Balance Changes


TERRAN
Engineering Bay
Infantry Armor: The time required for each upgrade has been reduced by 30 seconds, decreasing each upgrade time from 190/220/250 seconds to 160/190/220 seconds.
Infantry Weapons: The time required for each upgrade has been reduced by 30 seconds, decreasing each upgrade time from 190/220/250 seconds to 160/190/220 seconds.
Armory
Vehicle Plating: The time required for each upgrade has been reduced by 30 seconds, decreasing each upgrade time from 190/220/250 seconds to 160/190/220 seconds.
Vehicle Weapons: The time required for each upgrade has been reduced by 30 seconds, decreasing each upgrade time from 190/220/250 seconds to 160/190/220 seconds.
Ship Plating: The time required for each upgrade has been reduced by 30 seconds, decreasing each upgrade time from 190/220/250 seconds to 160/190/220 seconds.
Ship Weapons: The time required for each upgrade has been reduced by 30 seconds, decreasing each upgrade time from 190/220/250 seconds to 160/190/220 seconds.


PROTOSS
Zealot
The maximum shield capacity of this unit has been decreased from 60 to 50.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug where the Infestor's Neural Parasite ability could cause Reapers to lose the ability to move.
Fixed an issue that could use an incorrect HDR format on some ATI cards.
Fixed a crash that could happen on some ATI cards.

1. You whine about getting rushed

When playing an RTS game online, do you often find that your opponent manages to curb stomp your base before you’re able to set up any defenses or build an army of your own? Do you feel it’s unfair that you didn’t have a chance to make your base neat and organized or eat your bacon butter cake frosting Hot Pocket? If yes, chances are you were dropped on your face as a baby and it has caused permanent trauma to your cerebral cortex.


Why this makes you a noob
In case it wasn’t clear when you bought the game, you’re playing a real time strategy title. That means doing things before your opponent has a chance to do other things is part of the game. In fact, it’s not just part of the game, it’s the entire point of it. You’re supposed to do things faster than your opponent, and if that means building an army and attacking right away, so be it. Complaining about getting rushed in a real time strategy game is like complaining that the tuna sandwich you ordered has tuna in it.

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"Who put this %^&@* tuna in my tuna sandwich?"



What good players do
Rather than complaining about rushing and getting so mad that they rupture their family jewels, normal players simply assume that if they lost early on in the game that something was wrong with their build order and/or strategy. The next time they play, they’ll try something different to see if it works better.



2. You wonder why you can’t win by camping all game long

Ah the good old camp and wait strategy. Turtle up in your base and rely on defenses to do all the fighting while you wait for your opponent to…..run out of units? What could possibly go wrong with such a brilliant idea!?


Why this makes you a noob
For starters, if you invest money into defenses, then you can’t use them to fight for extra resources on the map. Eventually you’ll just run out of money. Secondly, the instant your opponent sees you camping, he’s going to either tech straight to siege weapons or he’s going to expand his economy and overwhelm your defenses with more units than they can handle. Either way you might as well be in the middle of a threesome with Michael Moore’s chins.

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If you don't expand, this is where you belong.



What good players do
Good players are greedy; they want as much money as possible and they know the way to get it is to take over expansion points on the map. Since camping up around every resource point you control with defenses isn’t as efficient or cheap as building an army you can move back and forth between them, good players choose to invest in units rather than static firepower. What’s more is once they’re done playing goalie, they can use their army to rape and pillage. Have you ever seen a defense tower rape and pillage anything? We didn’t think so.



3. You think micromanagement is just click spam

Clearly since the genre is called real time strategy it should be purely about thinking and strategy and have nothing to do with any actual control over the elements of the game. At least, that’s the mentality of people who don’t like to do the playing part of playing a game.


Why this makes you a noob
The first problem is thinking that micromanagement is just click spam – it’s not. Micromanagement is actually all about issuing lots of precise orders to units in order to maximize their effectiveness (why in Jesus would you NOT want to maximize the effectiveness of your units?). It’s about adapting as the situation changes, and anticipating what your opponent is doing. As it turns out, the brain has to do something amazing in order to accomplish this: it has to think. The amount of decision making and work the brain does when micromanaging intensely as compared to making purely strategic-level decisions is akin to Niagara Falls vs. a garden hose.

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A scientifically accurate depiction of how much thinking micro requires (left), vs how much thinking is required without micro (right)



What good players do
Good players instinctively like keeping their units alive. Why stop at killing one unit when you can invest a tiny bit of effort to keep your own unit alive long enough to kill something else? Since micromanagement techniques take practice, good players figure out ways to make their units more efficient killing machines (and believe us, they come up with some crazy awesome shit).