Er, you do realize that the deathballs in Wings of Liberty involved flying units, which stack arbitrarily in the Starcraft 2 engine, and Colossi/void rays/other ground units, which can also occupy the same space. There are lots of units in Starcraft 2 that can't deathball, but the deathball problem they had did not involve any of them, and range is, as usual, relative. You obviously have absolutely no idea what you're talking about w.r.t. deathballs in Wings of Liberty. The primary way in which they fixed the deathball problems were to increase the efficacy of raiding for all races. Warp Prisms buffed, speedivacs, speed mutas with healing, Mothership Core recall, Oracle harassment, etc. There were also a couple of specific units involved, particularly Infestors and Broodlords, which received nerfs in some ways because they were too strong, and the Protoss deathballs were eliminated by the new metagame pioneered by Stephano, who showed that the Zerg deathball was much more powerful. Simply put, they don't need friendly fire.
I'm sorry, I really thought they would have solved the issue of deathballs in Starcraft 2. I completely forgot about flyers with AoE and scenarios where unit types stack because they move in separate layers, but they still kind of "solved" the issue for "regular" units by giving them rather low range, huge spacing and preventing them from stacking in homogeneous army compositions. However, they didn't solve the issue on an engine level and the balancing in Starcraft is very fragile, it has also to be noted that they enabled deathball meta builds on purpose. Issue is, weapon range and unit radius just isn't to scale in Starcraft, but it is in PA (at least it's more close). So even armies consisting of a single unit type (tanks) only, can already form an efficient deathball in PA. Also flanking still comes natural in Starcraft since the maps are really small, the units really big, so the engine forces you to spread out anyway unless you are going for a death ball suitable army composition. Thats not true for PA either, at least not with the current map design. With high range and large open fields, there is no need to adapt the formation to the environment, at least not while the unit count stays reasonable in any terms. Of course, friendly units blocking shots does NOT solve the problem for all unit types and less so for complex meta builds, but only for the easily spamable tank / assault units, but thats sufficient. You want your army to perform better than linear? Play smarter. (Btw.: Shots from these units are not really arced. Well, they are in the engine, and they could even lob across smaller obstacles on maximum range, but at regular firing distance this is barely noticeable and it isn't enough to avoid a blocker right in front of the firing unit.) Indirect fire units can be balanced in other ways, e.g. by adjusting their cost and/or rate of fire, turning them into potential targets worth protecting. And inhomogeneous meta builds? These are actually supposed to have an advantage over single unit type blobs, otherwise there would be no point in having any diversity. The gameplay is supposed to evolve over the course of a match, and that does not only mean rushing from T1 to T2 and mass producing only a single unit type for a single, devastating strike (say hello to the classic tech rush turtle and the following gunship deathball, or bombers/tanks in PA), but to encourage rather small encounters mid term and to ensure that large scale battles actually come with adequate losses on both side and take a satisfying amount of time to resolve. Making early spamable, heavy armored, direct fire units incapable of forming the main strikeforce of an late game army (they don't get obsolete, they still form a formidable front line, both as meatshield and economic source of extra damage) is essential in order to achieve that goal. Lets say, partly perfect. Blocking shots was great. Full friendly fire without damage modification even for accidental hits was sometimes ... painful. Damage from friendly fire is something which should be toggleable, even if it is just to prevent grieving in team play.
Alpha, we have no Formations now, and i think the Flow field system is not fully implemented. As soon as we have these, you wont see Deathballs anymore, they will be just impossible. Look at SupCom 2 for example, Aeon Teleporting, units moved to a single spot but pushed each other out until there was enough space between the units and they reached a formation. The thing that you describe is "exploiting of unfinished ingame mechanics" Buildings blocking shots would be fine, artillery could shoot over them, but not a direct-fire unit.
It isn't. I'm not talking about making units stack, that's actually bug using, not to mention that it is very prone to AoE damage. I'm talking about using the most dense, legit formation in order to form the death ball, just as it is right now. You might know "death balls" better by their classic name: Steamrolling or even just "tank rush". If you can line units up so that the rearmost unit is barely in weapon range, and you can stuff in dozens of additional rows between the rearmost unit and the target without breaking targeting, then all requirements for forming an efficient death ball are already met as the effective strength of a trivial, dense formation no longer scales linear. You get a working death ball, as soon as you are able to fill ALL rows with attacking units before the first row got destroyed. Units don't need to stack in order to achieve this goal, it is just sufficient if every unit in the ball can get into weapon range before significant losses occur and this requirement is fulfilled if armor divided by movement speed is sufficient. As soon as this is achieved, the larger army is capable of winning with minimal losses while it is immune to any advanced tactics. Well, there is nothing wrong with achieving this advantage, but thats what flanking is usually for. If you can achieve the very same (or even better) result without flanking, something went very, very wrong. If tactic-less game play is superior to any advanced tactic, then the balancing must be considered broken.
Long range AoE with enough power to destroy handfuls of tanks can be turned to other purposes. Are you willing to vouch for the fairness and balance of such a unit when deployed against targets of opportunity... that it will completely trounce? Just giving something AoE doesn't make it only useful against tanks n' bots. The only other option I can think of is to buff the HP of such a unit to godly levels and take away the range; makinging it an effective line breaker and "Riot-Control" kind of unit.m
Also suited for breaking defensive lines, including whole bases. Thats even more fun than tank rush and could almost be compared to an experimental gunship - except for that fact that it isn't an aircraft and therefor hasn't fighters as a hard counter. Unless you make it slow enough - in which case it can have as many HP as you want it to have as it would still fall victim to the deathball without firing a single shot - it would require to have just way to much offensive potential to be balanceable. No, there is no other solution but to make direct fire units respecting full LoS including own units. Stacking firepower (=unaffected by friendly fire), decent range, high speed and high health at low cost simply must not be combined in a single unit.
And whats wrong about that? If your enemy can overrun you with a huge amount of tanks - your defense was bad. That's the sense of having a huge army. If he has the time to "rush" a tank army, you could have the same time to counter it. Lets just imagine if they would move in Formations, ok? Tanks have a limited range A huge mass with Formation and Flow field system would have space between each unit That means that some units in the last rows cant hit, until they move closer Maybe they break the formation and form a circle around the targets If your defense is too weak - you are screwed. That's the sense of having these armys. If i would know that my armys could not attack, because there are other friendly units in front of them - screw them, i build bombers. They would turn out to be totally worthless. Why should i use 1000 tanks, if only 20 can attack? And then they all get hit by enemy Artillery and i have wasted a huge amount of ressources, for effectively 20 units...sounds fair... Maybe a High HP, slow Movement shortrange AoE unit could bring some difference. Mixing different kinds of units would be the best for an attacking army. At the moment we have just Tanks VS Tanks. Thats why it is called Alpha.
I must admit I agree, friendly fire needs to be a thing. I think that having direct fire units be able to shoot through each other is game breaking. This will not be alleviated by formations either. You can have the whole formation just direct fire units. This also discourages flanking tactics which is bad for gameplay. I thought it was actually pretty hilarious when your army would injure itself in TA (or even supcom in some cases, but not all). It made you have to actually think about unit composition and not bring too many tanks, and have enough lobbers (indirect fire) to back them up, etc. This formation was also vulnerable from behind and incentivized flanking. If there were no friendly fire, then you could just nuke yourself to kill attacking armies. What? That's totally broken so now nukes DO friendly fire? Hooray for random magical exceptions to rules... having the only counter to a deathball be a deathball is proof that they are OP btw. Also you're not thinking your own example through. Obviously building 1000 tanks would be disadvantageous. That's the WHOLE POINT. You should build tanks and indirect fire units, and mortar units and anit-air units. Make a diverse army, and your whole army can attack and be much more effective. Would you prefer it stay the same and tank deathballs are the most powerful formation forever? Sounds like a boring game to me...
Bring a few AoE units with your Counter-Army and the Deathball is Smoking Scrap. They shoot your frontline tanks, while your Artillery in the back kills them all. At the moment they wont sort, they are all a big mass moving everywhere, no Formation like "Tanks to the front row, Artillery back row" Even if they could not shoot through eachother, they would line up in two rows and form a circular shape around the target, until everyone can attack. Huge Army = Huge Army, if you have nothing to counter them, you have spend your ressources wrong. If there would be not enough space for them to spread, like a Canyon, then it would make sense if they could not shoot through each other. But even there the limited range would be the main-factor for them not to shoot. Thats my opinion, PA is not a small scale Battle, our armys can be huge, and if every single unit would have the ability to destroy its teammates, it would be really a lame game. Small army's would rule the battlefield, just lame. And even if, as i said, as soon as we have formation systems they would act the same, they would just spread more.
They did. I just explained how. They solved it by making it disadvantageous to have your entire army in one place, because your enemy can do crippling damage to your economy if you're not in position to defend. They explicitly nerfed deathball builds. And the issue is solved; why should it be solved by an engine change instead of, say, fixing the game's balancing? To what scale? There's nothing more inherently valid about PA's scale than Starcraft's scale. But more importantly, the only things affecting the validity of SC2's solution is unit mobility and their capacity to handle defensive structures. The range of units is relatively immaterial. By that, you mean that the flanker gains a better surface area of contact with a concave, which is a pretty massive advantage, and the relative sizes of maps and units has nothing to do with the engine anyway (do you even know what the engine is). Seriously, please just stop commenting about the situation in SC2. You obviously don't know anything about what you're talking about. Deathballs are easily solved by introducing powerful area-of-effect units, of which all races in Starcraft have examples, and making raiding the enemy economy a very viable strategy. If your enemy does not have units available to defend his economy, it should be an easy kill for you.
I think we already have friendly fire. I'd love to see shots be capable of directly hitting friendly units too, though perhaps only after we have formations; it would really reward mixed armies with indirect fire units in the back and such, as well as making proper construction of defensive emplacements a more interesting challenge than just "plop down some turrets in the same general area". This is how it works in Spring to great effect.
Friendly fire worked very well in TA. Have you ever played TA? Also, yea I get that this is alpha, but I think you're missing my point. you can have a massive army and friendly fire at the same time. You can also make use of more complex tactics with friendly fire on, than if it is off. Not to mention it looks wonky as hell for tanks to shoot through each other. Right now it wouldn't work well because the alpha pathfinding is broken and there are no formations or LoS testing. But with those things in, there would be minimal friendly fire occurring. The units would simply be prevented from firing until they had a clear shot, not just murdering all their team mates. What about any game in the total war series? Friendly fire is a thing there, and tactics is way more important. all your unit types have purposes. You can't just have all your riflemen stand on top of each other (in a deathball) and put the cannons behind them. the cannons will shred your own troops! You have to plan, and move your units around so you have more guys that can fire than the enemy has. And many of these battles included thousands of units, on a scale I would not consider to be small.
Sounds like a hell lot of micromanagement, and wasn't it the plan to not implement such a hell of micromanagement? (i really don't know, i just heard it a few times) LoS check - fine, but if it has to be Friendly Fire that hurts your own unit, make it an option for those who want to have it. Maybe it turns out to be a great feature, i don't know, but I'm not really a fan of friendly fire. Sadly i have never played TA, started the "series" with Vanilla SupCom (was FF in there?) or do you have a video where i can see the Friendly Fire in action?
That's not the type of micro referred to on the forums. For one, the really bad micro is, where you need to command every single unit by hand in order to dodge shots, to sort your ranks, or to stay just outside/within range. Little, yet tedious actions which bring an huge advantage, but are actually only necessary due to stupid unit AIs. Preparing a flanking attack sure requires more effort than attacking straight on, but it doesn't require time critical baby sitting of your units in order to keep it up. Second, smarter unit AIs can actually assist you. Automatically going into a formation where as many units as possible can fire? Sure, why not. This isn't that difficult, as long as you haven't tried to stuff to many units into a small place. So the additional complexity is only added on the tactical layer, but you don't have to worry about additional micro. Thats the job of the unit AI to take care of that.
Yeah, I'm in agreement for the LoS check form of FF. SC had only AoE/Indirect fire FF and no LoS checks. Units could fire through each other (ie, gun turret placed on other side of buildings was only touchable by indirect fire but could smoke the attackers). And guys, if memory serves, TA did not have LoS FF check and actually had the bad form of FF for allied teams as they'd shoot each other in the back and kill one another.
TA had the same as SupCom, only AoE friendly fire. However, you're right, fire from allies would hit other ally armies in both TA and SupCom. Alliances were more of a "I'm going to do some movement through your territory and maybe we can do a joint attack or something," than "While in the shower room together, the CORE Commander did find out that PeeWees do indeed have balls made entirely out of reinforced tungsten steel."
Yeah, sorry, I didn't properly convey that TA and SC were basically the same with FF, aside from TA also having the allied assisted suicide. It seriously made it so that mixed (team) armies were impossible and you almost literally had to attack from completely different angles. And air? Just forget it....
I wouldn't say that mixed armies would have been impossible, it's just that the numbers wouldn't simply stack if you just increased army size. Going with actually mixed armies though (one player focuses on one unit class, the other on another) and each player only microing his dedicated unit type could get you an huge advantage though. Attacking from completely different angles is just fine, too. You are throwing in twice the attendance, so why shouldn't the game reward you for this? It comes also with additional benefits, like preventing your enemy from sneaking away.
