Valkyries actually did something? What? I've played a few games over the weekend with the newest ver and there hasn't been one complaint so far about anything in my games. Most people were happy, except for a few that rage quitted when silo died but you always get a couple games like that. Terrans liked the vulture back in and I used it quite a bit to own all of an enemy zerg's lings with mass vult/banshee (with reaper/marines) into wraiths when he got mutas.

According to the replay name it was recorded in 2.47. I did a little fix up around the nuke behaviour in 2.48 already so it's quite possible the bug has already been fixed.

Like adjusting the price of something by $10, a 1 dmg change is mostly psychological, although in the case of ranged attackers it does make more of a difference. Immortals have quite short range of course, though. However it is worth noting that many early units don't do particularly much damage vs buildings with their armor, such as lings and marines, whereas 15 damage at the start is quite strong vs the cell with 8 armor and not bad vs the silo with 15. Reapers have concussive damage so only do 50% vs buildings. So in this respect 14 or 15 damage is a little more noticeable.

If you want to get lot of immortals, build forges. The reason immortals are on there at all is because you used to get 2 reavers for $800 or whatever price it was, and I found that they were simply overpowered at that price. A protoss could be losing quite badly, then get reavers out and suddenly have enough breathing room to gas, sometimes twice, without much hassle. So I reduced the spawn to just 1 reaver, but because they're still quite powerful units I had to have a higher price to prevent them being rushed to, hence I threw in hero zealots for a while. But immortals work better since they're slow like the reavers and act as HP sink to keep other units up and front of the immortals. Adding 1 immortal here was also way to tell players "look, immortals are a good combination with reavers!". I think it worked.

In short: the 1 immortal on reavers is intended as more of a bonus than a strong base unit. When forges go down to 1.33 for $250, this will comparatively increase the worth of the immortal you get from the robotics bay anyway.

This means if you built 4 bays you would spawn 5 reavers instead of 4, for a savings of $640. It's not really that huge a change, but at the same time, I really feel like reavers are overused. IMO they have quickly diminishing returns and getting any more than 4 or 5 is a mistake; I myself usually only get 1 and sometimes 2, very occasionally 3 but never any more.

I'm not quite sure what you're suggesting here. Are you suggesting I reduce the number of hydras spawned by den, but increase their HP? Hydras are quite tricky to balance vs roaches, ultimately I've sort of ended up with a situation where roaches work well at the beginning due to their HP regen and high damage, but mid game (after the cell is destroyed) hydras become more powerful because of their 80 HP and IIRC 4 armor. Most of Zerg's power comes in their masses of units, I don't really want to reduce the number of hydralisks here.

The best zerg counters to archons are guardians and ultralisks. Ensnare is also far underused; maxed queens with ensnare and energy up is very difficult to deal with (hence why queens have a max on them). Anyway, if I cut Archon damage to 36 from 40, hydralisks will live longer. They're medium units and so currently take 27 dmg per hit, and so can be (just) killed with 3 archon blasts. But when they do 36 damage instead, it'll take 4 hits to kill them. So Zerg will have a much easier time vs Archons, especially as Kerrigans will become a bit more feasible and common as well. Lings would also take 3 hits to kill instead of 2 when their HP goes to 40, although that's not factoring in splash damage.

Haven't had anyone complain about it really except Hellfire. I don't think anyone really built armories for the valkyries specifically, they got them for the banshees which used to have 275 HP and 5 armor and good enough AA damage that hardly anyone built wraiths. Now that they're down to 4 armor and wraiths up to 4, I see banshees significantly less.

The valkyrie can also act as an early indicator that the enemy is starting to, or thinking about, saving for nukes. Probably no one "uses" it for that, but it's worth keeping a note of when you see them. It was also a nice way to make the nuke cost a little more, now that it's a much stronger special than it used to be, without changing its actual price.


I'll do some synthetic tests with carriers to see what capping them to 4 interceptors is like. Probably change the hybrid destroyer to 35 or 40 damage (from 45) and increase hp/shields to 250/250 (from 200/200). It seems to die fairly quickly (when coming under fire) at the moment, but similarly dishes out a lot of damage to the silo.

Also one other thing I'll probably change is to allow you to use your ally's insta-spawn powerup. You will only be able to use it to spawn their units: eg pick up and take to their beacon, not back to your own. It'll cost you money rather than your ally, as well. But this is good if you're playing with noobs or people that just won't co-operate with you (happened to me yesterday, just barely won a game playing with an inconsistent ally who started the game by mining gas...). Insta-spawn costs will likely change to $200 + $250 per gas, too. Recently I've been using it after getting 2 or 3 gas and it's been a bit too powerful compared to the price: guaranteed silo destruction or forcing them to use a boom.

At the moment the "units spawned" display adds up all the units spawned by any ally buildings in their base and reports just the single number (seemed less confusing). I'm considering taking this back though, so it reports the number of units spawned by each player always. You should still be able to tell which 2 players spawned because they'll have the largest numbers and their allies will have less (or 0).

Sorry I didn't manage to save a replay if you needed one but today I played a game. During the introduction where the two armies fight while the text is displayed, my ally computer managed to kill the computer quite quickly and push to start damaging the silo for about 2 seconds before it got boomed. You should probably heal the Silo once after that introduction boom.

The silo is healed after the intro. I always has been, ever since I did the intro.

About the silo being healed after the intro, that is not always true because I experienced a situation that the Reaver shot its last scarab and that hit the silo. I had 80 less hp in the beginning of the game, but it did not matter in the long run; it's a very minor issue. Perhaps just get rid of Reavers in the intro in case somebody starts raging about it?

And yes, I appreciate your time for testing Carriers with 4 interceptors. How about also testing interceptors with no HP so it won't be a distraction for the opponent? Or is this too much nerf of the carrier?

A scarab at the start of the game would only do 60 damage, and then only 50 armor the armor is counted. It would have had to have shot the scarab before all of the units were killed. I'll tweak the trigger to remove scarabs too, that'll fix it.

Interceptors being distraction for the enemy is the main reason why the carriers are overpowered. I've seen a version of DS where the interceptors were invincible and it was wildly overpowered - enemies have to be able to kill them to weaken the carriers. At the same time, making the interceptors so weak that they die after 1 hit would mean individual carriers were useless and you'd have to mass them to get any benefit. I think having weak interceptors that can be killed fairly easily, but not instantly, is the best balance. Note that interceptors actually toggle invincibility, so enemy units won't constantly target them and will move forwards to target the carriers (synthetically tested against BCs, toggling invincibility every 2 seconds made the carriers reasonably weaker).

Are we agreeing on the term 'invincibility'? When a unit has no HP, the enemy unit will ignore that unit and attack whatever unit that has finite HP.
I'm not talking about 9999 HP interceptor, but simply no HP so that the enemy will not ever target the interceptor.

My original thinking was that the units would attack the Carrier main body instead of the interceptor but I guess it doesn't work that way.
If the interceptor has no HP and that would make the Carrier even stronger, then I won't press on.

I would like to know more about this 2-second invincibility toggling though. I did notice this in the game, and I thought this is actually for the benefit of the carriers. An interceptor that should've died becomes invincible and therefore the unit that was attacking the interceptor has to find a new target.

I do not understand how toggling invincibility every 2 seconds would actually make the carriers weaker.

Yes, that is the invincibility I meant. I played a DS map where interceptors were invincible and they were terribly overpowered because carriers have a long range of 9, so all the other units would crowd in front while the interceptors would kill everything, preventing the units from ever actually approaching the carriers themselves to kill them. Units have to be able to kill interceptors as a way to weaken carriers, in conjunction with a system that only periodically refreshes interceptors.

In my testing, it did. Note that I tested 3 scenarios: no invincibility, toggling and always invincible. Toggling was the weakest. The tests were something like 30 carriers vs 30 BCs with Yamato. I tweaked the stats, HP/damage on the BCs and carriers until they were about even, that is out of 10 trials of single spawns, 1 or the other side would just barely win with a handful of units left alive. This was many versions ago, around 2.00 or so, but the principal of toggling vs no toggling stays the same.

Now, if I just made interceptors weak, like 1 hp or something, so any single attack would kill them outright, then that would make carriers weaker than simple toggling invincibility on them. But when the interceptors are at a strength sufficient to survive 2 or 3 hits, toggling invincibility means once a unit has locked on to attack them, when they become invincible the unit will now select a different target. If all of the interceptors are toggling at once (which I'm not actually sure if they do, or not) then this gives a brief window where the unit will select something else to attack: the carrier body, or some other unit that is bothering it, and not waste all of it's time attacking the interceptors.

I'm not sure if all interceptors on the map are made invincible at once or not. I use the 'toggle invincibility' trigger and I'm not sure if interceptors that are inside a carrier are affected by this trigger or not. If they are, then all interceptors will be vulnerable and invincible at the same time, if only interceptors flying around are affected then there will always be some proportion of interceptors that are invincible and some that are vulnerable, depending on when they were launched with respect to the toggling trigger.

It would be better if you remove invincibility on interceptors and just tweak their hp and make the carriers build slower interceptors. That would balance them more.

yeah I guess the nuke is a bit more improved than 2.47, and also I was talking about how you reduced hydra attack for 2.48. and also I guess I can try combining zlots with immortals(hoping zlots can get a higher attack change or HP next version) and I've been doing that made alot of ultras and guards for archons but still failed. I made so many and they were still too unstoppable, but I guess since their attacks might be reduced next version they wont be too tough to take on, hey chons are my favorite toss unit ever. I love making a shitload of them (lol) but when I pick zerg I also wanna succeed at beating them with my balanced zerg army, such as lings,hydras,guards,and ultra when it comes to taking on toss. However I wish ultras was back to costing 370 like in old versions.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jan 24 2012, 3:24 pm by NudeRaider. Reason: pointless huge quote, also watch your spelling

I can't remember what they cost at the moment, but they are quite a bit stronger than they used to be in 'old versions', principally they can get up to 6 armor now, and I made the armor upgrade a bit cheaper and I believe speed might be a little cheaper too. This made these upgrades more feasible to get if you only built 2 or 3 ultralisks. They are also generally quite difficult units to counter directly by the other races - protoss are best doing splash damage (archons, storm, reavers) but not so good vs single targets and terran units tend to attack from a distance and don't have lots of HP so when they get up close, ultras mince them up in no time.

Hmm, how about trying a new idea for Carriers? Making regular Carriers stay with 4 interceptors each, and introducing the Hero carrier ever now and then with the group of regular Carriers, possibly tweaking the stats a little different?

I was wondering also, is the Hero Zergling used for anything? I was thinking putting them with the Ultralisk, like 1 Ultralisk, 2 Hero Zerglings to compare with Terran and Protoss, who get 1.5 Tanks, 0.25 Viking and 1 Reaver, 1 Immortal? Making the Hero Zergling, weak in HP but strong in attack? Just random thoughts and ideas for you.

This would certainly be a way to get around the carrier upgrade thing; the hero could have 8 interceptors and the regular ones 4. Unfortunately however the hero carrier uses regular interceptors, so this would just be getting a hero that had more interceptors. I think it's cleaner and easier to understand if all carriers just had 4 interceptors only.

One possible idea (and this may have been what you meant originally) is that say the first 3-4 carriers were heroes and had 8 interceptors each, but carriers after that were standard and could therefore only have 4 interceptors? So massing lots of carriers would produce an abundance of regular carriers with 4 interceptors, but the first few you built would have 8. So a forced diminishing returns? The regular carriers could have slightly higher HP/shields, effectively a trade off from having fewer interceptors.

The hero zergling may potentially be used in a trigger system (I believe either it or the hero defiler is). If it's used for DCs or unused then I could use it fairly easily.

In the case of the tanks, the 0.50 vikings will actually spawn alongside the tanks, and all immortals spawn along side the reavers. They sort of act as body guards, because sieged tanks can't defend themselves in close quarters and reavers are very slow and often get left behind with no units defending them, leaving them easy pickings. Utralisks don't really have this: they're one of the fastest units once you get the speed upgrade and have massive HP and armor so don't really need any bodyguards. So there's nothing wrong with adding a companion unit, but it doesn't fit with the existing purpose of the companion units and I don't think the zerg really need it and it seems more like a flavour/neat thing than a practical thing - do Zerg really need more zerglings?

In contrast adding Kerrigan to the lurkers does fill a specific niche: Zerg lack any sort of mid-range high HP units if you don't count lurkers, and I don't because their AI is flakey. Giving her the fade ability was neat and fits in with the lurker's burrowing, also because the zerg don't have any other cloaked units while protoss gets DTs, observer and mothership and terran gets ghosts, wraiths and banshees. If Kerrigan did some splash damage she'd be even better, but unfortunately she doesn't.

Well that idea for the regular Carriers coming in later works too. I was referring more to the way you spawn the BCs, that you would do the same for Carriers.

And you can never have enough Zerglings. Aside that though, yeah Kerrigans are pretty nice for a new unit.

Just out of curiosity, you know how infested kerrigans have storm ability's when you play on single player playing missions where you're allied with infested kerrigans. Why cant they storm in ds?

No hero units use any of their energy-costing abilities, except for cloak because it is handled differently from the others - it automatically activates if they have sufficient energy to cast it in response to being attacked. That's how I enabled the fade ability for kerrigan: she has sufficient energy to cast cloak, but only enough for it to last a fraction of a second so she then de-cloaks.

To clarify: the hero queen won't use ensnare or broodlings, the hero defiler won't use plague, tassadar won't use storm, hyperion won't use yamato, etc. Even the hero arbiter will not cast Recall when you use the specific AI script that forces an arbiter to cast it; it only works on regular arbiters.

I guess you can reduce energy cost for zerg kerrigan to storm and fade then or replace fade with storm, however I don't really use them much they're not that useful they are fragile to me with their 4 armor. would it be to OP if you made them unlimited? I mean like they can still get easily countered by reavers an air simply but would be nice if you can use unlimited kerrigans

Kerrigan will never use storm when controlled by CPU players (as they are in DS). The Starcraft engine will not do it. So I can't make her use storm even if I wanted to. Cloak is the only ability that heroes will use.

As for unlimited Kerrigan, the problem with Zerg is their lack of buildings. Terran and protoss have both got more buildings than the zerg, especially when you count the addons. Another problem is zerg buildings that morph to higher forms: lair and hive essentially do the same things because I don't want upgrading to a hive to take away your lair units.

As it is, the Fade ability is kind of a neat power that she has to make her more interesting, much like void rays and roaches have the regenning shields/HP and those units are capped. So I've capped Kerrigan as well. I also threw her onto the lurker building because lurkers are somewhat useless late game because of their flakey AI, so this helps make that building more worthwhile. I'm thinking with the changes I've outlined for 2.49 so far, players will probably build the queen's nest more for the kerrigans than for the lurkers.

Now I could potentially nerf kerrigan to like 100-120 hp and 15 damage and stick her at 2 on lairs and 3 on hives or something, but I'm not sure how interesting that is. Her main purpose at the moment is to add HP to the zerg army cheaper/sooner than ultralisks do, so putting her on lair/hive may just make her into yet another melee zerg unit with no real interesting features or specific purpose: we do have zerglings, broodlings and ultralisk already.

oh I see, so computer used kerrigans refuse to storm regardless of what triggers are modified. hmm speaking of 2.49 is that coming out by this weekend

Probably, yes.