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I'm surprised no one has ever explored the horror potential of the candiru
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Oct 31, 2023 06:08
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yeerks aren't worms, they're slugs learn ur lore
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Oct 31, 2023 07:16
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slugs are just fat worms
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Oct 31, 2023 07:17
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 Dr. Hanson I am so sorry. If only we knew what was happening on Haven just a little bit sooner.
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Oct 31, 2023 14:42
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Unit Spotlight: Battlecruiser Overview:
You know it, you love it, the Battlecruiser is still an absolute powerhouse of a unit that's only gotten better. The ATS Battery now deals more damage than 4 stimmed Marines, but to balance it out their once-identical ATA Battery now actually funtions differently and takes a sizable damage cut and gives them a bit of trouble dealing with enemy air. The Fusion Core requirement is a bit restrictive, but this late in the game you have enough ways to boost your economy to get one out without much fuss. Abilities  Yamato Cannon
 Missile Pods
 Defensive Matrix
Armory Upgrades  Defensive Matrix
150K for this? No thanks.  Missile Pods
Specifically calling out Interceptors here is funny, just because of how rare TvP missions are in Wings outside of the Artifact chain. Your only options in the entire game for TvP with an upgraded Battlecruiser are Welcome to the Jungle and siding with the colonists at Haven. Mercenary: Jackson's Revenge 
For whatever reason, this is the only Merc in the entire game with no cost boost. It's just A Better Battlecruiser. As an additional bonus, the fact that Mercs don't need their normal prereqs means you don't have to invest in a Starport, Tech Lab/Reactor, and Fusion Core if you aren't going full air. You can just slap this into any army the moment the clock hits seven minutes. More interestingly, the giant rotary cannons on the front aren't just for show. The Jackson's Revenge actually attacks from those instead of just spamming out lasers like the base unit. Field Manual Artwork  
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Oct 31, 2023 14:44
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I'm sensing some mild hostility from our dear marine friend toward Marine accommodations aboard Battlecruisers.
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Oct 31, 2023 15:44
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To be fair, Starcraft marines are generally turbomurderers. They probably ought to be sleeping in the halls, or maybe in a cargo hold that can easily be vented into space.
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Oct 31, 2023 16:50
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BlazetheInferno posted:I'm sensing some mild hostility from our dear marine friend toward Marine accommodations aboard Battlecruisers. In LIberty's Crusade, they mention that Marines are on Battlecruisers, and during combat situations the ship's halls become one way to better accommodate marines in full combat gear.
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Oct 31, 2023 21:58
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Calax posted:In LIberty's Crusade, they mention that Marines are on Battlecruisers, and during combat situations the ship's halls become one way to better accommodate marines in full combat gear. Frankly I'd be surprised if a jacked up and good to go marine could fit through the door frame of a normal berth.
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Nov 1, 2023 00:56
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100 gunnery specialists? That's a bananas number. I think someone forgot that this isn't 40k.
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Nov 1, 2023 03:52
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aniviron posted:I think someone forgot that this isn't 40k. A recurring refrain in SC2 when it comes to at least the Terrans.
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Nov 1, 2023 03:59
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BisbyWorl posted:
Bwahahaha, I just KNEW you guys would pick the meaner (and therefore funnier) option here. Though I still curse Blizzard for cutting out one of the funniest dark humor lines ever from the ending cutscene for this choice, because it was an act of unforgivable cowardice. But here's hoping this works out better than the last time a Blizzard hero decided that an entire place had to be purged. Avoid any icy swords, Raynor!
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Nov 1, 2023 04:02
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Has any battlecruiser in any SC game ever had plasma torpedoes? And even then why would it be launching them from such an incompetent location?
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Nov 1, 2023 07:45
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Poil posted:Has any battlecruiser in any SC game ever had plasma torpedoes? And even then why would it be launching them from such an incompetent location?
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Nov 1, 2023 08:19
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aniviron posted:100 gunnery specialists? That's a bananas number. I think someone forgot that this isn't 40k. The writers, like a distressingly large number of others in sci-fi fiction, have zero sense of scale. If each battlecruiser needs 6000-8000 crew members to function, just how many people does Jimmy have working for him? Why are the Raiders scrappy underdogs if they have a planet-sized army? Where do the Raiders get the food and spare parts and other essentials that an army that large needs? Where do they get the reinforcements to cover the many quick deaths that marines canonically go through? Now, granted, the original Starcraft, and indeed almost all RTS games, don't really think about this. Even a more complex simulator like Nobunaga's Ambition very much simplifies the logistics. But the difference here is that they're not drawing attention to it. If Mengsk was still being portrayed as a cunning political and military strategist I'd be expecting him to attack Jimmy's undefended booze suppliers, not his army.
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Nov 1, 2023 18:52
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bladededge posted:The writers, like a distressingly large number of others in sci-fi fiction, have zero sense of scale. If each battlecruiser needs 6000-8000 crew members to function, just how many people does Jimmy have working for him? In fairness, each Ford-class aircraft carrier today has a crew of around 4500, so 6000-8000 for a battlecruiser isn't too far off. ...the implications of that, do not seem to be grappled with, yes.
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Nov 1, 2023 18:56
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"In fairness" and then a number that's off by like 33% for an entirely different ship class (the flight deck crew as a whole are a big chunk of a carrier's total) ...are we sure that's being fair to anyone? you'd potentially be better off comparing crew complements of a battleship, maybe the Iowa after its 80s refit as the most recent example, and then realizing Blizzard just made up a number and it's not worth any mental contortions to try and "be fair" and make a real world analogue fit at all. sometimes something is just dumb and that's the end of it. Psion fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Nov 1, 2023 19:01
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I can count on one hand the number of strategy games that pay more than a token nod to logistics being a thing. And two hands for war games in general.
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Nov 1, 2023 19:02
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the logistics are all inside those blue minerals & vespene geysers duh
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Nov 1, 2023 19:07
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Hwurmp posted:the logistics are all inside those blue minerals & vespene geysers In the Kopuru Sector, we all eat rocks.
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Nov 1, 2023 19:09
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Warmachine posted:I can count on one hand the number of strategy games that pay more than a token nod to logistics being a thing. And two hands for war games in general. now I'm trying to remember about the game a friend of mine told me did this. cmano? warno? it had some acronym name and you had to run supply trucks out to your units fairly regularly that's all I got. I think that proves your point  bladededge posted:The writers, like a distressingly large number of others in sci-fi fiction, have zero sense of scale. it's true, and it's really everywhere. A couple of my favorites are stuff like authors writing about capital ships and giving an impressive sounding tonnage number, then the calculations on dimension demonstrate it'd be less dense than aerogel, or a 'city planet' with a population number where the density per person is about 1 for every 40 square kilometers of land or whatever. math! it's hard Psion fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Nov 1, 2023 19:10
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To link to something that popped up earlier in the thread, what the writers could have used is that Jim has some Protoss backing. If Zeratul had handed Jim (or Swann or Stetmann) an old template for the protoss probes' AI we could explain how this ragtag band of insurgents has access to toys that absolutely need strong logistics chains to function: because most of the crew has been replaced by automated systems. Now, our new shiny battlecruisers are actually Valerian's so the question becomes how junior is hiding a fleet from daddy, but the point that sci-fi writers never think about scale or logistics still stand. For one, how is the Hyperion still functional, fueled and supplied since SC1? Admittedly logistics do simplify a lot when you can jump to a random asteroid field, deploy SCVs to strip mine the minerals and vespene present and use those for repair and resupply, but still.
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Nov 1, 2023 19:11
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Psion posted:now I'm trying to remember about the game a friend of mine told me did this. cmano? warno? it had some acronym name and you had to run supply trucks out to your units fairly regularly I think one of the Earth 21X0 games required regular ammo resupplies for your combat units, in what was otherwise a regular RTS. I want to say it was the second game, 2150. To my knowledge, it didn't come back in the third game for good reasons. Warmachine posted:In the Kopuru Sector, we all eat rocks. I overthink this kind of thing all the time but at this point I've decided that these silly huge ships full of people have whole decks and crew departments dedicated to space farming so they don't have to resupply quite as often. Especially a crew like Raynor's Raiders who aren't supposed to have the support base to just pull into a dock and fill their pantry for thousands of people.
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Nov 1, 2023 19:28
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they're probably 90% maintenance personnel
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Nov 1, 2023 19:38
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disposablewords posted:I overthink this kind of thing all the time but at this point I've decided that these silly huge ships full of people have whole decks and crew departments dedicated to space farming so they don't have to resupply quite as often. Especially a crew like Raynor's Raiders who aren't supposed to have the support base to just pull into a dock and fill their pantry for thousands of people. they stop in at Bubba's Gas & Grub for some bbq muta wings while looking up the name of that place I discovered that the mercenary agent's name is Graven Hill lmao
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Nov 1, 2023 19:41
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The thing with the terrans as an army is that their unit cap is determined by supply depots. And that makes perfect sense, the size of the army you can field is limited by your capacity to deliver ammo, fuel and rations to the front. It does leave open the question of where it all originally comes from, though. For the Dominion - or in the last game, the Confederacy and even the Sons of Korhal - you can imagine them being supplied by farms and factories on worlds within their domains. Even the UED could have conquered some industrial capacity on their way into the system, or maybe had some non-combat ships come in with their fleet for that purpose. Raynor's Raiders are way more ambiguous. Given how expansive the Dominion is now, you could easily imagine there's some liberated worlds supplying the rebellion, or sympathetic settlements sending stuff on the sly. They never... actually say that though. For all we know in this campaign the entire rebellion is on board the Hyperion, even after we have the ability to build more battlecruisers. It's a missed opportunity to have the rebellion growing as the campaign goes on. Win battles, free worlds, gain support, use it to resource your army as a progression mechanic instead of just spending credits. Hell, if they'd caught on at this point to the idea that being able to switch out your choices/upgrades on the fly is more fun than being locked in (like they did for the later campaigns) maybe they'd have even done that. Tenebrais fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Nov 1, 2023 19:44
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Tenebrais posted:It's a missed opportunity to have the rebellion growing as the campaign goes on. Win battles, free worlds, gain support, use it to resource your army as a progression mechanic instead of just spending credits. Hell, if they'd caught on at this point to the idea that being able to switch out your choices/upgrades on the fly is more fun than being locked in (like they did for the later campaigns) maybe they'd have even done that. They just can't do that because of the non-linear nature of the campaign and how much of it is optional depending on what you might or might not do.
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Nov 1, 2023 19:45
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Cythereal posted:They just can't do that because of the non-linear nature of the campaign and how much of it is optional depending on what you might or might not do. You could still do it, even if it's just a number equivalent to your available credits. Have someone comment after missions that this and that world are supplying you now. Maybe add some props into the space backgrounds to show more ships in your fleet, or bigger crowds in the Cantina. You wouldn't have to make big reactive changes to cutscenes or anything to still offer a sense of growth.
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Nov 1, 2023 19:50
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For all intents and purposes, the logistics of Starcraft are exactly as much space-magic handwave as the actual space magic of Medic Heal or Psionic Storm. The mechanics of "what the gently caress, how would that even work" are (correctly) ignored and glossed over in favor of making the game-play enjoyable.
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Nov 1, 2023 19:54
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Psion posted:"In fairness" and then a number that's off by like 33% for an entirely different ship class (the flight deck crew as a whole are a big chunk of a carrier's total) ...are we sure that's being fair to anyone? Per the Internet, a Super Star Destroyer has a crew of around 280,000 Imperial battleships run 100,000+. So yeah, 6,000-8,000 is a lot closer to some real life analogue by far. Even if you take the 1980s Iowa's 1500 or so crew instead of the Ford the Starcraft battlecruiser is only off by a factor of 5 (same order of magnitude) instead of a factor of 66-186.
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Nov 1, 2023 19:57
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the logistics problem is also how you know Kerrigan and the Overmind were both dumbasses they could conquer the entire galaxy without a single warrior brood; all they needed is Bugsnax
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Nov 1, 2023 20:00
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Tenebrais posted:You could still do it, even if it's just a number equivalent to your available credits. Have someone comment after missions that this and that world are supplying you now. Maybe add some props into the space backgrounds to show more ships in your fleet, or bigger crowds in the Cantina. You wouldn't have to make big reactive changes to cutscenes or anything to still offer a sense of growth. I mean kinda the point of the most recent plot development is that Raynor's revolution has been explicitly co-opted by Valerian and furthermore secretly had been all along there was never gonna be a popular revolution
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Nov 1, 2023 20:05
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Psion posted:it's true, and it's really everywhere. A couple of my favorites are stuff like authors writing about capital ships and giving an impressive sounding tonnage number, then the calculations on dimension demonstrate it'd be less dense than aerogel, or a 'city planet' with a population number where the density per person is about 1 for every 40 square kilometers of land or whatever. I read an okay popcorn mil SF series where the author just had zero idea about nuclear scale in particular. At one point a handful of half kiloton nuclear bombs render the entirety of Mars too radioactive to live on for a century.
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Nov 1, 2023 20:11
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Grand Fromage posted:I read an okay popcorn mil SF series where the author just had zero idea about nuclear scale in particular. At one point a handful of half kiloton nuclear bombs render the entirety of Mars too radioactive to live on for a century. That's like, half the Hiroshima bomb? *checking google* Estimates are at a touch less than 20 kTons for Little Boy's actual yield. That's loving 1/40th of the Hiroshima bomb, can you even make nukes that small? (probably yes but not the point)
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Nov 1, 2023 20:20
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Omobono posted:That's like, half the Hiroshima bomb? You can, ADMs have an adjustable yield and the low end is about ten tons.
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Nov 1, 2023 20:23
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Omobono posted:That's like, half the Hiroshima bomb? You can and they did.
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Nov 1, 2023 20:42
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Warning: do not leave unattended in the presence of rogue Russian colonels.
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Nov 1, 2023 20:50
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Psion posted:"In fairness" and then a number that's off by like 33% for an entirely different ship class (the flight deck crew as a whole are a big chunk of a carrier's total) ...are we sure that's being fair to anyone? So there's a good reason to have a lot of crew on a ship, and the main reason that having a smaller number is a bad idea at a larger scale. Said reason is damage control. You can't automate away damage control and maintenance as the LCS debacle has thoroughly shown, not with any degree of effectiveness -- the best way to keep a ship going when there's holes blown in it is to have crew moving around inside it repairing problems. For that, you need enough crew to keep the ship running AND deal with said problems, and also to account for said crew likely also taking casualties in an attack. This is why most ships the size of a destroyer have a crew of around 300 even in the modern era, and why the 45 on the LCS was hilariously inadequate. My favorite subverted example of this is the Imperial Star Destroyer II, or ImpStarDeuce, from Star Wars, which at several points in the fiction is described as having a standing crew of thirty-seven thousand. That doesn't include the nearly ten thousand stormtroopers they carry as marines, either. This is an absolute shitload of guys, but the thing is, an ImpStar is actually big enough for this to be a relatively reasonable number, especially considering that Star Wars ships explicitly don't use extensive automation post-Clone Wars. An ImpStar is 1600 meters long, almost exactly a mile, and is approximately a quarter-mile high at its tallest point at the back. That's a lot of ship. It also has over a hundred heavy weapons emplacements (a "turbolaser" being Star Wars' equivalent of a capital ship weapon), God knows how many smaller ones, a full fighter wing of 72 spacecraft, transports and equipment for all those troops... thirty-seven thousand is a number that starts making sense for a ship that size when you really consider how big it is and how many different things an ImpStar does. You'll need that many guys to deal with damage across a ship that big in any fight that can actually threaten it at all. For the SC/SC2 Battlecruiser, though, that number doesn't add up, because the thing is just not big enough. An Iowa-class 80's refit had a complement of just under 2,000, and this isn't a bad comparison to use because based on the Brood War cinematic, a Battlecruiser is relatively close in size to an Iowa - 1000 feet long, approximately (and you'll note that Blizzard does not give a solid number on a battlecruiser's size, which is probably wise of them). Now, a BC still has more mass and area than an Iowa because of its shape and role -- an Iowa is a two-dimensional ship because it floats on water, whereas a BC has weapons in every direction -- so I could buy a number half again or twice that relatively easily, if you're not automating the piss out of it (which you can only do so much of, because damage control). That's still WELL short of 8,000, though. 100 "gunnery specialists" is frankly not unreasonable if you're adding up the entire ship's fire-control crews and combining all their stations into a single CIC, but the external turrets we see in the Zero Hour cinematic don't look like they're staffed, at least externally. But even adding up all the functions an Iowa has, multiplying them by two, and then adding on additional functions for a starship, I can't see you making 8,000 dudes on a ship of that size. Quite frankly I don't know how you'd FIT more than 3,000 on a ship that size -- conditions on an Iowa for its crew of 2,000 were not what I'd call luxurious. And if a Battlecruiser is bigger than that then you actually get the opposite problem where it's rapidly not enough guys for the size, because the square-cube law means that ships increase volume exponentially to dimensions, not logarithmically. Redeye Flight fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Nov 1, 2023 21:46
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Redeye Flight posted:You can't automate away damage control and maintenance as the LCS debacle has thoroughly shown, not with any degree of effectiveness -- the best way to keep a ship going when there's holes blown in it is to have crew moving around inside it repairing problems.
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Nov 1, 2023 22:10
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MagusofStars posted:For all intents and purposes, the logistics of Starcraft are exactly as much space-magic handwave as the actual space magic of Medic Heal or Psionic Storm. The mechanics of "what the gently caress, how would that even work" are (correctly) ignored and glossed over in favor of making the game-play enjoyable. This is absolutely true, and I think most people ITT would agree. The problem arises when the writers themselves don't ignore it. I accidentally kicked off this tangent by saying I thought it was dumb that they called out that it took 100 people just to target the Yamato cannon, let alone all the support staff for maintaining it etc. Anyway, that's the point - in a well-written science magic/science fantasy setting, as in for example Brood War, you will notice that the writers never give you concrete numbers for things. How long is that battlecruiser? How many people are onboard? What's the power draw like? Is the jukebox that Tychus broke 120v or 240v? Once you start answering these questions with hard numbers, you destroy the fantasy. Now, instead of a Battlecruiser occupying a mental space where it comfortably is both a flying fortress that houses command staff and has orbital bombardment capabilities but simultaneously is about as expensive as 14 marines and can be shot down with a handgun, it instead occupies a defined mental space. Giving out the numbers as they did was some rookie-rear end amateur writing bullshit and I am calling Blizzard on it.
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Nov 1, 2023 22:12
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