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#Post#: 881--------------------------------------------------
First Impressions of Patch 4.0
By: deorai037 Date: November 24, 2020, 9:14 pm
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Hi. Let me introduce myself. I'm the player known as RedNova. My
experience in this game is as a solo pub player (no teaming, no
in-house lobby experience, not in a dedicated clan). I started
playing just before the previous major patch was introduced
earlier this year. I had substantially high win/loss rates as
both Terran and as Zerg; my Terran W/L rate was roughly 160/30,
and my zerg W/L rate was roughly 89/27 -- on this account. On my
other account I have similar win rates with more games (the Zerg
win rate was better, in fact, in spite of the greater number of
games). Although there are certainly better players than me, I
think I have some valuable insights to offer.
With that in mind, my first impression of Patch 4.0 is that it
is a significant mis-step in design for the game.
---------- Section 1: T1 marines and T/Z imbalance
-----------------
As pretty much everyone with a brain knew by the end of the
previous patch, Terran was substantially stronger than Zerg. If
you pitted six strong Terrans against two stronger Zergs, then
the Terrans would pretty much win every time.
But why was Terran stronger than Zerg?
A lot of people seemed to pin things on the firebat, and I agree
that the firebat was extremely powerful. If a single decent
Terran was left alone, then that Terran could secure 3 gas and
transition into 11/13/14 minute firebats, at which point they
could clear out pretty much every single Zerg forward spawner on
their half and cripple the Zerg economy.
However, the firebat wasn't the only reason why Terran was so
powerful. Firebats were most powerful within a very limited span
of time. If you didn't get firebats out early enough or didn't
do enough damage with them, then you might just as easily have
wasted a potential gas and mineral advantage.
The arguably more substantial reason why Terran was so powerful
is the t1 marine. With the same money it would take to squeak
out a single chem plant and five firebats (roughly what you'd
need to wipe out early hatcheries), you could afford to upgrade
your generator to roughly level 15 with the 500 mineral upgrade
(so roughly level 25). With the money it'd take to buy a second
chem plant (which you'd need to continue pushing with firebats
in any meaningful fashion), you could purchase roughly 50 t1
marines, which is all you need to start mowing down large
spines. More importantly, t1 marines are also a far more
reliable strategy; whereas rushing firebats would mean playing
fairly risky against a decent Zerg player (after all, every
marine/shock trooper/generator upgrade would also constitute
spending minerals you needed to squeeze out that all-important
first chem plant), with t1 marines you can steadily build up
your forces and expect to be able to use them later. It also
would matter less if your gas eco was a little behind if it
meant that you'd already killed off two or three large spines.
T1 marines also force the Zerg into a really key dilemma:
without roaches and tar rush, Zerg has no tools to actually turn
t1 marine numbers against them. I occasionally see people try
and defend large spines with a mixture of infestors and hydras,
but the thing is, if the Terran player is aware that you're
defending with infestors and hydras, then they just bring even
more t1 marines (which they were going to do anyways if they're
playing t1s) and then burst down the big spine faster than spam
clicking with infestors can heal it; you just end up with dead
infestors, dead hydras, and now you're upwards of 1.1~2k in the
hole with no way to really stop the t1 onslaught.
For Zerg who are experienced, it's relatively easy to suppress a
single strong terran t1 player by just building your early
spawners on them. However, with two strong terran t1 players,
unless you were extremely lucky and managed to catch one of the
terrans off guard early on (i.e., you managed to snipe an early
marine somehow, in which case the terran was probably lagging or
just not that good anyways), it was often difficult to suppress
them and still transition to roaches before they could pump out
enough t1s to end you. With three strong terran t1 players?
Unless your partner had nothing but goobers on their half to
fight, you were pretty much guaranteed to die.
With this in mind, the first thing I wanted to check with the
new patch was how it adjusted early game balance. And, to my
surprise.... it didn't? Marines now cost a grand total of one
more mineral than before, which is honestly not much. After the
first minute of gameplay, a 1 mineral difference is negligible.
It means that instead of having 48 marines, you now have 45
marines. Meanwhile, nothing actually changed to benefit Zerg
players. T1 upgrades are the same honey trap that they were
before (buy them too early, end up with a horrible eco), and
early supply upgrades are as expensive as before as well. Sure,
Zerg players no longer have to worry about 5 firebats wiping out
their front line spawners at 14 minutes anymore, but t1 marines
are as powerful as ever, meaning that they still have to worry
about t1 marines wiping out their entire base by the 20 minute
mark.
So did this patch fix the fundamental balancing issue between
Zerg and Terran at the top level? I'd say no. I think a team of
six Terran players, who are all competent at t1 marine pushes,
will still stomp two Zerg players any time even with these
changes, because virtually nothing about that gameplay dynamic
has changed. You didn't need chem plants before to do a t1
marine push, you don't need chem plants now either.
-------------------- Section 2: Severe loss of strategic
diversity ---------------------------
So now that firebats are not just nerfed, but completely nerfed
out of viability whatsoever, what is left for Terrans
strategically?
Well, in the previous patch, Terrans had a lot of options
available to them: t1 marines, firebats, ion, and late game
t2/t3 marine pushes.
As I detailed above, t1 marines are just as viable as they were
last patch.
In the current patch, I just don't see t2/t3 marine pushes being
viable anymore. T3 upgrades, which are necessary to meaningfully
push (since otherwise you won't even have enough energy to
defend with t3 marines, nevermind push out) are out of reach
when you either need to drain your entire mineral economy (which
you need to afford t3 marines in the first place) in order to
grab them, since chem plants have been removed. T2 marines
weren't very strong in the previous patch, and they're not very
strong this patch either; even if you could just barely squeeze
in enough upgrades (without chem plants) to fully upgrade t2s,
they're still less effective than t1s against roaches, and
useless against brutalisks. Their primary issue was their bad
energy-to-damage ratio, not their raw mineral cost, and the
patch does little to address that. Meanwhile, bold, ultra-late
t3 marine-firebat pushes are no longer viable either, because
the firebats, which once used to usefully soak up extra hits
while keeping back the masses, now just steal energy that
should've gone to t3 marines instead.
Ions may still be viable, but only in highly coordinated games,
where every single Terran player immediately rushes for fast
ions and takes out a single zerg hive by the 18/19 minute mark.
Terrans have virtually no hope of actually holding out late game
because wall upgrades are effectively way more expensive than
before with the absence of chem plants.
So, what Patch 4.0 has done is essentially remove most of the
strategic diversity that has previously existed for Terrans.
Your only choices are to go for pure t1 play or mid game mass
coordinated ions. This begs the question: why keep firebats or
t2/t3 marines in the game at all at this point? Are they kept
around so that terrans can flex against a phenomenally bad Zerg
player?
Remember, I don't say this because I needed t2/t3 or firebats to
win or anything; my high win rate from last patch was largely
due to the fact that I know how to run t1 marines competently
and with high skill. In fact, because of how flexible and
powerful t1 marines are, I almost invariably went for t1 marines
in the majority of my matches.
Moreover, has this patch actually opened up new options for
Zerg? Remember, early/mid game t1 marine play has not changed,
meaning the single biggest threat -- and limiting factor for
Zerg -- has not changed either. Will a reduced beastling
cooldown stop marine play? Absolutely not! In the past, I've had
games where my t1 marines just straight up ignored a brutalisk
rush and gunned down both Zerg Hives; big units like beastlings
and brutalisks tend to overkill t1 marines, so large numbers of
t1 marines are actually more viable against beastlings and
brutas than t2 or t3 marines are (way more effective HP for the
mineral cost). In practice, this means that a Zerg who builds
beastlings is going to kill two or three more marines while I
kill large spines anyways.
What this all adds up to, then, is that this game has been
significantly simplified and this patch will likely grow very
stale very quickly. In games with competent players (not
necessarily pro, but Z Hex regulars), Terran is stuck just
spamming either fast ion or t1 marines as their only strats,
while Zerg is still stuck being forced to respond to t1 marines
with roaches. The high-level balance issues haven't been
resolved at all (I would argue that in high level games, the
game still will favor Terran heavily), and the gameplay
experience is likely to be significantly worse for newer players
who aren't skilled or experienced enough to hit t1 marine
timings.
-------------------Section 3: Design
Suggestions-------------------------
Here I will add the caveat that, ultimately, the design and
major decisions about how the game should flow belong to the
developer, and not me, a random high-level solo pub player.
If the developer's vision is to produce a highly aggressive,
streamlined, early-game focused action game with little to no
emphasis on strategic variety or decision making, then this
patch would be, by that standard, an excellent one. The game
turns into "t1 marines win or lose (to roaches) by the 20 minute
mark," with no late game to speak of. In that case, I think
you're pretty much doomed to bleed out players over time; there
are games that provide much better action-oriented highs.
I am not going to offer specific gameplay tweaks and changes but
am instead going to suggest that opening up new strategic
options, rather than gutting old options, is a far more
interesting way to balance games.
------- Section 3a: Firebats as a case study----------
Let's look as firebats as an example.
In the previous patch, the difficulty in handling firebats was
that there was only one way to respond to them: getting 5-7
damage upgrades. Firebats were absurdly effective precisely
because of their high armor and high damage, and as a Zerg
player you couldn't even dent them without investing a
significant 2~3k minerals just to get your foot in the front
door. So, firebats represented a huge cash gate: spend money on
damage/speed upgrades, and they will never bother you again.
Don't, and they will wipe you out.
The approach that Patch 4.0 takes is to, essentially, remove the
need to respond to firebats altogether. Zerg essentially no
longer need to worry about firebats at all, as they are no
longer very useful for tanking. If you're pushing the outer
hatcheries, you don't need firebats to tank for your marines and
you need the 250 gas for armory upgrades anyways. If you're
pushing big spines, firebats take a lot of bonus damage, so you
might as well have just spaced out your marines a little. If
you're trying to protect your marines from roaches with
firebats, then that's laughable because either a) you don't have
enough firebats for a full surround on your marines, so the
roaches just walk past your bats (who are barely doing damage
and aren't a threat that need to be dealt with) to wipe our your
marines, or b) you've got a full surround on your marines,
meaning you've probably severely overspent on firebats and won't
have enough DPS to wipe out the big spines in time.
An alternative method of balancing out firebats would be to
offer more strategic responses for the Zerg player (bear in mind
that, even with newly-added responses, I think that firebats
would still need nerfs, but to how early you can get them
in-game mostly so as to shrink their window of viability). For
example, the developer could have tweaked the hatchery's slowing
cloud ability to temporarily strip away armor from firebats, or
slow firebats to a standstill, or both; this would add extra
micro and decision making to a Zerg player's plate, meaning that
a Zerg player could at least mount a temporary defence against
firebats at least until they could afford those attack upgrades.
Or, new units or unit abilities could have been added to counter
firebats: perhaps hydralisks could have morphed into stationary
impalers that could greatly damage firebats from a distance (for
a cost), again allowing Zerg to fend off early firebats. New
unit abilities could have been added to help counter firebat
massing strategies (with foresight); perhaps baneling spawners
could be upgraded so that the resultant banelings are
"fireproof," forcing Terrans to bring and micro marines
alongside their firebats instead of braindead firebat spamming.
-----------Section 3b: t1 marines as a case study------------
T1 marines were largely untouched by Patch 4.0. As noted before,
aside from roaches (and infestor + hydra works to a limited
degree against less-skilled Terran players), there aren't good
options for dealing with t1 marines because in order to counter
t1 marines, the counter needs to turn marines' low HP and high
numbers against them. Roaches do this by literally turning
marines into more forces for the Zerg, meaning that that 50
marine army is now a 50 roachling army in the Zerg's favor.
The easy alternative option for countering marines is AOE
damage. This is how infestors work against smaller t1 marine
armies: infusing gives big spines more time to deal massive AOE
damage. The problem is infestor-hydra alone don't do this well
enough. So, one way to open up more strategic options for Zerg
would be to add new ways to buff infestor-hydra-spine against t1
marines. One way would be to buff transfuse, although I would
take caution with this approach as buffing transfuse would also
affect a significant number of other parts of the game. Other
similar approaches might involve adding tankier buildings (what
if tankling spawners could have an upgrade after armor 2 that
increased their armor to 4 while reducing their HP a bit?) or
improving the hatcheries' slowing cloud ability (maybe the inner
hatcheries could be lairs that have increased cast range), all
of which would give big spines more of a buffer to wipe out t1
marines. Moving beyond big spines, adding a unit that deals AOE
damage (like the fireling, which was removed) and comes online
in time to actually soft counter t1 marines would also do the
trick.
As a side note, though, because terran strategic options have
been severely limited by Patch 4.0, implementing too many new
options for Zerg against t1 would likely throw the game out of
balance even more --- because then terran would end up with no
viable strategic options at all.
---------------Section 4:
conclusion-----------------------------
To summarize my issues with Patch 4.0,
a) Patch 4.0 does not actually resolve Terran-Zerg imbalance at
high level play because t1 marines are still powerful
b) Patch 4.0 makes the game less complex and frankly less
interesting due to cutting out strategic options
c) cutting out strategic options makes this game less friendly
to new players and, likely, more boring for veteran players in
the long run
d) A serious second look at design philosophy is warranted by
all of the above
P.S.: If you want to fix "newbies seem clueless and only turtle
up," add an actual tutorial maybe?
#Post#: 885--------------------------------------------------
Re: First Impressions of Patch 4.0
By: ZergTriumph Date: November 24, 2020, 11:13 pm
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I agree with your major points:
1. The game is still heavily imbalanced against zerg to the
point where it is essentially impossible for zerg to win against
3 good terrans on their side.
2. There is a lack of strategic options. The best strategy for
terran is always to take every possible gas and attack the zerg
as soon as possible. The best strategy for zerg is always to eco
up as fast as possible and hope to survive behind big spines
until enough good units are out.
I like your idea about making the interior nests into lairs with
larger blinding cloud range (and perhaps more than 3 blinding
clouds available with faster cooldown).
Perhaps the cost of transfuse could be lowered, and infestors
could start with enough energy for 1 transfuse.
Or perhaps there could be a way for zerg to actually punish
terran early if all 3 terrans take 3 gases. That would make the
game worse for lobbies with noobs, but if the game were actually
somewhat balanced and there were multiple strategies available
for zerg, more people would play the game. In my experience,
players are looking for games that are balanced and require
strategic decision making.
#Post#: 889--------------------------------------------------
Re: First Impressions of Patch 4.0
By: Speed Date: November 25, 2020, 5:13 am
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T1 = 3 damage (base) for 1 energy
T2 = 6 damage (base) for 2 energy
Sure there are upgrades like penetrating laser and cons1 that
benefit T1 more than they benefit T2. Nonetheless, the
unupgraded energy consumption is equal, and T2 is supposedly
doing better vs. armored targets.
I've made walls of text like this post and I won't repeat
myself. I disagree with this and I think with chem and firebat
being out of the game zerg is able to respond to early
aggression a lot better than before. If you build spawners up
front past 1st supply you are all-in in my opinion (even more so
if you upgrade ANY spawner capacity, that indicates all-in
play). There is a difference between "slowing" and "all-inning"
(trying to fully push back a terran). If your all-in doesn't
work, then I'm not suprised, and neither should you be, when you
lose the game after lol. Try not upgrading spawners before you
have good income, I'm gonna drop a random timing, I'm maximum
greed player, I don't really up any spawners lol. 8Minutes, if
you upgrade spawners before 8minutes and built any spawners up
front past 1st supply I'd most definetely consider you all-in.
If the terran isn't getting pushed in by your aggression it
isn't surprising, that you lose, at all.
Serious question; have you ever played vs. 3 slowling + full
capacity? Was it enough to push you inside, or did you manage to
hold on to 1 or maybe even 2 gas?
#Post#: 893--------------------------------------------------
Re: First Impressions of Patch 4.0
By: Adam Date: November 25, 2020, 8:15 am
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absolutely amazing post, but I dont agree with 1 thing - u rly
underestimate t2, as of now roaches are in no way counter to
them, hell I would even say primalas are strugling and about
ultras.. well most zergs were 1 leg in the grave by the time
they failed their way to primals so ultras arent even worth
mentioning
#Post#: 895--------------------------------------------------
Re: First Impressions of Patch 4.0
By: ZergTriumph Date: November 25, 2020, 10:10 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=<heXnab>Speed link=topic=99.msg889#msg889
date=1606302783]
T1 = 3 damage (base) for 1 energy
T2 = 6 damage (base) for 2 energy
Sure there are upgrades like penetrating laser and cons1 that
benefit T1 more than they benefit T2. Nonetheless, the
unupgraded energy consumption is equal, and T2 is supposedly
doing better vs. armored targets.
I've made walls of text like this post and I won't repeat
myself. I disagree with this and I think with chem and firebat
being out of the game zerg is able to respond to early
aggression a lot better than before. If you build spawners up
front past 1st supply you are all-in in my opinion (even more so
if you upgrade ANY spawner capacity, that indicates all-in
play). There is a difference between "slowing" and "all-inning"
(trying to fully push back a terran). If your all-in doesn't
work, then I'm not suprised, and neither should you be, when you
lose the game after lol. Try not upgrading spawners before you
have good income, I'm gonna drop a random timing, I'm maximum
greed player, I don't really up any spawners lol. 8Minutes, if
you upgrade spawners before 8minutes and built any spawners up
front past 1st supply I'd most definetely consider you all-in.
If the terran isn't getting pushed in by your aggression it
isn't surprising, that you lose, at all.
Serious question; have you ever played vs. 3 slowling + full
capacity? Was it enough to push you inside, or did you manage to
hold on to 1 or maybe even 2 gas?
[/quote]
If zerg goes straight eco against 3 aggressive terrans, they
will run over him. Even I was able to defeat you and spaceballs
once when my teammates all aggressively attacked you with T1.
Should we really have a game where there is no zerg counter to
such a basic terran strategy?
#Post#: 898--------------------------------------------------
Re: First Impressions of Patch 4.0
By: Speed Date: November 25, 2020, 10:39 am
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Old patch. Firebats. Bruta rush. No time to slow down to survive
T1 aggression.
New patch. No firebat (rework). Can address early pressure now.
Enough said.
#Post#: 900--------------------------------------------------
Re: First Impressions of Patch 4.0
By: ZergTriumph Date: November 25, 2020, 11:01 am
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We didn't use firebats. We literally just made marines and
killed you with power fields. Terran can do the exact same
thing in this patch. There is no zerg counter to 3 aggressive
terrans.
#Post#: 902--------------------------------------------------
Re: First Impressions of Patch 4.0
By: Speed Date: November 25, 2020, 11:48 am
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The option was there... I thought you understood that when you
said that you are happy you don't have to play rock paper
scissors vs. 3 terrans anymore.
We had to rush bruts at the OPTION of firebat doom push. And
yeah, T1 counters that surprisingly well... which isn't an issue
to me lol. In current patch we could commit to stopping the T1
cause the option for firebat doom push isn't there.
#Post#: 903--------------------------------------------------
Re: First Impressions of Patch 4.0
By: ZergTriumph Date: November 25, 2020, 12:15 pm
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How do you stop 3 aggressive terrans targeting down your big
spines with T1 marines and power fields before 15 minutes?
#Post#: 904--------------------------------------------------
Re: First Impressions of Patch 4.0
By: Adam Date: November 25, 2020, 1:06 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=ZergTriumph link=topic=99.msg903#msg903
date=1606328139]
How do you stop 3 aggressive terrans targeting down your big
spines with T1 marines and power fields before 15 minutes?
[/quote]
better question is how he managed to not recognize when terrans
are pushing him with t1 and not rushing fbs xD
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