Starcraft 2 Discussion Thread

It's actually the Queen, not Kerrigan.

 

Starcraft II -- Wings of Liberty Protoss Units

 

So, first of all, I wasn't familiar with the beta process and was expecting to get an email. I just got back from vacation last week and realized yesterday that I had I could download the beta for the last two weeks - so today I've been playing quite a bit for the first time.

I've been having quite a bit of success rushing banshees with terrans. Even with terrans I am still susceptible to zerg rush. I'm starting to plant my supply depots a little better on that front though. Those roaches hurt.

 

Aw lucky you!
I wish I had the beta to try it out

I've just been watching a crapload of Starcraft 2 Beta Videos on Youtube and it looks like a lot of fun.

Any Races you guys favor more than the other?

from what i've watched
I like Protoss, Zerg, and Terran. (in that order)

 

I want a broodling plushie. No joke. And the Zerg anti-air unit is the Corruptor, which is the basic unit that can morph into the Brood Lord.

And the Zerg defenses are... cute when they scuttle around. There's an experiement I need to try, though. Can the uprooted defenses be transported via Nydus Worm? That would be the ultimate troll tactic, to push a Nydus Worm into their camp and slap spine crawlers near their minerals. It'd be more effective to push, say, KEKEKEKEKE Zerglings and Roaches into the attack, but like I said, it would be a trolling tactic.

Confirmed.

SSSSPAWN MORE OVERLOARDSSSSSSS.
YOU REQUIRE MORE MINERAALSSSSSS.

I was watching his games, too. He said it's his favorite race.

It's not Kerrigan, who I think has the same voice actress from the orginal. Just some female EVA thing. I want to hunt it down and kill it, though.

 

I have only been successful with the Terrans thus far. In SC1 my fav. race was either terran or zerg. I absolutely sucked with zerg the one time I played them. Everything felt foreign, probably because they are most different. I've been playing a lot of Company of Heroes the last two years, and the zerg are nothing like those armies .

 

In the original I liked the Protoss because I found I needed to micro them the least. I hate micromanaging.

I just sent hoardes of Dragoons at the enemy, with the token Zealot and High Templar, until they folded or they oblitered my nub tactics.

 

*High five!*

 

Some quxk notes from a starcraft vet.

Protoss has been reworked completely. They gained a lot of mobility (Stalker Blink, Warp in, zelot charge, etc) however they lost a lot of firepower. They've also be become insanely flexible. Many builds that are viable. In the original game they really only had two build orders. Unfortunately their air fame sucks. Pheonix is absolute garbage. Void Ray is easily countered. Carriers are too expensive. And the only other two units that can hit air is stalker and archon. Stalkers don't have the hp to fight toe to toe and Archons cost almost as much as a carrier.

Terrains have become the best harrasrrs in the game. Reapers and Helions both do terrible, terrible damage to the mineral line. Cloaked Banshees are quick to access. Bunker push has become cost effective and both the Thor and infantry push are friggen broken with proper support.

Zerg is nutsauce. Absolute cheese. Zerglings with move and attack speed is insanely useful. Roaches have almost no viable counter early game once they hit critical mass. Roach build goes up to hydras with ease. Completely unfair.

Game is a little unbalanced at the moment but its still a blast.

Oh and blizzard is aiming for a 3 month beta and a summer release. Keep your fingers crossed guys!

 

Interestingly, I'm not seeing anyone ever use Banelings, which I always saw in the demos.

 

Will there even ever be a beta test for Europeans D:

 

They upgrade from the Corrupters? lol.
I don`t suppose they`re cheap either.

 

woot got into the beta yesterday, running it on max resolution and on ultra and looking good , how are some of you playing against computers? I would love to do that to re-learn the new hotkeys and unit/building requirements without getting killed heh

 

I LOVE reapers, I've been mostly playing terran since I got the beta yesterday and I've always made some reapers, in one game I had a group of 12 reapers bouncing around and tookout 3-4 expansions with them, quite satisfying

 

I hope there are more beta invites

 

They absolutely destroy marines, I've seen terran infantry forces that just tear through whatever the zerg player throws at them, until the zerg gets about 10 banelings and then usually with the help of some kind of flanking tactics the banelings will take out just about everything on their own.

Hellions with the pre-igniter upgrade (so they can kill banelings in 2 hits) are a pretty good counter though. Also ravens to spot burrowed ones.

Terrans aren't the only race that got better raiding abilities, nydus worms are just so friggen useful. Even if your enemy has enough defenses that you can't pop a worm up right behind his mineral line, you can still, say, pop 2 worms outside of his base and use those to bring a big enough army to destroy it the old fashioned way. And if the fight is going bad or the enemy suddenly attacks your base, you can just pull back into the worms and bring your army home in seconds. I saw a ZvP where after a lot of fighting the toss ended up with a huge army of carriers and about twice as large an army as the zerg, but the zerg used nydus worms to attack whatever bases the toss army was far away from and if the toss tried to pull his army back to defend the zerg could just retreat into the worms to cut his losses, and if the toss tried to attack the zerg base the zerg could also just retreat into the worms, to use the units for defense.

 

Banelings are underused because of their poor damage. Early game they are pretty decent. But once people hit mid tier they lose their potency. marauders, Stalkers, Roaches and even shield upgraded Marines shrug off 15 damage so they're not very good unless in masses. But they start becoming less and less cost effective when you consider the fact that you can get Roaches with that money who do better damage, has higher survivability and harass potential.

And remember they require their own building so you have to either decide between Roaches or Banelings.... Finally going dedicated Banelings mean your going to be upgrading melee.... which means poor Roach/Hydra damange output.

Remember Zerglings with speed upgrade will very potent even without attack upgrades until armor upgrades kick in, while Hydra/Roach get much much more powerful with each upgrade.

Nydus are great but very situational. A couple "Heavy Hitters" can take down a Worm in a few hits. They're also kind of big, so if your opponent does a good job placing their buildings there shouldn't be enough room for you to place a worm.

But hey, if they leave themselves open, EXPLOIT, EXPLOIT, EXPLOIT!

 

Who said you have to place them in their base? You can still use them travel across the map ridiculously fast.

Banelings are anti-marine/zergling, even shield upgraded marines will still die in 2 unupgraded baneling hits since they do +20 vs light. If you're fighting upgraded zerglings though you'll want to get the first melee damage upgrade (which will increase their damage to 39 vs light) so you can still one shot them. They may also be effective against hydras since hydras are light and only have 90hp which isn't very high considering they cost more than a marauder. They are not very cost effective against zealots or just about anything else though.

 

Banelings only do 15 damage? I thought a single one of them are able to knock out even a full healthed marine?

 

You're going to get funneled if you mass Nydus unless their building placement is poor. Unless you mass Ultras.... but if you've got enough resources for that you've already got the game in the bag.

Nydus is great in the right situation No argument there, I'm just saying it's a bit more situation than the other sneaky tactics.

You have kind of brought up the exact problem that everyone has with Banelings. They're great against light, but to keep up you need to be one step ahead to keep them useful.

Marine=100m
2 baneling = 150m 50g
Roach = 75 25g

When Marines hit critical mass they will murder Banelings without speed. At least 1/3rd to 1/2 will die before they get to detonate. This is assuming you are very good at micro and you don't get fed 1 shots. Oh and with Stims. Good game....

Banelings just don't make sense when Roaches are so much better. They're like John McClane, takes insane beatings but can keep going sequel after sequel. They're totally viable from beginning to end especially with the super high regen upgrade waiting for you at the Hive. And share same upgrade as Hydras, which are extremely strong in masses with Roach support.

If Banelings did like 20 (+15 light armor) they would be insane, but alas, that might actually be gamebreakingly good.

But really, this is observation from the outside. I mainly play Toss so I have more experience with them.

 

Oh god no that would be insane!
45 damage per hit would be nuts!

You must have seen multiple Banelings pop on a pack of Marines.

 

2 banelings is 100m 50g, 50m for 2 zerglings and 25m/25g to morph each one into a baneling.

They do 15 (+2 per up) base damage, and +20 (+2 per up) bonus damage vs. light.

They also have a secondary attack that does 80 damage (+5 per up) vs buildings, I think they made it so separate attacks so you can control whether the roaches autoattack buildings or units, and I'm pretty sure if they attack a building the splash won't have any effect on units nearby and vice versa. Doesn't seem very useful though since buildings just have so much hp for their cost and it would be hard to get more than 2 buildings in the AoE.

They destroy marines, they counter zerglings, they're probably good against hydras. They're not good against much else, and they require micro and strategy to make sure enough of them actually get to the targets.

~80 banelings can destroy an entire base if it's not well defended but obviously that wouldn't be cost effective, hilarious though.

 

Banelings are useful for setting up traps. Burrow where you know the enemy will push out, and unburrow when you have him surrounded. Watch the carnage.

 

I played some more yesterday and everytime I played zerg I've never touched the banelings interestingly enough, even for trying out every unit's sakes, and I realized roaches get the upgrade that you can move while burrowed which I immediately used to destroy the economy/nexus of my protoss enemy, pretty sweet.

But man, so much has changed since that 20+ min gameplay vid that they showed us. The corruptors don't seem to mind control air unit anymore, the battlecruisers don't get that secondary weapon upgrade anymore (other than yamato) that was supposed to kill swarms of ground units really well, phoenix don't have that overload attack, mothership is now basically the new arbiter rather than having the missile slow down ability. I guess all of those were too OP or something and got taken out during balancing, I was just so thrown off with my expectations heh.

I do like that all the hotkeys are designed such that you can reach it with your left hand alone, I always hated when I start up a game as random and having to have a finger on 's' to either create SCV's or select drones, and then reaching over for 'p' to create probe. The problem now is memorizing the hotkeys as they're not always very intuitive, 'E' to build pylon, which has no e's!

As for the other testers/players, what do you guys think of the new resource increments? 5 mineral per gather and 4 gas per gather (although double the geysers now), I do like the nice numbers that comes with the 5min/gather, and since they take sooner to gather, it makes them look like they're working faster, not sure if i like the new gas format since I have to build twice the amount of refiners and have twice the amount of workers on gas now

 

yech!

I'd rather have it opposite. Having so many worker units kinda puts way too much emphasis on resources and also kills your pop cap.

 

Hey, at least it's all kept to the left side of the keyboard now

 

Wut D: They removed phoenix overload, mothership time slowdown and the other battlecruiser upgrade? >:[ I was looking forward to those

 

I suppose you're right. I used them a lot too, but then they started becoming a pain because I needed to drag a whole bunch of vikings along with them. If my Vikings all got killed, then my Banshees pretty much just have to stay stealth and have no means to take down air units. Now I'm just massing Battlecruisers in large FFA games. xP

Not true. Terran buildings still require L for lift-off. The Terran Command Centre uses the button 'O' to load SCVs into it too. It's such a pain to reach for 'O' that I usually use my mouse to click on it instead.

Yea, pity. I was really looking forward to the Battle Cruiser upgrade. There's no point having a bunch of fancy new units when they don't have new skills. =/

 

Heh yeah, that's what my memories of them were when I went into the beta, since I saw them in that intro video, and we never saw those high tier units in the battle reports, I thought they were still in for me to give it a try but I missed the boat

The battlecruiser attacks a lot faster with lower damage though, so it kind of looks like that other upgrade heh. The time slowdown I think was reworked into one of the early gateway units (the unit that makes the forcefields seen in the battle reports), except that instead of slowing down missiles, the bubble will reduce incoming range attack damage by 2. And phoenix's new ability is an anti-grav thing that lifts up a ground unit so they can shoot them as air units

 

Oh yeah, did they remove Arbiters to replace them with mothership?

Also what replaced valkyries? o.o Or are they still around? I just found them to be the most effective countermeasure against mass mutalisks

 

Valkyries are gone, I guess viking in air mode is their replacement, and yeah no more arbiters, mothership fills that role now, it can stealth nearby building/units, recall units to it, and instead of stasis field it casts this vertex worm hold thing that acts the same as stasis field (removes units from combat) but its persistent, so once you cast it, units can walk into it after its been casted to be affected by it

oh yeah, why DID they do that, they haven't solved the problem completely, and loading/unloading is more combat related than building things so you'd think they'd make THOSE keys more convenient for the left hand, hmph, weird decision

 

I'm guessing they did that so people won't accidentally load SCVs into the CCs? (wild guess )

 

Funny someone would miss them, considering they aren't even considered a viable unit in high level SC1 play because their attack gets more and more likely to glitch up and be useless the more units there are on the map.

 

Tarpit Defense. Oh the horrors...

 

If it was only for the CC that would be fine, but medivac/overlords/prisms/nydus also? I think they want you to right click the units into the transport to load them and use 'D' to unload them, that way you're not reaching over for the 'O'

 

Man, massing Battlecruisers is for the win. The few times where I massed at least 12 cruisers, they barely took any damage at all. Most of the times they completely wiped out an army without a single loss. Most of the ships took less than 50 damage, and the ones that took the most damage only lost about 1/3rd to 1/2 of their life.

 

Did you fight against something like mass hydras or mass stalkers? I had a game yesterday where my partner tried to get a crap loads of thors but they got taken down by mass stalkers.

 

Wow infestors are pretty strong once you get a good group of them.

They have...

- Infested Terrans, 25 energy: Spawns 1 infested terran for 20 seconds.

- Neural Parasite, 50 energy: Mind control an enemy unit for 10 seconds, infestor cannot move or do anything else while using.

- Fungal Growth, 75 energy: Immobilize all enemy ground and air units in the area of effect for 6 seconds and deals 36 damage.

While being able to move while burrowed and having a healthy 120hp. You do not need to research any of their abilities, their only upgrade is increased move speed while burrowed and increased starting energy.

Basically with fungal growth you can really play hell with tactical positioning and use it to cut off groups of enemies or just as an easy retreat button. It also destroys marines/zerglings/banelings pretty easily and the damage is still significant against other units. Then you pop some neural parasites and take out the enemies big hitters or casters (dont forget to make them waste all their energy killing their own team). Infested terrans aren't very useful but they prevent the infestors from ever being totally defenseless since they dont have a normal attack, and you can spawn a very large number of them at once if you have a lot of high energy infestors. Burrow is almost a necessity because it lets you hide any infestors the enemy tries to focus fire and of course you can move while burrowed too so it's basically cloaking that costs no energy but you can't fight.

I think they need to make one or two of their abilities require an upgrade to become available, and to make it so if the zerg player moves a mind controlled unit away from the infestor and out of the spells range that it would wear off (it even makes sense thematically because they literally have to stretch out a tentacle to hang onto the unit). Perhaps also make it so if you mind control a unit and then have the controlled unit cast a spell, it costs the infestor some extra energy too.

 

New Favorite Tactic: Terran turtling with Reaper raids.

 

one thing that I've been doing the past few days was that I've been incorporating some of the casters into my main army. Had a game where I had BC's with a raven, I love just planting a bunch of turrets at their economy, I tried releasing that anti-missile drone for my BC's while my enemies were trying to shoot them down, amidst all the chaos I don't even know if it worked or not lol

Infestor was the other caster I've been playing too, similar to the raven's auto turret, I burrowed my way into their economy and just threw a bunch of infested terran haha. As for the tentacle, I don't know if I would want it to snap off, because the infestor is gonna be a big target while he's channeling neural parasite, and your enemies will most likely want to kill your infestor and preserve their own unit.

Did you also miss SC casters? When I was playing them I remembered that they had no cool downs.

I had a pro moment last night when my terran partner and my roaches rushed our enemies (terran & toss), my partner's guys got killed but we took down the terran's army, then the toss sent out a wave of zealots at me and I micro'ed my way and kited them and burrowed damaged roaches and unburrowed fully healed roaches and took them down and any other forces that terran kept pumping out throughout all of this. I wiped out the terran base then the toss just left Damn I love this game

 

that sounds ridiculusly powerful!

 

I can't wait to see a 2v2 where a toss and a zerg combo psi storm and fungal growth.

 

hmm actually I didn't realize it immobilized, I thought it was like ensnare with a dot, that does sound pretty awesome

 

Personally I find Thors to be pretty weak. They are pretty good if you just have a handful of them supported by a bunch of other units, but if you simply mass Thors, they seem to go down pretty quickly.

I haven't tried pitting my Cruisers against mass hydras or stalkers, but I can't imagine that the Stalkers will do very well. With 160 hp and 8 damage, it's barely going to put a dent into the Cruiser. The Hydras may do better with it's 12+5 damage, but with almost half the HP as a Stalker they might not fair very well either.

There was once where I had a clash of 15 Battlecruisers against 8 Protoss Carriers. 8 Carriers means a total of 64 interceptors doing 6 damage each. They barely damaged my fleet. I managed to down all 8 Carriers while only losing 2 Cruisers, with a handful only slightly damaged. I imagine that I would have had less losses if I had focus fired the Carriers earlier.

I figure the only way to efficiently take down a Battle Cruiser fleet would be with a huge anti-air fleet. Vikings do a very good job taking down capital ships. However you will need to focus fire or the Vikings will most likely lose as well.

 

I used some last night with the support of a crap loads of marines which made the thors more useful, I think you just have to keep them out of focus fire's harms with some support and they'll pay off, but I still wouldn't mass them.

I was also surprised last night when I realized how soon you can get ghosts now, just need barracks->factory->ghost academy [?], I had a teammate who had ghosts out soon enough to surprise me when I realized I had to think differently about the old units. Nydus canal/worms also moved to tier 2 i believe, if memory serves me right you needed a hive to make one in SC1 right? But only need a lair in this one. I like the fact that you get access to these once high-tiered units/buildings a bit sooner now, makes them more relevant. It's pretty much only the massive units and maybe another 1-2 units that's left into the highest tier. As far as the highest tiered units, I see carriers get more play more than any of them, I don't think I've seen a single ultralisks in play.

I do have a strategic problem that I would like your opinions about. My favorite race right now is terran, one of the reasons being their intel capabilities. Those sensor towers are absolutely amazing, someone about to drop behind your base? Someone sending a big army your way? I can prepare ahead, queue up some additional units, build up an extra turret or bunker. I scatter those all over the map too so I can keep an eye on my enemies at all time even with the fog on. That and being able to scan my enemies base at anytime and see where their tech is at and what they're building. Protoss has the perma cloaked observers which are good enough, you can go into their base without them obviously knowing you're there. So my problem is, what do I use when I play zerg? If I fly in an overlord they shoot it down, the front entrance/ramp will most likely be barricaded with supply depots/bunkers or photon cannons. So what's an effective way to gather intel on my enemies as zerg? I do like expanding the creep tumors so I can see a large chunk of the map around me, but it's not good enough if I don't know what they're up to

 

Moving something while it's burrowed? o.o

 

They don't get that great of a vision range though when they're burrowed, and that's assuming they don't have their entrances defended with turrets/cannons.

 

Aren't there any parasite-like ability like in the previous starcraft?

 

Hmmm, that does remind me that the overseers get an ability to spawn changelings that are basically spies, they change into the enemy units. But I've had that happen to me and it's pretty obvious when you realize that "your" units are going into the fog of war and you can't select/control them and when you left click them they're called "changeling". But I'll try it before I bash it, thanks for the reminder!

 

Honestly... with the way starcraft 2 is turning out, there's a major shift towards micromanaging vs. macro. Massing anything, or building many of only a few units seems like a death trap. If you look at a lot of replays, a lot of games are won due to unit diversity - and this is due to the properties of the units in the game.

For instance, Seige tanks may be able to take out an army of zealots (among other units), but throw in a few immortals and they're toast.