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Last I checked the balance was at least okay, there's more clunkers than diamonds though (hi reapers).
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Aug 25, 2021 02:04
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Acerbatus posted:Last I checked the balance was at least okay, there's more clunkers than diamonds though (hi reapers). They might have felt compelled by the simple concept of expansions to add units, and they didn't really fit. I can definitely see players getting stroppy if they did not add that sort of thing. They did really well in Brood War, but that was only one expansion and SC2 had two which means more opportunities to gently caress it up. I did notice that they re-added Lurkers to the Zerg, which I was glad to see. I really liked those in SC1. I miss Dark Archons, though.
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Aug 25, 2021 02:27
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JustJeff88 posted:They might have felt compelled by the simple concept of expansions to add units, and they didn't really fit. I can definitely see players getting stroppy if they did not add that sort of thing. They did really well in Brood War, but that was only one expansion and SC2 had two which means more opportunities to gently caress it up. I did notice that they re-added Lurkers to the Zerg, which I was glad to see. I really liked those in SC1. I miss Dark Archons, though. Also worth noting that while individual units might be clunkers or clearly outclassed (just like in basically every competitive strategy game), AFAIK the overall faction balance has typically been close enough that any of the races are competitively viable.
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Aug 25, 2021 02:56
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JohnKilltrane posted:
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Aug 25, 2021 03:06
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JohnKilltrane posted:
Okay, did anyone else look at this and have their first thought be, "the last big scene in Steamboy"? cause now all I can imagine is the sci vessel leaning over and stomping it's way across the map.
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Aug 25, 2021 07:29
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Radio Free Kobold posted:GO HOME MARTIAN Next update we showcase the Vessel's secret spell: The Heat Ray.
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Aug 25, 2021 13:20
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JustJeff88 posted:They might have felt compelled by the simple concept of expansions to add units, and they didn't really fit. I can definitely see players getting stroppy if they did not add that sort of thing. They did really well in Brood War, but that was only one expansion and SC2 had two which means more opportunities to gently caress it up. I did notice that they re-added Lurkers to the Zerg, which I was glad to see. I really liked those in SC1. I miss Dark Archons, though. To address the question in general, SC2's balance is pretty solid. It's not at the same level of Brood War but I maintain that Brood War's balance was in large parts a fluke and not something easily replicated, and that's something we'll be diving into as we get deeper into the game. I will say that SC2 loses a lot of what makes Brood War's balance unique - SC2 has more focus on big deathball armies and hard counters rather than BW's emphasis on multiple engagements all over the map between units that are good against each other (an emphasis that, by the way, mostly exists only because of BW's lovely pathfinding). Personally I do think that SC2 had a couple issues of "expansion-itis," units that didn't really fulfill a necessary role and were just added in for the sake of having a unit, but over time I think those mostly got ironed out and either the metagame or the units themselves changed until they did serve a purpose - for the most part. Of course I've also been crazy out of the loop on competitive SC2 for years so I could easily be 100% wrong on this.
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Aug 25, 2021 17:08
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Mechanicspost: Pathfinding 101, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Jank In this game there are often instances where you’ll give your units commands and they’ll do something entirely different. Some of your units might go where you tell them while others will wander around or dance in place. The reason for this is pathfinding. In this update, we’re going to take a look at why Starcraft’s pathfinding is so bad, and why its terrible pathfinding has been weirdly instrumental to its success. This is going to be a summary, of course - I’m not going to dig all that deep. If anyone reading this is considering graduate studies in computer science, this is unironically a good possible thesis topic. We will be doing deep dives into more specific pathfinding stuff, maybe once the Unit Spotlights have been exhausted. So here’s the basics. Starcraft is divided into a grid, like so:  A map is a whole bunch of squares, each in turn comprised of smaller squares (which we’ll refer to as… I dunno, mini-squares, to avoid confusion). When you tell a unit to move somewhere, it tries to navigate from square to square until it reaches its destination. But there’s a problem with this. See, this was based on the Warcraft engine - you had squares, some could be passed, some couldn’t. The issue, though, is that while Warcraft 1 and 2 were top-down, Starcraft is this pseudo-isometric view. So check out this bridge:  See, in Warcraft 2 with its top-down perspective, terrain fit relatively neatly into the square-system. But with things angled slightly, like in Starcraft - see that red line in the picture? That indicates the barrier of the bridge, where it becomes impassable. So those squares are being bisected in all sorts of strange, messy ways. This makes it hard for the game to figure out exactly how and where to move units. And then there’s the units themselves, which have different rules based on their size and speed. Going back to the above bridge, if you told a Marine and a Goliath to cross the bridge, it would figure out a different route for each of them because a Marine’s small enough to fit in some of the bisected squares but a Goliath isn’t. In other words, every single ground unit in the game has different pathfinding rules. But wait! There’s more! Because of the way Starcraft 1 was developed… well, I’ll just quote the lead programmer, Patrick Wyatt: quote:Because the project was always two months from launch it was inconceivable that there was enough time to re-engineer the terrain engine to make path-finding easier, so the path-finding code just had to be made to work. To handle all the tricky edge-cases, the pathing code exploded into a gigantic state-machine which encoded all sorts of specialized “get me out of here” hacks. I feel like I’ve been using the word “ad-hoc” a lot in this thread but it really sums up the way Starcraft was designed. They did the best they could and then slapped bandaid after bandaid on top of the problems that arose because there was no time to do anything else. In the case of Brood War, these pathfinding "hacks" are what's opened the door for a bunch of micro tricks, and we're going to dive into those tricks as we progress through the game (look for the first one, "Magic Boxing," near the start of the Zerg campaign). But why do some units like Goliaths and Dragoons have exceptionally bad pathfinding? Man, that’s a story. Get ready for this. It’s been fairly well known in the Brood War community that Dragoons are a different size when they stand still vs when they’re on the move. The theory is that because of this size difference, the pathfinding has a hard time handling them. That is all 100% false. I know, I was shocked too. I believed it to be gospel truth up until I did research for this LP. It turns out it’s all about speed. See, recent years have seen deeper dives into Starcraft’s programming, and a couple of things have become clear. First, units are always the same size. Any difference is purely cosmetic. Second, each unit has something called a “walk cycle.” I’m very out of my depth here (clarifications and corrections are, as always, very welcome!), but this is how I understand it: a “walk cycle” is basically a unit’s walking animation. And not all animations are created equal - some move the unit ahead more pixels, others less, leading to the unit moving at faster and slower speeds during different points of its cycle (of course, these changes are minute and for the most part aren’t really noticeable). As a result, a unit actually has several different movement speeds depending on where it is in its cycle, and what I give as the unit speed in the Unit Spotlight is the average of that. So, for example, a unit with a speed of 4 might actually be a unit that has a speed of 6 one frame, a speed of 2 the next, etc. Here’s the thing: When the speed difference within a cycle gets too big, the pathfinding freaks out. It doesn’t know how to handle it. That’s what happens with Goliaths and Dragoons. Issues in their walk cycles lead to their pathfinding glitching out. This is most obvious with Zerglings. Zerglings have the same walk cycle problem as Goliaths and Dragoons, but once you research the speed upgrade for Zerglings, the cycle gets smoothed out and their pathfinding works (or rather, works as well as any Brood War unit could). So there’s a noticeable difference between how smart the pathing is for unupgraded Zerglings and upgraded Zerglings. (Fun fact: this whole “walk cycle” thing only applies to ground units. Flying units follow different rules, as do - crucially - hovering units, which is part of what opens up some of the Vultures’ micro tricks). So this whole unit speed and the not-isometric square design compound to make the Dragoon have a really hard time getting anywhere - but they also made the Dragoon ludicrously powerful for its tech level (possibly to compensate for its terrible pathfinding), so if you can master Dragoon micro, you’ve got a terrifying weapon on your hands. If you fixed Dragoon pathfinding, you would literally have to rebalance the entire game because the unit would be stupidly overpowered. And that’s the interesting thing about this: It’s not just that Brood War’s pathfinding is so bad, it’s that this bad pathfinding has actually been a crucial part of the game’s success, for two main reasons: First, the terrible pathfinding means that moving a large amount of units together just isn’t feasible. As a result, competitive Brood War tends to be not about two large armies meeting in the center of the map, but rather many small engagements happening simultaneously all around the map. Not that you won’t see deathballs, because occasionally you will, but it’s a conscious strategic choice rather than the default. Second, it impacts how every unit controls. Starcraft gets compared to chess a lot, but that’s not just Starcraft fans being pretentious (well, okay, I’m sure some of it is). It’s because Starcraft is a game where, due to the way pathfinding was implemented, every piece has different rules about how it can move. Vultures, Marines, and Goliaths all move and control very differently, which means that not only is there a lot more variety between each unit than you’d initially suspect, but as I’ve mentioned before it also allows for a sort of specialization where certain players are particularly good with certain units because they’ve devoted more time to mastering that unit’s pathfinding quirks. These two factors combine to make Starcraft a surprisingly tactical game, where things like your positioning and your angle of attack are much more important than they generally are in RTS games. It also illustrates why this game has a reputation for being hard to learn (at a competitive level) - you’re doing all of this in real-time at a fast clip. People in the thread have mentioned Day9 and his Let’s Learn Starcraft series on Youtube, and I want to close by referring to that. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve seen it, but IIRC he starts out focusing almost exclusively on Vultures, Siege Tanks, Zealots, and Dragoons in TvP. The idea is to showcase how even limiting yourself to just those four units, there’s almost endless tactical depth to explore. And that’s mostly - almost entirely - due to Starcraft’s weird, bad, janky pathfinding system. What a strange, beautiful mess of a game. If you’re interested in reading more, I got a decent chunk of this post (including the quote) from the blog of Patrick Wyatt. Some fascinating reads on there if you’re into this sort of thing.
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Aug 25, 2021 19:53
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JohnKilltrane posted:Mechanicspost: Pathfinding 101, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Jank  What a beautiful mess of a game
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Aug 25, 2021 20:09
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't was a simpler time.
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Aug 25, 2021 20:13
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Sad that modern entitled gamers would rather smoothly order a giant clump of mixed units with few issues beyond the aggregate size of the blob in SC2 than master the dragoon's weird shuffling spider dance bullshit
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Aug 25, 2021 20:21
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Fond memories of having two dozen dragoons lose to one (1) bunker of marines because they get 90% of the way through their hilariously terrible attack animation and then realize they desperately need to cancel it so they can shuffle 3 pixels to the left (to make sure their giant robot rear end is in exactly the right spot to most optimally prevent the rest of their army from getting a shot either)
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Aug 25, 2021 22:16
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JohnKilltrane posted:And then there’s the units themselves, which have different rules based on their size and speed. Going back to the above bridge, if you told a Marine and a Goliath to cross the bridge, it would figure out a different route for each of them because a Marine’s small enough to fit in some of the bisected squares but a Goliath isn’t. In other words, every single ground unit in the game has different pathfinding rules.
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Aug 25, 2021 22:38
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Question about the big infopost: I've played a bit of Mass Recall. Since it puts SC1 into the SC2 engine, does that change the pathfinding at all?JohnKilltrane posted:To address the question in general, SC2's balance is pretty solid. It's not at the same level of Brood War but I maintain that Brood War's balance was in large parts a fluke and not something easily replicated, and that's something we'll be diving into as we get deeper into the game. I will say that SC2 loses a lot of what makes Brood War's balance unique - SC2 has more focus on big deathball armies and hard counters rather than BW's emphasis on multiple engagements all over the map between units that are good against each other (an emphasis that, by the way, mostly exists only because of BW's lovely pathfinding). That's an interesting take on how the general war is fought in SC1 vs 2. I can see the enjoyment in both multiple skirmishes on several fronts as well as just two huge (relatively speaking) armies smashing against each other. As for the pathfinding, I remember it driving me bananas as a younger man - I used to enjoy huge throngs of Dragoons - and I thought that it was just beause I was poo poo. It's slightly gratifying to find out that it was just suboptimal programming. I'm sure that competitive is cutthroat as hell, but I'm a casual sort of player. I'm not really impressed by people who are very serious about and good at silly wargames, nor do I care to play competitively myself. I imagine that the preceeding statement describes a hefty portion of the player base. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Aug 26, 2021 |
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Aug 26, 2021 02:39
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Aug 26, 2021 02:51
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JustJeff88 posted:Question about the big infopost: I've played a bit of Mass Recall. Since it puts SC1 into the SC2 engine, does that change the pathfinding at all? Yeah. MR is not "putting SC1 into the SC2 engine". It's remaking the campaigns in SC2, basically. So yes, it does change the pathfinding by using SC2's. Because of that, the missions are slightly harder as a baseline to compensate.
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Aug 26, 2021 03:14
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Space Kablooey posted:Yeah. MR is not "putting SC1 into the SC2 engine". It's remaking the campaigns in SC2, basically. So yes, it does change the pathfinding by using SC2's. Because of that, the missions are slightly harder as a baseline to compensate. I was going to joke and say 'Well, I'd like to say that the new pathfinding is why I'm so bad at Mass Recall, but really I'm just crap'. Honestly, though, I have had a much harder time with the MR campaigns than the original ones in SC1. I never understood why, but maybe that is the reason.
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Aug 26, 2021 03:46
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JustJeff88 posted:I was going to joke and say 'Well, I'd like to say that the new pathfinding is why I'm so bad at Mass Recall, but really I'm just crap'. Honestly, though, I have had a much harder time with the MR campaigns than the original ones in SC1. I never understood why, but maybe that is the reason. OG SC was more like Easy in Mass Recall, since they do additional AI changes too, like enemies being a lot more aggressive. The Brood War stuff has relatively less difficulty increase since it was already harder.
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Aug 26, 2021 03:56
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Acerbatus posted:OG SC was more like Easy in Mass Recall, since they do additional AI changes too, like enemies being a lot more aggressive. I should give it a try again some day. Mass Recall is excellent, by the way... don't get the impression that I am slagging it off as some kind of SC1 purist. However, my experience was that SC1 campaigns pre-BW were so-so difficulty on the side of easy in many cases. When I played vanilla SC1 campaigns in Mass Recall on easy they were child's play, but on Normal I would struggle. I'm not one to tie my ego into games, but struggling on Normal was kind of immasculating. As someone who knows a fair amount about SC I felt like I should do better, and I'm not sure why MR on Normal was such a difficulty spike. Keep in mind that I enabled 'Brood War units' as well while playing Mass Recall's vanilla campaigns, which would make them easier (especially for Terran) and I was still having a beast of a time.
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Aug 26, 2021 04:17
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JohnKilltrane posted:Mechanicspost: Pathfinding 101, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Jank chess certainly makes more sense as a comparison, I see lots of people say that Starcraft is a rock, paper, scissors sort of game but I've never felt that way. This isn't a Fire Emblem game, where if you send an axe user to attack a sword you're gonna lose, this is a game where units and abilities have been designed to "counter" other units and abilities but actually being able to do that requires more than just sending Firebats in to kills Zerglings
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Aug 26, 2021 04:18
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There are many theses on pathfinding and a few on Brood War implementations alone, it is a fiendishly hard subject. Even moving one unit is hard enough, what if you want to favour a formation, avoid enemy defences, or prioritize certain units? Mapmakers struggle with it too, I've heard Fighting Spirit's western 12 ramp referred to as the "vortex of death' a few times. Throw in the fact that spamming commands can cause units to glitch into each other (actually part of an infrequently used Protoss trick) and you can end up with a huge mess quite easily.
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Aug 26, 2021 04:47
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GunnerJ posted:Sad that modern entitled gamers would rather smoothly order a giant clump of mixed units with few issues beyond the aggregate size of the blob in SC2 than master the dragoon's weird shuffling spider dance bullshit I'm assuming this is sarcasm and if so, it's a great point. Brood War's scene does sometimes have this toxic, elitist vibe going on where other games are "dumbed down" by having, of all things, better pathfinding. It might be worthwhile for me to say that I'm a big fan of most RTS games and when I compare Brood War to other RTS games like Starcraft 2, Age of Empires, Total Annihilation, etc it's always as a reference point, never with the intention of ranking one game above the other (except for when it comes to what SC2 did to the lore and setting). There's absolutely nothing wrong with great big deathball clashes and they can be a lot of fun to both play and watch, but BW is AFAIK unique in providing an alternative to that. Xander77 posted:Ok... but specifically? The Dragoon walk and... whatever everyone else are talking about but isn't actually explained in the post? Hmm, I'm not totally sure what you're asking here. I'm sleep deprived enough that I saw the "Smilies" button and read it as "Similes" and thought "Oh cool, this forum must have a function to automatically parse your post and generate a relevant simile" so I'm guessing your question is perfectly clear and I'm just having a day haha. If you're asking what I think you're asking, the specifics of unit pathfinding other than the Dragoon, the answer is that it's just way too big a topic to tackle in a single post. I mean that update already was major  . As we progress, I'll pepper the LP with deep dives on certain unit specific pathfinding - probably moreso in the expansion.Thank you for this <3 Aces High posted:chess certainly makes more sense as a comparison, I see lots of people say that Starcraft is a rock, paper, scissors sort of game but I've never felt that way. This isn't a Fire Emblem game, where if you send an axe user to attack a sword you're gonna lose, this is a game where units and abilities have been designed to "counter" other units and abilities but actually being able to do that requires more than just sending Firebats in to kills Zerglings Yeah, I think that one of the elements that's made Starcraft such an enduring game is the overall absence of rock-paper-scissors gameplay. Instead matches tend to revolve around units that counter one another. For example, Marines beat Mutalisks; Mutalisks beat Marines. Which of the two will actually win is a matter of positioning and micro. Same deal with Vulture Tank vs Zealot Dragoon. It's part of what IMHO makes the game exciting to watch - for the most part, when a battle happens you don't really know what the result will be going into it. The only time rock-paper-scissors really appears is late-game TvT.
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Aug 26, 2021 13:13
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I have to go. My planet needs me E: the attack cooldown on the siege tank making it appear to look quizzically at the dragoon before firing is the best part.
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Aug 26, 2021 13:41
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Starcraft is absolutely a rock-paper-scissors game, at least in openings: safe > aggressive > greedy > safe. Starcraft 2 figured out how the majority of 1 vs 1 players actually wanted to play, i.e. build a big army, shove it at the enemy, watch the fireworks, repeat until someone quits. They figured out a core gameplay loop and optimized the hell out of it. It just doesn't lend itself well to strategic positioning. Contrast to Brood War where if you're actually watching your units battle instead of managing reinforcements/economy, you're probably going to die. There's a reason Fastest maps were so popular in Brood War. Of course, to prevent another DOTA, Blizzard then crippled UMS which was the actual thing people wanted more than 1v1. Turns out they're more into potential profit than good experiences, who could have known?
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Aug 26, 2021 13:50
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Decoy Badger posted:Starcraft is absolutely a rock-paper-scissors game, at least in openings: safe > aggressive > greedy > safe. Huh! That's a great point, I've never thought of it that way. I've always used rock-paper-scissors to refer to unit composition and gameplay that emphasizes hard counters. Looking at openings, I guess it is kind of a rock-paper-scissors game in some ways.
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Aug 26, 2021 13:55
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I agree that, in my modest experience, SC isn't very SPS (scissors paper stone, as I grew up calling it) and that's just fine. On the other hand, the fact that it's micro intensive and fast-paced real-time is why I'm not good at it, because I just don't have the reflexes and I can't be in 7 places at once. Advance Wars, another personal favourite, is very RPS, somewhat to the game's detriment. Since the attacker always shoots first and the defender then counters, usually after having taken a ton of damage, it makes encounters very predictable in a lot of ways. Sometimes it makes for interesting tension (bomber vs AA is all about who takes the first hit), but I wish that they had done more with it. For example, they could have had units that fire simultaneously with other units, units that get first strike in some situations, units with split moves, split attacks etcJohnKilltrane posted:I'm assuming this is sarcasm and if so, it's a great point. Brood War's scene does sometimes have this toxic, elitist vibe going on where other games are "dumbed down" by having, of all things, better pathfinding. It might be worthwhile for me to say that I'm a big fan of most RTS games and when I compare Brood War to other RTS games like Starcraft 2, Age of Empires, Total Annihilation, etc it's always as a reference point, never with the intention of ranking one game above the other (except for when it comes to what SC2 did to the lore and setting). There's absolutely nothing wrong with great big deathball clashes and they can be a lot of fun to both play and watch, but BW is AFAIK unique in providing an alternative to that. Any popular game and/or activity that requires skills is going to have that. Hell, I'm in higher ed and we see plenty of 'back in my day'! from older generations based simply on the fact that some things are easier to do than before due to technology. SC is a popular game with a strong fan base, and that elitism is going to be rampant. People invest a lot of time and even more ego in being good at what are really silly fun games, and if the game objectively improves - becoming perhaps even more accessible and attracting more players - but the necessary time commitment to reach a level of ability goes down then the old guard is going to complain about how 'the kids today have it too easy'! It's a story that's been around as long as humans have been dicks, which is to say since humans have been around.
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Aug 26, 2021 15:12
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JohnKilltrane posted:Hmm, I'm not totally sure what you're asking here.
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Aug 26, 2021 15:18
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Xander77 posted:"There's a lot of pathfinding jank and you need to manage units in different ways, depending on their flavor of jank". Ok, but... what does that mean in practice? What's the issue with the dragoon "spider walk" (though the gif kinda illustrated that, I guess?) and how do you overcome it? Etc etc if it's different for different units. Holy crap, you're completely right. I totally glossed over what that actually looks like. Thanks so much for pointing this out! So the following is a series of shots from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJRhW06OzRE Here we see Protoss with a bunch of Dragoons:  And Terran has just set up outside with Siege Tanks:  The Dragoons move out to respond:  ...and start having troubles.  In the above shot, the topmost Dragoon and the leftmost Dragoon are actually both heading north, away from the battle. They weren't told to go there, they were trying to get to the Siege Tanks, but their glitchy pathfinding sent them this way instead. The following shot shows a common issue, the "Dragoon snake:"  The pathfinding results in the Dragoons forming a sort of conga line as they try to go across the left bridge, meaning there's only one Dragoon attacking the tanks at a time. Meanwhile, you can also see that some enterprising Dragoons decided to go across the rightmost bridge instead because they can't find a route on the left bridge. Of course, that could actually be a good thing, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. And then...  The line collapses and the Dragoons get all bunched up on each other, sitting in the middle of the bridge while the Tanks rain death on them.  In the above shot we see that rather than deal with navigating past the surviving Dragoon on the left bridge, the pathfinding decided to send a bunch around to the right bridge again.  Protoss did not win the day. Now, the solution. For the particularly wonky units like Dragoons and Goliaths, the solution is often just careful micro: only move your units short distances at a time and be prepared to babysit them, particularly when it comes to difficult terrain (like bridges, or ramps). Again, this contributes to why Starcraft is a tough game to break into when it comes to competitive multiplayer. There's no real "trick" to overcoming their pathfinding issues, it mostly just comes down to practice - getting comfortable with the unit and getting faster at giving orders. Though there is a bit of a trick to help micro them in the heat of battle: "stutter-stepping," or something like it, where you take short steps and use the Hold Position command to have more precise control over when and where you fire. That's another deep dive that we'll explore later.
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Aug 26, 2021 16:01
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Is there any sort of fan mod that addresses this? It really seems a case of lovely programming with elitist hardcore players trying to pass off 'dealing with bullshit' as 'skill'.
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Aug 26, 2021 23:38
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It's probably embedded too deep in the game. And it is a powerful skill to have, you can achieve a higher unit density to have more of them firing at once, make them move a lot faster and so on, but it's also absurdly ridiculous, a half broken basic feature that makes it so that the commander screaming in his radio to move left one metre, then right one metre, then left again, constantly, manages to win the battle does just feel notionally wrong.
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Aug 26, 2021 23:47
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JustJeff88 posted:Is there any sort of fan mod that addresses this? It really seems a case of lovely programming with elitist hardcore players trying to pass off 'dealing with bullshit' as 'skill'. Might as well just play SC2. Its free.
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Aug 26, 2021 23:47
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SIGSEGV posted:It's probably embedded too deep in the game. And it is a powerful skill to have, you can achieve a higher unit density to have more of them firing at once, make them move a lot faster and so on, but it's also absurdly ridiculous, a half broken basic feature that makes it so that the commander screaming in his radio to move left one metre, then right one metre, then left again, constantly, manages to win the battle does just feel notionally wrong. I agree. It reminds me of the smug arsehole who knows how to avoid all of the potholes on the lovely American roads and loves to brag about it when they should just fix the bloody potholes. titty_baby_ posted:Might as well just play SC2. Its free. You're probably correct. Mass Recall is probably better, if harder.
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Aug 26, 2021 23:55
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That mission was basically the only good Terran vs Protoss action of the vanilla campaigns, and it only showed three of their combat units. I noticed in those screenshots buildings of an entire unused wing of their tech tree, specifically the Robotics Facility and Robotics Support Bay. Did they use shuttles or observers in that mission? I think the entire extent of the TvP from the other side is just some abandoned supply depots and missile turrets in one mission, followed by an indoor base mission where you fight some automated turrets. Dr Christmas fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Sep 2, 2021 |
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Aug 27, 2021 03:01
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Hey at least it's no warcraft III where you get decently deep into campaign 3/4 before they bother to introduce one of the main, playable races even bothers to show up at all.
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Aug 27, 2021 03:06
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Dr Christmas posted:That mission was basically the only good Terran vs Protoss action of the vanilla campaigns, and it only showed three of their combat units. I noticed in those screenshots buildings of an entire unused wing of their tech tree, specifically the Robotic Bay and Robotics Support Bay. Did they use shuttles or observers in that mission? Hmmm, "use" is strong. They had Shuttles, I never saw them actually use them. In fact, there's a single screenshot containing a Shuttle in that update; I'd meant to say something like "100 Killtrane bucks to whoever can spot the mystery unit!" but forgot. These things happen.
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Aug 27, 2021 12:56
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JustJeff88 posted:I agree. It reminds me of the smug arsehole who knows how to avoid all of the potholes on the lovely American roads and loves to brag about it when they should just fix the bloody potholes. Why are you so weirdly hostile to professional play? The wonky pathfinding can both: make the game less intuitive and more frustrating for new and casual players, which is bad, but also unintentionally create some very interesting and exciting dynamics at the very top level.
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Aug 27, 2021 13:03
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Sorry for the third not-main update in a row but tomorrow's the earliest I can do the next batch of recording and I figure hey in the meantime might as well get some spotlights and other posts out of the way. Unit Spotlight: Battlecruiser  Overview: At 400 minerals, 300 vespene, and 6 supply the Battlecruiser is the most expensive unit in the Terran arsenal and arguably the most expensive unit in the game. It also requires a Starport with a Control Tower and a Science Facility with a Physics Lab, making it tied with the Ghost for the most high-tech unit in the Terran arsenal. At 500 HP and 3 base armour it’s the single tankiest unit in the game, and it can attack for 25 normal damage (~19.8 DPS) at a range of 6. It’s also got the truly atrocious speed of 2.5 - not only is it the slowest unit in the Terran arsenal, but it’s nearly 50% slower than the next-slowest Terran unit. We talked about this in the update: extremely durable, kinda underwhelming damage output. I compared its DPS to that of two unstimmed Marines, and while that’s not totally accurate (higher, slower damage means that cruisers do more damage upfront and have less to fear from enemy armour) it does serve to illustrate that if all you want is to kill things as quickly as possible, you’re better off looking elsewhere. Or not. The Battlecruiser also has the Yamato Gun. We can research it for 100 minerals and 100 vespene from the Physics Lab, allowing us to spend 150 energy to blast a target for 260 explosive damage at 10 range. It’s not messing around. The fact that it’s got such an exorbitant energy cost means that the Colossus Reactor, available from the Physics Lab for 150 minerals and 150 vespene is probably the most tempting of the Terran reactors if you’re making heavy use of cruisers. One oddity of the Battlecruiser: Like the Wraith, it’s got two weapons - an air-to-air laser and an air-to-ground laser. Unlike the Wraith, these weapons are both identical. Since they can’t both be fired at the same time, this serves no discernible purpose, and if you were to replace them with a single laser that could target both land and air there’d be no difference. I’m assuming that one of them is vestigial and that at some point in development Battlecruisers were going to be weaker vs air targets or stronger vs ground targets or something until that was changed.  A mighty Terran fleet Fluff: The Behemoth-class Battlecruisers are massive flying fortresses and the pinnacle of the Terran fleet. They were the major weapon of the Guild Wars and what the Wraith was developed in response to. Battlecruisers also often serve as command ships - in fact, we’ve been commanding from the safety of Mengsk’s Battlecruiser, the Hyperion, for the last couple missions (hence why we weren’t in any danger when he abandoned Sarah to the Zerg).  A Battlecruiser looming over the battlefield Tech Fluff: Battlecruisers can be retrofitted to take advantage of cutting-edge developments in weapons technology: The Yamato Cannon. I said in mission 8 that this might have something to do with plasma; this is untrue (shout-out to Blazetheinferno for the correction! Thanks!). Instead, the Yamato Cannon actually uses a magnetic field to contain a nuclear explosion and focus it into a beam. Also, the game and the fluff refer to it as both Yamato Cannon and Yamato Gun. There’s also the Colossus Reactor. Engineers said “Hmm, I guess containing a nuclear explosion and firing it off is probably going to increase the ship’s power requirements a bit” and so Battlecruisers can also be optionally retrofitted with a more powerful reactor to compensate.  Charging the Yamato Gun Campaign usage: Battlecruisers are awesome. Their unprecedented durability allows them to go toe-to-toe with just about anything, and the Yamato Gun gives them huge - if limited - damage output. They’re particularly useful for missions that require you to kill one or a handful of specific buildings. Hell, sometimes they don’t even have to kill anything - just fly past the enemy, tank the damage, snipe the objective with Yamatos, and call it a day. I have fond memories of beating a few campaign missions as a kid by just turtling up in my starting area until I could afford a bunch of Battlecruisers to win the map, and I’m sure many others do as well. Competitive usage: Battlecruisers are a little tough to evaluate here: They’re a fairly rare unit, but they’re not rare because they’re bad, they’re rare because they’re the pinnacle of “late-game unit.” If a game goes long enough that you can afford to get BCs out without slowing production of your other units, then in TvT and TvZ they are absolutely worth building. Versus Terran: We’ve mentioned Battlecruisers before; they’re the third part of the big late-game rock-paper-scissors. Nothing takes care of tank lines quite like the Yamato Gun, and even without it the Cruiser’s attack can pick off tanks quickly. The reduced range of the normal attack, however, means that it’s tough to do so without Goliaths reducing your fleet to very expensive scrap metal. Sometimes, of course, this means that you get big Battlecruiser wars that’s decided by who can fire their Yamato blasts the fastest, and these are always fun to watch. The winner of this gains a huge advantage as their tanks become able to advance relatively unimpeded.  v iloveoov (T) on Lost Temple - StarCraft - Brood War REMASTERED 29-54 screenshot.png)  v iloveoov (T) on Lost Temple - StarCraft - Brood War REMASTERED 29-58 screenshot.png)  v iloveoov (T) on Lost Temple - StarCraft - Brood War REMASTERED 30-6 screenshot.png)  v iloveoov (T) on Lost Temple - StarCraft - Brood War REMASTERED 30-18 screenshot.png) Boxer (yellow; bottom) and iloveoov’s (orange, top) Battlecruiser fleets duke it out. Boxer’s Yamato shots gives him the edge, but iloveoov’s Goliaths are coming in and they look hungry Versus Zerg: This one’s really interesting: you used to never really see Battlecruisers in this matchup but in recent years the meta has shifted and they’ve become a lot more common. You can generally expect to see at least one show up in any match that goes on a while. See, Battlecruisers are strong enough to force a response, and durable enough that Zerg needs to commit to this response - they can’t just fart out a couple Scourge and call it a day. As a result, BCs are a big spoke in Zerg’s wheel - they have to stop churning out their key TvZ units and instead scramble something to handle the cruisers. If they don’t, even a single BC can gobble up an expansion or two easily. And here’s the crazy part: Even if your Battlecruisers die without killing anything, you might still come out ahead just by forcing Zerg to temporarily focus on anti-air rather than pumping out the big units they need like Ultralisks. Your BCs might be gone but in the meantime your Marines and Tanks took a decisive lead. Yamato Gun isn’t as common - it’s not that it’s useless against Zerg, because it absolutely isn’t. But you’re going to be stretching your budget so far to get a cruiser or two out, even the relatively low cost of researching Yamato might break your bank. If you can afford it, it can do good work picking off high-tier Zerg units.  Royal’s Battlecruisers mercilessly slaughter Shine’s Zerglings and Ultralisks. The latter needs to either shut them down or force a win quick, or he’s toast. Versus Protoss: You know what Protoss calls a fleet of Battlecruisers? Breakfast. Every spellcaster Protoss has will devastate these ships, and BCs have a hard time against Dragoons (Mission 9 might make that hard to believe, but ordinarily the Dragoons would outnumber the BCs by a lot more than they did there). Also, I just gotta say: The fact that Protoss, the hyper-advanced alien race, laughs at Terran’s big, scary capital ships but gets their asses handed to them by a bunch of guys on hoverbikes is real good. That’s peak scifi popcorn-flick stuff right there. Trivia: As has already been discussed in the thread, the unit is apparently a reference to an anime called Space Battleship Yamato, and through it, a reference to the IJN’s Yamato Battleship. It’s also worth noting that according to this article, the Battlecruiser’s iconic hammerhead design was arrived at by people saying “Ah, screw it” and smashing shapes together until they got something cool. JohnKilltrane fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Aug 27, 2023 |
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Aug 27, 2021 13:08
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JohnKilltrane posted:Dragoons being dragoons
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Aug 27, 2021 13:23
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Smiling Knight posted:Why are you so weirdly hostile to professional play? The wonky pathfinding can both: make the game less intuitive and more frustrating for new and casual players, which is bad, but also unintentionally create some very interesting and exciting dynamics at the very top level. I mean, I get it. The whole "bad pathfinding actually makes the game good" can sound a little Stockholm Syndrome-y at first. It's hard to show, without experiencing it firsthand, the way that it does actually add microing possibilities that better pathfinding wouldn't. And even once someone does get that, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say "Okay but the trade-off isn't worth it." I don't feel that way, but I certainly understand how someone could - no game is for everyone, after all, and while an important part of competitive play, BW's pathfinding is a net negative for more casual play like the campaign and UMS maps. In that way, while I initially disagreed with JustJeff88's pothole comparison, I wonder if it's maybe not rather apt: Having to deal with potholes on a racetrack would probably make auto racing more interesting, exciting, have a higher skill ceiling, and open more possibilities; having to deal with potholes on the way to work is just a PITA. MagusofStars posted:One addendum worth noting here: In a more open area where the pathfinding isn't as much of a factor, the dozen-plus Dragoons and handful of Zealots versus Tanks would have been a pretty fair fight - the group of Vultures that we see rushing in at the end probably tips the final edge to Terrans, but they would have lost a bunch of tanks in the battle rather than it being a complete cakewalk. This is a great point, and it's worth emphasizing that what I showed there is, like, peak Dragoon stupidity, not necessarily what they'll be like all of the time.
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Aug 27, 2021 14:19
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I always figured there were two “classes” of battlecruisers (and science vessels): the super huge ones in the cutscenes (like the Hyperion) and then much smaller ones seen in gameplay. The big ones presumably can’t enter atmosphere or something, so there’s a little tactical version.
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Aug 27, 2021 15:36
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