The AI Tried To Cheese Me! - Reversed StarCraft 1! - Pt 11 

"Do not cite the deep cheese to me, witch! I was there when it was written!" - GGG, probably.

"Feeble cursed one! Do you really think you can manage the glories that are my spells?"

GGG: I will put these foolish ambitions to rest.

Aldaris, after defending a DT rush: "Amusing."

came her to make sure someone else commented on this Fenix aint just some dragoon

Moments later: "There goes Fenix." And he still didn't realise it was that Chad-dragoon. :-0

I also liked how Grant didn't even notice

That is a built in simple trigger, commonly used at end of defense missions. "Send all units on random suicide mission". This trigger will send absolutely every unit, including hero units that the base AI cannot give commands to.

@@hallymiao2825 i know thats a simple trigger but normally they send all Combat units and not workers if you have seen giants video on warcraft 3 deathless they changed on the last scourge mission where you need to defend kelthuzad that all units are send to kill him not only combat units and i think its so chank that there are some probes or peasent on the way try to kill you XD

As a kid I thought Raynor was bald so that makes sense

Overall, Grant has a very peculiar view on Defense missions, that very very few players share. As you watch him play, he will complain about pretty much every defense mission ever made, unless it features attacks so frequent that the player can not do anything other than to scramble to defend. I consider myself a decent RTS player, nothing amazing, but I do enjoy breaking a challenge or two in half, but there is pretty much nothing the genre has to offer that I would enjoy less than what Grant considered a good defense mission ^^ A defense mission is difficult to make because you have to consider that an average RTS player tries to amass an army with one production facility and tries to build up static defense with a single half-saturated base. And I very well remember from my childhood, when I was terrible at RTS that the very missions that Grant complains about being missions where "the enemy forgets to attack" were absolutely deadly challenges to kid me. Most would require multiple retries, and when I did win it would be thanks to the timer running out before my last building was destroyed. So time crunch is very difficult to deal with for the player who doesn't have good macro basics. As I grew up and learned to actually play, realized that the economy is important, that you need to have multiple production buildings and that you must spend your money, of course defending the base got a lot easier. But not any less boring, to me the most fun thing about the defense mission is to try to kill the enemy before the timer runs out - this is a great challenge. I absolutely hate it when my agency is taken away from me. So when the nightmare difficulty WoL got released with Grants' consultation and blessing, he was so happy about the Zero Hour remade to make the enemy keep un constant aggression pinning the player inside their base. But for me - this is boring. It takes away the player agency, all you can do is sit there and defend, you can't explore, you can't attack, you can't do anything fun, you just have to sit there and defend - and that's not fun to me at all. I'm not sure you would consider that the same as death waves, but from my point of view - these are difficult for less experienced players and boring to experienced players. But it's a special kind of boring, it's the kind of boring where the mission may actually be very difficult, but makes you not enjoy playing it. TL:DR A defense mission strikes a very difficult balance, where it has to take into consideration that the mission should be challenging and fun for both beginner and expert players. and at least in my opinion players usually react more positively to missions presenting them with extra challenges they may partake in, rather than being forced to just sit there and try to survive Edit : I've decided to do an edit to clarify, that because defense missions require the player to spend a certain amount of time to beat them, and that time can't be reduced, barring from destroying the enemy - if the developers remembered that is a possibility - losing and having to restart the mission from the start is more punishing than pretty much anything else in the RTS genre, aka - not very fun. If the challenge is self-imposed by the player, even if they fail the challenge, they still win the mission and can proceed. If the challenge is actually about staying alive, and you died 25 minutes in - you will have to re-do the 25 minutes that didn't cause you problems.

Well, yes. I never beat the last Zerg mission in brood wars because of the time crunch.

Death waves and nukes. The AI cant beat us in a stand up fight unless they use invisible red dots on us and our ally

@@RancorSnp The edit is spot on. Unless it's some weird gotcha and the game has a well-timed autosave the final "death wave" should be a punishment for failing to play proactively not a natural feature of a timed mission. Regardless of how objectively challenging dealing with the wave itself is it just feels awful to lose right at the end of a comparatively long and boring timer. Gets even worse when they throw masses of cheesy crap such as corsairs, defilers or banelings at you. That said it looks as if a single arbiter casting stasis on the ramp should be able to halt this particular wave until the timer runs out, 2-3 and the ground units will never make it up the ramp.

As someone who grew up playing RTS and has played pretty much every single one out there, there are two types of missions that I just can't enjoy: defense missions where the enemy attacks nonstop; timed attack missions. While I generally can win those, I hate it when the game asks me to rush or die. Half of the fun of an RTS mission is building up your base/army before attacking, and not having your attention diverted by doing stuff all over the map at once in a pressured enviroment. Might be one of the reasons why old, old RTS' did so well. Look how many truly challenging missions they had, be they timed or hard and see how map design changed in the last decade or so. Hell, compare SC 1 missions to SC2.

Starcraft 1 defense missions are easy... until you start putting major handicaps on yourself.

Modded AIs might do things such as target them down with scourge, storm/plague them, spam lockdown, or potentially even scan your observers and kill everything with cloaked wraiths. Against vanilla, yes. If you get to that point there's little they can do especially since most units are dumb enough to target the interceptors (which unlike SC2 actually return to the carrier and get fully repaired for free when low on health).

Someone I knew about 20 years ago claimed this, so I challenged him on it. I went random, got protoss, so I made 4 arbitors and held them back with a bunch of land units. Sure enough, he came knocking on my door with I think 20 carriers which I froze solid with 2 arbitors and then used the other arbitors and land forces to decimate him.

@@NOTNOTJONnothing to claim, everybody does it apparently. I don't care of the multiplayer, I never have for strategy games TBH.

Omega is the ultimate bitch so far. The only mission I'm still unable to beat. Thanks to Grant for making a hint on how to beat Zerg 8. Took me a lot of tries.

No installation/no build missions at all, apart from escape from aiur in brood war I think. Probably because you could win by concentrating forces, so designing a challenge is tricky.

yeah, APM

Might need a few changes lol

Time in missions is measured using the normal speed, but the pros all play on Fastest which is where the difference comes from.