Pushing The Limits of Zerg Economy Builds - Page 21

On December 31 2010 06:56 gondolin wrote:
Yeah, I would agree with you that gas before hatch in 11p18h will hurt the economy quite a bit, but as you said, the strong point of 11p18h is the very fast queen, which allow it to be quite flexible.

My feeling is that fast gas will hurt it less than a fast gas in 14h15p. And we only need the economy to be better than 14g14p21h, which should not be too hard. 14g14p21h is the recommended buil by ZergLegend in ZvP, but I have the feeling the speed comes too fast, and we could improve the economy a lot by delaying it by 10-20 sec, and it looks like 11p18h would be the best build for that.

On April 25 2011 12:57 nodestar wrote:
You really have to read through the entire thread to get any benefits out of this. I would point you to specific pages but I can't remember them. It's been a few weeks since I read through it all. Also the OP seems to abandon the thread at some point but the work was carried on by Skrag. So the OP is not up to date with the final results.

All that said. From what I remember 13 hatch 15pool ends up being a terrible build if you have to build anything other than drones. I do remember the standard for the builds were something along the lines of getting 2 lings(1 larva worth) 1 spine crawler and gas at a point similar to when you'd get gas in a 14gas 14pool build. The point of this thread was to find the most realistic economy build. I'm pretty sure the final results were that 14 Hatch 16 pool won hatch first and 11 pool 18 hatch won pool first. With 15 hatch 16 pool being almost identical to 14 hatch 16 pool.

Also the work Skrag did gave us a way to predict how builds would turn out. Basically any very early pool must compensate for the loss of early drones by "catching up" with queen injects to make more drones than a later pool would allow. This is why most of those builds are terrible in "real world scenarios". Because you won't be able to just makes drones. You'll have to build lings and get gas and build crawlers, etc. For some reason the 11pool 18 Hatch strikes a fine balance and doesn't suffer from this like other early pool builds. Also there is a point where you start to lose economy by delaying your pool. Because Queen injects are so powerful. So I don't think a 17 pool is more economical that a 14 pool. At least not for very long. And finally some builds actually gave more larva but less minerals or more minerals for a certain time before dropping off etc. So some of those builds could be viable for certain builds. Mostly notable some allins or something. But most people won't need nor care for those.

Thats all I can remember. Really good thread. Just needs the OP to return and update with all the new info.

On April 25 2011 12:57 nodestar wrote:
You really have to read through the entire thread to get any benefits out of this. I would point you to specific pages but I can't remember them. It's been a few weeks since I read through it all. Also the OP seems to abandon the thread at some point but the work was carried on by Skrag. So the OP is not up to date with the final results.

On April 25 2011 13:17 SC.Shifty wrote:
With that being said, has the 11 pool 18 hatch build order been tweaked within this thread since the OP? I'm not sure if I have the mental strength to find it through all these pages.

On April 25 2011 14:17 Jermstuddog wrote:
In other threads 11 pool has been suggested for ZvZ.

It gives over 100 less minerals but gives 2 extra larva, which is the critical resource in early ZvZ games allowing for an extra 4 lings in your standard bling bust.

The problem is your gas, and therefore the whole bust comes about 5 seconds later than normal as well.

On December 27 2010 06:50 Skrag wrote:
Graph of the resource difference between 14h15p and the following 6 builds:

16h15p (purple)
13h15p (brown)
14p16h (light blue)
11p18h (red)
15p16h (orange)
13p15h (dark blue)



The results of this latest round of tests are slightly different than the last round. I changed the map so that I could publish it on battle.net and let the game run while actually playing there, so that replays could be posted. One thing that shows is that very simple random differences can have a pretty significant impact, so the absolute numbers can't really be taken as gospel. For example, before reconfiguring the map, 11p18h was only about 95 resources behind 14p15h, but now it's closer to 130.

The larvae graph unfortunately got really difficult to read as I added builds to it. The easiest way to see what's going on there is going to be to download the spreadsheet (you'll need openoffice, which is a free download), and modify the graph to just show one at a time.

Imprecise commentary on the larva graph:

16h15p is slightly behind the entire time, while 13h15p is slightly ahead.

The other 4 builds are all slightly behind until a certain point, and then pull slightly ahead in larva count.

11p18h catches up at about 4:00
13p15h catches up at about 4:15
14p16h catches up at about 4:20, and ends up further ahead than any other builds
15p16h catches up at about 4:30

Here's a graph showing the 2 minute average of the larva difference. Obviously it's really difficult to be precise when there are instantaneous jumps of 4 at a time, but this seems to give a decent picture of which builds are ahead in what approximate timeframe. The catch-up times I listed above are fairly accurate, but the average gives a way of displaying all the builds on a single graph without a ton of overlap.

This graph would seem to indicate that 14p16h is ahead of 13p15h even though I said 13p15h was the larvae leader. In that respect, I'd be more inclined to believe the average graph, since I was just eyeballing and guessing.



Commentary on each of the builds measured:

POOL-FIRST BUILDS:
13p15h: despite being economically ahead of all the other pool-first builds in the drone race, I honestly don't see any reason to ever use this build at all. It does have a pretty significant larva advantage over most other builds measured, but it never has enough resources, and gets stuck unable to use larvae a *lot*.

11p18h: This build held up to the reality injection very well, better than I expected, and probably far better than any of the people claiming that it would fall apart economically once you started trying to actually do anything would have thought possible.

14p16h: Somewhat unsurprisingly, since a 14pool was commonly quoted as a build that would be beating 11p economically, this one held up pretty well. It has a 20-50 resource advantage on 11p early, and ends up in pretty much the same spot as 11p after max saturation, being around 130 resources behind 11p. This build also appears the be the larva leader, and was actually able to take advantage of the extra larvae, so that might be a consideration.

15p16h: This build plays out pretty similar to 14p16h, except that it falls further behind as max saturation is approached. A big part of that is that this build had a *really* hard time matching the timings I was going for (especially the spine crawler), so this might be a little bit unfair. But without doing testing under different circumstances (which I probably won't have the patience to do), it seems there won't really ever be a reason to use 15p instead of 14. I'm pretty sure 14p is far more common, and the problems 15p had in executing the things I wanted to execute probably explains that quite a bit.

HATCH-FIRST BUILDS:
13h15p: This build gains a slight larva advantage over 14h15p (somewhere in the neighborhood of one larva) at the cost of lagging behind in resources by 30-40. It *might* be less susceptible to hatch blocking, although the hatch times are close enough that I'd be surprised if there was really that much of a difference.

16h15p: This build trades a small larva disadvantage for a small early resource advantage. Where 13p15h didn't have enough resources to use it's available larvae, this one doesn't seem to have enough larvae to spend its resources. If you were planning a very early 3rd hatchery, or expected to need to build a bunch of spine crawlers, this one might do ok, but you'd have to be planning on doing that in the first 5 minutes for it to be worthwhile, because the early advantage is only 25-ish resources, but the later disadvantage is 65-ish.

15h14p: The data for this build is not posted in the graphs, but it appears to take a late larvae advantage over 14h15p, at the cost of a slight early larva disadvantage and a resource disadvantage that is larger than 13h15p. So if you're wanting to trade resources for larva, it seems 13h15p would be the better choice.

On April 26 2011 00:43 nodestar wrote:


I'm not really sure. The 11 pool 18 hatch build came from this thread.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=172481
I can only assume they are the same build.

I was a little off from what I wrote earlier. Basically 14h 15p is the "best". Other builds can have more larva and no minerals to spend them or more minerals but no larva. So 14h 15p ends up being the all around "best". Where "best" is subjective.

14p 16h is the "best" pool first build. 11p 18 hatch is slightly behind it but it could be more useful in certain situations.


Here is Skrag's post on page 19 that gondolin recommended.

That's simplistic. "Best" meant in those tests: the build created most income+larvae at the 6'20 minute mark (building drones+queens+ovies only). However "best" in real world depends on your game style and your (and opponents) opening (e.g. queen, spine heavy, early pressure etc.).
What you can get from those stats is, that delaying pool/queen/hatch trades income against larvae, earlier pool/queen/hatch gets more larvae but slightly less income early on. Early (4..6 minute mark) income/larvae is important as it defines your tech timing and your defensive/offensive options.