|
BisbyWorl posted:drat who could have seen this coming Zeratul, obviously. edit: haha bad snipe, poll results at the end of the previous page
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2023 13:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 1, 2024 00:22 |
|
|
Tech Spotlight: Base Upgrades Bunker  Requirements: Default.  Projectile Accelerator
 Neosteel Bunker
While ordinary Bunkers can hold a maximum of four infantry, Neosteel Bunkers can house up to six infantry in fortified comfort. Both Bunker upgrades are no-brainers. There are a lot of defense missions in Wings, and making your main defensive wall better will make things a lot easier.  Missile Turret 
 Titanium Housing
Eh. Turrets have 250 life by default, making this just over a 25% increase, but Turrets are cheap enough that if you need more bulk in your air defenses you can just slap two down right next to each other.  Hellstorm Batteries
Hellstorm Batteries are a great way to welcome swarms of enemy flyers to your base. Don't disappoint! 8 shots of 1 damage. The damage floor if something has more armor than you have attack is 0.5. So really, this deals 4 damage and fires half as often as a normal attack. Neither of the Missile Turret upgrades are, like, actively bad compared to something like the Hellion or the Reaper since you'll be making a good number of them no matter what, but they're very much something you get when you have everything else you want and you have a bit of cash left lying around.  SCV  Requirements: 9 missions completed.  Advanced Construction
This upgrade is vital when trying to get a base up and running quickly, or when trying to rebuild a broken defense. Useful for getting an expansion online ASAP, but at the same time you can always just build a new CC in your base then float it over when the expansion is clear.  Dual-Fusion Welders
The Dual-Fusion Welder allows SCVs to repair at twice the speed, improving their ability to keep damaged units alive in the heat of battle. Really, really good. As I keep saying, defense missions abound in Wings, and doubling repair speeds makes it that much harder for a wall to get cracked.  Terran Building  Requirement: 12 missions completed.  Fire-Suppression System
Although these drones are effective at doing basic repairs. they do not have a strong enough Al to perform the more delicate repairs needed to restore a structure past half life. On missions with minor enemy aggression, this basically lets you not bother with putting SCVs by your defenses since half HP will be more than enough. On missions with heavy attacks, this is basically an extra source of repairs to go with all your double speed SCVs. This also opens up some niche strats on missions like The Dig, since you can now use floating buildings as spotters and not worry about chip damage.  Orbital Command
This comlink can also call down a MULE. A MULE gathers much faster than an SUV and can produce a major surge in mineral production. Because it is a prototype, the MULE will come apart after a short period of time, but it is still well worth the cost. The Orbital Command is far and away the biggest boost to your economy in the entire game. Why? Abilities  Calldown: MULE
I'm not kidding when I say that on longer missions it can be worth it to make extra Orbitals entirely to get more MULE casts off.  Scanner Sweep
This, on the other hand, is nowhere near as good as it was SC1 for a very simple reason: The devs have to design every mission under the assumption you don't have it, as well as one other source of mobile detection we'll be seeing in the protoss research tree. They can't send cloaked units after the player, because there's the slim chance you don't have enough research for one and not enough cash for the other and your only option for dealing with a single Ghost would be to lure them in range of a Missile Turret. So we get no Lurkers to shred Marines, no Dark Templars to sneak around and stab your casters, and no Ghosts to try and nuke your mineral line. Also, it shares energy with MULEs, so every cast of Scanner Sweep is effectively a 240 mineral loss.     
BisbyWorl fucked around with this message at 12:08 on Sep 3, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2023 13:52
|
|
|
BisbyWorl posted:
Fun Fact About Hellstorm Batteries #1: It's actually a lot better than it initially appears. The Hellstorm missile swarm hits in an area, so that 4 damage is multiplied against how many enemies it's hitting at once. Considering that the primary opponent of Wings of Liberty are the Zerg and they just love to send packs of flying units to harass, Hellstorm Batteries do a lot more work than you'd initially think. Fun Fact About Hellstorm Batteries #2: They are lag-generating machines. The engine chokes when there's more than 4 attacks resolved at once per weapon attack instance, and Hellstorm Batteries have twice as many. On top of that, each individual projectile's corkscrew flight pattern has to be calculated and executed, which is also something that the engine hates. If you get enough Hellstorm Batteries going off at once (which is a guarantee if you do certain missions), your game will turn into a slideshow.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2023 14:35
|
|
|
rastilin posted:I don't really forgive them for that writing. Oh, neither do I. I don't mean to excuse the writing, or suggest that there weren't/aren't any better alternatives. I think it's horrible, and I think even in the replies in this thread and Cythereal's thread we've seen people offer better solutions. I just meant that I can see what the impetus was. I understand the problem they were trying to solve and why they chose the solution they did, even though I feel that it's the worst possible solution and there were much better ways they could have gone about it, in contrast to SC2 where I just don't even know what they were going for or why. I have no idea what the impetus was other than "Blizzard likes retelling stories."
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2023 14:37
|
|
|
Mules are the real reason why planetary fortresses kinda suck... by upgrading to PF, you lose Mules. Also it is "fun" to go from campaign terran to skirmish terran and find out just how much stuff works completely differently, like having to upgrade to get access to mule, making PF more of an interesting trade-off. 
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2023 15:00
|
|
|
Xarn posted:Mules are the real reason why planetary fortresses kinda suck... by upgrading to PF, you lose Mules. PFs are still more of a 4th+ base thing, and once you get to 5-6 bases you'll probably want a few extra (not at any bases) orbitals for more mules.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2023 15:18
|
|
|
PFs would be worth it if they dealt absolutely absurd damage. Ballpark of 500 damage a shot, minimum. They don't, so they aren't. E: To be clear, this is about ladder. In the Campaign you can have your cake and eat it too, if you so choose. Kith fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Aug 15, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2023 15:20
|
|
|
Also the base upgrades are all so good. The entire category is mostly no-brainers. The Missile Turret ones maybe aren't as essential sub-Brutal, but they're still good. The multi-build one is maybe the weakest pick of the lot but even then it's still very strong and helps a lot to get your base up quickly, especially good for when it's Macro Time and you want to plunk down four Factories.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2023 15:21
|
|
|
Worth noting, in campaign orbital commands and planetary fortresses are not mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible to skip bunkers entirely and just build planetary fortresses and siege tanks for defense - and this can be downright practical in some situations, because PFs have far more HP than bunkers. Example. (Spoilers for Wings of Liberty, should anyone care!) Cythereal fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Aug 15, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2023 15:21
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Worth noting, in campaign orbital commands and planetary fortresses are not mutually exclusive. Funny you should be the one to post this, I was just thinking about the Warcraft 3 equivalent and how easy the final Undead mission in RoC is if you use Halls of the Dead instead of Spirit Towers. I was thinking about it because I recently played a mission in LotV that also is trivialized through weaponized town halls. It seems Blizzard never really realized just how powerful these structures are on defense missions if you build your walls out of them.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2023 15:25
|
|
|
Kith posted:PFs would be worth it if they dealt absolutely absurd damage. Ballpark of 500 damage a shot, minimum. A PF does sieged tank damage, including splash, for 0 supply cost and with 1500 HP. Add in that you can increase the range from 6 to 7 and give this thing a total of 5 armor with engineering bay upgrades, and I have no idea what your concern is. On ladder, defensive structures are to require your opponent to commit more fully to doing damage or to buy time for your army to respond. For context, standing in a full duration storm is 80 damage. Mines do 125 to the primary unit and have splash zones. A disruptor does 145 damage (with additional to shields). A nuke does 300 damage to units and 500 to structures. So you think for a PF to be worth it it needs to hit harder than a nuke? And if you want mules in a late game situation, you just build a lot of orbitals. They don't need to be near the minerals they call the mules down on, after all.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2023 17:32
|
|
|
Synastren posted:A PF does sieged tank damage, including splash, for 0 supply cost and with 1500 HP. Add in that you can increase the range from 6 to 7 and give this thing a total of 5 armor with engineering bay upgrades, and I have no idea what your concern is. On ladder, defensive structures are to require your opponent to commit more fully to doing damage or to buy time for your army to respond. Everyone I've ever talked to that were Diamond and above felt that PFs were a waste of time because being on the defensive meant that you weren't going on the offensive, and that's what you needed to do to win. Also if you built a PF then that's just an Orbital that you've missed out on, meaning fewer MULEs for mining and/or repair. Of course the meta has probably shifted since that talk, so maybe I'm just dumb as hell for not thinking about the passage of time and you're totally right.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2023 17:44
|
|
|
The pro strat is to float a CC into your opponent's base and turn it into a PF right on top of them
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2023 17:47
|
|
|
There's a guy who is a semi-retired pro who now just spends all his time making gimmick challenge videos, like starting a new account and getting to grandmaster using only all siege tanks or all battlecruisers He relies very heavily on the loophole that he can build whatever buildings he wants though, and gets like 15 planetary fortresses to defend while he's off doing dumb cheese across the map They seem to work really well for him, so
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2023 18:12
|
|
|
PFs are good in multiplayer because they force your opponent to commit tech units or a lot of supply if they want to harass your fringe bases, rather than just sending in 100 minerals worth of zerglings and forcing the entire base to evacuate. In a situation where both you and your opponent are turtling at max supply and you're banking a lot of resources, it can be good to poo poo up chokepoints on the map with them too.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2023 18:38
|
|
|
Kith posted:Everyone I've ever talked to that were Diamond and above felt that PFs were a waste of time because being on the defensive meant that you weren't going on the offensive, and that's what you needed to do to win. Well no, it's very possible to be attacked while you are also attacking. A PF will make e.g. ling/zealot runbys much easier to deal with, and that's often more valuable than another orbital (which you probably have like 8 of later on, anyway). Anyway I just went into channel HarstemCasts and clicked the first game with Terran it I saw, and HeroMarine built a PF at his fourth base against herO. I think that's always been fairly meta, too, but I might be remembering wrong.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2023 18:41
|
|
|
For basically as long as I've been watching SC2 it's been meta to make the 3rd or 4th base into a PF.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2023 18:43
|
|
|
Well poo poo, today I learned. 
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2023 19:12
|
|
|
I once heard that SC1 walling is why the AoE2 TC, the one combo civilian building and tower before the costly (especially in stone which is not that used) castles, has 3/4 of its surface walkable to all units of all sides.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2023 20:25
|
|
|
Warcraft 3 buildings are also walkable around the edges except for farm and tower equivalents, presumably for similar reasons.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2023 23:28
|
|
|
People been walling since Warcraft 1, not sure why they'd have a problem with it now.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2023 01:45
|
|
|
A greenhorn defends their base with bunkers. A veteran defends their base with bunkers barricaded behind supply depots and supported by siege tanks. A master immediately lifts off and moves to an island or inaccessible mountain at the start of the game and techs straight to cloaked wraiths on offense while the opponent wastes time on things like scouting or building a ground army. /S kind of but I tried that more than once back in ye olde dayes and it worked a non-zero number of times.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2023 03:20
|
|
|
Reminds me of the guys on here that called themselves clan towah or something in wc3. They'd set up team games and then move on top of an unreachable cliff and barricade it to hell and back with towers. Then they'd sit there and laugh as their opponents threw themselves at their unbreakable wall until either they ran out of resources on the map or ragequit in frustration.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2023 03:42
|
|
|
That would be the illustrious Clan Towa and the map in question is known as Highperch.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2023 03:56
|
|
|
clan towa are heroes and legends all
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2023 07:41
|
|
|
Felinoid posted:People been walling since Warcraft 1, not sure why they'd have a problem with it now. Lots of people think that aggression should be easier because aggression is fun and keep the game time down. A good numbers of gamedevs and RTS pros agree. Which is correct and fair, even if it sometimes gets a little exaggerated, I'm glad some devs go hard on "probe and evaluate and then bypass or commit" because it also makes for some interesting play and keeps some variety in the RTS space.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2023 10:02
|
|
|
Static defenses tend to be inherently unfavourable in most RTS games because there's almost always a mobile unit that outranges them, and you can't later commit them to the offense. Mobile units for attacking with, can also be used for defense, so there's never any wasted units there. Static defenses tend to be good or even great in the singleplayer portion of the game since the AI will almost always smash hordes of goons into them, rather than keeping their artillery out of range(with the units the AI would waste guarding the artillery), shelling your static defenses, and forcing you to commit your own mobile forces to pry them out of a temporary strongpoint, or simply bypassing the static defenses with fast units that can get into the soft core of your base out of range of your static defenses and cause havoc. The latter two being what I'd expect a human player to do. The imbalance gets even wilder once you get into games that have "superweapons" like the C&C games, which allow an enemy player to wipe out anything static without even committing any forces, so anything other than attacking first and preventing them from getting/using those superweapons tends to be a losing play.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2023 10:19
|
|
|
bladededge posted:A master immediately lifts off and moves to an island or inaccessible mountain at the start of the game and techs straight to cloaked wraiths on offense while the opponent wastes time on things like scouting or building a ground army. This sounds like the sort of thing I would do which makes me a bit suspicious about it. I read in a book about military tactics that amateurs are always looking for a superweapon or trick to overwhelmingly beat opponents, and solid (albeit) boring tactics in the hands of a veteran will win every single time.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2023 22:48
|
|
|
painedforever posted:This sounds like the sort of thing I would do which makes me a bit suspicious about it. I read in a book about military tactics that amateurs are always looking for a superweapon or trick to overwhelmingly beat opponents, and solid (albeit) boring tactics in the hands of a veteran will win every single time. This is pretty much a golden rule in SC2 and most other RTS games. All of the "cheap" strategies are very effective against new and inexperienced players if used by someone who can execute them properly, but they almost always involve sacrificing something that leaves you open for a player who recognizes what you're doing to withstand and then heavily punish you for it. It's certainly still possible to catch a pro off guard, it's just so much less likely because they've generally seen that kind of thing dozens of times before and know what buttons to push to make it collapse. Like the floating island expansions on certain SC2 maps, first of all you're at an immediate disadvantage because it takes some time to get your CC over there and that's time you're not spending building up your economy. Experienced players will be scouting for your base to see what your start looks like regardless, so if they see you aren't at any valid starting position they'll know what's up and be able to play accordingly.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2023 23:19
|
|
|
You see that in every StarCraft tournament, a lucky person can go quite far in single elimination rounds and then get stomped by a pro's pro if they have to get more than 2 wins to move on
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2023 23:20
|
|
|
painedforever posted:This sounds like the sort of thing I would do which makes me a bit suspicious about it. I read in a book about military tactics that amateurs are always looking for a superweapon or trick to overwhelmingly beat opponents, and solid (albeit) boring tactics in the hands of a veteran will win every single time. Literally all of the usual tactics. If you’re completely outclassed, you’re almost never winning by playing it straight because of the raw skill difference. But maybe if you with an oddball high-variance strategy, you can get lucky and catch the opponent off-guard.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2023 23:33
|
|
|
MagusofStars posted:That’s true but also: You know what other tactic leads to an amateur losing to a competently playing veteran? The counterpoint to that is that Starcraft, and SC2, isn't entirely a single battle so much as it is a resource war with a hugely abstracted logistics system attached to it, and one of the biggest advantages that veterans have over new players is a much better grasp of the logistics involved rather than micro advantage (although obviously they often have that as well). Moreover, the entire game is built around when you choose to compromise your economy to threaten your opponent with victory. Floating your command center actually exacerbates this disadvantage, handing both map control and economy time to your much stronger opponent without actually threatening them. If you're looking for a high-variance oddball strategy, you're actually looking at cheese like the classic six-pool, cannon rushing or proxy barracks since those try to eliminate the economic skill disadvantage by A) limiting the time involved (and thus the advantage gained), B) betting on the lack of available information for their opponent and finally C) pressuring your opponent when they may be unready. The strength of SC2 is that no build is purely capable of answering all possible timing pushes, the veteran must choose which possible pushes they wish to counter, leaving them open to being blindsided.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2023 00:46
|
|
|
Yes, but that wasn't the assignment. The post was about how a "master" would defend instead of walling. I always thought RTS favoured a more Jeet Kune Do approach; you intercept attacks with attacks of your own. EDIT: Sorry, I was also replying to MagusofStars.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2023 00:59
|
|
|
Torchlighter posted:The counterpoint to that is that Starcraft, and SC2, isn't entirely a single battle so much as it is a resource war with a hugely abstracted logistics system attached to it, and one of the biggest advantages that veterans have over new players is a much better grasp of the logistics involved rather than micro advantage (although obviously they often have that as well). Moreover, the entire game is built around when you choose to compromise your economy to threaten your opponent with victory. Floating your command center actually exacerbates this disadvantage, handing both map control and economy time to your much stronger opponent without actually threatening them.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2023 01:44
|
|
|
High level pros will absolutely throw a ridiculous cheese into a best of 5 or 7 if they're playing someone worse than they are, precisely because they know their opponent thinks they don't need to do it That said, floating your starter CC to an island only really worked as a cheese strat at launch when maps still had gold bases near player spawns.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2023 02:11
|
|
|
As somebody who has played many pro players, I can confirm that the trick is to hit them with a wacky build or cheese if you're genuinely trying to win. I even took a tournament game off a Korean pro named Hush when he was in Code S with a proxy hatchery at the gold base near his main and then using overlords to drop zerglings in early. I got lucky because he was doing a gimmicky fast dark templar build which didn't come online quick enough to adequately defend. When I was a diamond league rookie back in 2012 and first started entering online Australian tournaments, I won lots of early round Bo1 ZvZs against grandmaster players with a real specific and rare variant of a zergling rush. Of course, given that there is a near certainty that even your cheese won't work, if you're a somewhat serious player they're good to play straight-up against so you can test yourself and identify weaknesses in your game and what they do differently than the people you're playing on ladder, but of course you have to be in the category of 'good but not pro' to really get anything out of that.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2023 15:20
|
|
|
Sometimes you need to hit someone with a wakeup super so that your opponent knows they need to respect it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2023 16:53
|
|
|
Fajita Queen posted:This is pretty much a golden rule in SC2 and most other RTS games. All of the "cheap" strategies are very effective against new and inexperienced players if used by someone who can execute them properly, but they almost always involve sacrificing something that leaves you open for a player who recognizes what you're doing to withstand and then heavily punish you for it. It's certainly still possible to catch a pro off guard, it's just so much less likely because they've generally seen that kind of thing dozens of times before and know what buttons to push to make it collapse. There's an ancient episode of the Series-that-started-well-but-went-downhill-fast "When cheese fails" of somebody trying to proxy rush Crota (a popular shoutcaster). It didn't end well.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2023 23:12
|
|
|
the only episode of that I ever watched was a PF episode and it was superb. The commentators trying too hard was just, par for the course 2011 youtube. If it went downhill fast I'm glad I quit while I was ahead. 101 episode 7, if my quick yt search is correct
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2023 00:34
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 1, 2024 00:22 |
|
|
RIP Pylo the Pylon
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2023 00:37
|
|
