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I have received requests on how to try the model out: Search "Double Harvesting (TeamLiquid)" by ZeromuS as an Extension Mod in HotS Custom Games to try it out. Email your replays of your games on DH to: LegacyEconomyTest@gmail.com might have partnership with a replay website soon as well  In Game Group: Double Harvest |
On April 13 2015 02:21 ZeromuS wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2015 01:40 Ovid wrote:On April 13 2015 01:31 SC2John wrote:On April 12 2015 22:23 Ovid wrote:On April 12 2015 20:49 Teoita wrote:
While that's true, you have to remember that managing worker counts across all bases for the whole game becomes much more important, so i think it's a good tradeoff in the end. I agree losing early game worker micro isn't great though. Either lalush extension mod is bugged or there's a big flaw with this model. I tried force pairing workers and what I found was sometimes (after the first mining packet) if you force a worker to mine that patch the worker will force the one that was halfway through mining off of the patch. I then tried to replicate that without having clicked anything and I noticed very rarely but it does happen sometimes that the workers automatically override the others. I assume this isn't intentional? If I'm correct, that's the double harvest model. In the double harvest model, the workers go through 2 cycles of mining of 5 minerals each, and if a worker comes up to the patch while another is mining, it's entirely possible that they will kick them off the mineral patch and start mining before the other worker has time to mine a full 10 minerals. This is the intention of the double harvest model and part of the reason why it doesn't has as high of a curve as the double mining model (double the mining time for 10 minerals). It's supposed to make the mining overall less efficient unless you have a 1:1 ratio of workers to nodes. That doesn't make sense, Worker 2 coming to mine will still bounce and keep the 1:1 ratio, but kicking the harvester already mining off doesn't make sense and only wastes every so often the 5 minerals already harvested. you dont lose the 5 minerals already harvested. The worker holds onto them and returns them with the next 5 (total 10). similar to the "hold money" option in Age of Empires I think it was?
Ah, makes more sense. Still we've got almost a year before the game is released, I think something more elegant can be though of that enables some interaction with workers rather than allocating them correctly across bases.
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On April 13 2015 02:17 Bazik wrote:
so basically you wrote a massive post to say you want broodwar economy back? Well instead of writing a massive response I'll just say that the reason for double pairing is to reduce the overall size of the armies, by forcing the players to make a lot more workers it reduces overall max army size making it more manageable for most players.
makes no sense :
-no one wants "brood war economy back", but a better econ for SC2
-double pairing doesn't force the player to make a lot more worker than no pairing
-army size have little to do with ease of manageability in SC2, considering the existence of deathballs + unlimited selection. Some small armies are harder to control than bigger armies, depending on race and MU
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Hopefully someone in Blizzard will read this... I doubt it tho.
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On April 12 2015 17:44 Whitewing wrote:
Unfortunately, that's outside the realm of an economic system, as the base count you can secure is limited by maps and map design, which is rather prohibitive in that regard. Having 6 bases quickly enough that none of them are mined out by the time you've taken the 6th is already rather unlikely, 8 is pretty impossible to design a map for as is, unless you're taking your opponent's bases or something ridiculous (in which case, win the game already). I chose 8 because that seem close to the limit of what I can imagine for a reasonable map.
On April 12 2015 17:44 Whitewing wrote:
Raising the supply cap is pretty much out of the question: it's set at 200 deliberately by Blizzard because they want the game to run on lower end machines which wouldn't be able to handle more units. I would expect that to remain non-negotiable.
One can hope. I also would like to have a bigger army on "just" 6 bases. Computers have had a few years to improve since 2005. At 250 Max army 2 vs 2 would be like having one more max army. An unfair nitpick is that Blizzard could double the cap if they doubled the effect of units and structures on supply  .
P.S. Why is it that no one seems to be mentioning that Bob and Chris graph? Seriously though, if I didn't think your OP was any good I wouldn't have bothered criticizing what I think is a noticeable flaw in it.
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On April 13 2015 02:35 Pr0wler wrote:
Hopefully someone in Blizzard will read this... I doubt it tho.
I honestly do think theyll read it ( or someone working at blizzard will). But in the end, even if that person is completely convinced, getting a huge company like blizzard to actually work with something like this is not an easy task. But who knows, maybe itll get somewhere.
*Lunker a lot of people have mentioned the bob and chris graph.
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So I read through the article until I hit the part that it essentially said "The smarter AI is shit, give me back my bw workers". aka "the true culprit" and "breaking the cap" type of things. Then I simply skimmed the rest.
While I can't argue with the data because it sounds correct based off of my experience, I can argue with your conclusions and your concerns which I feel to be opinionated. What you see as a concern with the half patch system I see as the intended goal and overall.
While both players may be mining out the half patches in their main, the aggressor is in a much more advantageous position than the defender when one considers the impact that map control has on the ability to secure additional mineral nodes. In short, the half patch approach does more than impact the three base cap. It places a timer on all players that is effectively half the length it was in HotS to maintain their mining curve. If a player cannot maintain their mining curve while on one base their income drops by 50%.
You set this out as to be bad but it really isn't. This is the type of gameplay that people have been asking for and it was the goal to make players more aggressive. The way that you state this is as if the defending player has absolutely no chance to come back just because he doesn't have map control. But this just isn't the way the game will play out unless the defensive player does nothing for about 10 minutes. Most pressures or ways of grabbing this map control is always on a knife's edge between putting yourself ahead or behind and it is most obvious in zerg vs zerg.
Lets say we are on 2 base. I feel like being the aggressor so i make 24 lings to take map control. Yay, i control the map, he can't expand. But who is ahead? Obviously it is still the defensive player because I didn't deal any damage to him and now he has 12 more drones than I do. Okay so lets say he spotted my lings leaving and made lings of his own and we still don't fight. He is still ahead because he made a round of drones before the lings and still took no damage. Now lets look at if I attack him. I send my 24 lings in. Kill a queens and maybe 4 drones before his lings pop out and kills my lings. Am I still ahead? Maybe but probably not and I lost my map control. If I was to keep building lings and attacking then i've gone all in and have to win now. The new half patches don't change any of this and a similar area will happen in the other MUs because when the aggressive player stops building the aggressive units to expand then the defensive player, depending on the state of the game, will probably be able to bust out of the contain.
The reason I bring up the 2 bases is because this is the only spot where the 'timer' really comes into affect as once you hit 3+ bases both sides should be trading blows unless you try to play certain styles which brings up your next concern.
Another concern associated with the half patch approach is how it limits some of the strategic diversity currently in StarCraft due to its impact on the mining curve. Players are not able to choose to play defensively for an extended period of time while teching prior to obtaining an expansion or building a large and powerful army while slowly expanding.
You're right. Half patch limits SOME strategic diversity as in it hurts the players who sit on 2 base for 10+ minutes. These styles include, the old swarm host, turtle mech, and the extreme turtle protoss. The 3 MOST HATED styles in the game. So why is this a concern? I have no idea. The first 8-10 minutes of the game is going to be the same just sped up due to the worker increase. Most styles and players will always expand to a third and due to the half patch they will keep expanding because at the 8-10 minute mark their eco starts to get cut in half.
So yeah.I don't see any issues with the half-patch system. It does exactly what blizzard wanted and exactly what people have been asking for. It will end up as both sides needing to be more aggressive. Creating faster gameplay which is 100 times better than what it has been. Is there a chance that once the aggression/all in balance gets figured out and safe passive builds are made that we will go back to a HotS style gameplay? Possibly, but again because people have to expand beyond 3 bases by like the 10 minute mark else take a hit in their economy it makes those passive builds harder to do.
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Canada11218 Posts
These styles include, the old swarm host, turtle mech, and the extreme turtle protoss. The 3 MOST HATED styles in the game.
So why stop at half patches and instead make every mineral patch 500? That would REALLY punish those darn turtlers. At some point, you kinda just need bases to have money to allow you to set up, stabilize, build up your infrastructure, tech and still have money to make a few rounds of armies. It's the rate of income that is the main thing rather than the sum of resources that will have the best impact on gameplay.
The thing is the higher efficiency of more bases, combined with more gas, plus the increased longevity all the mineral bases combined (because your workers are more spread out) all gives the turtle player many, many reasons to get out on the map and start shutting expansions down or else harass like hell. Whereas if 3 base and 5 base has the same income due to 100% worker efficiency, the turtle player doesn't have a reason to move out on to the map until they've got their perfect composition. Giving an advantage to the player with more bases with more spread out workers actually gives a reason for the turtle player to stop turtling... or suffer the consequences.
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Canada13378 Posts
On April 13 2015 02:46 UltiBahamut wrote:
So I read through the article until I hit the part that it essentially said "The smarter AI is shit, give me back my bw workers". aka "the true culprit" and "breaking the cap" type of things. Then I simply skimmed the rest.
I think you should read the entire article as you have completely missed the point of it. You are attacking "opinionated" claims.
I never said the half patch was so bad we should return to HotS. I feel there are however better solutions. I also agreed in my article that the way blizzard approached the issue is a viable solution to the three base turtle problem. If you had read the whole thing you would understand that I am not arguing to remove the three base cap. The three base cap is just a colloquial expression of the true issue - the worker pairing resulting in removed incentives for expanding due to needing fewer bases for optimal income.
And if you had read the entire article you would see I did FAR more than just claim "I WANT BW BACK"
That is not what I claimed. At all.
I did not claim that I want a return to "turtle" play as we know it. I also made a concession that 1500 patches are possibly too many minerals on each base to begin with.
Skimming the rest means you skimmed some 80% of the article. I suggest you read it all before you start attacking a position I don't necessarily hold as strongly as you did.
I think there is a better way of achieving the goal of blizzard in encouraging aggressive play through rewards that aren't met with punishments on the other side.
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You really put a lot of thought into this ...
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United States7483 Posts
On April 13 2015 03:20 Fat_Elephant wrote:
You really put a lot of thought into this ...
You have no idea.
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That was far too long of a post for me to read. I read half of it and I understand the gist of the problem. Brood War was very basic in movements, but it introduced so many different strategies and unique techniques
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On April 13 2015 02:21 ZeromuS wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2015 01:40 Ovid wrote:On April 13 2015 01:31 SC2John wrote:On April 12 2015 22:23 Ovid wrote:On April 12 2015 20:49 Teoita wrote:
While that's true, you have to remember that managing worker counts across all bases for the whole game becomes much more important, so i think it's a good tradeoff in the end. I agree losing early game worker micro isn't great though. Either lalush extension mod is bugged or there's a big flaw with this model. I tried force pairing workers and what I found was sometimes (after the first mining packet) if you force a worker to mine that patch the worker will force the one that was halfway through mining off of the patch. I then tried to replicate that without having clicked anything and I noticed very rarely but it does happen sometimes that the workers automatically override the others. I assume this isn't intentional? If I'm correct, that's the double harvest model. In the double harvest model, the workers go through 2 cycles of mining of 5 minerals each, and if a worker comes up to the patch while another is mining, it's entirely possible that they will kick them off the mineral patch and start mining before the other worker has time to mine a full 10 minerals. This is the intention of the double harvest model and part of the reason why it doesn't has as high of a curve as the double mining model (double the mining time for 10 minerals). It's supposed to make the mining overall less efficient unless you have a 1:1 ratio of workers to nodes. That doesn't make sense, Worker 2 coming to mine will still bounce and keep the 1:1 ratio, but kicking the harvester already mining off doesn't make sense and only wastes every so often the 5 minerals already harvested. you dont lose the 5 minerals already harvested. The worker holds onto them and returns them with the next 5 (total 10). similar to the "hold money" option in Age of Empires I think it was? Show nested quote +On April 13 2015 01:47 Umpteen wrote:On April 13 2015 00:53 Plexa wrote:On April 13 2015 00:48 Teoita wrote:
I think it kind of does that - the first few workers are more efficient because they have access to the gold nodes. In that model, you have higher income on 4bases because you have access to more gold nodes. Am i missing anything? I suppose your right to some extent. The issues are similar to the LotV model in that the gold nodes are going to mine out quicker than the blue nodes (at the proposed 7/4 model it takes about 30% longer to mine out the blue ones). You could change the values on the golds to correct this, but that is kinda weird (having two kinds of gold minerals). The mmpm graph also looks unnatural. I'm not convinced that its necessarily better than DH as a result. DH feels like a very organic solution (so does FRB for that matter) whereas gold nodes and mixed minerals don;t. Yeah, having access to more bases means that more of your 24 nodes will be gold, returning 7 minerals per trip, as opposed to blue ones returning 4 per trip (in the version that most closely matches HotS per-saturated-base values) At the theoretical limit, with 24 gold nodes on 8 bases, you'd be mining 136% of the minerals mined by someone saturating 3 bases with the same number of workers. On a more realistic upper limit of 6 bases to 3, you'd still have a 22% advantage. Alternatively you could ditch 12 workers (or take four gases) and still match your 3 base opponent's mineral income. I get that the graphs don't look as 'organic', but from a design perspective I'd argue that the simple clarity of "These patches are better and by expanding player X has more of them than player Y with the same worker count" is more understandable and accessible. EDIT: Also, Blizzard's attitude to making unit AI look worse is well-established, which makes me very doubtful DH will ever fly. So even if salt'n'pepper blue/gold bases aren't as "good", the fact they achieve quite a lot in the right direction without introducing anything else new, without meaningfully increasing what's possible off X saturated bases, and without making anything look worse than before... that's a big deal. And it isn't even my idea, which makes me a sad panda... Honestly the biggest issue is that it doesn't remove pairing and that while it might be a better income the goal of the mod isn't to just make more money.
I might be wrong, but I think you've fallen into something like a circular argument.
In the OP you write this:
The mining cap is therefore set by interactions at the worker level, which will be discussed in greater detail further into the article.
But we now know that isn't true. Even with full worker pairing, it's perfectly possible to increase your income by spreading workers across more bases, if those bases mix gold and blue patches.
With DH, the first 8 workers on a base mine more than the second 8. Well, with gold/blue bases, the first 6 workers mine more than the last 10. The end result is pretty much the same - the graphs may be a slightly different shape, but neither of us know enough right now to say which graph suits the game better.
I think you've got hung up on 'fixing' worker pairing. Worker pairing is necessary for the HotS mining cap but not sufficient to create it. Removing worker pairing is one way of making more bases worth having, but it's not the only way.
Also, saying that the goal isn't just to make more money seems a bit wonky. If you want having more bases to be better than having fewer with the same worker count, you have to be talking about income differential. That IS the goal.
You also ignore the fact that the AI doesn't want to pair if it can help it. If there are open patches (blues) next to the golds, workers will eventually try to spread out to both gold and blues, so you would need to spend a lot of time to force workers to pair.
Its much more worth spending time to spread workers than it is to force them to pair on 5 or 6 base. IMO.
If that's the case (I don't know; I haven't tested it) that would be a problem, although not insurmountable.
And I think the idea of "spreading workers evenly" is much simpler than saying "pair workers on the gold mineral patches by spamming right click to get the AI to click and check back to ensure they are doing it".
It's simpler to do, certainly, but that's not necessarily the objective. What I'm talking about is the difference between:
Putting gold patches - something everyone already knows is a good thing to get if you can, into every base
and
Making workers look more stupid than they used to be and hoping people figure out that expanding more often is the way to stop them derping around.
In all honesty, if Blizzard had a gun to their head and had to implement one, which do you think it would be?
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Canada13378 Posts
On April 13 2015 03:32 Umpteen wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2015 02:21 ZeromuS wrote:On April 13 2015 01:40 Ovid wrote:On April 13 2015 01:31 SC2John wrote:On April 12 2015 22:23 Ovid wrote:On April 12 2015 20:49 Teoita wrote:
While that's true, you have to remember that managing worker counts across all bases for the whole game becomes much more important, so i think it's a good tradeoff in the end. I agree losing early game worker micro isn't great though. Either lalush extension mod is bugged or there's a big flaw with this model. I tried force pairing workers and what I found was sometimes (after the first mining packet) if you force a worker to mine that patch the worker will force the one that was halfway through mining off of the patch. I then tried to replicate that without having clicked anything and I noticed very rarely but it does happen sometimes that the workers automatically override the others. I assume this isn't intentional? If I'm correct, that's the double harvest model. In the double harvest model, the workers go through 2 cycles of mining of 5 minerals each, and if a worker comes up to the patch while another is mining, it's entirely possible that they will kick them off the mineral patch and start mining before the other worker has time to mine a full 10 minerals. This is the intention of the double harvest model and part of the reason why it doesn't has as high of a curve as the double mining model (double the mining time for 10 minerals). It's supposed to make the mining overall less efficient unless you have a 1:1 ratio of workers to nodes. That doesn't make sense, Worker 2 coming to mine will still bounce and keep the 1:1 ratio, but kicking the harvester already mining off doesn't make sense and only wastes every so often the 5 minerals already harvested. you dont lose the 5 minerals already harvested. The worker holds onto them and returns them with the next 5 (total 10). similar to the "hold money" option in Age of Empires I think it was? On April 13 2015 01:47 Umpteen wrote:On April 13 2015 00:53 Plexa wrote:On April 13 2015 00:48 Teoita wrote:
I think it kind of does that - the first few workers are more efficient because they have access to the gold nodes. In that model, you have higher income on 4bases because you have access to more gold nodes. Am i missing anything? I suppose your right to some extent. The issues are similar to the LotV model in that the gold nodes are going to mine out quicker than the blue nodes (at the proposed 7/4 model it takes about 30% longer to mine out the blue ones). You could change the values on the golds to correct this, but that is kinda weird (having two kinds of gold minerals). The mmpm graph also looks unnatural. I'm not convinced that its necessarily better than DH as a result. DH feels like a very organic solution (so does FRB for that matter) whereas gold nodes and mixed minerals don;t. Yeah, having access to more bases means that more of your 24 nodes will be gold, returning 7 minerals per trip, as opposed to blue ones returning 4 per trip (in the version that most closely matches HotS per-saturated-base values) At the theoretical limit, with 24 gold nodes on 8 bases, you'd be mining 136% of the minerals mined by someone saturating 3 bases with the same number of workers. On a more realistic upper limit of 6 bases to 3, you'd still have a 22% advantage. Alternatively you could ditch 12 workers (or take four gases) and still match your 3 base opponent's mineral income. I get that the graphs don't look as 'organic', but from a design perspective I'd argue that the simple clarity of "These patches are better and by expanding player X has more of them than player Y with the same worker count" is more understandable and accessible. EDIT: Also, Blizzard's attitude to making unit AI look worse is well-established, which makes me very doubtful DH will ever fly. So even if salt'n'pepper blue/gold bases aren't as "good", the fact they achieve quite a lot in the right direction without introducing anything else new, without meaningfully increasing what's possible off X saturated bases, and without making anything look worse than before... that's a big deal. And it isn't even my idea, which makes me a sad panda... Honestly the biggest issue is that it doesn't remove pairing and that while it might be a better income the goal of the mod isn't to just make more money. I might be wrong, but I think you've fallen into something like a circular argument. In the OP you write this: Show nested quote +The mining cap is therefore set by interactions at the worker level, which will be discussed in greater detail further into the article. But we now know that isn't true. Even with full worker pairing, it's perfectly possible to increase your income by spreading workers across more bases, if those bases mix gold and blue patches. With DH, the first 8 workers on a base mine more than the second 8. Well, with gold/blue bases, the first 6 workers mine more than the last 10. The end result is pretty much the same - the graphs may be a slightly different shape, but neither of us know enough right now to say which graph suits the game better. I think you've got hung up on 'fixing' worker pairing. Worker pairing is necessary for the HotS mining cap but not sufficient to create it. Removing worker pairing is one way of making more bases worth having, but it's not the only way. Also, saying that the goal isn't just to make more money seems a bit wonky. If you want having more bases to be better than having fewer with the same worker count, you have to be talking about income differential. That IS the goal. Show nested quote +
You also ignore the fact that the AI doesn't want to pair if it can help it. If there are open patches (blues) next to the golds, workers will eventually try to spread out to both gold and blues, so you would need to spend a lot of time to force workers to pair.
Its much more worth spending time to spread workers than it is to force them to pair on 5 or 6 base. IMO.
If that's the case (I don't know; I haven't tested it) that would be a problem, although not insurmountable. Show nested quote + And I think the idea of "spreading workers evenly" is much simpler than saying "pair workers on the gold mineral patches by spamming right click to get the AI to click and check back to ensure they are doing it". It's simpler to do, certainly, but that's not necessarily the objective. What I'm talking about is the difference between: Putting gold patches - something everyone already knows is a good thing to get if you can, into every base and Making workers look more stupid than they used to be and hoping people figure out that expanding more often is the way to stop them derping around. In all honesty, if Blizzard had a gun to their head and had to implement one, which do you think it would be?
There isn't a lot of hoping for people to expand more often because of worker bouncing.
They will learn if they want to play beyond an extremely casual level (like any other competitive game - see CSGO and bullet spray/movement influenced spread) and people who play very casually this will make zero difference to them.
I would be up for actually testing the gold mineral patches and blues being mixed but I dont know if it would be worth potentially changing the curve THAT much compared to HotS. You would need to make a map and test the numbers before I could REALLY support it.
I also think that visually it might become a mess. What is the correct gold to blue ratio? How many minerals do we put on the gold patches (they default mine quicker than blue patches which might have a half patch result if you dont do it right). Do the golds last TOO long (in total minerals given) once you make them bigger? Mules dont work on golds the same way regular workers do, so theres that whole thing to balance as well.
I feel like there are just soso many more variables when you do a mixed gold/blue patch system. The DH is just far more intuitive.
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Or they can simply make diverse type of economies that are completely random:
- Classic BW
- Modern WoL/Hots
- Neo (this new type)
If the type of economy depend on roll, not on the map, i think this might add alot of diversity...
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United States7483 Posts
On April 13 2015 03:32 Umpteen wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2015 02:21 ZeromuS wrote:On April 13 2015 01:40 Ovid wrote:On April 13 2015 01:31 SC2John wrote:On April 12 2015 22:23 Ovid wrote:On April 12 2015 20:49 Teoita wrote:
While that's true, you have to remember that managing worker counts across all bases for the whole game becomes much more important, so i think it's a good tradeoff in the end. I agree losing early game worker micro isn't great though. Either lalush extension mod is bugged or there's a big flaw with this model. I tried force pairing workers and what I found was sometimes (after the first mining packet) if you force a worker to mine that patch the worker will force the one that was halfway through mining off of the patch. I then tried to replicate that without having clicked anything and I noticed very rarely but it does happen sometimes that the workers automatically override the others. I assume this isn't intentional? If I'm correct, that's the double harvest model. In the double harvest model, the workers go through 2 cycles of mining of 5 minerals each, and if a worker comes up to the patch while another is mining, it's entirely possible that they will kick them off the mineral patch and start mining before the other worker has time to mine a full 10 minerals. This is the intention of the double harvest model and part of the reason why it doesn't has as high of a curve as the double mining model (double the mining time for 10 minerals). It's supposed to make the mining overall less efficient unless you have a 1:1 ratio of workers to nodes. That doesn't make sense, Worker 2 coming to mine will still bounce and keep the 1:1 ratio, but kicking the harvester already mining off doesn't make sense and only wastes every so often the 5 minerals already harvested. you dont lose the 5 minerals already harvested. The worker holds onto them and returns them with the next 5 (total 10). similar to the "hold money" option in Age of Empires I think it was? On April 13 2015 01:47 Umpteen wrote:On April 13 2015 00:53 Plexa wrote:On April 13 2015 00:48 Teoita wrote:
I think it kind of does that - the first few workers are more efficient because they have access to the gold nodes. In that model, you have higher income on 4bases because you have access to more gold nodes. Am i missing anything? I suppose your right to some extent. The issues are similar to the LotV model in that the gold nodes are going to mine out quicker than the blue nodes (at the proposed 7/4 model it takes about 30% longer to mine out the blue ones). You could change the values on the golds to correct this, but that is kinda weird (having two kinds of gold minerals). The mmpm graph also looks unnatural. I'm not convinced that its necessarily better than DH as a result. DH feels like a very organic solution (so does FRB for that matter) whereas gold nodes and mixed minerals don;t. Yeah, having access to more bases means that more of your 24 nodes will be gold, returning 7 minerals per trip, as opposed to blue ones returning 4 per trip (in the version that most closely matches HotS per-saturated-base values) At the theoretical limit, with 24 gold nodes on 8 bases, you'd be mining 136% of the minerals mined by someone saturating 3 bases with the same number of workers. On a more realistic upper limit of 6 bases to 3, you'd still have a 22% advantage. Alternatively you could ditch 12 workers (or take four gases) and still match your 3 base opponent's mineral income. I get that the graphs don't look as 'organic', but from a design perspective I'd argue that the simple clarity of "These patches are better and by expanding player X has more of them than player Y with the same worker count" is more understandable and accessible. EDIT: Also, Blizzard's attitude to making unit AI look worse is well-established, which makes me very doubtful DH will ever fly. So even if salt'n'pepper blue/gold bases aren't as "good", the fact they achieve quite a lot in the right direction without introducing anything else new, without meaningfully increasing what's possible off X saturated bases, and without making anything look worse than before... that's a big deal. And it isn't even my idea, which makes me a sad panda... Honestly the biggest issue is that it doesn't remove pairing and that while it might be a better income the goal of the mod isn't to just make more money. I might be wrong, but I think you've fallen into something like a circular argument. In the OP you write this: Show nested quote +The mining cap is therefore set by interactions at the worker level, which will be discussed in greater detail further into the article. But we now know that isn't true. Even with full worker pairing, it's perfectly possible to increase your income by spreading workers across more bases, if those bases mix gold and blue patches. With DH, the first 8 workers on a base mine more than the second 8. Well, with gold/blue bases, the first 6 workers mine more than the last 10. The end result is pretty much the same - the graphs may be a slightly different shape, but neither of us know enough right now to say which graph suits the game better. I think you've got hung up on 'fixing' worker pairing. Worker pairing is necessary for the HotS mining cap but not sufficient to create it. Removing worker pairing is one way of making more bases worth having, but it's not the only way. Also, saying that the goal isn't just to make more money seems a bit wonky. If you want having more bases to be better than having fewer with the same worker count, you have to be talking about income differential. That IS the goal. Show nested quote +
You also ignore the fact that the AI doesn't want to pair if it can help it. If there are open patches (blues) next to the golds, workers will eventually try to spread out to both gold and blues, so you would need to spend a lot of time to force workers to pair.
Its much more worth spending time to spread workers than it is to force them to pair on 5 or 6 base. IMO.
If that's the case (I don't know; I haven't tested it) that would be a problem, although not insurmountable. Show nested quote + And I think the idea of "spreading workers evenly" is much simpler than saying "pair workers on the gold mineral patches by spamming right click to get the AI to click and check back to ensure they are doing it". It's simpler to do, certainly, but that's not necessarily the objective. What I'm talking about is the difference between: Putting gold patches - something everyone already knows is a good thing to get if you can, into every base and Making workers look more stupid than they used to be and hoping people figure out that expanding more often is the way to stop them derping around. In all honesty, if Blizzard had a gun to their head and had to implement one, which do you think it would be?
The gold and blue mixed patches has a similar problem to the current model, in that the gold patches just mine out much faster.
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AWESOME article. Thank you so much for working on this. I geek out over SCII economy like crazy and this was a C's dream come true.
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On April 13 2015 00:53 Plexa wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2015 00:48 Teoita wrote:
I think it kind of does that - the first few workers are more efficient because they have access to the gold nodes. In that model, you have higher income on 4bases because you have access to more gold nodes. Am i missing anything? I suppose your right to some extent. The issues are similar to the LotV model in that the gold nodes are going to mine out quicker than the blue nodes (at the proposed 7/4 model it takes about 30% longer to mine out the blue ones). You could change the values on the golds to correct this, but that is kinda weird (having two kinds of gold minerals). The mmpm graph also looks unnatural. I'm not convinced that its necessarily better than DH as a result. DH feels like a very organic solution (so does FRB for that matter) whereas gold nodes and mixed minerals don;t.
You know, I agree with you about what feels more "organic." I also think Blizzard might have a different opinion. It could be more productive for us to push for something that we think Blizzard will more likely accept, to give us the best chance of seeing improvements to the game we love.
They've mentioned in the past that they prefer not to make units dumber so from their point of view, switching to a couple gold patches might, to them, feel more organic.
There's only one way to find out. In fact, it turns TL's very own beloved Uvantak was interested in trying this out around the exact same time that the half-patch approach was announced by Blizzard.
On December 22 2014 05:52 Uvantak wrote:Show nested quote +On December 04 2014 15:24 MarlieChurphy wrote:Guys, great idea here. + Show Spoiler +Regardless what blizzard does, what if we made our own maps and did something like this:
Since gold minerals mine faster and workers gather more per trip, and therefor for the same econ we need less workers and more bases.
What if as a standard we mixed gold and blue minerals in a set % so that we need less workers to saturate? And to compensate for the fact that they mine faster, what if we gave them all X% more per crystal so that they would mine out the same speed as the blue minerals? And to compensate for the extra minerals per base, what if we reduced the overall crystal chunks or overall reduced the percentage of the entire (8) cluster to even out to the normal 1500 or 1000 minerals count aka 9000 or 6000 total?
Would something like this be feasible?
This extra income early game, would also address the other issue of boring early game where everyone is just making workers. So we wouldn't need to start with 12 workers anymore, the game would start moving along faster, and rush strats would be less effected by the changes. Like this? ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/WltCmZs.jpg) Map is playable on EU & AM Servers under the name KTT Keynesian Theory, it has been on my shelf of to do's for a while but now that i have more time i'll try to finish it. Show nested quote +♦ Golden minerals have 2100 instead of 1500 to try compensate for the increased mining they will see
♦ Vespene Geysers are untouched.
and, of course Uvantak himself has already had a direct influence on the map pool in LoTV.
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On April 13 2015 04:01 yuzisee wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2015 00:53 Plexa wrote:On April 13 2015 00:48 Teoita wrote:
I think it kind of does that - the first few workers are more efficient because they have access to the gold nodes. In that model, you have higher income on 4bases because you have access to more gold nodes. Am i missing anything? I suppose your right to some extent. The issues are similar to the LotV model in that the gold nodes are going to mine out quicker than the blue nodes (at the proposed 7/4 model it takes about 30% longer to mine out the blue ones). You could change the values on the golds to correct this, but that is kinda weird (having two kinds of gold minerals). The mmpm graph also looks unnatural. I'm not convinced that its necessarily better than DH as a result. DH feels like a very organic solution (so does FRB for that matter) whereas gold nodes and mixed minerals don;t. You know, I agree with you about what feels more "organic." I also think Blizzard might have a different opinion. It could be more productive for us to push for something that we think Blizzard will more likely accept, to give us the best chance of seeing improvements to the game we love. They've mentioned in the past that they prefer not to make units dumber so from their point of view, switching to a couple gold patches might, to them, feel more organic. There's only one way to find out. In fact, it turns TL's very own beloved Uvantak was interested in trying this out around the exact same time that the half-patch approach was announced by Blizzard. Show nested quote +On December 22 2014 05:52 Uvantak wrote:On December 04 2014 15:24 MarlieChurphy wrote:Guys, great idea here. + Show Spoiler +Regardless what blizzard does, what if we made our own maps and did something like this:
Since gold minerals mine faster and workers gather more per trip, and therefor for the same econ we need less workers and more bases.
What if as a standard we mixed gold and blue minerals in a set % so that we need less workers to saturate? And to compensate for the fact that they mine faster, what if we gave them all X% more per crystal so that they would mine out the same speed as the blue minerals? And to compensate for the extra minerals per base, what if we reduced the overall crystal chunks or overall reduced the percentage of the entire (8) cluster to even out to the normal 1500 or 1000 minerals count aka 9000 or 6000 total?
Would something like this be feasible?
This extra income early game, would also address the other issue of boring early game where everyone is just making workers. So we wouldn't need to start with 12 workers anymore, the game would start moving along faster, and rush strats would be less effected by the changes. Like this? Map is playable on EU & AM Servers under the name KTT Keynesian Theory, it has been on my shelf of to do's for a while but now that i have more time i'll try to finish it. ♦ Golden minerals have 2100 instead of 1500 to try compensate for the increased mining they will see
♦ Vespene Geysers are untouched. and, of course Uvantak himself has already had a direct influence on the map pool in LoTV.
Yuzisee please note that the 3g3b system will still fall behind a no worker pairing system like DH or a BW like economy. Yes it is an improvement to HotS or LotV systems, but any system that *tries to fight worker pairing will be*.
/edit altered because I was being too harsh on LotV economy for no reason*
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Dear Zeromus, let's forget about all the graphs for a moment and try to see the bigger picture :
- player A and B are starting the game with the same stuff. they build their economy, expand and none of the early skirmishes gives any player an advantage.
- when they're both on 3 bases, players A decides to play defensive until he builds his death ball army.
- decision 1 : seeing this, player B decides he will expand all over the map be as greedy as he can to enter late game with the biggest bank possible. He also tries to trade armies when he can but the defensive play of player A doesn't allow much.
- decision 2 : when his main starts to dry out player A wants to take a 4th base.
The proposed changes to the econmy, will give a boost to player B when he takes decision one. That the option your seem to prefer, it's the incentive to expand more
Blizzard on the other hand tries to weaken player A when he takes decision 2 : he has a much smaller army at this point in LotV than in HotS. It's the punition for expanding less.
My problem here is that we had multiple of games when this scenario occured, and recently Yoda vs soO on KSS in SPL was an excellent example, but very few times the fact that player B had a crazy bank really solved the issue. I general these game ended one day or another when the map was actually mined out. taht Yoda vs soO game is the worst example of this, soO banking 14k mins 12 k gaz only to loose pitifully vs Yoda's perfect mech comp.
So how would the new economy concept you propose here would actually solve anything? is 2100 k mins per minute vs 2500 kmins per minute the real issue here?
Blizzard approach (which I don't like) may have its flaws but at least solves the matter albeit in a brutal way. Anyway, shouldn't the issue be solved above all with better units and maps?
Beside this, your spreadshit doesn't show what happens after 16 workers for double mining and double harvest. it annoys me a bit, cause the HotS system is all about having a loss of efficiency after 16 workers, we need to compare the 3 models for this.
Last, the income for double harvest and double mining for 8 workers on one base seems extremely high. we're talking about a 100 to 150 mins per minute difference here, wouldn't this impact the game too much?
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Great article. From the games I watched of LotV I too felt that the economy was somewhat too punishing for a defensive style. I like that they are trying to solve the 2-3 base turtle styles but in general, playing defensive should be a valid strategy. Therefore I think the proposed changes are good. It's better too reward players for expanding instead of punishing them if they don't. If my opponent does not want to come out of his base, I have free map control and should be able to pressure him by expaning beyond the 3. base. This is not really possible in HotS. It would be with the proposed changes, all the while keeping defensive play in the game.
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EPT
