The Mothership

The mothership has returned to its original unique status in regards to the latest build giveing it 600 health 600 sheilds and costing a total of 800 resources and 8 dudes.

Current abilities
vortex - sucks in units and puts them into stasis

time bomb - creates a distortion in the fabric of time stoping everything and everyone other then the colossus and warp rays attacks

cloaking field - creates a large cloaking area that cloak everything but the mothership and the mothership cannot move dureing this also sucks energy while its doing this.

Now my quiestion to you is should this unit be unique or should it be balanced so you can have more then one on the field?

Currently i can see this being a unique thing brought about by the protoss versus (and this is my opinion) the old nuke terran's have.

Information is from http://www.scraftwiki.net/Mothership

If this is untrue and it isen't unique as of now then still post your views of what it should be. (I personally don't like the unique anything idea)

 

Not sure. But the idea of 12 Motherships flying around is not a comforting one.
Whatever it turns out to be, it needs to cost a HUGE amount of pop, I feel, to be fair.

 

The Mothership should stay the way it was in the original gameplay video. 46 21.00%
It should stay a superunit you can only have one of but with minor balancing changes. 126 57.53%
The Mothership should stay the way it was shown at blizzcon. 23 10.50%
The Mothership should be completely scrapped and a new unit built to take its place. 24 10.96%

Here is an old poll from this site on what we thought of the Mothership shortly after the Protoss gameplay video. Sufficed to say most people like the idea of a unique Mothership, and I count myself among them. I have no intention of debating with you because this has already debated several times since this forum's inception. Also, if this just turns into a rehashing of old debates it will be locked however until that point everyone is free to go nuts and hopefully some new views will come out.

 

Maybe something like 1 MS per Nexus would be interesting. Would give the toss an incentive to get more bases, even if getting them could be risky.

 

So are they finally undoing what they did that totally ruined the MS? About friggin time.
I dop agree the black hole could have b een a mite overpowered, but there was never a reason to crush the mothership into nothingness and make it into a general unit.

That said, the current ability set seems pretty good, but I would love to have planet cracker again.

 

Make the cost higher but allow more than one..

A self destruct option with massive splash damage would be nice as a last option would also be kool.

 

Sorry, but once again, Bthammer, the website you've sent us is out of date. It has the old Colossus and Viking.

On the other hand, the current version of the Mothership is still Unique.

 

By the look of the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfUijY5w1GU&feature=channel_page they should make the mothership non unique and give it the proper abilities respectively.

Look at the battle cruiser its has the same type of attack same health ( mothership has 400 health 200 sheild) and the battle cruiser comes with some interesting abilities to be able to tap into

defense matrix - 200 damage absorber

yamato cannon - death cannon

missile barrage - ata aoe attack

The mother ship costs 100 more gas then the battle cruiser too.

the carrier should attack less but do heavier damage to units with more health also it should carry about 6 interceptors that do more damage to armored units.

 

No, they should just make it worth the one use factor.

I think it could use another ability that supports attack. Right now it has cloak, but that is more of a defensive ability, and since there's only one mothership, it doesn't seem all that useful, and certainly deosn't fit aunit that is supposed to be the ep[itome of the Protoss fleet.

 

IF they make it unique it needs to thus be powerful enough to be a unique unit but not too strong to overkill everything.

Also this meen the carrier needs to rival the battle cruiser and ultralisk in power.

 

I don't really care if it's unique as long as it's viable in games. It's like the Colossus, it's such an awesome unit that fits the protoss so well, but will be a waste unless it will be used in most games.

That said, I kind of like the idea of it being unique, I mean you only have one mother, don't you? I can't wait for more info!

 

The mother ship should take the place of the protoss capital ship and the carrier needs some other role.

So this meens it should rival the battle cruiser and ultralisk as last tier unit.

 

I think the Mothership (as I have said in threads past) should in effect be the avatar of all the Protoss stand for. The Protoss all about using a few strong units effectively, the Mothership should take that to new the next level which means being unique and powerful. Its power should come from something that you really wouldn't need more than one of (the ability I have been pressing for this is a cheaper version of recall) as well as sheer physical might (high stats to make it hard to kill) however it shouldn't be able to take on a army on its own. Basicly it should have the single unit game changing abilities of the arbiter without being much stronger than a Carrier or 2 in actual fighting ability.

With the above in mind that means the Carrier should be the Protoss Battlecruiser (just like in Sc1) and there has been an insane number of suggestions how to do this, a semi new one I jsut thought of would be to give it two kinds of interceptors one with a damage bonus to armored unit and one with a damage bonus to light units (I know there have been other iterations of this idea but im not sure if they suggested actual damage bonuses). My favorite idea though would be give Carriers the option to etiher build normal interceptors or scarab interceptors (baiscly a flying version of the Reaver scarabs obviously with less damage though so the Carrier wouldn't be OP).

I don't know how many times I have reiterated the above in the history of this forum, but I will keep doing so until I am given a good reason why those are bad ideas or until they are implemented.

 

Doesn't the Mothership act as a mobile warp-in field or did they remove that?
I think time bomb would be better if you can actually attack with any unit, not just the arp ray and colossus. At least let the MS attack units under the time bomb.

As for vortex, the whole pulling in units just to put them in stasis doesn't make much sense to me, why not put stasis directly on the units like the arbiter used to.

As for cloaking, as I said before, I think it is utterly useless due to the number of detectors floating around by the time you get the mothership, in addition, it can only cloak a small number of units, with the arbiter, you could at least cloak several group all over the map by making more than one arbiter.

Heres my idea for the mothership.
As a capital support ship, It should support units, and not be directly involved in combat. It wwould only have the same combatt capacity as 1 or 2 carriers, but would be more expensive.

FOr abilities, it should keep the time bomb as a deffensive or offensive ability to lock down enemy units long enough for your forces to destroy them, mobile units can leave the field and once outside, are no longer affected, so it would be best used on slow or stationary units. Good for cracking defenses.

II think cloaking field should bne dropped in favor of a better defensive ability, I think wjhat would be best would be some sort of shield boosting skill to make the MS something of a mobile shield battery, that or a passive bonus to shield renegeration for anything in its area of effect.

As a MOTHER ship it should be able to deploy smaller ships. Maybe it could act as a mobilee stargate and deploy carriers and Phoenixes in the field. Have it lay warp beacons like probes do, but to warp in units instead of buildinhgs, they would be able to be destroyed as they warp in, so you should keep them near the mothership, away from enemies.

 

Good ideas BoP, with the warp-in/stargate/passive shield ideas. If u put a Time-Bomb on enemy defences would it stop the shots from leaving the field? @LordKerwyn the scarab interceptors sounds like a good idea, but maybe there should be a limit of 4 of them? or just cost double the interceptor price or something like that..

 

That's probably not necessary, they are single shot items and you would only be getting a few HP of damage per mineral spent.

Anyway maybe we should remake/ resurrect the carrier thread. We discussed ideas like that, as well as such things as an ATA only and ATG only interceptor. It was more of an answer to the BC's customizability than an answer to the carrier being crappy (since we didn't know about that at the time)

 

We might as well ressurct both the Mothership and Carrier threads then (which I might actually do anyways considering the sheer amount of stuff in them as far as these debates go, but at the same toekn my posts/typing was atrocious back then).

And I think I agree with BoP on the scarabs, they would be very inefficient as far as minerals per damge goes, so 8 (fired only 1 or 2 at a time) would be balanced. The trade off of course would be the damge would more easily kill groups of units as well as more easily break through high armor units.

 

As of now the mothership is not unique.

Its on http://www.sc2armory.com/ if you want to see it.

This also meens the carrier is fine as is because of its damage boost and slight cost reduction (does 64 total damage versus 48 damage) (no longer have to buy carrier capacity plus they come with 4 interceptors and also costs 50 less gas)

 

You only have one mother, unless your parents are lesbians. Are protoss lesbians? I rest my case.

 

ahhh.... ok i can see what type of family you came from T_T

anyway, the mothership is just a name to me.. if from the start it was named as something else it wouldnt have been to much of a question to debate about its "Parent-role" from the start..