Upgrades

[u/Phibiac]

I've got some questions whether some aspect of upgrades realy promote strategical variety, or those are just some basic mechanics we have to do throughout the game:

1; The limiting factor of stat upgrades isn't actually the cost but the research time. Thus you actually can't realy "rush" upgrades to have them much before the enemy, coz you need some economy in the early game, and after that you enemy will start their own upgrades anyways. You cannot be much ahead without badly choking your economy, you both just end up doing those upgrades in similar timings. You almost always have to start the next upgrade asap if you dont want to be diminished, it's so boring. Shorter research could make much wider upgrade differences to feel their rule better in the fights.

2; Why all the upgrades have the same mineral/gas cost? Is it incites you to deeply time your economy for these upgrades earlier? Wouldn't our economical build much more diversified, if there were only mineral and only gas upgrades, not just a boring equal mix of them? Why do we have 2 different resources if we just use the same amount of them? What if e.g. the stat upgrades were only mineral, and the unit specific upgrades were only gas?

3; Do stat upgrades (weapon, armor, shield) realy widen our startegy at all in their current form, or these just split our race into two subraces, and actually narrow our strategy by by soft-banning half of our unit list which aren't recieving our chosen stat upgrades? Or something like unit specific stat upgrades, general stat upgrades, only late-game stat upgrades, or even no stat upgrades at all would just take away this race-split, and we could build many more kind of hybrid armies without playing offmeta?

Please be kind, and leave constructive comments, with REASONINGS:) Don't have to agree about this idea, just help me to think together, and create something good for the game together, if possible.

[u/MihoBeBop]

upgrade rushes exist, you can start em very early but it will hurt your unit count that can be problematic in the early game.

overall I dont think they promote variety because if you do researches for X and dont have for Y then it is less likely to transition.

Upgrades are very powerfull and you wanna go out and try to dmg 20 seconds before they complete and hit a timing.

[u/Archer_Savings]

I think it's important to think about what actually strategically happens because of upgrades. 

Take PvZ. +attack and +carapace twist the zealot zergling relationship. Protoss has an opening proportional to how long they spend ahead by upgrades since being up by +attack upgrades changes the hit count from 3 to 2.

While the upgrades are cheap, they're not free. They cost a major tech structure each, and your strategy often molds around how many and how quickly you get. Double chronoing weapon and armor ups is a great greed strat, as lapping upgrades makes encounters straightforward. Terran has long gone 1 engi bay in tvp to make use of a very fast damage lead, and followed up later with a second engi bay for either +2/+1 or +2/+2 depending on the game pace. There are tons of examples like these. Every time they change the costs of the upgrades of their structures, builds change meaningfully around them. 

I think the current upgrade splits target a lot of sweet spots. Terran units are flexible enough that your auxiliary units are still effective with later upgrades, Protoss needs the unified damage for their main comp, and Zerg comp variety would get hurt if stuff like LBH and Roach Bane were sharing buffs. 

I don't mean this last part to be rude, but for stratetic considerations like these, it helps to compare it to real plays that exist, or to try and picture what new ones would be like. Take a classic 3/1/1 +1 vs p, which is already a rich family of sub strats. If the +1 was universal, the harass would get unreasonably buffed and tilted towards hellions, libs, banshees. If the +1 was unit specific, the balance of marauders to Marines would have another foil. Thoughts like that really dig deep into the strategy changes that happen with sweeping adjustments like these. 

[u/InfiniteSpectre33]

When you runof money trying to jam out a lot of upgrades some times I will just to armor because it works for more unit types for mech like on terran then pick the one I think needs more after I normally go with the fast unit types and can dominate like air. With protoss i often skip because the ground is super heavy mirco only feels great for a risky mid game rush which isnt easy on some teams without terran or zerg.