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Physician
United States4146 Posts
An introduction to a StarCraft player from Peru, Cusco and his extensive and very smart analysis of Protoss mineral mining. An article with relevance and interesting applications to both map making and gaming, with particular impact to Protoss "macro".
I met a StarCraft gamer, a while back when I worked at GG.net and I had opened their Spanish forum. At that time he had read one of my medically oriented articles about the possible trauma's any keyboard warrior or pc gamers could encounter. He sent me some very sharp observations and ideas about a possible article going a little deeper into the possible impact gaming can have on the developing mind. By itself the advice and comments surprised me, but when I discovered that the man in question was an informatics engineer, a slave to the physical sciences and not a psychology major, I knew that a very highly developed thinking entity had just tried to communicate with me.
http://www.sclegacy.com/showthread.php?p=58861#post58861
Thanks for reading on ~
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I liked it.
It might get confusing in the middle though.
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interesting stuff, never really thought about "probe wandering" and its implications before.
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I read through the whole thing, and though it's a little complicated I definitely learned some stuff. Great article, thanks for pointing it out.
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Trinidad/Tobago1177 Posts
Nice Read 
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Agreed with above poster. Good read. However, ingame situations will never allow for just 2probes per patch and then stopping. Gotta keep building to recover from economy harasses even though that will increase wandering.
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SO lets say there are 4 patches of mine
one north of the nexus
one south
one east
one west
having more than 8 would be worthless than ?
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interesting article, and it could certainly come in handy if you're trying to make an all-in build or timing rush so that you're not wasting money on probes when they'd otherwise decrease speed and productivity. apart from that though, its applications are minimal. some areas can adapt that optimum mineral patch style (particularly islands), but in most place it'd muck up aesthetics and free movement of other units who need to pass by.
it is useful in that in late game maxed out situations we now know how many probes to keep and how many to sacrafice. for map makers to be honest i can't see them adopting this style of mineral alignment simply because most maps are mirror maps anyway so it makes little difference regarding play style other than perhaps expansion preference. the only thing i can see it promote is faster all-in attacks and possibly a faster progression into lategame. and to be honest, roaming doesn't seem like a problem worth addressing to me.. on low mineral maps anyway. i'd prefer better gameplay and aesthetics over the space consuming mineral design he has suggested.
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This is really interesting but I find the implications rather confusing...all I can get from it is that sometimes its a lot more efficient to add more expos instead of more probes?
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
I"ll read it tomorrow when i'm groggy and busted from getting my wisdom teeth pulled =(.
hopefully this article can restore some of that lost wisdom in me.
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When he talks about the dsitribution of probes among more than 1 expansion instead of just 1 main, he doesn't really take into account the cost of the expansion I think.
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GrandInquisitor
New York City13113 Posts
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I've already known about "Probe Wandering" but I thought it was a good thing. It helps you split your Probes in the beginning of the game and it also helps manage your minerals throughout the game. I know Wandering increases as you get more Probes, but the point is, like a few posts above me said, you have to make up for harass and transfers. There's also times when you have to build Cannons within your Mineral line and this changes your Probe behavior alot.
Otherwise, it was pretty interesting to see all the math of a perfect Protoss world 
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Its only a good thing very early on
If it didnt exist then 2 probes per block would give you optimal in any normal mineral setup
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building the extra probes for protoss in the long run is still efficient cuz think about when you expand but only have two probes per patch....then you're back down to one per patch or you just dont maynard at all and you're basically making you're expand take forever to build....the mining thing is closer to 2.5 anyways
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although ive known about this in detail for a while, it was a very good read still . thx for the research antrax
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Very informative, well written articel that gives us futher insight into one aspect of theorycraft. It also shows how complex starcraft is, i shall forward this to the next person ask's me for a "strategy" to win instead of trying to explain strategy is useless without a fundamental understanding of not just starcraft but of war in general. Many people fail to really grasp how important econ, recon, and interpitation are, not just in commiting to a strategy but in order to recognizing when a strategy _will always_ work in game situations (or even real life. mr.bush  who created a war of ideals which cannot be won by conventional means/warfare when it has the best conventional militry means in the world show's a lacking perception of conflict on he's behalf.
i dont mean to hijack thread but it is a very good example. When Mr.Bush decleared the oppisition as _evil_ he created a war in which there is no room for negioation or settlement (who would make peace with what has been defined as evil?)
See the bigger picture, the larger context of what you see your oppenent doign rather then what he wishes you too see because if you do not he controls the course of events and your influence or power is diminished.
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Belgium9950 Posts
the question is: Do we want to reach max probes easier? this would make expanding even more efficient, this would higher the mineral/gas ratio too.
lets think of the impact this would have on gameplay:
reaching max workers easier would help T and P a bit since Z never goes for max drones. Higher mineral/gas ratio, though would lead to T>Z and Z>P. Ofcourse the changes would be really small, but overall it would help T in TvZ and I think the effects kinda cancel eachother out in PvZ.
I guess it's another incalculation map makers have to do while making their maps. It's another variable.
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Good work! I added a link at my website, www.artofprotoss.vze.com. I understood the most of what you consdier in this article beforehand, but you investegated in detail, and presented it well.
I was considering issues related to this a shortly ago. I was wondering about 2nexus vs. 3nexus, vs. 1fact cc early timed attack. Thread can be found here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=42251
One issue was mins lost by transfering probes. Another issue was about just how much more mineral patches increases income with the same ammout of workers, most importantly, max at min and nat. Also, consider less workers with more minerals. Perhaps you could shed some light on this.
Sure, the article does lead itself to much practical application, that was not already known, but it goes into detail and sums things up well. It seems a great idea to me to start playing around with mineral layouts more, if not to create maps with 4x4 main mineral layouts.
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EPT
