DarkBlizz

Teknogods/Lazytown are dead. Code.gen is fake.

So what teams are still working on an emu at this point?

Quote from: jackal on April 16, 2010, 04:23:58 AM
The video is fake and it is played vs AI. You can read here why.

Yeah, you make good points there. The mouse cursor movement after clicking "Launch SC2" is something I missed initially, but that certainly makes sense..

Also, another thing.. why is he clicking "Start Server" after he's sending data to the client? How is he sending anything if the server isn't even listening for connections?

This is almost certainly a total hoax.

Though I don't feel like it's a game against AI. It's a game against someone on legitimate battle.net. But there's no emulation of a server going on here. The opponent doesn't really behave like an AI (dual engineering bay outside of base), and I think the lag screens are probably real. Of course, that really doesn't prove anything except he's got a beta account.

Sadly this looked pretty fake, mostly because of the server set up screen.

Prevent cheating (experimental)? What?

  Synchronization compensation? What the hell?

Seriously, why would they have so many possible options and features on an emulator that still doesn't even fully work? They've even apparently got an option for mod support. That makes no sense how I see it... I mean they haven't even got the base game to work yet, why are they putting in a checkbox to enable mods?

The intro where they send the data to the client seems rather odd. Why send it before you start the game? Wouldn't that be part of the start game sequence?

Now once the game actually started, it didn't seem bad.

About the only thing going in their favor is that the game was laggy and had some unit warping which shows that it was an online game (of course could have been just a game played over battle.net too). Actually, I'm not quite sure if unit warping occurs over battle.net. I know in WC3 it would, but regular SC would just lag freeze the game until it got the packets. I have no idea how SC2 behaves in that regard. Maybe someone who has experienced lag on battle.net could tell us.

But at the very least, it seemed apparent that they were playing the game against another human. It wasn't a game against AI.

Quote from: itsarabbit on April 08, 2010, 01:25:15 AM
Anyways, AFAIK it was a necessity, most players but the top platinum ones could get owned by a marauder rush.
People were complaining about it alot on teamliquid.

Yeah pretty much it's obviously overpowered when basically every terran build makes use of marauders, regardless of matchup. In fact in some TvP, you see good players going with all marauder. As HDStarcraft said, marauders basically beat all protoss ground. They're by far one of the most overpowered units in the game.

If you ask me, the marauder nerf is long overdue.

Well lets see, you're shocked that a unit designed to counter light units slaughtered your army composed of only light units...

I don't get it.

Why would you want to play against AI when you can play against real people? I tell you what... you give me your battle.net version and I'll give you my AI version.

Basically I guess bnet encodes the unit orders and sends them to the client machines in a different format than the original machine sends them.

So what you send to bnet can't simply be forwarded to all the client machines connected to a game, it has to be translated into something a client machine can receive. Probably this is to better detect map hackers, or possibly just to make it harder to reverse engineer a bnet server.

The psi storm nerf is enigmatic.

If the goal is to encourage other strategies other than M&M for terran and mass roach/hydra for zerg, it seems odd that they would nerf a strong counter to both of those.

Yeah if anyone would be so kind as to invite me. I'd be really happy  O:)

Quote from: berrykerry789 on March 27, 2010, 08:34:10 AM
Do colossus still kill a marine in 1 attack? or is it 2 now?

Two. Marines have 45 hp, and colossus now deals 20 twice for 40 damage per hit. That's assuming no upgrades.

Quote from: Rain[sun] on March 26, 2010, 06:51:26 PM
Obs are nearly standard when you do need it though, but I agree its a bit much. Cloaked Banshee rushes should be pretty obvious if you're scouting enough though.

Well, keep in mind that if you go templar tech first, you can't scout very easily. Though I suppose if you suspect that the terran is up to something, you're going to suspect a cloaked banshee rush. Against normal banshees, with the upgraded stalker and warp gates, you can generally respond quick enough to a standard banshee rush by just warping in 3-4 stalkers instantly as a reaction.

In brood war, generally you could get by with just temp tech/cannons as an early counter to cloaked units. a couple cannons at your natural or choke point where generally enough  to stop dark templar or lurkers. Lurkers could be stopped pretty well in general by using psi-storm. Already the existence of banshees pretty much encourages people to go fast robo, and this new change seems to almost force it, which is rather unfortunately in my opinion because the robotics bay units aren't even good against air. Not to mention most toss players at the highest tiers already do a robo-first build anyway, so I'm not sure why they'd want to make that even more mandatory.

I'm a protoss player mostly, but I also like playing Terran as well for variety. Protoss surprisingly hasn't changed a heck of a lot in SC2. You get some neat stuff like warp gates, but for the most part, you're playing the same strategy you did back in SC1. Namely zeal/temp, with goons (aka stalkers) mixed in when you need them. Ironically you now do this strategy against terran and zerg because terran is all infantry now and zerg is all hydras and roaches. Either way, it seems to be a heck of a lot of storm spam.

Still the ability to warp in temps that are capable of storming is crazy awesome.

Another fun thing to do is to warp in cannons on someone's cliff with a warp prism.

Zerg I find the most boring. I never really liked them much in SC1 either. They're just all about "mass unit X, attack." They may actually have even fewer things to do in SC2. At least in SC1 you had muta harass and lurkers as side strategies. Roach burrow micro seems to be about the only special thing that zerg can do now

I'm not sure I like the SCV thing. I know why they did it, mainly because people did marine/SCV rushes, but the increased marine build time and reactor build time will fix that. At worst, drop the SCV damage by 1 or something, but don't lower the hp, makes them too easy to snipe while building stuff.

The stalker change was needed, so they can counter banshees slightly better. Either that or they could have made banshees armored instead of light units.

I like the factory change to 150 as well, as it makes a metal build a lot more possible now, so all terrans don't have to go with barracks units. Definitely adds a few more versatile options to terran, and that's a good thing. I'm kind of sick of the current setup where it seems every terran goes marine/marauder for the entire game. I'd like to see some more tanks.

The baneling thing, I'm rather mixed about. Banelings are extremely effective against light units as it is now, and about the only thing balancing them happens to be that they suck against the armored units. As it is there's really nothing you can do to stop a baneling force from chewing up your zealots. The best you can do is put armored stuff up front to soak it. You'll never really kill them fast enough. So this one really worries me.

The rest of the changes I'm okay with though. Roaches certainly needed a little nerf. Though zerg still feels like they could use a buff. I'm thinking maybe make adrenal glands into a lair upgrade instead of a hive, since zerglings feel very unused, and adrenal isn't nearly as good as it was in Brood war anyway.

I'm also not really sure why the observer got a cost increase (and especially a build time increase). Protoss already has the worst detection in the game right now, I don't see any reason to make it worse. They're the only race that doesn't necessarily have any detection at all by tech 2 units. Zerg can always make overseers and every terran has scan sweep. Protoss basically have only cannons until they get robotics. I've always felt that was enough of a drawback. Cloaked banshee rushes are scary enough as it is.

Quote from: berrykerry789 on March 24, 2010, 10:40:01 PM
wish i had an starcraft 2 beta key...

Yeah, the friend invites are really depressing... means I probably won't get in at all.

That's a pretty vague topic. You probably should focus on a single race matchup at a time.

Generally though, in SC2, the counters are rather self explanatory, you can see just by looking at a unit's descriptors. A unit that happens to be armored and deals bonus damage against armored, like the maurader is best countered with units that are not armored, and deal bonus damage against armored. Barring that you take the best fit. Hydralisks for instance are not armored and deal generic damage against everything, making them effective against marauders.

Sometimes you'll find a perfect counter. Like the Void ray is armored and deals bonus damage to armored. The Thor is armored and deals bonus damage to light. Thus you've got the perfect damage and soaking balance.

Obviously also if you a given unit can only hit ground targets, then attacking it with air is a good strategy.