EPT[D][I] Resource Saturation
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Randomaccount#77123
United States5003 Posts
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FlopTurnReaver
Switzerland1980 Posts
Upvote for effort! (mentally) | ||
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Johanaz
Denmark363 Posts
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Randomaccount#77123
United States5003 Posts
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EatThePath
United States3943 Posts
On October 10 2011 08:05 Barrin wrote: Yeah sorry about turning mapmaking - a truly great outlet of creative expression - into a mind-numbingly drawn-out intellectual ordeal  My greatest fun comes in trying to be good at combining the two  Those are the same thing! Which is why combining them is exciting. In one, your brain is doing all the crunching behind the scenes, and you perceive this as fun. In the other, it's out in the open and it's "numbing", unless you acquire a taste for it. ;D Great work putting those graphs together, that's awesome! It'd be really freakin sweet if liquipedia had an interactive tool that let you see a graph like this for a chosen pool of maps (because all their stats are already in the database). In fact it'd be nice if those things were in liquipedia, resources/cell and cells/base. Theory 2... is not wrong, but it's only part of the story. You also have to account for the quantized nature of one of the properties being analyzed: bases come in units of one, never fractions. They also take up roughly the same amount of space uniformly. This means that a smaller map with less cells/base is going to have to be very clever to get open space that isn't imbalanced because it encroaches on early game boundaries that are more or less standard (things like 1-diag main-nat ramp, or easily defendable uncliffable natural). In fact the smaller the map dimension the less viable layout arrangements there are, which is true in general anyway, but even more constrained for heavy resource saturation. Hence the only room for novelty in design is to use weird harass incentives or give the player very few or no alternatives to a defined "balanced" expansion pattern and play strategy. The first 3-4 bases define so much of map balance and map strategy, it is interesting to see these aggregate stats but for smaller maps it's hard for them to say much, if you know what I mean. A map like Shakuras Plateau with 14 bases actually only has 2 "unpinned" bases that aren't related to a start location. So even the bigger maps with 14-16 bases don't escape this because they are usually 4 start locations! Basically what I'm trying to say is that everything is all tied up like pick-up-sticks. Smaller map dimensions amplify this a whole lot. | ||
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