited at the start. It could be alleviated by suggestions above of adding more supply to towns, but then you need to then consider how much food each building provides and retool that system. Humans could have a huge advantage of having to build one farm fewer, while other races might need to still build that 4th supply building to hit the 50 mark.
Harass meta might change. With more workers, maybe creeping and turtling is preferred since everyone gains more resources and is able to rush tech faster. This ties into the quicker towers and better anti-harass issue.
Less ‘risk/reward’ for skilled micro and macro well in the early game. Right now we don’t start with enough workers to fully mine gold and start getting wood and build stuff at the same time. There is a very defined choice driven decision to start making buildings by sacrificing early gold/wood income.
This would not be balanced because of how humans can speed build, an additional peasant for humans means they could speed build their altar even faster.
Undead would not benefit much from this change since they only need 1 acolyte to build with, unless you gave them an additional ghoul but that would be too much and allow UD to harass/rush much earlier
It usually takes about 2.5 - 3 minutes for players to train their hero and start creeping. Reducing that time means players get less time to scout and plan ahead. I dont think it would be good to cause players to feel overwhelmed in the first 2-3mins
If you really want gameplay to happen earlier, you could reduce the time it takes to train a first hero, but this would also be unbalanced for tavern heroes. Imagine a human speed building their hero vs a player who wants a tavern hero, nobody would ever pick tavern first again.
Nothing about this idea seems to make sense IMO, the game has been just fine with 5 workers since 2002 and nobody has ever wanted that to change. Balance always come first, you dont change things just for the sake of it.
if they should increase the number of initial workers, they should add 2 more acolytes. the undead have a disadvantage at the start because they can not gather as much gold initially. the undead could possibly have its initial gould not cost food and then add 2 more acolytes, that should balance things a bit.
Well on the other hand, it wouldn’t need to be tweaked so much for balance’s sake if the change just wasn’t implemented either.
Speaking as someone who likes Heroes of the Storm more than League of Legends and DOTA because it’s a faster game with quicker matches? I didn’t like the ramp up in Starcraft 2 when they added more workers to the start of matches. I don’t think I’d like it in Warcraft 3.
see how much change you are suggesting? If your original idea requires additional changes inorder for it to work, then its not balanced.
If you are trying to claim that Undead is the weakest race, then that is a completely different issue than your original idea for more workers. The best possible solution to improving a races weakness is probably not as simple as giving 1 free/extra ghoul at the start of matches
You also seem to be completely ignoring the fact that Humans would be able to speed build their altars faster, which in turn would make tavern heroes obsolete
i was not suggesting adding more workers to the humans but adding more workers(acolytes) to the undead to offset the inbalance of their starting work force.
yeah it was always weird to me why it isn’t 5. It makes much more sense to be 5.
but should also reduce the creep experience gains to 4. now thinking about it 6 is fine actually since level uping until 4 with creeps is a little underwhelming compared to 5. so nvm
Yeah that’s kinda how I feel. Ult at 5 sounds good on paper until you realize that how well paced it feels right now, especially in deciding whether to make that second/third hero yet or not. If you just lower the cap to level 4 then it just pushes you to get a 2nd hero faster.