I needed a way to find (almost) exact figures for balancing my map. How many hits will a zergling do before it kills a unit? Damage types, unit sizes are both annoying. Also, another thing I look at is the time it takes to kill a unit.

I've made an excel spread sheet that calculates 1v1 unit fights; it reports the number of hits to kill the opposing unit, the time it takes, and damage per second. It also shows unit statistics, such as unit range (in fine grid), cooldowns, and a couple other things to be added later.


Includes:
Unit cooldowns (attacks/game second)
Damage
Life and Shields
Base Armor
Unit Size
Damage Type
2x damage and 2x armor effectiveness
Range
Multiple Shots (Valk, Carrier, etc.)

To be implemented:
Set upgrade level (to see how it affects all units) by each upgrade type (weapons, armor, shields)
Weapons upgrades
Armor upgrades
Shield Upgrades
Independent Unit Size and "Attack = enemy Armor" (.5 damage).
Protoss Shield Regeneration
Protoss Shield Regeneration w/ Battery
Zerg Regeneration
Medic Healing
Movement Speed/Distance for extra shots in ranged vs melee (or longer range vs shorter range)
Buildings
Compare different players w/ different upgrades (ie: 2 rines w/ different ups)
Maximum Splash Damage



Attachments:

Post has been edited 7 time(s), last time on Feb 10 2010, 10:33 pm by fat_flying_pigs.

Cool. You should probably make it into a simple application or something if you can.

Even including protoss shield regen and zerg life regen?

Yes, and possibly accounting for the extra shot(s) a ranged unit does to a melée unit. And maybe include minimum and max damage done from splash.

As for making it a program, maybe, but that would require me to learn how to code in c++ or something.

So this is what you were doing... I've been meaning to get some of this stuff into the wiki, but making tables is quite annoying.

Interceptors are 38.something frames per attack.

A game second is always 16 frames, or 8 hyper trigger runs. A real second is dependent on game speed and 1 game second can never actually = 1 real second.

To clarify:
[16 frames = 8 hyper trig runs = 1 game second] <-- always true for any speed
fastest = 24 means "24 frames = 1 real time second"
faster = 21 means "21 frames = 1 real time second"
etc.

I don't know how you'd do that when a player micros a vulture, for example (or any other fast ranged unit).

huh? Like when a reaver attacks another unit how much damage your "main unit" receives? Unnecessary imo.

Micro beats the system, of course. Theoretically, the vulture could never take damage. What i mean is if a ghost and a zergling stand X grid apart and patrol to each other. The ghost will start shooting the ling before the ling reaches the ghost, giving the ghost 1-2 extra shots. Or a stimmed jimmy might have 3-4 shots on a slow ultralisk.

Yeah, I wasn't entirely sure about this topic; was gonna read up more on it. But if a firebat attacks a zergling, does it do just its normal damage (and splash damages other near by units), or is it normal damage + splash damage to the zergling? Either way, I'm gonna list the possible splash damage it does to the inner/medium/outer areas.

How is splash calculated?

See the nuke wiki article for what splash looks like.

There's an inner, middle, and outer section, each doing 100%, 50%, 25% damage.

Firebats are finicky.

The firebat's attack sequence has 3 distinct attacks, I believe one is 24 pixels away, the next is 52 pixels away, then 80 pixels away, each are on 1 frame apiece. I assume that the splash radius is centered along this, which is why when you attack a unit diagonally, they tend to take more damage. However, that would mean the third hit would always do splash damage to the unit, which it doesn't always work that way. In any case 80-25=55, which is 3 more than 52, so it's possible for the unit being attacked to get hit only by the first two and not the third, especially if it's really close.

IDK how lurkers work, but I do know that attacking diagonally doubles the damage on larger units, since two "spines" hit. I would presume these spines are 20 pixels apart, since that's their splash radius.

Tanks, scarabs, and infested terrans are easy, since they do point based splash. Treat them just like nukes. There's also no way to get "extra" damage. Valkyries have a sort of random halo rocket fire, which has a large splash radius (5, 50, 100). I think it was designed so that the rockets don't usually do their full damage.

After reading dozens of pages on this thread, I never came across the lurker's and valkyrie's attack particularities, so thank you for that!

Do you or any of you know of a place where someone compiled these sort of particularities into a list, and who is to be trusted with the information posted there? I'm also looking for something that doesn't involve reading code.

I think the Valkyrie part above is fairly misleading (at least partially), since they at the very least always deal full damage with all rockets that at least partially hits their main target, overriding aoe radius settings.

The Lurker part is either wrong I don't understand what rockz meant - checking in-game they don't seem to deal double damage diagonally even against large units... but I know that there's a bug where they deal double damage when they're dying, so maybe that's what he observed?

A, I see how the valkyrie works.

At first I was thinking about that double damage bug when a lurker dies, as well, but then I thought there might be something different.

Maybe what he knows is tied to certain attack angles. I'm saying this because I saw a Flash tutorial where he says (and shows in the game) that firing within a bunker using a ranged unit that +1 range is gained only by firing at certain angles, if I'm not wrong. And I think he also said that this had to do with what slot that ranged unit took in the bunker. Too bad I can't find that video anymore, but I know it was uploaded by a YT channel that translates korean videos into english.

Flash was wrong, that's unrelated to whatever slot the unit takes (all units are centered in the centermost pixel of the bunker)
The different range at different angles is caused by BW range not being a perfect circle - https://i.imgur.com/vtolZoc.png
Red is actual range, green would be the range if it's a perfect circle

In practice, this means that units shooting diagonally will have a slightly higher range "than advertised", which, combined with range being edge-to-edge, leads to some weird scenarios where Marines in Bunkers can hit Sunkens without Sunkens being able to attack back etc.

Aaaa, I never knew that. Thank you for the explanation!
So that was the reason why korean pro players said it was better to use mutas to attack diagonally, and that's also the reason why I kept losing guardians and reavers to cannons and other defensive structures.

If my memory didn't trick me, then all blame goes to Flash

If you don't mind, what tool did you use to get that sort of image?

I got it from neiv, not sure how he generated it tbh. He made a in-game debug tool as well but ironically it makes a simplified range circle (easier to draw)
Also yeah guardians suffer a lot from this - I noticed too in my mod that when you get into very small range differences, some of them are almost irrelevant in most combat scenarios (for example units at 4.5 range are almost identical functionally to 5 range marines, even down to having similar interactions with bunkers vs dragoons)
Edit: Here's a fun example using neiv's tool, where a photon cannon (dark blue range outline, hard to see) can hit a probe outside of its simplified circular range - https://i.imgur.com/RezRLCs.png

I see.

Has neiv posted that tool anywhere, because it seems awesome to be seeing that while playing, even if it is working for Starcraft 1.16.1?

Talking about such a tool, I recall seeing in the past a mod on moddb.com where range circles were present on all units and all defensive buildings. I'm gonna look for it now

I found it!

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 11 2022, 12:17 pm by NiceNowIHaveAName.

I think it's this - you open a console via " ` ", type help and hopefully figure it out from there. Needs to be added to a firegraft mod ofc

Attachments:

Nice! Thank you! I'm gonna have a look at it right now.

Daaamn, this tool is crazy! Neiv can have my babies now, no homo!

Thank you very much, again, for sharing it!

I figured out most of the commands, but some of them are showing in red. I guess those were not implemented.

I think those just need an argument or sth else to go along with it - airegion is probably an argument for "show" (show airegion?) and gsw is a game speed setting (gsw 42 0 iirc is fastest, 42 ms per frame)

Edit: Oh also I asked neiv about Lurkers - Lurker spines can normally only deal damage to a unit once per 32 frames, but when the Lurker dies they instead all deal damage in their area without the once-per-32frames-check. Meaning if there's a few of them overlapping over a building they could even deal 3-4x dmg etc.