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Damn, amazing find.
@Trump- isn't the point that you will never want to mine reds with MULEs because you will reduce the total minerals you will mine from a patch by 30 each time you do? Or am I missing something and those minerals magically get added back to the patch?
And just general comment, this on top of that Terran players still can't rotate their buildings so there is already the positional issue of walling screwing with add-ons (not as big an issue in Brood War since the 'rax didn't have/need any add-ons).
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On April 15 2010 12:59 brocoli wrote:
I remember someone saying how in Scrap Station it was possible to snipe an expansion with high ground Tanks on one side but not on the other.
Maybe there's some bug with the distances ingame? Or maybe the tiles themselves are not symmetric?
I know for a fact that there is a hellishly annoying light pole in the north base on scrap station that blocks a nice and proper wall in. There are also tons of other asymmetrical elements on ss, such as the fact that you can blink to the island w/o and obs from the south base but not from the north base.
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If you're truly worried about losing scraps of minerals in the long run, you should be using Calldown Supply.
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There are always a few assymetries on maps as blizzard thinks (and so do I) this looks better. Most of them are pretty irrelevant of the time, this one actually matters a slight bit. All you have to do I guess is use Mule on the close patches instead of the far away ones, lategame it really won't matter.
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Another thing to keep in mind is that you should spread out which patches you call down MULEs on because once it starts mining out, you'll end up with 1 less patch after awhile and less mining efficiency if you always calldown on the same patch. So these results are very helpful; players should cycle their calldowns on each green patch.
I think a solution to the red mineral problem is to have the MULE drop its minerals when it dies so that another scv can pick them up. Could also make for hilarious strategies where you drop minerals in key locations to block your opponent ;D
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The question I would now have, after this wealth of information, is whether or not it's actually worth not using MULEs on the yellow/red patches. Obviously you'll want to hit the greens first, but killing your saturation by using MULEs only on those might end up hurting you in the long run.
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Amazing! I hadn't even thought of this.
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starcraft is ALL about doing the little things
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Wow. I figured putting the mule on a closer patch could help a little bit but I never thought you'd lose that 30 min from it if it dies coming back! Thanks for taking the time for this!
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so jumping to conclusions here u wanna spread ur mules on all the green ones, not all on same green ^^
great find but i doubt ull get the same result if u redo everything
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I thought everybody knew this?
Like, I mean, everybody figured out some paths are shorter than others, and regardless whether it was as significant (30 minerals) as OP illustrated it would be obvious enough that with shorter paths you get your minerals quicker and eventually this would lead to more minerals collected overall as the MULE has a duration.
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Interesting find. Perhaps they could make it so that if the MULE dies from timeout, the minerals it is currently holding gets added you your total anyway?
On April 15 2010 21:25 AcrossFiveJulys wrote:
I think a solution to the red mineral problem is to have the MULE drop its minerals when it dies so that another scv can pick them up.
I could be mistaken, but I think they actually had that in the original SC beta when workers died. Ended up causing too much clutter.
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On April 16 2010 01:48 Koffiegast wrote:
I thought everybody knew this?
Like, I mean, everybody figured out some paths are shorter than others, and regardless whether it was as significant (30 minerals) as OP illustrated it would be obvious enough that with shorter paths you get your minerals quicker and eventually this would lead to more minerals collected overall as the MULE has a duration.
The issue here is that the mule carries enough minerals on each turn that if it dies in transit, you actually lose a lot of minerals that you will never get back. I.e., the total possible amount that you could mine from a base is decreased.
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very nice threat is there 1 mineralpack at which it goes all the time??
that would be awesome :D
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I do have one concern- BW mining times were not consistent, there was some slight randomness. I'm not sure if that has carried over to SC2.
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On April 15 2010 12:59 brocoli wrote:
Another thing that could be happening, is that the Mule speed is screwed up due to angle rounding errors: the game needs to translate the MULE's speed into X and Y speed with sine and cosine functions, and by doing so truncates both, lowering the unit's speed when it travels in specific angles.
Yeah I wondered about this for a moment so I actually went to check, as it turns out, in UnitData.xml unit speeds are of the type double, not integer like in warcraft 3 (which was a constant source of frustration for map developers), So thankfully this is almost certainly not an issue in SC2 in any significant capacity. <3
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this is really fucking cool dude. we need more contributions like this!
great job! 
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On April 16 2010 01:48 Koffiegast wrote:
I thought everybody knew this?
Like, I mean, everybody figured out some paths are shorter than others, and regardless whether it was as significant (30 minerals) as OP illustrated it would be obvious enough that with shorter paths you get your minerals quicker and eventually this would lead to more minerals collected overall as the MULE has a duration.
i agree that everyone could logically reason that the closer patches would yield minerals quicker, this is obvious. however i dont think its quite as clear that if you chose to mule the slightly further out resources 30 resources will vanish, nor was it clear ( for me anyways ) that this problem was even more complicated by spawn location vs spawn location, and finally the problem is biggest when combining this all with the tvt matchup.
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On April 16 2010 01:38 MorroW wrote:
so jumping to conclusions here u wanna spread ur mules on all the green ones, not all on same green ^^
great find but i doubt ull get the same result if u redo everything
Not necessarily. Remember that not only do mules mine those patches first, but other workers mine those patches faster too. You don't want to lose anything by mining a red patch, but you may want to mine yellows in order to keep up regular worker efficiency. Obviously, the most important minerals are early in the game, so you want to mine green first, but after you mine those a little, you may want to try and equalize using the yellow patches as well.
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Wow that is a crazy thought. Thanks for the info! Very useful thread.
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EPT
