Zerg Hex Forum

Terran economy can still be insane... you just have to adapt your gameplay and expand more.

And yes i played a lot of 2hours games in these stupid patches. And i was playing ALONE. 60% of my games in main account are alone... I'm like you guys, just a player.
You all forget about converter because chem plant destroyed it. This building is still here and has the same purpose x)

How do you think bunker worked before ? High mineral income transformed into gas with converter.

And i'm obviously not ignoring what you say... Just because your team is bad doesn't mean you must have a free way to win alone... Wtf is this logic.
If your team is bad as Terran ====> you loose.

"Is it a problem that you can win a game solo as a Terran while withstanding the full might of 2 zergs? Considering the game concept, yes."

Yes you are, otherwise you wouldn't have missed this from my post.

You can't expand more vs a decent zerg.

Hello! Thanks in advance for reading this!

Introduction

Terran main here. A decent 380-170 score, 95% solo games and no resets(it's not much, but it's honest 99% SOLO work). If I'm premade, I was mostly with one other player in my party(this is important for later). 150 APM+ and ex-Master in Ranked 1v1 also helped me a lot.

How did overwhelming majority of my games go?

Safe to say that most of my games were won solely by me alone(or I had a very very big impact on the game) due to having new people in the game(which I've always tried to teach) or people absolutely stubbornly refusing to understand the game and having an impact on a game even after several hundreds of games played.

Is it a problem that you can win a game solo as a Terran while withstanding the full might of 2 zergs? Considering the game concept, yes.

I am mostly focused because I was a chart leader with my score. I did enjoy being focused most of the time, as if forced me to adapt, learn the game, be more effective and personally I like a challenge.

Problems pre 4.0

Gonna try and keep it short.
- Firebat rushes. 11-13-14 mins Firebats popping out which were absolutely devastating for the zerg.
- 2 gas play with Firebats at min 16. If the zerg was decent this put a tremendous amount of pressure on the other 2 terrans on the lane which mostly resulted in a loss because the turtling player failed to have such a meaningful effect on the game to reverse the losses of 2 Terrans being overwhelmed and not able to do anything(or be relevant) for 16 minutes and beyond.
- People not attacking at all or doing it way too late. I would suggest putting the first line in the loading screen "THIS IS NOT A TOWER DEFENSE!". The amount of people not understanding this is absolutely baffling for me. I am not targeting new players with this.
- People turtling/not expanding for no reason. I was even flamed in some games that, I quote: "It's your fault for expanding"
- Very lengthy games because of the general passive approach of players in their gameplay style.

Keywords/problems in all this and one which everyone agrees upon? Firebats and passiveness.

Patch 4.0

Forcing players to be aggressive now. Excellent way to do it with these changes. But there are some big problems as well.

The concept is still the same. You have to push as a Terran to deal damage to the Zerg economy.

Was it imbalanced before? Yes. I always said after I got a grasp on the game that this game is only balanced because the lobbies are not filled with terrans that know what they're doing. 6 good Terrans means no chance for the Zerg. 2 good Terrans on the same side could mean the end of the game for the zerg without the siding zerg investing heavy resources in spawners to try and keep the Terrans in check, which resulted in a loss because of the lack of economy.

Now, while I absolutely agree that a game must be balanced against it's most experienced players, I find counter arguments here.

This game does not have a ranking system for pre-selecting players of your MMR to join in the lobby. It will never have. With a ranking system and being relatively sure that you get people of close enough skill, these changes would not have been such a big problem.

This is not a Triple A game with immense popularity and a blooming community of players. This is an SC2 custom game(absolutely no disrespect towards the creator, I think it's an excelent idea otherwise I wouldn't have spent hundreds of hours in it), but you have to consider this aspect when balancing. For 99% of the people it will be playing a few games from time to time. If you're not good, indeed, you should not be very effective, but forcing players to team up to be able to beat Zergs is a very very bad idea. People that have ridiculously high win rates don't play solo almost at all.

With this patch
General problem: Most of the players don't understand the concept, don't expand, don't attack, don't answer your queries when you ask them to do something, don't help you with energy from the tech lab if you have problems holding, have no map awareness or micro. Flaming is an often occurrence from players that have the least impact on the game. 

Removal of Chemical Plant & Defenders massive nerf
This thing was extremely unwarranted and not the cause of the problem. Firebats? Absolutely. Their removal would have been extremely good for multiple reasons, as per the reasons stated above. I don't think any player would have had a problem with that. Except butthurt and hypocrite ones. Any player playing them know they were imbalanced.
Gas is the backbone of the Terran economy. You need it for absolutely everything except energy(actually, indirectly, you need it for energy as well). Farms, marine upgrades, farm upgrades, wall upgrades.

Now you have to chose:
- Abandon defense and eco to get aggressive and have an impact. I am talking about getting to vets and actually doing game ending damage. Which is fine, if all players do it. But lets be serious.
- Abandon aggressiveness to play defensive and make eco to be able to do something in the long run(which is disgusting and sad) and cause 30+ min games for no reason.

You basically took the concept of a car which works with GAS and said "Hey, you either push it to move or you stay inside to have shelter. You can't do both at the same time."
This change completely drove the ability of "solo" players to have an impact on the game. Took away all the rewards of actually doing all the things above, respecting a build, using your experience to get a good balance between economy and army to have impact on all stages of the game. You have to chose a path.

Marines upgrades cost waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much to be able for them to be effective after a certain time stamp considering the removal of Chemical Plants. Zergs can still rush Brutalisks and completely stomp your base as with Veterans you have no real chance of defending, not even your Construction Yard side. Good luck getting to Elites now in a timely manner. Brutalisk rushes at min 20-21 were a problem before if executed correctly, now even more.

Defender nerf was way too much. The regen is absolutely useless, I couldn't hold my walls with 3 defenders vs T1 units. You cannot hold all sides of your base at the same time. This, coupled with the fact that you have no gas to be able to upgrade your wall is devastating. When Ravators come into play... I don't even want to talk about it.

If you get pushed in base because of extreme focus, it's basically GG for you. You have no real chance of being effective as your ramp walls can be easily destroyed/no Chemical Plant to augment your economy to be at least able to get some in base eco.

Proposals
Now, because I'm used to life and don't just wanna be a naysayer without bringing any relevant courses of action to the problems I signal, here follows my list of suggestions:

1) Put the chem plant back.
Holding 4 total gases will be hard enough this patch. Getting 2 extra side gases is impossible vs a zerg that has more than 5 games in the game. This game is not built for you to defend everywhere and that is fine. Every inch of expansion must come with costs, not with only benefits.

Balance(numbers bellow serve only example purposes biased from my own experience):
- Remove Firebats or keep the the existing ones. They are utterly useless anyway in this state. Not even a match for T1 units.
- Put a timer on the possibility of building chem plants. Let players start building it since like minute 18. In this way you completely eradicate rushes with Firebats/stop Terrans snowballing with too much economy. This will also force players to be aggressive as they can't do anything otherwise.
- Limit the amount of chem plants players can build. Lets say, a maximum of 3. 800/200 is still a serious investment, especially in the early stages.
- Considering the changes above, players can still pile up resources and build 2 chem plants min 18. To counter this I would propose a "charge system" to build chem plants. Grant the first charge minute 18-19.  Second charge min 23. 3'rd charge min 28, or something close to that. This will reward micro, resource management, build order and prevent players from snowballing with resources, as I stated above.

2) Give Defenders some of their DEFENSIVEcapabilities back.
- Half of their bonus to walls. I agree it was a bit too much and very strong how it was before, but now it's like they're not there. The bonus to the wall upgrades is way too little considering the removal of Chemical plants. Completely removing their defense bonus and dropping them to 3 is just too much.

3) Pro Mode
- This is an excellent suggestion from another thread. Default to "Vanilla mode" and let players choose if they want the "Pro Mode" or not. Make it Brutal there. Make it such that only the best players on both sides will be able to be relevant there.
- This will also alleviate the frustration of solo players that just wanna have some fun. I only stuck to this game because it was possible to for me to be relevant on my own. Having to rely on another 5 people with no real ranking system is almost surely going to bring extreme frustration. Having to rely on people in games is very rarely yielding good end games. I think we all can relate.

This is basically all that I have to say at the moment. Don't assume that everyone is playing in parties with good Terrans. Most of the people play solo because of the imbalance of having good coordinated premades.

Good to have you back and see you balancing/maintaining things for absolutely free for us to enjoy out of your own precious time.