In this weeks' Q&A Karune discusses some of the issues brought up since our last gameplay experience at WWI. We've all been brimming with questions, so he picked out some of the most pertinent topics including the Zerg static defense buildings and the highly debated new vespene gas mechanic. Enjoy!

Chat with Devs: Since the Worldwide Invitational in Paris, the topic of the new Vespene Gas mechanic has come up a lot across many different fansites and message boards. Thus far, this is one of the biggest changes which will affect the macro management of bases in StarCraft II. To shed some more light on this new mechanic, I have gotten a chance to talk to Dustin Browder, our Lead Designer for StarCraft II, about the progress thus far of the new mechanic, as well as the objectives this new mechanic is designed to achieve.

To start, the new Vespene Gas mechanic is to further distinguish the play style in which players gather minerals versus gathering gas. In the original StarCraft, the gathering of gas was very linear in the rate in which gas is gathered. Often, players would put 3-4 workers on the gas, and the players would forget about it until the geyser was depleted. Minerals on the other hand, were much more exponential in the rate of growth and were also often played differently amongst different races. Zerg would likely expand rapidly with less drones in each expansion and Protoss/Terran could sustain a sizeable force with higher numbers of workers on a smaller number of expansions.

How the New Vespene Gas Mechanic Works
For StarCraft II, with the new Vespene Gas mechanic, players will have 2 gas geysers at their starting position. These geysers will start with X amount of gas (currently 600 and subject to balance) and at any time players can purchase additional gas in their geysers for X minerals (currently 100 and subject to balance). With each purchase of additional gas for your geyser, the geyser increases with X gas (currently 600 and subject to balance) and the geyser shuts down for 45 seconds. When a geyser is depleted, workers will still be able to gather gas at a low rate of 2 per round (subject to balance).

How the New Vespene Gas Mechanic Plays
With this new gas mechanic, players have a wider variety of strategies in developing and maintaining their refineries, as well as additional attention needed to make sure they are collecting gas at the most efficient rate. On the production side, players now also have to decide between sticking to Tier 1 units longer, or to play it balanced with one geyser, or even max out on gas to invest heavily on teching and higher tech units. Additional, the relationship between minerals and gas have an added layer of depth since investing in additional gas will actually cost the player minerals as well. How often a player invests in gas will also not necessarily be consistent through the game too and will depend upon what units that player is currently choosing to mass. Scouting too has an added layer of depth as well, as a players gas collecting play style may determine if the player is teching to a higher tier mineral heavy unit (like a Dark Templar) or a higher tech gas heavy unit (like a High Templar).

Overall, players will have to build the appropriate buildings as well as gather resources in a particular method in order to execute a certain strategy at a professional level. It is the hope of the development team that this new mechanic will not only make gas collecting more interesting, but also increase the amount of macro management skill needed to compete in StarCraft II at the top levels while at the same time making the game playable for mid level players without using some of these more advanced techniques.

---StarCraft II Q&A Batch 41---

Source: Battle.net

Discuss this article in the Forum!

We've returned from Paris and are feverishly working to decipher the information we received there. I've already made a post of my customary build report available on the forum here. I will soon format that article as a true article to go into the archive.

You can also see the unit stats we've collected in Excel format on the forum here. Tech trees and other resources should be available in the coming days.

Please enjoy these resources responsibly! For now I'm going to relax. We will be sure to answer your questions in time. Keep posted here for more updates! Images and videos will be forthcoming in the next week or so.

UPDATE:  The  Tech Trees are up! See them here.  You can also see some of the pictures we took from WWI in that thread as well. Enjoy!

Blizzard has revealed on Starcraft2.com site the second hero biography, Zeratul. The biography focuses on his involvement in Starcraft from his first appearence to his most recent encounter with Duran. The article is a nice recap of his history up to the end of Brood War, both good and bad.

Below is an excerpt from the biography.

"Zeratul is a dark templar, a renowned psionic warrior and assassin whose forbears were exiled from the protoss homeworld of Aiur over a thousand years ago..."

Source: Starcraft2.com

StarCraft2Forum.org coverage of the WWI convention in Paris, France starts today! Nikzad and myself are covering the event from the multitude of press and, in fact, we are at the moment awaiting the Blizzard presentation of their newest program.

We will continue to provide you with updates as we learn them. In the meantime we have a couple of interesting tidbits for you all. After playing the game a bit this morning, there are clearly some marked changes. For instance, the Corruptor can now be morphed with only the lair tech, giving the Zerg a powerful anti-air unit at the earliest tier two possible.

Also, we can confirm movement on the Swarm Guardian and its attack. It attacks only ground units with an initial damage of 20 and spawns broodlings (about as weak as .5 zergling) who have a very short life span and low HP. However, these little guys are great at drawing enemy fire.

We will continue to keep you updated!

Discuss this article in the Forum!