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As the title of the thread says, how much is a creep tumor worth in terms of resources?
It's common place for Terrans to scan Zerg creep to kill creep tumors but I was wondering if you can put an actual monetary value on individual creep tumors. In other words, how many creep tumors do you need to kill for a scan to be worth it, assuming the trade-off for a scan is the 240 minerals that a mule would give you?
I feel like creep tumors lose their value slightly as the game goes on because having good creep spread in the early game is essential for fending of all-ins or any other early aggression, and with the low number of tumors and energy available early, killing even a single active tumor may be the difference between pulling off a successful attack or getting your attack shut down. This isn't as much the case later in the game, since Zerg will have more queens, energy, and tumors, but killing creep is obviously still important to make sure you get the most cost efficient engagements possible, as well as limiting Zerg's map vision for future harass and engagements.
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Creep tumors vary in value depending on how many Queens and Creep Tumors the Zerg currently has. They also vary in value depending on the APM of the Zerg. They also vary in value based on their positioning.
There is no way a formula can present to you an exact value due to the multitude of very fine points that lead to the total value of each tumor.
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it also depends on the matchup and the composition zerg is going for.
ie) In ZvP if zerg decides to go mass muta/corruptor, forward creep tumors are pretty much worthless.
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each creep tumor varies in value, it's not completely impossible to calculate its value
for example a creep tumor that blocks the third of the opponent would worth how much gas/mineral the third would have been provided until the tumor is removed and landed the third. that would be one valuable tumor
but monetary value doesn't offer the whole overview of the tumor cost and is only a rough estimate.
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On June 07 2013 13:29 Banchan wrote:
it also depends on the matchup and the composition zerg is going for.
ie) In ZvP if zerg decides to go mass muta/corruptor, forward creep tumors are pretty much worthless.
I was mostly referring to TvZ with a standard unit composition. Actually i think any unit composition in ZvT benefits from creep since marines destroy all unprotected air units.
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It is an interesting thought - but perhaps too complicated to try to pin down.
I would say that spending a scan to kill creep tumours is going to be worth it in about %100 of cases, so by that measure a creep tumour is always >$240.
By killing creep you're removing speed and vision. Also, I would argue that the act of spreading creep and maintaining it is more attention intensive than hitting scan as your army a moves across it. (Just my opinion).
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Creep tumor cost certainly decreases as more active tumors are produced [let's say you're using one extra queen (150 minerals) to spread tumors]. The creep queen pays for itself almost twofold with the first scan that is used to kill creep, making it a worthwhile investment in a long-term game-plan in ZvT.
Cost-wise, creep spread has more resource cost in any other matchup than ZvT but can pay for itself in ZvP in damage prevented or army cost efficiency due to vision or increased ground army speed. In ZvZ, it can get you killed by aiding the movement of enemy units, which explains why it's not always a good idea.
Creep really is a wildcard and this is really an interesting discussion.
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United States4883 Posts
I think it's not really comparable; it's like comparing how fast people drive and if the cars have wheels (which...btw, has some rather interesting statistics hahaha). The main purpose of creep is to buy you time against attacks. This encompasses vision, speed movement, and the ability to spot drops. It also pushes back bunkers and pylons and allows you to set up defenses much further up. When you clean up creep, you're denying the zerg's ability to defend, not any set of resources.
That being said, you CAN, however, quantify the resources lost in the early game with a queen laying a creep tumor vs. a queen injecting. However, this still has a direct correlation to zerg's income, making this really only an important statistic for zerg players, as terran players cannot influence whether a zerg injects vs. laying a creep tumor. Perhaps the only situation where you can actually quantify what a creep tumor is worth is when a zerg lays a creep tumor instead of an inject in the early game while floating money and you manage to kill off the tumor before it finishes. We'll say it's probably worth around 300 minerals.
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On June 07 2013 14:26 snexwang wrote:
25 energy.
Exactly!
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how many minerals/gas would you pay at most to have a creep tumor if it wasn't free? also, what about active or spent tumors? considering you can only have tumors on creep, i would pay about 250 minerals for my first 3 bases to be connected with spent creep. beyond that, i would pay more for tumors further from my bases. then it also depends on whether I'm against protoss or terran or zerg and whether they have a raven or observer out.
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On June 07 2013 14:27 SC2John wrote:
I think it's not really comparable; it's like comparing how fast people drive and if the cars have wheels (which...btw, has some rather interesting statistics hahaha). The main purpose of creep is to buy you time against attacks. This encompasses vision, speed movement, and the ability to spot drops. It also pushes back bunkers and pylons and allows you to set up defenses much further up. When you clean up creep, you're denying the zerg's ability to defend, not any set of resources.
That being said, you CAN, however, quantify the resources lost in the early game with a queen laying a creep tumor vs. a queen injecting. However, this still has a direct correlation to zerg's income, making this really only an important statistic for zerg players, as terran players cannot influence whether a zerg injects vs. laying a creep tumor. Perhaps the only situation where you can actually quantify what a creep tumor is worth is when a zerg lays a creep tumor instead of an inject in the early game while floating money and you manage to kill off the tumor before it finishes. We'll say it's probably worth around 300 minerals.
I'd say it's worth 5 larvae in that case; 5 larvae and 150 minerals if the queen gets gibbed.
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Creep tumors are invaluable!
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On June 07 2013 13:29 Banchan wrote:
it also depends on the matchup and the composition zerg is going for.
ie) In ZvP if zerg decides to go mass muta/corruptor, forward creep tumors are pretty much worthless.
unless zerg plans to transition to broodlord with air upgrades in the lategame at which point queens transfusing is very helpful.
Also vision itself is quite worthwhile
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On June 07 2013 16:59 TheGreenMachine wrote:Show nested quote +On June 07 2013 13:29 Banchan wrote:
it also depends on the matchup and the composition zerg is going for.
ie) In ZvP if zerg decides to go mass muta/corruptor, forward creep tumors are pretty much worthless. unless zerg plans to transition to broodlord with air upgrades in the lategame at which point queens transfusing is very helpful. Also vision itself is quite worthwhile
You could always use your air superiority to establish a good overlord creep highway, since you'd want to be banking queen energy for transfuse, but ideally, you'd still have done some creep spreading throughout the game for the vision alone.
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On June 07 2013 14:26 snexwang wrote:
25 energy.
I think this is the most objective answer. The problem with this question, or the way you worded it, is that your value for a unit or structure at a point in the game is unlikely to be its mineral cost.. and indeed your intrinsic value for a unit of mineral will be different for different times in different games, depending on the situation. A marine holding the xelnaga tower is probably worth more than 50 minerals, but an extractor you are not currently mining from is probably not worth 75. A creep tumour is worthless if it doesn't get in the way of your attack, but invaluable if you can deny the zerg vision before your allin. So the best answer is still 25 energy, without taking into account the situation
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creep tumor costs 25 energy if you kill the first one, but every one after that is less costly. Way you think about this is not how much in minerals, but is the creep tumor more important to your opponent than what you get with that 240 minerals. so is 1-4 marine 0-1 barracks more important to you than that x amount of killed tumors to your opponent.
The minerals you get from mules is not important its what you use it on. Some times you having 4 less marines may not be as important than that opponent dosen't have creep spread to make engaging your army easier. But then again killing creep somewhere where its not that important is not probely worth dealying your 3th cc or something.
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This is generally way too hard to estimate. Depending on how you lay down the first tumor the opportunity cost for this is either 4 larva (from the inject that is missing) or 150 minerals for the extra queen. Some builds you even get the second queen for the second hatchery sooner than it's needed so that it's going to have energy for both in which case the opportunity cost is only the income you could've gained by getting more economy sooner than the queen sooner which is going to be very little.
Let's assume your opponent went for getting the extra queen as that is the simplest example. Then he spent 150 minerals for that tumor. However, after a short period of time that tumor will be able to replicate itself and now there are two which are essentially worth half of the original so now it's 75 minerals each, meanwhile the queen will also obtain energy to put down more tumors (where the opportunity cost is only the energy lost that could've been used to transfuse). So basically you could take the 150 minerals and divide it by the number of creep tumors there are on the map which in a long game is going to mean that one tumor's monetary cost is next to nothing.
To get a better idea of how much one tumor is worth you'd have to look more at how much the zerg benefits from it which unfortunately is going to vary a lot from game to game. Sometimes they are going to give you the necessary vision to save one of your expansions which basically means that a group of tumors had the value of the entire expansion. It's going to make the units stronger which is going to change the outcome of battles but that is going to depend on so many other things including unit choices and how you play the battle. Other instances the zerg is spreading creep but really he is actually planning a roach bane bust in which case the tumors were worth almost nothing (unless they influenced you to think he was going for a more macro like play, or it helped prevent your scouting of it)....
So to sum it up: The cost of the tumor is next to nothing but the value he gains varies insanely from game to game.
I would say in most cases the value YOU gain from killing creep tumors is a lot of times going to be way more than what the mule could give you (if you just start to imagine different scenarios and think of how much the zerg benefits from creep in those). The value of the minerals mules give you is also going to vary based on your current situation.
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The best resource to measure the value of something in starcraft is time; spending minerals costs time, spending energy costs time, waiting for cooldowns costs time, getting map control costs time.
So the value of the creep is the time it took to spread creep over that area, and the value of any individual creep tumor is how much time to gain map control enough and how many queens it would take to replace it.
Also I would really question the idea that creep is only valuable early game. watching streams of zerg players you'll often hear them talking about how they shouldn't fight off creep because it is less efficient. This doesn't change just because you got to hive.
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Shouldn't the question be "how much is it worth to get rid of creep tumors in a standart TvZ?"?
A Creep Tumor is worth 25 Queen energy + APM
To get rid of it is obviously more costly earlier in the game since less Orbital Commands are available and a single scan gets "cheaper" the more OCs come into play.
On the other hand the longer the game progresses, the more Creep Tumors can be in place.
But all of that doesn't matter at all the way I see it.
A Terran army that barely loses against a Zerg army on Creep will usually defeat it off Creep hard.
An extra salve of Tank shots on Banelings or 2 more Volleys from Marines before they get attacked by Zerglings as well as a lot better stutter-stepping/spreading due to the slower Zerglings and Banelings, thus, relatively spoken, faster Marines.
That obviously makes Creep Spread/Creep Tumors really valuable for Zerg.
That means:
If you Creep Spread is good enough to force Terran into engaging you on Creep, you can have a much smaller army, meaning better eco/tech, and still deal with it.
Obviously if you struggle to keep injecting and have a ton of overmins on few bases Creep Spread should not be #1 priority but you should never completely disregard it.
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When you scan you are also able to make sure that there are no burrowed banelings in your path. For me, that is worth it as well as removing vision and speed from the zerg.
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Measuring something like the mineral value of a creep tumor in my opinion is impossible. You could probably calculate by simulating army fights, the army value saved/killed as a result of the move speed, and the detection spent to kill it, but the tumor itself does not provide any money, value worth of money, or anything of the sort that can be measured in self worth. This is probably most easily compared to the "cost" of an Auto-Turret, or Infested Terrans. They may kill, or aid in the killing of something, so they have a form of pseudo-cost efficiency, but not a base value.
Though, in ZvT, I value creep tumors to be, divided by how many get hit by a scan. Meaning if he hits 6 tumors with 1 scan, I valued them at about 45~ minerals each, and so on.
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If a terran scan kills 3-6 creep tumors, it's considered good.
If a terran scan kills 1-3 creep tumors, it's considered "worth it" but you cringe when you do it
If a terran scan kills 6-12 creep tumors, you're planting too many tumors in one spot.
As for non-scan value.
If your creep tumor micro spots and stops even 1 medivac drop from killing a mineral line--it's worth an expansion.
If your creep spread allowed you a surround that killed his army--it's worth a nuke.
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It's very easy to give value to creep tumors, but the value is not in minerals. Creep spread means zerg can wait till the last possible moment to mount a defense since terran and protoss can't afford to just march through creep. It's the most cost efficient base defense unit in the game with only 1 drawback--it needs units to stop the attack.
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On June 07 2013 13:29 Banchan wrote:
it also depends on the matchup and the composition zerg is going for.
ie) In ZvP if zerg decides to go mass muta/corruptor, forward creep tumors are pretty much worthless.
I know this is a nitpicky point to make, but I'd disagree that tumors are worthless in this case. Lings are often a large part of this composition, also the transition is to something + BL which needs static d which needs creep.
Sorry couldn't help it.
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the advantages of an engagement on creep versus off for zerg can be the difference between victory and defeat, Im not sure how to really put a price tag on it
also, I agree with the guy above me
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EPT
