The Thematic Imbalance of Starcraft

Sunken was never in the middle. Drone + creep colony + sunken mutation = 175 minerals, the most expensive defensive structure in the game. What are you on about?

Now it is not the same as the bunker as there is no sunken colony. The spine crawler does not have a creep colony stage because it was an unnecessary stage in SC because people already knew what they wanted there (GTG or GTA), so no need for the branching. Plus the crawlers are units, not buildings, hence no creep colony stage. Creep is spread by units in SC2.

 

So in actual fact:

Drone + creep colony + sunken mutation = 175 minerals

Bunker + marines = 100 + 50 to 300
Full bunker = Bunker + 6 marines + Neosteel Frames upgrades = 100M + 300M + 100M&100G = 500 minerals and 100 gas And the aditional full bunkers are only 400 minerals. Cause the upgrade is a once only research.

Photon Cannon = 150 minerals.

So taking everything into acount the Terran is the most expensive and the Protoss is the cheapest. Which really strange having the Protoss version the cheapest when they are a race which are quite expensive to play as.

 

But the photon cannon has a fraction of the punch of a full bunker or a spine crawler. And you can't move them, unlike the marines and the crawler (in fact you can even move the bunker with salvage). The cheap price tag makes perfect sense.

 

terran makes offense. it's always there and ready...

You make it seem like the bunker can't be unloaded once the marines are in it...

wow...

 

Filling a bunker doesn't cost you anything considering you make marines anyways... come on now... lets be realistic.

And a bunker does not pack a punch, lol... it takes a bunch with 1-2 scvs, in fact, it practically takes punches forever.

 

Yes but marines in a bunker are not marines fighting for you far away at the enemies base .

 

Edit: Sorry for digging up so ancient a post, was looking up AtlasMeCH's posts wondering about a somewhat controversial post he made and why he had negative rep(haven't seen anyone else with a minus there) and found this and well, one thing brought the other >.<)

How?
Our world's 4-dimensional, both 3 and 7 are out of the question for the world we can percieve.

Light and time are one and the same, how?

I think you have confused lots of stuff about physics, mate. Such conclusions are really not the product of rational thought.

Time is the 4th dimension. We have 3 dimensions for space because to describe a spot or item in space we need 3 linearly independant vectors for it. Time is a requirement because we cannot percieve matter without motion and there's no motion without time.

When you're sitting on a couch you're doing it for a definite time interval. Without it your state cannot be described. We cannot percieve matter without motion(if something doesn't move we cannot know it exists{the light has to travel from the item we're observing to our eyes to observe it, to take a blunt example, while everything is in constant motion at least in particle scale} as we cannot percieve motion{and time} without matter{if nothing moves then we cannot feel the change/difference to the previous state so we're in stasis}. That's the reason why the world we percieve is 4dimensional. There can of course be dimensions we cannot percieve(theories so far have gone up to 11,13 and even 24 and 26 dimensions).

As for scientific work: Theories are called theories just because of that. They are not reality, they're an idea(inaccurate word, but english isn't my native language) about reality that is believable so far as it's tested and not proved wrong upon reality. Every theory is a step into understanding the world and provides ground for more theories and tests and mathematics to be based upon and the human knowledgebase and understanding of the world can move ahead.

As for things like "god created the world in 3's and 7's that's why it's beautiful"... Who says these things, really? Where are they based? As combos that lead to 3 and 7 as you can find you can find equally many that lead to other numbers, such number-based conspiracy theories have no scientific value, really. Observing sets of things and giving special cosmoligacal value to their cardinal numbers is just baseless and ultimately dumb, imo.

A reasonable voice would say: "If such a thing as A existed(A is apparently not observed yet) then it would make B convenient, solve C but would perhaps create and obstacle in D"
"A(something unobserved) created B using C to make B beautiful" is just baseless and has no meaning.

Edit: as for the 2 articles linked in your post(Redorbit article and Ezine Article)

The first one talks about a theory that some physicists have concieved. String theory has evolved since 2005 and the number of dimensions they're talking about has almost trippled up to now. A theory is just a step to another theory and a base for scientific method to work on.
The second article on ezinearticles, is just a pile of crap filled with mistakes(not all of them accidental) and forces stuff to fit the lucky number 7. I won't comment on it in detail though it's just a waste of time.

 

See I don't understand why Time was classified as a dimension when it is actually quite different from the other dimensions. This makes Time a controversial, or I'll just say a Gray area dimension.

What physics fails to acknowledge is the significance of color, because physics cannot wrap its rational head around it.

If you watched the history channel special on Einstein, it explained how Einstein's world would have actually been considered a Theme Park, it proposes that we live in Einsteins theme park.

But what is the difference between a dimension and a theme? Colors have been refered to as dimensions of color. It is infact irrational NOT to acknowledge the significance of color in our world.

Let me ask you this question... would color exist with out time? Theoretically, light is made up of color itself. Yes, there are colors that are outside our visual perception, but with in light exists the 7 colors once again.

it is the combinaion of the 3 dimensions, length, width, and height, with the 7 dimensions of color, which make up the 11th dimension, and the single governing dimensions of time.

You have physics, and then you have Thematics. Physics can't seem to wrap it's rational head around the structure of thematics... yet, there does indeed seem to be a structure to it to some degree, with the 7 colors.

 

Colour is not a dimension. In simple terms you can't specify direction in the colour. Or actually you can define some direction (light to dark etc) but what would the meaning of this be? Colour is an attribute of the matter. It refers to the wavelengths of light it absorbs and is secondary to the actual matter.
Also it's subjective to the perciever. 2 different animals can see the same object as being differently coloured. Even colorblind people(fully or partially) see different colours than the rest of us. Plus the 7 colours of the rainbow were initially 5 but 2 more were added just for symmetry. People see beauty in things with 3 or 7 "sub-things" in them and try to force such stuff from where no such 3 or 7 numbered clear subset exists.

For example: The rainbow is created when light passes through a water sprinkle(not sure if that's the actual word for it, I'm on my limits regarding english on this topic, lol) and part of it bounces out while part of it goes through. This has a specific effect on the light ray: it changes it's wavelength. What we interpret as colour is that different wavelengths of light trigger different inceptors(again not sure if it's the right word to use) in our eyes and so our brain interprets this as a specific colour. There are unlimited numbers of different colours even inside the rainbow. The human eye can only see some of them and so we only care about these. We can see more than 7 deffinitely. Another animal could see more or less than what we can see. It's not an objective thing to consider, colour is just an interpretation.

To illustrate, A, B and C are sitting on the couch watching a football match and drinking coffee(why coffee and not beer, you ask? well, my example has a cup in it and you can drink beer easily from a can, let's consider they're not huge football fans, they just had nothing to do that evening)
A: Pass me the violet cup, please
B:There's no violet cup here. The only one close to violet is the Indigo cup, I take it you mean that one?
Coh, it's purple!


========|===============|====================
Purple Indigo Violet
Taking the same colour type(violet) and breaking it into 3 parts naming each of them differently(we have to do it else if there was both a violet a purple and an indigo cup in the previous example, our friends A B and C would be drinking each other's drinks). It's useful to do so, but the limits are not definite. You can shuffle the limits around and still get the same effect. A deeper violet is purple, a less-deep-than-purple is indigo and violet's violet.
===|======================|======== and =====|=====|===== and ===========|===|===== all do, so long as you can distinguish the one from the other.


As for the dimensions of colours, well, I think I've heared that you can create all colours using Red Blue and Yellow(or anyway 3 colours). If that's true and can affect the whole light spectrum and not only the visible by human beings part, I believe it's safe to consider that the colour is 3-dimensional(or whatever's the minimum number of light spectri from which all others can derive, haven't really bothered with that so far, tbh.

Dimensions are not something that you can add up or multiply randomly. The dimension of a space is the minimum number of vectors of that space that can generate all others.

For every 2 points in the universe, A and B the minimum number of straight lines we have to draw to connect them is 3. 1 for height 1 for width 1 for length(the only thing you need about them is that no 2 of them are parallel)


Time is classified as a dimension because to define an object's location we need to say where it is and also when it was there. As it is impossible to percieve matter without motion, we cannot define the location of matter without adding in time as motion is a function of time. Let's consider a reference point O and a fly flying near it at point (1,1,1) Is it enough to describe the fly's location? No. When is the fly there? Just by saying it's at point (1,1,1) means that the fly has always been there and will always be there. That's metaphysics. What we say is: At t=0(that's the reference point for time) the fly is at (1,1,1). That essentially means that the fly's coordinate's are (1,1,1,0) thus 4.

The colour of the fly? It's black. Or brown, or whatever. When a ray of light hits the fly, the fly absorbs part of the energy and radiates an amount itself. Rays of the light the fly radiates are caught by the eye of the observer and translated to colour. According to what the fly is made of, what the temperature of the fly is and other parameters, it'll radiate a different wavelength, and thus a different colour. Colour is deffinite and important but we don't need it to describe the fly or where it is. If the fly radiates in UV too, then our brain can't assign a colour to that radiation, so saying "The fly is blue" is not accurate enough and thus not enough to define anything other than our personal perspective. Saying that "The fly radiates light in frequencies x/y/z and only those" is accurate and can tell us both what colour a non-colorblind human being will see, what colour certain animals with different eyes than ours will see, and also what colours we won't see.


How does this radiation happen? With motion. The ray of light hits the molecules of the fly, electrons absorb the energy, jump to a higher energy state, then they jump back to the lower energy state sending off a photon charged with Y amount of energy. That Y amount of energy makes the photon wave more in a specific wavelength which our seeing organs percieve, and translate to a specific colour. If it were not for motion, we couldn't have defined anything, and motion consists of 2 things: time+space Space as to what "is" and time as to how it moves to occupy other space.
We need 3 dimensions to define a spot in space and 1 dimension to define a spot in time, thus our system consists of 4 dimensions. These 4 are enough to give us information about the colour too(a photon moves at Y wavelength so it has Z energy in it and it'll translate to the human eye as "yellow".Thus we only used motion(space(wavelength) and space/time(movement) to define a colour.

It's not as simple as that, but please, consider that english is not my native language so I cannot be accurate or lively enough for science in english. Asside from mathematical terminology, terms for other sciences(physics/biology etc) elude me for the time being.

I hope I was clear enough though.

Btw, what are Thematics anyway? Wikipedia has something weird about it

 

What Atlas means is spatial dimensions. Time is not a spatial dimension.

Space and time are in some ways like real and imaginary numbers. Bring them together and you have "space-time" or "complex numbers". But when we talk about numbers in common parlance, we usually mean real ones, not imaginary or complex ones. Talking about dimensions is kind of similar.

 

Thematics is what I would describe as the function or balance of Ideas.

When you look up the definition of Ideas, the 5th definition down is...

theme: (music) melodic subject of a musical composition; "the theme is announced in the first measures"; "the accompanist picked up the idea and elaborated it"

Themes and Music go hand and hand, and music is of or related to the word Muse.

chew over: reflect deeply on a subject;
the source of an artist's inspiration; "Euterpe was his muse"

Which is of and related to the word "Amusement", which is at the heart of what Entertainment itself is and everything that it strives for.

Theme park, or Amusement park..... The art of entertainment.

If colour is merely a wavelength then there is no doubt that it is of and related to music. Interestingly enough, there are 7 notes in the scale.

these 7 notes are clearly of direct correspondence of color, because the distance from each other is just enough to give each note its own identity. Each color is just at that right point where it has its own identity.

And on that note... that's what I think I'm getting at. In diablo , there are 7 classes, but if the game turns out as brilliant should be, there should be 7 identities.

When defining entertainment, sometimes we can only clarify what it is in reference to boredom.

So I would say, The opposite of boredom.

Because there is, like you said, colors with in colors, and it is true, we can acknowledge familiar identities from the other identities with in a single identity.

Anyways, It's blizzard ENTERTAINMENT.

Blizzard needs to hit its roots hard.


But going back to the original point of the thread, "The thematic imbalance of zerg"

I argue that with in the race of zerg, 1 of 3 colors, we can not identify enough of the 2 other colors, terran and protoss, with in the color of zerg.

This is why I proposed that the overlord be able to land, but would not be able to lift, familiar yet still unique of terran, and then when that overlord lands it would emit creep naturally, but would have the option of converting that creep in to a slow toxic creep for a continual mineral cost, familiar yet unique to terran's repair.

It is familiar yet unique to protoss in the sense that a pylon has it's build radius, as the overlord is also considered zerg's control building/unit.... when it lands it yields that build radius and gives power or life to the structures with the creep.

Kill the overlord, the creep dissipates.

Finally, it isn't JUST zerg that would have this thematic problem.

Like, protoss should have the option of lifting a pylon, but perhaps that pylon would now be stuck in the air and not be able to come back down.

That would be pretty interesting.

Final note to the creep concept though...

The concept would be, that because of the toxicity of that creep, it would be having a weakening effect on the unit, therefore, making it more difficult to move through the creep, reducing it's speed to some degree.

 

BTW: This has gone completely from starcraft to philosophy, lolz Copletely off-topic, wanna move the discussion to the OT forum?

Not really. You can work with Real numbers independantly and do calculus of real numbers. They are not dependant on the Imaginary ones.
On the other side there's no problem in physics, or no situation in reality in general where you can consider space without it being a function of time. Consider a building, a tree, anything. Without motion you cannot percieve them(cannot see, feel, interact with them, with motion out of the equation it'd be as if nothing existed) and motion has time inherent in it(nothing moves from spot A to B in 0 time).

I can't think of a good enough example at this time(just came home from studying and my mind's burned out a bit )

Spatial dimensions(At least if my understanding of spatial~= purely space related) are purely abstract and don't exist in real situations. You can assume that a certain item in an abstract environment is equipped with certain attributes(A set equipped with an operation does not need a time-frame to be considered in, but a real world item cannot be considered outside the time-frame in which it exists and interracts with the world)

 

It is reasonable to use color as a dimension -- as the definition of "dimension" is quite controversial.

Now, don't think that there are 7 colors. Thats ridiculous. Thats like say "this line segment has 7 points on it". Even so, that line segment is part of a larger line segment (yes I'm assuming 2 ends for the amount of energy in light).

Thats what I understand and omg pooping is good.
that being said, I have no idea wat's going on in this discussion.

 

I agree with that.

But also, when a person talks about dimension outside the context of modern physics, we normally assume we are talking about the (purely abstract) three spatial dimensions of classical physics.

Yet, quite often, people will take great pleasure destroying any mention of "three dimensions" by aggressively introducing a fourth dimension, like it matters to the discussion at hand.


Time being a dimension is only relevant if time is significantly different between two points in the system. Very often (even in physics) it is not, we ignore temporal displacement, and describe systems using three dimensions of space (x,y,z) and assume time (t) is the same at all points.

In classical physics, you may still need to refer to real points in both when & where terms if the system is dynamic one, but time isn't a dimension in that system in the same way that time is a dimension in a "space-time" manifold.

 

http://www.theimagineershome.com/blog/?p=1321

 

Quarks do not have actual colours; it is being used only as a metaphor for the three fold symmetry that quarks have. They might as well have called those three symmetries Rod, Jane and Freddy, for all it matters.

Why do you insist on taking quark colour literally, when it is only a metaphor?

 

If you read the top of the article it says...

The Imagineer's Chronicles

"Demonstrates one of the most powerful tools for developing a Unification Theory are ideas created by imagination."

I'm trying to understand thematics, or the function of ideas.

And I do believe it can be understood mathematically.

 

How can you reasonably understand something that's against reason? Mathematics and Numerology are not the same thing, get over it.

And what is the function of ideas? Try to explain things that you say in a way that makes at least a tiny bit of sense if you don't want your opinions to be treated like that. Being constantly non-coherent and copy-pasting stuff you googled, read the title but didn't understand at all"still you're quoting them for some reason" doesn't give you or your opinions any validity, really. Especially the fact that you try to FORCE your opinions on both the way the game should work(really? since when do games have to work according to what players say? if you don't like it, don't play it, end of story) and the way the rest of this community should think. And you've come as far as calling all of us stupid, not smart enough to understand the obvious(which you apparently need a journey to see{quoting you} and if noone sees it but one and that one has to take a journey for it then how is it freaking obvious, really?) etc.

Really quit posting, it's not even fun anymore