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Lets say your main is just at or before saturation (not above!!!), and your FE finishes at your natural. Is it better to maynard half your workers from your main to your natural and then re-saturate from each nexus/cc/hatch individually? Or is it better to keep your main saturated and then rally new workers from both cc's to your natural?
I posted this earlier and the moderator locked it for the following reasons:
1) He did not understand that I was referring to the situation where you are not above saturation at your main
I did state this in my first post, but hopefully my new emphasis cleared this up
2) He told me it wouldn't matter except at the highest echelon's of play.
This is Team Liquid, it was my impression we discuss changes in gameplay that can give you small advantages at a high level of play. Obviously mineral boosting is one example of such a change. The forum should be open to discuss top level play (isn't that what it is designed for?)
3) He wanted actual numbers
OK. I used an online stopwatch to find these numbers. At full saturation (16 workers on 8 mineral patches) your income is about 800 minerals per minute. It takes about 15 seconds to fully maynard scvs from your main to natural on LT. If you maynard 8 scvs immediately (half your workers) you lose 800minerals/2*15s/60s = 100minerals of mining time. If you rally both cc's to your natural, you lose 800/16*15/60 = 12.5minerals every 17 seconds (scv build time), until you have built 8 scvs, for a total of 100 minerals lost over the course of 136 seconds (2minutes 16 seconds).
The Take Home Message:
Maynarding half your scvs immediately causes you to lose 100 minerals in lost mining time immediately.
Rallying both cc's to your natural causes you to lose 100 minerals in lost mining time evenly over the course of 2 minutes 16 seconds.
If you get attacked in that 2 minutes and 16 seconds, I bet you would wish you had another zealot, 2 marines, or 4 zerglings. This difference is more dramatic for zerg, where the extra 100 minerals you save early can let you get more drones and make more money.
This is strictly about income, there can be other advantages to having workers at your natural (i.e. for defense). What are your thoughts?
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Can you tell me how much more money i make in 3 minutes with 10 workers at main and 10 workers at expo, vs 20 at one base over 4 minutes?
Im quite certain the 10-10 wins this, despite the 20-30 seconds of no mining when transfering workers.
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What's your income if you maynard half the workers to your natural? You said its 800 with full main saturation and that we lose 100 in mining time immediately. But what did the income look like for maynarding.
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Pretty sure that unless you have more than 16 workers on mins (assuming 8 patches) when the expo finishes, it's not worth transferring. Just rally both CCs/Nexuses/Hatches to the new minerals and saturate that one
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If you got more than 16 (2 per patch, when a third worker comes he doesnt nearly increase the amount of mining as much as the first and second one does) at your main, transfer them to your nat and set your rallies to your expo. The easiest way and probably one of the best.
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well if hellions drop in your base, or mutas arrive and you must evac your main base probes, you will be happy 1/2 of your probes are at the expo.
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On September 25 2010 03:52 tackklee wrote:
What's your income if you maynard half the workers to your natural? You said its 800 with full main saturation and that we lose 100 in mining time immediately. But what did the income look like for maynarding.
If you are at or below saturation, each worker adds linearly to your income. During maynarding, the remaining half scvs at your main have an income of 800/2 = 400 minerals per minute. In that 15 seconds of maynarding, your workers at your main mine 100 instead of 200 minerals. Once the half of your scvs get to your natural, your income returns to 800.
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On September 25 2010 03:56 RexFTW wrote:
well if hellions drop in your base, or mutas arrive and you must evac your main base probes, you will be happy 1/2 of your probes are at the expo.
This is a good point. In other words, you don't want all your eggs in one basket. It's less of a gamble against drops, etc to have 2 partially mining bases. Is this worth the extra 100 early minerals?
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You're not accounting for the danger of worker transfers.
You use LT as an example. Even just taking the natural your ramp is much easier to approach than your mineral line. If you are rallying workers to your natural minerals from your main and they come to attack you can't pull back beyond your ramp otherwise your transferring workers are going to be picked off.
Transferring your workers at once let's you only worry about protecting the transfer once and instead of having a general slowness in your economy you get to have one very specific timing you must defend and get a surge forward afterwards.
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Because of wandering of workers, you do want to split them between bases. It was even worse in BW but it's still present in SC2.
*Rechecked it, this logic does not apply when you make sure each patch only has 2 workers on it. Still, there's a mineral advantage because an expo usually gives you more close patches.
I did some very easy tests for you, here's some numbers.
16 probes, split evenly among 2 bases will generate around 640 to 680 minerals
16 probes, all on one base will get you 580-640 minerals.
The ingame resource counter always jumps a bit but if you look at the 580 (lowest) and 680 (highest), it's definetly worth it to split workers between bases.
I did the same test with 24 probes which is I believe is maximum saturation on one base, needless to say the wandering of the 3rd worker will lose you even more minerals.(difference of about 350 minerals per minute)
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On September 25 2010 03:56 RexFTW wrote:
well if hellions drop in your base, or mutas arrive and you must evac your main base probes, you will be happy 1/2 of your probes are at the expo.
Typically, I find it harder to defend drones at the expansion from hellions than it is to prevent those same hellions from going up the ramp into my base. This obviously doesn't apply to drops, but...
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I maynard fewer workers on steppes than I do on maps with closer naturals. Full saturation is 3 per patch, but after 2 per patch you get far less of an increase, per worker. 16 workers each on 2 bases is substantially better than 24 workers in your main and 8 at your natural. You have offered no compelling evidence or reason to not try to maynard exactly half of your workers and produce the rest from their respective Nexus'
maybe they closed your other thread because its misleading and wrong.
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One of the other little advantages of maynarding is that your minerals get mined down a lot smoother between the different bases. Its not much, but if your expansion gets sniped for some reason your other base(s) will have more minerals left on them if you did maynard workers over instead of slowly filling it with reproduced workers.
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On September 25 2010 04:09 disco wrote:
Because of wandering of workers, you do want to split them between bases. It was even worse in BW but it's still present in SC2.
*Rechecked it, this logic does not apply when you make sure each patch only has 2 workers on it. Still, there's a mineral advantage because an expo usually gives you more close patches.
I did some very easy tests for you, here's some numbers.
16 probes, split evenly among 2 bases will generate around 640 to 680 minerals
16 probes, all on one base will get you 580-640 minerals.
The ingame resource counter always jumps a bit but if you look at the 580 (lowest) and 680 (highest), it's definetly worth it to split workers between bases.
I did the same test with 24 probes which is I believe is maximum saturation on one base, needless to say the wandering of the 3rd worker will lose you even more minerals.(difference of about 350 minerals per minute)
Yes I did not take into account the position of the patches themselves. Is it true in general that the natural has more close patches, or was this the particular map main/natural combination you chose to do your test?
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Other things you'll want to take into account.
Expiration of Mineral Patches
For Zerg/Protoss especially, you want to take into account the rate at which your mineral patches expire. It is better to have 3 bases all about 20,30,60% life and 70 peons rather than 2 bases, one at 10% life and one at 80% life with 70 peons. We Terrans have our mule mechanic:D
Flexibility
Having more peons in your nat will allow you to:
populate both geysers faster if you decide to go early gas
Make crawlers/spores/turrets/cannons faster in the right places without hurting your eco too much
Defend your ramp (greatest tactical positional advantage) with a peon wall for a second as you get your units into position
Anti-harassment
Especially in ZvT, you will want to maximize average global income, taking into account what harassment will do.
Mineral Income
You will pay 50-100 minerals for greater sustained income growth.
I find it very interesting that new SC2 players completely ignore over a decade of thinking that went into SC:BW and immediately think that double rallying to nat min lines is preferable to maynarding. Even the semi-pros/amateurs in the GSLs do this and it boggles my mind to no end.
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Although I haven't studied this specifically; when watching my own replays I notice that after the maynard my worker force tends to be mining at a more efficient rate than my opponent's one base. I think the factor here is that the 2nd worker per spot is mining slightly slower due to the AI. The thing is that the temporary loss of minerals is unavoidable like OP says; either losing mining time immediately due to maynard or due to long rally. But I think if you check you'll see that the maynard ends up being profitable shortly thereafter.
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There is also an advatage to spreading out your resource consumption. By transferring workers, you don't mine out your main as quickly and you get a more frontloaded return from your expo. Really, this matters more later on as you start mining out and become oversaturated, especially if you are being contained to 2-3 bases. It's the same reason you want to drop mules at your newest expo rather than your main, the more spread out your saturation is and the longer it takes to mine out each node, the more efficiently you'll be mining.
At the time you take your third, you probably have more than 32 workers (on minerals, not counting gas), right? For maximum efficiency you want no more than 16 (+6 for gas) per base, but if your main is mined out or almost mined out, you'll effectively be on two mining bases and oversaturated (or at least not mining at 100% efficiency). If you spread out your worker distribution from the beginning the natural and the main will be closer in terms of mineral depletion, the degree of which depending on how fast you took the natural. Then, at the moment you take your third you are mining efficiently from all 3 bases for a while.
I hope all that made sense.
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All you said was:
1. If you maynard half ur probes you lose mining time.
2. If you don't maynard probes, you also lose mining time.
Of course you are going to lose mining time, i don't get the point of this post.
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I maynard 2/3 of my scvs to my nat each time I expo. The main keeps minerals until the very end of the game because I expo so much. Main makes maybe 10 after I maynard 15 away, then they get sent away.
I'm not at all sure of the math. Due to human error and nature, 50-100 minerals over 10 seconds isn't shit. 1 more maurarder? Really?
It may be just me, but I find it better to maynard a lot to the nat, because that becomes your 'front' if you will.
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The point of this post is that the number of probes you maynard is important. It has already been proven elsewhere on this forum that probes (and other workers) mine at 100% efficiency up to 2 probes per mineral patch (thus, 16 per 8patch main). Because of this, it is only a good idea to drop a base below 16 workers if you're maynarding to a gold, and even then only if you have to.
tl;dr dont maynard if you have less than 16 probes at main
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EPT
