Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gus_massa 1748 days ago
> StarCraft did this by destroying the siege tank under a landed building

If this in StarCraft I? In StarCraft II even a burrowed zergling can prevent the landing of a Command Center. (That makes no sense from a realistic point of view.)

2 comments

Yes. And it only became relevant if you exploited a race condition by ordering the building to land, then ordering a siege tank to move under that landing point while the landing animation was in progress. You couldn't order a building to land on top of a unit, and a queued order to land would fail if any units were in the way, but once the building started to land, it wouldn't stop, and any units under it would be trapped. The bug fix added a second check which would kill any units under the building when it finished landing.

In principle, you could do this with any unit, but it was mostly useful for siege tanks, since those were the only Terran ground unit which really benefited from sitting in place.

Yes, StarCraft I. The issue wasn't physical realism. The problem was that a player could move a tank under a building during mid-landing, siege it up, and the boundaries of the building protected the siege tank from melee attacks.

Killing the tank was the "creative" solution, instead of a "brute force" solution to change the game dynamics to prevent the tank from sieging up under the building in the first place.

In SC2 the tanks will be forced to move out from under the building when it lands, but SC2 also has a much improved unit movement system over SC1 that allows this to be done more easily.

I've never seen this in any of the BW games I watched. I wonder if they fixed it. You just can't land a building where a unit is. There was a crazy bug where you could load units into a flying CC and use it as a mobile fortress but that too is patched.
That was the whole point -- it was fixed early on by killing the tank, rendering the exploit useless, which is why you never see it in games anymore.

Search on YT for the tank glitch.

I only found buildings crushing interceptors https://www.starcraftai.com/wiki/Tricks,_Glitches_and_Exploi...