In Response to David Kim re: SC2 Economy - Page 13

On April 23 2015 09:36 Barrin wrote:

Someone said that a mining time long enough to break worker pairing makes them spend so long at the patch that harassing the workers becomes too effective. I personally would love to see more harassment with initial scouts, but there might be a point here when it comes to trying to defend a 6pool or proxy 2gate for example.

On April 23 2015 10:53 vesicular wrote:
Based on this thread, people should have a better appreciation for David Kim. Balancing a video game isn't easy. My guess is they've already tested all of this type stuff at one point or another over the last 5+ years, and there's a good reason they're sticking to what they have with minor tweaks.

That said, I'm all for trying out these changes, but ultimately I think they've already tried and dismissed it.

On April 23 2015 11:05 StarStruck wrote:


I don't recall many people saying otherwise. I just really dislike the design. At least they're trying different things lol. I wouldn't agree with the last part about good reason why they're sticking to what they have with minor tweaks. It could very well as come as stubbornness. No this is the way we want people to try and play.

On April 23 2015 10:53 vesicular wrote:
Based on this thread, people should have a better appreciation for David Kim. Balancing a video game isn't easy. My guess is they've already tested all of this type stuff at one point or another over the last 5+ years, and there's a good reason they're sticking to what they have with minor tweaks.

That said, I'm all for trying out these changes, but ultimately I think they've already tried and dismissed it.

On April 23 2015 06:37 Plexa wrote:
The graphs in the OP assume you have a fixed worker count and then calculate the income/minute you receive from having that fixed worker counter. We're not making any claims about bases running out faster.

Yeah, hence why I made is exceptionally clear in the OP by what I meant by "saturation point". We need words to describe the concepts we mean, and saturation literally means "cannot hold anymore" (eg. saturated sponge) so it seems very appropriate to use that term to describe a mineral line which cannot hold anymore workers. That said, being careful with language in these articles is paramount.

On April 23 2015 11:50 Big J wrote:
Also, they explicitely put in a feature that would still allow players with mapcontrol to mine more than the other player: gold bases. That was their idea of punishing a overly defensive player economically, and quite frankly, it isn't a bad one, because it does exactly what DH10 tries to achieve. More income for less workers. Like, if there was a way to make every base past the first 2-3 a gold base without making it abuseable (blizzard's idea to put rocks onto those bases to ensure only a player with mapcontrol and an army can take them), it would actually be quite a nice solution too in my opinion. But I don't think this is possible.

"Lalush" 4th base
I am coining a term here, in reference to an old thread analyzing SC2 macro which concluded that it was pointless to have more than three bases in SC2. Zergs and protoss get more bases for the gas, but we don't see the same incentive as in BW to get more and more expansions for better mining by distributing workers.

This base changes that.

Because it is a gold base, it gives you better mining income per worker. But only 3 of the mineral patches are at a normal distance. The other 3 are at a distance of 5 or 6 squares. This means that only 6 workers will give you a substantial economic boost, even if you pull them from elsewhere instead of add them. But to engage the full mining rate, you need more workers than normal to saturate the distant patches. You need at least 3 workers for each, so an "optimal" saturation is 15 workers, as opposed to the 12 normally needed at a gold base (compared to 16 on a standard base). This means the mineral income possible is nearly standard, and so is the number of workers required to achieve it. The gases are normal.

So you are rewarded for expanding before you "have to", but the base functions as a normal base if it has to.

A small point is that it also discourages mule spam by having distant patches.

On April 23 2015 10:16 ZeromuS wrote:


Hmm are you factoring in the wait times into your second sheet? because those impact the way the AI works to pair as well as the time it takes to mine.

Thats something to consider as well.

Simply making them mine quicker and doing two 4+4 trips to approximate DH9 is an interesting solution, but at its core as long as we approximate a curve of DH9 from barrin's other graph that might be ok?

We need more in game tested graphs

On April 23 2015 08:18 ZeromuS wrote:
Can't do 4 and 5 so need to find some way to make 3 trips of 3 work but not in the time that blacklilliums did it (that was too long a mining cycle i think).

On November 28 2014 04:58 BlackLilium wrote:


Assuming I understand you correctly - if you were able to squeeze 2 separate pairs at a mineral patch, it would mean that - by removing 1 worker in each pair - I can have 2 workers with little or no penality. That in turn would mean that I can have 16 workers per single base without penality. That means late 3rd and no need for 4th, similarly to the standard strategy.

So, one of my constraint was, that I do want to penalize 2 workers per patch a bit, but I still want to have some room for a 3rd worker.

Now, if you want an elaboration how I reached this values (some math ahead - beware )

An important observation in double-harvest strategy is that 2 workers on same patch can be set up in two configurations:

• Sequentially: one worker would do HWH while the other would WT and then vice-versa (H for Harvest, W for wait and t for transport, as in the first post).
  
• Interleaved: one worker's H hits the other's W, and then they both do WT at the end, with a single, last H difference.
  

Now, we want both strategies to actually be equally efficient. Otherwise, a player would be forced to do "micro" on a 8-16 worker base, to set them up correctly for a % boost - and we don't want that!

So, I come up with a formula: For an n-harvest, a full sequential cycle of 2 workers takes (time between events when first worker starts harvesting again):

For interleaved cycle you have

We want them to be equal, yielding the formula:


I then took the formula and did some testing with different values. To my delight, this computation on paper actually matched with what was happening during experimentation. When formula was not satisfied, 16 workers interleaved or 16 workers sequential were mining faster. When satisfied - the difference was within 1-2%.

So, equipped with this equation I could continue. The value T (transport) depends on the acceleration and speed of the worker and an (average) distance to the drop-off building. I approximated the value to 4.1s. So we have:

• For n=2: W+H=T
  
• For n=3: 3W+H=T
  
• For n=4: 5W+H=T
  

On the other hand, the ratio W:H roughly controls how much at disadvantage the 16-worker base will be over 8-worker base. A ratio around 1:2 seemed right to me. On the third hand (lol?) we want the total harvest time 2n(H+W) to be not too long.

So, for n=2 we have

H=2.53s
W=1.36s
Total harvest time = 7.78s
That, plus 1.36s worker waiting at the end with mineral patch already in its hands (claws?) looked ugly.

With n=3 I ended up with values

H=1.6716s
W=0.8093s
Total harvest time = 7.44s (a bit better), and the worker at the end of the harvesting sits for much shorter time with the minerals.

On April 23 2015 06:37 Plexa wrote:
The graphs in the OP assume you have a fixed worker count and then calculate the income/minute you receive from having that fixed worker counter. We're not making any claims about bases running out faster.

On April 23 2015 14:25 BlackLilium wrote:

>snip<

If you play with the numbers of DH 3x3, please make sure you don't fall into the same trap I did, where reorganizing workers gave different results.

On April 23 2015 14:30 fancyClown wrote:
The whole justification of the DH10 model is to prevent bases mining out too fast.
If you want to sell your idea, you need to display concrete data to show how money accumulates and when a base is mined out in DH10 compared to LotV.

On April 23 2015 07:10 Big J wrote:
Just to add to the discussion, I think that DH10 at the moment provides too much income already in the early game. I ran two tests with HotS vs DH10 with Zerg, featuring (very economic) hatch/pool/hatch builds and summed the minerals mined at each minute in the game for the first 7mins.
These are the results:


And in numbers


This test was run on the premise of similar build orders, which with the changed economy sytem is probably suboptimal in the DH10 model.
Since in HotS I was more or less spending all of my money, it goes without saying that in DH10 it became quickly apparent that I was building a bank. Enough money that I could have expanded a 4th and possibly even 5th time within the first 7mins to even further boost my economy through extra production and extra worker spreading.

This happens, because DH10 is modelled to behave similar to the HotS model in full saturation, but before that, the income is quite a bit higher. Rapid expansion - like a hatch first build, but just in general the acquisation of a fast 3rd, or even 4th and 5th base - allows you to spread your workers very thinly. Therefore, each of your bases rides on the more effective bottom of the saturation curve.
+ Show Spoiler +
Obviously, this is the intended expansion effect, but it needs to be noted that this effect starts to kick in within the first few minutes of a game. Trying to model the same fully-saturated 1base income might be too much of an economy boost, given that the common openings usually evolve around a very quick second if not even third base.