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Warmachine posted:Honestly I feel like I might have been one of the only people not deeply attached to the Vulture. Literally everything the Vulture does that's important in multiplayer which makes it critical is much less relevant in the campaign. -Harassment isn't a thing; since enemy bases come pre-built there's not really much value in rushing in and killing a handful of workers, nor is there any such thing as "diverting the AI's attention" like you could with a human. -Spider mines defensively are pointless because the AI likes to send constant streams of small attacks, so your mines basically just chew up a couple Zerglings or whatever the gently caress, which would have gotten smashed by your Bunkers anyways. -Campaign missions usually have a long enough build-up time that the "no gas!" is much less of factor than in the competitive scene. -On offense, most of what you're doing is assaulting enemy bases where the very first thing you run into is some form of building-based static defenses that don't trigger mines anyways. MagusofStars fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Oct 19, 2023 |
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Oct 19, 2023 01:56
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I feel like if Vultures could be told to maintain a field of Spider Mines, they'd be a lot more popular in the campaign.
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Oct 19, 2023 02:29
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On the other hand Jim Raynor has a very powerful vulture which is cool and good and my friend, so it makes a big impact. An impact immediately betrayed the first time you build a regular vulture and realize it doesn't hold a candle to Jimmy's bike.
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Oct 19, 2023 06:08
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Kith posted:I feel like if Vultures could be told to maintain a field of Spider Mines, they'd be a lot more popular in the campaign. Vultures in SC2 feel bad to use, partially because of the way that the game engine changes their movement & damage (no turning circles for any unit feels better in general, but for vultures and fast movers it makes them worse vs everything slow, also they don't have an acceleration/deceleration and that makes them feel weird, surprisingly) and also because they just turn up far too late to be super useful. There's at least one mod that unlocks them on The Evacution, and they're actually pretty great there.
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Oct 19, 2023 06:17
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Kith posted:I feel like if Vultures could be told to maintain a field of Spider Mines, they'd be a lot more popular in the campaign. This, but for every RTS in existence.
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Oct 19, 2023 10:55
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aniviron posted:I think a lot of the Vulture nostalgia comes from how much character the pilot had. I hated the voice and face of the vulture pilot, so kid me never built one, ever  The vulture is probably my least favorite unit in SC and Broodwar purely because of the pilot lol.
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Oct 19, 2023 12:05
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My main thing was always thinking, when one was built, that the pilot was saying: "All right, breed on!!" Which, uhhh...
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Oct 19, 2023 12:27
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I read you... Sir.
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Oct 19, 2023 17:35
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Kith posted:I feel like if Vultures could be told to maintain a field of Spider Mines, they'd be a lot more popular in the campaign. Speaking of mines, I never felt the Vulture-laid mines in the campaign were very impactful. Key word being felt--I know they do their job since in my last campaign run I made it a point to use them on the Vulture level. Now, co-op? Raynor doesn't seem to get anything special, but Nova gets spider mines on siege tanks. Probably in part due to Nova's gimmick, but those things are loving fun. You get enough charges that when you want mines, you can throw down a whole minefield with excellent density and depth in a big hurry.
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Oct 19, 2023 18:56
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Warmachine posted:Now, co-op? Raynor doesn't seem to get anything special Raynor gets replenishing vulture magazines, bigger mine booms, and orbital commands. Raynor in co-op can (and in the hands of good players, usually does) cover the entire map in spider mines to serve as his base defense.
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Oct 19, 2023 18:59
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silly question, but can vultures queue up laying down multiple spider mines at a time?
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Oct 19, 2023 21:38
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Weed Wolf posted:silly question, but can vultures queue up laying down multiple spider mines at a time? In this game? Yes. In SC1? Hahaha gently caress no
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Oct 19, 2023 21:41
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Me, 11 years old, frantically drag-selecting hundreds of zerglings to send against my brother during a LAN. Peak gaming right there(I am not even joking)
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Oct 19, 2023 22:37
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Noir89 posted:Me, 11 years old, frantically drag-selecting hundreds of zerglings to send against my brother during a LAN. Peak gaming right there(I am not even joking) There is a certain charm to being limited to 12 selected units at a time. At the same time, going back to SC1 and dealing with movement jank is JARRING, to say the least. Hope you didn't want to send all your units up that ramp, because like 3 of the 12 just ran off looking for a new path.
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Oct 19, 2023 23:33
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Definitely, it gets a massive pass for me being 11 and being an early RTS. I don't think I could go back and play it again and a new game trying to pull that poo poo should rightfully be shamed lol. Though wasn't there a bunch of drama about being able to select multiple buildings when SC2 was coming out? That and/or hotkeying them. If I remember right it was that it would dumb down the game/macro etc.
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Oct 20, 2023 01:14
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Noir89 posted:Definitely, it gets a massive pass for me being 11 and being an early RTS. I don't think I could go back and play it again and a new game trying to pull that poo poo should rightfully be shamed lol. There was a lot of stuff that people got irrationally pissed about. Another baby casual feature I saw zealots go off about was how workers rallying to a mineral patch/geyser was baby dumbing dumb and that manually tabbing back to base and ordering each worker to work as they came out was true skill. The internet makes you stupid.
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Oct 20, 2023 01:25
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It's a big part of why Brood War has such an enduring pro scene; you can't (and shouldn't) make an RTS today which intentionally frustrates the player with terrible pathfinding, limited selection, no queued commands, and other frustrating arbitrary restrictions, but because Brood War is grandfathered in, it means the skill ceiling is absurdly high. I remember stuff like how the pros will never make a control group of dragoons greater than 10 because from 1-10 they will path mostly fine but in groups of 11-12 they will blunder into one another and take double the time to move. poo poo like that along with the other ten billion frustrating quirks of SCBW means the skill ceiling is impossibly high, and these stupid arbitrary things do separate the people who can put 10000 hours in from the kinds of casuals who only do 1000.
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Oct 20, 2023 01:30
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I always figured it might have been an intentional choice for the point of micro. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 1 launched on Halloween of 1996, almost a year and a half before Starcraft 1 (2 years and 48 days before Brood War*), and you could select however much you wanted to. You couldn't give that clusterfuck more orders than move or attack (or maybe some context-sensitive stuff with particular units? I never tried that when grouped), but it worked. Starcraft, meanwhile, put an activate-able ability on your friggin' grunts. Marines could stimpack, zerglings could burrow, and zealots...could suck, I guess. Maybe that's why they gave them the charge ability in SC2. The supply cap, too. I saw it go from "how many farms can you make without breaking the program" in WC2 to 200 in SC1, to 80 in WC3 (90 with expansion) and with friggin' gold taxes for larger armies. Felt like they were trying to aim for smaller armies with more micro-management to distinguish themselves. SC2 obviously breaks that cycle, but they also waited a goddamn decade to do so; a change of heart in that amount of time is very understandable. E: fuckin' release dates, every goddamn time I make that mistake, I swear. Felinoid fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Oct 20, 2023 |
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Oct 20, 2023 01:35
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Selection limits are a deliberate choice. There's no technical limitation forcing a developer to only let you select twelve at a time - the computer is simulating all those units anyway whether you've got them selected or not. Unlimited selections make it easy to move your entire army at once, and when that isn't easy it impacts your strategies. Even at the pro level, Brood War games have a lot more small groups of units staking out territory compared to Starcraft 2 (although map design plays a role in this too). Now, the pathfinding, that's the sort of stuff that is strictly improved and you really couldn't make a new game like that.
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Oct 20, 2023 09:18
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The frankly gruesome limitations SC and SCBW imposed on its players via interface and controls limitations are even less excusable when you consider that Total Annihilation released a year earlier and had a UI and controls toolkit that remained unmatched until, let's see, Supreme Commander which released ten years later and mostly from the same minds. Admittedly those games don't have the same regard for spellcasting units, even TA:K didn't but let's not talk about that one. When I ended up playing SC and WC3 and so on, it was some time after they released and also after playing TA, a lot, and it left me with a bitter taste, as if a core design objective was task saturation of the player. And I ended up reading that actually task saturation of the player was an explicit goal for C&C1.
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Oct 20, 2023 09:29
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Here's the thing though, I suspect that the reason you can only select 12 units at a time is because the pathfinding absolutely shits the bed when you try to move large groups of units all at once. So sure, you can technically make a Brood War that lets you select more than 12 units, but I assume that it's still down to technical limitations in a more roundabout way. Also for the Vulture haters have some high level gameplay where the Terran player puts on a clinic with vultures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE5z-d8POmg
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Oct 20, 2023 09:38
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It's my opinion that WC3 reeked of Blizzard intentionally trying to capture more of that Brood War pro-scene magic. Unit selections were kept tight, screens were kept tiny and zoomed in, unit massing is penalized in macro and the abilities of heroes and units have such a dominant focus. In retrospect it feels like it was trying to make micro-focused RTS-gameplay more accessible. Find a way to make it function for more players. As everyone who played WC3 knows its skirmishes and competitive multiplayer was never its strength. So it makes sense SC2 went in a completely different direction.
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Oct 20, 2023 09:38
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In another way, they were too successful with WC3 - DOTA is the logical conclusion of focusing your RTS around a small number of units with a large number of abilities, and it killed the genre.
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Oct 20, 2023 10:38
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aniviron posted:Here's the thing though, I suspect that the reason you can only select 12 units at a time is because the pathfinding absolutely shits the bed when you try to move large groups of units all at once. So sure, you can technically make a Brood War that lets you select more than 12 units, but I assume that it's still down to technical limitations in a more roundabout way. Here is an interesting blog post by the guy who is responsible for making mineral walking a thing. It was a "hack" in order to get around the huge problems created by the path-finding algorithm. Some choice quotes: quote:Game-unit path-finding is something that most players never notice until it doesn’t work quite right, and then that minor issue becomes a rage-inducing, end-of-the-world problem. During the development of StarCraft there were times when path-finding just didn’t work at all.
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Oct 20, 2023 11:41
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Noir89 posted:Me, 11 years old, frantically drag-selecting hundreds of zerglings to send against my brother during a LAN. Peak gaming right there(I am not even joking) ZERGRUSHKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKE It was bad enough that Blizz deliberately turbonerfed zerglings in SC2 to give Terran and Protoss base defenses a fighting chance.
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Oct 20, 2023 16:40
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aniviron posted:Here's the thing though, I suspect that the reason you can only select 12 units at a time is because the pathfinding absolutely shits the bed when you try to move large groups of units all at once. So sure, you can technically make a Brood War that lets you select more than 12 units, but I assume that it's still down to technical limitations in a more roundabout way. SC64 increased control groups to 18 and made targeting spells only do one per press of the button instead of every templar in the group psi-storming if you have more than one selected. Also workers got to work immediately when they were done building. All things I missed going to PC for the first time way back when and always thought should have been backported into PC. Other than dragoons, and custom games on the opposing city-states map which has a bunch of narrow areas, young me doesn't remember much in the way of pathfinding difficulty in SC64. Maybe MassMedia tweaked the pathfinding while porting? Or more likely I just wasn't aware of the weirdness to look for it back in the pre-internet days.
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Oct 21, 2023 03:56
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Artifact 4: Supernova Video: Supernova  The last TvP mission we've had was pre-pondering, as a reminder.   Yep. Sensors indicate...    Unlike Mass Effect 2, where a sun going supernova way ahead of schedule was a subplot that ended up getting dropped, this just... happens. Sometimes stars in the Koprulu Sector just explode.  Fire. Why does it always have to be fire...     You ain't seriously goin' down there?    You know, it's really annoying that a key terran feature is being seriously used as a loading screen tip this far into the game.  We've already seen Banshees here and there, and even had some of our own back in Ghost of a Chance. But as a refresher, they're a dedicated anti-ground unit that picked up the Wraith's cloak. To give an idea of how the Banshees compare to a Wraith's ground attack, a single Banshee deals more damage to ground targets than four Wraiths.  Anyways, quick no-build section to show off the new toy. I'm sure the fire doesn't mind waiting. You can also see that I'm locked at 200 supply for the entire mission, just as Matt said.     Simple.    There's the artifact on the right.  And there's the fire on the left.  The flames will slowly spread across the map, putting me on a soft timer before I lose. If the fire destroys the target, it counts as a loss. Interestingly, losing my entire base isn't a loss condition here. So long as I have a single unit left standing I can still try to win.  Oh hell, not these Tal'darim guys again. They seriously need to learn when to quit.Yes, Jimmy, how dare they take offense to you stealing their poo poo for a quick payday. The very nerve!  The bonus is relics. For the sixth and final time. And one of those times was in Cutthroat, and that wasn't even against protoss! Bonus objectives get a bit more variety in the other games.  At least the first one is impossible to miss.  I send my Banshees out to do some scouting.  Like The Devil's Playground, the map is covered in small resource clusters that encourage me to keep moving my base.  Also here's the second relic.  Further east is the first enemy base. I could technically skip past it entirely. In fact, the speedrun route for this mission involves just grabbing your four starting Banshees and taking a precise route to bypass almost all detection on the map. But a base means resources, and I always need more.  This spot's a good place for the Armory, since they're a smidge immobile.  This is where I'd make some Vikings to support my Banshees with some much needed anti-air damage.  If I had them.  At this point, an enemy base is revealed on the map as it gets consumed by the flames.  This reveals some caches it holds, which is supposed to tempt the player into rushing in to grab them before the fire covers them all. There is, however, one small flaw in that plan.   MULEs can pick up caches.  So for 100 energy I get an easy 300 of each. In fact, tactical MULE drops are a better use for them here. Mineral patches are so slim on this mission that you're liable to mine them out even without MULEs helping.   And the first base migration begins.  Once it's finished I start attacking.  The only detection in this base are the Photon Cannons, and the majority of defenders are units that can't hit air. Knocking out the Pylons powering them will let me clean up the base in perfect safety.   The base also leaves a few caches when it's destroyed.  So, like, are any of you guys going to try and run off with the artifact before the world ends? Or are you trying to stall long enough that the sun explodes and ensures that Raynor's never able to take it.  Mercs are actually kind of awkward to use here, just because the Merc Compound is fixed in place. Once the starting base burns (you can actually see the flames starting to creep in) you'll have to shell out 150/50 every time you lose one to the fire. Thankfully, the air focus for this mission means that I only really need one set of War Pigs and Siege Breakers to handle base defense.   The funny thing about having Automated Refineries for this mission is that it gives me a massive gas surplus, since they'll happily keep chugging away until the fire gets them. Minerals are the major bottleneck here because I spend a good amount of time moving from base to base and not doing any mining.  While pushing towards the next base, an attack wave happened to march directly under my cloaked army.  The problem with using Wraiths alongside Banshees is that they're faster, have a shorter range, and have slightly less health. This means that they'll always be first into the fight and take aggro.  So while I try to find the third relic I'm knocked down to one single Wraith for anti-air.  I try to push into the next base anyways.  Only to find out that one Wraith is not enough.  And, for the first time in Starcraft history, a Scout is able to fend off an attack.  I make a few more Wraiths and try to push in again.  This time things go much better.  Also they have an actual Observer here, which is just rude. If you don't have enough protoss research for the Detector or didn't buy Orbital Commands you have zero possible way of revealing them mid-fight, rendering Cloak worthless.   And one last base migration.  Now, you may have noticed something wrong here. Namely:  That tiiiiiiiiiiiny little relic icon on the wrong side of the fire wave.  But what about my perfect record? Will I have to reload a save for the first time in this LP?  Scanner Sweep to give vision on the relic-  And drop a MULE right on top of it. While the fire deals enough damage to kill weak units almost instantly...  'Almost' still gives me enough time to grab it.  I have to make a Barracks at my latest base. Not because I need to make more infantry or anything, but because I can't build a Bunker without one and I forgot to move my starting one over. I completely forget to build a Bunker after this.  The final relic is right next to me, I send a Marine to grab it offscreen.  Since I'm right next to the final enemy base, I grab everyone for the push.  Which means I can finally do some Siege Tank plays!   Once the vault is in sight I dive it.  I like Supernova. Yeah, the fire wall is basically a time limit, but like with Smash and Grab I enjoy time limits that are more organically tied into the mission rather than a simple timer to failure. The creeping wave adds in a sense of tension as you watch it slowly get closer to you.  And done.       Aerial Superiority - Complete the "Supernova" mission without building a unit from a Barracks or Factory on Normal difficulty. The Normal achievement here is weird. Because you all saw how slow the fire was, right? The only way you're losing a unit to it is if you accidentally forgot an SCV in a base or something. BisbyWorl fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Feb 5, 2024 |
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Oct 21, 2023 04:13
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This is a very fun mission. It's where I found my love of Viking/Banshee pushes.
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Oct 21, 2023 04:28
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God I hate the idea of this mission so much. My hoarder instincts scream at making things (in this case tech labs and upgrade buildings) to be left behind and burned to a crisp, and I've already griped about not liking timers not that much earlier in the thread.BisbyWorl posted:The Normal achievement here is weird. Because you all saw how slow the fire was, right? The only way you're losing a unit to it is if you accidentally forgot an SCV in a base or something. I think they were banking on you doing so, really. The Command Center holds five SCVs and they give you six. Then with the amount of stuff you do have to leave behind, it's easy for something you'd meant to take along to get left with the detritus. Like a barracks.
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Oct 21, 2023 04:43
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I mostly rely on mercs for this mission, since in most playthroughs I have them all unlocked by the time I get this far. Just call the whole lot down at once, add a few Banshees, and send them off to meet the Tal'darim. Bloody mayhem ensues. I like your creative use of MULEs though. GrandTheftAutism fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Oct 21, 2023 |
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Oct 21, 2023 04:47
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BisbyWorl posted:If I had them. i wonder where you get vikings from. must be later on in the campaign
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Oct 21, 2023 04:47
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Kith posted:i wonder where you get vikings from. must be later on in the campaign haven't seen where yet
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Oct 21, 2023 05:03
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Vikings can't be that important if they become available so late in the game
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Oct 21, 2023 05:50
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That ghost lady seemed fine and all but I don't see what she has to do with this mission. Kith posted:i wonder where you get vikings from. must be later on in the campaign I've seen every mission reward screen in this lp and not one has had vikings!
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Oct 21, 2023 08:06
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Fun fact about this mission: the fire wall does not move in the initial banshee segment, but the timer on mercs does tick down. You can stall on killing last protoss building to have all mercs ready to go instantly. This can be used e.g. to get Viking mercs right at the start
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Oct 21, 2023 08:37
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Xarn posted:This can be used e.g. to get Viking mercs right at the start If I had them.
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Oct 21, 2023 08:39
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I'm quite sure Vikings are introduced in the next game, not this one. You must be confused?
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Oct 21, 2023 09:45
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BisbyWorl posted:If I had them. I am gonna keep voting to not let you have them.
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Oct 21, 2023 09:55
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To answer Bibsy: yes, the Evil'darim were more than willing to throw themselves into the sun with the artifact. Fukken cultists. And don't they realize that artifact belongs in a museum anyways? :Indiana Jones:
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Oct 21, 2023 09:56
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Honestly, from how the rest of the plot plays out, the Tal'darim are probably totally fine with the artifact being destroyed and I'm not sure why they aren't doing it themselves. Or maybe it would survive the supernova and they know it. Who knows with that kind of stuff. The Tal'darim, naturally, never mention or care about James Raynor again.
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Oct 21, 2023 12:48
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