I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. Are you saying I shouldn't do -2 damage to scout and instead keep it at 32 damage? Or something else entirely?

I believe I put the hero BCs in around 2.01-2.02. The main reason wasn't to help vs zerg, but to help vs protoss MC. At that time the protoss counter to BC's or indeed any terran army was just to mass DA's and they would MC the army and destroy it. The CPU never casts MC's on hero units so this immediately prevented that strategy from working. I've also added additional changes to weaken MC since then, such as starting some of the DA's off with less energy or more energy so that they cast Feedback instead of MC and broadening the target units that the DA will cast MC on, notably it now includes goliaths and dragoons. The faster firing rate on the Hyperion was a useful benefit vs devourers however and ended up being why I chose hyperion over norad 2 which doesn't get the fire rate bonus.

BCs do Normal damage and therefore the same amount to all enemy units regardless of size.

It doesn't represent any SC2 unit. I couldn't simply leave everything out that didn't have a counterpart in SC2 (Dark Archon, Medic for example) without severely gimping some of the races.

I think the valkyrie adds more to the terran army in terms of being an additional AA unit with quite a few HP, than the vulture would add to the terran army of being a mech vehicle (so medics can't heal it) that does concussive damage vs ground targets only.

Initially when the vulture was in I called it hellion, although it never really sat well with me because the hellion is quite different from the vulture. I ended up keeping Science Vessal name because the Raven is quite different, and the SV is available in single player anyway (same with the vulture). If I added the vulture back I'd probably just call it vulture. If I add Kerrigan, I won't be waiting until the expansion to do so.

K, just saying that it would seem cool to the coummunity that right as blizz releases their expansion you bring kerrigan. Also, the valkyrie seems to only add one thing: people like massing it. A bit too much. Like you said, it is the main anti-air unit terran use. If u replace them with vultures the armory becomes an anti ground building while you have the starport for anti-air as well as BCs. I don't understand what the valkyrie adds to the terran army at all personally. Other than that noobs at first sight say "WOOT!" then go "this game sucks, it is like evolves, units stop firing >.>"

I don't think I've ever seen anyone build the armory specifically for the valkyrie. Seems they get it for the banshee, and mainly only then because it had such high HP and armor. Now that it's down to 4 armor and wraith has been increased to 4, I see a lot fewer armories built.

The valkyrie suffers the same problem as the corsair: it has an attack that does very little damage over a very large area. Also akin to the corsair, it has an explosive attack. For these reasons it's only truly effective against large-sized weak and massed units. Mutalisks are small, so they take 50% to all explosive attacks. Additionally, valkyries are infamous for maxing out the map sprite limit, a large headache anyone who has played Evolves can relate to. I think adding them in a large massing game like DS for this last reason alone is enough to rule them out.

This is exactly what I am talking about. And yes, people like massing armories for the banshee. However, the 2nd unit, the valkyrie, is basically useless because it maxes out the map sprite limit and then causes people to rage so much that I end up seeing half the new players I introduce into the game leave just because the game has buildings that become a waste of money fast. And honestly, if you make the armory become pretty much unused then it becomes irrelevant to the actual metagame. Vulture/banshee makes a nice combo for anti-ground because when the Banshee attacks air instead of ground(often) the vulture will be attacking the ground instead. Plus, valks don't help at all. I think the original idea, at least mine in terms of usage, was that the banshee would kill ground units, while the valkyrie would kill any air that would otherwise distract the banshee from its job.

I would propose it to be a hero unit, but I feel it would be far too hard to balance if its damage were, say, four times what it is now.

Yes, making the valkyrie a hero is attractive, but the problem is that the 'non-firing' thing would still affect it. Spending $$$ to get a hero that doesn't do much is kinda lame. Also I quite like the Thor and definitely not replacing the Medivac.

Complete current changes:

• Mothership -1 armor
  
• Scout -2 A.A damage
  
• Immortals 3 shields and 2 armor, shields regen every trigger cycle (effective temporary 6 armor).
  
• Robotics bay -$50 to $270, Observer -20 hp to 40/20 shields/hp, 2 armor
  
• Void Ray pulse to 12 shields instead of 8, +$20 to $420
  
• Archon -1 armor
  
• Dark Archon +10 hp to 60, +2 armor to 6, -30 shields to 120
  
• Dragoon +1 dmg to 21 (hero remains at 17)
  
• Terran BC hero -1 dmg to 26/26 (regular remains 27/27), -$25 to $900
  
• Marine, Marauder, War Pig +5 hp each to 50, 85, 95
  
• Siege Tank -5 dmg to 40, -30 hp to 150 in mobile mode, +10 dmg to 85, +15 hp to 135 in siege mode
  
• Vulture replaces Valkyrie on Armory, price stays at $505 for 1 banshee + 1 vulture. Vulture is 185 hp, 3 armor, 28 dmg
  
• Valkyrie moved to "tech to nuclear armageddon" which now costs $250 for 1 valkyrie. Valkyrie +10 hp to 190, +1 dmg to 12. Ghost energy upgrade -$120 to $155
  
• Greater spire spawns 0.83 devourers (5/6) instead of 0.875 (7/8), price unchanged
  
• Hatchery price to $9 from $63
  
• Lair price to $333 from $434, now spawns 1 Queen instead of 1.5 lurkers. Max 2.
  
• Hive price unchanged at $256, now spawns 1 Queen + 1 Overseer instead of 2 Lurkers + 1 overseer. Max 4.
  
• Queen's Nest now cost $426 for 1 Lurker, 0.66 Infested Kerrigan. Lurker -5 hp to 160. Max 6.
  
• Infested Kerrigan 200 hp, 4 armor, 25 dmg, has 'fade' ability where they will briefly cloak when attacked, so attackers will choose another target unless detectors are around.
  

I haven't yet tested any of these changes. Infested kerrigan could easily end up being way too strong with the fade ability and that many HPs (see previous discussion about fade on reapers). The zerg changes preserve a total cost of $1,033 to get an overseer / hive tech. I didn't want to make the lair tech much cheaper than it is as it would make early mutas even easier. Will probably make the queen spell upgrades a bit cheaper too.

Terran changes are primarily to give the vulture a bit bigger niche in terms of high HP ground unit: so moved the siege tank down in hp to compensate. Vulture will kill a marine in 2 hits. No plans for vulture speed upgrade as I think it's just too unbalanced compared to the other races, especially with these stats.

Across all 3 races there's a bit of a nerf to the anti-air capabilities, with devourers spawning a bit less and BCs doing less damage. The scout bears the brunt of it though.

Interesting. I didn't expect for you to put that much of a limit on lair/hive. I also wonder, why not 3/3 instead of an awkward 2/4 lair/hive limit? Makes it so people have to morph Lairs into Hives 2 at a time >.>. I like the vulture change. Valkyrie change to nuclear silo could become quite interesting. Promotes mass BC.

The limit on lair/hive is really a limit on queens. If I made it a 3/3 limit then I'd be limiting the zerg player to only 3 overlords, which I don't really want to do.

It's unnecessarily complicated trying to limit the player to 6 total of lair and hives, eg allowing 6 lairs or 4 lairs + 2 hives is difficult; it's easier to just limit it to 2 lairs and 4 hives, so that's what I did. I don't know that you're every really going to get people trying to do mass upgrades to hives anyway. The way I'm going to have to handle it (since there hasn't been a cap on lairs or hives before) is to detect if you have 3 lairs, and then replace one of them with a hatchery and give the 333 refund, and if there are 5 hives then replace one of them with a lair and give the 256 refund which in turn can theoretically result in a lair being refunded, but in practice this is actually unlikely to chain like this because it requires someone to upgrade a hatchery into a lair at the same time that they're upgrading a lair into a hive and the build times are quite short.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 7 2012, 3:30 am by Lanthanide.

Ahh, I understand then . Thanks for the fast reply and great explanation!

Hmm, what about larvas? Is there a possibility they might get in the way of being able to re-place the Hatchery or Lair?

Possible. If so I'll just have to kill them. Generally people won't be doing this on purpose so it's not really a big deal.

Right, so now I've implemented the triggers for all of the above. I've gone with $300 per mine for the insta-spawn powerup cost, rather than something more complicated that is harder to communicate to the players (if only we could change unit names over time during the game...).

Few additional changes or tweaks to the above:

• Fixed a mineral exploit I spotted in the triggers.
  
• Valkyrie cost increased to $275, capped at 4, +2 damage to 13
  
• Banshee -2 dmg to 30
  
• Science vessal -$60 to $455
  
• Armageddon/Nuke sets the HP of the units it steals around your temple to 66% instead of 75%
  
• Spawn broodling cost -$20, queen energy upgrade -$30
  
• Infestation now creates a few Infested Kerrigans amongst the units.
  

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jan 15 2012, 6:02 am by Lanthanide.

I just noticed, Robotic Bay to $270? I think you mean Facility or else Reavers would be pretty cheap. But besides that, just wanted to report that Robotic Facilities is buildable up to 6 times, though text says Max is 5, when you build up to a 7th.

Yeah, I mean robotics facility.

And yes, I think I spotted and fixed that bug too, but didn't write it down and so missed it from my changelog above.

Wait, so are these in the current download now or.... ?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 8 2012, 10:09 pm by 3FFA. Reason: I missspelled "in" >.>

No, I haven't yet released 2.48. Was waiting for more feedback.

I was wondering if you would do a 66% refund if I would kill a building that I built.
like, I kill a Creep Colony so instead of wasting 50-60 minerals on the building I would be refunded at least 30.
or even with the Pylon,some buildings should refund you if you kill it.

It's possible, although not particularly easy to do because kills can't be reset to 0 easily. I suspect that KillScores for buildings almost certainly overlap, if not within a race then probably between races, so a protoss player go could kill their ally's buildings and it may be impossible to decide if it was a cyber core or a queens nest that they destroyed and therefore difficult to give the appropriate mineral refund.

Also I don't really want to give refunds for buildings killed in general; both for griefing above and because it would make the final special battle kind of silly: you could kill all your buildings, getting refunds for them, and therefore not spawn any more units. Use your new-found wealth to use specials to steal the enemy units and attack their temple, but they can't do the same to you because you have no units left.

Terrans have the refund because add-ons that are abandoned are given to Neutral and there's no easy way to give them back to the correct owning player and having buildings owned by Neutral screws up my spawn system a lot. It'd probably be possible to finangle the spawn system to cope with neutral add-ons but it would be a lot of work. Also terran getting this refund system gives them another extra edge over the other races: now that nuke is a much more powerful special than it used to be this probably isn't as necessary any more, but nuke used to be clearly the weakest of the 3 specials and so allowing terrans this extra ability to gather money was a way to help balance it. It's also limited to only their add-on buildings which really means tanks and heroes, so doesn't unbalance the enemy specials in the way that destroying all of your buildings for refunds would.

So I would only be willing to give refunds for specific buildings, which would really be pylons and creep colonies. But I already made pylons and creep colonies spawn probes and broodlings to help address the issue of being forced to build something that doesn't have much benefit. Probes in particular are quite useful early game, particularly vs a terran that has gone early ghost as they suck up the lockdowns. Broodlings should also be a lot more powerful as of 2.47.