Some weird question (StarCraft)

[Kamarov]

Well - I saw the "Return of the Zerg" vid from the upcoming SC2 - and that featured Hyperion engaging in battle with the zerg just performed a warp-jump FROM THE ATMOSPHERE of a planet - thus making it to safety....But - if you remember the ending movie of StarCraft: Brood War - you'll remember UED fleet going on sublight velocities, probably to reach safe distance from Char for a jump (they failed to do it before Zerg appeared -then admiral DuGalle shot himself and fleet was overrun and destroyed)
WTF? If no 'safe distance' applies why wouldn't DuGalle just order to start a jump to Earth?

[Batman]

1. I'll assume you're NOT a native speaker so I won't hold your english language skills (or lack thereof) against you but if you want to hang around this place I DO advise trying to improve on them.
2. Asimov answered that one more than half a century ago. Just because it's POSSIBLE to engage your stardrive doesn't mean its SAFE to do so, nevermind the possible effects on the ACCURACY on the jump.

[Samuel]

I think the WTF part is the fact that none of the UED ships bothered to do so even though the alternative was being killed which makes the risk of accidentally destroying the ship acceptable. The only rationale I can think of is that the ships refused to jump until all were cleared of a minimum distance and hoped that their combined defenses could beat of the zerg. Obviously they were wrong.

[Sea Skimmer]

I wouldn’t pay too much attention to consistency in Starcraft after they had the UED show up using the exact same ships and weapons as the rim world Terrans.

[Simon_Jester]

The UED's warp drive capabilities may not be capable of handling jumps out of an atmosphere, even though the Zerg can. I don't know if Protoss teleportation works on principles analogous to warp drive, but if it does then you'll notice that the faction with the "advanced technology" is also capable of warping practically anything to anywhere, whereas the Terrans have no such capability This may not be a coincidence; a more advanced warp drive might let you handle things that the Terran designs can't.

[Kamarov]

> The UED's warp drive capabilities may not be capable of handling jumps out of an atmosphere
May be.... it contradicts some common sence (e.g. civilisation developed from a bunch of exiled criminals from Earth have better tech then Earth-based civilisation) but it could be
Or it is just Blizzard accidently created paradox in their own storyline - that's more likely.
PS- I'm not surprised because considering how many times for example 40K storyline was retconned....

[Lord Revan]

first please use the in built quote funtion when qouting it makes it much more easier to figure out what's the quote and what's your reply.

Second while retcons are hardly unheard of in Blizzard games you have to remember that the Zerg funtion with a different tech base (if you can call it that) then the Terran (and by extension UED), it's actually better to assume disparity on FTL tech when it's shown that Terran and the Zerg work with different "tech base" to begin with.

and it actually isn't that fer fetched that Terrans might have better tech seeing as they might have had to develop their tech to survive and as far as we know UED didn't have that incentive so their tech might lag due to "if it's not broken why fix it" attitude.

otherwise it comes out as just a stupid joke on Blizzard.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Or, it could be that the Hyperion, a renegade ship crewed by a bunch of renegades who are constantly on the run and have spent a lot of time with the Protoss (to the extent of a drydock - Brood War) might have access to slightly better FTL tech than most of the UED's ships. (There's also the possibility that the technology simply improved with time, despite the small time gap).

[Guardsman Bass]

I think the WTF part is the fact that none of the UED ships bothered to do so even though the alternative was being killed which makes the risk of accidentally destroying the ship acceptable. The only rationale I can think of is that the ships refused to jump until all were cleared of a minimum distance and hoped that their combined defenses could beat of the zerg. Obviously they were wrong.

The fleet may have over-estimated the time they had to get prepared for a jump back (that's an unknown factor, too - whether they can simply jump or whether there is some prep time involved). After all, Kerrigan did say she was going to give him a head start.

[Sea Skimmer]

first please use the in built quote funtion when qouting it makes it much more easier to figure out what's the quote and what's your reply.

Second while retcons are hardly unheard of in Blizzard games you have to remember that the Zerg funtion with a different tech base (if you can call it that) then the Terran (and by extension UED), it's actually better to assume disparity on FTL tech when it's shown that Terran and the Zerg work with different "tech base" to begin with.

and it actually isn't that fer fetched that Terrans might have better tech seeing as they might have had to develop their tech to survive and as far as we know UED didn't have that incentive so their tech might lag due to "if it's not broken why fix it" attitude.

otherwise it comes out as just a stupid joke on Blizzard.

No, that doesn’t make any sense. Especially not when the most advanced Terrain Colony is supposed to be Tarsonios specifically because it was the only one able to fully exploit the technology of its colony ship, which is 200 years old by earth standards. Even if the earth tech base was inferior, that still wouldn’t explain why they’d make EXACT clones of weapons anyway. Just look how many different assault rifles are on earth. It was just Blizzard being lazy as it could be with writing for an expansion pack they planned to sell on the cheap.

[Gil Hamilton]

That's straight up game mechanics. They didn't want to alter in-game balance by introducing a dozen new units to make a brand new army set, which is what you are suggesting they do. I suppose they could have redone all the graphics but kept the functionality of all the old units, though, but I think they cared more about consistant gameplay than plot consistancy (which is par for the course for Blizzard, except vis a vie Spell Power Plate Armor in Warcraft).

[Sea Skimmer]

They could have balanced a whole new race in no problem, they probably have enough rejected unit concepts to do it out of hand, its just then they’d have had to charge more money and this was back when full price for a PC game was still only 30 bucks. Brood War was 10 bucks I think when it came out. Personally I would have preferred they just added more then two new units to each existing faction and came up with a decent plot.

[Samuel]

They could have balanced a whole new race in no problem, they probably have enough rejected unit concepts to do it out of hand, its just then they’d have had to charge more money and this was back when full price for a PC game was still only 30 bucks. Brood War was 10 bucks I think when it came out. Personally I would have preferred they just added more then two new units to each existing faction and came up with a decent plot.

Actually if they were into balancing they could make the UED campaign only. I mean they are supposed to be more advanced than the Terrans- it would make sense they were better.

[Gil Hamilton]

They could have balanced a whole new race in no problem, they probably have enough rejected unit concepts to do it out of hand, its just then they’d have had to charge more money and this was back when full price for a PC game was still only 30 bucks. Brood War was 10 bucks I think when it came out. Personally I would have preferred they just added more then two new units to each existing faction and came up with a decent plot.

Those unit concepts often end up in the reject pile due to game balancing. Adding a fourth army and tightly balancing it with the other three would taken alot of time and besides, I think they thought three armies was a good number such that the majority of fans would overlook the UED having the exact same units. After all, three adds enough complexiy and variety in place style without bogging the game down with too many details.

[Sea Skimmer]

Well they just as well could have introduced one of the other Terren colonies described in the manual but never really featured into the original story as a new campaign faction anyway. The UED was just dumb. Certainly introducing just two new units didn’t require anything more then hey, we are fighting a war against not one but two previously unknown factions maybe we should build some new shit?

BTW, the very plot demands that the UED be more advanced then the colonial Terrens, because the UED managed to come all the way from earth with an entire invasion armada in less then one year, while it took decades for the original colony ships to reach the rim.

[Guardsman Bass]

BTW, the very plot demands that the UED be more advanced then the colonial Terrens, because the UED managed to come all the way from earth with an entire invasion armada in less then one year, while it took decades for the original colony ships to reach the rim.

Keep in mind that the original colony ships didn't exactly take a straight-line path to the Koprulu Sector - the guide booklet describes the ships basically barrelling around in warp for nearly thirty years before the computers dump them off in a habitable star system near the point of total collapse.

EDIT: Here's the passage in question:

. . . The four ships, [note: one of the ships crashed and killed all of its passengers attempting to land on Umoja later on] carrying their hapless cargo in stasis, barreled blindly through space at warp speeds for nearly thirty years.

Eventually, the warp-drive engines of the four supercarriers reached critical meltdown. After twenty-eight years of warp travel, the huge ships emerged into real space near the edge of a habitable star system. Some 60,000 light years from the Earth, their engines destroyed and their life-support batteries nearly exhausted, the ships engaged their emergency protocols and plummeted towards the nearest habitable worlds in the system.

[hongi]

But - if you remember the ending movie of StarCraft: Brood War - you'll remember UED fleet going on sublight velocities, probably to reach safe distance from Char for a jump (they failed to do it before Zerg appeared -then admiral DuGalle shot himself and fleet was overrun and destroyed)

From the Starcraft Wiki (see inside for sources):

Terran jumps through warp space can be short ranged or long range, the latter being reserved for large ships such as battlecruisers. For these jumps, a few hours are required to charge up the engines, along with plotting the co-ordinates. A long jump can be made instantly in desperate circumstances, but this is regarded as tantamount to suicide.[6] Still, when properly planned, these jumps can be highly accurate, terran technology being sophisticated enough for one ship to warp right in front of another.[3] Terran vessels "leap" through warp space, making it very difficult to track a vessel's course from the direction it is facing.[7]

Presumably the UED fleet was attempting to 'go long', but were annihilated before they could do so.

[Shroom Man 777]

Answer to OP question:

Presumably the mechanics of human warp-opening via the use of computers and FTL-machinery is different from the mechanics of Zerg warp-opening wherein big-ass Overbrain creatures rip holes through space and time with their squishy minds without mechanical assistance?

[Sarevok]

Sea Skimmer is right. There is no justification for why UED uses same units as Terran colonists. Blizzard could have easily come up with a fourth race and fit it in. Making a faction for a RTS game is not difficult thing to do. In addition a new faction would have actually improved gameplay and make the expansion pack wortwhile beyond a few extra goodies.

[Serafina]

Heck, all they would have needed to do is make some new models for the old units.

Two human factions having units of comparable functions makes sense.
Two human factions having units that are completely identical? Not so much.

So yeah, no "it would screw up game balance" complains - they were just lazy.

[Sarevok]

Indeed, A more advanced UED would have offered a different way to play starcraft when fighting for humanity. Instead of repeating same old tactics you would a whole new army to learn to use and master as you did in zerg and protoss campaigns. Personally I have my own ideas for what the UED with their technological lead would have fielded. They would not be as powerful as the protoss of course. But they won't be as weak before the zerg as the terrans were either.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

I don't believe that game-balancing is as hard, time-consuming or costly as implied. The huge mod-community speaks against this. Sure, there's a lot of crap out there, but there's also a large amount of well done, well balanced total conversions done for free by people with regular computers in their spare times. It really should be no issue at all for a paid team to bang out a well balanced fourth faction, and since this was back in the day I still liked Blizzard's products, I would have been willing to pay full price rather than expansion price.

[Ghost Rider]

I don't believe that game-balancing is as hard, time-consuming or costly as implied. The huge mod-community speaks against this. Sure, there's a lot of crap out there, but there's also a large amount of well done, well balanced total conversions done for free by people with regular computers in their spare times. It really should be no issue at all for a paid team to bang out a well balanced fourth faction, and since this was back in the day I still liked Blizzard's products, I would have been willing to pay full price rather than expansion price.

One point against that thought. Modders are not a time table. Programmers usually are, and at times very unreasonable ones.

[Samuel]

For example Kotor 2 was released on computers in 2005. It took the modders 4 years to make the restoration mod. Shockwave took about 2 years as well for the first release.

[Sela]

I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with the idea of the UED getting different units. If you try to cast them as a different species, it's not fair since - strictly speaking - they're still humans. Part of the game aesthetic is the Protoss, Zerg, Terran balance. Now, putting in Spoiler

hybrids, as implied existed in the bonus mission

would have fit that aesthetic perfectly; a sort of center to the triangle. Or putting in an altogether new species (though trying to justify why they didn't appear on the radar during SC 1/BW) would also have worked. But giving the UED a totally new army and leaving them as the same species? It seems to elevate the humans in the original triangle.

Now I agree having identical technologies develop in parallel is unlikely to say the least; but then so is having all the various already-existing factions of terrans "just so happen" to have the exact same tech tree. Or having the protoss warp in buildings from Aiur after Spoiler

the downfall of Aiur to the swarms

. Aesthetics won n both those cases, and I feel that they did right by letting the aesthetics win out again here. New heroes, same units. If they'd wanted to add a 4th species to the triangle, then let it be a new *species*.