EPTWell, I'll tell you.
For as long as there has been Starcraft, Zerg has been burdened with an additional resource: larvae. Having a fourth resource to manage makes macro more complex and difficult.
Or does it?
In Broodwar, there was no hard and fast relationship between the production capacity of a hatchery and the resource collection potential of a base. It was just a unit producing structure like any other. But in Starcraft 2, the queen has been calibrated such that - for a large portion of the game and a surprising variety of unit mixes - the larva output of one hatchery plus one queen is a pretty good match for the resources which can be gathered from a single base.
I want you first to cast your minds (or your browsers) back to the last episode of Swarming Down the Ladder, in which I talked about the difficulty I was having staying on top of everything that needed doing. It seemed that whenever I tried to focus on some aspect of my play, I would inevitably forget something critical and get myself killed.
A day or two after writing that blog post, while practicing my macro versus the Very Easy AI, I noticed that - left to my own devices - my attention gravitated to spawning and spending my larvae as rapidly as possible. Moreover, many problems with the rest of my play (supply, drone count, army composition, mineral/gas collection ratio etc) were quickly reflected in the state of my larvae. Rather than larvae feeling like an additional headache, they seemed to act as both a macro-barometer and a natural 'hub' for my in-game focus.
This struck me as potentially useful. There's nothing analogous for Terran and Protoss players: a bad Protoss player who neglects to build probes, for instance, can sit on one base with two gateways constantly producing, keep his money low and never get supply blocked - and think he's doing fine. But a bad Zerg player like me (so long as he remembers his injections) can't fail to see his larvae stockpile and know something is amiss. It's as big a clue as if Protoss could only make gateways in batches of four (I know it seems like that actually is the case but I assure you it's not).
I started playing some ladder games utilising this mindset, and several things quickly became apparent.
First of all, I realised just how poorly I'd been using my larvae for the last 700 games. Not just through inattention, but through poor decision-making. Several times I caught myself waiting on gas to make roaches, hydra or mutalisks - and while I was waiting I wouldn't build anything else. I'd have larvae and minerals, but I wouldn't squeeze in extra drones, or zerglings. I'd just sit there while the next 50 or 100 gas rolled around; classic tunnel-vision.
Secondly, it was uncanny how many problems or mistakes manifested as an abundance or lack of larvae. If my army composition didn't suit my mineral/gas income, if I under-droned, failed to expand, forgot to tech - the first I knew about it would be that I either had a stockpile of larvae or none at all. They would pile up if I under-droned, or if I was trying for a too gas-heavy army mix; they would run out if I fell behind on tech and wasn't able to spend enough per larva.
Thirdly, I was playing dramatically better.
By no means 'well', but so much better than I had been. Partly this was improved macro, but mostly it was that instead of feeling like I had a million things to worry about, I now only felt like I had two: Larvae and Map Awareness.
In an earlier blog post I talked about CLOUDS: using a mnemonic to remember Creep spread, Larvae, Overlords, Upgrades, Drones and Scouting. I liked the idea at the time, but after a while I found it very difficult to consistently make a full circuit because the six elements often trod on each others' toes rather than flowing naturally.
Breaking things down into Larvae and Map Awareness proved much more intuitive. For one thing, it was easier to bounce back and forth between two activities than remember where I was in a cycle of six. Secondly, there was a logical train of thought to follow for each, as opposed to a disjointed checklist:
Map Awareness:
Check the minimap; what's my vision like? Where are my overlords and scouting lings? Can I see if he's moving out? Is he taking an expansion? Can I see if there are incoming drops? What's my creep spread? Do I know where and what his army is? Do I need detection? Is my army positioned correctly? Am I making the right units? Enough units?
Larvae:
Am I spawning larvae? How many do I have? If I have too many larvae, why? Am I undersaturated? Am I making the wrong unit mix? Do I need a gas expansion? Do I need to take drones off gas? Is there any way I can spend all these larvae now?
With so much to think about, I was always busy doing something. And I found it much easier to bounce to 'macro mode' during a battle, too: all I needed was to bring up my available larvae and I would be 'distracted' - only in a good way.
I want to be clear: this way of thinking by itself is never going to make me or anyone else play well. You can't succeed at a high level by noticing and compensating for mistakes on the fly; you need to avoid making those mistakes in the first place.
And to be fair, I'm still struggling to remember upgrades. I'm still looking for a way to tie them in to everything else so I don't have to try to remember them separately.
But all that said, just how much has this shift of perspective helped already?
Well, within a few days I was out of Silver and bumping along the top of Gold league with an 80% win ratio. I'm still awful, of course, but at least I feel like I'm genuinely punching my weight, rather than being endlessly let down by stupid mistakes.
So if you're in a similar place, maybe you too can use larvae - the handy macro-barometer Blizzard put into Starcraft 2 for us - to improve your game. Let me know what you think - and if you try it, let me know whether it worked!
Thanks for reading.
