EPTJust don't forget, SC2 will have 2 expansions, so supply drop might only become a good mechanic later on.
Some Thoughts on Supply Drop - Page 2
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P00RKID
United States424 Posts
Just don't forget, SC2 will have 2 expansions, so supply drop might only become a good mechanic later on. | ||
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0neder
United States3733 Posts
On March 27 2010 13:36 Divinek wrote: they are dumbing it down, auto mine, auto split, mbs, smart casting, auto surround etc etc. So people with non-korean hands are stupid? I fail to see how physical limitations make someone 'dumber' than a BW vet with 300 APM. A better interface isn't dumb, it's smarter. The only valid point you have there is the smart casting. Auto surround existed in BW, the AI just wasn't as good. The others are just sensible improvements. | ||
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Endrick
United States14 Posts
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Rabiator
Germany3948 Posts
The MULE may also deceive people regarding the state of their own economy and after the "high" of having 3-4 MULEs mine for a few seconds there is the definete "low" of "not enough minerals" that will follow. This will probably be a problem for the not-so-great macro players who tend to use MULEs irregularly. This deception might make you forget to expand and especially the "super influx" from a high yield expo - which is mined out a lot faster too - might cause this fluctuation in income. Most people say (MULE Mantra): "A MULE earns you 300 minerals!" I would think it should be adapted to: "A MULE earns you almost 300 / 450 minerals and costs you two Marines or a Marauder and SCV build / mine time!" The supply drop is great - when your economy is thriving anyways and you dont really need the MULE for instant gain, - when you need extra supply FAST ... after losing some depots due to an attack and you are desperate to rebuild troops, - when your space is limited, - when you have enough minerals to produce units anyways, - when your minerals in the patches are running low and you will have a hard time expanding, - ... So it is a situational good thing and not a "clear third choice to be ignored" ... as it seems to be the case for many players who are stuck in the "MULE Mantra". | ||
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Funchucks
Canada2113 Posts
Supply Depot + Calldown: MULE 0 sec (-100 minerals + 0 supply) take SCV out of mining line, start building (100 minerals spent) 30 sec (-150 minerals + 8 supply) Calldown: MULE, return SCV to mining line (50 mineral gathering missed) ~80 sec ( 0 minerals + 8 supply) breakeven (150 minerals gathered by MULE) 120 sec (+120 minerals + 8 supply) MULE expires (120 more minerals gathered by MULE) Calldown: Supplies 0 sec (0 minerals + 0 supply) do nothing 30 sec (0 minerals + 8 supply) Calldown: Supplies ... 120 sec (0 minerals + 8 supply) When you choose MULE over supplies, it takes about 80 seconds to recover your lost minerals, and another 40 seconds to get your extra 120, so it is an investment that takes time to mature. This is ignoring some fine details that could skew it a few seconds one way or the other and assuming you need the supplies just then. | ||
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PhiliBiRD
United States2643 Posts
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ComradeDover
Bulgaria758 Posts
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SichuanPanda
Canada1542 Posts
At non-specific times in mid-game I find myself using Supply Drop when I have a surplus of minerals already from previous MULE use, and want to expand my army quickly. But I digress, the two uses I usually think of are as follows: 1. If you used SD early game you could effectively negate the supply from your wall depots. In other words, you have 3 wall depots, and you build your fourth depot at a relatively safe location in your base. Once its done you use SD on it and build your fifth depot and subsequently SD it. At this point your opponent attacks you, you hold off the attack but lose a wall depot (or two). If you did not SD your fourth and fifth depots you potentially could have to build more supply depots, either that or be to close to the cap to properly macro. By using SD on the other hand you can easily rebuild your wall depots, and continue production. 2. Once a game reaches the late-game phase, and you have 3 or 4 bases with 2 or 3 Orbital Commands (or four if a Fortress isn't applicable) and your supply cap is maxed out you can use Supply Drop to: i. Conserve the minerals from the last remaining expansion by not wasting money on building Supply Depots in the event that one of your outlying bases gets destroyed. Also in late game on smaller maps you can: i. Use Supply Drop to go from 140 or so pop to max, as soon as your high-tech production/eco is ready - thus getting an army faster | ||
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blipster8
United States71 Posts
On March 27 2010 12:42 ComradeDover wrote: I'm not the greatest player, so my thinking might be completely off here, but... With regard to macro mechanics, it seems like Supply Drop (If you can call Supply Drop a macro mechanic, I would) seems to be really undervalued. Part of the reason is obvious -- Scan is an old favorite with a myriad of uses and MULES are useful as well, but I can't help but feel there's something to Supply Drop that a lot of people are missing. Consider a hypothetical scenario that happens all the time in many games featuring a Terran player; You have 50 or more energy on your Orbital Command and have no immediate need to scan. You're also close to being supply capped, and it's time to build a new depot. You can either: 1) Call down a MULE (Which mines about 300 minerals during it's lifetime, right?), have it and your SCVs mine 100 minerals and build a new supply depot. If you do this, total income = (300 - 100) = 200 + whatever your SCVs mine. Of course, you don't actually get any more resources than you would have without MULE -- the amount in the mineral fields remains constant, regardless of how fast you drain it. 2) Use supply drop. Your income remains unchanged, but you now have 100 minerals that you would have spent on supply to spend on something else. Furthermore, unlike MULE which is a benefit with a drawback (faster mining = being mined out faster), the 100 minerals that you "gain" from supply drop are pretty much permanent (unless the target depot is destroyed, obviously). A 2-base terran who's mined out on all his bases who used supply drop will have 100 x (times supply drop used) more minerals worth of stuff compared to one who used MULE. Still, even on paper, it seems like option 1 is a no-brainer, right? You get 200 minerals you wouldn't have had before, and I grant that in many cases you could find many uses for those more immediate 200 minerals, including make more CCs/workers to expo with, or units to help secure more expos. But that can't last forever, and from what I've noticed other races are far better at expanding than Terran is. By the time you reach that point, though, you're pretty much done making supply depots... I guess what I'm getting at is I'm questioning if Supply Drop is really quite as bad as people make it out to be in the long run. Can someone smarter than me shed some light on this? Am I totally misguided here? Certainly near the start of the game, MULE is awesome because you really want money NOW. If it's useful at all, I'd say supply drop would be used later on, where the "create 100 minerals from nowhere" benefit outweighs the "give me less money in the next 30 seconds" drawback. But yeah, depending on the game I can definitely see supply drop being useful in later game play. | ||
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ComradeDover
Bulgaria758 Posts
On March 27 2010 14:15 SichuanPanda wrote: But I digress, the two uses I usually think of are as follows: 1. If you used SD early game you could effectively negate the supply from your wall depots. In other words, you have 3 wall depots, and you build your fourth depot at a relatively safe location in your base. Once its done you use SD on it and build your fifth depot and subsequently SD it. At this point your opponent attacks you, you hold off the attack but lose a wall depot (or two). If you did not SD your fourth and fifth depots you potentially could have to build more supply depots, either that or be to close to the cap to properly macro. By using SD on the other hand you can easily rebuild your wall depots, and continue production. 2. Once a game reaches the late-game phase, and you have 3 or 4 bases with 2 or 3 Orbital Commands (or four if a Fortress isn't applicable) and your supply cap is maxed out you can use Supply Drop to: i. Conserve the minerals from the last remaining expansion by not wasting money on building Supply Depots in the event that one of your outlying bases gets destroyed. Also in late game on smaller maps you can: i. Use Supply Drop to go from 140 or so pop to max, as soon as your high-tech production/eco is ready - thus getting an army faster This is very true, and something I had completely overlooked. I often find my wall depots get destroyed, in some cases even if I lower them to tempt the attacker to ignore them and let him through. Rather than take even more SCVs off mining to rebuild or compensate for what are pretty much doomed depots. On March 27 2010 14:20 blipster8 wrote: Certainly near the start of the game, MULE is awesome because you really want money NOW. If it's useful at all, I'd say supply drop would be used later on, where the "create 100 minerals from nowhere" benefit outweighs the "give me less money in the next 30 seconds" drawback. But yeah, depending on the game I can definitely see supply drop being useful in later game play. If Funchuck's timelines are to be believed (And they seem fairly accurate), the exact opposite would be true (Assuming you have a depot to build), and MULE is an investment that requires time to reap the benefits. If you don't have a depot to build, then the choice is obvious... | ||
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Tinithor
United States1552 Posts
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Funchucks
Canada2113 Posts
The MULE does pay for the Orbital Command quickly, but with the supply calldown, it's instant. It does cost you the opportunity to build 2 SCVs, but these would cost an additional 100 minerals and are less valuable for economic purposes than the OC. So if you're having trouble fitting the cost of an OC into your tight build order, you might want to use supply drop as your first OC spell. | ||
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Haemonculus
United States6980 Posts
But for those of us with less than perfect macro who supply block ourselves now and then when we REALLY NEED TO BUILD STUFF TO HOLD OFF THAT PUSH!!! it's quite useful, lol. In a perfect game, ideally you'd never have to use it. However, it's a great way to recover from a supply block very quickly. | ||
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Divinek
Canada4045 Posts
On March 27 2010 13:54 0neder wrote: So people with non-korean hands are stupid? I fail to see how physical limitations make someone 'dumber' than a BW vet with 300 APM. A better interface isn't dumb, it's smarter. The only valid point you have there is the smart casting. Auto surround existed in BW, the AI just wasn't as good. The others are just sensible improvements. I think making things easier makes them more friendly to the mentally challenged if you have any experience with that sorta thing, but i wasn't actually making an intelligence comparison. But supply drop seems like one of those rarely used things, that will only have it's niche in strange or really long games somehow. Like you know if you're base trading and someone kills all your depots but you have like a bazillion minerals anyways and need an army up asap and things like that. | ||
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ComradeDover
Bulgaria758 Posts
On March 27 2010 14:38 Divinek wrote: But supply drop seems like one of those rarely used things, that will only have it's niche in strange or really long games somehow. Like you know if you're base trading and someone kills all your depots but you have like a bazillion minerals anyways and need an army up asap and things like that. Obviously it's rarely used. Even a casual observer could tell you that much, but that I'm trying to get at why it's rarely used, and if it's a mistake to be using them quite so rarely in the first place. | ||
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Divinek
Canada4045 Posts
i can't see why it would be a mistake to use them so rarely because, why should they be used over those two other awesome abilities? There would really need to be concrete implementations of it over theory crafting | ||
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ComradeDover
Bulgaria758 Posts
On March 27 2010 14:52 Divinek wrote: It's rarely used because good players can build depots on time and figure having instant vision of anywhere on the map or a super scv is alot better. i can't see why it would be a mistake to use them so rarely because, why should they be used over those two other awesome abilities? There would really need to be concrete implementations of it over theory crafting I guess your underlying assumption is that we've figured out SC2 already, and I think that kind of thinking is flawed and counterproductive so early in the game's lifespan, especially since it hasn't actually launched yet. Funchucks has posted some concrete implications of it so far. Is anyone willing to test them? | ||
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nujgnoy
United States204 Posts
For example, two players begin a game A begins with 7 patches and start with 1000 minerals B begins with 8 patches and start with 0 minerals Obviously it would be better ot begin as A because having the money NOW lets you use it for quicker development. Sure, the extra patch is worth 1500 and 500 more, so B would be better off in the long run, but A would dominate early game. The faster development would let him probably secure another expansion = more money. A can FE. Or, he can take map control with macro which will allow him to take expansions. Or, he can tech faster. This is an exaggerated example, but one that shows why having faster money albeit lesser overall might be more beneficial than having more money at a slower pace. I would say it's a mistake to use it early on, because supply is not as valuable in the early game where unit production rate is low. It might be more beneficial later in the game when 1. unit production rate is higher and 2. Overall income is higher so 270 income is relatively small. | ||
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mcneebs
Canada391 Posts
To make an extreme example, If you told me I could mine 3x faster on a field that had 3x less minerals, I would surely choose the faster field, because it allows me to do what I need to do. Get an army large enough to either win outright or expand via map control. You don't need a full mineral patch most times, and the return you get on the supply drop hardly seems worth it. EDIT: haha ninja'd by nujgnoy. | ||
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Funchucks
Canada2113 Posts
On March 27 2010 14:41 ComradeDover wrote: Obviously it's rarely used. Even a casual observer could tell you that much, but that I'm trying to get at why it's rarely used, and if it's a mistake to be using them quite so rarely in the first place. I think it's just that MULEs are cooler and easier to understand. The advantages of calling down supply are subtle. I expect supply drops to feature regularly in optimized build orders, since they give you a minute+ timing advantage. One way to think of it is that, building 3 permanent SCVs with the time and money you save by supply dropping is obviously more profitable on any timescale than making one MULE which will disappear in 90 seconds. MULEs without pumping SCVs doesn't make sense (with obvious exceptions, such as not needing supply or being saturated). | ||
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