Should the player have to come back to the base to produce reinforcements?

[pure.Wasted]

Do you think the player should have to come back to the base to produce reinforcements?

Thats the question. Clarification of your answer is left to you.

Oh, so you can't clarify the question. I see... I see...

OK, well why don't you go ahead and answer the question, then? I'd like to hear your opinion on the question presented by this thread.

ArcherofAiur, do you think the player should have to come back to the base to produce reinforcements? If yes, why, and how? If no, why, and how?

[Kimera757]

German, huh? That probably explains the weird answer. Even if Dustin Browder said that in English, it doesn't match the evidence you can glean in gameplay.

In game, you can put all your town centers and production buildings into one or more control groups (use tab to shift through them so you can distinguish between them) and then almost never have to go back to base. You can select all warp gates just by pushing W, you don't even need to go to your base to put them into a control group.

(If you literally put all your buildings into control groups and not just production buildings, you won't even need to go back to base to upgrade things like Infantry Weapons. You'd only need to go there when expanding, putting down base defenses and maybe building new buildings... and even then, you can queue up building production (if you're not playing zerg that is) so you only need to be there for a very short while.)

There's just no need to go back to base to make combat reinforcements. The closest you get to that is building new unit production structures (and then add them to the appropriate control group), and you don't need to do that every 20 seconds!

As far as I can tell, progamers complained of not enough screen-switching to base, which is one reason for the macro mechanics; two of them require you to go back to base to use them. Unfortunately, they've taken a life of their own, with the potential to take over gameplay.

[supersonic]

To be exact he never said any of that. The qouted interview was in German, what Archer is qouting is a Translation TL.NET provided. We don´t know the exact words Dustin used (unless he speaks German).

That pretty much goes to show by, "going to the base", could easily mean hot keys and "thinking" about unit production.

[unentschieden]

As far as I can tell, progamers complained of not enough screen-switching to base, which is one reason for the macro mechanics; two of them require you to go back to base to use them. Unfortunately, they've taken a life of their own, with the potential to take over gameplay.

As far as I remember the issue was bland, uninteresting and "easy" Macro. SC:BW had the first two problems but "easy" was never a issue. UI improvements aggrevated the simpleness which is why they attempt to not just go back to the SC:BW standart but to actually improve the game.
In terms of taking over Gameplay, well they are supposed to. Macro Gameplay for the 3 races should be fundamentally different.

That pretty much goes to show by, "going to the base", could easily mean hot keys and "thinking" about unit production.

Even if that wasn´t the case it was an INTERVIEW. Browder was talking about production-qeues.

[ArcherofAiur]

I get the feeling people are uneasy answering this question if there view might contradict Dustin. Right now why dont we all protend it was a translation and that way you can answer truthfully.

And then later we can clarify the translation and see what Dustin really said.

[Nicol Bolas]

Should the player have to come back to the base to produce reinforcements?

I don't know. Let me ask Multi-Building Selection:

Multi-Building Selection, do I have to go back to my base to produce units?

MBS: No. I'm designed for the sole purpose of making this completely unnecessary. That's pretty much all I do. And I'm in the game. So if I'm in the game, and all I do is make it so that you don't have to go back to your base to produce units, then clearly that's something that they don't want you to have to do.

Actions speak louder than words. And the presence of MBS speaks louder than whatever Browder was saying.

Oh, and for the record (since ArcherofAiur's link is broken), Browder isn't speaking in generalities here. He's talking specifically about build queues.

So that you can know the real truth for yourself, here is all of the pertinent parts of the interview:

Q: Apropos huge armies. In comparison to its predecessor, you are allowed to select many more units in Sc2. And that's great. But still, some game concepts seem antiquated, for example the 3D camera that does not zoom out very far. Or the production queue that can only hold five units. Why did you change unit selection but kept the other elements the same?
A: There is a quite obvious reason for the camera position. I am not a big fan of zooming out very far from battles. In other games, this might work out, but not in Starcraft. There is so much Micro that the battles would look confusing if you could zoom out further. Also the atmosphere would get lost - the units would transform into tiny symbols and you couldn't recognise anymore, how diligently they are designed. The feeling of fighting for a distinctive faction would get lost - and just in Starcraft, with its three characteristic races! Zoomed out very far, those battles would degenerate to a feud of ants. This might be appropriate for games like Supreme Commander, which are fully geared towards the zoom function, that have huge maps on which the units traverse very long distances. But Starcraft works differently: It happens faster, matches often last only half an hour. A zoom function simply wouldn't fit in.

Q: And what about production queues?
A: There you see that Sc2 is orientated towards esports. We have to keep a fragile balance: The game should offer comfortable usage, but it should not play by itself, else the challenge would evaporate. Let's see what the Beta testers say about it.

Q: So manual labor instead of automation?
A: Exactly. There is a nice story about this. Back then, I was working on addons to Mechwarrior 2. That's how I know that there was still automatic targetting in an early version: You only had to decide, which weapons to fire in what order, the Computer would guide them to the target. The only thing you had to watch out for was not to overheat. That might even have been interesting, but just for few players. The majority wanted action, and they got it in the end. The same applies to Starcraft: We want the players to go back to their base in order to produce reinforcements. We want them to really take care instead of relying on an automatic process.

Browder is talking about build queues, not everything. The question was why StarCraft has limited build queues (you can only have 5 units producing at once time) while other things have been improved.

Archer is being deliberately deceitful in his question. Just FYI.

[DemolitionSquid]

Archer is being deliberately deceitful in his question. Just FYI.

I love old news.

[ArcherofAiur]

A) I posted the entirety of that part in the Macro thread.

B) Queues dont have anything to do with going back to the base.

[DemolitionSquid]

Queues dont have anything to do with going back to the base.

Then why do YOU keep bringing them up?

[ArcherofAiur]

Then why do YOU keep bringing them up?

I dont keep bringing up queues. Im bringing up Dustins answer to a question about manual labor.