Hives Need a Nerf vol. III
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View this replay and watch Stec:
https://replay.faforever.com/12950928
This shows why hives need a nerf. Stec goes hardcore eco and gets overflow from other players or mass pass and hits insane early eco timing. This is not possible with any other faction, the build speed is just not fair. Kennels won't do it as they don't have enough production power and can't move targets fast enough. Seraphim t3 engineer bonuses have been stripped. Aeon doesn't fare a chance, even following the same macro layout and using t2/t3/t1 engineers to build. Too many spastic things happen blocking build locations and not applying build power efficiently.
Hives just stack into a hard parabola too fast without any trade offs. Basically every player is getting Cybran tech gifted now as a result of this. Its terrible to see balance out of whack this badly.
I know my team overreacted to what was essentially a "decoy" nuke build instead of a proper rush, but the timings Stec hit are broken, even with mass throws. I'd like to see hives nerfed some to fix this. Put them down to 2 upgrades and bring them closer to in line with UEF kennels.
So again, every hero build I see uses hives, every super fast macro I see uses hives. Every impossible to deflect nuke rush uses hives. Every hero defense of areas that don't have sufficient defense uses hives. They are broken and need to be put down in effectiveness some to make the game playable on random.
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tl;dr Gap player problems
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Imagine balancing a game because a unit is too good on a broken and unbalanced map. Seems very reasonable.
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I wouldn't even say it's broken on DualGap, just easy and convenient. I think good players can achieve the same with engineers, but it requires more effort.
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This is why I think balance should be done moreso with maps. This is how it has been done in StarCraft Brood War for the last decade and the meta is constantly shifting and evolving, despite no actual balance changes to the different factions.
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Can you elaborate what you mean @archsimkat?
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or you can create a mod that nerfs them and use it in dual gap lobbies, or just use unit restrictions and disable them in lobby (like thermo lobbies disable air), this seems like dual gap exclusive problem
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I also think a mod of some sort may be the best solution here.
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@Jip: The races in SC:BW are very different and have very distinct advantages/disadvantages. Basically, whenever a player developed an OP new strategy that became meta for that faction, mapmakers would be able to tweak the maps to help the other races.
Here's an explanation from someone who knows more than me.
The last actual balance patch for Brood War was 1.08, and it was released in May of 2001. The developers at that time had absolutely no way of knowing what kind of strategic and tactical innovations players would come up with in the next 10-12 years, but somehow, none of the progress ever seemed to reveal one race as fundamentally stronger than the others.
And there were huge innovations. Some of the most significant were mutalisk stacking/micro, forge wall-off fast expansions in PvZ, one rax/one fac CC openings for Terran, carrier/interceptor micro (fuck Katrina), zergs actually figuring out how to use defilers effectively, and lots more.
The biggest thing that enabled SC:BW to remain balanced and dynamic was the map-making community. The maps were constantly changing, and there were dozens of little changes that you could make on any given map to make life easier or harder for some particular race in some particular matchup.
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This somewhat exists in FAF already. You can see it in the fact we have minimal faction diversity relative to something like starcraft, but that lack of faction diversity is specifically what allows us to have such a wide range in potential map variety. I'm not really sure you only need to focus on one because the two types of balance speak to one another and kind of drive what is possible in the other.
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I see the normal dual gap hatred has been the main substantive reply to this post.
Heres my constructive feedback:
Problem is switching gears between rapid expanding production and eco cannot be done with other races. UEF get's close, but the 3rd upgrade on hives vs 2 upgrades on kennels and the drone movements across distances prevent them from matching up .
Solution: make a spool up time on hives. Change nothing else but set an early falloff that makes their initial effect a fraction and follows a linear acceleration up to current balance effect. This would fix all the problems I'm seeing.
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The "hate for Dual Gap" is irrelevant here.
You have (again) failed to provide an argument for why this should be a core balance change rather than just a mod. Hives are balanced just fine on virtually every other map. Nerfing them so they're balanced on Dual Gap would come at the expense of those maps.
Hives were considered very OP in Phantom. You know what people did? They wrote a mod that gave hives to all factions. Problem solved.
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@deribus nowhere was I discussing mods. Also dual gap not that outlandish of a map. It has player roles just like setons does, just like tons of other starting positions suggest. I would like to see more maps like this rather than the "if its a not a bunch of 1v1's on lanes its not a real map" argument.
If players play passive and use com/turtle and minimum required defenses on canis for example, the same thing can happen. Overflow to some cybran eco junkie and the games maximum potential eco is totally offset by hive's fast transfer time and the ability for that player to spend that overflow seamlessly without engineer clumping, and slam rapidly through tasks without a single bit of transfer time. Please read my posts again and look past your blindness.
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@Spy_Emanciator said in Hives Need a Nerf vol. III:
nowhere was I discussing mods.
That's my point exactly. Why should hive rebalance for Dual Gap not be a mod?
Also dual gap not that outlandish of a map. It has player roles just like setons does, just like tons of other starting positions suggest. I would like to see more maps like this rather than the "if its a not a bunch of 1v1's on lanes its not a real map" argument.
You're the only one here who's stuck on Dual Gap. Your argument is "Hives are overpowered on X map and only on X map and should be rebalanced." It doesn't matter if X map is Dual Gap or Cobalt Valley, the argument is the same.
If players play passive and use com/turtle and minimum required defenses on canis for example, the same thing can happen.
If you're claiming hives are overpowered on other maps as well, provide replays. I've never heard of a team purposefully overflowing so that one of them can make use of their 15 hives.
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For Devil’s argument sake, Seton’s? Maybe
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Hives are strong in super late game where BP concentration and pathfinding is more important then BP efficiency. In every other situation other forms of BP are more efficient and therefore with good BP scaling better.
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I'm not going to comment on whether hives need a nerf.
But the decision on whether to address a gameplay issue should not be disregarded because it only happens on the most played map types. That is just insanity.
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It's not insanity since the imbalances on such maps are results of bad mapping that disregards the most basic approaches and concepts of the current game balance like expansion and risk/reward of attacks. If you would like to keep the games "balanced" on such maps you would need a completely different balance with other basic assumptions.
As it is it's impossible to keep 1vs1 and Gap like maps balanced at the same time and since the game is supposed to be played more like 1vs1, 2vs2 or any decent team game map rather then Gap style that's the balance route that was chosen. -
@Tagada said in [Hives Need a Nerf vol. III]
and since the game is supposed to be played more like 1vs1, 2vs2 or any decent team game map rather then Gap style that's the balance route that was chosen.
As far as I recall, Isis was an original map in the original game and in the 1v1 rotation as well. Discounting "laned" team maps, the style of map that seems to be overwhelmingly popular in team play because its not "how the game is supposed to be played" is a completely unsupportable opinion. Best you've got is "me and my friends all think that", but the truth is that those team maps you feel don't represent the game were present at launch and even part of the original competitive map rotation.
But more importantly, you're presenting a false choice. You're claiming that we somehow can't balance both 1v1 and team maps and that's just wrong.
The truth is that people like yourself just don't want to bother addressing the concerns of people that play maps you don't care about. Its not that it can't be done, its that you don't feel anyone should bother trying.
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@moses_the_red come on - you're taking it out of context. You're free to make a mod, ask FtXCommando (or whoever has authority over that) to have it ranked, etc. The same has been done for RksExplosions - it is therefore possible. Problem solved for that single map. And that is what it should be - a solution for a single rather unique map.
Gap (and Astro) is a unique type of map where all the players are heavily concentrated along with 8x mass / player and therefore:
- Raiding is impossible when both teams are decent
- Expanding is not actually required because you start with 8x mass
This is fundamentally different to even Isis:
- There is reclaim in the center that you have to go for
- There is enough space for raiding and / or drops because the mass is not 100% concentrated
- Because there are (relative to gap) many options one has to take them into account and that costs resources / skill
And with regard to your argument about 'me and my friends all think that' - the same can be applied to you, me and my neighbor. Without being disrespectful to anyone, that is generally a good description of how a community works with the assumption that you consider the people in the community to be your friends.
And I'd really like to end with the casual vs competitive type of players. But, we've been there and we didn't agree on that so I won't.
