Tech Lab

We'd better be crapping ourselves with the amazingness.

I just pulled out SC and played with Ych9 in a 2v1. Got my ass raped by the both of them. I'm a bit rusty. Lol.

And Remy, those are close to traitorous thoughts.

 

if infantry is still the way to go against zergs then the nuclear reactor will make a massive difference early game, since most terrans gets 2 barracks very early against zergs.

 

Why would Terrans NEED a melee unit? There is no advantage in that for them, actually all their AoE would make such a unit suicidial. Even the Firebat wasn´t true melee, it had a bit range even though the attack counted as melee for Dark Swarm purposes.

Melee is more of a disadvantage than not, what would be the actuall advantage?

 

Depends on darkswarm, or any other new spell or mechanic that makes specifically require melee attack/damage type. But otherwise, I don't see a huge need for it personally.

The Terran race as a whole is a glass cannon. They have all the firepower and range, but their units are very fragile. IMO, Terran is at least as flimsy as Zerg, but people have this misconception where Zerg is cheap and flimsy while Terran is not. Since Terran always hit hard from a distance, their poor resilience balances out their firepower. It's not bad for Terran to have a melee type of unit(or something close to it), keeping enemy at range is certainly something the Terran can benefit from. However, if Terran starts to get units that are too good at tanking(as in meat shield, damage sponge), I think Terran would start heading over to IMBA Land.

Can Terran benefit from a melee type unit? I think so. Is it absolutely needed? I think Terran can do fine without it. But I believe that it's far more important to limit the effectiveness of such a unit in Terran's case, than to make it good.

 

The Terrans DID get a unit that is good at tanking: The Thor in combination with Defense Matrix and (especially) Nano Repair. It is currently the most durable unit in SC2, (as well as the least mobile).

But I don´t think the Thor makes the Terrans imba, the lack of mobility (turning speed, size and inability to fit in the Dropship) keeps it from being uber-they will still be able to be flanked.

 

I would hardly call the thor a tank. Just because a unit has a lot of HP and/or armor, doesn't necessarily make it a tank. The BC with 500 HP isn't a tank for instance. The thor is already way too high up on the tech tree to really be useful as a tank. But if saw a Terran stick the thor up front, I honestly would just route my lings, lurks, and hydras around it. Even if it's a choke, you wouldn't really build a thor there instead of supply depots IMO.

In SC you can't really tank with just one or two monstrous units. It's simply too easy for lesser units to surround and focus fire, you're taking hits from too many things at once. But I doubt late-game Terran would actually be able pull as many thors as do Zerg with ultras.

 

I'm guessing a max of 4 per player. And that's when you start losing the balance of supporting units.

I personally think the Thor is going to be REALLY hard to kill. I'll be the first to say that right now I'm scared of it. It's insane.

I still think it's not fair for it to not be able to island hop and/or move at ALL. But hey... I'm not Terran, you guys can deal with its immobility. But I think that's taking the one-shot-momentum concept of Remy's to an extreme.

As far as balancing with the other races and a need for a melee unit, we can't really say until we see the Zerg and the abilities of all three races are set at least in the mud, if not in stone.

 

A Tank or Damage Sponge needs to attract fire. You WANT it to be surrounded/focus fired. Of course you could simply walk around it-thats why it has the 250mm ability.
It isn´t a Damage dealer, it´s normal damage sucks compared to the Siege Tanks and we aren´t even considering Splash. Yet the ability deals enourmous damage if what we saw of it before is any indication.

It acts as motivation for your enemy to attack/stop it before the Thor can position itself - forcing the enemy to abandon the advantage of his static defenses and keeping him from attacking your other units wich are "Glass Cannons".

Tanks aren´t automatically disqualified by coming late - they are disqualified if the enemy can simply ignore them.

 

Which remains to be seen. The best way to counter the Thor may be to render it useless rather than actually killing it. How do you do that? Force it to move. The further it moves the longer it takes to come back. If you can delay its arrival it's absorbing valuable food, minerals, and the other player's time.

 

Yes. That is propably the main reason it is build "on the field". This allows it to have the problem Joneagle_X just explained while keeping it also usefull. It allows it to have a unique set of dis/advantages and hopefully make it a fun unit to use or fight against.

 

@ Jon, that's not "my" concept actually, I merely put the insight of Korean progame analysts/commentators into English. I can't say the analyst/commentator guys are the very first humans to be the first to analyze Terran that way, but I certainly didn't come up with it from scratch on my own.

In any case, I don't think much of the thor to be honest. I might think differently later on when I see how it works first hand. But as of right now, I wouldn't use it even if I played Terran.

EDIT: Having to kill off your own unit because you have no way of getting it off a remote island is not a disadvantage, it is a flaw.

 

Between the Tech Lab and the Reactor, I think that Terrans will somewhat enjoy the kind of build flexibility and build power that Zerg have enjoyed in the first game. Even so, this only encourages flexibility at the cost of some degree of power dipping.

For instance, you build Tier 1 and have your Barracks. You build what? Reactor for bulking troops or Tech Lab for teching them up? If you build the Tech Lab, you could find yourself in numerical disadvantage against an opponent who decides to "double Rax" himself with a Reactor. You COULD tech up, THEN move the Rax over to build a Reactor. That'd be one way to tech and mass, then build the new Factory on the Tech Lab for teching, then move it to the Reactor for switching unit masses.

Or you could build the Reactor first, then tech up your large army with the Tech Lab, build the Factory on the Reactor for massing Vikings, then tech them with the Tech Lab while you boost your forces with more stuff from a Reactor Rax.

All in all, it makes for some fairly interesting decision-making in terms of strategic and tactical application.

It's not just a faster tech up that the Tech Lab offers. Anyone who has played Protoss ought to know that teching is only half the battle. You actually have to build the units that do the damage before that tech means anything. The Tech Lab offers you variable teching in separate lines of tech, without as much of a building commitment.

 

Well don't forget you could technically spend build time on both. While you are going to take a direct production hit from going to the tech lab instead of the reactor..... I think it might be worth the tradeoff.

Especially since Terran is so dependant on early tech. Just going M&M may keep you alive until mid-game, but it's not going to win it for you in the later tiers.

 

Welcome to the forums Scrubhuman. Great post. owerup:

I agree that the new addons will grant Terran the flexibility that they never had. However, I don't see not going reactor on a particular barracks because you went tech lab as a realistic disadvantage. Any Terran player who is planning to use marines are gonna get the tech lab on one of his barracks for attack range and stim pack. Once you've gotten all the usage you've wanted out the of tech lab, you could just quickly relocate it to refit it with a reactor while you build a factory in the place of the tech lab.

What you said about teching up is true, but I really didn't mean hard tech to siege tanks to begin with. Completely diregarding everything else to just simply tech straight to siege tanks, isn't really feasible anyway. I just think after doing whatever needs to be done in tier 1, the transition to tier 2 will be quicker and smoother than before.

 

@ Remy, you mean the transition won't be like an awkward, puberty-laden 13 year old anymore as Terran switches to Vults/Tanks?

Awww... my baby's growing up...

 

Remy i also favor of the universal addons. It really shows that terrans have developed new technologies to make things a little bit easy to access. Thing is about terrans, they always emphasized in defense. So to make it better, they made the reactor to speed up the unit productions to fill up the bunkers then to strike when theres large army. Then if thats not enough Tech Lab was made for better upgrades to decrease the chance of getting easily. These addons will also help on the economy. It'll save up resources for further use and again it adds up to new Intelligence, Analysis, Strategy, Tactics (Remy's art of war).....Victory.

 

one thing we should consider is how much the nuclear reactor add-on would cost. if it costs 100 minerals and 50 gas then it's arguably more expensive than simply building another barracks, whose cost is likely to remain at 150 mineral. so early game it may not provide that much of an advantage.

the use of the reactor kicks in when you start reusing it by attaching it to your newly built factory, which is much more expensive. this will also enable you to afford 2 factories straight away and enable mass production around the time where the economy is starting to boom. so there could be a huge boom for terran production capability around the time of the first factory.

 

That's a good point you bring up, Breaker. Gas cost on the addons will have a big impact on what they mean to Terran. Now I'm very curious about the cost of the reactor and tech lab. Shouldn't this be known? Terran was there available for play at BlizzCon after all.

 

I think the doubling of production without taking up space and time is a massive advantage. I don't remember the prices they had at BlizzCon, but they weren't anything prohibitive. I am pretty sure gas was needed though, so going for a Refinery early on was almost a given.

I imagine a good thing to do with the add-ons is have buildings with 1:1 ratio of the two. That way you have 1 Medic for every 2 Marines, 1 Siege Tank for every 2 Vikings, and tech for all.

 

10-Neon do you remember if both addons had a gas cost? I would think so. Then it would mean Terran has to start on gas earlier than before, the academy had no gas cost.