Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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A situation that arises rather often in Axis and Allies, Civ4, Starcraft 2.

It results because of math. To defeat 100 units of equal strength requires *more* than 100 units (!!!).

Take for example 100 Zealots (Starcraft / Starcraft 2 melee unit). If you send 1-Zealot vs the 100 Zealots, it will die before it deals much damage.

In fact, even if you send 10 Zealots vs 100 Zealots, the 10-Zealots will almost certainly die before dealing any lasting damage. (All Zealots have a "shield" that regenerates. You probably won't even get past the shield).

As such, 100 Zealots can perpetually kill 10 Zealots over-and-over again. Your 100 Zealots can kill 1000+ Zealots (as long as they only attack 10-at-a-time).

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Same thing with Axis-and-allies infantry / tanks, or many other strategy games. The "strength" of a ball of units is the *square* of their size.

That is to say: 100-Zealots is 100x stronger than 10-Zealots (!!), not 10x stronger as you may initially assume. As such, both players end up building a bigger-and-bigger death ball as a primary tactic (which is in fact, unfun and stale).

In Starcraft: Brood War, your 100-Zealots could only be grouped into groups of 12, meaning you need 18 actions to attack-move the group. In Starcraft 2: your 100-Zealots can all be in a single group, so you only need 2-actions (one selection + one A-move) to attack-move the group.

The formalization of this is "Lanchester's Laws", equations that estimate the strength of unit numbers. Here is an excellent video explaining these laws in the context of Age of Empires 2:

https://youtu.be/wpjxWBwLkIE

Two laws, for two different situations.

Lanchester's Square Law applies to Starcraft, AoE2, Axis and Allies, etc. etc. The assumptions therein are "ranged units all within fire of each other"

Lanchester's Linear Law applies to Risk, Hearts of Iron, and "bottleneck" situations in Starcraft/AoE2, etc. etc. The Linear law applies when units are no longer within reach of each other, and are instead seen as reinforcements to a limited sized "front" where combat takes place.

In Risk: only 3 units can ever be attacking, and only 2-units can ever be defending. This is the conditions of the linear law.

In Starcraft / AoE2, a "bottleneck" may force a limited number of melee units to fight, leading to a rare situation of the linear law in action.

Hearts of Iron "saturated frontline" concept also gets into the linear-law. Once the frontline is saturated, additional reinforcements do nothing to change the battle.

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Take those assumptions, craft a rather straightforward differential equation out of them, and solve. Bam, you've arrived at Lanchester's Laws (though Lanchester was the tactical genius who figured this out over a hundred years ago).

Modern board games almost always come back to Lanchester's laws. Lanchester wrote and published those differential equations so that generals could create wargames after all, to train their armies / commanders.

Wiki article for more context

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester%27s_laws

It's been a long time, but IIRC you could still group units in SC1 and bind them to number keys. So maybe only 12 at a time, but you could still navigate multiple groups of 12 with just a few keypresses.

Yes, you can.

But it still means attack-moving 108 units (aka: 9 groups, all labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) requires 18-actions.

That is: 1 (select group 1), then a, then left click on the attack-area. Then 2 (select group 2), a, left click on attack area. Etc. etc.

That's a difference of 18-apm (Starcraft Brood War) vs 2-apm (Starcraft 2). Furthermore, that "Group 1" in SC2 could have 150-units or 200-units (or 400-zerglings, lol) in it. They pretty much made death-balls have 10% of the APM requirement in SC2 compared to SC:Brood War.

I'm all for making the game easier and more accessible: but the death-ball tactic was a little bit "too obvious" and kind of unfun to watch, compared to the tightly coordinated groups of 12 that SC: Brood War was famous for. The groups were too big, numerical advantage was the biggest advantage in SC 2 IMO.

SC2 having larger groups has allowed a different focus of micro though - stutter-stepping marines is a tactic that was out of reach of most players in SC1 but an absolute necessity in SC2 and the addition of unit abilities has decreased the utility of giganto deathballs - the micro is still very much a requirement.

Not to mention AoE attacks making splits important, as well as melee units still requiring careful setup of engagements for success. SC2 is extremely micro intensive, especially for how fast it is (in fact I dislike how heavily weighted it is towards success), and it feels a lot less like you're spending your APM fighting the game and your own units and more like you're helping your own units against your opponent's units.

SC:BW still had AoE attacks, arguably more important ones too.

Nuke and Psi Storm exist in both games, but Plague, Irradiate, Ensnare, Stasis Fields are all AoE effects... as well as AoE damage sources (Tanks, Archons, Valkyries, Devourers, and kinda-sorta Mutalisks).

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Lets put it this way: if you really wanted to, you could just have 12-units per group in SC2. But no one would do that, the APM-advantage of having a big group (and manually splitting in the rare cases where a split is needed) is far superior than using 9 groups to split up 108 units.

And sure, stronger players probably split their death-balls into smaller groupings of maybe 30 units or so (you don't want to just A-move all over the place, a degree of flexibility is useful), and only occassionally merges everyone together into a deathball. (Fast and loose is good: you don't want to dedicate an entire army to a battle, especially if they might lose).

But no one is making groups of ~12 in SC2. Its too small.

I don't see it mentioned here but the other limiting factor in Brood War is the pathfinding AI doesn't use modern techniques like flocking, so moving 100 zealots in the same direction is actually a lot of work if there are any obstacles along the path.

Personally, I disagree about the death-ball buildup being un-fun, and it's only really a thing with Protoss (or it was when I cared about SC2), and that's because you had some relatively immobile units that needed protection.

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