Khross wrote:
Diamondeye:
IdrA does finally win, but that's not the point really. 50 Supply Level 1 Units Decimated 66 Supply of Fully Upgraded T3 Units in less than 5 seconds. I play Zerg a lot. It's my favorite race in StarCraft II. I win my fair share of games, but even a total noob Terran can thrash one of my Tier 3 Units without a challenge (Ultralisks). And surrounding the ball doesn't work as well as you think, because we still have to chew our way in ... and there's a ton of splash damage going on during that time.
Brood Lords work because they range all Terran Ground Units and Structures, but you need empty supply to convert, time to convert, and as that video proved, 2 Vikings can counter 10 Brood Lords.
Yes, because they have no air-to-air attack. 2 Mutalisks and an overlord can counter 10 Banshees. During the time it takes to kill them with that ratio of AtA v. AtG you'll still do enormous damage.
As for surrounding, it looked like it worked enormously well in the video. The difference was very marked. Surrounding will greatly reduce splash damage because it spreads your units out; all the splash damage from every attack won't concentrated in a small area but spread out.
The reason that 50 supply of T1 units can destroy 66 supply of fully upgraded T3, furthermore, is that in the examples you showed, they aren't fighting 66 supply of T3 units. They're fighting 12-18 supply of T3 units in 3-5 successive increments so they can put ALL their fire on one or two at a time and only take damage from two or three rather than all eleven.
Essentially, think of the ultralisks as antiship missiles. The ball is the ship. When the ultralisks have to come in one after the other (or in pairs or threes) rather than in a mass, it's just like a ship dealing with attacking missiles in pairs rather than in a big mass that comes in all at once; there's far more time available to deal with the later missiles.
The same thing is happening here although for far different and less technically complex reasons; by coming through narrow defiles IdrA was essentially buying time for the ball to wipe out the lead ultralisks and heal the marines and marauders for the successive ones, not to mention bunching them all up to make any splash hit more ultralisks.
So, while their might be some imbalance on paper, it looks like that imbalance is remedied by actual tactics and proper use of terrain; from the video series it seemed the imbalance was just as great the other way when the Zerg player could surround.
Now, that's not to say that there is no problem; it may be that with the available maps there are far more opportunities to force a Zerg player into a funnel than there are for Zerg to use their swarm tactics. In fact, I'd say that's even likely what with all the ramps. That tells me that the problem is A) with the maps and B) that the remedy may be in map revisions, or may be in toughening up the Zerg units to let them survive a little longer when they have to funnel. I'm thinking B would be more practical to implement.
Still, the game is only out a few weeks and I don't think all the nuances have come out yet.
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