[Q] Order of larva use

On May 04 2011 02:52 Kambing wrote:


TL;DR: I just realized I wrote too much for a simple answer. Easy to get me talking about something I've been looking into I suppose. In short, you will get roughly even production but the specifics are unknown.

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This is actually somewhat of an open question that I need to sit down and figure out one of these days. Here's what I do know via the testing I've done in the past:

1) The order in which you build larva from your hatches is in-order (top-left to bottom right) from the selection of larva obtained when you press the Select Larva command on a set of hatches. So the problem is really determining what order the game places your larva in when you press that button.

2) From observation, it appears that the game smartly orders larva in a group (via Select Larva) so that if there is an equal amount of larva among your hatches, then the sequence of larva in the selection is roughly in a round-robin style . That is, if you have three hatches, then such a selection is possible:

2 1 3 | 3 1 2 | 2 1 3 | ...

where the pipes ('|') are visual aids in demarcating the groups of larva I'm talking about. So if you produce 3N units, then those 3N units will be distributed evenly across your 3 hatches.

I say roughly because I've seen instances such as:

2 1 2 3 1 3 |

where 2 consecutive larva from one hatch appear before larva from the other two hatches in a sequence, but never 3. So that gives me reason to believe that there is some smart grouping here rather than the sequence being completely random.

3) The sequence of larva you get from a selection is not stable. That is, new larva are not necessarily appended to the end of the sequence. For example, if you produce all larva at one hatch but not the other 2 hatches, then the new larva at that first hatch will be inserted into the sequence of larva so that it is roughly round-robin as described before.

Other than those 3 things, I don't know the precise algorithm that larva is ordered (in general, any selection of units of the same type) which affects whether we get an even distribution with the one production hotkey method. In particular, I only looked at un-injected hatches for simplicity's sake as injections can mess up the ordering (but shouldn't fundamentally change how things are ordered).

Besides all these technicalities, we can probably say for certain that the distribution of units is "even enough" for most practical purposes.

On May 06 2011 06:41 Gao Xi wrote:
i cant get used to using the backspace key (even if it remapped). so i just hotkey my hatches individually and have a hotkey for all my hatches together

On May 05 2011 20:55 dredlockz wrote:
If you like having all your hatcheries in one hotkey there is a trick to select a specific hatchery without having them individually hotkeyed or having to click on the minimap. Actually there's two ways:

1.- Backspace (you should remap that hotkey). to cycle through your hatcheries and select what you want made in each one faster than clicking on the minimap.

2.- Save Camera Position: I always save the camera positions for each of my hatcheries. I remapped Ctrl+F1 to F6. So F1 takes you to your main, F2 to your natural and so on.


I actually end up just using F1 and F2 for main and natural. And the backspace method when I have 3+ hatcheries.

On May 06 2011 15:56 ssartor wrote:
From my experience, I have found that when you have two bases, before queens are out, when you make units the larvae from the hatch that has the most is the one that is used first. More bases and more larvae stored up makes it more complicated though and I'm not sure what happens then. But its nice that its smart enough to do that though, that way if a hatch has three and another has two the three hatch will make first therefore letting it produce more larvae.