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Recently I've seen jinjinn's video where he translated Flash tutorial. At some point Flash said that you need 4 SCVs to mine efficiently when a vespene geyser (gas) is placed on the bottom of yor command center. Even though I' ve been playing this game 10 year I didn't know that. I did some testing on Fighting Spirit and these are my results.
When a vespene geyser in for instance on the top of command center you just need 3 SCVs for efficient mining which gives you 296 gas per minute (fastest).
Not efficient gas mining:
- 3 SCV's mining vespene geyser placed on the bottom of command center. Result: 240 gas per minute.
- 3 probes mining vespene geyser placed on the bottom of nexus. Result: 272 gas per minute.
- 3 drones mining vespene geyser placed on the bottom of hatchery. Result: 264 gas per minute.
In that case you need 4 SCVs/probes/drones mining gas to get 296 gas per minute. I haven't tested it on other maps but it should be the same. What do you guys think about it? Did you know about it?
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/GMQzFmV.jpg)
* img shows about which expansions i am talking about.
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United States10890 Posts
WTF...You always learn something new with SC1:BW, I have played since 97 and I never knew this...
MIND = BLOWN
Again WTF. >_<
Thanks for sharing!
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On September 27 2019 05:21 Arronax23 wrote:Recently I've seen jinjinn's video where he translated Flash tutorial. At some point Flash said that you need 4 SCVs to mine efficiently when a vespene geyser (gas) is placed on the bottom of yor command center. Even though I' ve been playing this game 10 year I didn't know that. I did some testing on Fighting Spirit and these are my results. When a vespene geyser in for instance on the top of command center you just need 3 SCVs for efficient mining which gives you 296 gas per minute (fastest). Not efficient gas mining: - 3 SCV's mining vespene geyser placed on the bottom of command center. Result: 240 gas per minute. - 3 probes mining vespene geyser placed on the bottom of nexus. Result: 272 gas per minute. - 3 drones mining vespene geyser placed on the bottom of hatchery. Result: 264 gas per minute. In that case you need 4 SCVs/probes/drones mining gas to get 296 gas per minute. I haven't tested it on other maps but it should be the same. What do you guys think about it? Did you know about it? * img shows about which expansions i am talking about.
wow that is really weird. I'm surprised something that important is so obscure; feels like something everyone should know.
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This phenomenon has long been well known to map makers as "the gas issue". Why do you think main geysers have only been put on top of or sometimes to the left of starting locations for well over a decade now?
Starparty wrote an article about it all the way back in 2005 and spinesheath systematically explored the effect for all races in detail. These values can till be regarded as mostly accurate reference, with some caveats:
- The effect of pathfinding regions (unknown about back then) was not taken into consideration. While the placement of the resource spots on little rectangular island in the test map ensures that pathfinding regions relative to the resource depots are almost identical across all setups, the regions are not laid out in a way that guarantees "neutral" pathfinding, so there are some unusual paths that workers take that slow down mining rates at some positions for some races (all race diferences are due to different collision sizes of their respective resource depots and gas gathering facilities, workers all travel and mine at the same rate)
- He did not evaluate the effect of add-ons on mining rates, even though for some positions to the right of a Command Center mining can be significantly slowed down and the setup and triggering of the map is actually suggesting he planned to evaluate this too. Likewise placing other buildings in specific positions can slow down or sometimes speed up mining, but testing gets of course really convoluted here and mostly more interesting to players than map makers, so its understandable this was omitted.
- Lastly the direct effect of unwalkable terrain, similar to buildings, was not considered. If you look at modern maps by me or some other BWMN map makers you'll notice that geysers at the right side of a resource depot have some doodads or similar unwalkable terrain placed below them, as this helps at least partially fixing some worker respawn issues that slow down mining rates for those geyser positions (there is of course a Protoss specific issue of workers getting trapped, as has bneen seen in some of the ASL/KSL games on Overwatch. There's a simple fix for this, expect a bugfixed Overwatch update soon!)
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Freakling, did you ever think of compilating all your posts and providing them as a BW encyclopedia? Maybe I would even pay for that.
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That's actually one of the things the "melee mapping tips and snippets" thread was originally intended for. I just never came around to actually sieving through all the spreat out mess in long forgotten threads…
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You learn something new every day when it comes to BW !
That's why i love this game so so so so so much !!!!
And JD! i love him too !!!!!
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On September 27 2019 08:22 Highgamer wrote:
Freakling, did you ever think of compilating all your posts and providing them as a BW encyclopedia? Maybe I would even pay for that.
Yes, don't underestimate the number of people who would be interested and fascinated. 
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This.. Omg. Never knew.
Thank you!
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i knew that it was always ideal to have the gas above the building which is why it is generally there on every modern map(in the main lat least). however i did not know the difference between the locations was THAT significant. losing almost 20% of gas mining is insane! was also surprised that it varied by race
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mining towards bottom of the building also sucks because it makes sending new workers to mine harder without selecting already mining workers and disrupting their movement
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map makers have known about this since at least mid 2000s lol
You start to see the change in Korean pro maps' gas placement around 2006ish
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This is very known issue, but in fact not many players consider putting 4 scvs on bases other than main, so generally dont do it at all, considering all new maps have proper gas placement in each starting location. Only terrans very often put 4 scvs on right side gas location in each such base, since after buiilding command center addon you can see it instantly something is very off.
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On October 01 2019 02:43 mishimaBeef wrote:
mining towards bottom of the building also sucks because it makes sending new workers to mine harder without selecting already mining workers and disrupting their movement
There's a simple fix for this: if you cant click the new worker individually, just box-select the new worker with a few others and shift+click on a mineral patch. Only the new one will go there, the others just keep mining the one they were at.
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Maybe you guys are also not aware that you CANNOT shift-target with sieged tanks? xD
(yeah - this means that shift-clicking on those dragoons doesnt make any sense)
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Bottom, right = 4
Top, left = 3
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On October 01 2019 20:01 LaStScan wrote:
Bottom, right = 4
Top, left = 3 That's the gist of it.
For non-cardinal directions it should be noted that workers usually respawn with an offset in clockwise direction (the function that determines worker spawn is an almost incomprehensible mess for the most part and this behaviour makes no logical sense in the first place, so if you want to know the exact details, go torture yourselves trying to figure it out), so geysers with a counterclockwise offset (like top right or bottom left) mine a lot faster (or rather geysers with a clockwise offset mine a lot slower).
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On October 01 2019 04:54 radley wrote:
This is very known issue, but in fact not many players consider putting 4 scvs on bases other than main, so generally dont do it at all, considering all new maps have proper gas placement in each starting location. Only terrans very often put 4 scvs on right side gas location in each such base, since after buiilding command center addon you can see it instantly something is very off.
Yes proper maps nowadays will always have decent gas mining in the mains. Outside of that the gas issue is more or less negligible. The thinking for this is that by the time players take their naturals and other expansions, other factors besides unequal gas mining rates will play a bigger role in determining the outcome of the match. But it plays a big role in mirror match ups, where by 5 minutes the differences in gas mined from geysers can add up to over 100-200 or even more. That means an extra tank, mutalisk, etc. This stuff matters a lot the higher the competition obviously. Map makers have since designed their maps taking things like the gas issue into consideration, being aware that most players don’t know about it. I think good design is doing as much as possible to let players simply play the game without having to worry about small things like that.
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I know terran should send 4 to a gas below the CC but should all zerg/protoss do the same? I would imagine yes with protoss once they are saturated enough but I am not sure about zerg.
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On October 07 2019 06:09 Anc13nt wrote:
I know terran should send 4 to a gas below the CC but should all zerg/protoss do the same? I would imagine yes with protoss once they are saturated enough but I am not sure about zerg.
Yes for most efficient mining. No in the sense that it is situational. I'm sure better players than me can actually give better practical examples since I don't really play the game anymore.
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EPT
