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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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On September 25 2010 04:21 Emperor_Earth wrote:
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.
SC2 is a different game from BW. While some of the core concepts remain valid, it's useful to re-evaluate long-held assumptions in light of the new game mechanics.
You can't rally workers to a mineral line in BW so there may be additional macro issues at stake that make maynarding more or less effective in SC2.
Thinking through some analysis is much better than just blindly accepting old dogma as still relevant.
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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.
Or if you want your main base to take longer to mine out which is a very significant issue.
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On September 25 2010 03:48 Cell.cell wrote:
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).
16 workers at 8 patches is not full saturation on most maps. Full saturation requires 3 workers for the patches that are further away from the town hall. I know this is nit picking but its still worth mentioning.
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whats the most effective way of counting your workers at a base for saturation? hotkey them?
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On September 25 2010 05:10 CoFran wrote:
whats the most effective way of counting your workers at a base for saturation? hotkey them?
Usually just boxing your workers at minerals and counting rows. If there are two full rows of drones, you have 16 workers mining. Any more than that is oversaturation.
This is an interesting look at this, because usually I only maynard the drones I have over 16 and change rallies without thinking about it. It seems like it's a much more interesting choice now. Not that I have been thoroughly convinced either way because there are arguments for both.
Also, I thought that FULL saturation was 3 workers per mineral patch. I think there was even a little tip for this in-game. Is it just the point that any more than 2 per see such insignificant gains that it's not worth doing?
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Full saturation is 3 per patch but the third mines less efficiently. You never want to just stop making workers at 16 because the extra income is worth it, but if you have an expo you'll get more minerals per minute if you balance it out so they are mining as efficiently as possible.
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Just to clarify for some people that might use the word maynard in other contexts than SC, it's a term describing the act of transferring your workers to a newly finished expansion. Foreign community calls it "Maynard"ing because it was generally started by a foreign gamer named Maynard in the early ages of Korean progaming. Don't use this word in this context in real-life or in any academic papers since the word has no meaning outside of starcraft (expect a male name).
Topic: Although this is nice to know, it doesn't much in-game uses because fast expand isn't viable, most people would have their expansions when they have at least over 25 workers anyway.
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On September 25 2010 05:54 nitdkim wrote:
[...]
Topic: Although this is nice to know, it doesn't much in-game uses because fast expand isn't viable, most people would have their expansions when they have at least over 25 workers anyway.
I guess you don't play zerg?
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Who the fuck has an expansion complete and needs to maynard to it by the time they only have 16 workers?
I'm sorry, I agree with the mod. This thread is useless.
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I ALWAYS maynard a majority of my workers to an expansion (and 3 per patch for gold).
I hate getting mined out in my main, and by focusing my mules on my expansion I can keep up the income from my main base way longer than most of my opponents who just maynard 6 or so workers and then still have full saturation in their main.
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Another thing is that if you rally both to the natural, you lose mining time in the travel distance of the scvs going from the main to the natural.
On September 25 2010 06:00 Vexx wrote:
Who the fuck has an expansion complete and needs to maynard to it by the time they only have 16 workers?
I'm sorry, I agree with the mod. This thread is useless.
Have you never done 1gate FE, 1rax FE, or played Zerg?
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The automine AI is bad enough that a split down the middle will be more efficient than all at one, even if your main has exactly 16 workers. You still loose money on the cc, but you gain an additional worker production queue. That said, if you have 24 workers, you will make that money back rather quickly. From my data, if you have 26 and split 13/13, you get about 260 extra mpm (pays itself back in under 2 minutes), plus you can add workers in half the time. If you are at exactly 16 and you split 8/8, you get about 20 extra mpm, so it would take 20 minutes of game time to pay for the investment, ignoring your ability to produce workers in half the time.
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On September 25 2010 06:28 teamamerica wrote:
Another thing is that if you rally both to the natural, you lose mining time in the travel distance of the scvs going from the main to the natural.
The OP covered that, did you read his post?
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Prior to 2:1 saturation, maynarding is definitely less good in SC2 than it was in BW thanks to the smarter workers. There is some advantage to 8:8 versus 16:0, but it's not very large.
I still maynard workers to balance saturation, as I want to mine out my main as late as possible. There's not much advantage to be had here, but there isn't much cost either.
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There are multiple threads like this from BW. Look them up, you'll find your answer.
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On September 25 2010 03:50 Adaptation wrote:
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.
Until you get past 16 workers, mining speed is based purely on how far away the patch is. It's not until you start getting 3 workers on a patch that you start losing efficiency.
So 10 on each of two bases will mine slightly faster than 20 on one base, but the difference is pretty small.
There are some misconceptions in the original post, though, which seems to be claiming that you lose minerals because of the travel time.
Travel time is mostly irrelevant, because you should be doing one of two things: maynarding workers to the expansion, and building new workers at each base, sending them to the nearest patches, or leaving workers at the main, and rallying workers from both bases to the expansion. So if you don't maynard, you still have to pay the travel time cost, as workers go from the main to the expansion.
That cost does come a little later when not maynarding, but that's just another argument for not transferring.
The real cost, and I did extensive tests on this during beta, is that workers need to "settle in" to a routine, where they're just going back and forth between a single patch and the base. Any workers who are shuffling around looking for places to mine are obviously not actually mining, and are not contributing anything at all to your mineral input. It's not until they settle in that they start adding to your income.
Every time you add a new worker, there's some amount of time between the time that it's built, and the time that all the workers are settled and fully mining. Every time you add a worker, the routine gets broken. The new scv will pick somewhere to mine, but will likely interrupt another worker who had already settled into that spot, and that worker then has to go find somewhere, which likely interrupts another worker, etc.
The more workers you have, the longer that settle-in time is. And it can get *really* long. For example, on lost temple, where 22 workers is the maximum that will ever be actually working at once, I've seen it take as long as two full minutes for everybody to settle in after adding the 21st and 22nd worker. That is two full minutes before the worker you built even BEGINS contributing to your economy. Average time was less than that (I don't remember the timings, it's been so long, but somewhere around 60 seconds seems to be sticking out), but it absolutely shocked me to see that the last worker could take that long before it even began to contribute.
If you have a saturated main, with all the workers settled in, and not bouncing around, you then take half of those workers to the expansion, and start building workers at both bases, you're messing up the routines in both bases, rather than just one, which has a penalty associated with it.
In the tests I ran, I started with 20 workers at a main (22 is the max on many maps, but those last two workers can take a really long time to settle in, so it may not even be worthwhile to hit max saturation) fully settled into a routine, and compared the difference between taking half of them to the expansion, and leaving them there and just rallying new workers to the expansion, until both bases had 20 workers each.
Transferring showed a very consistent cost of around 150 minerals, due to the "settle-in" effect.
That's where the real cost of transferring comes from.
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On September 25 2010 03:57 Cell.cell wrote:
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.
This is only true up to 16 workers (2 per patch) the third worker on a patch decreases the efficiency. Not nearly enough to want to stop at 16, but it does have an effect.
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On September 25 2010 04:09 disco wrote:
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.
Having done very extensive tests on mining rates and the effects of transfers, I have to assume that you didn't account for the "settle in" time in those tests. Probably you just sent 16 workers, measured minerals after some amount of time, and then did the same thing for 8 workers on each base.
16 workers will take quite a bit longer to settle in than 8, and you'll probably have multiple bouncing workers initially, while they try to establish a routine, while 8 will just immediately go one to a patch.
If you build up to 16 one at a time, you only ever have one worker bouncing at a time, so that effect will be minimized somewhat.
Also, as I'm sure you found out, it's EXTREMELY difficult to measure mining rates by looking at the mineral count, which is why your tests show such a massive range. When I was testing mining rates, I focused on the trip time instead, and can say with complete confidence that 2 workers on one patch mine at exactly double the rate of one worker on the same patch.
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Most of the time your getting an expo when you have over 16 workers anyways so I don't see this being a huge deal but I guess it makes you think more about how much you maynard
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On September 25 2010 04:20 Cell.cell wrote:
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?
It's not globally true, but is very map specific. For example, I believe the Metalopolis naturals have one more "close" patch than the mains.
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The main reason to maynard workers is to prevent your main from mining out. You try to saturate your natural first because it is more likely it will go down, so you try to maximize your investment in the base by sending workers over.
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Actually defence can be an important factor, for example in ZvT your natural is exposed to hellions for a while so it's better to have 8 drones at natural and 16 at main (with new drones rallying to the nat) than a 12/12 split
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I have to agree with Skrag. I've done pretty extensive testing of mining speeds, and 2 workers on one patch mine at EXACTLY the same rate as 1 worker apiece on two patches.
Assuming your main is "better defended" than your natural, you should never maynard your main below 2 workers below mineral patch. Any less would simply be an inefficient use of resources.
By maximizing the number of workers per base (while expanding when needed), you keep your income high on relatively few bases. One base with 24 workers is much easier to defend from harassment compared to two bases with 12 workers each. Two bases with 24 workers each is easier to defend than three bases with 16 workers each.
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On September 25 2010 04:21 Emperor_Earth wrote:
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.
While all your other points certainly have validity, this is just silly.
Workers in SC2 are different than workers in BW. They don't behave the same way, so assuming that decade of thinking applies at all is a pretty big assumption.
For example, in BW you could "oversaturate" and get increased income at a diminishing rate.
In SC2, you simply cannot oversaturate. Maximum income is 2 per close patch, and 3 per far patch, or 22 workers on lost temple mains. 23 workers mine at the same rate as 22. 24 workers mine at the same rate as 22. THIRTY workers mine at the same rate as 22.
So technically, if you ever go past max saturation, you'd be way better off distance mining anyway.
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On September 25 2010 06:54 GreEny K wrote:
There are multiple threads like this from BW. Look them up, you'll find your answer.
Absolutely.
The fact that workers behave totally differently won't have any impact on those answers at all.
Oh wait...
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On September 25 2010 05:23 Triscuit wrote:
Also, I thought that FULL saturation was 3 workers per mineral patch. I think there was even a little tip for this in-game. Is it just the point that any more than 2 per see such insignificant gains that it's not worth doing?
The closest mineral patches will never be worked by 3 workers at a time. You'll always have a "bouncer", who is contributing exactly zero income to your economy.
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On September 25 2010 06:56 Skrag wrote:Show nested quote +On September 25 2010 03:50 Adaptation wrote:
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. Until you get past 16 workers, mining speed is based purely on how far away the patch is. It's not until you start getting 3 workers on a patch that you start losing efficiency. So 10 on each of two bases will mine slightly faster than 20 on one base, but the difference is pretty small. There are some misconceptions in the original post, though, which seems to be claiming that you lose minerals because of the travel time. Travel time is mostly irrelevant, because you should be doing one of two things: maynarding workers to the expansion, and building new workers at each base, sending them to the nearest patches, or leaving workers at the main, and rallying workers from both bases to the expansion. So if you don't maynard, you still have to pay the travel time cost, as workers go from the main to the expansion. That cost does come a little later when not maynarding, but that's just another argument for not transferring. The real cost, and I did extensive tests on this during beta, is that workers need to "settle in" to a routine, where they're just going back and forth between a single patch and the base. Any workers who are shuffling around looking for places to mine are obviously not actually mining, and are not contributing anything at all to your mineral input. It's not until they settle in that they start adding to your income. Every time you add a new worker, there's some amount of time between the time that it's built, and the time that all the workers are settled and fully mining. Every time you add a worker, the routine gets broken. The new scv will pick somewhere to mine, but will likely interrupt another worker who had already settled into that spot, and that worker then has to go find somewhere, which likely interrupts another worker, etc. The more workers you have, the longer that settle-in time is. And it can get *really* long. For example, on lost temple, where 22 workers is the maximum that will ever be actually working at once, I've seen it take as long as two full minutes for everybody to settle in after adding the 21st and 22nd worker. That is two full minutes before the worker you built even BEGINS contributing to your economy. Average time was less than that (I don't remember the timings, it's been so long, but somewhere around 60 seconds seems to be sticking out), but it absolutely shocked me to see that the last worker could take that long before it even began to contribute. If you have a saturated main, with all the workers settled in, and not bouncing around, you then take half of those workers to the expansion, and start building workers at both bases, you're messing up the routines in both bases, rather than just one, which has a penalty associated with it. In the tests I ran, I started with 20 workers at a main (22 is the max on many maps, but those last two workers can take a really long time to settle in, so it may not even be worthwhile to hit max saturation) fully settled into a routine, and compared the difference between taking half of them to the expansion, and leaving them there and just rallying new workers to the expansion, until both bases had 20 workers each. Transferring showed a very consistent cost of around 150 minerals, due to the "settle-in" effect. That's where the real cost of transferring comes from.
You can avoid this "settling in" problem by paying attention to which patch you send each worker to
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On September 25 2010 07:03 Skrag wrote:Show nested quote +On September 25 2010 04:09 disco wrote:
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.
Having done very extensive tests on mining rates and the effects of transfers, I have to assume that you didn't account for the "settle in" time in those tests. Probably you just sent 16 workers, measured minerals after some amount of time, and then did the same thing for 8 workers on each base. 16 workers will take quite a bit longer to settle in than 8, and you'll probably have multiple bouncing workers initially, while they try to establish a routine, while 8 will just immediately go one to a patch. If you build up to 16 one at a time, you only ever have one worker bouncing at a time, so that effect will be minimized somewhat. Also, as I'm sure you found out, it's EXTREMELY difficult to measure mining rates by looking at the mineral count, which is why your tests show such a massive range. When I was testing mining rates, I focused on the trip time instead, and can say with complete confidence that 2 workers on one patch mine at exactly double the rate of one worker on the same patch.
You won't have "bouncing" workers when there's only 2 per patch. So there is really no settling. And I did wait a while untill the resource income figure settled.
And a little tip, you can reply to multiple people in 1 post. Stop posting multiple times in a row.
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I don't think you can concretely come to this conclusion using math alone. You'll need to do a controlled experiment with multiple iterations to prove that there is a statistically significant advantage/disadvantage either way. It would be interesting to see how this advantage/disadvantage changes as the distance to the expo gets larger, and see at what distance, if any, it is no longer optimal to do a worker transfer.
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I looked at It and there are pros and cons for each method, I don't really think one is concretely better than another.
Its like all the methods of splitting SCV's and whether or not to send or build first... ultimately its just a waste as there are such more important things to think about, plus its a moot point when talking about far bases (3rd/4th) as you cant be streaming scvs across the map and you often wont take them until like 35 workers in your nat/main lines.
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On September 25 2010 07:21 disco wrote:
You won't have "bouncing" workers when there's only 2 per patch. So there is really no settling. And I did wait a while untill the resource income figure settled.
You absolutely do have bouncing workers when there are 2 per patch, until they settle into a routine, it just doesn't take nearly as long as when you're adding the last few. If you waited until everything was settled, then there are some other factors that might account for the differences you saw, but the difference is not because one worker on a patch is more efficient than 2 workers on a patch, because that is provably untrue.
Again, during the beta I spent hours and hours examining mining rates, and the things that can affect it. I'm pretty damn confident on the "2 workers mine exactly twice as fast as 1" assertion.
And a little tip, you can reply to multiple people in 1 post. Stop posting multiple times in a row.
Oh. How do you do that? I just hit the quote button. I haven't seen a multi-quote feature on this board, but then again I haven't looked very hard. 
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I can see the double rally for FE zergs, and I might start doing that more, but for typical T and P expo speeds, I don't think this is all that worth-while.
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On September 25 2010 08:11 Skrag wrote:
[...] If you waited until everything was settled, then there are some other factors that might account for the differences you saw, but the difference is not because one worker on a patch is more efficient than 2 workers on a patch, because that is provably untrue.
Yeah, like I said, you're gonna have extra "close" mineral patches at a next base which probably explains the income difference.
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Personally my main reasons for transferring only workers above 16 to my nat are as follow:
1: easier to defend the main than the nat, and Im not worried about drops when I take my nat.
2: gas. When I take my 2 geysers at the natural, Thats going to be 8 workers. If I have both hatcheries rallied to their respective minerals after maynarding half the workers, and then use 8 from the nat to take gas, I end up having to transfer 4 from the main to the nat to keep equal saturation, quite annoying.
3: I play zerg. So if I have to make a couple of units, then Ill be using up larva from one of the hatcheries. Thus by maynarding half the workers, and then having them both rallied to their respective minerals, I end up with uneven amounts of workers. Also, I tend not to have a queen up for the expo when it finishes, so thats again an uneven number of workers.
4: When I take my third, I can just transfer all the extra workers from the nat which will be slightly oversaturated at this point to the thirs, without having to take the ones from the main too to move to the third.
Mostly, its just less hassle, I hate spending time microing workers and making sure that all my bases have 16 workers on minerals, and not 30 in my main due to spawn larva, and 10 at the expo due to having taken my 3d and 4th gas 
And for BW refferences: Well since the workers mined differently, there was no max saturation, they was no worker rally points, there was only a single gas, and so on, Id say thats fairly irrelevant here.
But yeah, personally, I just like not having to worry about what my workers are doing until I take my third, at which point I only need to maynard from the nat.
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On September 25 2010 07:06 xixecal wrote:
The main reason to maynard workers is to prevent your main from mining out. You try to saturate your natural first because it is more likely it will go down, so you try to maximize your investment in the base by sending workers over.
That's not the main reason to Maynard workers. It's to get maximum value from your workers, to maximise resource collection.
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Maynarding half is stupid anyway, please redo this with proper calculations.
On September 25 2010 07:09 Piousflea wrote:
I have to agree with Skrag. I've done pretty extensive testing of mining speeds, and 2 workers on one patch mine at EXACTLY the same rate as 1 worker apiece on two patches.
Assuming your main is "better defended" than your natural, you should never maynard your main below 2 workers below mineral patch. Any less would simply be an inefficient use of resources.
By maximizing the number of workers per base (while expanding when needed), you keep your income high on relatively few bases. One base with 24 workers is much easier to defend from harassment compared to two bases with 12 workers each. Two bases with 24 workers each is easier to defend than three bases with 16 workers each.
Something you probably haven't thought about: If you don't maynard your main mines out much faster and you'll end up being oversaturated on one base(your nat) instead of mining two bases at full saturation later on.
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Well for me, i always maynard half for my 1st expansion, when i get a 2nd expansion i maynard 1/3rd from the 2 bases.
why? To prevent oversaturation. the fact that its more effective to have a 8:8 instead of X:X split between expansions is just a bonus to me.
i always get ALL my CC's into one hotkey,and build scvs on them all at the same time. By splitting my base workers into half,and sending to my expansion, both my main & expansion will be saturated at the same rate making my life easy.once i get all 3 bases up and running,my main will be running out giving me a reminder i do not need to build anymore scvs and i can grab another expansion and get it running at max capacity using the base SCVs.
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On September 25 2010 04:01 Cell.cell wrote:Show nested quote +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?
on the other hand 2 bases require more defense than one and early game its just easier to defend 20 drones in one spot than 10 and 10 split up. muta harass is the perfect example because they can pop between the bases picking off workers.
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On September 25 2010 07:06 xixecal wrote:
The main reason to maynard workers is to prevent your main from mining out. You try to saturate your natural first because it is more likely it will go down, so you try to maximize your investment in the base by sending workers over.
if your natural is likely to go down wouldnt it seem counter intuitive to get it saturated befor your main?
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On September 25 2010 08:41 toadstool wrote:
That's not the main reason to Maynard workers. It's to get maximum value from your workers, to maximise resource collection.
The point of this thread is that you don't actually get maximum value from your workers by maynarding.
If that's the main reason people do it, they should stop, because the transfer actually *costs* you minerals, unless your main is past max saturation.
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EPT
