The Ever-So-Important Opening HARASS!

zero clutter and nr 15 aside... lets look at the facts.

the opening harass, is definitely key in the first 3 minutes of a game. Watching a MSL player like Boxer shows what just an SCV can do, same with a zerg drone.

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From what Ive viewed/encountered there are 3 main strategies with the harass:

1) the preventative base expansion; this involves constructing something like 1-2 engineering bays where a player intends to put a main, its annoying to the player because it causes them to either have to waste time destroying the e-bays or having to place the expansion farther away, making the position less fortified.

2) the lure. luring a gatherer away from minerals by attacking 1-3 of them and fleeing, causing them to chase you down. this is only useful however if the unit is static (just made) or not currently gathering resources.

3) the ever important scout block. once a player has found his enemy, it is great strategy to prevent his enemy from finding, well, anything. A scout block usually involves blocking a choke point with 1-2 worker units, once the AGRO (or aggressive guard ruling option) has been triggered on a unit that is static, it will chase the aggression unit. this allows a player to take an un weary opponent's scouts for a wild goose chase to the far reaches of many maps.

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so my question is this for all of you:

what sort of things could be tweaked to make harassing more fun? afterall, it is satisfying, and important as well as very known to be a large part of SC in the MSL.

i thoughts some of these might be cool.


a) A slight speed booster for the SCV
b) A timed mediocre sized force field wall (a shield which can be disposed by a probe with around 50 hp) or just a replica, aka like that HT ability to make copies.... the shield would be more of an obstacle... like placing a few of them beside an enemys main, to slow down economy by a bit.
c) The zerg drone having the ability to "goo," or ensnare weak units, just SCVS and other worker units only ect. slowing down their individual production for 90 seconds or so.



so something like that, nothing to drastic, but just to add a little macro to the harass, whadaya think?

 

I'd like to see harassing taken out of the game, squashed flattened and pulverized. If actively pissing off your opponent with weak units is what makes game, you're not playing a game, you're feeding an obsession.

 

hahaha, oh what ever, its just macro, if you cant multitask, you shouldnt play the harras always existed and always will, its UN PREVENTABLE...

but thats the point of this thread, how do we make it less annoying, and more strategic...

thanks.

 

Unpreventable? I've played several games where it is absolutely impossible to touch a base with just a worker.

It is, by definition, a form of annoyance. A game should be fun, not annoying. I would opt for some sort of inbuilt defensive mechanism around CC/Nex/Hatch Just a single, tiny turret that deals just enough damage to keep enemy workers from overstepping their bounds.

 

haha, well, i see what you mean.

although, the harass isnt just an annoyance, this is where i gotta put the foot down.

the harras is a highly MICRO reliant method of slowing down an enemys economy. If done right, it could lead to a devastating advantage in an early rush.


the thread is designed to prevent these so called "boundaries" you speak of. every unit is useful in its own way, thats why we all love this game. the new slight abilities are for decreasing the annoyance factor and increasing the strat.... if you read the post youd hopefully realise this

you cant just let ever CC get a turret, it would make for a WAY to easy seal, imagine, i plunk my CC down at your zerg base, use your resources, and use that turret to kill everything....

see ?

 

Make the Planetary Fortress an early tier one upgrade, Burrow-esque, then make it upgradeable for later on. We already know CC PF's can't lift off. Problem solved.

 

best 3 options for anti early game attacks
1: make defensive building low-tech
2: make map bigger
3: make the first unit you create slow moving

 

I agree wholly with 10-Neon. Harassing makes games more annoying to the victim and boring to the one doing the harassing. Whenever I harass a player, it may be fun at the beginning but it'll make the game all boring and people wouldn't want to play with you anymore.

 

I have a policy of quitting a game the second I can tell someone's trying to harass me. Zero tolerance.

Just because something requires micro does NOT make it something that should be a major part of a game. There are thousands of things you can do with good micro. You can make your workers follow each other around a geyser! Let's think of ways to make this less pointless and more important to gameplay!

The fact that you can harass and actually get anything out of it is nothing more than a glitch. The game was not designed for stuff like this to occur. If what you want is more interesting stuff to do in the beginning of the game, fine, but don't try to base it off a tactic that is, at its heart, insulting and disrespectful to your opponent.

 

people please give a defenition of harrasing so we know were talking about the same thing, for me harrasing is attacking enemy workers with reapers from the back

 

In that same line of logic the SCV rush should be eliminated as well. But if you weaken the SCV to the point that this is no longer effective, the Terran basically have no defensive options early game.

I remember the original release of StarCraft where the SCV was matched equally with the Drone/Probe. The Terran were completely vulnerable without bunkers. Until Firebats appeared the Terran was pretty much a sitting duck. And forget medics, they didn't exist.

Of course the game is going to have twists and turns that the game makers didn't intend. That doesn't mean that it's "annoying" when someone utilizes a tool that they've found. For the most part its very easy to beat off a worker harass.

The classics are the gas block, what with the assimilator/extractor built on the gas of the opponent. Or the bottleneck where you start building a hatchery or supply depot to keep the enemy from sealing off their entrance, etc...

The only things I find truly annoying are cannon/bunker rushes.

 

if im right harrasing is just using annoying techniques right?

 

No. They're delaying techniques. They're meant to frustrate the opponent and force them to micro and/or interrupt their economy while yours remains intact.

 

worker harassing is a basically by-product of scouting, once your worker has found the enemt's base, you would like it to survive in there for as long as possible so that you can continously obtain info about what startergy the enemy is going for. while inside the enemie's base goof players will use the scouting worker to haress because it's better than simply sitting there and do nothing

 

I'm going to try m best to not fluff this post up as much as possible

What an AWESOME discussion this has turned into. we got a couple playing for the green team, and a couple playing for the Blue team, don't we

okay time for some quoteables...

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It seems that there is a certain accord which we all agree with here, early game tactics are DEFINITELY part of SC. if you don't want to play with early tactics, and just want to blow shit up with your fleet of cruisers.... then you should stick to ZERO CLUTTER or NO RUSH games.

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Ahh, yes, early game tactics, aka, harassing, although i must agree with ijffdrie, reaper dropping is A HUGE harassment to anyones economy.

It seems there are a handfull of abilities we would like to see our gatherers endowed with - only 1-2 max each tho, otherwise they would be huge:

1) A quick speed burst, to allow for a little more micro when they get dropped and to allow for a little better scouting speed

2) An ability to lay a "mine" type thing that can slow down an enemy worker, or a small group for 10-20 seconds

3) an ability to "burrow" or cloak?

4) an ability to gather different amounts of economy like in orig SC.... I believe probes get 9 minerals each, scvs 7, and drones 5?


anyways, yes, so the question is then, with kudos to NEON:....

HOW DO WE MAKE EARLY GAME TACTICS LESS ANNOYING AND MORE STRATIEGIC WHILE KEEPING ALL 3 RACES UNIQUE AND BALANCED???!?

try lighting up your bulb with that one

 

reaper mines are going to be awesome at harassing, you'll give your opponent a headache by simply throwing them next to the minerals, if the enemy choose to disarm the mines using workers then he run the risk of it blowing up in the face of all those bunched up workers, and while attacking mines the workers are not mining anyway. if he pull the workers back then he loses even more precious mining time. the worst case scenario is that the enemy don't have any ranged units nearby so he'll have to wait for the d8 to explode before going back to work. either way he has lost mining time simply because you chucked a few d8 at his way

 

ya, but the reaper mine is obviously a tier 3 or perhaps 4 upgrade, its massively strong. or not, i mean, imagine that new BC spread attack on an economy, take in 2-3 of them... bye bye workers.

the question still remains

HOW DO WE MAKE EARLY GAME TACTICS LESS ANNOYING AND MORE STRATIEGIC WHILE KEEPING ALL 3 RACES UNIQUE AND BALANCED???!?

thanks.

 

Reapers are tier 1.  It is unlikely that the D8 would be any later than tier 2 IMO.

There are more ways to harass early on than the three methods pointed out in opening post.  Like the ones Jon mentioned.  Another is summoning pylon on enemy mineral patches.  When done right, you trap at least one worker, making it unable to return gathered minerals until the pylon is destroyed.  Also, I think most people who block their choke/ramp early on with units have them holding position anyway.

While I agree that the various ways to harass your opponent very early on in the game are not part of intentional design, I personally feel that they are completely legit.  While that certainly might depend on every individual's opinion, they are certainly not imba.  As in, the effort and risk involved in the execution vs counter does not noticeably lean one way or the other.

While I personally don't do a whole lot of harassing with workers, I feel that those things make the game more colorful and fluid.  But I don't think we need to really worry about it for SC2.  Even if the devs gave early harassment zero thought, I'm sure people will find interesting ways to accomplish that.

@ Fenix, I think planetary fortress is already tier 1.  It's even before pre-rax-req, so it certainly isn't late tier 1.

 

I agree that the lone worker harass is a byproduct of scouting. You absolutely must scout early, SC is an aggressive game after all. Although I do agree that using a single worker to disrupt economy does hurt the fun factor. Perhaps workers should have reduced armor/HP when not near one of your own CC/Nexus/Hatch. As you build more structures around that first main building the "safe worker" aura should increase as to not make workers weak while inside your own base; even if it is a large sprawling compound.
This shouldn't hurt expanding, as soon as you start your CC/Nexus/Hatch workers are near a main building and would go back to normal stats.

EDIT: Then again, can't you just send 2 of your own workers to destroy the intruder? The attacker does lose that workers economical productivity as well as the 50 mins/time to build it. Is it really such a staggering trade off? Maybe I don't fully understand the tactic. I do watch the Korean games and none of the pro-gamers seem to have too too much trouble with it.

 

the workers of korean players inside enemy base spend most of it's time dancing and running away form enemies trying to stay alive so that it can gather more info.