Will be releasing 2.52 today, likely within the next hour or two. Although maybe I should call it 2.60?

Maybe you should put it in the briefing/mission objective that 2.56 is not yours.

There's a possibility that the below list may not include all changes, or may be slightly off for some of them. This is a result of this version being made over a long period of time, so I may have lost my notes or failed to record something properly.

I've posted 3 other changelogs so far, this one includes those changes as a base but updates them as appropriately (eg earlier I had reduced nuke damage from 3000 to 2700, now it's back up to 3000 so there is no changelog entry as it hasn't changed).

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

Consolidated changelog.

• Mechanic changes
  
• Various changes around map-max and spawning:
  
• Diffused spawning, so in the case of map-max, both teams should now spawn something, whereas previously it was possible for 1 team to spawn something and the other team to spawn nothing. More powerful units are spawned before weaker ones; see earlier threads for more details.
  
• Maximum cap of 400 units per spawn per player. Additional units over this cap will be removed on an even basis (eg BCs and marines will be removed roughly evenly). This shouldn't matter for most games and should mainly impact on obnoxious (zerg) players that build worthless units like zerglings and marines to cause map-max and take an avantage.
  
• Zerg larva in your own base are now capped to 6. In previous revisions I also removed all of your larva that spawn in ally bases, but removed this as it could be annoying and there wasn't an easy to implement compromise.
  
• Added blue beacon option at the start which selects double rate + specials enabled in a single action
  
• Selection timer at the start begins at 10 seconds, after making a rate selection it will add 10 seconds, so still get the full 20 seconds as previously, just it'll end sooner if you don't select anything and go with the default (2x + specials)
  
• 10 seconds are added to the countdown timer when a night defence dies. I changed the text description to say this in 2.51, but actually it only added 5 seconds. So now the delay matches the description and is longer.
  
  
• Bugs fixed
  
• Fixed infestor stealing brutalisk (and other heroes) bug properly this time.
  
• Fixed boom issue during cinematic as reported by Whateverson. Could not reproduce the silo healing issue, but put some triggers in place to hopefully mitigate it.
  
• Fixed an exploitable spawn bug for one of the units (built 8 buildings, received 10 units instead of 8)
  
• Found a very obnoxious bug that affected Protoss and possibly Zerg (unlikely Terran) where if you build the special on top of the worker and had enough money, sometimes the triggers would mis-fire and destroy your building while claiming you didn't have enough money and not giving you a full refund. The fix prevents this from happening: if you have enough money and build the special on top of the worker, it should work fine as normal.
  
• Fixed issue where prison cell wasn't placed after the intro finished due to creep left by the Infestor.
  
• Building placement for geysers in the corners is corrected.
  
  
• Balance changes
  
• Nuke will thin out stolen enemy units in your half of the field (similar to infestation/MC)
  
• Nuke will cause enemy units directly on top of your temple that have been stolen to scatter, like the enemy units do. Scattering effect will not last as long as the enemy's however: between 0 and 8 real time seconds, vs 15 for enemies
  
• Nuke heals enemy units directly at your temple to 40% health/shields before scattering them
  
• Nuke used to kill a lot of enemy units around their temple, which combined which often wiped out most of their recent spawn. It now only kills terran siege tanks around the temple (due to invincibility issues when siegeing/unsieging, the BC could sometimes target them accidentally).
  
• Armory +$30 to $505, -0.5 vulture spawn to 1 banshee / 1 vulture (back to 2.49/2.50 stats)
  
• Banshee +2 AA to 8, -2 ground damage to 28.
  
• Vulture +2 dmg to 30, +55 hp to 240, +2 armor to 5
  
• Goliath -10 hp to 120
  
• Marauder -2 dmg to 18, -1 armor to 3
  
• Hero BC -1 air/grnd damage to 25
  
• Thor +150 hp to 450, -2 armor to 7
  
• Thor will now also dispel 1 disruption web that it is underneath on a 2 second timer, in addition to the dark swarm dispel.
  
• Medivac Dropship now has a 25% chance every healing cycle to dispel 1 disruption web that is underneath it.
  
  
• Cybercore -$10 to $190, spawns 1.33 stalker up from 1.25. Proportion of Fenix dragoons decreased: used to be 0.5 to 0.75, now is 0.44 to 0.88.
  
• Dragoons -10 shields to 40, -10 hp to 80.
  
• Zealot -10 hp
  
• Immortal +1 damage to 15
  
• Colossus +10 base damage to 70, +10 upgrade damage to 100 (from 60/80). Maximum build cap is now 8, max 14 on field at a time. Damage upgrade +$100 to $350.
  
• Archon -2 damage to 34, +5 hp to 30, -$30 to $670.
  
• Maximum of 9 tempest carriers on the battlefield at once; additionally spawning ones will be replaced with regular carriers
  
• Fleet Beacon (carrier) -$30 to $850, Carrier (normal unit) -1 armor to 5
  
• Interceptors -5 hp, -15 shields, +1 armor, +1 damage to 15 hp, 5 shields, 2 armor, 12 damage. Interceptors now respawn a bit faster. Previously mentioned invincibility toggling is now universal and this has made a noticeable difference (see commentary).
  
• Mothership and Thor will now kill fewer interceptors as part of their special pulse cycle; this is due to interceptors now being a lot weaker
  
• Void Ray -6 shields to 24, still pulses to 12 shields before full healing, +40 hp to 400, +1 armor to 4. Max 8 on field (down from 9), per-player spawn is still 5.
  
• Maximum of 12 observers on the field at a time.
  
• Scout +2 AA to 32, -20 shields +20 hp to 80/200.
  
• +0.05 phoenix on Stargate to 1.25 from 1.20
  
• Phoenix energy spawning changed. Not all phoenix spawn with 100% energy - this has been the case for a long time, but I've changed the way it is handled now. The new scheme is now much more of a flat curve: for example when you get 40 phoenix from stargates, only 11 of them will have 100% energy, whereas previously 27 of them would, on the flip side when you spawn 12 phoenix, 11 will have full energy when previously only 9 would. Phoenix that are spawned from the robotics bay alongside the observer will always have 100% energy.
  
• Dark Archon +20 shields to 140, MC will now no longer target hydralisk, mutalisk, viking, valkyrie or stalkers (effective buff, especially vs terran)
  
• Tweaked the way probes are spawned; it is no longer possible for a single protoss player in a 3 player game to build 12 pylons in each base and therefore spawn 18 probes per player. They will now spawn a total of 18 per complete spawning cycle (same mechanic as Tempest Carriers).
  
• Modified high templar handling. If you research hallucination they are now much more likely to use it (before moving away from the spawn point), whereas previously they almost never used it. They can only cast it on Archons, Void Rays and Carriers.
  
  
• Queen spawn broodling energy changed, so they will now only have enough energy to initially cast 2 of these, instead of 3. If a queen stays alive long enough they'll replenish enough to cast another. -$50 energy upgrade, +$10 ensnare
  
• Overlord -1 armor to 4, maximum of 9 on field.
  
• Roach +5 hp to 50, -1 dmg to 15.
  

The terran changes involve making Nuke weaker as I still wasn't particularly happy with the way it worked. It simply stole too many units, while killing too many enemy units, and dealing a free 3000 damage to the temple. So now it won't steal as many units, some of them will be scattered and won't kill as many enemy units outright. The vulture is now the terran's beefy ground unit, which they previously haven't really had, whereas Protoss and Zerg had Archon/Ultralisk. Thor was also a bit fragile. Marauders are weaker as I find that Protoss has a very difficult time vs terran infantry as marauders can chew through zealots very easily and also zerglings.

Lots of protoss changes. One of Protoss' problems is that they have a hard time massing units because most of their buildings are quite expensive and only spawn a few units, compared to the other races. The only building in the $400 range is the Void Ray. It's almost a given that Protoss will get void rays simply because they need something that is high DPS to deal with enemy mass, but void rays are very easy to distract, especially with other void rays as they end up shooting each other with AA attacks that never actually get through the shields to do any damage. Void Rays are stronger vs other protoss because they don't have any fast-hitting units like hydras or marines so dragoon shots are usually healed before it does any hull damage. So to help with this I reduced their shields, while increasing HP and armor to better counter terran and zerg units. Increasing the spawn on the dragoons and decreasing cost will hopefully make us see more of them again, although they're now quite fragile. Immortals also don't get a lot of usage due to their slow movement, so increasing damage back up to 15 will make them a bit more viable again, coupled with making dragoons and zealots weaker. As noted, Protoss have a very difficult time vs terran infantry (try playing 2Pv2T...) so I'm hoping that the increased damage on immortals and reavers will help them here - remember that terran infantry are Small so only take 50% damage from reaver shots, and even with the 100dmg they still won't be able to 1-shot marines due to their 3 armor. Archon change is to make them a bit cheaper and because of the void ray change they don't need as much damage to punch through the regenerating shields and armor. The increased HP will help them last a bit longer vs weaker units, like terran infantry, thanks to their high armor.

Protoss air got a bit of a shakeup, with a smidge more phoenixes but their dweb will now be quite a bit weaker as Terran will have 2 options for dispelling, and when massed there will simply be fewer phoenix that have enough energy to cast 2. Dark Archons will now be a more feasible counter to enemy capital ships as they won't waste energy MCing weaker ground units any more. The changes to carriers may look a bit crazy, but in balance testing it seems better. I did tests of 27 carriers vs 27 BCs with Yamato and with the previous stats the carriers demolished the BCs every time: the BCs would waste time targetting the interceptors. Now I've made interceptors weaker and also changed the way the invulnerability cycling works, so the BCs will stop targeting the interceptors and go after the actual carrier ships. With this change by itself, the BCs easily overpowered the carriers, so I increased the damage to 12 and tweaked the interceptor stats and under these conditions the carriers will slowly push vs the BCs. It is worth noting that this is 27 carriers vs 27 BCs: total cost would be $22,950 for the protoss but only $16,200 for the terran as they get 1.5 BC per $900 spent while protoss only get 1 carrier for $850. When you even the costs up, Terran gets 37 BCs and easily stomps all over the carriers. I'm hoping that this asymmetry will account for massed army situations and also the 12 damage on the interceptors should mean that just having 1-3 carriers is more effective than it used to be (not very - their strength came from the massive number of interceptors).

Capped observers and overlords at 12 and 9 because they tended to just stack up and get in the way, in particular observers did now that players are incentivised to build more of them. Terran has caps on science vessals so this seems fairer from that perspective as well.

Post has been edited 5 time(s), last time on Apr 14 2012, 11:26 pm by Lanthanide.

Dang. Lot of changes. I like how you took consideration of pretty much all the comments and suggestions made. I can't wait to try it.
Looking at the changes, it seems like I can still use Dark Swarm + Ultras against Terran and make them rage quit haha.

Yeah, only the Thor can dispel Dark Swarm. But with vultures having a lot more HP hopefully they can stand up to Ultralisks a bit more (although they'll only do 25% damage to them).

Can you post the scx file if it's ready?

Not quite ready yet. Also I like to play a game on b.net first to make sure there's no horrendous/stupid bugs before I post up here. But it should be up within 2-3 hours at the latest.

[Update]
Just played it on b.net with an average-ish Terran. He built wraiths and medics, but didn't get any science vessals until very late and I told him to, and kept building, never saved and never even had a CC ready to build nuke from

Noted 3 changes I forgot to include above, so they've been added: building placement for geysers in the corner has been fixed, roach +5 hp to 50 and -1 dmg to 15.

Protoss seemed a bit more 'dynamic' with the void ray / dragoon / archon changes, which was nice. Archons are now pretty good vs void rays and 2 archons can take 1 down quite quickly (1 archon can still do a bit of damage too, though). Archons with dragoon backup are even better.

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

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Apr 14 2012, 11:48 pm by Lanthanide.

New version, 2.61: http://www.staredit.net/files/2203/

I accidentally left a debug trigger in 2.60 that would create vultures inside orange's base when the top team owned carriers.

Funny, I haven't had this problem.

Found a problem that carriers would get immortal. My assumption is that the immortal interceptor somehow gets carried to the Carriers.
When I start casting nukes, I steal those Carriers and they have finite HP again, but it was quite annoying that they would spawn interceptors and my army can't advance b/c they have to attack the interceptors.

Attachments:

Hmm, that's very odd. I don't think it's really possible for carriers to 'become' immortal if there isn't some trigger that sets them so.


Edit:
Right, found the culprit. As I suspected, the carriers don't "become" immortal, however they are actually "created" immortal. If you look on the change log you'll see that I cap Tempest Carriers to 9 on the field at once, and excess are replaced by regular carriers. Unfortunately there was a mistake in the trigger and the replacement carriers are created immortal. So that's why it's only a few of them that are affected - the ones that would have spawned as Tempests but were replaced instead.

Also from your replay I found that reavers weren't being capped at 14 on the field as they should have been. That was because the trigger to do this removes them from the spawn location when they're moved onto the battlefield, but reavers aren't moved to the same location as regular units so the trigger failed.

New version, 2.62, that fixes both these bugs. Thanks for the prompt report.

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

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Apr 15 2012, 8:30 am by Lanthanide.

Bug after bug after bug.
But yeah 2.61 would be the good name for it since those losers keep modifying your DS's and making them 70 times worse than it is.

Someone told me Terran is far off worse dunno what thats about

Wanna game today/tomorrow <3 ?

The changes to Voids actually made them weaker. You say it's to give them an advantage, but I've found the 6 points really make overpowering their shields far easier.

Not that it's not a bad thing, mind you. Voids were obsessively strong to begin with, and could take out large swathes of infantry. Ghosts are only good if they get hit, and building air power only works if you're P.

It was to make them weaker vs protoss and hopefully stronger vs terran and zerg. They're definitely weaker vs protoss, and maybe too weak vs terran and zerg: surprising that reducing shields by 6 would have a big difference, it is the equivalent of 1 marine shot for example (9 damage - 3 from shields = 6).

I could make voids recharge their shields faster, or remove the 12 shield pulse, or increase their armor/hp more.

Hey,

love the DS maps - This version is horrible for terran vs a lot ... im playing a game and roaches RAPE reapers, in .51 it was reverse, a pack of roaches just killed my bcs ... roaches alone. 45hp was just fine earlier

PLEASE look into this... I like the other changes but might have to revert to .51 until this is fixed...very very 1 sided.

and 5 nukes for ND to drop... ouch

Roach changes were from 45 to 50 hp and from 16 damage to 15. I don't really see that that should be making massive changes to them. The main reason I did that is because early roaches would take down the cell very very quickly because they did 16 damage per shot and had very short cooldown and you could mass a lot of them quite quickly. Seems that if I'm going to reduce the damage to 15 then they need some compensation. I also generally thought that they just died too quickly, even with the healing, which made them early-mid game units only. If they're now more effective in the mid-late game, that's good as far as I'm concerned.

Now for roaches vs reapers, reapers will do 50% damage vs roaches which are medium and take off their armor which I believe is 2? So they'll do 6 damage per shot. Roaches will do 50% damage vs reapers and take off their armor, so they do 7 damage per shot to reapers. It therefore takes 15 roach shots to kill 1 reaper. It takes 9 reaper shots to kill 1 roach, assuming it doesn't heal. Now compare these numbers to 2.51: 14 shots for a roach to kill a reaper, and 8 shots for a reaper to kill 1 roach. Really not very big changes. IMO reapers are somewhat overpowered very early anyway because of their very big HP sinks.

As for "5 nukes to ND to drop... ouch". I didn't make any changes to the nuke damage, it still does 3,000 damage just like it used to.

I understand your logic, but I just played terran 4 times for fun and every time it was a rape-fest... try it yourself, T gets steam rolled harder then ever...

p.s. thanks for the reply...appreciated!

One thing I've noticed is that often when a new version is released, people continue to use their old strategies and find they don't work, so complain about it. If the balance changes, then obviously your old strategies may no longer work well, so you have to come up with new strategies.

If the changes were such that roaches truly are unstoppable, then clearly that needs to be fixed. But I simply don't believe the minor changes made to roaches could create that sort of situation in this version.