[A] Starcraft 2 Brood War - Page 223

On September 29 2013 08:44 LaLuSh wrote:
The people over at starbow have been downright obsessed about matching their income rate to BW's for the last 2 weeks now (ever since they switched to BW economy a month ago).

Their first version was very similar to SC2BW. Turns out that matched BW income really well between 0 and 2 saturation. But between 2 and 3 saturation, the numbers were really off (BW's max income rate is much higher than either SC2BW or Starbow was).



Anyway. They identified some quirks of BW mining and set a couple of new triggers for workers. The most important of which I think was triggering out the way SC2 has hardcoded workers to queue rather than bounce if a currently mining worker has less than a defined time limit remaining before finishing up. This only applies if all patches have at least 1 current harvester (if there are 0 current harvesters at any patch, workers will always bounce immediately, even in SC2). This discrepancy seems to exist in SC2BW. As if you push harvest time below 5.412, the 2nd worker on a mineral patch will always queue (despite arriving there before the currently mining worker is finished).

In order for the max income rate to be pushed higher though, the harvest time needs to be lowered.

The other condition they found was that if all mineral patches were occupied (i.e. all of them currently/simultaneously being actively mined from, workers in BW would always queue as opposed to bounce). This meant that there was no wandering after 3 per patch saturation in BW (well, sometimes there was, but given 1-2 minutes, workers would settle in and mine optimally while always queueing and never wandering). In SC2BW and earlier version of Starbow workers keep wandering even towards infinity saturation. Decemberscalm in the starbow thread managed to set a trigger that makes workers settle in and mine optimally after 3 per patch saturation.

Thought you might be interested. The only problem is, their results don't 100% mirror BW's income rate in the 0-2 saturation range. So they've resorted to even more triggers to make workers even more stupid (like making them turn before they can move when bouncing off from an occupied mineral patch to a new one). They are very close to BW income rate right now.

I still think the feel of SC2BW units is superior, since you've scaled the unit speeds differently than they do (they do a 1:1 scale between maps of the same exact dimensions). So their mutalisk is 3.3 speed for example (I believe). Personally I don't think such slow speeds fit with for example the glide distance that SC2 engine allows. But that, like all things, is a matter of preference...

I still want to get two koreans playing a showmatch in sc2bw somehow. But I don't know any non korea based ex-bw pros except forgg.