User:Shard/StarCraft2

Part 1

I've had the StarCraft 2 Beta for a while now (about three weeks) and would like to share some of my experiences, thoughts, and concerns. What better place to do this than for a wiki of a different game!

First of all, the game looks great, and it runs surprisingly well on my machine. I have a video card that's almost two years old, and I am able to run the game on max settings and get a solid 60FPS most of the time. Like GW, the engine is very well optimized even for low-end systems.

Sound: Awesome. Some of the unit sounds are a little cheesy, but the music is stellar (no pun intended, or maybe it was) and many of the sound effects add more depth to the units that were in the first game.

Now to gameplay, the most important aspect for the sequel to the best game ever made. The first time you play, you notice that the screen area is pretty small, and you can't zoom out much. You get used to it after 1 or 2 games. Once you customize your scroll speeds, it feels like any other RTS. Many of the players in the beta are friendly, and you'll usually get a "hi" at the beginning of each match and a "gg" at the end of each match. Sometimes you get a "@($^ @*^ *&%*@& MOTHER@*%#*%" from people you do a cannon rush on, which I personally think is adorable. The beta balance forums are a different story. Most of the people in the balance forum are too stupid to know it's a beta, and they assume everything in the game is already perfect, so anytime a thread pops up reading "X is OP/UP" one of them comes in and says "learn to deal with it." A similar phenomenon happens on GWG, except this game is 5 years old.

Before I get to balance issues, I think I'll just make a note of some of the bigger changes from SC1.

Protoss have a new ability on their gateways called warp in. You have to research it at the cybernetics core. When you do, any gateway you have can morph into a warp gate, which is the same thing, but it spawns units in 5 seconds with a 20 second cooldown, instead of using the units' normal build times. In addition, you can spawn these units anywhere you have pylon power. It's a very powerful tool for placing your army in front of an opponent's base, or quickly reacting to a drop in one of your expansions.

Terrans only have two addons now, but any of their production buildings can use them interchangeably. The reactor doubles your production queue, letting you build 2 units at once (in effect cutting a unit's build time in half), and the tech lab unlocks more advanced units like Siege Tanks and Banshees and contains all of their upgrades. Nukes are way less expensive and don't take up food, but they don't do as much damage as they used to. 1 nuke takes out squishy units, 2 takes out all units and most buildings, and 3 nukes will destroy pretty much anything.

Zerg have the queen. I'll talk more about that later. Overlords no longer have detection. You have to upgrade each individual overlord to be detectors, and you can do this once you get a lair.

On to balance. This is the part you wanted to read right? I have to say, for a beta, I can find very few flaws in the game. There are so few issues that I can (and will) list all of them on this page. I'll divide them by race to make it easy.

General

Generally, there is no punishment for turtling in one's base. Any player (even I've done it) can hide in their base, build too many base defenses for any ground force to deal with, tech to their best air unit, mass, and win. This makes for boring games. The reason you are able to do this is because resources last longer (you get 5 instead of 8 minerals and 4 gas per extract), and you can have 2 workers on a mineral patch without the AI becoming stupid. Basically, income is higher and you keep it longer per base. In games lasting up to 30 minutes, you only need to expand once. Any more than that only hurts you because the cost to make the additional building and worker units is better spent on units. In StarCraft 1, expanding was a huge deal, and keeping your opponent from expanding was too. It's not so important in this game, which disappoints me, because map control is one of the things I'm really good at. The game is more focused on just massing powerful units than it is about positioning.

Early and mid-game seems really solid right now, excepting the things on this page. The late game has a problem though. There is no way to counter large masses of units (or capital ships). StarCraft 1 handled this problem with certain spells. Terran had lockdown for BCs and Carriers. Zerg had plague, dark swarm, and hydralisks (which aren't spells, but were still awesome), and protoss had psi storm, mind control, and stasis. StarCraft 2 has psi storm, but it is much smaller (its diameter right now is smaller than the size of spawning pool.) SC2 also has stasis, but you cast it from the mothership, which takes about a year to build and dies in 5 seconds to focus fire anyway.

Terran

I find terran to be the most boring race. Their whole balance is based on walling themselves in, which is something I don't like. If you're a good terran playing against an equally skilled P or Z, you have to wall yourself into your base or you lose. It's related to the thing mentioned above.

Marauders are a new unit in SC2. They are basically siege tanks that can't deploy. They have tons of health and they do tons of damage to armored units, which includes buildings, and they cost 100/25. They require a tech lab to build, which means they're a tier 1.5 unit. The protoss and zerg equivalents are stalkers (costing 125/50) and roaches (costing 75/25), and marauders steamroll both of those in equal numbers. The only ground counter to marauders is the protoss Immortal, which costs exactly twice as much and is a tier 2 unit. Thanks to how cheap tech labs are (50/25), terran players are able to build 3 or 4 barracks and pump these guys out nonstop, and after some time, they walk into your base with about 30 of them plus a few marines and your base is gone within seconds.

Reapers are another new unit, but they've been changed since the last battlereport came out. They are basically ground-ground ranged units that can hop cliffs (ie they can fly except over water). They cost 50/50, the cheapest flying unit in the game, and the only one you can get on the map in 2:33. Their ONLY use is to rush the opponent's resource gatherers, kill about 5 of them, then either let them die or make them run away to safety and do it again while you mass marauders. After about 5 minutes into the game, reapers are 100% useless, because they lose to pretty much every unit beyond tier 1. This means they have a tiny window where they are incredibly overpowered, followed by the rest of the match where you never see them again. They really have no place in the game if their only use is to get an early cheese win.

StarCraft 2 has a feature adopted from WC3 where if a player no longer has his main building, his other buildings become revealed. Terran is able to ignore this rule by lifting off their command centers. Flying buildings still count as buildings for the purposes of this mechanic and for victory, and I actually lost a match because of this. Adrin and I were playing on teams against two terran guys. We ran into their base with all our stuff and destroyed EVERYTHING they had. They lifted off 1 command center each and flew to the corners of the map (which were surrounded by water, so no ground access), then killed all of our air units. They had no buildings left, but were still allowed to run to our bases (all 6 of them) and destroy them. The game never revealed where their CCs were hiding, and the game never gave us victory for achieving victory.

Protoss

Protoss is probably the most balanced race right now. The only thing they have that causes problems is the Void Ray. It's a flying unit built from the stargate, making it tier 2. It's a problem for three reasons. First, its weapon does small damage for 4 seconds while it charges up, then after those 4 seconds, it rapes face. The thing is, it keeps this charge even after its first target dies, so once the ray has been in combat for 4 seconds and becomes fully charged, it becomes more powerful than a carrier ro battlecruiser (both t3 units, probably the most powerful in the game). In addition to this, the void ray can shoot while moving, so it is impossible to micro your guys away from them to avoid damage. This also means you can't make them lose their charge once they have it, with the exception of the Stalker's blink ability.

The third thing: You can build a void ray before zerg can tech to anti-air (I and many other people did the math. You can't get any AA before a void ray). I main protoss, and I have never lost a 1v1 vs zerg, because I just tech straight to void rays and win every single time. PvZ is broken for this reason.

Zerg

Zerg has 2 issues. First is the Queen. It's not like the queen from SC1. This one is built from the hatchery (not from larva) and is basically a walking hatchery for only half the cost. It can spawn 4 larva every 40 seconds (doubling your unit production), and it can spread creep. Numerically speaking, it's the best unit in the game because of the larva thing, but if you read the balance forums, you will hear idiots crying about how queens can't kill everything in the game. You have a unit costing half as much as a hatchery that doubles your unit production. Please shut the fuck up and stop crying that it's not a battlecruiser.

Second on this list is mutalisks. You can build a spire as soon as your lair comes up, same as the first game. As zerg, this is easy and quick to do, because your queen-powered hatchery can make 10 drones per minute to pay for the minerals/gas. Mutas are the third fastest unit in the game. The only things faster than them are phoenixes (a protoss unit that replaced the corsair but sucks ass) and some other weak unit I can't remember. Neither of them beat mutalisks because mutas are just stronger, and nothing can chase them because they're faster than everything else. An early mutalisk harrasment means you're going to lose in 2 minutes when 20 more mutas come for your base. This isn't so much of a problem with mutalisks, but more of a problem with anti-air in general. SC2 doesn't have much of it yet. SC1 had goliaths, hydralisks, and corsairs. SC2 only has hydras, and they're more expansive and have about the same power. I'm assuming they plan to add more AA in the two coming expansions.

Part 2

It's not news to many people that the blizzard forum community is dumber than the average stuffed bear, but I feel like I should shed light on the situation.

First, a little story. Imagine you and your friend playing a custom game on Battle.net. Well, trying to play. The game freezes every 5 seconds due to connection problems. Connection problems to Battle.net, because vent, firefox, and MSN are still working fine. The lag is so insane that the two of you decide to partake in a ranked 2v2 match. You start the 2v2 search, hoping to fight against scrubs. Surprisingly, two opponents are found rather quickly.

You start the match as you would any other. Standard build order, scouting. Your partner wants to do something silly and begins to cannon rush one of the enemies. No longer after his first pylon finishes does every player get connection problems every few seconds. After about one minute of game time (which came out to like 5 minutes in real life time), your partner has dropped, and one of your opponents has dropped. StarCraft 2's ally system is much better than the first game. When your partner drops, you gain control of his units, and you obtain his income.

While the two players were dropping, you had a sizable army inside the other guy's base. Lots of marines, and a few sieged tanks doing terrible, terrible damage to units and strictures alike. He tries to fight back and even counterattack with marines, but your mighty force dashes his hopes.

The terran opponent lifts off what he can, and runs all his SCVs away from danger. After destroying the remains of his main base, you scour the map for his remaining forces. Since he's the broken race in StarCraft 2, his remaining structures don't get revealed when he no longer has a base (a feature that affects only protoss and zerg). You manage to track down and destroy his remaining SCVs and a handful of barracks. He only has two buildings left. One is a command center floating in the corner of the map, and one is a supply depot you just discovered. You rush to build air units to kill his command center, while your ground forces head toward the depot.

The score is You: 30 Marines, 6 Siege Tanks, 2 Orbital Commands, 4 Barracks, 2 Factories, about 20 SCVs, 2 Starports, 2 Vikings. Him: 1 Command Center, 1 Half-dead Supply Depot.

Your opponent has no units and no production buildings. It is only a matter of time before you hunt down his floating Command Center with your newly-built vikings. As you destroy the supply depot and start heading for the command center. . .

You get 45 seconds of lag and drop from the game, resulting in a loss for you, and a victory for him.

Don't believe me? Here's the replay.

Are you fucking serious? In a matchup which was literally impossible for me to lose, I lost, 100% due to lag.

Nice. Fucking. Joke.

An undeserved -8 on my rating can be won back in a single match, and while annoying at the time, is something I will forget in a week. The larger issue, however, is that it's not the first time this has happened. Baddle.net fails all the time. I made a post on Blizzard's Forums expressing my concerns about their shitty network system. I was expecting the average response. Some people say "I feel for you, this happened to me too" mixed with some "lolurbad" from the trolls. Now, I referred to Bnet as "Baddle.net" on purpose (which was obvious to me, and hopefully is obvious to you as well), and without fail, every single person who read my post didn't know what a portmanteau was.

When I pointed out that the misspelling was intentional, one of the other posters googled the wikipedia article for portmanteau, then failed to read the definition. I kid you not.

Other guy: Also...its BATTLE.NET not BADDLE.NET.

Me: Obviously, you do not know what a portmanteau is.

Other guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau, Battle is one word... Nice try slick ;)

So basically, posters on Blizzard's forums are intellectually barren.

Part 3

Hey, I don't have to change my rant header! It's still about the retarded Blizz community!

So, while this originates from Sc2, I will talk about other similar games including GW. Blizzard posted early patch notes for the first retail balance patch for SC2. It's pretty small, and ignores all the game's problems (reminds me of another company I know), but the worst part is that Blizzard fanbois think it's the best patch of any game ever made.

I should probably give a brief background of strategy games in general. This mainly comes from my Command and Conquer and Magic: the Gathering experience, but most strategy games (real time or not) follow these patterns. You generally start with lower tier units that are weak across the board. After you build up and fight a bit, you end up getting higher tech units over the course of a game, and higher tech units tend to be natural counters to lower tech units. The end result is that when one player goes for higher tech, the other has to follow shortly or lose for staying weak. This is why strategy games have more than 1 unit per army type or race. In MtG, you start with no lands, and can play one each turn. Generally, every turn, you can play more powerful spells than the last, and the end of a MtG game usually has expensive permanents (all 4+ mana and some 7+) on the battlefield instead of things costing 1 mana.

StarCraft: Brood War is a strange exception to this. Some of the low tier units countered higher tier, and some of the higher tier units countered the lower tier. The units in that game were mixed well enough that each race had options for countering either lower tech or higher tech units of any other race, but not teching still costed you the game most of the time.

StarCraft 2 is going in the other direction. Siege tanks are units that can deploy and deal huge area damage to balled up enemy units. Naturally, these counter small, weak units (like all of tier 1), and don't do so well against units with a lot of health. If you're massing tier 1 units and you see siege tanks, you almost always want to tech up, because you will lose if you keep making swarms of small weak units.

The first SC2 balance patch nerfs siege tanks against lower tier targets. It cuts their original damage by 30% (including splash damage). After this patch, tanks will take at least one extra hit (sometimes 2 on the main target, 3 on splashed targets) to kill as quickly as they kill now. Bottom line: They won't be viable against low tier armies anymore, and nobody will ever make them. Furthermore, if your enemy is making a massive tier 1 army, you will be forced (as terran) to do the same, since teching up does nothing for you.

There are already things in the game that fail the same way, but people have mostly been ignoring them because they weren't drastically flawed, and teching up was still allowed.

This is all fine and good, so I made a thread describing in more detail what you just read. You may read it if you'd like, but it's not necessary. The general response has been:

You don't know what you're talking about

StarCraft 1 was like this

Oh, and the patch mentioned ultralisks would get lowered damage, but have more DPS against buildings (they are only used to counter armored units like tanks and thors. Nobody makes them to destroy buildings) I mentioned this and got

Lower damage on ultralisks is a buff and you're an idiot.

It's apparent that nobody in the thread up to now has ever played any other RTS (except someone said he played WC2) or any other strategy games in general. MtG is exactly like this. CnC is exactly like this. Even chess is exactly like this (you can't move back row units early game, and for a good reason). SC2's patch 1.1 will turn any game against terran into a tier 1 massfest, because there teching up won't be viable. Me and Adrin already play double terran and mass nothing but marines for a nearly 75% win ratio, regardless of the enemy's tech. I guess now it will be easier for us to beat other terran teams.

Not much of a rant, it just surprised me that none of Blizzard's fanboys know how RTSs work.

Part 4

Blizzard just released a new patch for StarCraft 2. It's the first major balance patch since the game's release. I thought I'd go through it, give a little commentary, and explain why Blizzard makes better balance updates than Anet used to.

The top two units causing problems in SC2 were the Void Ray (especially in team games) and the Reaper. You can find Oni and/or Morphon denying this somewhere on one of my pages, but apparently Blizzard agrees with me.

• Void Ray - New charge damage
  • Level 1: 5 -> 6+4a
  • Level 2: 5 -> 6+4a
  • Level 3: 10+15a -> 8+8a

Void rays are flying protoss units which "charge up" their attack. After they're charged, they do more damage to anything they hit. Before this patch, they could sustain 50DPS against armored targets, which is the second highest DPS in the game (the highest was the Ultralisk). Depending on the situation, a single void ray could be an instant win because one of them can destroy any building in just a few seconds. Blizzard realized that void rays causing instant victory was a void ray problem, not something completely unrelated, and nerfed it accordingly. Now, they are a little stronger when uncharged, but about half as effective when fully charged.

• Reaper - Speed upgrade requires Factory (used to require nothing)
• Barracks - Requires supply depot (used to require command center).

Reapers are the terran's glass cannon. They don't have much health, but they do insane amounts of damage to buildings and to light targets (which includes everything in the game by the time reapers are on the field). They also move very quickly (even faster with the speed upgrade) and can jump up and down cliffs, which makes it a flying unit for positioning and strategic purposes. Reapers could be on the field in under 3 minutes, and were usually used to harrass (by harrass I mean erase) the opponent's resource line. The 9-rax reaper build was the equivalent of 4-pooling in Brood War. It was nearly unstoppable. If you've watched the GSL finals match 5, you will hear the commentators saying "proxy reaper against a fast expand is supposed to be an auto-win." Apparently, Blizzard doesn't want every tvz game to last 2 minutes, so they nerfed the reaper. The biggest issue with the reaper is that you can only counter them with higher tech units. The only way to stop them is to sacrifice your current army power and tech up. Blizzard changed the Barracks so you can't proxy one before your first depot is done, and the reaper speed upgrade is now at a higher tech level, when your opponent should already have counter units for them.

So, as a little lesson to anyone going into game design. If there's a problem, you want to find out what's causing the problem, then change it in a way so that it won't cause that problem. You don't ignore the problem completely, change something unrelated, then hope you got it right. I mean, you could, but then you'd spend the next 10 updates getting nothing done.

Part5

"This game should be balanced only at the highest level." And now I will explain to you why people who say this are stupid.

While browsing TeamLiquid today (the most reputable StarCraft related forum in the world), I came across a thread titled "Dedicated Balance Discussion Thread." Sounds right up my alley! The poster wanted to create a thread that compiles all the balance concerns people currently have about SC2. He created a template for how to report your observations and what your fixes might be. The next few threads contained the following quotes:

• "The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play."
• "balance only matter for the highest level of play."

I had some problems with this, for a variety of reasons. Are you ready?

Games can be balanced at all levels

While difficult, this feat can be accomplished for ANY game, and it's pretty easy to prove mathematically, so I have trouble understanding why so many people believe otherwise. Yes, metagames at different skill ranges will vary, but the integrity of a game shouldn't be compromised by neglecting the 99% of players who aren't professionals.

Chess is perhaps the best example to use here. Chess is balanced at all levels of play. You can get two people who have never played it before, tell them how each piece moves, and they will have have an even match most of the time. In ten games, someone will probably win 6 times and the other will win 4 times. In SC2, if you give one new player Terran and give the other player Zerg, the terran will win 9 times out of ten. Even in mirrors (matches where both players pick the same race), the games won't even be close if one player builds differently from the other.

I realize Chess has much more simple rules than StarCraft, but the basic principle I want you to take home is that a game, whether simple or complex in design, can be balanced for everyone.

Games balanced at different levels are different games

A game that's only balanced for the "best" players will see a huge gap between players who are already really good and players who are trying to be good. To get to Diamond League in SC2 requires you to perform one set of strategies for any given race. Once you get into diamond and want to move up to masters, you literally have to forget everything you know about the game and learn a new set of strategies, because the strategies that work up to Diamond League suck against Master League players. Moving from Diamond League to Master League is like moving from Command and Conquer to StarCraft 2. The gameplay is essentially the same, but your playstyle changes completely.

Improving yourself in an orthogame should be a constant process. That's why they call it a learning curve instead of a learning plateau. When you play SC2 to get up to diamond league, you're not playing to get better. You're playing to get a better rank. Your skill actually changes very little during this time. You don't actually have to try very hard until you start getting matches against players who DO think about what they're doing.

Look at IWAY. IWAY was a build that required no skill, but could trample most other builds that had thought put into them. Do you know any famous IWAY players who later joined a top guild that didn't play IWAY? Of course you don't. That's because if those players really wanted to be good, they had to switch to a build that actually allowed them to grow as players. SC2 is the same way between leagues. You basically have to cheese every game or counter a cheese every game until you get high ranked enough to fight players who are genuinely good.

When games are balanced only for one set of players, it becomes very difficult and often frustrating for other players to reach that point. This exclusion doesn't help a game grow, it only holds it back.

More than the best 1% of players play the game

This is the most obvious point I can make, yet most of the people who say things like "only the best players matter" always fail to realize it. If you only look at the top 1% of the SC2 ladder, the game is almost perfect. If you look at the other 99%, you realize it's pretty shitty. 99% of the people who ladder on SC2 are playing a shitty game that receives very little attention. The same can be said about Guild Wars at almost any point in its life. There were many points where GvGs were very competitive if you were top 100. Otherwise, it was just a cheese-fest. Sadly nobody GvGs anymore cause Anet forgot GW is a pvp game.

Speaking of bad guilds cheesing, I had a friend who I recently found out played GW for a long time, and said he liked pvp. He said he never got very good, so he ended up just playing GvGs casually at rank 3000 (this was back when 3000 guilds actually existed, which I understand is not the case today). I told him about the guilds I'd been in, many of which he'd heard of. We got to talking about our pvp experiences, and we found that it was like we were playing two different games. While I actually got lucky and crawled my way into top guilds mostly by winning HoH all the time, he never got a chance to play with or against any good players. He never learned any of the cool strategies top guilds used back then. The negligence of the developers to make the game fun at the low level is the sole cause of this.

Games should be fun for everyone, not just for the people who are the most skilled.

Closing

I hope you were able to take something away from this page (hopefully not text, don't vandalize my page). I hope the next time you see someone spew some arrogant bullshit like "Only the highest level of play matters," you respond with a witty but subtle retort. I suggest "What about chess, dumbass?" or "I can mathematically prove you wrong, let me go get my whiteboard." If all else fails, you can just pick Terran, make nothing but marines, and say "Is it fun when I mass the best unit in the game starting at 2 minutes, and no matter what you do, I still win?"