I think there is no absolute answers for this because it only depends on the situation.
killing a fresh mule in the early game will delay the opponent build and timings, wich can give you room for breathing or pushing. Killing an early SCV will give you an advantage during the long game.
It only really depends on two factors :
- Do I need a economy advantage right now or later ?
- How old is the mule, (you'll better check that before sniping).

samuraibael

Australia294 Posts

April 25 2010 12:41 GMT

#42

Interesting thread. Petered seems to have said everything that can be said on it though. That kind of mineral value/time value is going to vary game by game and so never be calculate-able I suspect? I also love some of the dogmatic proclamations (MULE IS BETTER etc) spat in the face of good reasoning.

Klockan3

Sweden2866 Posts

April 25 2010 15:24 GMT

#43

On April 25 2010 02:22 fdsdfg wrote:
Constants:

SCV Cost: 50
SCV Build time: 17s
SCV Collection rate: 1 min / s
SCV Saturation level: 22

Mule lifespan: 90s
Mule collection rate: 3 min / s

These are wrong, SCV's do not bring in 1min/s, they bring in 1min/1.4seconds since real seconds are not ingame seconds.

This throws off your calculations by a lot btw, and equates to it practically always being better to target mules.

morimacil

France921 Posts

April 25 2010 18:42 GMT

#44

On April 26 2010 00:24 Klockan3 wrote:

Show nested quote +

Irrelevant.
Whether you play the game on fast, very fast, or slower, does not affect the SCV to mule relation.
If SCVs take 1.4 x longer to build, bring back 1 min per 1.4 seconds, and mules last 1.4 seconds longer, and collect 3 mins per 1.4 seconds, the relation still doesnt change.
In fact, if you wanted to, you could replace the s (which stands for second) by "time units", and it would work just as well.
What matters, is not the actual time, but the relation to each other.

Xursian

Canada94 Posts

April 26 2010 16:16 GMT

#45

mules > extra supply, only time that should be used is if you supply cap yourself, or of banelings bust your supplied up and you need to continue making units ASAP... its a good way to help out with that too... instead of waiting forever to build a freaking supply again when you know another atks coming..

josemb40

Peru611 Posts

April 26 2010 16:18 GMT

#46

mule if its early game i think, else go for scvs

Ghostcom

Denmark4783 Posts

April 26 2010 16:36 GMT

#47

On April 27 2010 01:16 Xursian wrote:
mules > extra supply, only time that should be used is if you supply cap yourself, or of banelings bust your supplied up and you need to continue making units ASAP... its a good way to help out with that too... instead of waiting forever to build a freaking supply again when you know another atks coming..

Read the OP - it's not that hard, and it's pretty darn clear that the issue is not to chose between mule and supply drop, but which to kill when vs T, the SVC or the mules...

Vikkekh

Sweden47 Posts

April 26 2010 16:52 GMT

#48

On April 25 2010 10:44 xnub wrote:
Think it all depends on how much time the mule has left most times i just go for the SCVs on gas first really fucks the person up and if you are lucky he forgets to put some back on gas : )

I agree to this, if I knew he recently called the mules down I'd def go for them.

Gnaix

United States438 Posts

April 26 2010 16:58 GMT

#49

killing mules is better for short term while scvs is better for long term. If you harass early and kill a mule, you can delay him from teching and making more scvs, which is a lot better than killing an scv which although will mine more long term, doesn't have a huge impact on the current economy.

SleepSheep

Canada344 Posts

April 26 2010 17:04 GMT

#50

nice OP, good reasoning and analysis
some contributing thoughts...
like you say, assuming your analysis is correct a good heuristic would be to kill scvs over mules, unless we think the mule was just called down, in which case it would be better to kill the mule.
let's think of a scenario where you can take advantage of this knowledge. assuming the terran has called down mules as soon as their OC gets 50 energy, then at some point theres gonna be 2 mules out, one of them is just about to break down, and the other is basically new. so in that case killing both would be like killing a 50% mule or something like that, with twice the hp of a normal mule so even then killing both would be useless since you don't know which one is new and which one is old and it's more damaging for the terran if you target the SCVS. fortunately, since one of the mules are going to break down soon (assuming t has used OC at 50 energy each time, one of them will die in a relatively short period of time, i feel its like 5-10 seconds, maybe someone can verify this, but i know its really short) so in the meantime we can kill SCVS while we wait until the old mule reveals itself by breaking down and then of course you can target the one that is still alive. anyone see a problem with this

we might also want to consider that mules cost terrans 0 supply, so while killing scvs might generally be better economically it also frees terran up of supply which might detract a bit from the effect. this seems like a minor point though, and probably isn't gonna be that useful.

SleepSheep

Canada344 Posts

April 26 2010 17:13 GMT

#51

On April 25 2010 21:39 Diks wrote:
I think there is no absolute answers for this because it only depends on the situation.
killing a fresh mule in the early game will delay the opponent build and timings, wich can give you room for breathing or pushing. Killing an early SCV will give you an advantage during the long game.
It only really depends on two factors :
- Do I need a economy advantage right now or later ?
- How old is the mule, (you'll better check that before sniping).

OP addressed those factors already, did you not read it all?
anyways, ignoring that, you're incorrectly assuming that we're trying to find something that guarantees it being the best choice across all situations--but you're missing an important principle here. it's about finding a general rule (heuristic) that is more often than not going to be more useful following it than not following it, with exceptional cases. of course, the more we discuss and think about it the more likely we'll identify those exceptional cases (admittedly there doesn't seem to be many), in which case we can ignore following the heuristic to our advantage.

niteReloaded

Croatia5282 Posts

April 26 2010 17:39 GMT

#52

Go for the mule.
It makes a bigger shock, as it disrupts the mineral/gas ratio and makes it harder to optimize the Build Order.

Your theory is good if computers play the game.

NiiPPLES

United Kingdom201 Posts

April 26 2010 17:45 GMT

#53

Why the hell do people think 16 SCVs is saturated?

Diminishing returns do start around 16 SCVs but if you build 16 SCVs per base you're going to lose a lot of games very fast.

16 SCVs = ~900 minerals/min
22 SCVs = ~1100 minerals/min

tl:dr people who aren't in the beta stop giving advice

SleepSheep

Canada344 Posts

April 26 2010 18:49 GMT

#54

On April 27 2010 02:39 niteReloaded wrote:
Go for the mule.
It makes a bigger shock, as it disrupts the mineral/gas ratio and makes it harder to optimize the Build Order.

Your theory is good if computers play the game.

yeah, but how exactly does it make "a bigger shock". OP brought a fairly convincing analysis to the contrary, so if you're making a claim against it, i think you should provide evidence to support it. it seems like the burden of proof is on you now.

Fallen

Canada192 Posts

April 26 2010 19:00 GMT

#55

holy theorycrafting captain!

If you've seen mule being dropped, then kill mule. if you havent seen mule being dropped, then kill scvs.

Thread closed.

Orpheus

United States35 Posts

April 26 2010 19:06 GMT

#56

On April 25 2010 04:42 SuperJongMan wrote:
Just kill the mule.
Slowing him down 270 soon means his factory or whatever will be late etc etc.
Its a big chain event of slowdown and 270 short term is strong early game.
LOL!
Cmon ppl...
CMON!!!

Shh!!!!!! lol

ilnp

Iceland1330 Posts

April 26 2010 19:12 GMT

#57

On April 25 2010 14:20 zatic wrote:

Show nested quote +

Either present an argument for why you think killing a MULE is better that refutes the OP or just don't post. You are wasting space.

Excellent thread btw OP, we need more of these contributions towards figuring the game out.

Question: If you have unit bars turned on, do you see the energy on enemy mules?

this is an understatement. refuting someone coming here with statistics and math with "god, you're an idiot, just kill the mule" is so mindboggling. maybe you should take a step back, realize that you're not the best player in the world, and then wonder why.

the soul of this post is: what is the true value of an scv/drone/probe? and what is the true value of a mule? how can we figure this out?

the worth of a single worker is always worth more than 50 minerals, but for each race it's different. the value of a single worker also varies over the course of the game -- as the number of CCs and active mineral patches change...

mOnion

United States5657 Posts

April 26 2010 19:13 GMT

#58

assuming the terran does not oversaturate to prepare for expansion

most glaring error in your calculation. You ALWAYS oversaturate to prepare for a maynard.

sigh. this just seems so based on random timing...

FabledIntegral

United States9232 Posts

April 26 2010 19:22 GMT

#59

On April 25 2010 02:35 Sky101 wrote:
I thought SCV saturation level is about 16? I mean, 2 SCV's on a patch is a LITTLE BIT over-saturated, assuming one SCV starts mining immediately after the other is done, you'll soon see that after 2-3 trips, 1 SCV will have to wait for the other to finish mining.

Say you kill 1 SCV, he'd stand to lose 17(minerals per a new SCV build time) + 50 = 67 minerals.
But if you kill a Mule, he'd lose 3 x 45(half of the Mule's lifespan) = 135 minerals.
I thought the math is clear??

Very incorrect. 16 is definitely not saturated yet, not sure how it would even be considered OVER saturated. 3 SCVs per crystal will show benefits on the further away crystals, while having a small (almost negligible, yet still apparent) effect on mineral return rates.

Sejong

Korea (South)153 Posts

April 26 2010 19:26 GMT

#60

I was just about to post what xnub posted..

Many are granting the MULE his full lifespan in the equation, but we know that the MULE has even less than 90 seconds left. You could be killing the mule 5 seconds before he goes back to whatever satellite he came from. For this reason, I spit my gas at the MULE.