Altering Worker Spawning Position

HCN - Hatchery,Command Center, and Nexus collectively. Refers to any of the races.
*Not to be confused with hydrogen cyanide

Purpose of this article to change the worker spawning locations, in relation to the HCN.

This is an extension of improving worker spawning locations, mainly the idea of putting supply depot next to the Command Center. I was inspired by SCII and how their workers spawned, and how that would be much more important for BroodWar. I first tried temples, and then i discovered the List of Unit and Building Sizes. So then i tested with buildings specified and to see how far i could overlap the start location with the buildings, changing the worker position as well as avoid the bug stack problem. Fellow Mapper Freakling Implimented the idea of using Hallucinated Mineral Fields, as i myself never used hallucination much.

The purpose of this article is to allow equal mining, for an example, minerals on top of the HCN as compared to the left/right/bottom.
This can also lead to mineral formations based in the corners of the HCN, and better worker positioning there.

In an original spawn, Terran and Protoss have their Command Center Spawn, and then their workers.
In my observations, in a Zerg spawn, the Hatchery spawns, the creep spawns, one drone is spawned, the three larva are spawned, the next three drones are spawned, then the Overlord spawns a bit away from the corner of the hatchery that is closest to (respectively pointing towards) the center of the map.

The normal spawning position for units of production facilities is below the bottom left corner, then at the next spot with enough room for the respective unit counterclockwise from there if all other spots in clockwise direction are blocked by either any units or terrain.

For those who SimCity, the buildings of SCBW does not fully occupy their entire matrix. This can present a problem if you use a wrong building.

Must be 12th Player (Neutral)

*Turning "debug/display unit collision boxes" in the "Debug" Tab of SCMDraft2 on is a good idea. You can pre-place everything as a building and then just place the unit sprite just on top of it (simple pixel-matching), finally remove the building.
*For Minerals Fields, you must disable mining distance required.

First, knowing which way you want your workers to spawn at is important.
*For two player maps, there are two options; sprite buildings or hallucinated mineral fields. For three players or greater, hallucinated minerals must be used.
*For two player maps, sprite buildings are acceptable because there are only two possible spawning locations..
*For three player maps, sprite buildings would appear on the map, if a player does not spawn at the specific place. Hallucinated Mineral Field will vanish after a certain amount of time, therefore leaving the future game play unaffected when the expansion to the mains occur.
*BUILDINGS(maybe mineral fields) CANNOT BE USED FOR THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE HCN. USE HALLUCINATED CRITTERS INSTEAD.

Next, you must choose a non-movable object that you wish to use. Units that do not match with their matrices exactly are therefore less desirable than other ones.
Buildings that occupy entire area are the Zerg Nydus Canal, Protoss Temple, Warp Gate, Mature Chrysalis, and Stasis Prison.
Mineral Field occupy the entire area they take.

You must then take the buildings/minerals and border then along the HCN.
Then displace the Hallucinated Mineral Field one pixel towards the HCN,
And for buildings The sprite must be placed one pixel towards the HCN.
The original reference building can be deleted.

Using Mineral Fields
1. Basic Main Setup


2. Setting Proper Settings, and adding Basic minerals.



3. Placing of new Mineral Fields


4. After deleting the old mineral fields(Hardest to do Part), Set to hallucination

*Note Mineral Fields Not yet touching the HCN

Currently being updated.

If buildings/minerals are too far placed, a Stack Bug can occur. This Happened to me when i tried this initially.


Freakling::
The stack bug, mentioned in the article, is a real problem, and also appears if you place overlapping minerals (or any building-unit) at the right side of the HCN.
Hallucinated critters are an alternative.
If you use neutral buildings instead, the problem is that on maps with more than 2 spawns, the free spawns will have neutral buildings partially blocking them.
There's one neat thing you can do with that, though: place neutral command centers on each spawn of a (3) map, and you'll get an infestable CC for Zerg on the free spawn in each game

If any unit is overlapping the 4x3 tile area that makes up a spawn point (i.e. the initial CC/Nex/Hatch) at game start, it is removed (the exact order seems to be place CC/Hatch/Nex/place workers [hence the position changing works], finally remove the unit). If that unit is a building-unit (this includes resources), it can happen that the part of the main building [CC/Nex/Hatch], that would have been covered by the removed building, becomes buildable again (any full overlapping tiles will become buildable, as well as tile-high overlaps of only one pixel [or more obviously] a the right side of the spawn [hence you cannot use buildings to move workers beyond the right side], other partial overlaps depend [it's complicated]...)
So, because part (or all) of the area, that's taken up by your initial main building is buildable now, you can stack further buildings on it (only one stack, after that the engine will correctly recognize that area as build on, but the bug won't disappear, even if you repeatedly destroy and rebuild the stacked buildings, unless the main building itself is destroyed or, in case of a CC, lifted).

First of, it's just something that will alienate players, it's something one is not used to, that is not supposed to happen, that one would not expect.
But there are some serious balance/gameplay implications as well.
Think protoss vs. x: Manner pylon? Laughable. We can go manner proxy gateway now!
Or just defensively , you could place pylons/sunks/canons that are [almost] unreachable for melee units and hard to target (i.e. click on) for any other unit. Just think of a ZvZ with an invincible sunken in the main...
Other abuses, that I haven't tried out yet, is, if the stack bug applies to the whole spawn point (the whole 4x3 tile area of your main building) you could try one of the following things:
I. TvP: Build a CC or factory on top of the enemy Nexus (both have larger collision boxes than a Nex) and thereby stop probes from returning gathered resources (not sure if this even works, but if it did...)


II. ZvP [or ZvT]: Abuse the smaller collision box of hatches to place a proxy hatch right on top of the enemy main building, where it would be hard (or even impossible) to reach by melee units) [not tested as well]...


However, melee units still have a little bit of range and hence may still be able to hit a stacked building.

Zerg creep will not be present in the beginning of the game where the buildings/minerals have been, but refills fast enough before any possible spawning pool.