Yeah, the melee units like marauder and zealot simply die too fast to ranged units like marines and reapers. Immortals suffer much the same fate because they move so slowly and have short range.

In other versions of DS, I think particularly the Ultima ones, Zealots are very very powerful. Early on in DS Night Fixed, Zealots were quite powerful but over time they've become sort of a weird niche unit. They're good very early game, and sometimes good mid-game if you absolutely spam them, but that's about it.



Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Dec 16 2011, 8:09 pm by Lanthanide.

I think the zealot is fine with their speed and normal attack, just will never do so well against Terran. But units like zerglings, marines and zealots become more useless late-game. It's just harder to balance the use of Marauder though since its attack is uhh concussive, right? And with people always building large units, it is just never needed to build. Immortals are better though. I think of them as more really short range marines or something. Just combining them with Archons for tank and High Templars for mass killing, they can take out Terran pretty well. Zerg struggles a bit more with their Hydralisks and stuff but they can still beat them. Maybe just give a tiny bit more HP to Zealots and Immortals?

I'm not sure if I played the Ultima ones, so many versions out so I don't remember how Ultima was like. I played Queen's versions. Zealots and Dragoons were strong and massing them easily helped push.

As for Marauder, I don't know, maybe you could give them some special passive ability? That or possibly make them like high HP, no armor, low or normal attack damage, tanks but putting a limit on them? I don't know, I'm not good with ideas.

Yeah, Zerg is tricky because they have rather limited ground units: Zerglings, Hydras and Ultralisks. Lurkers have shitty AI that forces them to unburrow when a new target comes into range and have quite a slow attack rate so they often die after only getting a couple of shots off and seem to be quite high priority targets once they've been detected. That's why I threw in roaches with the healing, to give them an early tank unit. I'm tempted to increase their heal rate a little thought (1 or 2 ticks) just to help them out a little. They make up for it in massing though, and I think still have the strongest air. Broodlings seem to have poor DPS due to the random delays in their attacks, although I'm surprised more players don't build them.

Unfortunately the types of things that can be done en-masse in Starcraft with units is quite limited: basically you can set shields, HP and energy. Firebats don't have shields or energy so that just leaves HP, and roaches and void rays already use that mechanic and I don't think it would really suit firebats anyway. Their damage type is concussive and unfortunately you can't change it.

I removed vultures because they just didn't have a proper niche and no one really built them. Super-fast units that outran the rest of your army and then proceeded to die quickly because of their HP/armor weren't much use. Firebats are similar although they have splash damage which makes them useful under dark swarm. Lots of terran players complained they had no real counter to swarm, so tying the war pigs up with the marauders, and then making the supply depot very cheap, was an attempt to get people to build them early while also making them more feasible vs swarm. In most games I see a mixture of reapers, marines and marauders so it seems to be working out ok.

Hey I've been lurking for a few years now but decided to finally register at SEN . I was taught how to play terran by stf-sleepy@USEAST back around version 2.18 and teamed with him/1v1'ed him a lot. I found that only a couple people on b.net even know that 2.45 exists. They still think 2.41/2.33 is the most recent. If I were you I would do what I've seen you do before and just make a DL only DSN game and afk in it for a while on east or west.

As for the vultures, I found them very effective in earlier versions where I would just go mass rine/vult/reaper(back then hero rine). I would some times mass so much that it would still be spawning as the next spawn began lol. I find the new depot to be a waste to buy and will only buy a max of 4 depots per game. Either way, bat just dies too fast to any non-zerg race that I only find a use to it if my opponent goes MASS zergling or MASS zealot.

Also, speaking of the new reapers why did u pick kerrigan and not Admiral Stukov etc. Does the less range balance it in some way? Oh and, nice job balancing probes away from being OP.

I've left my computer running over night a couple of times with DL only games. I've recently created games and had the 5 players who joined all have the map. It simply takes times for these things to be distributed, and having come out with so many versions in such a short space of time doesn't help matters.

I think in the next version I'll bump marauders up to 5 armor and maybe to 22 dmg and do +$10 on the depot. Maybe even given the +5-10 hp as well, but as discussed these are quite marginal units that I don't want to become the new "best" unit. Immortals up to 15 damage might be possibility, too.

All hero ghosts have the same range of 6, while regular ghosts have 7. Hero ghosts controlled by the AI will never use lockdown, only cloak - if they did I would have made Kerrigan the bunker 'ghost' with lockdown and regular ghosts into reapers, probably. So when you're faced with stukov vs kerrigan, the only reason to choose kerrigan is her in-game graphic with the orange hair that clearly distinguishes her from regular ghosts, whereas stukov looks the same. Also the orange hair kind of looks like the reaper jetpack.

Oh, I thought kerrigan was the only hero ghost with less range. Thanks for the info . Also, would it be possible to make the scanner give something like .25 vults along with the vessel or something like that? I miss them lol.

I've toyed with giving vultures back via nuke, which I might still do. I think the current iteration of nuke may have swung too far and made it too powerful compared to the other specials - it now steals units directly attacking your temple, so is a good counter to infestation or divine judgement (although everyone still calls it MC). Instead of doing that, it could create vultures at your temple.

Making it 0.25 per scanner would only give you 1 vulture per spawn if you built all 4. Generally the lowest sensible spawning rate is 1 per building, although I went to 0.66 for valkyries and 0.75 for devourers because they were simply useless and overpowered respectively in greater numbers. I've toyed with giving Protoss a Void Seeker air unit spawning at 0.66 capped at 3 that was attached to the robotics bay that was fairly weak with mid-range anti-air for use vs void rays, but I think that's taking the paper-scissors-rock approach just a bit too far. As it stands, void rays are really only good vs other protoss, and they can get their own void rays or go archons with some dragoons as support, so I think adding void seekers would kind of ruin void rays altogether.

Well, the reason I said .25 was because you seemed to be against having vults at all.

I also know what the nuke does now and toyed with it but found that any protoss(in 1v1) using a large mass of air was hard to counter via nuke as the nuke had to be delayed for far too long to get phoenixes/scouts let alone the mass of carriers I often faced MC'ed (MC is better to teach noobs so that is why I usually stay with MC). This made TvP very annoying which is the bulk of 1v1's I've had when choosing terran to test the strength of the new nuke. I found that matches were however very close and quite tricky.

I also found through both stf-sleepy's teachings and my own testing that the old raynor in mass together with some marines just destroyed carriers in mass very easily where as kerrigan just doesn't cut it as she doesn't have the dps required for it. I am left massing marines which push somewhat but as soon as a tiny increase in carriers is made I'm left in the same position of carriers pushing ez pz. Once again I wonder why you changed the reaper aka the unit that used to be the bulk of my terran strategies together with the vulture.

Wraiths target interceptors and then goons/sairs/scouts then interceptors again but with a giant mass of Carriers as well the wraiths become almost play things.

Valkyries just stop shooting and banshees' air attack is 8 I believe...

BCs are the only answer left but they cost so much even late game that it ends up turning into 1BC-2+Carrier because of the extra minerals the protoss 'gains' through not requiring as many. When testing this my theory just stated became reality and I became overwhelmed.

Overall, in pvt I find no answer to the mass of carriers combined with other units in desert strike night 2.45. Every answer has a glaring weakness.

Note: By mass carriers I mean they transition into mass carriers after massing a good amount of everything else as well. Without even the nuke really effecting them it causes the great mass to stay on the battlefield and cause even more destruction.

However, I give you props on the confusion mechanic. I would've never thought of that. Was it your own idea or someone elses?

Confusion was my idea. Almost everything in this map has been my idea.

It's not that I'm 'against' vultures, it's just that they never seemed to fit very well. Terrans didn't like building firebats because it was like 1 firebat and 1.5 vultures and most people thought vultures were useless: they're concussive and only hit ground, their speed usually makes them die fast, they were weak because making them have too many HP on a fast unit like that would be unfair.

I changed the raynor marine from Reaper to War Pig and reduced the numbers because they were simply overpowered: terran would just build reapers and no marines, or build both and nothing else. I literally had games where the terran just build marines/reapers until late when they went heavy banshee. Boring and unbalanced.

BCs + yamato are the counter for carriers, and I'd say also make sure you've got 10 bunkers and ghost energy upgrade for lockdown. I was toying with the idea of giving Thor an anti-interceptor ability that I mentioned a few posts ago, but this wouldn't be obvious that it had that effect and doesn't seem like a nice solution. I'm starting to think that I need to drop interceptor damage from 11 to 10, which will probably make a pretty big difference (most capital air have 5 armor so it'll go from 6 to 5 damage per shot).

Also your initial comments about delaying the nuke, I don't really understand. The counter is that it steals units directly attacking your temple - so if they do an MC just after you spawn, the nuke will take a good bunch of the units back for you and then proceed to annihilate the enemy units which are confused and on 5%/5% shields & HP.

Basically what I meant was that sairs wouldn't get that far quick enough for me to MC them without losing more than necessary HP which would be a great counter to the mass carriers. Also, I've never seen people get yamato with their BCs ever since you added in hero BCs because of their huge dps(That and yamato'ing a dark archon isn't practical T.T). Also, I always got the 10 ghosts+upgrade. Heck, some games I try rushing to get the upgrade mid game lol.

Also, it was easy to counter mass rine/reaper/banshee. Just go mass archon/zeal/stargate. Templars storm rines/reapers and zeal/archon cleans up then stargates web anything left as well as counter the banshees as banshees target air before ground.

As for the 1/1.5, few like to build the depot now either. It gives what? 0.50/0.75?(Not sure on exact numbers as I never built it) Even for hero rines thats a bit weak. Plus bats die easily too. Maybe as a mass versus a noob but other than that there is no real place for them. There is no role that they fill that other units can't. Also, it was the mass of vultures with rines that allowed terran to have an actual chance to counter dark swarm in my opinion. Vultures would get stuck behind your own units slowing them down and causing them to become nice fodder. Plus, those that ran ahead just slowed the enemy down giving you more ground over the opposition.

Well small bug for 2.45, For Marauders, if you only build one depot, it only gives 1 instead of 2. Then for some reason, when you build more, the rest of the supply depots continue giving 2. Which is until you build like 5 or 6 Depots I think, it fixes and they all give 2.

A little more HP and armor wouldn't hurt though. I don't see why the price should be raised though. I doubt they'll ever become a "must build" unit unless you make a large difference in them.

For Vultures, can't you add them in the Machine Shop or something along with the .25 Viking and 1.5 Tank?

And while killing Carriers are a problem every now and then, instead of Thor having anti-interceptor, why not give it to Medivac?

Yeah, a small issue with trying to steal enemy units attacking your temple is that the area of stealing is small. You need better timing to steal them and it doesn't help with farther range units like Carriers or Guardians.

I've seen people get Yamato. The upgrade is in the game for a reason - if you choose not to get it and then complain that you counter carriers... 50% of BCs are hero and 50% are normal, and the normal ones will use yamato. They have energy for 2 shots or 3 with the upgrade.

I didn't say it wasn't possible to counter them, I said it was boring. It was such a strong terran strategy that you could generally just build it against anything and then transition later on once you had opposition.

Like I said earlier, most games I see a mix of reaper, marine and marauder.

Thanks, confirmed this bug. With 1 depot (or any odd number of depots) it gives 2 war pigs and 1 marauder instead of 2 marauders and 1 war pig (modified to 0.75 because the 4th wave won't spawn one).

Ok, noted.

I'd run out of room to display the units in the string for machine shop

The medivac AI makes it hang back more so it wouldn't be up in front with the interceptors a lot, and also it's a healing unit rather than a combat one. Sticking it on the Thor makes sense from a flavour perspective.

Yeah, it's a balance thing. There're two locations, one which will steal the units and the other that is 6 tiles wider and taller that will kill enemy units. So you steal some, then have a halo that are killed outright, and the rest are injured. So ideally a nuke should be used 5-10 seconds after an infest/MC so you can steal the maximum amount of units.

I have an idea for the map.
there should be a mode where players fight a computer Fortress which spawns more and more men each spawn (2 marines 1 zealot 4 lings) too (3 marines 1.5 zealots 6 lings) the two player fortresses are aligned to each other against a common enemy. and whoever kills them first wins?

I don't think that would work.... There's 2 computer slots and 6 player slots, one of the computers would need to be removed + it would be a completely different game.

Interesting idea, although not really DS as K_A points out. It could be achieved with only 2 computers if 1 of them is the enemy and the other is the player representative, just have two separate fighting areas per team.

I don't think this would really work on the existing battlefield layout, not in how I'd want it to play. Also it would be difficult to actually make this particularly fun: part of DS is that you're fighting vs humans who are free to change their strategy on the fly. A CPU that always spawned the same units in sequence would be boring. Adding randomization in would help, but could make it difficult to balance (what if it spawns 5 extra guardians 3 times in a row and your force simply can't deal with them?) and could lead to situations where a battle is very easy or very hard, and players would probably just build a broadly mixed army without much depth to ensure they always have something that will counter what the CPU throws at them. The current structure of DS means that zerg players are forced to get queens before they get guardians/devourers and the pricing system ensures that you don't see more costly units until later, yet there is still scope to pull of unexpected strategies by building mines and saving your money up earlier than normal.

Can't you shorten the names? I mean you use 1.5 Crucio Tanks and 0.25 Viking. Why not make it "1.5 Tanks / 0.25 Viking / (#) Vulture"? Or Vult for short. You fit stuff like Guardian and Corruptor in one building.

Yeah, well in flavor perspective, Thor would be better with it. Just suggested Medivac cause sometimes it is in front and Interceptors fly all over anyways

Another small bug but not a big issue. When your enemies leave, you get a defeat trigger instead of a victory one. Well it happened while I was player 2.

Also I wanted to be sure, what are all the effects when Terran uses their Nuke Special?

Shortening to "Tanks" might work, but probably not. The Guardian / Corruptor one, and Dark Templar / D.Archon ones are at the limit for what will display, it seems to be based on character width rather than number of characters, too (not surprisingly). The Dark templar one is actually at the very limit: "1.33 DarkTemplar / 1 D.Archon", putting a space in Dark Templar or replacing the . in D.Archon with spaces both cause letters to fall off the end. I think 1.5 Tanks / 0.25 Viking / x Vult. would probably still be too long.

As for the defeat trigger, that is indeed a bug (haven't checked triggers) - it should be a Draw instead.

Nuke:
1. Clears enemy boom prevention timer (all specials do this)
2. Centres two locations about midway between the Temple and the Night Defense, the first is 13x13 tiles and the second is 21x21 (was wrong earlier). Enemy units in the small location are given to the allied CPU, enemy units in the larger location are killed outright.
3. All men owned by allied CPU in the larger location are healed to 100% HP/shields/energy and ordered to patrol to the enemy temple.
4. All units in the enemy's spawn buffer are removed (all specials do this)
5. All enemy units are set to 5% HP, 5% shields and 0% energy
6. All allied CPU spider mines are healed to 100% HP (any spider mines left over from previous nukes or stolen via divine judgement/infestation)
7. All interceptors and hero units are killed for enemy players
8. All Armageddon Dreadnaught are killed for allied CPU (so two simultaneously allied nukes will only land 1 shot on the temple)
9. The two locations from #2 above are centered on the enemy temple, again this is actually midway between the temple and defence. Enemy units in the smaller location are killed, enemy units in the larger location are set to invincible (to prevent dreadnaught from firing at them, temporary, see 14 below).
10. Armageddon Dreadnaught is created for allied CPU midway between enemy temple and defence
11. Create mines at following locations: 6 @ enemy field spawn location, 4 @ enemy silo location, 3 @ enemy tank/reaver/immortal spawn location
12. All enemy units are set to Junk Yard Dog for 12 real-time seconds. Any units spawned onto the field during this 12 second duration (eg, insta-spawn powerup or normal timer countdown) will randomly JYD as well. All hero, lurker and observer AI routines are disabled during this time.
13. Create 2 spider mines at 19 locations across the field, both ally half and enemy half (these are the same locations used to control lurker behaviour).
14. After 1.4 seconds, kill the Armageddon Dreadnaught as it definitely will have fired at the defence/temple by now, before it has a chance to shoot a second time. Remove invincibility from all enemy units that was applied in #8 - due to SC trigger limitations this will remove invincibility from all enemy units (men, not buildings) so anything in stasis will become vulnerable after this.

So that's all of it, read directly from the triggers. In short:
1. Steal enemy units at my temple, kill halo of enemy units at temple
2. Kill enemy units at enemy temple
3. Set enemy units to 5% hp, 5% shields, 0% energy
4. Create dreadnaught at enemy temple to do 3,200 damage
5. Place mines all over the field
6. Cause enemy units to be confused for 12 real time seconds

Thanks for the great in-detail description Lanthanide .

How about, 1.5Tank/0.25Viking/xVult to squeeze it in real tight?

Ah I was wondering because of Armageddon Dreadnaught. It seems a lot more useless now because in one game I had, one of the enemies had a large ground zerg force. So when a Nuke Special was used on that force, most of the time, it would just hit a ling, hydra or something.

Other than that, try putting in the Vulture in!

It shouldn't ever hit a regular unit, since 2.45. In 2.44 it could potentially be killed by some other unit before it got a chance to land the hit on the temple. See Rivalz earlier post with the replay attached and my reply.

So if you've seen for sure that it hits a regular unit, try and keep the replay and post it so I can check.