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Poil posted:Zealots went from CHUNKCHUNKCHUNK! to swish swosh. What made this worse is the switch from those intense quick "punching stab" motions to whatever awkward looking slashes and such they do in SC2.
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May 13, 2021 01:46
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Poil posted:One of my biggest issues is how tame and dull the sound effects became. The only reason I don't think Starcraft has the best sound design of the era is because the Thief games exist. It's crazy to me that virtually every unit has such a distinct attack and death sound - even if the camera isn't on the action you can tell what's attacking you and how well it's going just by listening. And like you said, the sounds are so satisfying. I think I remember at one point seeing a petition for Blizzard to replace the SC2 Siege Tank sounds with their SC1 versions. ChaosStar0 posted:Okay, so I'm curious. For the mission where you need to destroy the Ion Cannon, is using Goliaths, Siege Tanks, Wraiths, and Battleships not the right moves? I mostly leave a few bunkers of Marines and a couple of Siege Tanks for my defense, while building up my armies and getting everything fully upgraded, then once everything is upgraded I send my armies to start wiping out the enemy. Thing is I usually never get to that point due to the enemy has by that point decimated my base with their Siege Tanks and Goliaths. I figure I'm doing something wrong, but not sure what as this strategy worked on all the other viable maps in the Terran Campaign. I never really use Firebats, Vultures(Except Raynor), or Science Vessels. Whoo boy. I have a weird amount of trouble in that mission. I find it the most difficult mission of all - base game and expansion. And like, objectively it's not, not even close, really. But for some reason I find it harder than, say, To Slay the Beast. I've just got some weird mental block with it, and I'm kinda looking forward to getting there so I can showcase fun footage of me making stupid mistakes. In any case, while it's been a while I seem to recall that an early, aggressive Marine push will give you a lot more breathing room. In fact, when in doubt, "early aggression to secure breathing room" is normally a safe go-to approach for tough missions in Starcraft. And Warcraft. Age of Empires. Heroes of Might and Magic. Age of Wonders. Total Annihilation. Really just about any strategy game I can think of.
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May 13, 2021 02:27
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JohnKilltrane posted:Versus Protoss: Here’s where Vultures really shine. The Protoss ground army is a little cumbersome and unwieldy, so before they get some form of Detection up (and, to a lesser extent, even after), Spider Mines are incredibly potent at containing them. Protoss will need to advance slowly and methodically to pick off the Mines, and that gives you all sorts of opportunities. If you watch competitive TvP it’s not uncommon to see Terran turn large parts of the map into minefields. Correct me if I'm wrong (it's been a billion years since I had all the unit stats and mechanics memorizes), but don't Protoss shields also take full damage from all damage types? I figured this was another advantage vultures had against Protoss since concussive is normally quite weak against larger units. Then again, maybe they just don't enjoy going face to face against dragoons anyway. I dunno, I'm pretty clueless about the pro scene.
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May 13, 2021 09:34
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Clarste posted:Correct me if I'm wrong (it's been a billion years since I had all the unit stats and mechanics memorizes), but don't Protoss shields also take full damage from all damage types? I figured this was another advantage vultures had against Protoss since concussive is normally quite weak against larger units. Then again, maybe they just don't enjoy going face to face against dragoons anyway. I dunno, I'm pretty clueless about the pro scene.
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May 13, 2021 14:41
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As an aside, in the Brood War AI development scene (which is surprisingly large), it's an open question as to whether Factory armies are better than Barracks armies in TvT. The potential for perfect micro really negates a lot of the drawbacks, and the lack of wreckable wrists on the bots helps too. One of the driving forces behind the development of mech strategies supplementing SK Terran vs Z was that it simply damaged players' wrists less.
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May 13, 2021 16:54
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Decoy Badger posted:As an aside, in the Brood War AI development scene (which is surprisingly large), it's an open question as to whether Factory armies are better than Barracks armies in TvT. The potential for perfect micro really negates a lot of the drawbacks, and the lack of wreckable wrists on the bots helps too. One of the driving forces behind the development of mech strategies supplementing SK Terran vs Z was that it simply damaged players' wrists less. If I wanted to learn more about custom Starcraft AI scripts, which website should I go to? Google is not being too helpful.
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May 13, 2021 17:34
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Use BWAPI to let your bot interact with the Starcraft game engine. OpenBW is an open-source recreation of the Starcraft game engine which lets you efficiently run a dozen games at a time for testing (and on Linux). They also have a nifty browser-based replay viewer which is better than remastered's, in some ways. SSCAIT has a tutorial to get started and get your bot on the bot ladder. SCHNAIL is the latest development which lets humans play against the top bots, which range from "SCV rush" to capable of defeating even A-rank players. The #1 bot for a while was a pile of ~150 IF statements, so they can be pretty simple!
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May 13, 2021 18:03
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Clarste posted:Correct me if I'm wrong (it's been a billion years since I had all the unit stats and mechanics memorizes), but don't Protoss shields also take full damage from all damage types? I figured this was another advantage vultures had against Protoss since concussive is normally quite weak against larger units. Then again, maybe they just don't enjoy going face to face against dragoons anyway. I dunno, I'm pretty clueless about the pro scene. Yep! Like DTurtle said, you're right. I'm waiting until we actually see Protoss before I talk about shields and how they work.
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May 14, 2021 22:19
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Update 4: The Jacobs Installation Unfortunately, this is from the same footage as the last one, so there's still a couple blurry screenshots in here. I was going to re-record it, but then moving happened.  “Former Colonial magistrate.” Whoops.  Your tenure as colonial magistrate is suspended, pending an official investigation of your affiliation with the Sons of Korhal. Receiving incoming transmission… Hey man, Arcturus’ boys sprung me from the prison ship. Apparently they’re as frustrated with the Confederates as we are! I know their reputation, but they seem to be on the level. I think Arcturus wanted to speak with you… Commander, Mar Sara is almost completely overrun by the Zerg. The Confederates are abandoning the planet, and so are we. However, there is one thing I’d like to do before we leave. I want you to raid this colony’s Confederate outpost and retrieve whatever designs or weapon schematics that you can find in their networks. With the chaos of the Confederates’ evacuation, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting in or out of their installation. I’m into it.Mission Objectives: Retrieve data disc from the Confederate network. Raynor must survive.  Here’s our starting position. We’re still in the run of tutorial-ish missions, and this one is a gentle introduction to something Blizzard pioneered with Warcraft 1 (and kinda dropped the ball on with Warcraft 2): Dungeon missions. We’ve got seven Marines, four Firebats, and Jimmy Raynor - who has left his sick ride behind and is joining us in a Marine suit. As you can see, he’s, uh, pretty badass. You also might have noticed that there’s been a palette swap. Starcraft continues Warcraft 2’s practice of using different colours to differentiate factions within a race. Now that we’ve officially cast in our lots with Mengsk and his crew, we’ve gone from the blue of the Colonial Militia to the red of the Sons of Korhal. It’s a neat detail. As we head on down the hall, we see our first threat:  Dungeon levels in SC1 are full of traps like this - wall and floor turrets that fold out when you get near them and open fire. Here we see a wall trap launching missiles at our boys. For the most part these traps aren’t terribly dangerous individually, but with no way to heal or reinforce our soldiers you have to be careful of attrition.  Upon entering this room, we get some very blurry footage of a Goliath, a Terran unit that we won’t be seeing for a couple missions. True to RTS form, the enemy will almost always have cooler toys than you. Even this, however, is no match for our forces. Hey, have I mentioned why we’re having such an easy time of this yet? See, the devs did us a huge favour for this mission - you might have already noticed it. Our units start out with max upgrades (also referred to as 3/3). Check it out:   As you can see, Jimmy’s stats are absurd. But even our ordinary Marines are doing 9 damage a pop, as opposed to 6, and have 3 armour, instead of 0. Meanwhile our enemies have no upgrades, sitting at 0/0. While this mission is an introduction to dungeon levels, it’s also an introduction to the importance of upgrades. We absolutely tear through the enemy. Which reminds me, we haven’t actually talked about armour yet. Each point of armour reduces incoming damage by 1 (for the most part). So not only do our Marines do 9 damage to enemy Marines’ 6, those Marines are effectively doing 3 damage to ours since they’ve got 3 armour. And Jimmy, sitting there with 6 armour, takes almost no damage from them. (If you're interested, when a unit's armour is equal to or greater than the attacking unit's damage, you'll take 0.5 damage per attack - so Raynor still takes damage from enemy Marines, just very slowly).  Beyond that, we come to some stairs. Stairs are normally a huge pain in dungeon levels - the game’s pathfinding has a hard time with them, and while your units are milling around trying to get to the top, the enemy’s got a high ground advantage on you. Fortunately their numbers are small and our upgrades are large, so it’s not a problem.  Down the corridor a bit…  It’s our first floor trap! It pops up and fires machine guns at us. You know, I’ve always wondered if it’s possible to see these things ahead of time if you have some form of detection, and what they look like if you do. Yeah, this level is mostly wandering down hallways that have one or two Marines in them. Not the most exciting thing in the world, but later dungeons get very exciting indeed so I’m not complaining. I actually kind of like this - setting aside the whole “early mission” thing, it also makes sense. The Confederacy’s evacuating as quickly as they can so token resistance is what you’d expect.  This is the formation I make a half-hearted effort to maintain for the level. Firebats roast Marines in a second if they can get close, and with more HP and base armour they’re tankier than Marines so they’re a great choice to have out front.  And up here we see a beacon. They’re special objects that normally do something cool when you walk on them, and are a big staple of dungeon missions. In this case, it’s a teleporter:   Hey! You’re not allowed in here! What the hell? Matt, are you reading this? They’re shooting civilians! Those “civilians” are Confederate scientists tasked with developing weapons. Weapons that they have deployed and will continue to deploy against innocents. It doesn’t matter what they’re involved in. This is wrong. Hmm. Perhaps there’s something the two of you should see.During the firefight, one of our units also stepped onto that white beacon there, which… Security cameras activated.This reveals three computer consoles:    The last of which we can see, between the two Marines, a Ghost - another Terran unit that we won’t be seeing for quite a bit. The first one is actually right near where we’ve already explored, so we have an uneventful trip there.  Touch the beacon and… Automatic Defense System Deactivated.This disables some (but not all!) of the turrets on the level. The next console on the camera is just across the hall. Along the way we see this:  A locked door separating us from a bunch of different “critters” - neutral, harmless creatures that appear on different tilesets. True to Blizzard tradition, if you click on them a bunch of times, they’ll explode.  You rebel scum!This beacon unlocks the two doors in this hallway. The critter one, and…  Zerg! I don’t believe this! Believe it. I saw Zerg within Confederate holding pens myself, and that was over a year ago. It’s clear the Confederates have known of these creatures for some time. For all we know, they could be breeding the things! Be that as it may, our priority here is accessing the Confederate network. We’ll deal with the Zerg another day. What the hell does this mean? I don’t know, Jim. You weren’t there when they really hit us. Their attacks were… coordinated. I definitely think something or someone is controlling these things Gentlemen, please focus. We don’t have a lot of time.Oh, unlocking the doors also means the critters are now meandering the hallways. Exceptionally sadistic players can wax them - they serve no purpose but to get in the way.  Wandering through the sparsely-populated corridors, we eventually get to some sort of machine bay.  It contains a couple of Vultures - easily the most serious threat we’ve faced so far. Still not a danger, but no joke either.    Most of my Marines didn’t even make it in (more evidence of my pro-level micro skills, I know). Firebats are normally the last thing you want to take on Vultures with. Normally. Being 3/3 to your opponent’s 0/0 changes things quite a lot. Here the mission springs a nasty surprise on us:  Remember how I said we disabled most of the automated defense? Yeah. There’s still a few turrets working. Here we see another wall mounted turret, but this one’s spouting flames. It does considerable damage to Small units and is responsible for our first casualty this mission as it roasts an already wounded Marine to death.  Up the stairs we see another beacon! This one teleports us to Sector One.   It’s them! Blast them.Oh hey look, another type of turret:  This is just a ground one that fires missiles. It is able to pick off a Firebat, though. Down the hall, we bust down the door to find the room with the last of the three consoles we saw. Unauthorized entry detected  The Ghost is able to snipe another of our men, but otherwise it’s an easy fight.    If you look, you can see the data disc lying on the ground beside the topmost Marine. Hey, we’ve found the plans, man. Have the transports waiting when we come out.Time for an interlude!    ...Whelp. JohnKilltrane fucked around with this message at 23:52 on May 16, 2021 |
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May 16, 2021 23:21
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JohnKilltrane posted:You also might have noticed that there’s been a palette swap. Starcraft continues Warcraft 2’s practice of using different colours to differentiate factions within a race. Now that we’ve officially cast in our lots with Mengsk and his crew, we’ve gone from the blue of the Colonial Militia to the red of the Sons of Korhal. It’s a neat detail. This is also how Starcraft identifies hero units! Raynor, in both vulture and marine forms, isn't actually just colored teal. His model is the same as any other unit of the type, he's just created as part of the teal faction (not used for any large-scale faction) and put under player control. In skirmish vs the AI, each color is also identified with a specific faction - the campaign usually but not always lines up with these. Terran skirmish colors pre-Brood War: Blue: Mar Sara Red: Elite Guard Teal: Kel-Morian Combine Purple: Antiga Orange: Delta Squadron Brown: Omega Squadron White: Alpha Squadron Yellow: Epsilon Squadron
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May 16, 2021 23:34
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Yep! Absolutely. As we saw in mission two, the Terran campaign also likes to use purple for "rescuable" units and buildings - which makes sense, as we'll see. Also worth noting that white, who we were fighting in this mission, is Alpha Squadron. Astute readers may remember that these are General Edmund Duke's boys.
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May 16, 2021 23:54
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well it would appear the Sons of Korhal isn't a complete sausage fest, that's a plus compared to the Confederacy right?
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May 17, 2021 00:20
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Aces High posted:well it would appear the Sons of Korhal isn't a complete sausage fest, that's a plus compared to the Confederacy right? I wouldn't get your hopes up. I'm sure that's just a background character the artist added in. Probably never see her again.
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May 17, 2021 00:23
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Surely there's more than one named female character in the game. Surely.
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May 17, 2021 00:28
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JohnKilltrane posted:Yep! Absolutely. As we saw in mission two, the Terran campaign also likes to use purple for "rescuable" units and buildings - which makes sense, as we'll see. Also worth noting that white, who we were fighting in this mission, is Alpha Squadron. Astute readers may remember that these are General Edmund Duke's boys. I remember absolutely loving that rescuable units kept their original colors, so you could be finishing the map and notice that one purple marine in your army - hundreds of units lost, but this one dude survived the whole time and was still kickin’.
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May 17, 2021 00:54
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Cythereal posted:Surely there's more than one named female character in the game. Surely. Excluding brood war, not outside of the non-blizzard dlc.
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May 17, 2021 01:16
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Acerbatus posted:Excluding brood war, not outside of the non-blizzard dlc. 
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May 17, 2021 01:23
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Acerbatus posted:Excluding brood war, not outside of the non-blizzard dlc. Tbf brood war has a decent number of women. They just all lack mouths
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May 17, 2021 01:30
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quote:It’s our first floor trap! It pops up and fires machine guns at us. You know, I’ve always wondered if it’s possible to see these things ahead of time if you have some form of detection, and what they look like if you do. There is! You can use Ensnare on the floor traps in the Zerg dungeon crawl on the Amerigo to reveal them.
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May 17, 2021 06:07
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The non-blizzard TheLoquid posted:There is! You can use Ensnare on the floor traps in the Zerg dungeon crawl on the Amerigo to reveal them. I think people can spawn them in custom maps too, and I vaguely recall them as appearing just like tiles.
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May 17, 2021 07:53
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Acerbatus posted:The non-blizzard  In this (and other dungeon maps) you can usually see them and other traps, because they look slightly different from the normal floors and walls. Pro-tip to not lose any units: Because of the ridiculous armor and damage output, always lead with the hero unit.
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May 17, 2021 18:31
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DTurtle posted:They were (famously?) used on the ASL Season 9 tournament map Inner Coven to block perfect placement of Command Centers (and other main buildings) without detection. You can see (but not attack) them without detection: Huh! I missed that map. I'll check it out. And you're right about the hero units. Raynor could easily solo this mission with minimal micro. Unfortunately, particularly in these early missions, I tend to get a little impatient and think "Why minimize casualties when I can just A-move into them."
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May 18, 2021 00:52
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I think detection lets you target the tiles, but it's been a long time so don't take my word for it.
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May 18, 2021 18:24
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JohnKilltrane posted:Huh! I missed that map. I'll check it out. And you're right about the hero units. Raynor could easily solo this mission with minimal micro. Unfortunately, particularly in these early missions, I tend to get a little impatient and think "Why minimize casualties when I can just A-move into them."
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May 18, 2021 18:25
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Dallbun posted:Dammit, John, those pixels have families! Oh, that's great! I needed more zergling fodder. Want to go visit daddy, kids?
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May 18, 2021 18:30
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JohnKilltrane posted:Huh! I missed that map. I'll check it out. And you're right about the hero units. Raynor could easily solo this mission with minimal micro. Unfortunately, particularly in these early missions, I tend to get a little impatient and think "Why minimize casualties when I can just A-move into them." Pooncha posted:I think detection lets you target the tiles, but it's been a long time so don't take my word for it.
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May 18, 2021 19:13
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FoolyCharged posted:Oh, that's great! I needed more zergling fodder. Want to go visit daddy, kids? I dont think I've every been so disgusted by something I agree with so wholeheartedly before
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May 19, 2021 00:31
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Dallbun posted:Dammit, John, those pixels have families! Look on the bright side - maybe they were local boys and their families were all vaporized by the Protoss.
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May 19, 2021 01:43
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Dallbun posted:Dammit, John, those pixels have families! We can use those families as backup troops!
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May 19, 2021 02:04
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Something to pay attention to, part of something larger I noticed when I played through the series: note that we've spent four missions, almost half the Terran campaign, on just one planet.
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May 20, 2021 14:16
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At least it's better than warcraft 3 where you didn't even see one of the factions until you were well over halfway through the campaign. Imagine if you didn't get to see the protoss until you were nearly done with the next campaign and everything up to that was endless TvT and TvZ.
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May 20, 2021 14:24
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That's one of the cool things about the SC1 campaign and is true about Brood War as well: you will have every kind of matchup at least once. Sometimes the reasons for those matchups are a little contrived, but its good that the game does try to push you to explore every facet of the game and learn to fight everyone as everyone.
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May 20, 2021 16:41
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FoolyCharged posted:At least it's better than warcraft 3 where you didn't even see one of the factions until you were well over halfway through the campaign. Imagine if you didn't get to see the protoss until you were nearly done with the next campaign and everything up to that was endless TvT and TvZ. I was bringing that up as a good thing, actually. SC1 has a pretty good sense of scale and scope. SC2, not so much.
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May 20, 2021 18:51
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FoolyCharged posted:At least it's better than warcraft 3 where you didn't even see one of the factions until you were well over halfway through the campaign. Imagine if you didn't get to see the protoss until you were nearly done with the next campaign and everything up to that was endless TvT and TvZ. For sure, though it's still going to be quite a while before the Protoss pop up. Speaking of which, it really is amazing to me the difference in quality between Starcraft Remastered and Warcraft 3 Reforged. I guess not even Blizzard's Perpetual Bad Idea Machine could compete with the weaponized grognardism of the Brood War fanbase and proscene. Well, okay. Mostly just the proscene. But still.
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May 22, 2021 23:36
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Unit Spotlight: Firebat Overview: We can train Firebats from the Barracks - but only so long as we’ve also got an Academy. It costs us fifty minerals, twenty-five vespene gas, and one supply. It’s Small, has 50 HP, 1 armour, 4 speed, and 16 Concussive damage (~17 DPS - well, sorta. It’s complicated). Like Marines, Firebats can also use Stimpacks, giving them 6 speed and bumping their DPS to ~25. I called them the “closest thing we’d get to a melee unit” because they’re still technically ranged, having a range of 2 - half that of an unupgraded Marine. There’s already been a fair bit of discussion about Firebats in the thread. They’re… weird. They’re one of the most niche units in not just the Terran arsenal but in the entire game. They do absolutely insane damage against Small units, but there aren’t a whole lot of targets you’d want to use them against. Marines are Small, but with their range advantage Firebats don’t have much luck against them. The Protoss basic unit is also Small, but a) they’re strong enough that Firebats are okay but not great against them, and b) against Protoss you wanna be pumping out those sweet, sweet Vultures anyway. Firebats absolutely punish worker units, but that’s not always feasible. 95% of the time, if you’re building Firebats, it’s to roast Zerglings. Since Zerglings are highly deadly, this is a more important role than you might expect. Lore: Like Marines, most Firebats are “resocialized” criminals (or, as the manual puts it, “culturally challenged persons”). They’re suited out in CMC-660 Heavy Combat Suits - fairly similar to the Marine’s CMC-400 Powered Combat Suit, except the CMC-660 has got two arm-mounted plasma flamethrowers and reinforced protection, particularly against fire. Sadly this fire protection doesn’t translate into gameplay. Well, I mean, the Firebat has more armour than Marines but they aren't resistant to fire-based attacks like... other Firebats. No tech fluff today, since the Firebat only has one upgrade, Stimpack, and we already saw that with the Marine.  The Firebat as seen in an upcoming cinematic 2.5 shots, 1 kill. So the Firebat’s attack is nuts. First, the Firebat is one of four units in the game that actually has double attacks - the game says it does 16 damage, but it’s actually two simultaneous attacks at 8 damage each. The only real difference with double attacks is that armour is applied to each of them, meaning it’s twice as effective against double attacks. Except for Firebats. Remember how I said it’s two simultaneous attacks? I lied! For Firebats it’s actually three simultaneous attacks, extending out in one line. So the Firebat’s got a unique sort of splash damage. Against Small targets, the first two attacks will hit the target and the third attack will (probably) hit if there’s something directly behind the target. But against Large and most Medium targets, the third attack will also land on the target, doing extra damage. Of course, this is essentially useless since Firebats do Concussive damage so you almost never want to use them against Large or Medium units if you can help it. The real takeaway here is that Firebats do some splash damage to units that are closely clumped together - like, say, Zerglings. Campaign Usage. Like I said, we won’t see a lot of these in the campaign. As you might expect based on what I said above, how important Firebats are for you kinda depends on how important Zerglings are for your enemy. Since Zerglings aren’t a huge threat in this campaign, we won’t see a lot of them. Their main usage will be to chuck them in Bunkers, alongside three Marines, against Zerg. You might sometimes see me do this 3 Marines:1 Firebat Bunker ratio against Terran - when I do, it’s almost always going to be unintentional: a stupid mistake from being on autopilot. However, with the Bunker’s +2 range bonus, Firebats actually have equal range to an unupgraded Marine, so it’s not entirely worthless. Competitive Usage: Versus Terran and Protoss: For the reasons mentioned above, you will almost never see Firebats in these matchups. Just about the only time you’ll see them is when someone decides to load up a Dropship (the transport ships that rescued us at the end of mission 3) with a handful of Firebats to dump them in the enemy’s mineral line and just completely obliterate their workers. But this is very rare - why do that when you could just zoom past their defenses with Vultures? In fact, can anyone think of any recent games (i.e. from the past 2-3 years) where Firebats were used in either of these matchups, for this purpose or otherwise? If you can I’d love if you could link it. Versus Zerg: Okay, now here’s where the Firebat shines. Zerglings are a major threat at all stages of the game and you need something to shut them down. Firebats are that something. Their main use is mixing in a handful with your Marines - the combination of the two (along with a third Terran unit we’ll see… someday) is a force that early Zerg can struggle to deal with. As things progress to the midgame, Firebats fall off a bit - but this can free them up to do the sort of drop mentioned above, in a way that requires way less investment. Or you can station them at your expansions, in case Zerg tries to get sneaky and zoom some Zerglings in. Late game, Zerg has a unit that almost completely shuts down every unit in Terran’s arsenal - except the Firebat. As a result, you’ll occasionally see Firebats deployed to counter this. More importantly, Zerglings hit a new level of danger in the lategame, making Firebats important again. Overall, Firebats aren’t a core unit in TvZ, but they’re a useful support unit, and you’ll usually see at least a few built in this matchup. They’re very much a reactive unit - how many you want and when you want them depends entirely on how many Zerglings your opponent is using.  Royal illustrates a fairly typical late-game TvZ composition. Notice that there’s just a pinch of Firebats - not a lot, but enough to make a big difference against the incoming Zerglings So, to summarize: TvT: Not really used. TvZ: Common support unit, mostly used to help Marines shut down Zerglings. TvP: Not really used. Let's close with some trivia: The Firebat was actually created from the Goliath - that Terran unit we saw in the last update. Originally (i.e. back in the... Alpha? Beta? I forget) the Goliath was also rocking a flamethrower, but the devs felt it was too many weapons on one unit, and so the flamethrower got split off and made into its own unit - the Firebat. I also believe that there was a point where the Firebat was going to be able to set the surrounding scenery on fire, Total Annihilation-style. EDIT: Five Minutes Shorter I'm retroactively adding here a new feature I'll be doing: Going over the hero version of a unit for all the units who don't have heroes we'll see in the campaign. The Firebat hero is Gui Montag, named of course after Guy Montag, the protagonist of Farenheit 451. He's got 160 HP, a base armour of 3, and does double the damage of a regular Firebat. Gui appears in the bonus campaign Enslavers, and statistically identical versions of him called Cerberus Firebats appear in the demo campaign, both of which I might end up doing - so who knows? Maybe we'll get to see him after all. Also, I gotta say, the demo campaign gives you a mission where you've got two Cerberus Firebats and you're going through a dungeon of mostly Zerglings and it is satisfying as all hell. Worth playing for that alone. Lorewise, Gui was just a particularly badass Firebat in the Omega Squadron. Kind of lame, but also kind of cool - there's nothing special about him, he was just real good at setting stuff on fire. JohnKilltrane fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Aug 27, 2023 |
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May 24, 2021 03:31
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JohnKilltrane posted:Let's close with some trivia: The Firebat was actually created from the Goliath - that Terran unit we saw in the last update. Originally (i.e. back in the... Alpha? Beta? I forget) the Goliath was also rocking a flamethrower, but the devs felt it was too many weapons on one unit, and so the flamethrower got split off and made into its own unit - the Firebat. I also believe that there was a point where the Firebat was going to be able to set the surrounding scenery on fire, Total Annihilation-style. An alternative explanation I've heard is that they couldn't get units to have multiple weapons targeting the same unit. The Goliath was supposed to have a flamethrower, autocannon, and missiles for use against ground targets, and only the missiles for air, but the game's code only supported one weapon against ground targets and one weapon against air targets.
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May 25, 2021 15:28
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JohnKilltrane posted:Unit Spotlight: Firebat Wow, I did not know that. Very interesting! It actually makes them even better against clumped up Zerglings. Here it is visualized (red circle=full damage, orange= 50%, yellow=25%):  And a Firebat setting a tree on fire in the beta: 
DTurtle fucked around with this message at 21:48 on May 25, 2021 |
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May 25, 2021 21:41
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With that damage profile, no wonder Firebats didn't get a normal damage typing. They would have been pretty monstrous, even being the only Terran "melee" unit.
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May 25, 2021 23:29
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Building Spotlight: Refinery Manual posted:The rather ramshackle Refineries were designed to speed up the arduous process of Vespene mining on the more desolate Terran worlds. Once constructed on top of a Vespene geyser, the Refinery will automatically package the gas into containers easily transportable by SCVs. Building Costs:  100 0 25Stats:  750 1Only buildable on Vespene Geysers, a Refinery allows SCVs to harvest Vespene gas so you can start creating things that require the resource. Despite Liquipedia's entry on this building being a little obscure (I had to pull up their list of Terran buildings to find it as it did not show on the roster at the bottom), the Refinery is essential for a player of any stripe due to many, many things requiring Vespene. Even if you're going Marines or Zerglings or anything that just use Minerals, their upgrades require Vespene! Unfortunately, unlike the Supply Depot there's not as many unorthodox situations that you can employ a Refinery in due to their placement. Some players would pull the SCVs toward the Refinery in the event of an attack on the mineral line so that they would remain close by to resume harvesting once the attack had been repelled, and very rarely people would partially build them (build, then cancel the SCV, leaving a partially built Refinery) on top of empty Vespene Geysers to deny the opponent access for the time it took to destroy the Refinery and build their own equivalents afterward. Because of that, let's cover another building! Building Spotlight: Barracks  Manual posted:The Barracks houses and trains all of the Terran infantry units. Like the Command Center, it is a mobile structure able to traverse great distances in order to reach new hot-zones or deployment centers. Building Costs: 150 0 50Stats: 1000 1Mobile This building produces Terran infantry units such as the Marine and Firebat. It's also a prerequisite to unlock the Factory which is used to build mechanical units such as Vultures. Alongside the Command Center, the Barracks is very important! It lets you get the smattering of Marines out to deter scouts and early-game assaults and it's often used in walling up chokepoints alongside Supply Depots. A player focusing on massing infantry units will be building a lot of these arranged in rows not only to allow for more efficient building, but also to hinder enemy advancement into the Terran base by blocking large units and only allowing smaller ones to approach single file (especially important against Zerg). Even if you don't intend to go infantry or use them as chokepoint holders, you need a Barracks to build the more advanced units anyway. As far as unorthodox use goes beyond walling, Barracks have been used in some more offensive capacities. One use has been to fly a Barracks over to a corner of the enemy's field to covertly produce units there and lead an assault on the mineral line (or some other target of opportunity) while bypassing guards. Other uses include providing line of sight for other units while flying (which is important for one later unit in particular), and to obscure or prevent other units and objects from being spotted or targeted by flying over them. A notable example of this second scenario occurred at the 2007 Blizzcon, where one player hid a Vulture's Spider Mines under a Barracks to prevent their opponent from being able to see and target them with their units. They will also get their own Add-Ons by the time of the sequel, though that's a story for another time (and a StarCraft 2 LP). Pooncha fucked around with this message at 07:09 on May 26, 2021 |
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May 26, 2021 07:01
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If you think about it, it's pretty weird that you have literally a flying barracks but you can't carry infantry with it.
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May 26, 2021 07:37
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