'Cliffs' Are they still safe?

Hey, cmon... I reckon it would actually be a good mechanic. Just to make cliffs and stuff more hazardous (because they are). and it's not like there would be tonnes of death each time, just like a 5% chance or something. Purely to make attacking or retreating over cliffs a bit more risky. And the deaths aren't random, it's because it's such a dangerous way to travel... not like your Reapers are all just standing there idly and one of them suffers a cerebral hemorrhage. Now THAT would be random/funny!

 

If you want to make traveling on cliffs more dangerous, imposing random deaths or damage is not the way to go. There are games where this might be done, ones that are trying to simulate a realistic war, etc, but StarCraft is not one of them. Now, as I am sure ijffdrie and the others will agree, it is not the idea of making cliffs hazardous that is objectionable in your idea, it is the idea that in doing so, a "dice roll" is occurring, something that is being decided by some random number generator instead of a player.

A StarCraft way of making cliff jumping risky would involve no randomness, no death. There might be damage involved, but it would be set. When Marines/Firebats use Stimpack, they take a set 10 damage. Now, what you could do for cliff jumpers is do something similar: Have them take maybe 2 damage for every hop. Maybe larger units will take more. This way, there is no random punishment: if a player chooses to hop a cliff, they know exactly how much damage their unit will take.

Another way to do this, and this one I would prefer if I had to choose, would be to "stun" the unit before or after it makes a jump. This is already used with a few different SC2 units. Stalkers' Blink takes a while before it can be used again, it risks Blinking into a situation that it can't get out of before its cooldown is over. Phoenixes shut down after they use Overload: they become sitting ducks until their systems come back up. With cliff jumpers, a Reaper might have to "charge" its jump packs before jumping a cliff, leaving them vulnerable for a second or two before the packs engage, a Colossus might have to slow down to a quarter of its normal moving speed in order to safely negotiate the change in elevation. These would be non-random and expected effects that both the player and their enemy would know about. An enemy would not have to just hope that a twentieth of the attacking force will spontaneously explode on the way over: they can just pick the right moments, before, during, or after the jump depending on how it is implemented, and cause the deaths themselves. The player using the units would know to treat these situations with caution, forcing them to look for safe jump areas as opposed to "any old cliff."

This is the kind of change that would alter gameplay in a useful way. Something that players can work with. Something with predictable results. But there is an interesting problem even with this: for Reapers and Colossi, moving over cliffs is done automatically, so if something bad is going to happen to the units, this will automatically happen even if the unit was not explicitly ordered to place itself into that situation. I think this is the kind of thing that Blizzard finds to be unacceptable. So, in order to make cliff jumping risky, they would also have to make the abilities like Blink: called directly by the player who is opting to take that risk. In my opinion, this would detract from the use of cliff movement, and certainly from the fun, which is probably why cliffs are not made to be risky at all.

 

yea it's a beutiful mechanic. i see it already, Bisu sends his collosus down into Boxer's base. collosus trips and the scvs manage to get out of the way from the collosus while it's stumbling to get up. Koreans commit suicide.

 

Woah! send me the link if you can! i would love to see that! very interesting

 

I am afraid he's seeing it in his head, along with quite a few other strange things I would rather not discuss.

 

Yeah, I see what you mean, the player should always be in control, but I'll sticking by my original statement by saying that they are not purely random deaths. There is a proper reason for the odd one to die, being that constantly traveling up and down cliffs is not safe. I was just trying to think of a way that would make inter-tier traveling less of a sure-fire method. Are there any other ways of doing it?

 

that's strange. sort of felt u weren't joking there.

 

well, maybe the terrans can build a cliff mounted defense.

 

But not all maps have cliffs: such defenses would be too specialized. Kind of like the Infested CC, only available with Terran opponents, almost never used. Now if it were a standard defense building that could also be built on cliffs...? That might work.

ItzaHexGor: That is what my big long post was trying to address, by making cliff jumpers vulnerable while in the act, they are open to being attacked by other players. It is like using a transport to drop units in an enemy base: if they have turrets, the transports, which can't attack and have less HP than the units they carry, get shot down. This is the risk, making transports a non-sure-fire tactic. If there is no air defense, transports are safe. The same idea would apply to cliff jumpers, they do not take damage, they do not die, simply for jumping. They are placed in a position where it is much easier for them to die, but it is up to another player to take advantage of this. There is therefore skill on both sides: avoiding defenses for the jumper, anticipating jumps, for the defender.

 

In games were someone puts "no rushing" or other limitations, I see it as there inability to deal with a new or different opposing strategy. The cliffs are just another expample of this, and while I can't claim to find the answer to this I can say theres still the ability to try.

Plus in most "no rushing" games the host decides when to attack, and if you so much as peek in his base before hes ready to teh pwn you he gets pissed. that's why a don't like limit games, even if I'm not as good at them