Hatchery as a Universal Building

I want to go back to the proton.

Notice the 3 totally unique themes of Red, Green, and Blue.

The two U quarks represent the terran and protoss function generally, while the D quark represents zerg.

It's like I said, it's almost as if the 2-1 pattern is kind of like a fractal in starcraft. The zerg truly being the different race because they scout with their supply and it is airborne, and having a universally functioning building to emphasize, hatchery.

And then on the specific detail level, the 2-1 pattern can be seen. Example would be the CC and Nexus being 400 minearls and the hatchery 300, and the probe and drone being 40 life, the scv 60.


I remember watching a you tube video once where an asian who was talking about starcraft balance stated that starcraft was locally balanced, but generally it wasn't.

I guess this was some kind of point as to how this was the beauty of the game.

I don't think this means that just because the game is not balanced generally speaking that we shouldn't make a great effort to make it as balanced as possible.

 

I don't have time for this anymore: you simply do not want to understand how flawed your current theory is, and how limited its applications are. You are attempting to bridge the gap between Thematic balance (The Fractal) and Gameplay. Unfortunately, this ''fractal'', as you call it, cannot help balance gameplay. It can help us identify Redundancies, as I explained on page 4, but nothing more than that.

 

I think it can help balance gameplay...

blizzard just needs to stop approaching the game with the idea that they have the freedom to do what ever they and the public wants to and still expect to produce a decently balanced game.

They should work from the ground up and place thematic balance as high priority, and then try and conceive what interesting functions would work best to represent the theme of each race as an art, yet still follow the rule.


Think about it like this, starcraft 2 is the evolution of starcraft, and people are expecting a deeper more complex gameplay.

With that in mind, the issues of balance which took so long to hammer out in starcraft are going to be at least twice as hard, if not much harder considering that it would become exponentially harder to achieve a reasonably balanced state by altering specific values here and there.

The evolution of starcraft calls for it.

And again, it calls for it to compensate for zerg's uniqueness of function, whether you see it or not.

 

It is a guaranteed that I have seen more TvP games then you have.

Zealots and vultures do build up... even though taking the map is a higher priority, excess minerals are still going to be somewhat spent on the non gas basic warrior units a long the way.

If both players are being agressive in their attempts to prevent expanding, then there is a definite resort to building vulture or zealot a long the way.

besides, we are talking about the comparison and reference to zerg.

 

Isn't everything you want is to be able to directly put down buildings instead of using drones?


I don't get this why?

Sunken/spine crawler rush is still doable but of course only against enemy zerg (creep)


Other then that isn't it to balance zerg? You have to sacrifice drones to get zerglings (larva) and the other way around meaning you can't in the tier 1 - 2 game quickly amass an army.

It also balances zerg rushes as the spawning pool requires a drone (Putting you back some minerals and larva)

 

And then God made the Guardian mutation for this purpose. Any experienced player would know that, Guardian's are what I always use to kill annoying High Templar.

 

I think I'm a little lost here. I thought this thread was about implementing a spontaneous static defense that can spawn from the hatchery. Why're we debating unit counters?

 

This guy is either a highly skilled troll, or a highly unskilled Starcraft player.

 

Between Atlas and ZealotInATuxedo,I have never before seen so much terminology made up on the spot.

Zealot: Please don't use the term "Atlas Ratio" it is extremely overdramatic and not particularly descriptive. And it's not like Atlas invented the thing. And it takes longer to type than 2:1. And it hurts my head.

Atlas: your posts don't make sense. You're writing as if you have a point (and keep saying things like, "you missed my incredibly powerful point") but never get around to making it by the end of the post. For each post. Write your posts around your points, rather than forcing us to try to tease the points out.

For one particularly irritating thing, this might be helpful.

My opinion (I seem to be echoing everyone else): 2:1 is elegant, yeah. But the game isn't written around it and the game certainly doesn't need to be changed so that it is written around it. It a coincidence and a triviality. "Balance" is not about symmetry. It isn't. It is about the races being such that, with two players of equal skill (with the race) they have an equal chance of winning. Balance also tries to achieve things like making all (or most) of the units relevant in a large number of games/maps/matchups.

(Atlas) You seem to think that building a game (from the ground up) around a 2:1 ratio is necessary for making an extraordinarily balanced game. (It isn't!) SC2 isn't even out yet, and is strikingly well-balanced. Is it because they followed your policy of ratios? No- Dustin Browder has stated that SC2's design philosophy has been, from the start, "make a whole bunch of really awesome and unique units, put them together, then tweak it so it's fair." And when they say unique, they don't mean "mathematically unique" they go by feeling- they try to make units that do not "feel" like other units. They tweak dozens of stats- size, speed, acceleration, damage, weapon cooldown, number of shots per cycle, range, armor type, bonuses, hp, armor, upgrades*. There is no special reason any of these variables should be set to any particular number. You can't balance a 20-dimensional problem with a 1-dimensional model!

*

Spoiler

*tech tree placement, mineral/gas cost, supply cost, build time, special abilities, turn rate, upgrade cost, upgrade research time, upgrade building, splash radius. Then there are the dozens of variables that you wouldn't even think about. Like the point of origin of splash damage, the chance that the unit will miss its target because the target got out of range.

 

I didn' t think there were Lurkers in sc2, so how could you counter Templars with a unit that doesn't exist? The game is balanced because the Zerg no longer have any units that can attack while cloaked and are more vulnerable to air attack because they lost Dark Swarm. Also, the Zerg don't have units that make them strong in the late game. There are a lot of things to consider before you say it's not balanced.