A Treatise on the Economy of SCII - Page 5

On April 12 2015 08:22 ZeromuS wrote:


There is no way to avoid an "optimal" base count. When workers mine most efficiently alone you can only ever have a 1:1 ratio, its impossible to be smaller. So in a system where resources exist to be obtained the most efficient way to do that will always be a "cap".

The goal isn't to completely remove the theoretical cap since this is legitimately impossible. The goal is to make the cap difficult to obtain. The harder it is to reach the cap the more time (<3 theDWF) there is for players to interact on the map and for their strategies and approaches in the game to interact.

If a player wants 6 bases as quickly as possible. They are free to achieve it. But 6 bases take a long time to get in terms of building times alone on Nexus/CC/Hatch. In addition it takes a lot of map control, which is not free, and it takes a lot of units to obtain that map control which takes a lot of micro.

And this is only from the "expanding player" perspective. The not expanding player has the power to harass, slow down, attack, TECH with their gas income, convert that to a timing, upgrades etc.

Its fine to have a six base cap. So long as it takes a lot more time, and a lot more effort to get there than in the current economic model

As to harvest time:

We did increase the double mining by more than just 2 actually. We increased it by about 2.15ish or something. This still has the worker pull issue because it takes so long to interrupt the cycle.

The nice outcome of the higher income is twofold: players get more money early for faster build order development (instead of 12 worker money), and the overall higher income speeds up the slow "I have my natural I'm gonna wait for X and Y to happen before I leave my base". The overall higher income ALSO speeds up the need for another base just a little bit. Much less drastic than in LotV but I think just enough (coupled with 1400 mineral patches it gets quicker I *think* we didnt test 1400 patches in long games just 1500) to make the game move with a touch more pace.

Maybe not LotV pace, but definitely a bit faster than HotS. And not because we force players to expand quickly, but because we give players the tools to get those expansions. A few more minerals could be a nexus alongside a 4 gate zealot warp in timing. The minerals could be an extra round of zerglings to pressure the map or defend the third hatchery as it gets put down. The extra minerals could be a sooner third hatch after taking gas (instead of 3 hatch before gas). The extra minerals could be another barracks and more marines for a strong 2 base timing (at the detriment of a third for example).

The extra minerals unlock a lot of mineral based strategies while keeping the gas based ones almost the same. The relative timings are all off in LotV atm because 12 workers provide much more money and at a higher worker count, making tech based timings shift. The 12 workers are an extra larva round for Zerg, and this alone pushes any Protoss WG timing to be effectively 6 larva behind (relative to HotS). The discussion of the impact of a 12 workers start, as i mentioned in the OP is for another article we have started on.

But in the end tech related timings all get pushed into an odd space when you have 12 workers, when your minerals mine out so quick, and when you are forced to spend minerals expanding. You end up with mineral heavy armies from some races and skipping gas spending, and in other cases gas only armies with minerals feeding expansions.

I think this has a bigger impact on protoss than people think. A forge and 2 cannons is almost an entire Half patch. A forge and 2 cannons are 1/8th of your available income on one base. Ravagers kill buildings, making the investment into cannons less valuable compared to HotS etc, it all snowballs.

But I think ive just started rambling

On April 12 2015 09:32 timchen1017 wrote:
I am very disappointed. This long article actually does not analyze much into the current LotV economy, instead it pushes this BW nastagia idea of "worker inefficiency" without really comparing the two in a meaningful manner. I really doubt Blizzard will read into this much if at all, since the analysis is pretty much biased in the beginning.

Think about this. The current LotV approach can be thought of as such that bases that start from same as HotS, which "favors" turtling and defense on fewer bases, but only until the point where half of the patch starts to mine out. Then it switches to the mode that it rewards expanding, as 8+ workers in a half mined out base is highly inefficient. Thus, it is actually sort of midway between the original SC2 economy, where when you have 16- workers it does not matter where they are, and the proposed reward-to-expand proposals, which wants to put 8 workers per base to be at optimum efficiency. Therefore, I would say the current approach actually favors defending on fewer bases more than the inefficient worker approach, instead of vice versa.

The catch is, of course, that this favoritism lives on a timer, due to the lack of total resources. This, however, can be remedied by increasing the amount of minerals in the "large" patches, maybe to match the original total amount.

Also I really strongly object to the statement saying "current approach penalizes for not expanding, instead of rewards expanding" , especially without any supporting arguments. Notice that since the resource is symmetrical across players, so technically speaking reward one player is equivalent to penalize the other; so this statement in itself is meaningless anyway. I would say the impression is from comparing to playing the original SC2/HotS, where one would find the new approach similar in the beginning but if not expanding, soon turn bitter. This is why there is a penalizing feeling; you need to expand to sustain. But if you switch to the proposed approach, in effect it is bitter in the beginning. So maybe there is a "reward" feeling when you expand, but it is just an illusion due to the fact that the current approach actually gives you better things from fewer bases in the first place.

All in all, those feeling comments and comparisons between the current LotV setup and the proposed inefficient worker approach really do not withstand scrutiny, and are really formed just from biased observations. In fact, I think people will find that blizzard's current approach will work better with some number tuning, without those weird mechanisms to handicap the workers. And it is after all a good virtue, such that every additional worker gives you the same resource income most of the time.

p.s. Even given the stance of the article, certain points are really out of place. Comparing 3 bases with 6 gases and 4 bases with 8 gases? Why do you complain the lack of minerals when you put those workers in the extra gases? That is at best irrelevant to the point, and can be misleading. Also if one wants to discuss in detail how income increases as a function of the number of workers, should one not consider the effect of far and near patches?