[G] [D] Zerg Mineral Saturation

Before I begin I'd like to have a little disclaimer. This is my oppinion as a player on mineral saturation. It will not be correct for every situation. These are simply the rules I follow. I'm sharing them here, please do not post along the lines of "Well you made more drones this game!" or "I made less drones and won!" This is not that sort of thread. I am simply stating what I feel to be optimal and wanted to share it with the community. Also this is not about balance.

First a few fun statistics. Once you get more then 24 drones mining on 8 mineral patches ( 3 per patch ) you will not be receiving minerals any quicker than if you had 24 drones. 29>24? The answer is no. Don’t get me wrong, there are times that you should get 29 drones, however you won’t receive any more of a boost to your economy. This is fairly common knowledge, but keep it in mind. The next level of saturation that is a solid amount lies somewhere around 16-20. This level is very very close to the maxed 24 amount of drones, so it provides a large amount of economy, but it’s not quite perfect. A situation that involves this is as follows.. “Player A is a Terran, he has 16-20 scvs on his mineral line in his main base. He does not have an expansion. You can deduce something like 3 barracks and 1 factory can be producing off of this economy(I’m not covering extra orbitals and were assuming he has both gas). Now to do the math, if Player A has 16-20 scvs on his mineral line in his main base and 16-20 scvs on his mineral line at an expansion then he should be able to comfortably be able to produce from 6 barracks and 1 factory and 1 starport. (Note this is not exact because of mules and timings)” Now to give you an example of how this can be used for a zerg player. “I see player A has this 16-20 scv range on 2 bases I can assume he will have a fairly large army, fairly soon. So I will need to deal with it at some point, I would prefer to have something along the lines of a 24 drone saturation on 2 bases, or a 12-16 saturation on 3 bases in order to be economically ahead of Player A and then I can simply produce units to counter his while having a better economy.” I havn’t even discussed 12-16 saturation and lower. However here is a nice chart (without going into gold, or mules … how complicated!.. also ok its not really a chart)

12-16 saturation < 16-20 saturation < 24 saturation 8-12 saturation on 2 bases< 12-16 saturation on 2 bases < 16-20 saturation on 2 bases < 24 saturation on 2 bases < 14-16 saturation on 3 bases and so forth… HOWEVER we now come to a new rule. You DO NOT want to get 3 levels of saturation ahead of your opponent. Versus a competent opponent you will LOSE. (This considers you are playing someone of equal level and you haven’t killed his army 10 times and are about to win the game. 12-16 saturation implies that you have 12-16 drones mining on 8 blue mineral patches.. and so on)

An example, your opponent has 12-16 saturation (1 worker on some patches, 2 on most) you have 12-16 saturation on 2 bases! That means you have almost double the economy of your opponent, shouldn’t that be good?! In some rare lucky cases you can live, however if your opponent has cut workers much much earlier and has produced a huge army, you won’t be ready for it because you will simply have too many workers. The same goes for most statistics in this 3 level rule. You do not want 24 saturation on each base, while your opponent only has one base saturated, you want 2 levels ahead. 2 Levels ahead is where you want to hit, no higher. 1 level ahead, is generally fine and you can find an advantage there, but you want 2. (This applies for Zerg vs. [Any race that isn’t Zerg], it does not apply for Zerg vs Zerg. ) These are the basics, I won’t blame you if you skip ahead a bit now as I’m about to get into race specific and small information such as map position, race specifics and gold minerals.

For vs Terran we add in these pesky little units called Mules.

About Mule Being About Equal to 4 SCVs
+ Show Spoiler +

Terran get these every 50 energy (I can’t be exact on times for Terran, I simply do not know enough to get exact). However I do know that a Mule mines at approximately the same rate as 4 scvs. So were going to assume that depending on how many orbital commands they will have 4 more added on to their saturation. For playing against a Terran the saturation rules differ somewhat. If you have a 12-16 saturation on 2 bases and they have a 24 saturation on 1 base, you are not that far ahead, in fact you are barely ahead at all. The reason for this is when you play against Terran they have different levels of saturation. They can go OVER the 24 workers on a mineral patch rule. Terran depending on how many orbitals can go up to something like 32 workers on 8 mineral patches and it will still be optimum. (24 scvs and 2 mules) 32 workers is VERY similar to 14-16 on each patch, but still a little behind. However as a zerg you want to be 2 levels ahead and this is tricky. If they have 2 orbitals in their base you want to adjust for this as well if you can scout it. So the vs Terran mineral saturation rules look something like this….
12-16 < 16-20 < 20-24 <8-12 (2 base) < 28 < 32 < 12-16 (2base) < 16-20 (2base) < 20-24 (2base) and so on….

So to explain where you want to be as a Zerg  Opponent has 12-16, you would be happy at 16-20 and just about perfect at 20-24. You want their number to coincide with your number, for instance if they are at 12, you would like 20. If on the other hand they are at 16 you would want to be at 24. Again we have to include mules in this calculation and generally staying one saturation level ahead of Terran in the early game is just about all we can hope for. This section is very important to when to make drones and when not to make them in general. Again this does not at all apply for ZvZ.

Now onto GOLD expansions. These expansion are GOLD, and as we know Terrans like shiny things. Our goal is to keep them away from shiny things. Once they get on gold, their minerals can skyrocket. To give a good gold mineral vs low mineral saturation point lets discuss this a bit. Scvs and drones mine 5 minerals from a regular expansion and 7 from a gold expansion. Having a gold is then like having 1 base and 2/5 of another base. The main benefit of mules here increases. Mules here are not mining from simply one base, but are mining from 1 2/5 bases making them even more powerful. The downside to the gold expansion is always that there are only 6 mineral patches. So 18 is the most workers you can put on a gold expansion to take advantage of it.

Terran is the ONLY RACE that can abuse gold. THEY can put AS MANY WORKERS as they want on the gold expansion. They can have the original 18 scvs and by all means if you take the gold, simply send all 18 of your scvs from other bases to their, (Why not?) and THEN they can call down Mules. Mules can then bring this 18 up to say 36. Well that’s only 36 miners, and I mean you have to balance with mules anyway right? WRONG it’s NOT just 36. Its 36 mining on 1 2/5 bases. So let’s do a little bit of math here. 36 x 1 2/5 is 36 + (3.6x4) 14.4 so its 50.4 workers. WOW that scales a bit eh? So by simply having a gold expansion and 3 orbital commands (or just enough energy to toss down 4-5 mules often they can raise their worker count through the roof on saturation. To be perfectly honest in a macro game I cannot think of a way to keep up and scale with this. If we take the gold and have an extra base saturated is just about our only hope. Keep in mind if they have 38 workers (on gold and 20 being 5 mules) and say 16-20 saturation on 2 others bases (a common occurrence) that’s 78 workers for Terran, only taking up 58 supply. We on the other hand will have to have to levels ahead of that, which for them is something like 16-20 on 4 bases, so we’ll need 24 saturation on 4 bases or 16-20 on 5 bases, or something like that, however we don’t have mules to free up supply, so we will simply have to waste 90 supply on drones allowing Terran to have basically a higher supply cap. This is the main problem you must contend with when trying to stay ahead of a Terran in saturation on maps with gold bases. It is VERY difficult. Luckily mules do NOT mine gas, so we can gain a foothold there.

We’ve discussed mules and Gold expansions a little bit. If you ever let a Terran get 2 Golds.. well I’m not even going to go there and may you have peace my brother. Onto gas saturation. This part gets to be short and sweet. However as many posts about mineral saturation as there are, there are very few posts on gas saturation. We can all figure out fairly quickly that the optimum is to have 3 workers mining a vespene geyser. So how can this be complicated? Well there are several ways. I’m not going to cover build orders with gas removal timings and the like, but I simply want to go into general situations. Sense we are still under the “Terran” side of things lets discuss why a Werran would mine vespene. I’m going to need to discuss why we as Zergs mine vespene, but that will probably be elsewhere. Terrans can make SCVs and Marines and Hellions and most tier 1 buildings (Supply, Barracks, Command Center) with only minerals. These are the things that Terrans will be producing most of if they don’t take their gas early. This may seem like common knowledge, but it has a deeper impact.

If you can have an overlord above the Terran’s gas, or near the Terran’s gas you can find out if they are mining it with 3 and if they have both gas. In the openings of games in close air positions, you definitely NEED to have overlords watching for when he takes his vespene. If he ever removes scvs from vespene you can be fairly certain there are no banshees, tanks or vikings etc. on the way. Generally if a Terran removes workers from gas he’s going for a quick command center timing with hellions, or a marine all in, or some sort of build that isn’t standard. (Bunker banks for instance! If you don’t know what a bunker bank is, don’t worry about it XD!) So then you can somewhat get a tell on what the Terran is planning on doing. If you can see his expansions gas you can also gain A LOT of information. If a Terran player is planning on doing a 2 base timing push, he generally will not be mining gas at his expansion. (At least not at all of them)

Some examples of this are as follows. Marine tank 2 base push – Does not require 4 gas. Marine Marauder push – Does not require 4 gas. Hellion marine medivac push – Does not require 4 gas. Any combination of Marines, Marauders, Hellions, a few tanks, and a few medivacs – Does not require 4 gas. So, if you see he has not taken his 4 gasses (the 2 at his natural, you can assume he is doing something with these units in general). Builds that Terrans will do with 4 gas. Banshees with or without cloak, Tanks used defensively into Mech (Thor Tank Hellion), Medivac drops into macro, Thors mixed in with marine marauder, Heavy upgrades on bio / Heavy upgrades on Mech. (If they are securing a 3rd base it can be done either way.) You want to be watching this with an overlord on a cliff, or an overlord out of range of being shot by marines. If you have to suicide an overlord that’s fine to get this information. (Only do that if you don’t know what’s going on AND try and suicide a ling either at the same time or before, for the information. So basically, if they take their gas late, watch out for early marine / hellion attacks, if they take it early watch out for medivacs, blue flame hellions and banshees. (I didn’t really go into blue flame that much because it can be used either way as well).

Ok. Look at me. Look at the distance to your opponent’s base. Look back at me. How far away is the opponent? Do you want your opponent to be as close as me? NO AS ZERG YOU DO NOT. The farther away your opponent is, the more levels of saturation you can get above your opponent. (AKA good for Zerg!) If your opponent literally spawned right next to you, you should 6 pool. If your opponent spawns really really really far away, just take like 4 hatches before spawn and get a huge economy. However on most maps such as Xel’naga, the rules I’ve listed apply. On maps such as Delta Quadrant, Steppes, and so on you really can’t get even 2 saturation levels ahead of your opponent. 1 level ahead is about good, and 2 is risky. Basically the closer you are to your opponent, the more units you have to make. You want to make sure you have enough units that WHENEVER your opponent moves out we can be safe. And quite honestly this is a pure guessing game on our part in really close maps. Good scouting helps, but…. It’s still really difficult. This is a major reason close positions have been removed in most tournament games.

The basic information for Mineral Saturation is still very sound for Protoss, but here are a few helpful tips. Protoss doesn’t care much for minerals. If you give a Protoss the gold, he really doesn’t need it. If you give a Protoss 2 blue mineral patches he might not even mine the minerals. What a Protoss REALLY needs to destroy Zerg in general is vespene gas. (Clearly they need minerals as well, but who is scared by non upgraded Protoss Warpgate units?) So, in cases where there are rich vespene geysers, we need to keep Protoss away. We need to minimize simply the amount of bases Protoss has not because of the minerals, but because of the gas. Protoss will ALMOST NEVER win a fight because they had 30 supply of zealots mixed into their army. However the Protoss will ALMOST ALWAYS win a fight because they had 30 supply of colossus mixed into their army. Sure colossus takes minerals as well, but the vespene gas is the real problem for Protoss making those units.

When you’re watching your opponent you want to find out his gas timings as well. With Protoss you also want to count and this is important : COUNT HIS SENTRIES, CHECK THEIR ENERGY. THIS WILL WIN YOU GAMES. THIS WILL LOSE YOU GAMES. Were now going to discuss what this sentry count means, what the energy amount means and basically how in the world this will help you win or lose!
Ok. This part is going to be some guess work and NOT approximate numbers, but I feel it Is sound enough to post.

The standard build for Protoss at high and low levels is simply a 3 gate expansion. What this entails is the Protoss makes units that cost low minerals (sentries) and uses these to defend while he creates his expansion and lots of probes (mineral heavy). Now, let’s look at how we can tell if he is pretending to do this and actually doing something else. If we can figure out whether or not he’s faking it we can defend from the hidden DT tech, Stargate tech, 4 gate and so on. (I hope the Protoss building is called Stargate lol!) (This part will change based on the new patch changes as far as I can tell, so it’s only viable until then…. I’ll have to adjust whenever that comes out!)

Before Warpgate finishes, the Protoss should have approximately 1-2 zealots and 2-4 sentries and maybe 1 stalker. (You need to send an overlord around the side to make sure they take their second gas. If you can’t see that, then I recommend you drone scout to see if they have their second gas or not, because if they don’t take it early I can say they are very likely going to do a 4 gate rush. ) So now that the Protoss has 1-2 zealots and 2-4 sentries and maybe 1 stalker you need to watch carefully. You should be constantly sending a Zergling up his ramp just to poke and make sure these units are there. If you only see zealots + stalkers, THERE WILL BE A RUSH, if you only see 1 sentry and Warpgate is done (75% of the time THERE WILL BE A RUSH) Now that Warpgate research is done you want to keep checking with a ling to MAKE SURE they made 3 more sentries. If they did not make EXACTLY 3 more sentries then they had before Warpgate finished something fishy is up. If they made 2 sentries and 1 zealot, very likely something fishy is up. Keep all of this in mind it’s vastly important. You MUST count sentries throughout the entire early opening of ZvP. If you don’t see the proper amount, subtract it and you’ll realize how much gas they can be using on other things. (2 sentries less than normal? Stargate with a voidray seems like a good choice. 3 or more sentries missing? Seems like DT or phoenix build. No sentries, or a lot of sentries and a lot of stalkers zealots? It’s probably going to be a 4 gate or some sort of early pressure.

This is simply how to judge the early game by unit totals. You also want to make sure that the sentries all have different amounts of energy. If they all have the same amount of energy that means he simply warped them all in at the same time. If you ever see 4 sentries with the same energy that means he has 4 gates. If you never see 2 sentries with the same amount of energy, expect something tricky. These are things people rarely look at because it requires high apm, but people should be watching these things!

(As I’m writing this something hilarious is happening next to me. There is this little old lady with her hair dyed orange and a regular library worker trying to help her. She is having problems on the library computer she can’t get on her mail ID. It is a yahoo mail account. She is telling the worker that the library computers are not allowing her onto her mail ID. She expects this worker to know HER password and to know her ACCOUNT. She KEEPS telling him “nono I have it all written down here”. She thinks it’s HIS fault that she doesn’t remember her password correctly. It is rather hilarious lol (Also upon re-reading somewhat mean). This has been going on for like 3 minutes in that lovely recorder sort of setting. She says the same thing and he replies No I do not know how to get on this, it is your personal account not the libraries and she simply states “see I have the password written down right here, but I can’t get on. LOL its great!)