Shouldn't have brought any units back from the original game? So what, they shouldn't have had marines or zerglings? k.

What they should have done is just made a new game entirely. The campaign would have been marginally more tolerable that way.

Yer and avoided shattering plot continuity into tiny little pieces.

Not bothering to learn to counter payload. I know it's getting junked.

But is it really entirely unfeasible? I mean is it not able to be balanced? The concept is novel enough, it's just a matter of making it fit the structure of the game, right? Surely there's a way to balance it. You probably won't have a unit that is identical to the one we have now, but it could still have a lot of the same concepts. I'd be willing to bet since they've tried changing it (rather than outright scrapping like they did with the warhound) that it will remain in the game in some form.

Does that make sense?

I think to balance it you'd have to make it pretty bland, to the point people won't use it.

It's also very OP at counting drops in your mineral line: put 3 there and they'll have to send in sacrificial units to have a chance at dropping. Protoss can do that if they bother to research hallucination, but the others?

Differences don't necessarily imply unfair imbalance. Just because a race is more suited in one specific scenario doesn't make the game broken.

The thing about Starcraft is that all the races can be used in such different ways that shaping a race to be used more in a specific way is not how it should be. You shouldn't force the race to use its units in only a limited amount of ways; you should be able to utilize whatever strategy you want, with whichever units you want.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Oct 11 2012, 12:12 am by Dem0n.

I agree with Dem0n and TiKels.

Balancing a game doesn't require it to be bland. It is all about introducing different mechanics that works in different situations. The best would be to have perfect imbalance


Again, Blizzard ruined the game due to conservatism and greed. Which is, well, too bad...

According to something I read on the internet somewhere, Blizzard's design motto for the new units in Heart of the Swarm is merely 'design something that looks cool and get it working; balance it later'.

Regardless of whether or not it's true, it certainly seems believable if we look at what we've been given thus far.

That's honestly the best idea. It takes the viewer to heart and assumes that balance is always possible. I'd rather watch a game that took awhile to balance and has interesting gameplay mechanics than one that was easy to balance with boring mechanics.

Interesting gameplay mechanics =/= looks cool. They are not mutually inclusive or exclusive. There can be one or the other.

They're relying even more on flash and logo selling their product than they did with the original game. The best idea is to not rush the development of the game. Design these concepts with the billion dollars and seven year development time that you had. Or, better yet, make use of the downtime between the release of the main game and the beta of the first expansion to design these concepts. I don't think the team behind balance, bug-testing, and patching is the same team behind unit designs and lore.

Although, hah, that wouldn't surprise me either.

No mention of widow mine being phased out, by the way. They're going to balance the game.

And I never said it couldn't be done. I still hold firmly to the viewpoint that nothing they've included thus far feels even remotely like well-thought-out concepts that belong in the StarCraft universe.

Updated first post with Balance Update #6 and David Kim's explanations.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Oct 12 2012, 9:29 pm by Ahli.

Interesting. Anyone else find this interesting?

Well, at least they're being up front about it?

With the detector changes helping the defense, mines might appear less of a problem now as they can't attack buildings. I wonder how the players adapted their strategy to the mine right now. I didn't watch a lot of streams the last couple of days... I just saw on TL that the mine can be deadly to the Terran's own Marines versus carriers.

It's ready sound was already something with "Hellbat"... so that name was either very old or already considered to be changed for quite some time.

SC2 didn't cost a billion to make. Maybe $50m.

I thought that was obvious exaggeration. Activision threw over 60 million at them.