I found this post on another forum:

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Q u o t e:
Starcraft actually has something of a buffer against slippery slope [= when you lose a battle, you are lower on units and you keep losing until you die]. Although SC definitely does have some obvious slippery slope properties, I've found that they tend to exist more in the details than in the overall picture. A property of SC that I've seen in very few other RTS games is that units do an incredible amount of damage compared to how little health they have. Just a few seconds of combat can completely devastate armies and that immense power serves as a counterbalance to slippery slope. The High Templar shows this property best. For a good example, imagine a PvT match where the Terran has just clobbered the bulk of the Terran army with siege tanks. Slippery slope will definitely affect the Protoss player if he merely retreats and tries to hold off the Terran army, but if he slips down a high templar unexpectedly and psi-storms the moving tanks, he can cause enough damage to the Terran player to fend off the assault.

The power of a single unit in the right place to be able to sway the flow of a large battle in Starcraft really helps to keep everything in check because until there is a very large advantage for a player, the underdog can always force his way back into a favorable position with good micromanagement of his units, even if he is outnumbered.

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I think he has a point. Smartcasting means fewer TERRIBLE DAMAGE situations, which means fewer opportunities to really get someone if you catch them for just a moment. Like in Warcraft 3 (which has a giant slippery slope issue: there is one Big Battle and whoever loses this loses the game), the army that loses the first contact may be hopelessly weaker to the point where it takes boxer micro to even recover. For most players, this loss may just cascade into more losses until gg.

It seems to be happening already. Psi storm nerfed, reavers replaced with a gimmicky tank variant, EMP removed, lockdown removed, stasis field removed... More focus on support units (slow, nullifier etc) which may result in armies being gimped if their support units are gone.

Good? Bad?...

I personally believe that Smartcasting actually means a better placement of TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE DAMAGE™ dealing abilities, take psi-storm for once. The time you invest in placing the different psi-storms could mean more units taking damage, and casting a storm after another doesn’t really take a huge amount of time, just like the force fields being cast in the Battle Reports for example.

Talking about support units: is putting some focus on support units necessarily a bad thing? Why is that? Don’t you think that including these kind of dependencies between different units will deepen the strategies involved in battles? Mixing your units in order to have a diversified army has always been a key element that SCII inherited from the original StarCraft, just think of the marine+medic combo. Snipe the medics and you'll have an easier job killing the marines, right? I believe the same mechanic applies to StarCraft II as well. Sure, the units are going to be different, the control groups management will be different as well, but are these negative things? I honestly don't think so.

What do you think about this?