The zerglings are melee attackers, so holding a small choke point is an effective way of only allowing one or two zerglings to attack at a time, even if there are more (usually 6-8). What no one has mentioned is how many "essential" skills have arisen as a result of this hack.įor instance, an everpresent threat in Starcraft is the Zerg Rush, in which a player skips building an economy to build zerglings-cheap, light, raider units- to attack the opponent early before he has any defenses (as he, presumably, has not skipped building an economy). Similarly, KESPA (korean e-sports association) was one of the driving forces for map balance in brood war, and their version of the Lost Temple was considered very balanced for reasons much more strategically significant than "people like it". Of particular note are the GSL (A/THE pro-league in south korea) maps that actually include a neutral supply depot at the bottom of the main ramp to prevent pylon ramp-blocks from being viable so as to prevent drone drilling from being necessary. (see )Īs for the complicated "Blizzard Approved" maps, they're present in the ladders, but most have tweaks. Even with the drone drilling technique, it's still relatively uphill and requires good micro.
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Also worth noting is that just because it's simple doesn't make it easy it still required good APM/Micro to manage and a solid understanding of the magic-boxing techniques.Įven now, in SC2, the idea that workers don't collide with each other when given a command to mine a remote mineral patch is necessary at high levels of play to use the drone drilling technique in order to avoid a pylon ramp-block, which is an extremely simple technique for the protoss to use, but disproportionately difficult situation for the Zerg to deal with. At the time, top Zerg players were having tremendous problems breaching Terran static defenses, and it proved to be relatively "fair" for them to have that option in the mid-game. In the mutalisk stacking example, it ended up being a very good thing in terms of metagame balance.
Compare the solutions and balance opinions of Dustin "Rocks are Balanced" Browder to Sean "Day" Plott, for example. I think you grossly overestimate Blizzard's grasp of balance when compared to the SC/SC2 communities' grasp of balance.
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The manner pylon got it's name because it is so incredibly annoying to deal with, it will cause anyone to lose their manners.įor those of you who might be familiar with Starcraft, but not the competitive scene, you should know that pro players are executing these techniques at a rate of hundreds of APM (actions per minute): In Starcraft-speak, "manner" means being respectful (such as saying "good game" when you lose). This renders the workers useless until the pylon is killed. If a protoss player builds a pylon in their opponent's mineral line with great timing, they can trap their opponent's workers between the minerals and the pylon. This lead to a technique known as the manner pylon. With respect to the path-finding behavior described in the article, there is a funny aspect the author doesn't mention: mining workers still collide with buildings while mining, just not other workers. Using this technique, a pro gamer named July won the 3 OSL tournaments. This meant that an attacking player could deal the damage of 11 units while only exposing the surface area of 1 of them. However, at some point in the early 2000s, it was discovered that when 11 mutalisks were grouped with 1 overlord, the mutas tended to stack. One of the reasons Starcraft is interesting as an e-sport is because bugs like this have kept the game in racial balance for over a decade.įor example, the game was not designed to give mutalisks the ability to stack on top of each other.