Rant: Game interface design

[Archon_Wing]

The MOST annoying single thing in Brood War (to me), BY FAR, is the following:

Say you have a unit of M&M (Marines & Medics) which you want to make an attack-move with.  4 Medics, 8 'Rines.  You attack-click on the opposite side of a cluster of 3 Sunken Colonies.  Your guys walk there until the Marines get in attack range and open fire.  But your Medics keep walking!  Right into the 6 Zerglings waiting behind the Sunkens, and your Marines are already locked onto targeting the Sunkens.  Thus, what should have been a nice neat Zerg bloodbath instead turns into a complete write-off of 600 minerals and 100 gas.

What Blizzard SHOULD have done was have the medic AI behave AS IF they had a ranged weapon with the range of a Marine's gun, and halt in "firing range" of the enemy.  Whereupon, the Marines would have taken damage within the medics' range, causing their heal AI to go into effect as it should.  Instead the Medics always blitzkrieg the enemy, and the only solution I've found is either to waste tons of time micromanaging the Medics, or have them in their own seperate unit, which means they can't heal as efficiently.

This is SO annoying, it's almost enough to make me not play the BW expansion at all.

-Kasreyn

Ha! I hate my stupid medics too. I think have lost games to that. That and my lack of general skills. But that's kinda hard to program correctly. Right now, they react if a neaby units gets hurt. What if you had a mix of marines and firebats? Your firebats would just get killed. Wait, I think I found a solution to your problem :D

I'm no gosu, but I have four ways to go around this:

1.) Attack-move to outside the creep area. That way the medic will just stop there. Do not just attack-move to some area of the map. Amubshes will screw you up. Just last night I had all my medics run into the enemy base when my marines decided to chase after zerglings. And yes, this is a game balance issue. Terrans were supposed to be weak to ambushes because they are very, very stupid. Wait, not sure if its the programmers fault. I should take my own advice, as I have lost entire squads to bad micro :P

2.) Use firebats+ marines. The medics will heal them.

3.) Stim-pack your marines and move. Most people do this, and the medics will automaticaly chase after.

4.) You need tanks. :P You're not supposed to be able to ovecome this heavily armored tentacled structure-beast by just using machine guns :P Yes, I know that's not a solution. But a marine dies in two hits and multiple sunkens kill them faster than medics can heal.

Actualy no, M+m do take out sunkens well, but most people don't just build sunkens.

But I like Brood War better. Dumb medics are better than no medics.