Starcraft 2 Armory - Unofficial Starcraft 2 Fansite

Q: Can your allies use the Nydus channel?
A: At the moment, no. We decided only recently which abilities should affect your allies. The Nydus channel is not on that list. But it's not excluded that we change our mind. What's your thought?

Q: One of the units that was changed the most during the past two years was the Thor Warmech of Terran. Recently you could still reconstruct it after it was destroyed. Why did you remove this possibility?
A: In principle it was a cool idea: If the Thor was destroyed, you could spend 200 Gas to activate its repair system. After some time, it would get back up. During reconstruction, all enemies would see where the wreck was and could attack it, in order to knock out the Thor for good. The problem was: This tactic was essentially meaningless. Frequently the Thor would die within the enemy base, so you couldn't save him. Or he died within the own base. And reconstructing him there was too cheap and too simply. Therefore we removed this ability and gave him the particle cannon ability, which he used to pulverize ground troops. Let's see if that works.

Q: In paris we noticed that the AI opponents play extremely strong at the highest difficulty setting. Are they cheating?
A: Yes, on the highest setting "insane", the AI profits from additional resources. On all other settings, the opponents do not cheat. On the 2nd highest level "hard" they act as smart as on the highest, simply without the added resources. This is a notable improvement compared to the first game. As in many other RTS titles, the AI in SC1 would see the entire map and would know exactly where the player's units and buildings were. In part 2, this does not hold anymore. The AI opponents have to send out scouts to find the players. Only when they find out, what the opponents are building, they adapt their tactics. If you hide units from the AI - on hills or behind bushes - you gain an advantage.

Q: Will there be night battles or weather effects in Multiplayer mode?
A: We are considering it in any case! Weather effects are possible and we are even testing the day-night cycle at the moment. I am worried, however, if everything is easily discernible at night. In the battles, many units clash that have varying size, from the tiny zergling to the gigantic Battle Cruiser. Also, the speed of the game is extremely fast, a bunch of things are happening with rapid speed.

Q: But the day-night cycle and the weather effects wouldn't have any gameplay effects?
A: We talked about it, and even tested it, but the answer's: No. We do not want maps with differing rules. Just imagine a snowy area in which ground troops move more slowly. That would completely revert the balance. The Zerg would suffer a lot, since they are highly dependant on their speed. Or imagine rainy maps, on which the sight-range of flying units is reduced. The balance would be shaky and we would have to rebalance the races just because of the stupid rain. That might be an interesting idea for the future, but at the moment we don't want it.

Q: All maps we have seen so far were symmetrical. Will there be asymmetrical ones at release?
A: Of course. In Sc1 there were also maps with better or worse starting positions, e.g. Lost Temple. If we will use these asymmetrical maps for the automatic matchmaking on bnet we don't know yet. But it would be unfair to start at a bad spot in a random game. Nobody should enter a game and begin cursing: "Damn it, I play Zerg and I spawned at bottom right - I'm outta here". Therefore, most of the maps should turn out to be symmetrical. We still try to slightly diversify the starting positions. For example, players could start closer to an observation post than others.