Actually, SCVs get stuck easily through mass depot etc. Happens in regular and DS star craft. Especcially with noobs that haven't heard of sim city.

Drones get stuck(even when I am zerg as I try to fit everything possible in the smallest spaces) when spawning out of hatches, like if you really pack them. Larva's egg spawn is buggy and if you are rushing to build buildings some times drones will go through the hatch and other buildings flying and then get stuck half way to the other side. >.>

I think what would be cool is if you added like realistic things, perhaps maybe a Empire like look?
Garrisons [Bunkers] defending and a bridge maybe more terrain detail, mountains and chokes to influence the gameplay so it would be different everytime
It doesn't make sense for these two races [queens and raiders] to be fighting each other if they dont have a fortifed front line.
why would they just defend there temple when they could defend there lands far east/west which would be much better.

hmmm? just wondering..

how come you don't? fill the bunks up front with just 1 marine or 2 and cover it with another building that when killed it kills bunker; like a Gun Pad called Machine Gun.

Gets boring with same old things happening.. I also think there should be a selection to deploy your men on 3 angles.. top middle bottom, so your men would go straight at the middle [of course this would work perfect if there was awesome terrain and chokes to cut up a large army from moving]

Good ideas?

The things you're suggesting would make it no longer be desert strike.

Besides, I can't do much with the terrain because the AI pathing is already pretty bad.

How do you get stuck with SCVs with mass Depots? If you mean Supply Depots, you just click your way out. Unless the terrain edges get in the way between the ally bases or the geysers, and sometimes the larger buildings. I've never seen them get stuck from Supply Depots though. I've never had a Drone stuck. I just don't see how that happens. I main Zerg and I'm very neat with my buildings. Yeah though, it happens with Probes a lot when you make a building right where your Probe is.

Aside that though, is there a strat for PvZ in the beginning? I just find it kinda unfair if Zerg goes a very early Muta rush, and Goons just aren't reliable due to their damage type. It's not worth making Corsairs early on because you'll lose your Cell building by then, Archon may work if you're lucky but if the Zerg makes Hydras, it won't really work. Just wondering since I can't seem to find a way for PvZ. Feel free to correct me!

Yeah, protoss really sucks vs early air, of any opposing race. Usually that's zerg because they have the cheapest air out of anyone with their spire cost. Dragoons just shoot too slow and being explosive are terrible vs mutalisks in particular, while Wraiths are classed as large (should be medium IMO). Protoss' best anti-air is really archons, but as you say they're a tight squeeze against really early air. I don't really know how to remedy this without introducing a new unit type or something. I had considered introducing a Void Seeker based on Zeratul's ship in SC2, but it would have to be the Mojo hero (currently used at the start to select mineral speed) and seemed a bit lame. I would've tied it to the robotics bay with the observer, but even so it suffers from the usual scout problem: explosive damage and 2x attack so is doubly penalised by armor.

I just had a very interesting game, ended up being 3 protoss vs 2 (1 terran, 1 protoss) on top and the terran went afk until he came back with 21k in the bank. Yellow protoss went very heavy stargate, while I wanted to see what a dragoon army was like - worked fairly well, particularly vs the terran, until the protoss had so many corsairs that the entire ground was just webbed all the time. I've never seen anyone build so many stargates, and each of us 3 had average or above average numbers too. I already have some triggers in place to spawn some corsairs with less energy once you reach a certain number, but I think I need to ramp it up further because it really was overkill.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 27 2011, 7:44 pm by Lanthanide.

I've found maelstrom/storm and archon rapes Zerg air, especially those clustered Mutalisks. That with corsairs.

Terran air is far more troublesome, I still need to experiment. I don't know if scouts or dragoons are better. But in my experience, I'm leaning towards dragoons. Scouts seem to be caught up attacking ground units. It's problematic to have such powerful air units be rendered useless because they prefer ground targets.

[MAJOR BUG]
Its rare but if timed right... you can take over the SiloLisk with Infest. I don't know if it does with mind control but it takes it over with using infestation on the field. the silolisk cant die by units either and I dont know if I could boom it..

Well yes, it's a bit obvious that maelstrom/storm along with Archons would rape Mutas easily.

I still want to find a helpful strat for early PvZ though.

Hey Lanth, how about introducing the second Corsair? I forgot her name. You can put it together with the Observer and limit it to like 1 or 2 buildings of them. Just so Protoss can have a little boost against Zerg in early air attacks. I don't know what special ability you can give them but hey, it's just a thought. Or are they not able to create by trigger?

I could potentially do that, although it's explosive damage so not particularly good vs mutalisks still. My main concern is that it would make enemy observers too easy to kill. Since the current corsair does 7 damage and mutalisks have 4 armor, it means the damage on the unit would probably have to be 6 to be worthwhile and that starts to make it a bit too effective vs other units. Then if you give it low hp/shields it becomes useless. Very tight tightrope. Probably the best way to do it would be to make it 0.50 per building and potentially just make it a regular corsair. This would encourage people to build 2-4 observers and I could compensate by reducing their HP a bit.

Hellfire - if you've got a replay of that I'd be keen to see it. There are already triggers in place to prevent brutalisks from being stolen or killed by the various heroes and specials. In fact a while ago I found a bug where the infestation would continue forever if used when a brutalisk was on the field, so I fixed that up. I think it might have to be a particular combination of factors to produce the bug you've seen, so I'll really need a replay to understand what's going on. Usual story of if I can't reproduce it, I can't fix it.

That unit cant be created with triggers so no

Actually it can. If you play Tar Pit Defense you can upgrade regular corsairs into the hero type.

I don't know where the myth started (and I've repeated it myself) that extended heroes aren't creatable by triggers. Generally they are. What aren't creatable are the other extended units like gas canisters and mineral chunks.

Just tested it. No they can't be spawned by triggers.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 27 2011, 9:22 pm by K_A.

I was, although I just made a test map and it didn't work. But I'm sure I've played over maps where they were created, definitely the BC heroes (Mengsk, Dugalle).

Oh well, just something is needed for Protoss to make it more fair.

Just went through my maps and found the one that did it. They had pre-placed a bunch of neutral ones that they would Give to the players. So looks like they aren't creatable by triggers after all

I remember a game when the silo brutalisk was mind contolled by Infestation. I killed it with a boom, and also happened with Divine Judgement, but it eventually exploded.

Incompleted units aren't able to be created by triggers (Raszagal, Adun).

Ok, current changes in 2.47:

• Fix base-hopping exploit from Hellfire
  
• Insta-spawn powerup -$250 to $1750 to use, no longer requires 4 gas mines to use (seemed an irrelevant check since hardly anyone ever uses it early anyway).
  
• Changed bonus minerals for imbalanced teams, for an imbalance of 1 (2v1 or 3v2) the bonus remains 15% for 0-4 gas mines, but is now 20% for 5 mines and 25% for 6 mines. For an imbalance of 2 (3v1), the bonus remains 30% for 0-4 mines but is now 40% for 5 mines and 50% for 6 mines. The message to notify players continues to say just 15% / 30% bonus though, I don't want to clutter it up further (unless someone can suggest a succinct way of communicating the above numbers).
  
• Mothership changes as noted above: kills max of 6 units when dying instead of 7, sets friendly shields in death radius to 100%, no longer sets enemy shields in death radius to 0%.
  
• Immortals -100 shields, +105 hp: 225 hp now, 15 dmg, 5 armor, $250 for 1.66
  
• Archon +1 armor to 19
  
• Fenix Dragoon +1 dmg to 17, regular Dragoon remains 20
  
• Scout -30 shields, +20 hp
  
• Interceptor -1 dmg to 10, +5 hp/shields to 20/20 and +1 armor to 1
  
• Carrier: -$60 interceptor upgrade to $360, reverse 2.46 changes: +30 hp and interceptor regen time made a littler faster (but not all the way up to 2.45 speed).
  
• Void Ray +1 armor to 2, initial shield replenish pulse up to 8 instead of 12, max build of 5 instead of 6 but max on field remains 9.
  
• Marine range upgrade can no longer be researched: War Pigs will automatically use it however
  
• Stim +$120 to $345
  
• War Pigs +1 dmg to 13 (since they don't use stim)
  
• Overlord -1 armor to 5
  
• Broodling +10 hp, spawns 2.5 per creep colony, +$8 to $64 ($73 inc Drone).
  
  Additional changes
  
• Goliath +1 grnd damage to 14, -10 hp to 130, +1 armor to 4
  
• Thor +2 armor to 9
  
• Spire +$30, mutalisk +5 hp, spawns 1.20 scourge instead of 1.33, scourge damage +13 to 99.
  
• Greater spire cost -$40 (total cost now -$10 to $615), spawns 0.875 devourer instead of 0.75, guardian +1 dmg to 23
  
• Swarm guardian +2 dmg to 32, +9 hp to 120 (less susceptible to storm)
  
• Plague cost set to 105 energy instead of 135. Previous adjustment assumed defilers spawned at 200/250 energy but actually they only spawn with 150/175 and so 105 reflects the same intended calculation using this as the base.
  
• Robotics bay now spawns 1 observer and 0.5 phoenix, max of 8. Costs +$60 to $320.
  
• Observer now 40 hp 40 shields, 2 armor from 75/35/0.
  
• Reaver -$10 to $640 and spawns with 1 immortal instead of 2 zealots. The fenix zealots can still be spawned by the Warp Prism (stats unchanged).
  
• Void Ray -$30 to $400 (retains above armor change).
  
• Stargate -$20 to $640 and 1.25 corsair instead of 1.33. Also strengthened the energy nerf applied to corsairs to curb dweb a bit further, although in practice it will likely be 'very strong almost overpowered' instead of 'wildly overpowered'.
  
• Dragoon +1 armor
  
• Stasis energy to 128 from 130 (at 250 energy, there will be a slightly shorter delay before enough energy for the 2nd cast).
  

Basically a bunch of the changes as I've discussed above are now implemented. Decided it was worth giving the protoss the corsair on the robotics bay, and it allows me to make the observers weaker because I've felt like they've been too strong for a while. The 2 extra armor is to help them fend off against the enemy corsairs, and the HP drop helps ensure that they are indeed weaker vs other units too. Price changes for void rays and reavers are to accommodate the increased robotics cost.

I played with the 'fade' idea for reapers but it's just way overpowered. I'd have to completely change the current niche of the reaper. Example results: 28 zealots vs 22 reapers with current stats, zealots completely wiped out the reapers with about 7 zealots left. When I added fade with the current 1 armor 100 hp, the zealots managed to kill only 6 of the reapers. When I changed reapers to 0 armor 75 hp, the zealots only managed to kill 5 in that trial (in other words, no change). It seems that this cloaking completely screws the pathing AI up for these units. Note that as soon as you got detectors, the fade ability would become worthless. So this change would make reapers very strong early, and then no change once you got detectors; if I weakened the reapers to account for the fade they'd be much weaker once detectors were around.

I tried to reproduce the 'stealing the brutalisk with infestation' but couldn't make it happen just by spawning the brutalisk and using infestation against it. I'll need a much more detailed description of what happened or a replay to get to the bottom of this.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Dec 28 2011, 4:27 am by Lanthanide.

Changes as per above, but changed robotics bay to 0.8 corsair max 5 and stargate to 1.20 corsair instead of 1.25.

Just played a 3v2 game where I was the 2, and probably would have won if my ally hadn't made a couple of rookie mistakes. So I think the rebalanced mineral rate makes this a lot closer than it used to be.

http://www.staredit.net/files/2203/