Blizzard: StarCraft 2 Battle Report!

@LJYLJ. Marauders have a slowing attack. He had to choose between letting his Stalker slowly die whithout any damage output as it hopelessly crawls away, or let it die fast but deal some damage. Seeing as the Marauder almost died, it was worth the try/damage.

 

I am curious why he didn't research blink. You'd think that blink would be a stalker's one counter against marauders.
On the other hand I am very greatful that the Terran now have a tier 1 unit that is useful mid (and assumedly late)
Marines + firebats? Not so much, while Zelots, Dragoons and Hydralisks always had their place.

 

Well, they should know how to use units and so, since they are "game balance designers"...
(havent seen the movie yet, since my internet sux so I dont kknow ,yet, if they did something wrong )

EDIT: I....want.....this.....game.......NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and, yeah, protoss unit choice wasnt the best... This game is gonna fu-king PWN A$$!!

 

How many time we didn't get any info from Starcraft 2 ? We were just crushed by WoW !

I hate this game, sorry Blizzard.

Hope we get battle report each month. Hope Blizzard will fix some bugs like the blue blob moving on the map. But we must tell Blizzard that this is a problem.

 

Terran units are too indistinguishable grouped.

A welcome change from the Q&As.

 

that was refreshing tho i did think that they followed a script since they seemed to played oddly, hmm, and i remember seeing parts of this match before so this might have been from Blizzcon, in the end its now an old build.

 

Finally, a gameplay video that they actually want us to see! I hope make a trend out of these battle reports; it'd suck if this was just a one time holidays gift to us fans :arghh:

First thing I notice: New terran adjutant model! Really cool looking, and if you look at 3:18-2:22, you can see the adjutant's face opening up to reveal the circuitry. Cool stuff!

That activity/progress meter in the top left looks interesting, but I'm a little confused on what the worker part is. Does it show the players build order throughout the game, or just what one builder is currently working on?

New shield recharge mechanic looks nice, it makes protoss rely on micro a little more, rather than just pound away at enemies while the shields constantly regenerate.

 

I think that activity/progress meter in the top is only visible to spectators of the matches. If you noticed, it helped with some of the commentary in the video.

 

I hope they do a match with zerg, thats the race im most interested it.

 

yeah it did seem like the spectator hud that let them see at least 3 types of info.
Current unit count
Currently build units/building
Resources count

I think this HUD is great.

 

great video. My only disappointment was, I did not get to see much use of marines from the terran player. i was kind of excited to see marines in action throughout the video with the medivac.

 

A lot of the behavior in the game struck me as bizarre and foolish.
1. The Marauders retreated from Zealots even when there was no hope of escape and even as Charge let the Zealots attack with impunity while on the run.
2. On the other side, the Stalkers failed to retreat against Marauders, even though they are Mechanical and thus immune to the Marauder's slow effect, faster than the Marauders anyway, and can if all else fails blink away.
3. In fact, the player didn't seem to research Blink at all, even though it massively increases the survivability of Stalkers by retreating them away from the frontline, or off the battlefield entirely to recover their shields.
4. However, far worse was the use of the Colossus. Yes, sending a single Colossus unsupported into a crowd of Marauders is insane, especially since it didn't have anywhere near the firepower needed to destroy the worker pool quickly. Also, not once did the Colossus even try to use ledges to its advantage, either to get cheap shots on enemies, or to quickly retreat.
5. At one hilarious point, the Colossus and Stalker are cornered on top of the small platform with the forward Pylon and slaughtered, despite both of them having the ability to simply get over the ledge and out of the Terrans line of fire, while the Terrans would have been forced to take the long way around.
6. Also, why on earth were they using Colossi on Marauders? Marines, yes. Zerglings yes. Marauders, NO. Not to mention that Colossi were never used in groups larger than 2, even though that is precisely where their high but scattered DPS become extremely powerful.
7. Why did he bother building a Nullfier if he wasn't even going to try and cast spells with it?

 

Here's the map they played on:


It looks really nice and orderly.

 

Are you sure about that? Formerly yes, but i thought the slowing effect was changed to effect all units, especially with Dustin Bowder and the commentator talking about the marauders slowing effect in relation to the stalkers.


Yes kuvasz, there's one trick i want to try with that map, loading the command center with the starting SCVs and flying it to the hidden expansion, ofcourse you wouldn't be able to scout either until reapers but still.

 

Yes it is ordered, maybe to much for a battle field.

Maybe i can be false, but i don't remember a lot of green maps in SC1. Green don't look like war. But it is maybe because I played with zergs that i didn't see the grass.

 

Blizzard should add another battlereport quick.

This map is great ! How strange those "lakes" are. They have been build by Protoss ??

 

Maybe you can consider them to be wells?

 

Obviously balance comes before visuals so although it may look artificial (which it does), it's only to be 100% sure that the players stand an equal chance at winning from the point of view of starting positions. The only means of making maps as asymmetric and thus as 'natural' as possible is to play around with different tiles, which we see in the picture - one base is grassy, one is sandy, etc.

For some reason I don't like this in SC1 but with SC2 graphics it looks very elegant and attractive.

One thing I never understood is the fact that mineral placing is also mirrored, which creates a clear disadvantage for players having their minerals to the north of their base because their workers need to travel that much more at their first trip. This will surely become less of an issue due to the improved pathfinding in SC2, but I was surprised to see this be true for 'pro' maps such as ICCUP selections in SC1.

 

@Kuvasz. It would be cool if the first (6 nowadays, right?) workers could spawn at any of the 4 sides of a main that is closest to the majority of the starting minerals. Would make things fair without sacrificing design (having all minerals south of mains would look ugly).

 

That map is indeed beautiful. I'm getting the same feeling I had in 1998 when I saw each new environment for the first time and was awed. It feels like I've tripped through a space/time warp to a dimension that I hadn't spend billions and billions of hours doing gungle terrain Big Game Hunters matches.

Also, I see they've taken some lessons from the "Pro Maps" on how to make orderly mirrored maps instead of the "each side is different and has it's advantages and disadvantages" approach. Although, I'm sure a lot of this was because of the limits of the original StarEdit.

I saw something like this mentioned in a Q&A batch a while ago so I'm sure that Blizzard will base their maps around balancing this. So, I'm sure that this would be kept pretty risky and if it fails you're probably going to get owned.

-- I, too, agree that Blizzard should implement some sort of protection against workers being on the wrong side of the building. I also hope that they keep units coming out of a building in the direction of the rally point (like in WarCraft III) so that we won't have any more issues like in Big Game Hunters where Marines would be on the base side in some positions but outside the base in other positions. It was a considerable disadvantage to have to lift your Barracks to let your Marines in on a map where every second counts when you're trying to defend against a Zerg or multiple player rush.