The main apsect I hope SC2 retains from SC

I have played many RTS games and keep on returning to Broodwars. The reason I believe that I enjoy starcraft so much is that you always have vulnerabilities. I believe that many RTS games make it too easy to defend.

For example, in Warcraft 3, there was no reason to divide your army into many armies. Additionally, drops were very ineffective (that is if you even had access to a drop ship). So you have one large army all clumped together, and if an enemy did catch you off guard and started attacking your base while you were not there it was easy to recall. The game always seemed to end with two large armies clashing and the person who managed their army better winning. There was not nearly the emphasis on exploiting your opponents weaknesses with gorilla attacks to gain an upper hand in the game.

In starcraft, your largest vulnerability is you economy. You are constantly in a battle with the enemy to grow your economy while stifling theirs. The more you do grow your economy (expansions), the more vulnerabilities you have. Once you start expanding in starcraft you cannot defend against every possible kind of attack. If you do sink those type of resources in to defending your opponent will out expand and most likely win due to a superior economy.
This vulnerability makes scouting and recon paramount. I have found a great way to win is to only try defending against the types of attacks the opponent is preparing. Spend the rest of your resources on creating more units and creating a larger economy. It is not easy to defend in starcraft and that is one of the main reasons I believe it is a great game.

To get to my point, I hope that Starcraft 2 does not provide players with ways that are too easy to defend. It looks to me that the races all have more mobile defenses than in starcraft. I am not too concerned thought because it looks like each race is getting new mobile units that will allow them to try and exploit base defense.

Anyone have any input on how they feel the new defense systems will play a role in starcraft 2 and how it will affect the dynamic play of the game?

 

actually i like sc2 to have new stronger base defenses and mechanics. ok, sometimes turtling is fun as well.

the new defense system or stronger base defense will allow players to be more careful on choosing what units to use and when to raid a well protected base thus creating more strategy and tactics.

tier 3 units are rare to see in real games, so there should be some type of defense that can only be easily destroyed by tier 3 units thus making them not useless and not relying on mass tier 1 and tier 2 units.

 

As far as I can tell, base defense has not really gotten "easier" in SC2. There is some increased mobility- but all that means is that, after an attack, a base can recover more quickly, and, if they're being attacked, a player cna opt to cut their losses and surrender a position without surrendering all of their structures.

This certainly gives defenders more to work with, but it is not something that is going to make turtling a viable strategy.

Terran
The Terrans have Salvage- it will allow them to recycle a base or defensive position that they no longer need, or that they expect to lose anyway. This doesn't let them actually hold out in an attack longer, but it does make it so that they can produce a stronger counter-attack, or begin repairs more quickly. It means that they can "heal" after a battle more effectively, but I do think this is fair, considering the fact that all three races can move large numbers of units across the battlefield, very quickly now. The Terrans also have the Sensor Tower, the sinking Supply Depot, and the Planetary Fortress, while we're considering defenses.
As you mentioned, knowing enemy movements is a critical feature of success in SC2- the Sensor Tower gives the Terrans the unique ability to detect over long ranges, but this is partially offset by the fact that the Sensor Tower itself always gives its position away to other players.
The Supply Depot now gives Terrans the ability to quickly control the way units flow within space they control. It will allow the Terrans to decide which units they want to be fighting, and allow them to keep their ranged attacks ranged- in defensive situations. Of course, there is always the risk associated with placing your supply structures on the front lines, and it's greater now that other players will have more incentive to kill them.
The Planetary Fortress allows Terrans to sacrifice their famed mobility for some firepower around critical resource nodes. Interestingly, the Command Center can be used to boost one of three critical aspects of StarCraft gameplay: mobility (Command Center), information (the Surveillance Station), and resource control (the planetary Fortress) ...but only one at a time. The benefits gained by any form are offset by the opportunity cost of not being able to use the other forms of the structure.

Protoss
In terms of defensive structures, the Protoss do not appear to have changed much, but this can be misleading. What's happening here is that the Protoss are becoming more reliant upon their units, to bolster their structures.
The most noticeable change in defense is the inclusion of the Mothership's ability cloak structures- while it is something you'll see late-game, it can force other players to maintain detection if they want to siege a Protoss player.
The Phase Prism allows the Protoss to recover from attacks on their Pylons, meaning, unless the attacker is taking out the unit infrastructure, too, a Protoss base can be up-and-running after an attack in almost no time.
Because of its long ranged splash attack and high mobility, the Colossus, like the Terran Siege Tank, can act as an excellent defender on top of being a powerful assault weapon. It can stand behind the front-line defenses and tear away at smaller units (Marines, Zealots, Zerglings) that would normally give Phase Cannons a hard time because of their numbers. They can also be used, in certain map configurations, to provide defense where it is impossible to place structures, or even other units.
This kind of ranged defense can also be provided by the Warp-ray, except instead of specializing on small units, this unit can focus on large ones.
Warp-in is an often-overlooked change to Protoss Defense. Now, instead of having to haul an army across the map to defend a remote base, if you can afford it, you can construct an entire new army, where it is needed, when it is needed, anywhere there is Psi, which is basically anywhere you have a base. Like other things, Warp-in lets Protoss players recover from attacks as well, letting them place units where they are needed as the static defenses are being replaced.
Like the Terran and Zerg defenses, the new situation for the Protoss is simply a tighter interplay between defensive structures and units. It is certainly not easier to defend with structures alone.

Zerg
As we've been seeing, the Zerg have had a lot of changes to their entire defense paradigm. We have the fairly recent change, of the Spore Colony and Sunken Colony being mobile, and the more immediate change of the degeneration of structures that are off the creep.
As was the case with the previously-mobile Phase Cannon, and as is the case with just about all of the Terran defense, the new features applied to the Zerg defense allow for them to recover quickly after an attack or minimize their losses, by letting them retreat from bombardment.
The inclusion of the Queen as the defensive "hub" takes a lot of pressure off the Zerg economy- they no longer have to spend so many Drones, but it also makes it tougher for them to defend on multiple fronts at once, for a prolonged period. While it is still up to debate, I believe Deep Tunnel will allow the Zerg to hold their own against continuous assaults, at least within the scope of most games.

As it appears, the main thing that is changing is not a player's inherent ability to easily defend, but the ability to extract more from their defense with the appropriate application of skill. With each bonus though- with each decision a player can make, there are drawbacks, too, that they will have to take into account. StarCraft, like any good game, is requires making decisions. What we are seeing, in these new defenses, is the player being given more choices when it comes to defense, but more responsibility at the same time, because every choice could hurt them if applied in the wrong way.

 

KacherMB great post

I believe in what you've said as well.. SC stands out vs all the other RTS games even modern ones! Because of the unique balance and emphasis on scouting, base control, micromanagement... player choices.

In other RTS games and I've played alot... there tends to be 1 or 2 strategies that you can do in almost any game without scouting and get away with it, or at least open strong into a good game. This isn't true in SC if you don't know what the enemy is doing you're fugged!

 

power vs mass

if some1 starts to power (2gate for instance) while the other players goes for mass (Fast xp, for more income)

the player who does power have to time their attack to attack while their power is at its peak compared to the player who mass, since mass is quickly transmuted into power, and with more mass u will quickly get much more power
so 99% of games is a constant power vs mass equation

(this whole reply is maybe off-topic but thats what all starcraft tactics and bo's resolve around )

 

First off, great post 10-neon. I forgot about some of the new aspects you mentioned and enjoyed reading your post.

LJYLJ, this reminds me of the games we played against eachother in the tournament. We will ignore the game you played as terran becuase you terran is not nearly as good as your protoss=P

In the second game we played I tried going quick DT to deny you an exp and grab a quick exp myself. I was hoping that by the time you got obs, that the benifit of my exp would allow me to have an army of comporable size with the benefit of having an early exp. You ended up getting observers quicker than I thought (it looked like you were massing really hard) and hit me at a great time to destroy my expansion. This is the perfect example of mass vs power. You took perfect advantage of your mass to destroy my exp and pin me in my base.

In the third game we played it was similiar but instead it was Tech (me) vs mass (you). Unfortunately I did not do a good job at hiding what I was doing at all and when my dropship with DT showed up you had goons ready around the perimeter of your base. I got desperate knowing that if I failed to do any damage on the attack that you would have a huge advantage and ended up trying to force the dropship in and got it destroyed before a single dt dropped. I think the this game also demonstrates how I only had a small window to take advantage of my tech.

I just think it is amazing how many options there are in the game and how each option you take there is a chance the opponent can exploit it if you are not prepared.

I had a great time playing against you and learned a lot. It had been about 5 years since I had last played SC and have enjoyed trying to become competitive again

 

Turtling has never been a strong tactic in SC. When the battle ends up in your base you are usually losing So the hole point of SC was to try and push the attacking player back to his base so you could do critical damage to his unit production or economy.

I believe SC2 has given the various races a way to bounce back form a devastating attack on their own base.
In my experience playing toss my enemies loved to attack my pylons and take out my unit production and halting my research now toss can jump right back into unit production and research by using the Phase Prism.

Zerg have always been good at bouncing back from a economic raid. they could always just produce a new three drones right after they took out that pesky reaver. However Zerg has been incredibly bad at the front defense of their base. They had to wait for the building of a new creep colony and also they had to sac a drone. now they can move backward defenses to the front to thwart any quick second attack. They can also retreat their defenses deeper into the base if being sieged by a ranged unit.

Terrain have always been the best base to base fighters with some of the best defensive structures and the best sieging units. the terran now have even more toys to protect their base like the sensor tower and the Thor for siege.

 

first of all turtling is not totally intended to last the whole game, you just want to rally enough force or amount to be able to move into a new expansion or build an army able to take care of business,.. and if the battle ends in your base getting raids and stuff then the problem is your defense.. its quite possible that your turtling tactics have some cracks in the shell that most of the time your base are getting easy raids slowing your economy... Whats the point of turtling if you cant even muster your defenses...

Dont quite depend so much on the phase prisms coz they come at later tiers, and possibly at 2.5 coz they either come from robotics facility ot the stargate.. and if you are bothered with early rushes i think that the protoss are now more able to handle their own base on the videos that weve seen, the zealots are quite tough for the zerglings to deal with.. so perhaps a few with phase cannons are enough to stop the prob...

btw if planetary fortresses are still in the game then i'll bet that the terran base is gonna be the hardest to bring down..

 

Wow, this thread is full of great posts all around. Thumbs up to everyone. However, I have slightly different views on the new Zerg Queen.

While Terran and Protoss have newfound(and much needed) flexibility that they've never had, the Queen could become Zerg's Achilles heel. To be honest, having all of Zerg's static D built by a single unit scares me a little bit. In the inevitable case that the Queen is taken out at some point, it could be really tough for Zerg to spring back and rebuild base defense, since now you have to first build the Queen again. The Queen also must be evolved all over again, and if I'm not mistaken it doesn't start out with deep tunnel, which only makes matters worse.

Now that Zerg's detection has been nerfed, things like getting your Queen sniped by multiple Ghosts wouldn't be too hard to imagine. As building structures out of Drones is a Zerg racial identity, and has been balanced all these years, I feel that the Queen is an unnecessary weakness while trying to fix something that ain't broken.

Since Zerg base D hasn't been the best of the bunch in SC1, I feel that allowing Zerg static D to relocate, and more importantly, to be built without Creep(if that turns out to be the case), is a good start. But I just can't help but feel uneasy about the whole static D only built by the Queen thing. It definitely takes away some flexibility from the Zerg. I just hope the good will outweigh the bad when we see everything in action.

 

The main problem I had with Warcraft 3 was how the game has been designed for micro players: You can have 3 bases, if the enemy has a better micro than you, you lose, whatever your economy. The only thing he has to do is to send 5 workers to gold, 4-6 workers to lumber, to well play his hero, harassing you, using items, killing key creeps etc, and teching like hell to tier3 units. 80% of the official maps become then useless, as no creep ever blocked the key pathes for reasons beyond my understanding.

In Starcraft, macro management is as important as micro management, which makes this game more balanced in my opinion, then more interesting. I will miss the heroes/items system (unless I missed something), but I rather like this kind of gameplay. I just would have enjoyed a fourth race...

But I agree that most online RTS are just a race of who build the biggest invinsible base. Blizzard is not really famous for the defensive strategies in their games (be Warcraft, Diablo or Starcraft), and I don't worry about the game mechanisms.

 

I think Blizzard should do more the develop the new extra mineral veins that encourage people to build new bases. If players need to defend bases that are in the middle of the map susceptible to attack from all directions. Then by lowering the amount of minerals available near a player's base to only half way through Tier 2 or a small army and well on the way to Tier 2 then players will be forced to expand early and spread out their army to multiple bases in order to defend them all and face small skirmishes. It also forces players to scout more, something important a lot of people neglect to do and should definitely learn.

One problem with this is that tech tree climbers are going to be at a disadvantage since they forfeit defenses at the beginning in order to gain big guns before their opponents. However the new base defenses available will serve to alleviate some of those pressures. All in all, I don't think SC2 will just be one clumped army against another clumped army.