274 replies to this topic

[badger2d]

aaaaargh

Getting frustrated with playing Protoss.

As P I feel like I just have to pray for early/midgame mistakes from the opposition that will buy me enough time to build a bunch of colossus and win with a single powerful strike. No other strategy I've attempted has been remotely as effective. But I feel completely unable to influence or respond to what the opponent does before that stage with varying reactive moves, and so I hardly feel like I'm playing at all when you get right down to it.

Either the opponent will make a big mistake during the stage when I'm vulnerable, allowing me to get through it safely, or he won't, and I might as well be a bot.

[uff0]

Yeah, Protoss is pretty badly designed IMO. They rely way too much on gimmicky mechanics, such as forcefields, warp gates, and collossi. I mainly play Terran, and whenever I meet a Protoss I already know before hand that I just have to survive an all-in attack of some sort to win.

[Frost]

uff0, on 18 September 2012 - 02:50 PM, said:

I mainly play Terran, and whenever I meet a Protoss I already know before hand that I just have to survive an all-in attack of some sort to win.

I kinda found this too when I was doing 1v1 a bunch this summer. Once I'd gotten past about 30 games or so, TvT would still be pretty damn random and I had no idea what was coming at me, but Protoss vs. Zerg ended up always being basically the same. With Zerg, some times they'd mix it up, but mostly they'd use the 4 queen to make themselves impervious to harassment, rush to 3 bases, and unless they made a mistake so I could bring down the hammer on their main base (which did happen plenty since I was lower leagues), I would be so covered in zerg crap I couldn't fight out of it and eventually be worn down.

Protoss, as long as I could keep them from expanding too much and bait their army into attacking a defensive wall, it was just an arms race until the inevitable HugeAttack. As long as I survived that attack, I win. Got super easy once I started keeping a handful of Vikings around to fly behind them and destroy the Colossi as soon as they'd commit the attack.

I still stand by my feeling of, with the current balance, Terran trumps Protoss which trumps Zerg which trumps Terran.

[badger2d]

Protoss tech tree is weird too, I've been thinking.

Terran and Zerg both have a main line to their tech tree, with single-step optional unit-unlocking branches you can take at each level of the main line. I see this as meaning, from  a design perspective, that you can balance your unit roster based on sure knowledge that certain units will be unlocked by a certain stage of the game, and at the same time there's still room for player choice and creativity at every stage. Protoss on the other hand, have a main line with no branches at all for the first two steps (Gate --> Core), and then beyond that have no main line at all, instead a split into three entirely separate branches for tech levels 3 and 4 (Stargate --> Beacon; Council --> Archives/Shrine; Robotics --> Support Bay).

Seems like two weird and kind of frustrating things arise from that. One is no flexibility in how you can play in the early game. The other is that in order for the later game part of this tech tree structure to really make sense, there ought to be some form of redundant baseline functions across all three branches such that you could play each individual one as a different but viable style, without necessarily needing to build the others (but there would still, ideally, be enough diversity of function that a good player should have incentive to build all of them eventually in a long hard-fought game).

Way it is right now, it's very hard to play Protoss at all without going for the Robotics branch simply because Observers are so necessary and there's no unit that can fill in for them in either of the other branches (Phoenixes are good scouts in the Stargate branch, but there's no detection, and in the Council branch you don't get any scouting power at all!). And then, once I've invested in a Robotics Facility, it's then always more efficient and reasonable to go ahead and aim for a Colossus-based lategame rather than reinvesting into building up a different tech branch. And then all the games start to feel exactly the same, and I go blaaaargh...

In HotS they're adding a form of detection to the Stargate branch with an Oracle spell. I dunno. Personally I'd rather simply see Observers become universal to the Protoss tech 3 structures, either by being buildable from all of them, or by being buildable from an earlier structure like the Core or the Nexus and unlockable by any tech 3 structure. It feels like that would be the single simplest answer that could free up Protoss play to be a lot more versatile and fun.

[Frost]

THANK GOD

1.5.3 unassed the UI finally. It no longer is a sucky, slow piece of popsnizzle and is back to its nice pre-1.5 self performance and usability-wise.

[badger2d]

I probably never noticed the UI slowdown because my computer is so slow it can barely run this game anyway.

[Frost]

badger2d, on 19 September 2012 - 12:17 PM, said:

I probably never noticed the UI slowdown because my computer is so slow it can barely run this game anyway.

"It hurts to be you." -- Duke Nukem

I can run this game, MAXED, man. 1440x900 at medium detail...!

[badger2d]

That's cool Frost.

Spoiler

[Sneaky Snake]

Frost, on 19 September 2012 - 02:40 PM, said:

"It hurts to be you." -- Duke Nukem

I can run this game, MAXED, man. 1440x900 at medium detail...!

I gave you beans for this post, simply because I wanted to give beans. Have some beans

[uff0]

What's up?! Blizzard have finally given us a release date for Heart of the Swarm! http://eu.battle.net...n/blog/6512880/

[Frost]

Just got sent a beta key. Sweet!

[badger2d]

Heart of the Swaaaaaarm!

Bought it the other day. I'm about five missions into the campaign. From what I've seen so far, they've done a great job making appropriately Zerg-y missions that are about mobility and aggressively controlling the map. Given that I've favored playing Zerg in multiplayer since Starcraft the First because I really enjoy that style of play, I'm delighted to see it finally being translated well into campaign missions.

Also enjoying the variations on upgrade mechanics from how it was done in the Terran campaign in WoL. There is no money-based upgrade system like the Terrans had where you choose which units to invest permanently in and which to ignore, but rather you get a mix of different kinds of choices specific to a unit. With my Zerglings, I was just given a permanent choice I had to make between two very different but both awesomely OP evolutions. But in addition to that there is also a loadout choice between 3 mutations of smaller effect, where I can only have one of them active at a time, but can freely change it up between missions. Fun stuff to chew on. I'm looking forward to seeing the various ideas they've had for all the units and I can imagine it being fun to replay later with all sorts of different mutation combinations.

Oh, and Kerrigan is a leveling hero unit. That also brings more choices to the table with her skill tree, which is made up of mutually exclusive but flexible choices like the unit mutations.  And the cinematics are fantastic. And...oh hell I'm going to go play some more. Bottom line, you should definitely be playing this too if you enjoyed WoL at all! It's damn good stuff.

[dojoboy]

My son picked it up Thursday and completed the campaign by Friday midnight ~ Spring Break. He absolutely loved it.

Can someone tell me how to set up a sandbox game now? The UI is confusing to me since the recent updates. Of course, I haven't played in a while, so I don't when it changed.

[badger2d]

Been toying around in custom games a bit vs sleepwalking AI to warm myself up for doing some ladder play again, been a long time. Trying to get used to the new maps and to shake the rust off my macro, building up to 3 bases and 200 supply as smoothly as I can. Bit wobbly at first, but then it starts to click and I get that "like riding a bike" feeling.

[badger2d]

Finally got around to playing HotS multiplayer.

First game was on Red City, a pretty cool looking brand new ladder map. I don't see how to embed links the clean way while posting from my iPad, so here: http://us.battle.net...n/blog/10145837 (click on the Red City LE thumbnail, it's the first one as you scroll down). Isn't that a gorgeous map?

Only one problem: Red City is riddled with choke points, and I had randomed Zerg vs Protoss. Back when I was a purely Z player maps like this were flat out nightmarish. Zerg are primarily about speed and swarming numbers, both of which are most advantageous on open ground. Even if you manage to obtain a sizable economic lead, trying to attack Protoss to actually seal a win on a chokey map feels like reenacting the Battle of Thermopylae from Xerxes' perspective. And this time, the Spartans get WMDs!

Enter my new favorite unit, the swarm host. It's appearance vaguely calls to mind a giant diseased tortoise and it has no attack of its own, but when it's burrowed, the disgusting bubbles in its shell will periodically pop and spawn a pair of locusts. Locusts have a short timed life, but they do murderous amounts of damage comparable to hydralisks. Setting up a position from which to send endless waves of literally free units? Finally, we get to do Zerg-flavored choke point abusing sieges!

After denying the Protoss first attempt to take his third base with a pack of hydras and lings, I followed up on the advantage a couple minutes later by burrowing a pack of swarm hosts in the crater outside the Protoss natural, a perfect position to send waves of locusts up the ramp at him. What followed was a grinding, deadly, and I must say for me rather cathartic siege on the Protoss base. The Spartans have WMDs? What if Xerxes actually has an infinite number of men instead of a mere million? The handful of colossus were the very last to fall, and all their massive damage output had made not a bit of difference - they weren't able to kill anything that actually mattered!