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Analysis of Macro - Page 7
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iloevrsg
128 Posts
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Eschaton
United States1245 Posts
I disagree however, with your argument that an increased supply cap would be better for the game. The current goal of every zerg is the "300 food push" where through instant remaxing you can have a larger army than the T or P opponent via attrition of his forces, whose 200 food army is just stronger than yours. Can you imagine allowing a Protoss army with Colossus and Void Ray another 100 food? A supply cap of 300 would only make this worse, when the strength per unit is greater for T and P, and you would need MORE than 1.5 the food (and thus more than 1.5 the bases) to take on the army as the needed food differential is probably exponential in form. This seems very ironic, that a larger supply cap would should favor the "macro" race simply would not. | ||
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QuestSeekers
United States39 Posts
Also, great post, and I want to hear your thoughts on Zerg. EDIT: I would also like to hear Lalush's response to questions/critiques like Eschaton's ^ (above) | ||
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imbecile
563 Posts
So while bigger maps won't fix the economy side of the game, they might do something about the strategic side. Warp ins and nydus are much more powerful on large maps, while big army balls are much less powerful. Army movement and positioning becomes the focus. Scouting also becomes much more useful (and harder) on larger maps. | ||
bLuR
Canada625 Posts
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slappy
United States1271 Posts
much of the recent balancing of the game appears to have gotten stuck in fighting mineral surplus disguised as imbalance. my favorite line  | ||
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1Eris1
United States5797 Posts
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Klamity
United States994 Posts
Since the bulk of your argument deals with minerals, have you considered any changes to mining in the early game? Specifically, the charts deal with the mule are absurd. Should mule mechanics be altered? | ||
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MGren
Sweden148 Posts
I have a suggestion to solve some of this problem, though. How about expansions with less than 8 mineral patches? It seems to be a reasoanble way of getting players to have to make more expansions (fulfilling the way Zerg should ideally play), and not altering game mechanics. | ||
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ChrysaliS_
United States261 Posts
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A e s t h e t i c
United States1 Post
AoE attacks also scale better than 1:1 with army size, since the larger each army is, the more units are likely to be hit by each attack. Imagine 3 immortals vs 4 tanks. The immos will destroy the tanks, but 66 tanks will kill 50 immortals. Additionally, chokes are more punishing at larger army sizes. It follows that increasing Max army sizes by ~50% will advantage long range units with splash more than anything else. The problem here is that T has the longest range anti-ground and anti-air in the game, and both have splash, as well as the 12 range and 8 radius nuke. P fares decently well against ground with colossi's very efficient splash at range, but Z is completely shafted in both departments. The only true splash (mutas don't count) is melee range and anti-ground, and the only long range unit is the BL, which is anti-ground and suffers from melee scaling. The end result is that without taking other aspects of the game Into account, a maxed T is relatively more efficient and a maxed Z relatively less so. It seems trying to alter mineral patch counts/amounts/color at expos would both be much less volatile in terms of balance and result in less SC2 slideshows on my computer : ( Edit: It has been noted that changing harvesting mechanics or reducing the number of mineral patches would slow down openings as a side effect. Perhaps starting with more workers would help reduce the unnecessary slowing. One side effect I can foresee is a shorter window to scout rushes, but since it is rare to scout before 9 anyway, I'm not sure it would be relevant. | ||
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Elldar
Sweden287 Posts
The main conclusion I think you could draw out of OP is that expanding beyond third is meaningless for your income (minerals). What is causing this issue? I don't know exactly, however I would try to adress what I believe to be one issue from all the possible factors. I read someone who said something about make the scv traveltime longer. I like this idea somewhat however I would rewrite it as "longer mining time" (for both workers and the mule like about 0.1-0.2 seconds). Not to long to have major effect on the openings and midgame (perhaps a slight delay). I do realize that if raise the mining time for mules they will mine less in total minerals, however I suggest that this would stand in proportion to the mining for the workers delay. What issues does this idea try to adress? This would try to adress the "3-base ceiling" effect. This would reduce the effectivness of each patch while stockpiling workers on them (just slightly). This slight delay would (if I am theorizing correctly) add up for each return thus encourage spreading out your workers to more than 3 bases. Since fully saturating each patch this slight "delay" would add up for every return therefor have some affect on the "3-base ceiling" possibly. cons: - stacking workers to closer patches at start could be bad. - Delayed openings? (- Effect the ai of the workers? How long they wait for a mineral patch before they jump to a free one.) | ||
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schmubob
Germany10 Posts
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QTIP.
United States2113 Posts
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SetStndbySmn
United States657 Posts
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BGrael
Germany229 Posts
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skipdog172
United States331 Posts
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Atheros
United States84 Posts
On February 10 2011 05:48 intrigue wrote: very good post. the vague discomforts i had about the game are being addressed one by one on TL forums by people like you! are there custom maps with a 300 supply cap to test out? i really want to see how it feels, and how zerg fares with maxed armies in that situation. I was thinking the same thing so I modified Shakuras Plateau so that it had a 300 supply cap. If anyone wants to try it search for "Shakuras Plateau(300 Supply Cap)". When I tested it it seemed to benefit protoss the most but my friends and I aren't very good  . I'm interested to see how higher level players would play with a larger supply cap. | ||
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Dominator1370
United States111 Posts
Players don't want to allocate too large a portion of their available supply cap (200) to workers, because it drastically reduces army size. Traditional wisdom is somewhere around 70 workers, for all races. With 70ish workers, you can mine from 3 bases with shockingly close to maximum efficiency. Thus, if you are fixing your worker count around 70, when referring strictly to mineral income, there is no need to saturate more than 3 expansions simultaneously. You may want to build additional Hatcheries to macro from, but that is completely different than holding a mining base. (Whether 70ish workers must be the worker cap is something addressed later) Next, with regards to gas: If you've got so high of a mineral income that you don't have enough gas to spend it, it's true that taking additional expansions solely for the purpose of getting more gas is beneficial. However, with a mineral income that is so high, the cost of a solely-gas expansion isn't all that expensive. Likewise, the benefit gained from that expansion isn't so large, relative to a full mining base. On the other hand, if you lose everything at a saturated mining base, it's expensive to replace and a huge impact on your production capabilities. The point here is that the survival of a gas-only expansion is nowhere near as important as the survival of a full mining base, and thus the amount of effort you need to expend in defending it is much less. The effort required to defend spread out bases is, of course, one of the greatest deterrents to taking expansions, particularly in the late game. You wouldn't need to expend nearly as much effort depending an expansion mining only gas, because its defense isn't as important. In other words, an expansion where you're only mining gas isn't quite comparable to a full mining base. With regards to Terran and the worker cap: Terran isn't actually limited by a worker cap, because they can keep adding Orbital Commands for Mules. Since we're discussing the effect of map size on number of bases, Terran's income is actually hard capped only by the number of mineral patches on the map that they can mine simultaneously. That's a highly theoretical statement (and not some kind of claim that ZOMG Terran has INFINITE INCOME!!!), but suggests that Terran benefits from maintaining as many mining bases as they can get Mules to mine from, which is not true for the other races. Starcraft is a complicated and multifactored game, and no one factor means anything in isolation, but this certainly has implications for the super-lategame. It's something to consider, in addition to all other factors. It may also be worth noting, and again this is highly theoretical, that the fact that Mules cost no supply allows Terran to forgo any mining workers and set aside that supply for their army. There has been discussion about attempting to increase the "worker cap", or the amount of supply players feel they can allocate to workers. If this happens, it, in theory, increases the amount of supply a Terran can convert to Mules that their opponent still has tied up in workers. Again, theoretical, isolated factors and all that jazz, but it is a factor for the super-lategame. With regards to the worker cap being ~70 I understand there is good reason for a worker cap where it is. Purely as an exercise in determining whether there could be merit in going beyond this cap, however, consider the following: 54 workers on minerals (the number used in the OP) should generate, roughly, enough income to produce 30 Roaches every minute. That's 60 supply produced every minute. With 72 supply reserved for Drones, that's a total of 130 supply. Zerg needs some supply for Queens, but even if we allot for 5 Queens, that's still 58 extra supply we have free. Assuming we could find a way to trade those Roaches over the course of the minute it takes to be able to produce another round, we'd have extra supply we couldn't afford to fill up with our production. In this case, it would be beneficial to Drone up past 72 (which means additional mining bases would be beneficial) to be able to produce more units. It would even be possible to come up with a number of Drones required to remain maxed, dependent of course on how frequently we intended to trade supply. For example, if we trade a given unit every 2 minutes, those 30 Roaches every minute should be about exactly enough to keep us maxed at all times. It's also worth noting that Roaches are exceedingly cheap per supply, costing only 37.5 minerals per food. If you wanted to continually produce something other than pure Roach, you'd need more income to remain continually maxed. In summary: using Zerg as an example, if the player wants to trade supply more than every 2 minutes, or if the player wants to trade supply every 2 minutes while producing something other than pure Roach, it could be beneficial to make more than 72 workers. Whether or not this hyper-aggressive style of play is valuable is a completely different discussion. | ||
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Ack1027
United States7873 Posts
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