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On February 13 2011 23:59 morimacil wrote:Show nested quote +On February 13 2011 23:11 aksfjh wrote:
To those of you complaining about the "less forgiving" nature of inject, just remember, every other inject is virtually a mule(+4 workers). However, that zerg "mule" is permanent, and compounds with the next. Also, the natural larvae mechanic can give you a new unit every 15s, which requires (production time/15) structures per base for every other race. For example:
If a zerg uses 2 hatches for straight army production, that's 600 minerals in production investment for a roach every 7.5s on average (6 larva every 45s). To get the same stalker production, it takes 4.27 gateways, or 600-750 minerals.
If we take macro mechanics into consideration, 450 minerals gives you a roach every 6.43s (7 larva every 45s). To get the same stalker production with chronoboost, it takes 3-4 gateways, or 450-600 minerals. The difference is inject is always available while chrono may not be available for the protoss since they get 1 chrono for every 1 inject.
As you can see, inject is more of a blessing than a curse. Zerg get so much more out of perfect injects compared to protoss and terran macro mechanics. At the end of the day, having perfect injects is more likely to win you a game than missing injects will cost you one. Thats just such a simplistic view :/ First of all, a hatchery costs 350 minerals, not 300. You have to pay for a drone first before you can get a hatchery. Second, you fail to take into account the fact that unlike a mule, to get 4 workers after an inject, you actually have to buy 4 workers. An inject doesnt give you a free 4 workers, it gives you 4 larva, that you then have the opportunity to use to buy workers.
I admit I wrote much of that in haste. However, after those workers pay for themselves after roughly 1 minute, there is a real gain in income over a mule. The only way this isn't the case is when the zerg is oversaturated.
And you also seem to forget to take into account that anything zerg takes larva. So sure, queen+hatch can match the production of 3-4 gateways. But it certainly cant match the production of 3-4 warpgates, plus a nexus, plus chronoboost, and pylons, and any additional structures. Overlords, gas geysers, expansion hatcheries, roach warren, spine crawlers, and so on, they all take larva to build.
I think you missed my inference of it being a purely offensive hatch. If you used one hatch as an overlord/drone hatch and the other as an army producing hatch.
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morimacil if anyones macro would be perfect we would not have this whole conversation!
After playing some terran recently and watching some t streams i often find the same situation:
After microeing stuff they find themselves with 1k mins and they go back drops 2 mules sink their mins into units and go back to micro. They almost never switch to base during battles to drop a mule or q up supply depots.
Zerg HAS to switch back to 3+ bases to check for larvae and injection. Its like trying to juggle 3 balls while firing a gun. Terran just drops the balls, fires the gun, drinks a diet coke and then starts juggling again, no harm done to his macro.
After looking into my crystal ball i predict that with bigger maps (aka more places to safely expand) we will see the rise of the macro hatch.
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On February 13 2011 06:56 Odoakar wrote:
I feel the protoss players have also started to realize the importance of CB their probes, and doing it as soon as the CB is ready, and all throughout the game. So it will come to the point where it pretty much resembles the inject mechanics - you will have to drop it as soon as your nexus has enough energy, and do so at every nexus you have, keeping you energy constantly low.
Now if only the terran mules had a cooldown so you couldn't just drop dozen of them, but would have to drop them in similar fashion...
Forget the cooldown for mules. Just limit the OC's energy at 75 to keep the Terrans honest haha
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indeed, no one has perfect macro, that is true. But if you want to improve, then perfection should be your goal.
Here is how to improve:
step 1: Notice a problem
step 2: Fix the problem
Avoiding the problem, doesnt help you improve.
If for example, you are unable to macro, to improve, you need to focus on learning to macro.
If instead, you avoid the problem, by for example doing a 6 pool 100% of the time, then sure, it will help right now. Someone who doesnt know how to macro will win more by doing a 6 pool than by trying to macro and failing.
But 6 pooling doesnt make you improve your macro, and extra hatcheries also doesnt help you.
You could also decide for example to make 5 hatcheries and no queens off 2 bases. That way, you dont have to inject, at all. Same principle as your macro hatch, a fix for not being able to inject, that is suboptimal, since you have to spend a lot of extra minerals on it.
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My TvZ strategy is all about constant timing pushes and as a result zerg's queens aren't spitting on hatcheries. You can see the red strips in parts of the game are more or less representative of an attack or something that was happening in which the player's eyes couldn't be focusing on hatcheries. So in essence being attacked as a zerg at a crucial time could be damaging in 2 ways:
Units being lost from the fighting itself.
Potential Units being lost from a missing injection.
as far as fixing it? Well one thing that IS a bit annoying is the delay if you spit asap. There will always be about 2-3 seconds you have to wait, if you minimap spit with multiple queens grouped, your queens will start running around to the wrong hatch.
I don't think it should be changed at all, in fact I think zerg players should really embrace it, their mechanic is pretty different from the other two and powerful in its own regard. If my totally sweet sony walkman doesn't work because I didn't put batteries in, I don't send it back to sony because it isn't playing my Ace of Base cassette. I put batteries turn it on and become a fest djur.
It's kind of one of the reasons I'd like people to post some results of their own and maybe a little of why they lost the game (or won). I don't know if there's a direct correlation to consistent injections and winning/losing, but I know for the other two races building production buildings to build units is (which is what the larva themselves represent).
I've actually been playing zerg all weekend because of this trying see how good I can be about them. I have to say, it's fun and rewarding.
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a macro hatch does not free you from having to inject as well as possible. it just makes the inject mechanism more forgiving, also gives 2 supply, creep spread an overall higher production caps in case. Once you are that perfect, that you feel you don't need it anymore, just omit it. Building a macro hatch does not prevent improvement imho.
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A macro hatch is simply a way say "I'm going to invest 300 minerals and a drone because I know I'll miss injections."
Could you imagine if mules were on 45 second timers, it would be like building an extra command center so you could drop 2 mules at once. Getting my injections down is one of the biggest things I keep trying to improve, and often I find that I get behind enough I can actually work 3 hatches with 2 queens. I do everything I can to stay on it, but remembering to do something every 45 seconds that isn't making units, isn't making drones, gets tough. It is easy to lose track of time in SC... especially when trying to somehow micro around a protoss death ball and not lose everything you have and kill nothing.
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On February 14 2011 03:33 FLuE wrote:
Could you imagine if mules were on 45 second timers, it would be like building an extra command center so you could drop 2 mules at once. Getting my injections down is one of the biggest things I keep trying to improve, and often I find that I get behind enough I can actually work 3 hatches with 2 queens. I do everything I can to stay on it, but remembering to do something every 45 seconds that isn't making units, isn't making drones, gets tough. It is easy to lose track of time in SC... especially when trying to somehow micro around a protoss death ball and not lose everything you have and kill nothing.
I don't want this thread to degenerate into a mule discussion as it is flirting closely with. In essence, a mule IS on a 45 second timer. It mines for 90 seconds and it takes roughly about that for the energy to return. With about 7 seconds leftover, in some cases during that last 7 seconds the mule dies with his precious cargo. The mule however, is an economic advantage. That's all I'll say about the mule and I hope we can keep it regarding larva inject (though I understand talking about 1 macro mechanic is hard to talk about without comparing the two others).
Circling back to the Queens and the injects. The inject represents basically an infrastructure investment. That macro mechanic is in the form of expanding production slots. The mule and chronoboost don't do that. They can help grow the economy, but they can't expand production capacity directly. Sure the money spent from extra probes chronoboosted can be invested in buildings and units later on, the same can be said for a mule. The only difference is that it can be dumped directly.
The "dump" of zerg's macro mechanic only comes after "maturing" so to speak. If you've hit your spits consistently enough you can cash in on that mechanic when you exchange an army around the 18 minute mark and you have 38 larva banked, with another 12+ (I'm assuming 3 hatcheries with consistant spitting) arriving shortly. No other race works like that.
That's Starcraft 2, each race is different and has different strengths. Zerg I would say is fundamentally the hardest to play. For people who want to make that race easier by changing some of these things that make zerg powerful because they can't harness them diretly; well, shame on you I guess. Here you have a race that has a ton of potential at a basic level. And you could be proud you play the hardest race.
I think this is one of the reasons that blizzard has such a difficulty balancing zerg. If zerg is potentially missing around 12-15 (arbitrary number though an educated guess) spits a game, do you balance the units that ARE made around the fact that zerg is losing out on 48-60 units that could be eventually built? Those larva also represent drones that could be built, supply cap increases and of course larva can be represent a 1 to 6 food unit.
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On February 14 2011 00:29 CrumpetGuvnor wrote:Show nested quote +On February 13 2011 06:56 Odoakar wrote:
I feel the protoss players have also started to realize the importance of CB their probes, and doing it as soon as the CB is ready, and all throughout the game. So it will come to the point where it pretty much resembles the inject mechanics - you will have to drop it as soon as your nexus has enough energy, and do so at every nexus you have, keeping you energy constantly low.
Now if only the terran mules had a cooldown so you couldn't just drop dozen of them, but would have to drop them in similar fashion... Forget the cooldown for mules. Just limit the OC's energy at 75 to keep the Terrans honest haha
That's actually not a half-bad suggestion to make the other races macro mechanic less forgiving. Limit the total energy of Nexus and OCs to 75 or 50, and soon they'll be sweating bullets trying to constantly CB/MULE on time.
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Interesting 'Moo' analysis that confirms my suspicions that even the best players in the world (Haypro) miss injections (and a LOT) which is a huge problem because the zerg economy is like compound interest. The sooner you produce the drones, the soon you get the minerals to produce more drones and more expansions which in turn produce more drones... It's a giant feedback loop in which a tiny economic hiccup in the early game (like harass or missed injections) magnifies itself many times fold in the late game.
Solutions...
Folks, we have to consider auto-inject. Ask yourself...is manually clicking the inject button each time a cycle comes up creating diverse and interesting gameplay or is it tedious pointless busywork? Do I buy SC2 just so I can beat my opponent because I kept up with the injection cycles?
If we're not going for an auto-inject option (and for whatever strange reason ergonomic time savers for nonstrategic functions seems to be so unpopular in SC), then we need to make the injection process easy to keep track of and to execute.
Could be...
Hatchery icons (like warpgate) so each hatch is displayed and changes color when injectable. A queen could then actually inject straight onto the icon.
Being able to stack larvae (maybe a limit of 8).
Having dockable hatcheries/queens so when the queen 'docks' it can do integrated commands without having to switch control groups. To defend, the queen would then have to undock with maybe a slight time penalty.
Really the big pain is the control group switching you have to do execute timely injects. If you are doing muta harass the last thing you need is to lose control of your mutas for a couple of seconds while you are dancing around AA looking for gaps in their defense.
APM is scarce and blizzard needs to let players emphasis it on strategic decisions (which are fun) as opposed to monotonous no-brainer decisions in which automation should be enabled).
Build more hatcheries is NOT an answer. The queen is too valuable for it's cost and flexibility to not build and fully utilize.
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I miss wireframe injecting from the beta... made it so much easier. You just grouped your queens and hatches together and just Tab-> V-> Shift click. Done. easy to do every 45 seconds, never had to look away from a battle.
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Missing Inject Larvae is similar to having idle Barracks, Warp Gates, etc. If your Barracks is idle, you've lost the marine that could have come out forever. But if you inject, you can always make the roach, albeit, late (if you forget to make it an egg). In fact, I think, getting supply blocked as Zerg is more forgiving than Terran or Protoss as long as you are Injecting Larvae.
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On February 14 2011 05:18 Klishu wrote:
Missing Inject Larvae is similar to having idle Barracks, Warp Gates, etc. If your Barracks is idle, you've lost the marine that could have come out forever. But if you inject, you can always make the roach, albeit, late (if you forget to make it an egg). In fact, I think, getting supply blocked as Zerg is more forgiving than Terran or Protoss as long as you are Injecting Larvae.
It's less forgiving as zerg...
Say I have injected, and my larva pop, but I am supply blocked.
I inject my larva, build 3 OLs
Since I have 4 larva at hatch, hatch makes 0 larva.
OLs pop
Inject pops
I now have 8 larva at hatch. I have permanently lost 3 larva (the ones that would of been grown naturally at the hatch).
T and P just make the units a bit later.
Z lose larva period which means lost: harvesters, buildings, and units.
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Missing Inject Larvae is similar to having idle Barracks, Warp Gates, etc. If your Barracks is idle, you've lost the marine that could have come out forever
Actually it isn't, at all. This is the problem.
In your example it is zerg forgetting to make units with their larva, that is the same thing. Injecting and forgetting to make a marine are 2 totally different things.
The comparison would be not injecting and forgetting to drop a mule. The difference if you forget to drop a mule, it is ok just drop 2, or 3, or 8. If I miss injections, I can't inject multiple times.
I'm not trying at ALL to compare the mechanics in terms of how they are used, or the advantage. I'm simply saying it is an extra thing to worry about which is very tough. I don't want to nerf mules because I forget to inject. I'm just simply stating between spreading creep, and injecting, Zerg end up w/ these 2 very important features on top of having to do all the other things the other races are trying to do.
I go back to something I posted earlier, perhaps you give queens the ability to spawn single larva on a shorter timer for 10 or 20 energy. They would stack with regular injection and it is still going to be way more energy efficient to do a normal inject on time(4 larva for 25 energy vs. say 2 larva for 20 or 40 energy). But at least you could have a way to get that number from the OP's chart somewhat close between ideal larva injections and not.
Until I saw that graph I never realized how bad the problem really compounds especially in long games. I always figured maybe you'd be a bit behind, but not THAT behind on larva. If the pros are missing injections I certainly will.
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I don't like how important larva inject is to Zerg. My feeling is that Zerg is more or less balanced around its macromechanic, and too much of Zerg macro revolves around properly timed larva injects.
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On February 14 2011 03:33 FLuE wrote:
A macro hatch is simply a way say "I'm going to invest 300 minerals and a drone because I know I'll miss injections."
Could you imagine if mules were on 45 second timers, it would be like building an extra command center so you could drop 2 mules at once. Getting my injections down is one of the biggest things I keep trying to improve, and often I find that I get behind enough I can actually work 3 hatches with 2 queens. I do everything I can to stay on it, but remembering to do something every 45 seconds that isn't making units, isn't making drones, gets tough. It is easy to lose track of time in SC... especially when trying to somehow micro around a protoss death ball and not lose everything you have and kill nothing.
this is too one dimensional, a hatch gives creep spread (without having to drop an inject) + 2 supply. Additionally: even with perfect inject you cannot spend all your money from 2 hatches in case you want to build mass lings or build drones from all your mins. I mostly end up building a 3rd queen to also inject the macro hatch midgame. Just try it, you'll wonder how easy you survive 5+ drone-loss harrass, because you can replenish extremely quick with the increased larvae production. BTW pros build macro hatches also, its not a noob strategy ..
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On February 14 2011 05:51 Schnullerbacke13 wrote:
Additionally: even with perfect inject you cannot spend all your money from 2 hatches in case you want to build mass lings or build drones from all your mins.
This is something that someone smarter than me and with some sort of financial or economics degree
can do the math for. Can we actually say that this is actually true theory? Or is what you are saying based on what we've seen in the past with huge mineral spikes because spits have never been perfect. I'm currently looking at a replay and getting numbers of a game between Ret and tGcBosseR and will be posting that graph by the end of the day.
I'm inclined to say that it is possible to spend all your money from 2 hatches provided you don't miss too many spits, though again, I can't be sure. Spending the larva would be the issue though I think as the game goes on this eventually evens out.
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On February 14 2011 06:17 Sv1 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 14 2011 05:51 Schnullerbacke13 wrote:
Additionally: even with perfect inject you cannot spend all your money from 2 hatches in case you want to build mass lings or build drones from all your mins. This is something that someone smarter than me and with some sort of financial or economics degree can do the math for. Can we actually say that this is actually true theory? Or is what you are saying based on what we've seen in the past with huge mineral spikes because spits have never been perfect. I'm currently looking at a replay and getting numbers of a game between Ret and tGcBosseR and will be posting that graph by the end of the day. I'm inclined to say that it is possible to spend all your money from 2 hatches provided you don't miss too many spits, though again, I can't be sure. Spending the larva would be the issue though I think as the game goes on this eventually evens out.
its basic math: a hatch + queen gives theoretically 10 larvae (perfect inject, instant consume larvae, in practice its ~8) per minute. If you want to build lings/drones only, this is 500 minerals. You can mine ~700-800 minerals with 16 drones from one base (and >800 if you saturate fully).
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On February 14 2011 06:23 Schnullerbacke13 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 14 2011 06:17 Sv1 wrote:On February 14 2011 05:51 Schnullerbacke13 wrote:
Additionally: even with perfect inject you cannot spend all your money from 2 hatches in case you want to build mass lings or build drones from all your mins. This is something that someone smarter than me and with some sort of financial or economics degree can do the math for. Can we actually say that this is actually true theory? Or is what you are saying based on what we've seen in the past with huge mineral spikes because spits have never been perfect. I'm currently looking at a replay and getting numbers of a game between Ret and tGcBosseR and will be posting that graph by the end of the day. I'm inclined to say that it is possible to spend all your money from 2 hatches provided you don't miss too many spits, though again, I can't be sure. Spending the larva would be the issue though I think as the game goes on this eventually evens out. its basic math: a hatch + queen gives theoretically 10 larvae (perfect inject, instant consume larvae, in practice its ~8) per minute. If you want to build lings/drones only, this is 500 minerals. You can mine ~700-800 minerals with 16 drones from one base (and >800 if you saturate fully).
Try building something other than lings and drones?
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Well this is not what I expected....
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EPT
