Comment by 6510
21 hours ago
There is a design choice to be made balancing apm and technical play and I think they went to far towards the apm side. Could compare it to bullet chess. While broodwars was arguably even more neurotic it oddly seemed to have more surprising builds. Like many, I've been wondering what slower speed sc2 tournaments would look like.
Also interesting, they went with a specific kind of maps with things like nearly identical mineral lines, no islands or isolated high/low ground, map symmetry, not to big, not to small, ramps, chokes etc and then they balance the game mechanics around those maps making those choices almost permanent.
I use to download a lot of replays and there is a lot more technical fun to be had that is pretty much irrelevant in apm battles. It is also funny to see the game fall apart on maps that don't follow the standard design. Like, flying buildings should be fun not useless or the end of the world.
I don't love a lot of the design decisions sc2 made but at the end of the day it's pretty small nitpicking.
It's incredibly hard to divorce the map from the unit balance in a game like this and people eventually just settled on some combination of standard map features in order to balance around.
That being said, I think sc2 is considerably worse about map variety (mostly due to having more air units and more responsive/smaller collision box armies), every season bw had at least one "wacky" map pros were expected to play on, whether that involves islands or the nearly infinite number of tricks designers pulled off using minerals and gas geysers and such as ways to force certain play patterns
A couple of times they'd even design maps in such a way that one of your close expansion bases started off covered in creep, meaning zerg players could build there whenever they wantes but the other races had to destroy the creep first, with the idea being to make zerg stronger.
I think flying buildings are an interesting example of a fairly useful ability that ends up being extremely subtle, sort of like zerg healing. In almost any pro game, a terran player will lift off at least one building, frequently more (depending on how long the game lasts), but it's rarely a huge game defining moment, just a little optimization (unless they manage to lift off the barracks just when the speedlings show up...)
As you say, there's a balance between apm and "pure strategy", at one end you have chess and the other, dunno, bw I guess, and where you design for is going to involve a whole bunch of subjective factors.