Post by SpaceDominator on Jan 9, 2021 17:27:44 GMT
Changes That Happened In the Starcraft Beta:
Pretty nostalgic.. few things that I forgot about:
1) Spider Mines would attack buildings.
2) Mutalisks had a single Glave attack.
3) Queens were way overpowered and had the current Mutalisk attack.
4) Plague was called Blood Boil
5) Spawning Pools used to take 50% less time to build than a barracks, and Zerglings used to take 50% shorter time than zerglings.
6) Buildings had a lot less Hit Points, so your bases were very susceptible to quick raids.
7) Archons had Mind Control, but would crash the game just about every time you used it. lol.
8) Reavers came before Shuttles
9) The Wraith Cloak Upgrade was part of the Science Facility I believe.
10) Just build a mass group of HT's and Psi Storm the entire map to melt everything.
NEW STUFF IN PATCH #4:
- Goliath's ground attack has been dropped from 15 to 10, to tone down the build nothing but Goliath strategy.
Just think about this, Imagine Goliaths with 15 Ground Damage! People actually used this as a strategy to try to destroy everyone just using Goliaths! It worked real well too!
- The Spawning Pool now takes twice as long to build (same as a barracks) and zerglings take 50% longer (same as a marine), to tone down the zergling rush. (FYI, build firebats and upgraded zealots to protect against the zergling rush).
God Just think about this one too. TRUST Me, It made me GO INSANE! Reduce the Spawning Pool by 1/2 and the Time Zerglings take to build, trust me.. It is a Pain!
- The score screen should more accurately reflect the actual game (many bug fixes here :-))
GOD, this was so annoying too. Whenever I would win a game with Protoss, the screen would crash and I get no credit for a win! That I hated.
- Dark Swarm had a major bug that we fixed. It should now work properly.
- We removed Mind Control from the Archon, and the game in fact. Too many bugs and WAY too powerful.
- The cost of the Spawn Broodling spell was increased to 125 from 100. Now unupgraded Queens can only cast one spawn broodling.
- Your win/loss record should be updated better. We still have some more work to do here, but you should get some credit from now on. After ten wins you will eligible to play ladder games and be ranked for the whole world to see (here's your big chance Scooby :-)). FYI, games are not counted as wins or losses unless they last longer than 5 minutes. Only ladder games are factored into your ladder rating/ranking.
- Automatic map transfer should be in and working. We will be seeding two new maps tonight, so if you want them, join a game that uses them and they will automatically be transferred and saved to your system.(Solar Station+Dire Straits)
- Blood boil was renamed to Plague in preparation for a change in effect. Coming soon.
- Spawn Broodling now works on Archons too.
- We increased the drop player timer and removed the abort game button. Too many people were dropping others or accidentally aborting games that they didn't need to.
- If a player lags out and is dropped, you shouldn't receive the "failed to achieve victory" message any longer.
- Team games should be more stable in general.
- General improvement to pathing. More to come.
- Many crash bug fixes. Games should be a bit more stable now.
- Many misc bug fixes
NEW STUFF IN PATCH #5:
- Disconnects are only counted against the disconnecter. If the other guy bails out, you still don't get a win, but neither do you get a disconnect. If someone makes a habit of disconnecting, over time his/her record will reflect it and you can choose to play them or not. We will be resetting disconnects to zero soon.
- Units on low ground now receive a -30% to hit when firing upon units on high ground. The moral of the story: control the plateaus.
- Nearly all flying units have had their hit points increased and their costs reduced. You should find them easier to build and more effective once built.
- We did however go the other way with transports in an effort to allow a well defended town a chance of protecting against shuttle drops. All transports are slower, and have fewer hp, and the ventral sacs upgrade takes longer and costs more.
- In an effort to slow down the Zerg's ability to expand we have increased the cost of a hatchery to 300 minerals (in addition to slowing down the overlord and the ventral sacs upgrade).
- To help the Protoss expand a little quicker we swapped the order in which you can build reavers and shuttles. Now you get shuttles first at the robotics bay.
- To make the Reaver cooler, we increased its speed by 30% (we still have work to do on the pathing of the Reaver's scarabs. Soon.)
- We reduced the Queen's attack from 10 to 8 and will be reducing her hit points to 120 and increasing the casting cost of Spawn Broodling to 150. The all-queens strategy was too powerful.
- You can no longer target buildings with Spider Mines. Our intention is that mines are to be used defensively, not to take out an opposing town.
- The Protoss shield batteries now charge shields at three times the speed and can restore three times as many shield points.
- The Templar hallucinate spell now creates two hallucinations instead of just one. (More changes coming soon to make hallucinations even more useful. Watch for it in the next patch).
- All maps should have fewer mineral fields on them. This should adjust the rate of mineral production relative to gas production. This more balanced production, coupled with the changes to air units should help bring air back into the game. Build those Battlecruisers! They should be very useful now (and keep in mind they can be repaired).
- You can now squelch people from within the game. Just use the standard '/squelch playername' command. BTW, you can talk to people in the chatroom and vice versa using the '/w playername' command.
- By popular demand, you can now view a player's stats in the ready room by using the '/stats playername' command.
- The ladder screen should accurately list and sort by ranking, wins, and games played.
- On going efforts to reduce the memory footprint. The less a 16 Meg system has to use virtual memory the faster the game will run. Even if you have 32 Meg or more, if the other guy doesn't the game will slow down. Recent memory reductions should help speed things up a bit. The next patch will have an even smaller footprint.
- On going efforts to optimize CPU usage. The game should be running noticeably faster. Combined with the smaller memory footprint, things should be running smoother on games with low-end systems. More improvements on the way here too
WHY IS THE PATCH SO LARGE?
The reasons for the large size of the patch are twofold:
1) IT INCLUDES THE CAMPAIGN EDITOR!
2) We have done a huge amount of work to shrink the size of the memory footprint to minimize the amount of disk reads/writes caused by virtual memory swapping. To this end there are now two sets of art files. One for 16 meg systems and one for 32 meg systems. Over the last three weeks we have managed to reduce the memory footprint for the 16 meg memory model to the point that the game should run smoothly even on 16 meg systems. The primary difference between the two art sets is that the 16 meg model has fewer angles for the small and medium size flying units and hovering ground units.
THE CAMPAIGN EDITOR
With this patch you will find the campaign editor enabled. You can run it from the StarCraft main menu or you can run it as a separate application. THERE IS A KNOWN BUG THAT WILL SOMETIMES GIVE YOU AN ERROR MESSAGE INDICATING THAT YOU NEED TO REINSTALL TO RUN THE EDITOR. IF YOU RECEIVE THIS ERROR YOU DO NOT NEED TO REINSTALL. SIMPLY EXIT STARCRAFT AND/OR THE EDITOR AND REBOOT YOUR SYSTEM.
We think you will find the campaign editor to be the most robust, full featured map editor ever made for a strategy game. Besides being able to easily spray out terrain and preplace units there is a very powerful natural language trigger system that will allow you to design your own missions complete with sound effects, modified unit stats, custom heroes, and all kinds of special events. Over the next week we will release a custom map or two that will illustrate some of the wackier things you can do with the campaign editor. Ideas that have been suggested so far that are completely doable are football, chess, gauntlet, missile command, steal the bacon, king of the hill, etc. Be creative, go nuts and have a good time. We can't wait to see the things you come up with.
With the release of the Campaign Editor, there will be literally thousands of maps out there in cyberspace. Not all of them will be well formed. To make sure that ladder games are fair, only certain, pre-approved maps, will be allowed in competitive play. You will find these in the ladder sub-directory within the maps directory.
Please see the section below titled "Known Bugs" for an explanation of some issues that may come up while patching and/or playing ladder games. WHAT'S NEW?
- When you quit a game, you will see clearly if you are surrendering, drawing, or winning. FYI, you can quit any game within the first five minutes and receive a draw which does not affect your record in any way. This is so that if you start a game and realize something is not right (eg, too fast, too laggy, wrong game type, etc.) you can exit with no negative repercussions.
- We have adjusted all upgrade costs and added techtree dependencies to many of them. This was done to slow down the mid-level rushes. Now, you can no longer rush with fully upgraded mid-level units without advancing down the tech tree.
- All buildings except towers now have 30% more hit points. This was to give your towns a greater sense of permanence and give a player a chance to react to attacks on his outpost towns. By comparison, it took less time for 3 marines (one of the basic combat units) to kill a farm than it did for 3 ogres (one of Warcraft II's advanced combat units) to kill a farm.
- High ground now affects the line of sight of units down below. In other words a unit down below will not be able to see anything on a plateau above. High ground is now of extreme tactical importance. Coming soon, units will unmask when attacking out of the darkness, so even if you can't see the whole plateau above, at least you can see the unit that is shelling you. Keep in mind however, that units firing up still receive a -30% to hit.
- The Wraith's cloaking has been moved to the control tower. This makes it much easier to get to cloaked wraiths which should in turn make Wraiths more useful. Also, coming soon, Wraiths will start with burst lasers and you will not have to research them.
- A more balanced Psionic Storm. It no longer stacks, it costs 75 mana, and it does healthy damage when cast individually. No more building of 8 templars and casting 8 stacked Psionic Storms for 25 mana, instantly melting anything they touch.
- We reduced the cost of the Protoss Scouts.
- We removed the attacks from the Queen, Defiler, and Templar. Instead they each start with a "spell" (Vessel too). This ties into the purity of purpose discussion which should encourage combined forces. Also, they won't have the annoying habit of auto-acquiring enemy combat units, rushing into a firefight with their weak attacks, and getting themselves killed.
- There is now a button on the hatchery that selects all of that hatchery's larva.
- The Archon no longer does splash damage. This is temporary. It will be going back in with a reduced area of effect.
- Photon Cannons are cheaper.
- All gas units (ghost, scourge, vessel, arbiter, observer, and defiler) now cost a nominal amount of minerals.
- You can no longer place a nydus canal exit through the fog of war. You must have a unit observing the enemy Zerg base if you want to try to cheese him.
- Better leader board for Greed and Slaughter that shows everyone's stats. You can toggle it on and off using ctrl-r.
- Flags in capture the flag will wait for 3 minutes before returning home to their Beacon if left untouched.
- Reavers will now auto-acquire and counter attack enemy ground units. Further, we doubled their attack rate, halved the cost of a scarab, halved the damage that a scarab does, and halved the build time of a scarab. You will find Reavers very good at defending your own base, not to mention razing enemy bases.
- Much polish work has been done on the vulture's spider mines. The vulture can no longer place them at range, but must drive to the drop site, they take a couple of seconds to activate during which time they remain unburrowed and easy to kill, and they have fewer hit points. Our intention was to have mines used defensively to mine choke points, not to annihilate incoming forces as they are approaching. No more spider mine cheese!
- The user interface to allow you to change your Battle.net password is in.
- Sight upgrades now give +2 improvements to sight. The ghost no longer dies when nuking at max range, and the occular implants will increase the Ghost's maximum nuke range.
- We reduced the cost of the Protoss StarGate and Robotics Facility. It was much less expensive for the other two races to advance down the tech tree. These reductions bring the Protoss techtree more in line with the other two races. Their units are still more expensive however to reflect their superior abilities.
- We increased the cost of the Ultralisk and its control requirements. These guys were just too nasty.
- The shield battery is better still. It can now instantaneously recharge shields at a short range and has a recharge button on it.
- The Queen's spawn broodling spell now spits out a small parasite so you can tell where the spell is coming from.
- Irradiate is no longer affected by armor. Coming soon the Science Vessel will have more hit points, which should make casting its spells without it dying a possibility.
- Dark Swarm no longer provides cover for buildings or fliers. This was too cheesable (cast it on your own town whenever his ranged units try to attack and all of your buildings become invincible or even worse, cast it over your pod of guardians while they shell his town).
- The mutalisk now uses the Queen's old glave wurm attack. It has range which should allow the mutalisk to do some damage before getting killed at a distance by units with ranged attacks.
- Spawn Broodling no longer affects Archons. Use ensnare instead to slow them down, then kill them fair and square. It was just too wrong to have the strongest combat unit in the game die instantly by a single spell from a zerg unit that any good zerg player is building a lot of.
- Sunken colony and spore colonies take longer to mutate. They were just too fast before.
- Reduced scourge hit points to 20. Now you have a remote chance of killing them before they blow you out of the air.
- Hallucinations now cost 125 but you get two and they have the full hitpoints of the unit hallucinated. The trick is they take double damage. This is now a very useful spell. Try hallucinating your 2 archons into 6 before sending them in, then watch the fireworks. Or perhaps 10 inbound shuttles, only two of which are real. Other players, keep in mind that area effect spells (ensnare, emp, stasis field, etc.) will immediately dispel all hallucinations, so there is a counter if you have spell casters about. If not, good luck.
- Tons of minute polish.
- Tons of bug fixes.
TRANSPORTS
- Transports have all had their capacities reduced. Overlords have 4 slots, Dropships have 6 slots, and shuttles still have 8 slots, but Zealots and Templars take up two slots each instead of one.
- Transports will still automatically unload all units, but they do it one unit at a time.
- When designating your unload destination, if you select the transport itself, it will unload right there instead of ignoring the command.
- The unupgraded Overlord speed has been dramatically reduced, one last time.
These are some pretty drastic changes to transports, so we thought we'd take a minute to explain why we have made them. It was our intention from the beginning that transports would be used to ferry units around the map, BUT NOT PAST WELL FORMED DEFENSES. In practice what was happening was that unless your base was PERFECTLY defended, a good player could scout your town then shuttle drop 8 upgraded zealots, 8 upgraded marines, 64 upgrades zerglings, into key points within your base and effectively end the game. The tactic of using overlords and zerglings to peon drop was pioneered by Sharon Shellman and is called the Shellman Gambit. It was UNSTOPPABLE. In our tests, our best players (all of them top ladder players) could use varieties of shuttle tactics to kill each other even if the other player new exactly what was coming. This is a bad thing.
As for their capacities, given that the zerg have a bazillion overlords (with upgraded speed) it was necessary to reduce the payload. Given that 8 zealots are roughly equal to at least 16 marines and that 8 templars can melt an entire town, it was necessary to reduce the effective shuttle payload. Finally, to try to make things fair between species, we reduced the dropship capacity.
So you must learn to use transports in a new way. Use them to expand to islands. Use them to expand to high ground. Use them to ferry units to the front edge of combat. Accompany them with escorts (wraiths, scouts, scourge). But do not use them to cheese past well defended bases and do not move them around the map unescorted, or suffer the consequences.
THE ZERG
Zerg players will notice that quite a few of the changes in this most recent patch "tone down" the Zerg. The bottom line is that prior to this patch, in the hands of an expert player, the Zerg were the best race, bar none. Many of the best ladder players are Blizzard employees, and to a man, they agree that the Zerg are unstoppable. Reasons for their absolute dominance:
- Their ability to pre-scout the entire map (with many overlords), prevent other players from expanding to secondary resource nodes (with many overlords), transport massive amounts of units to any point on the map (with many overlords).
- Their ability to fill the sky with Queens that instant kill almost any unit on the ground and guardians that shell at long range any buildings on the ground.
- Queens and Guardians wouldn't be so bad if you could get units into the air, but a zerg player using scourge can very cheaply and very effectively keep the skies clear of escort class ships, capital class ships, and transports.
It is our hope that these changes to the Zerg will allow the VERY BEST ladder players to play competitively against each other using any of the three races. And the Zerg still rule!
WHAT'S NEW IN PATCH #7
- Miscellaneous multiplayer balance. In particular, scouts, ultralisks, battlecruisers, archons, and shield batteries have all been adjusted a bit.
- Much improved pathing, both long range and short range.
- We have reset the capacities of the overlord and the dropship to eight. Loading only one tank or one ultralisk was just not useful enough.
- Two of our coolest custom maps: King of the Hill and Steal the Bacon. Play these using the "use map settings" game type to enable the special map rules.
- New ladder maps. A total of seven to be exact.
- Authenticated Blizzard maps. You will be able to tell which maps are Blizzard authenticated and which aren't by looking for the Blizzard logo when joining or creating games. - Tons of speed and memory optimizations.
- Tons of bug fixes. CAMPAIGN EDITOR
The campaign editor has also evolved quite a bit since the last patch. New features in the campaign editor include:
- Unit properties (hit points, armor, damage, cost, time to build).
- Customizable heroes (names and unit properties).
- New improved regions that can filter units based on elevation (low, medium, and high ground, low, medium, and high air).
- Force properties (randomize, share vision, ally, allied victory).
- Chaining maps together to form your own complete campaigns. You can even create branching campaigns if you want.
You will find that the map editor and its trigger language are incredibly powerful. We've included King of the Hill and Steal the Bacon as examples of how to properly use triggers to create some very interesting maps. Get creative. We've used it internally to create Zergling Roundup (round up the most zerglings to win), Old Faithful (techtonic anomalies kill all units on low ground every few minutes), wakka wakka (like a certain classic arcade game), race of death (vultures race around a dangerous track, complete with pit crews), Star Fortress (groovy team play), and many others. Let your imagination go wild.
A couple quick notes regarding the campaign editor: you will need to update any maps you have created with previous versions of the map editor. You can do this simply by loading the old map into the editor and then saving it off. This process may filter out some of your units, buildings, or doodads and may require some fixup. Also, the computer ai is not enabled in the Beta builds. If you place computer units in the map editor, they will remain inactive when you play the map using "map settings".
Pretty nostalgic.. few things that I forgot about:
1) Spider Mines would attack buildings.
2) Mutalisks had a single Glave attack.
3) Queens were way overpowered and had the current Mutalisk attack.
4) Plague was called Blood Boil
5) Spawning Pools used to take 50% less time to build than a barracks, and Zerglings used to take 50% shorter time than zerglings.
6) Buildings had a lot less Hit Points, so your bases were very susceptible to quick raids.
7) Archons had Mind Control, but would crash the game just about every time you used it. lol.
8) Reavers came before Shuttles
9) The Wraith Cloak Upgrade was part of the Science Facility I believe.
10) Just build a mass group of HT's and Psi Storm the entire map to melt everything.
NEW STUFF IN PATCH #4:
- Goliath's ground attack has been dropped from 15 to 10, to tone down the build nothing but Goliath strategy.
Just think about this, Imagine Goliaths with 15 Ground Damage! People actually used this as a strategy to try to destroy everyone just using Goliaths! It worked real well too!
- The Spawning Pool now takes twice as long to build (same as a barracks) and zerglings take 50% longer (same as a marine), to tone down the zergling rush. (FYI, build firebats and upgraded zealots to protect against the zergling rush).
God Just think about this one too. TRUST Me, It made me GO INSANE! Reduce the Spawning Pool by 1/2 and the Time Zerglings take to build, trust me.. It is a Pain!
- The score screen should more accurately reflect the actual game (many bug fixes here :-))
GOD, this was so annoying too. Whenever I would win a game with Protoss, the screen would crash and I get no credit for a win! That I hated.
- Dark Swarm had a major bug that we fixed. It should now work properly.
- We removed Mind Control from the Archon, and the game in fact. Too many bugs and WAY too powerful.
- The cost of the Spawn Broodling spell was increased to 125 from 100. Now unupgraded Queens can only cast one spawn broodling.
- Your win/loss record should be updated better. We still have some more work to do here, but you should get some credit from now on. After ten wins you will eligible to play ladder games and be ranked for the whole world to see (here's your big chance Scooby :-)). FYI, games are not counted as wins or losses unless they last longer than 5 minutes. Only ladder games are factored into your ladder rating/ranking.
- Automatic map transfer should be in and working. We will be seeding two new maps tonight, so if you want them, join a game that uses them and they will automatically be transferred and saved to your system.(Solar Station+Dire Straits)
- Blood boil was renamed to Plague in preparation for a change in effect. Coming soon.
- Spawn Broodling now works on Archons too.
- We increased the drop player timer and removed the abort game button. Too many people were dropping others or accidentally aborting games that they didn't need to.
- If a player lags out and is dropped, you shouldn't receive the "failed to achieve victory" message any longer.
- Team games should be more stable in general.
- General improvement to pathing. More to come.
- Many crash bug fixes. Games should be a bit more stable now.
- Many misc bug fixes
NEW STUFF IN PATCH #5:
- Disconnects are only counted against the disconnecter. If the other guy bails out, you still don't get a win, but neither do you get a disconnect. If someone makes a habit of disconnecting, over time his/her record will reflect it and you can choose to play them or not. We will be resetting disconnects to zero soon.
- Units on low ground now receive a -30% to hit when firing upon units on high ground. The moral of the story: control the plateaus.
- Nearly all flying units have had their hit points increased and their costs reduced. You should find them easier to build and more effective once built.
- We did however go the other way with transports in an effort to allow a well defended town a chance of protecting against shuttle drops. All transports are slower, and have fewer hp, and the ventral sacs upgrade takes longer and costs more.
- In an effort to slow down the Zerg's ability to expand we have increased the cost of a hatchery to 300 minerals (in addition to slowing down the overlord and the ventral sacs upgrade).
- To help the Protoss expand a little quicker we swapped the order in which you can build reavers and shuttles. Now you get shuttles first at the robotics bay.
- To make the Reaver cooler, we increased its speed by 30% (we still have work to do on the pathing of the Reaver's scarabs. Soon.)
- We reduced the Queen's attack from 10 to 8 and will be reducing her hit points to 120 and increasing the casting cost of Spawn Broodling to 150. The all-queens strategy was too powerful.
- You can no longer target buildings with Spider Mines. Our intention is that mines are to be used defensively, not to take out an opposing town.
- The Protoss shield batteries now charge shields at three times the speed and can restore three times as many shield points.
- The Templar hallucinate spell now creates two hallucinations instead of just one. (More changes coming soon to make hallucinations even more useful. Watch for it in the next patch).
- All maps should have fewer mineral fields on them. This should adjust the rate of mineral production relative to gas production. This more balanced production, coupled with the changes to air units should help bring air back into the game. Build those Battlecruisers! They should be very useful now (and keep in mind they can be repaired).
- You can now squelch people from within the game. Just use the standard '/squelch playername' command. BTW, you can talk to people in the chatroom and vice versa using the '/w playername' command.
- By popular demand, you can now view a player's stats in the ready room by using the '/stats playername' command.
- The ladder screen should accurately list and sort by ranking, wins, and games played.
- On going efforts to reduce the memory footprint. The less a 16 Meg system has to use virtual memory the faster the game will run. Even if you have 32 Meg or more, if the other guy doesn't the game will slow down. Recent memory reductions should help speed things up a bit. The next patch will have an even smaller footprint.
- On going efforts to optimize CPU usage. The game should be running noticeably faster. Combined with the smaller memory footprint, things should be running smoother on games with low-end systems. More improvements on the way here too
WHY IS THE PATCH SO LARGE?
The reasons for the large size of the patch are twofold:
1) IT INCLUDES THE CAMPAIGN EDITOR!
2) We have done a huge amount of work to shrink the size of the memory footprint to minimize the amount of disk reads/writes caused by virtual memory swapping. To this end there are now two sets of art files. One for 16 meg systems and one for 32 meg systems. Over the last three weeks we have managed to reduce the memory footprint for the 16 meg memory model to the point that the game should run smoothly even on 16 meg systems. The primary difference between the two art sets is that the 16 meg model has fewer angles for the small and medium size flying units and hovering ground units.
THE CAMPAIGN EDITOR
With this patch you will find the campaign editor enabled. You can run it from the StarCraft main menu or you can run it as a separate application. THERE IS A KNOWN BUG THAT WILL SOMETIMES GIVE YOU AN ERROR MESSAGE INDICATING THAT YOU NEED TO REINSTALL TO RUN THE EDITOR. IF YOU RECEIVE THIS ERROR YOU DO NOT NEED TO REINSTALL. SIMPLY EXIT STARCRAFT AND/OR THE EDITOR AND REBOOT YOUR SYSTEM.
We think you will find the campaign editor to be the most robust, full featured map editor ever made for a strategy game. Besides being able to easily spray out terrain and preplace units there is a very powerful natural language trigger system that will allow you to design your own missions complete with sound effects, modified unit stats, custom heroes, and all kinds of special events. Over the next week we will release a custom map or two that will illustrate some of the wackier things you can do with the campaign editor. Ideas that have been suggested so far that are completely doable are football, chess, gauntlet, missile command, steal the bacon, king of the hill, etc. Be creative, go nuts and have a good time. We can't wait to see the things you come up with.
With the release of the Campaign Editor, there will be literally thousands of maps out there in cyberspace. Not all of them will be well formed. To make sure that ladder games are fair, only certain, pre-approved maps, will be allowed in competitive play. You will find these in the ladder sub-directory within the maps directory.
Please see the section below titled "Known Bugs" for an explanation of some issues that may come up while patching and/or playing ladder games. WHAT'S NEW?
- When you quit a game, you will see clearly if you are surrendering, drawing, or winning. FYI, you can quit any game within the first five minutes and receive a draw which does not affect your record in any way. This is so that if you start a game and realize something is not right (eg, too fast, too laggy, wrong game type, etc.) you can exit with no negative repercussions.
- We have adjusted all upgrade costs and added techtree dependencies to many of them. This was done to slow down the mid-level rushes. Now, you can no longer rush with fully upgraded mid-level units without advancing down the tech tree.
- All buildings except towers now have 30% more hit points. This was to give your towns a greater sense of permanence and give a player a chance to react to attacks on his outpost towns. By comparison, it took less time for 3 marines (one of the basic combat units) to kill a farm than it did for 3 ogres (one of Warcraft II's advanced combat units) to kill a farm.
- High ground now affects the line of sight of units down below. In other words a unit down below will not be able to see anything on a plateau above. High ground is now of extreme tactical importance. Coming soon, units will unmask when attacking out of the darkness, so even if you can't see the whole plateau above, at least you can see the unit that is shelling you. Keep in mind however, that units firing up still receive a -30% to hit.
- The Wraith's cloaking has been moved to the control tower. This makes it much easier to get to cloaked wraiths which should in turn make Wraiths more useful. Also, coming soon, Wraiths will start with burst lasers and you will not have to research them.
- A more balanced Psionic Storm. It no longer stacks, it costs 75 mana, and it does healthy damage when cast individually. No more building of 8 templars and casting 8 stacked Psionic Storms for 25 mana, instantly melting anything they touch.
- We reduced the cost of the Protoss Scouts.
- We removed the attacks from the Queen, Defiler, and Templar. Instead they each start with a "spell" (Vessel too). This ties into the purity of purpose discussion which should encourage combined forces. Also, they won't have the annoying habit of auto-acquiring enemy combat units, rushing into a firefight with their weak attacks, and getting themselves killed.
- There is now a button on the hatchery that selects all of that hatchery's larva.
- The Archon no longer does splash damage. This is temporary. It will be going back in with a reduced area of effect.
- Photon Cannons are cheaper.
- All gas units (ghost, scourge, vessel, arbiter, observer, and defiler) now cost a nominal amount of minerals.
- You can no longer place a nydus canal exit through the fog of war. You must have a unit observing the enemy Zerg base if you want to try to cheese him.
- Better leader board for Greed and Slaughter that shows everyone's stats. You can toggle it on and off using ctrl-r.
- Flags in capture the flag will wait for 3 minutes before returning home to their Beacon if left untouched.
- Reavers will now auto-acquire and counter attack enemy ground units. Further, we doubled their attack rate, halved the cost of a scarab, halved the damage that a scarab does, and halved the build time of a scarab. You will find Reavers very good at defending your own base, not to mention razing enemy bases.
- Much polish work has been done on the vulture's spider mines. The vulture can no longer place them at range, but must drive to the drop site, they take a couple of seconds to activate during which time they remain unburrowed and easy to kill, and they have fewer hit points. Our intention was to have mines used defensively to mine choke points, not to annihilate incoming forces as they are approaching. No more spider mine cheese!
- The user interface to allow you to change your Battle.net password is in.
- Sight upgrades now give +2 improvements to sight. The ghost no longer dies when nuking at max range, and the occular implants will increase the Ghost's maximum nuke range.
- We reduced the cost of the Protoss StarGate and Robotics Facility. It was much less expensive for the other two races to advance down the tech tree. These reductions bring the Protoss techtree more in line with the other two races. Their units are still more expensive however to reflect their superior abilities.
- We increased the cost of the Ultralisk and its control requirements. These guys were just too nasty.
- The shield battery is better still. It can now instantaneously recharge shields at a short range and has a recharge button on it.
- The Queen's spawn broodling spell now spits out a small parasite so you can tell where the spell is coming from.
- Irradiate is no longer affected by armor. Coming soon the Science Vessel will have more hit points, which should make casting its spells without it dying a possibility.
- Dark Swarm no longer provides cover for buildings or fliers. This was too cheesable (cast it on your own town whenever his ranged units try to attack and all of your buildings become invincible or even worse, cast it over your pod of guardians while they shell his town).
- The mutalisk now uses the Queen's old glave wurm attack. It has range which should allow the mutalisk to do some damage before getting killed at a distance by units with ranged attacks.
- Spawn Broodling no longer affects Archons. Use ensnare instead to slow them down, then kill them fair and square. It was just too wrong to have the strongest combat unit in the game die instantly by a single spell from a zerg unit that any good zerg player is building a lot of.
- Sunken colony and spore colonies take longer to mutate. They were just too fast before.
- Reduced scourge hit points to 20. Now you have a remote chance of killing them before they blow you out of the air.
- Hallucinations now cost 125 but you get two and they have the full hitpoints of the unit hallucinated. The trick is they take double damage. This is now a very useful spell. Try hallucinating your 2 archons into 6 before sending them in, then watch the fireworks. Or perhaps 10 inbound shuttles, only two of which are real. Other players, keep in mind that area effect spells (ensnare, emp, stasis field, etc.) will immediately dispel all hallucinations, so there is a counter if you have spell casters about. If not, good luck.
- Tons of minute polish.
- Tons of bug fixes.
TRANSPORTS
- Transports have all had their capacities reduced. Overlords have 4 slots, Dropships have 6 slots, and shuttles still have 8 slots, but Zealots and Templars take up two slots each instead of one.
- Transports will still automatically unload all units, but they do it one unit at a time.
- When designating your unload destination, if you select the transport itself, it will unload right there instead of ignoring the command.
- The unupgraded Overlord speed has been dramatically reduced, one last time.
These are some pretty drastic changes to transports, so we thought we'd take a minute to explain why we have made them. It was our intention from the beginning that transports would be used to ferry units around the map, BUT NOT PAST WELL FORMED DEFENSES. In practice what was happening was that unless your base was PERFECTLY defended, a good player could scout your town then shuttle drop 8 upgraded zealots, 8 upgraded marines, 64 upgrades zerglings, into key points within your base and effectively end the game. The tactic of using overlords and zerglings to peon drop was pioneered by Sharon Shellman and is called the Shellman Gambit. It was UNSTOPPABLE. In our tests, our best players (all of them top ladder players) could use varieties of shuttle tactics to kill each other even if the other player new exactly what was coming. This is a bad thing.
As for their capacities, given that the zerg have a bazillion overlords (with upgraded speed) it was necessary to reduce the payload. Given that 8 zealots are roughly equal to at least 16 marines and that 8 templars can melt an entire town, it was necessary to reduce the effective shuttle payload. Finally, to try to make things fair between species, we reduced the dropship capacity.
So you must learn to use transports in a new way. Use them to expand to islands. Use them to expand to high ground. Use them to ferry units to the front edge of combat. Accompany them with escorts (wraiths, scouts, scourge). But do not use them to cheese past well defended bases and do not move them around the map unescorted, or suffer the consequences.
THE ZERG
Zerg players will notice that quite a few of the changes in this most recent patch "tone down" the Zerg. The bottom line is that prior to this patch, in the hands of an expert player, the Zerg were the best race, bar none. Many of the best ladder players are Blizzard employees, and to a man, they agree that the Zerg are unstoppable. Reasons for their absolute dominance:
- Their ability to pre-scout the entire map (with many overlords), prevent other players from expanding to secondary resource nodes (with many overlords), transport massive amounts of units to any point on the map (with many overlords).
- Their ability to fill the sky with Queens that instant kill almost any unit on the ground and guardians that shell at long range any buildings on the ground.
- Queens and Guardians wouldn't be so bad if you could get units into the air, but a zerg player using scourge can very cheaply and very effectively keep the skies clear of escort class ships, capital class ships, and transports.
It is our hope that these changes to the Zerg will allow the VERY BEST ladder players to play competitively against each other using any of the three races. And the Zerg still rule!
WHAT'S NEW IN PATCH #7
- Miscellaneous multiplayer balance. In particular, scouts, ultralisks, battlecruisers, archons, and shield batteries have all been adjusted a bit.
- Much improved pathing, both long range and short range.
- We have reset the capacities of the overlord and the dropship to eight. Loading only one tank or one ultralisk was just not useful enough.
- Two of our coolest custom maps: King of the Hill and Steal the Bacon. Play these using the "use map settings" game type to enable the special map rules.
- New ladder maps. A total of seven to be exact.
- Authenticated Blizzard maps. You will be able to tell which maps are Blizzard authenticated and which aren't by looking for the Blizzard logo when joining or creating games. - Tons of speed and memory optimizations.
- Tons of bug fixes. CAMPAIGN EDITOR
The campaign editor has also evolved quite a bit since the last patch. New features in the campaign editor include:
- Unit properties (hit points, armor, damage, cost, time to build).
- Customizable heroes (names and unit properties).
- New improved regions that can filter units based on elevation (low, medium, and high ground, low, medium, and high air).
- Force properties (randomize, share vision, ally, allied victory).
- Chaining maps together to form your own complete campaigns. You can even create branching campaigns if you want.
You will find that the map editor and its trigger language are incredibly powerful. We've included King of the Hill and Steal the Bacon as examples of how to properly use triggers to create some very interesting maps. Get creative. We've used it internally to create Zergling Roundup (round up the most zerglings to win), Old Faithful (techtonic anomalies kill all units on low ground every few minutes), wakka wakka (like a certain classic arcade game), race of death (vultures race around a dangerous track, complete with pit crews), Star Fortress (groovy team play), and many others. Let your imagination go wild.
A couple quick notes regarding the campaign editor: you will need to update any maps you have created with previous versions of the map editor. You can do this simply by loading the old map into the editor and then saving it off. This process may filter out some of your units, buildings, or doodads and may require some fixup. Also, the computer ai is not enabled in the Beta builds. If you place computer units in the map editor, they will remain inactive when you play the map using "map settings".