4 ms·
As a master-level player of SC2 and once a top-1000 ladder player of Brood War I would also love to a see this genre evolving and staying fresh. I think that S
by stephc_int13 6y ago
As a master-level player of SC2 and once a top-1000 ladder player of Brood War I would also love to a see this genre evolving and staying fresh.
I think that SC2 should be studied for its qualities but also for its mistakes.
I think it is overall an excellent game but at the same time I feel that it was not as well designed as SC1, even if patches improved it and fixed some glaring errors over time.
A few things that come to mind:
- Free units, they are extremely hard to balance and can easily lead to stale situations, and in my opinion they never feel right.
And to be clear, projectiles are not free units.
- Spell casters able to stand a fight on their own and be massed, again it does not feel right and lead to imbalance/abuse. Spell casters should be support units, fragile and not scalable to a whole army.
- stackable aoe damage, because it leads to death ball armies that can be extremely difficult to engage, with somewhat difficult to read and seemingly random outcomes. A good aoe design is the SC1 inspired Psionic Storm, powerful but not stackable.
- Hero units, there is only one hero unit in SC2, for no good reason.
- Population cap, in SC2 the population is capped at 200 supply, this is an inheritance of SC1 technical limitation, but it has a strong impact on SC2 late game, not for the best as players tend to invest in defensive structures to compensate, leading to potentially static/ boring games.
- cjbprime 6y agoThese mostly seem to have been solved in modern SC2 already -- swarm hosts are no longer a lategame unit, high templars and ghosts are extremely vulnerable to units like speed banelings, viper abducts are powerful against motherships, it's fairly rare for tournament SC2 games to last more than 20 minutes and when they do it's not because there are fields of static defense splitting the entire map: more like mining out for a 200 supply fight, after which the next fast remax's composition choice will decide the game. (Am also Masters SC2.)
- Synaesthesia 6y agoI think the biggest problem is just how quickly units do damage and how fast fights go. It's way too fast! Brood War has slower fights and it better for it.
- hjnilsson 6y agoIndeed. While the damage & health numbers are the same between games, the improved “MicroAI” of the units makes them much more efficient. Doubling the health of all units, would make the game more interesting.
- baby 6y agoInterestingly that’s my biggest issue with dota2, and with ssb (I thought the first ssb64 was amazing because it was pure skill, after that it’s just a mess)
- halflings 6y ago> - Population cap, in SC2 the population is capped at 200 supply, this is an inheritance of SC1 technical limitation, but it has a strong impact on SC2 late game, not for the best as players tend to invest in defensive structures to compensate, leading to potentially static/ boring games. I actually find the population cap to be super useful, and serves the opposite purpose: Without a supply cap, the player with the better economy can just turtle up, defend their bases with strong tanky units, while they build a gigantic army. The supply cap forces them to move out and attack, trading units.
- stephc_int13 6y agoThere are pros and cons, and I agree that the supply cap is also something that can be used to reverse an unfavorable situation, knowing that over time the other player won't keep the economic advantage he gained early (same with upgrades or tech). But I think that's the opposite of being a pro-turtle mechanic, or at least in this case your incentive for turtling is when you've already won. I think that diversity of ressources on maps should play the role of supply cap, leading to different strategies on different maps.