Version 10.1 Changelog

v10.1

Major Additions:

-Mind controlled zerg drones now have a completely different tech tree. This revamped tech tree includes completely new units such as Squirmers and Venom Cannons.
-Downed Survivors can now use their gun in a last-ditch attempt to defend themselves. (You can shoot while downed, and you get bonus energy regeneration while downed)
-Barricades can now be built on ramps. No other building can do this.
-Increased the amount of vespene in vespene geysers. The amount is random and is larger the further it is from the starting point. The richest vespene geysers can go up to 500 vespene.
-Added a new type of mineral field, the purple mineral field. Purple minerals are identical to blue minerals, but will never run out and grow over time (+1 mineral every 5 seconds)
-Mineral fields will now change appearance depending on the amount of minerals in them. The richer the mineral, the larger the model. For instance, Minerals with less than 100 minerals appear as small minerals, minerals with 100-150 appear as medium and minerals with more than 150 appear as full minerals.

Balance Changes:

-The protoss fleet will now receive full upgrades on Brutal mode, similar to how the Zerg are fully upgraded.
-The Protoss fleet has been re-tooled and is now generally stronger. For instance, the purifier now attacks twice as fast and deals more damage per hit.
-To indicate the Purifier's new power, the purifier's attack animation has been made 300% more awesome.
-The protoss fleet nows holds fewer units. This has the effect of reducing lag.
-The Purifier's Impervious ability now reduces all damage to a maximum of 25 (was 50)
-The Purifier's weapon range has been reduced to 0 (was 3). This might sound like a nerf, but it's actually a stealth-buff: it means that the Purifier will position itself directly above your buildings for its planet cracker attack.
-The Purifiers now summon a much more consistent amount of units. They will also summon double this amount on Brutal.
-Protoss units now take much less damage when warping in.

-Increased radius of the transport ship's restoration field - it now covers the entire starting area.
-The transport ship's restoration field now affects itself.
-Overlords and overseers will no longer generate creep on normal difficulty.
-Fungal growth range reduced to 1 (was 3). This means enemy infestors must be in melee range to fungal growth you, giving you more time to react.
-Barricades now have a sight radius of 2 (was 0)
-Healbot Health increased to 200 (was 100)
-Added a few more Corruptors to the later attack waves
-Protoss units and buildings now take up supply (Photon Cannons: 3 supply, Skypiercer/Colossus: 8 supply)
-Changed attack speed of Photon Cannons to 4.0 (was 2.0)
-Survivors are no longer flagged as "Biological". This was done to avoid having the Protoss one shot survivors. Medics (from the rescue event) can still heal survivors.
-Restore range increased to 19 (was 15)
-Automated Siege Tank Health changed to 400 (was 150)
-The Warp Manipulator now shoots lasers from its head, instead of having them clip through the model.
-The Warp Manipulator's attack now deals damage 18 times (was 6).
-The Warp Manipulator's attack now ignores armor. (It will deal exactly 108 damage every time it attacks, no matter what)

Minor Improvements/Bugfixes:

-When drag-selecting multiple units, the game will no longer attempt to make groups of buildings and non-buildings. For instance, if you drag-select multiple barricades and your survivor in the same box, only your survivor will be selected. This change affects barricades, the wrecked transport ship and automated siege tanks.
-Built transport ships are no longer flagged as mechanical. This means that you cannot repair them - rightclicking on a transport ship will load you in, instead of repairing it.
-The wrecked transport ship is now flagged as a structure.
-Fixed a typo in the text warning you of Banelords
-Streamlined the game messages to have less clutter. Most messages have been shortened. The messages telling you to what you can make at each factory are gone.
-Zerg around a downed survivor will now run away (to give other survivors a chance at helping him)
-Restore should no longer auto-cast on neutral units like destructible rocks
-Restore can no longer target resources (for real this time)
-Observers no longer receive bonus damage against biological
-When right-clicking with multiple restorers selected, each right-click will only cause ONE restorer to cast restore on the target, instead of all of them.
-Pylons are now treated as drop-off points when placing them (cannot place them within one tile of a geyser)
-Assimilators now have have the proper footprint with regards to placing resource drop offs nearby
-Tweaked the movement animation speed of Healbots. Actual movement speed is unchanged.
-The Purifier icons on the minimap are now blue instead of red
-Planetary Fortress hotkey changed to F (was P)
-Changed the loading screen hint to point newbies towards the objectives
-Changed the text of one objective to tell newbies to right click
-Tweaked the weaponized bunker actor again, hopefully the turret should always disappear on death now
-If player 12, the owner of shared buildings, ever acquires any resources, for example if a player queues and cancels units on a shared building, the resources will instantly be redistributed among all active players.
-Fixed a typo in a message that occurs when the transport ship is destroyed.

-Added a tiny easter egg (two named critters)
-Added an extremely rare easter egg (extremely well hidden, occurs only 1% of the time under very specific conditions)

0_0 My god, it's... beautiful. The patch notes look amazing. Brodyaga and I just played a quick round on 2-player normal. We didn't actually notice a lot of this stuff. I have two pieces of bad news, though:

LAAAAAAAAAAAG There is a LOT of it. During the night, the lag gets pretty intense. It is REALLY epic-scale lag by the later waves, but the earlier ones lag a good bit too. Are you running up against the max unit count again? I know Blizzard had a editor patch yesterday, could that have something to do with it?

Money is free. In our 2-player Normal game, I was able to rack up 4000 mins and 1000 gas by about the muta wave. Now I have always been a prolific and efficient miner, but that is downright insane. I only spent a fraction of what I mined all game. The average for minerals now appears to be about 100, and gas 200-400.

Note on purple minerals: they are scattered in with blue minerals and are not THAT uncommon. About a 5-10:1 ratio of blue to purple. Brodyaga hit upon a cool tactic for mining them. At our ship, there were 3-4 purple mineral patches. He left an Auto-turret, Missile Turret, and a couple Mules there, and they mined throughout the game, lasting to the Ultralisk wave with only a SINGLE AUTO-TURRET. (Brod, was there a second one?) EDIT: A PAIR OF AUTO-TURRETS

Thoughts on the patch notes (that Brod and I didn't see):
Now we have a real incentive to get our ass in gear and avoid the survival ending. >=D

Cannons got the nerf we all saw coming. Not unexpected, but halving the DPS may be a bit much, because the often waste the majority of their shots by all firing at the first target to come in range. Spacing them out helps some. With a two-second delay, it was bearable. Four seconds will be killer. Also, no supply was a trade-off for being non-salvagable.

Infestor nerf sounds awesome, those stupid things.

I was hoping for a Restorer NERF, not buff. Ah well, this isn't much of a buff.

EDIT: Oh, I missed something! The Zerg no longer puppy-guard downed Survivors! Yay!

Starke wrote: (Brod, was there a second one?)

Yes, there was the second one. Up to the Ultralisk's wave)

Starke wrote: LAAAAAAAAAAAG There is a LOT of it.

Definitely the lug is terrible now.

I played solo (i7(920) + Radeon-HD-5870 + 12 Gig memory), min video settings in a game. The graphic card was taken apart and completely cleaned inside just two days ago, new cooler on the processor.

Everything was OK up to the Leviathan's arrival. Once it got into the range of vision, there came huge LAAAAAAAAAAAG

Could the lag be tied to purple minerals? If you watch them, you can see that the models slowly grow or shrink over time. Plus they all gain another mineral every five seconds. These tasks must take some processor load (probably the former more than the latter), but I have no idea how much. Still, with tons of purple minerals on the map, is it possible they are responsible for the slowdown?

did you fix the mass recall that allows you to recall siege tanks yet?

Rather than making the minerals grow, have them change model depending on the count of minerals, in the same manner as blue minerals.

This way, your game doesn't have variables that loops and continuously adding +1 to the actor's size, causing lag.


As for restorers, in mass amount, they'll be powerful, but in small amounts, they are pretty much not as great.