|
I agree with Tang.
What I think the OP is trying to describe is a sort of "leap frogging" of tumors. There'd be no point in having an active tumor sitting in your main base for "back up" purposes. When you have an excessive amount of tumors though, it makes sense to have active ones lagging behind your forward ones though. Sort of "protecting" your spread in the same way seige tanks protect each other while repositioning.
One reason to have like 5 tumors heading in one direction though is to branch off in secondary directions in the future while still maintaining the same rate of spread in your primary direction. IE: Branching off from spread to opponent's base towards future expansions.
Really though it comes down to sort of keeping up the number of active tumors in all directions while maintaining the ability to easily replace lost creep. By lagging your active tumors behind, etc, you take part of the burden off your creep queen. One reason you'd want to do this and keep her available energy up (that I haven't seen mentioned yet) is transfusion. Especially late game when you have a flock of broodlords floating over a spine crawler forest.
|
this is interesting but the correct way is the fastest way which is continuously using all creep tumors and getting there quickly
|
A better question is why dont more players use overlord creep dropping when they have lair to spread creep faster? I've never seen a pro level zerg do this. If you have overlord speed or map contorl theres no reason not to do this unless your apm can't support it.
|
... but then with less creep tumors, creep spreading will slow down, and so you will have to replace the destroyed creep tumors anyways if you want to spread your creep faster... gg
|
Primary problem to this method as far as I can see is that there is no reliable way to predict just how far the opponent will smash your tumors, and thus have a backup tumor ready. A guessing game more or less tbh.
|
If you're so worried about one scan killing all of your freshest creep tumors, why not just spread them more out in a fan/ branching out pattern, rather than keeping all of them clumped?
Each area of the creep will expand a bit slower with one tumor than with multiple ones, but you can probably cover just as much ground in the long run and a single scan won't hit all of the new tumors. Unless you plan on attacking very quickly and you need fast creep highways in one focused direction only (where you might be using overlords too), I don't see why spreading the tumors out wider would be bad.
|
The problem I see with this is that there is nothing stopping your opponent from killing the "backup" creep tumors. It's not like a terran will scan and go, "Oh, this one hasn't been spread yet, I think I'll go kill that one over there instead." I see this as an inferior solution to a problem that could be solved by something such as managing your creep queen(s) better or having faster creep spread in the first place.
|
slows down creep spread in the early game, this would only be used later on to reinforce your current creep spread as well as expanding your existing creep spread in a more later game stale mate
|
Not spreading creep tumors on cooldown is like not injecting and "saving it for later" for your macro hatcheries.
AKA, its a terrible idea. Some maps you can't even have a 3rd base safely without creep (lookin at you, korhal compound)
|
On March 29 2012 10:27 Br3ezy wrote:
slows down creep spread in the early game, this would only be used later on to reinforce your current creep spread as well as expanding your existing creep spread in a more later game stale mate
How can you be so sure this is the theoretically correct way?
Most players do not hit their tumors optimally, and with a dedicated queen, laying 2 tumors in a backward position would not be a big deal to your forward creep spread; if forward movement is lacking, it's the players lack of hitting cool-downs rather than not enough tumors.
There are many extremely viable applications of this:
For instance on Antiga, when a terran is holding the high ground watch tower, scan, and run small groups of marines forward beyond tank range to pick off tumors. When this clears, they advance and push down. What if rather than that creep receding, when they pull the marines backward, two more tumors enter the area to keep creep and vision in such a critical location.
This same concept is applicable on many maps, and it' something I've been incorporating into my play for a while now, and it's quite useful.
|
As with all the posts above your method is not superior and is only viable mid to late game. Even then setting up back -up tumors would be detrimental to your overall creep spread, it would deny possible transfuse energy and they are just as likely to be scanned and killed with all the other tumors.
The tumor will always be scanned and killed so it would be faster to replenish creep by spawning a new tumor. Your method actually makes creep spreading a slower process by wasting energy on tumors that will be killed before they have the chance to spawn new tumors.
|
I think people are kind of misinterpreting the OP's intent with this. I don't really view it as an attack on people's current ideas of creep tumor management, or a "new strategy," etc, but more an exploration of the area. IMO creep spread is one of the areas in the game that's still needing more time to be understood/mastered. This is afterall a "new" aspect of SC2 and SC2 is still a relatively "new" game. The fact that creep spread with Overlords is rather "uncommon" just sort of underscores this point.
The goal is to be obviously to maximize creep spread and minimize the effect any attempt to clear or control it has. The best way obviously to do this would be to spread out your tumors as much as possible. If you're pushing a full front of creep in all directions then when some gets cleared out, the remaining tumors on the outskirts can begin to fill in.
It seems the ideal is to have pairs or trios of creep tumors pushing out in a fashion where the radius of their spread slightly overlaps. You have your creep queen throwing down tumors in directions that need to be pursued and there aren't any available tumors. Overlords fill where the tumor spread hasn't gotten to yet, IE: at an expansion in an area you want spine crawlers immediately. They also lay the foundation in a way, so you can join expansions before a tumor spread is established. This is rarely seen, but makes perfect sense. If you control that area and are expanding, why not use OLs to fill when you're in lair tech?
Regardless, in that sense, the creep queen will after a certain point establish a lot of energy (this is assuming very anal creep spread, it'd require a ton of APM and multitasking, without the free energy is more abundant) It makes perfect sense to start making "back up" tumors. This keeps you from putting your queen into a zone that is likely to get hit or harassed again and she doesn't have to run down there and throw the energy. All that energy can then be used to transfuse whatever, buildings, units, etc. Hatch gets harassed? Transfuse it. Rarely see that too.
This game still has a LOT of stuff to be hashed out.
|
On March 29 2012 10:35 KhAmun wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 10:27 Br3ezy wrote:
slows down creep spread in the early game, this would only be used later on to reinforce your current creep spread as well as expanding your existing creep spread in a more later game stale mate How can you be so sure this is the theoretically correct way? Most players do not hit their tumors optimally, and with a dedicated queen, laying 2 tumors in a backward position would not be a big deal to your forward creep spread; if forward movement is lacking, it's the players lack of hitting cool-downs rather than not enough tumors. There are many extremely viable applications of this: For instance on Antiga, when a terran is holding the high ground watch tower, scan, and run small groups of marines forward beyond tank range to pick off tumors. When this clears, they advance and push down. What if rather than that creep receding, when they pull the marines backward, two more tumors enter the area to keep creep and vision in such a critical location. This same concept is applicable on many maps, and it' something I've been incorporating into my play for a while now, and it's quite useful.
You said it yourself, it would not be a BIG DEAL to your forward creep spread, but it does slow it down. Early game is when you want to get your creep spread out the most, its the best time and allows you to take map control. I was also saying this from a point of view of being a high masters zerg that spread my tumors optimally, unliked most players. Spreading 2 creep tumors together also increases creep spread and decreases the cooldown twice as fast as compared to having one back and only forwarding one as well
|
This is a genuinely interesting idea, and worthy of some exploration.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/2lpRm.jpg)
From what I understand, should the creep under the red line be destroyed, the tumours with the green highlight could immediately reinforce them - possibly while there's still small amounts of creep, depending if the Terran has retreated.
Note that even if the rightmost green tumour is killed, the tumour above it can still reinforce the low ground.
I'd like to see the numbers for this - I'm sure that with some serious structure to the design, this would come out ahead.
|
I disagree with the OP.
You want all your resources invested pushing your advantage (ie greater and faster creep spread). Leaving some tumors as back up is almost like banking some minerals just in case you need to reactively drop a building. It might have it's uses, but it's situational.
Spreading creep as fast as possible always reaps you the benefits of all the tumors, keeping some as back-up is situational.
Fanning out does appear to be an optimal solution though.
|
the OP seems highly inefficient
|
On March 29 2012 11:08 thesideshow wrote:
I disagree with the OP.
You want all your resources invested pushing your advantage (ie greater and faster creep spread). Leaving some tumors as back up is almost like banking some minerals just in case you need to reactively drop a building. It might have it's uses, but it's situational.
Spreading creep as fast as possible always reaps you the benefits of all the tumors, keeping some as back-up is situational.
Fanning out does appear to be an optimal solution though.
For the early game, I completely agree, as creep spread is completely necessary for specific timings, and allows you to cut a couple corners.
But in mid-late game, I guarantee your creep spread is not being hindered by a lack of tumors, unless you're cutting an early creep queen, which you shouldn't really do.
Your creep spread is hindered by your missing cooldowns, and stretches of time in which you're simply doing other things.
Putting down two tumors in a defensive position, just outside of typical scan/key attack areas, could prove to be an extremely helpful maneuver. If those two tumors is hindering your spread, you should adjust your build to include more tumors, or you have jaedong apm.
|
On March 29 2012 10:35 KhAmun wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2012 10:27 Br3ezy wrote:
slows down creep spread in the early game, this would only be used later on to reinforce your current creep spread as well as expanding your existing creep spread in a more later game stale mate How can you be so sure this is the theoretically correct way? Most players do not hit their tumors optimally, and with a dedicated queen, laying 2 tumors in a backward position would not be a big deal to your forward creep spread; if forward movement is lacking, it's the players lack of hitting cool-downs rather than not enough tumors. There are many extremely viable applications of this: For instance on Antiga, when a terran is holding the high ground watch tower, scan, and run small groups of marines forward beyond tank range to pick off tumors. When this clears, they advance and push down. What if rather than that creep receding, when they pull the marines backward, two more tumors enter the area to keep creep and vision in such a critical location. This same concept is applicable on many maps, and it' something I've been incorporating into my play for a while now, and it's quite useful.
I agree with this completely. I find while it's useful in the early game to spread as quickly as possible, there are certain maps where later in the game, you can have very smart backup creep tumors. Shakuras is a good map for it, because you don't need a huge amount of tumors to push through the middle of the map with creep, and terran will usually push up the middle, killing the tumors in the center. If you have a few, even just a couple on the north and south flanks of the map, then after terran retreats you can very quickly regain that lost vision.
The other big application, as you mentioned KhAmun, is that when marines are stimmed forward to shoot creep, you scare them back with a few lings and immediately replace the tumor with one that was further back. I find this to be an extremely useful tactic in the late game, as it can be really important (again using Shakuras as an example) to maintain the vision in front of your three bases. In these situations, you can't always get a high energy queen out there to replace the creep in time. The terran is slowly moving forward and by the time the queen gets there the opportunity to regain vision of that space may be lost. Also, if the queen is killed you're out of luck until you can get another one down there.
TL;DR I think it has some really nice applications later in the game with replacing creep when vision is extremely important. Early game it's wisest to spread quickly, but on specific maps you actually reach a point where you don't need to be adding more tumors to your front line because the choke is thin (Shakuras).
|
I think one of the big reasons that pro players don't stagger tumors like the OP suggests is because its a lot more complicated to keep track of where your active tumors are if they arn't on the front of your creep. Its much easier to click the minimap near the edge of creep and spread from there.
The best solution imo is a dedicated creep queen. If she has energy she can replace the creep. You can also use her 25 energy marker for a reminder to creep spread in the early game (its a similar cooldown).
I should point out 1 thing in favor of the OP's idea. How often have you spread 4 tumors in 1 direction then the second those tumors are off cooldown you spread them again? Probably not often after mid-game. Well if you took 5 extra seconds you might as well have spread 3 tumors and had 1 backup tumor because thats how long it takes creep to reach max distance. If you took 10 extra seconds it shoulda been 2 tumors forward and 2 backup. Its a waste if you take too long to spread the tumors again.
Overall pros should look into better 'creep queen' management rather than some special creep spreading technique as it is more flexible and doesn't use a ton of extra apm.
|
There's actually a thread on creep tumor efficiency. It said that two tumors is the best increase you're going to get. After that, the speed increase has diminishing returns and becomes unimportant to add additional tumors for the purposes spreading creep faster.
I think the reason pros tend to neglect a more "efficient" way of spreading creep is because it's such a quick and easy thing to do, but there are a lot more things to be done. So having a queen slap down 5 creep tumors to replace the creep and expend her extra energy is much easier than "okay, i'm going to drop 4 creep tumors, then spread the next 3."
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
