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Karune, Blizzard’s RTS community manager, has sprinkled a few new bits of information on the Battle.net forums.
First, he is asked about his thoughts regarding StarCraft 2’s unique units:
In the current build, only the Queen is ‘unique’ (only limited to 1 per Zerg player at any given time). The Thor is currently the Terran’s primary ground to air mechanized unit. More than one Mothership can also be built, though they are quite expensive in cost.
Will the Zerg Queen remain the only unique unit? The concept of its uniqueness is drastically different than both the Mothership and the Heroes of WarCraft 3. The Queen’s role is part of the Zerg’s building and unit evolution; It isn’t just a one-unit army or the pinnacle of the Zerg’s tech tree.
Comments made by Battlarmd and an Anonymous reader in our last post raise a few interesting ideas for both races:
As long as the Mothership is in the lower orbit, all units will get stronger shields, and maybe even decreased mana cost for abilities. Keep the Mothership unique, this way every Protoss player will want to build the Mothership asap, but again, it will be a major attack target by most players, but this kind of ‘fear factor’ will be cool. Maybe even have it so when the Mothership is created, a warning message can be sounded like the nuclear launch, something like “A Protoss Mothership has descended into lower orbit.”
The Mothership remains as one of the most powerful support units. The Vortex ability can potentially eat whole armies up, if the enemy players do not react fast enough (especially in difficult to maneuver choke points). Furthermore, the Time Bomb is extremely effective at breaking the enemy’s defensive line in a drawn out escalated battle.
The Void ability, Originally known as the Black Hole, has again been renamed to “Vortex“. It seems that the main drawback of this ability, despite being extremely powerful, is that it can relatively easily be dodged. Spells of this type, which are not instantaneous and require careful planning, also take a lot of skill to use. Of course, since the Mothership is not unique, there’s nothing holding a dedicated Protoss player from casting 2 or 3 of those, completely surrounding an enemy army with black death.
Next up, a few Zerg questions answered:
The visuals for the Zerg’s defense structures have not been finalized.
The new defense gameplay mechanisms they are working with on the Zerg are actually introducing many new tactics in terms of how you build your base defense. In order to maximize the efficiency of your defense structures, players will have to place them very strategically. I am sure we will go into this in more detail when we chat with the devs about it in a future batch of Q&As.
One of the reasons the size of the Banelings were increased from the size in the original Protoss Release Video was to make it plausible to defend against it. Before, if you have a group of Banelings attack with Zerglings, it was near impossible to focus fire on the Banelings. In the current build, their size, splash damage distribution, and hit points have been increased. These changes still make them potent, yet still allow the possibility of defense with superior micromanagement.
The final size of the Banelings still may change, but this is the current design they are testing.
One of the most seen offensive strategies internally at Blizzard is using the Queen to build base defenses on enemy creep in Zerg vs Zerg matches. The Queen can also regenerate the health of those defenses as well, making it an excellent Zerg on Zerg rush strategy.
Offensive towering taken to a new extreme. The Zerg Queen is the ultimate tower-rush weapon, capable of constructing the towers, healing them instantly, and providing back up herself. This is quite a risky move, but obviously a very effective one.
27 Comments to “Karunology: Unique Units, Offensive Queen, Bigger Banelings”
Post-Zerg Q&A and Interview with Blizzard Developers »
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Excelent job folks, the queen is the pinacle of evolution zerg…
So the Thor is now a glorified goliath? Bring back the old, interesting Thor please…
And why did it take them so long to reveal the Zerg? The queen is cool, but besides that you only have one new ground unit and one new air unit (and one new caster if you want, but it’s changed less than templars have). After 1- years can we have some actual change?
Why did it take so long
Possibilities: Balance adjustments (The zerg were developed later, so the balance testing needed to work out these new abilities is more than for when there were just protoss and justy erran units being tested against each other. Though the zerg were in developement for awhile, so maybe this reason is less strong.)
Art: the units have to be drawn and developed, in addition to the statistics being thought up.
Lots of units were thought up, few were used: self explanatory.
The zerg did not actually take that long: The game has been in development for 5 years or so in total, the zerg got released within about 9-10 months of when the protoss were released.
In addition, the amount of new units is actually not too much different between the races (The zerg have 5 new units plus infestor, the terrans had 4 new units, the protoss had 6 or 7 or so, though tempests and soul hunters were taken out pretty fast, and stalkers are quite similar to dragoons.)
On the Thor changes, although flak guns make some sense for the Thor, i agree that overall it seems like a weak role for the unit model and description. I don’t have a lot of good ideas on what could be done with the Thor to make it work while avoiding however much overlap the developers are trying to avoid.
This all well and said, considering we have a beta right around the corner, but people need to stop complaining about how powerful one unit is over the other. Everyone keeps demanding for a new game, something different from SC1, and now that we have it from these special units like the Mothership, Thor, and Queen. People are just tearing away at them saying they are “too powerful,” and should be made more manageable. But because so many have just decided to whine and complain about what was wrong with the unit you just saw without even considering the other races will have something to counter it.
I remember clearly from the video, the very first protoss video, that the mothership was not all that powerful. Yes, it had great abilities and was very awe-inspiring, it only went up against a few turrets and some marines who were ill equipped to fight a protoss ship using one of his best abilities. I’ve watched the video carefully and i’ve seen that the battlecruiser squadron nearly killed the mothership, if one more had fired his Yamato cannon at the ship, it would have easily destroyed it. So it really irritates dedicated players when people just want to tear down a good unit when, if you watch carefully, is just an impressive unit that only needed to be used right.
The thor was yet another unit that very impressive considering it was a huge monster of a unit and had not only the bombardment ability but also the passive ability to still function when half its health was gone. That made it very unique and very attractive unit to have in your arsenal, and the fact that it needed to be build straight on the battle field instead of being built in the factory made it feel like it was a necessary unit to use at some point in the game. But then, people decided to complain that it was clashing with a siege weapon. Yes, it did have siege abilities, but it was not dedicated to siege use. It was an effective anti-air, ground and possible siege weapon as needed. The siege tank was dedicated to being a proper siege weapon, there is very little clashing to me.
And there is my rant about what should of happened. If you want a different game, then think about it rather then complaining about it when it doesn’t match the SC game, it is SC2. It will have similarities, but it will be different in many aspects as well. It needs to be if it is going to survive as a prominent sequel to one of the best games made. So, go ahead, make suggestions, voice your complaints and compliments, but please, think before you criticize a unit when you haven’t seen enough to make a proper call on it. And trust blizzard, they are a very well organized and well known company. They have delivered on this part (save for Starcraft: Ghost, but we will let that slide for now) so lets let blizzard work on this and allow them to balance it out, they are the professionals.
everybody knew thor’s role was overlapping with siege tank. Blizzard won’t allow overlapping role/units because that is boring and it means losing more interesting units!
I am quite sure that Dev teams and other teams in blizzard are shaping this game right.
I am not sure how long it is going to take them to make this game right, but i can wait for the sake of game.
lol banelings got bigger, when everyone was complaining about it being too big.
i am in favor of making the mothership unique agian
also for returning the thor to what it was, not a goliath.
the mothership overlaps with the carrier, both being kick ass, powerful air units except one has powerups. they need to make the thor the super ground unit it was in the first place.
I think if they want a mecha anti-air unit then they should bring back goliaths, maybe new and improved ones like the siege tanks. I think that the Thor would have made a great later-tier full on assault unit if it had turrets that were not as powerful as its main railguns but could move freely around, and if you made an assault, and you started to loose, then your Thor is screwed as it can’t get away quick enough (especially with its immobilization).
speaking of the immobilization,it is another reason why freely rotating turrets would help. It would be annoying if your Thor is immobilized, because then it would mean it can’t turn, right? And all of its current guns are fixed forward, right? so with these freely rotating turrets it has some small chance of defending itself, from holding off any small attacks, until the SCV arrives to repair it.
I will say: THESE TURRETS WILL NOT HAVE TO BE POWERFUL! THEY WON”T BE AS STRONG AS IT’S CURRENT RAILGUNS!!!
That is all.
If the Protoss can have more than 1 Mothership, then I demand that the Zerg can have more than 1 Queen. Once the Planet Cracker gets going, there’s nothing for the Zerg to do but run/teleport away, with the Zerg Anti-Air probably squabbling between the Carriers and other air support.
I dunno, it almost seems like it’s a BAD idea for Zerg to bunch up a mass army now. XP
I like the idea of making the Thor become a super powerful unit which doesn’t have any special ability at all, with just its guns it can tear up the whole enemy’s army both on ground and air. Disabling anti-ground weapons of the Thor should also be added to the immobility penalty so that it’s not totally invincible.
It is great that Thor is very strong anti-air now. However, it seems that it is too weak while facing ground unit. I would like to have a stronger Thor. How about let the infsntry like marine gets on the Thor and able to attack the ground units only. I think this may strengthen the Thor.
Besides, the mothership is horrible. If it is a support unit, why it has so many destructive ability like Vortex. Although the ability would easily be dodged, how about the defensive building. No matter how strong the building are, I think one vortex is enough to clear a wide road for protoss.
Ah, and the blog comments become taken over by the “Everyone who comments complains about something” sybdrome. (including me a bit.)
I do like, in theory (becuase I haven’t actually tried it out yet), the idea of the queen as a specialized, powerful base defender, though not having any built base defense does seem a bit iffy.
The baneling size increase seems nice, though if banelings are designed for micromanagement, i wonder how damaging they would get if a player makes a few slipups and a bunch get through. In the actual gameplay videos, though, they seemed to be pretty well balanced.
I’m guessing overlord transport, for now, is out to avoid a “drop a bunch of banelings on the enemy” strategy. It does seem air transport will need to be back, though, if only for island maps.
I have 2 big questions I’d like to ask karune. But too lazy to figure out how to get on blizz’s forums so can anyone here please kindly ask him for me?
1. Can units such as Siege tanks Target ground? So I can take out lurkers and stuff without seeing them?
2. Are they planning on backwards replay compatability? Or do we lose access to old replays once a new patch comes around? It would be great if we could watch older replays in its “old build” even when SC2 is patched up many versions.
Re: Thor
As it looks to be moving into the dedicated ground-to-air attack role, why not give it these capabilities:
a) Weak ground attack, as it would be silly to build something this big without any ground defences
b) Normal air attack - lasers/missiles, whatever, at about the damage of several goliaths
c) Entrenched air attack - using the animations for fixing the Thor into position, you can plant the Thor on the battle field, allowing it to utilize its shoulder cannons as flak (AoE damage), protecting your units from attack.
d) Keep the manufacture on the battlefield with an SCV
e) Allow the Thor to act as a static flak cannon if it gets damaged to 50%.
I have to say, I do like the idea of an AoE flak cannon, and the Thor’s bombardment animation would have looked very good as it…
Yesterday i came up with another idea for the Thor. Blizzard can still have the Thor built by the SCV and make it an unit which deal huge damage to both air and ground target. Instead of having special abilities like the Mothership or the Queen, the Thor will have 4 special modes like Boost engine, Boost air weapons, Boost ground weapons and Normal mode. These modes can be switched with 0 casting time, 0 energy requirement but fairly long cooldown. The Normal mode gives the Thor 100% power for moving + turning speed, 100% power for both air and ground weapons. The Boost modes will give the Thor 200% power for each option (speed, anti-air or anti-ground) and reduce 50% power for the other two. If the Thor is in a Boost mode, losing 1/3 health will disable the Thor’s ability for that boost option, eg. the Thor cannot move if it loses 1/3 health when in Boost engine mode or cannot attack air enemies if in Boost air weapons mode. And if it’s in Normal mode, losing 1/3 of its health will cause it radomly lose 1 of the systems.
I don’t know if this idea will work well so please give me some comments about it ^^
dats pretty good…
Look guys, this is STARCRAFT 2, originated from STARCRAFT, no matter what you want to change in the game, it’s still STARCRAFT. These devs from Blizzard, they know what are they doing and it’s not easy to make a game as huge as SC2. Cause, now it’s the DEVS that are designing the game, not us. We can’t just go around demanding what we want, we may like it but others may not. I’m not saying that comments aren’t necessary, it’s just that…those devs from Blizzard are trying their best to satisfy everyone and the more request we make, the more pressure is on them. There are like thousands of ideas all around the net, imagine if they have to go through them one by one.
In my opinion, we should not be complaining or debating about the changes that they made. Yes, many did not agree on the Thor before but then I thought, there must be a reason for them to do that. We guys never played the game before, so we can only imagine how is it like, but we will not know the effects of it to the gameplay. Just imagine designing and creating something, endng up with people feeling not happy or not satisfied with it. In this case, the devs are still trying to make changes to the Terran and Protoss to satisfy everyone.
I know that Blizzard takes into account about the comments and reviews from us, so what im basically saying is, just give the devs some space to breathe. Let them consider things now and leave the final decision to them.
agreed. thor muz remain super ground
meo123 comments are good.
Yes, Meo123’s comments are very good.
Meo123:
Does the Thor still go offline when “killed”, to be rescued by any Terran SCV?
If so, if some random SCV goes to save it, owned by a player other than the maker of the Thor, repairs it and it goes online, all those boost engine “ailments”, like losing one boost systems in normal mode, would still stay. But the player who made the Thor and repairs to recommissioning, all “ailments” from boost engine damages would get fixed too, fixing that immobile Thor in boost engine mode.
Just a thought, so that Terran players would be discouraged of repairing an enemy disabled Thor(minerals and gas to be used), and getting this unit without full capacity, and just build their own while encouraging repairing a Thor who you unfortunately got mishandled and got turned off in battle, for less the price than a real building a Thor from scratch.
I fully admit, this would be REALLY annoying, but it would be cool (I think at least) if an offline thor could be repaired by an enemy and be salvaged to be used against you (prolly have to be a terran enemy tho). So if you launced a failed attack on enemy base with a thor, and it is put offline, the enemy SCVs could nip out and turn ur weapon against you!
Actually I don’t know if this mechanic is already in the game, if it is then don’t worry.
A suggestion for the Mothership “unique” factor: Maybe like a nuke, where you have to have perhaps as many fleet beacons (for example) as motherships, and for each F.Beacon upgrade some ‘warp in’ that will give the ability to warp in such a energy-demanding warp as the Mothership. it would be 3 costs - Fleet Beacon, Mothership warp in and then the actual Mothership. Sounds a little too much anyway, so maybe keep it to 2 costs and have the mothership be bound to a fleet beacon. If the beacon is destroyed, the energy which is needed to maintain the warp in vanishes along with the mothership - which makes it really important for toss players building placement and base defences or in contrary opposing players to have a chance against this monstrum. If a mothership is destroyed and the fleet beacon persists, a Mothership cost is ofcourse required to summon another.
- Feedback appriciated
I’m not so fussy about the mothership or thor (they look like they need a minor tweak here and there, and that’s it), but I think the queen could be better thought out. Fundementally it’s just like the heros from Warcraft III, while good in theory, it can be difficult to pull off. To have the Queen relegated to a mid-tech caster unit would probably be better in the end.
My one big gripe about SCII thus far is the newly announced “line of sight system” in which, unlike Starcraft, no defensive bonuses are granted to units on cliffs. Instead, marines or whatever on the lower ground must have direct line of sight (uninhibited by cliffs) to fire upon units on the cliff (e.g. a seige tank), and even when firing, the seige tank on the cliff remains in the fog of war instead of being momentarily revealed. I may have read it wrong, but I cannot see this working. In the spirit of good ol’ Brood War, mechanics like this seem to have no place.
In my opinion, the game mechanics from Starcraft should be kept in SCII, but refined. It’s up to Blizzard to raise this child, let’s hope they do it right. I don’t want it skating on my sidewalk listenin’ to all that hippity-hop music. No respect for their elders!