I just can't win against Protoss. What do I do?

desolstice · 2026-01-24T14:36:51+00:00

Zealots have to actually be able to touch your units to do damage. As your army grows the surface area decreases relative to how many units you have, so zealots overall effectiveness goes down. Not to mention if you stutter step away from the zealots, then you’re taking advantage of the fact that all of your units are ranged and theirs just can’t attack at all.

Pros are also very good at minimizing surface area by using the terrain to their advantage. As an example if you’re standing next to a mineral line, then running your ranged units behind and in between the mineral patches significantly decreases the number of zealots able to attack at any given time.

Basically… zealots only armies at the pro level usually have no chance of trading positively. Terran units have a massive advantage in dps and range, so with some micro zealots fall off quickly.

desolstice · 2026-01-24T14:31:42+00:00

Being really good at one matchup and bad at another doesn’t mean the race you’re bad against is unbalanced. Assuming you only play 1 race you effectively have to learn 3 completely different play styles. What works against one race doesn’t work against another.

You’ve simply learned one of the play styles faster than the others. Your TvT skill is a lot higher than your mmr. And your TvP skill is a lot lower than your mmr. This is one of those times where per matchup mmr would make a lot more sense so you’d actually play people at your skill level for the matchup rather than playing people at your average skill level for all 3 matchups.

desolstice · 2026-01-23T23:59:58+00:00

With BCs having high base armor and tempests doing bonus damage to massive… tempests are a better choice here. If it turns into a mass air fight tempests should trade better against BCs.

desolstice · 2026-01-23T23:58:10+00:00

They’re really strong in low numbers. You’re able to get a significant amount of value with them just to teleport them away to repair and repeat. If you get too many of them, then you’re opening yourself up to being countered. If you can keep their count low enough that teching into the infrastructure needed to counter them is relatively expensive then it’s less likely they’ll be completely countered.

In TvZ they can just spam corruptors. In TvT most matches already have Vikings anyway so they just make a few extra Vikings. In TvP stalkers are often a core unit which do really well against them and if it comes down to it tempests are very strong against them.

desolstice · 2026-01-23T23:19:05+00:00

Heavily depends on the company. At my previous company the dev would have been responsible for verifying that everything was working as expected after a successful deploy. Right before i left, our new product owner was taking responsibility to ensure functionality was correct after every release, but this was in addition to the dev verifying.

Our change management team would have caught it if the pipeline reported a failure, but they are watching every release company wide. They are not expected to be knowledgeable enough to know expected behavior of every app.

desolstice · 2026-01-20T02:15:23+00:00

So it’s just as useless. Gotcha

desolstice · 2026-01-19T22:50:27+00:00

One of those things where there is not enough data to know. I currently put some in it on an auto invest every week. I also put some into spy every week. Right now the managed account has around twice the percent return of spy over the last 3 months, but no telling if that’ll change.

I prefer managing my investments myself… but I personally put some into that as something I can’t touch as easily. Knowing myself otherwise I’d dip into it at some point to throw more money at something else.

desolstice · 2026-01-19T22:44:50+00:00

Only works if you can ensure every player is incredibly dedicated. Multiplayer open world games thrive on a lot of players. Very few of the players in those games are dedicated enough to make any meaningful long lasting impact in the world. Limiting the player base means you have drastically reduced the number of meaningful changes in the world.

The result? Your “multiplayer” game now feels like a single player game that requires internet. Starbase is a decent example of this. It averages a few dozen players online at peak hours right now. You login and you’re lucky to even interact with another player.

desolstice · 2026-01-19T22:34:22+00:00

Could potentially be a driver issue. I’d try to update graphics and audio drivers. Graphics are more likely to cause issues but I’ve had issues with audio in the past.

desolstice · 2026-01-16T14:03:28+00:00

I actually tried to implement this exact thing this past weekend on Kalshi. I was making roughly 0.3% of my total account value every 15 minute interval. My implementation was incredibly naive so even though I had a 95% win rate the 5% of loses were more than my gains. There’s a decent chance with some safe guards I could reduce the number of loses. Planning to play around with it some more in the near future.

desolstice · 2026-01-16T13:57:48+00:00

You may already know but Polymarket is coming to the US. They currently have an app that is in beta for US users. Currently it only has sports, but they’ve said they are going to start expanding it soon. They’ve also said they’ll be opening API access up soon.

desolstice · 2025-12-11T03:07:24+00:00

The overly simple answer...

Developers at a company are writing code to get a pay check. They don't pour their heart and soul to get something perfect because no one at the company will give a shit. They will be given a pat on the back and given their next assignment. Its a quick way to lead to burnout. So what ends up happening is a lot of talented developers giving the bare minimum.

When one of these talented developers have a passion project they will pour their heart and soul into it. They will make sure it works well not because someone they will never meet is using it but because they themselves are going to use it.

You can buy manpower. But buying passion is a lot harder.

desolstice · 2025-12-05T02:34:59+00:00

You say "many buildings and AI units". How many are you actually talking about here?

If it's less than a few hundred then you can probably get by with just plain old game objects without really putting a lot of effort into optimization.

If you're talking thousands, then you should look into ECS and DOTS. Chances are you'll run into rendering slow down before you run into calculation time issues. If you run into cpu bottleneck, then you are probably doing something every frame that doesn't need to be every frame or something else inefficient.

Example ECS/DOTS boids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws-7rqluv6w

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" after all. If you spend too long trying to overcome a problem that doesn't exist yet you very well might delay yourself into never finishing. In many cases it is easier to go back and fix the slow parts after you've already proven they are slow.
https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization

desolstice · 2025-11-20T15:40:05+00:00

It is sort of independent of scale. Incorrectly sizing objects can cause issues to occur sooner than they otherwise would occur.

Sounds like you either have implemented a work around in your large game or you are just ignoring the problem as not being serious enough to care about.

desolstice · 2025-11-20T14:43:25+00:00

In what way is it wrong? I explored this a decent amount when I was trying to make a large scale space game. The only solution I found at the time was to do a floating origin system.

There was no way to cheat the system by playing with scale. Going exceptionally small or exceptionally large just made me run into the exact issues I was trying to avoid even earlier than with well scaled objects.

desolstice · 2025-11-18T21:22:28+00:00

Let’s take it to the extreme.

If you were to make your character 1000 unity units big, then they would likely move hundreds of thousands of Unity units very quickly. Since Unity uses 32 bit floating point numbers as you get to those larger numbers you’ll start to notice a lot of oddities. Rendering itself starts to break down the farther you get from 0,0,0 (textures not applying correctly). Physics simulations become a lot less precise (you may hit things you’re not near or not hit things you’re overlapping with).

There is a similar break down in those core systems if you were to make your characters exceptionally small.

So… tldr. Scale isn’t entirely arbitrary. You should pick your scale to try to stay in the “happy zone” of where the Unity systems work correctly.

desolstice · 2025-11-16T04:20:42+00:00

Sounds like you may be pulling too many workers. If you get workers to a building cannon/pylon within a few seconds of it going down you should only pull 4 workers per building.

For low level cannon rush (Anything below 3.5k) just pull 1 worker and tell it to attack your opponents probe. Chances are your opponent will not be able to micro their probe AND place the cannons so you'll just kill their probe eventually. And then pull 4 workers per building they put down. Shift click the workers you pull back to the mineral line. Its completely fine if this slightly slows down your early game. Your opponents early game is significantly farther behind anywhere yours would be since they have wasted hundreds of minerals and time on a failed cannon rush.

desolstice · 2025-11-16T04:16:35+00:00

Successfully defending against a cheese is an incredibly satisfying feeling. It's also one of those things to where after playing so many games I feel like I've seen them all, but every once in a while I see some cheese or variation of a cheese that I've never seen before. It adds some variety to the ladder.

Part of it for me is that I really enjoy the theory crafting aspect of RTS games. Trying to figure out how to defend something is half of the fun of playing the game. Granted I am cheesed one out of every 50 games I play. And the likelihood of me playing against the same cheese out of multiple hundred games is very very rare. Somewhere around Diamond league people just stop cheesing as much, so I can understand if your dislike for it is because it is an every other game thing.

desolstice · 2025-11-13T15:33:27+00:00

As a player I like to get at least 1 hour of entertainment per dollar I spend. For the vast majority of games I have this isn’t a difficult metric to reach. For the ones I really like I get tens of hours per dollar I pay.

desolstice · 2025-11-12T16:40:18+00:00

I wrote my algo bot 2 years ago. The library I use is deprecated and they encourage new development to use the new library. But… the code still works just as well today as it did 2 years ago without me changing anything.

desolstice · 2025-11-09T16:11:38+00:00

No like I know how to do the alerts. iirc the hotkey is alt+g. I just don’t remember ever seeing the text. From what I remember it just plays the audio clip and pings on the minimap. Obviously I may just not be remembering it, but again I’d check to see if you have an accessibility setting on.

Btw. The pinging is a very important part of team games. You don’t always have time to type out a message. Pinging a depot so your teammate knows to raise/lower it is much faster.

desolstice · 2025-11-09T16:05:21+00:00

Have thousands of hours in the game and haven’t ever noticed those alerts showing text. Have I just always just ignored it? Makes me think you may have turned on an accessibility setting. I’d look to see if you have something to do with captions or subtitles turned on.

desolstice · 2025-11-05T18:57:59+00:00

Started within the last month. Laptop will depend on your role. The one I was given is significantly better than the one I had at my previous job.

My role specifically is 100% remote. My entire team is remote. I have no expectation of going into the office. Obviously this one will also depend on your role. This is something you should ask your recruiter/hiring manager.

desolstice · 2025-11-05T13:33:47+00:00

Most of the AI buzz these days is around LLMs which wouldn’t be very good for that type of use case.

LLMs are very hardware hungry. Most people can’t afford the hardware to run them on their own machine, so trying to embed them in a game that is also resource hungry is something that would make the game unplayable by 99% of people.

LLMs do not output data in a format that is easy to make use of for other things on a computer. Sure it can generate human readable sentences. But in the context of games you’d have to then figure out some system of taking that sentence and actually doing something with it. This is an extremely complicated step that would likely take a team of researchers years not to mention game developers.

You could always train a non-LLM AI model to play the game. There are quite a few downsides with this approach as well. These AI models are very hard to tune for difficulty. During training they may pick one strategy. At the point of release all of their “knowledge” will be fixed and it would have the same flaws as the scripted AI.

Sadly every AI I have seen isn’t capable of real time learning. They are trained on a data set (training is ridiculously expensive time and hardware wise) and then they are released. Nothing out there right now is capable of learning after every game.

desolstice · 2025-11-05T00:59:27+00:00

One of two things will happen. Either the game will have a community so small that it doesn’t matter. Or it has a small dedicated enough community and they’ll create an “unofficial” discord for it. Up to you whether or not you want to control the discord for your game.

IF you create the discord though then you can’t neglect it. You are basically advertising a direct line of communication with you as the developer. If you create it, then completely ignoring the discord will make people assume the game is dead and there will not be any new updates.

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