The Ultralisk Bug/Nerf Fix

Starcraft 2 forums have been inflammed after that hotfix

The controversy is over a language difference.  In the original Patch 1.1 the intention of the change was to nerf ultralisk damage against buildings.  Instead the intention was to have ultralisks cleave everything they attack.  The obvious bug was the range increasing the cleave range against large targets.

Terran players are calling this a fix.

Zerg players are calling it a nerf.

It feels that this is a very different Starcraft community.  In the original Starcraft community there was a lot of anger over changes but never anything this bad mannered.

Starcraft 2 Withdrawal

I sort of named this blog jokingly that I’m addicted to this game… but it may actually be coming into reality.

Addiction can be clinically identified by two signs:

(1) Excessive use/abuse of your supposed addiction

(2) Removing that activity causing odd social changes or health/mental effects.

Like with a smoker you see people addicted smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.  Then when you cut them off they start doing some odd things.  The biological change is they’ll just crave it so heavily and start binge eating to make up the loss.  This’ll cause some weight gain.  The odd thing is when people start doing habit things.  Like sometimes people will reach for a non-existent pack of cigarettes.  Some people need some gum in their mouth at all times.  Some people are going to do the motion with their fingers just purely out of habit.

I’m starting to feel a bit of this.

I actually left the house yesterday for some social interaction.  During all of it I was just going through strats in my head for countering some moves I’m scouting.  My fingers are constantly moving to try and keep up my finger speed.

Then when I get home the first thing I do is load up Starcraft 2 and do a warm-up 4v4 match.

Patch 1.1.1: Ultralisk Bug Fix

Well it looks like they’re going to ‘fix’ the ultralisk bug.  It will still cleave units near buildings but instead the splash damage will be significantly lower.

This is actually going to have a pretty severe impact on zerg play.  What it means is that mass ultralisks are going to lose to mass thors.  In his latest match up Cool (A Fruit Dealer) was able to topple OGSTop by dropping ultralisks on thors and mineral lines.

Could be a sad day for zerg once again.

Edit: It also looks like they’re going to make mineral boosting impossible.  This is actually kind of sad for anyone decent because it means you’ll have nothing to do for the first minute of the match.  So yeah…. guess you’re just going to have to go back to just spamming buttons without purpose or flavor if you want to look like you have high APM.

Patch 1.2: Team Patch?

Blizzard hasn’t been saying much about the 1.2 Christmas patch and who exactly it will be a Merry Christmas for.  But one thing that has slipped up is that patch 1.2’s main focus will be on team play.  This is a common step for blizzard.  Group activities are what the casual gamer market feeds into so heavily.  Look at how raiding took off so heavily in WoW.  How people will farm each other’s fields in Farmville.  Look at how small 1v1 Halo is compared to team play.  Now look at how many people have moved up to gold-platinum diamond compared to the total people playing 1v1.

Starcraft 2’s team community is HUGE.  So what changes should we expect?

1. Map Adjustments: Let’s face it the majority of team games are rushes.  This is not based on player attitudes but how maps are setup.  Maps are just too friendly to four player rushes.  The most popular 4v4 maps are those that require players to zigzag around.  Blizzard needs to either add in more team maps like these or change current ones to have more choke points and travel time.  I suspect we’ll see more Destructible Rocks placed all over the place.
2. Better FFA: There’s a neat feature Blizzard has built in but never gets used to ally yourself with people.  This feature is currently locked in four-player FFA.  Being able to make allegiances with people would be huge in an FFA strategy setting.
3. Smaller Construction Areas: The benefit of a large building area if you don’t have to build unit production buildings outside of your base.  The downside is that it leads to way more cheese.  With such large construction areas and so little vision it’s so easy for people to sneak in pylons with cannons/gateways and barracks for some early aggression.  In my latest 4v4 matchup I decided I wanted to cannon rush someone.  So I did.  I built a pylon and a forge in one of these ghostly fog of war spots.  I built one cannon and moved up to place the next, but he already had a forge down and was getting cannons to try and repel my attack.  So I put a pylon at the next door base, dropped a cannon, pulled two probes off my line and kited his zealots/probes around.  I built a cannon as my probe died.  He thought he had me but then the two probes came in and just started building pylons and cannons all over the place.  Case in point even though my cheese failed it was too easy to pull off twice.
4. Better VoIP: And this is the biggest problem, the in game chat system is absolutely terrible.  When I play with friends we pop on vent to talk with each other.  The game chat isn’t loud enough and isn’t clear enough.  This is just something Blizzard needs to just ship off to a company that focuses around gaming VoIP.  The system needs two things.  It needs to have a more powerful volume option for VoIP and an option to turn up your microphone so that your team mates can hear you clearly.  On top of this it needs an easy way to mute annoying players.

Unit of the Day: The Baneling

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these.  Today’s unit of the dayis one that I’ve fallen in love with and terrans have fell out of love with… the baneling.

History

In Starcraft zerglings are introduced as the basic melee unit of the zerg.  It is recognized as a mineral dump.  In Starcraft there was only one mutation, mutalisk into guardian.  Two if you count the spire turning into a greater spire three if you count creep colonies transforming into sunkens and those AA things.

For a race that was purely biological and was said to be ‘evolving’ you never really got to see much of it, it sort of just stayed the same.  So when brood wars came out blizzard added in the lurker an underground attacker that evolved from the hydralisk.  People loved this and a lot of early game tactics focused around getting a fast lurker.

But that’s where it died.  It felt silly that the basic unit couldn’t become something else.  People often think of zerg like an evil pokemon.  You start off with some unit and it evolves.  The lack of that sort of triffled a lot of players.  It felt weird that you could just make your zerglings hit harder and move faster.

So the baneling gets introduced.  It created a unique anti-zerg/terran unit that gets used more than almost any other zerg unit in the game.

In the campaign the baneling shows up in some odd places.  If you are doing it on casual your first time running into these guys is on the second last mission where you have to chose between wiping out air or ground for the final level.  You have to choose to wipe out his nydus worms in order to encounter them.  They show up and the Steadman tells you to “stay away from them.”  As you try to micro away one of them is bound to hit you and he tells you that you’re sort of dumb for getting hit by it.

And that’s it.  If you do the casual round you’ll never see banelings ever again, until multiplayer.

You see banelings once more in Hard Mode reaper level.  A reaper jumps down and destroys one and takes no damage from it, yep nothing big.  I may have spotted one in The Moebius Factor where you have to destroy the buildings but I mean you’d never engage it.

All-in-all the baneling is non-present in the terran campaign probably because of how explosively powerful they are.  I think blizzard had a sense of humor by making the zergling evolution into a suicide unit considering many zerg players will use zerglings as suicide units.

Strengths

It’s really hard to talk about the ‘strengths’ of the baneling unit.  Anything they are strong against they coincidentally die to.  Banelings DO NOT do bonus damage against any types.  Unlike their counter part the tank which does bonus damage vs. light units.

The baneling is mostly used against terran bio balls and zerg lings.  Two other common uses for banelings is to destroy command centers and kill harvesters.  Each baneling will cost you 50 minerals 25 gas (including the zergling you are morphing) so in order to make this worth while you need to kill a mere 3 units.

Banelings mix in well wit most army compositions.  The most popular is the terran buster, baneling/mutalisk.  But banelings also work well with just zerglings for the famous “baneling bust” where you use banelings to break open the terran door as well as baneling/hydra

Banelings have one upgrade that requires hive tech.  This makes it so that your banelings will roll instead of crawl.  It’s the most ridiculous upgrade but what it’s doing is increasing the movement speed of banelings.  When they crawl they’re only going to be good very early game with smaller numbers of enemy troops.  But once your enemy gets large mass and tanks then suddenly banelings aren’t getting to their target enough.  Rolling makes them a potent enemy.

Banelings also have the ability to BURROW which is insanely cool it makes your banelings transform into land mines.  This way you can plant them and detonate them as your enemy moves on you.  It feels kind of anti-climatic since you can’t see the damage they deal but it does end up being insanely cool.

They’re also the only unit that has the ability to auto-unburrow.  This makes them more like land mines as soon as his ball runs over it they’ll unburrow and detonate.  Pros don’t do this.  The simple reason is because they lose control on the vicious numbers they’re looking to kill with it.

One other powerful use of banelings is to load them into overlords and use the overlords as bombers and CARPET BOMB your enemy.  Some people will use this to drop them into piles of terran units while others will use it to bomb enemy structures.  It’s very challenging as you have to detonate these units as you drop them.

Weaknesses

The obvious weakness of banelings is that every time they have success you’re going to lower your army count by one.  There’s no other unit in the game that is literally trading army count for victory.  So one significant weakness of this unit is a player who makes poor choices.  If each baneling isn’t destroying 100 minerals worth of structures it may not be worth while.

Another weakness is that they die very easily to everything.  This is part of the design function, they wanted to make it so that they are going to hurt you for trying to kill them.  A lot of terran players (myself included) will bind sacrificial lambs who will absorb baneling hits making them really worthless.

Banelings as a final weakness have no other attacks other than suicide.  This makes them vulnerable to every single unit in the game.  They also cannot blow up air units meaning if your enemy has banshees, void rays or phoenixes maybe baneling play is over.  On that note I think if a phoenix kills a baneling in the air it should do air splash damage.

And that’s the baneling!