3 workers per mineral field is the best thing right?, so 1 normal base should contain 24 workers per mineral field.. my question is if u have an expansion with 12 workers for each base does that actually get minerals faster then when u have 24 in one base mining? i ask this cause i always thought that when a 3rd worker is mining he may actually have to wait 1-2 seconds before the 2nd worker finishes mining ... if this makes any sense.
im a zerg player and i feel that microing for zerg is a whole lot ezier than macroing. I dont know if pro zerg players feel this way, but this is just how i feel when i play zerg.
@joelpalkia I feel the opposite. Its easy to pump out a swarm but i fong it hard to control them all in an effective way... Maybe we could learn something from each other? :)
nah terran is pretty easy once you learn how much you can support based on how many bases you have.. 1 base = 3 rax, 2 base = 5 rax, then add a factory/starport and your great. Then you can swap some addons around and build additional buildings if you need different units instead of infantry.
I have 100 wins for P and Z, and 250+ for T. Im a diamond player, and trust me when i say this, T macro is hardest to keep up with. You have to keep up with your production buildings, and they take allot of time to build if your behind, wile your scrambling to pump as much as possible from the little production you have. Also, with mules you can all of a sudden have an extreem cash of minerals for multiple reasons. While the majority cry over T, they fail to realize there the hardest race toplay
Please make a QandA about BO's. you could even split that up into the 6 matchups, you could evaluate which BOs are advantageous against which others, and give the respective timings. i know this is a lot of research but there is no need to hurry. Also, i love your wc3 vods because i dont really know wc3.
When I play zerg, I almost always get too many minerals. It's incredibly difficult to dump your minerals in zerglings since they're so cheap. I watch game casts all the time, I still have no clue how the pros are keeping their minerals low with fully saturated mining bases.
@bionikspoon They are not fully saturating each base. They fully sat the first, then expand. This is good because two bases with 30 drones > one base with 30 drones. Also think this way, if one base gets attacked you can lose 30 drones, or 15 depending if you have your units spread between two bases.
@bionikspoon If you find that you are swimming in minerals, and particularly if you want to produce a lot of low-gas units like roaches, zerglings, or even hydras, then you should put extra hatcheries in your own base. You can put them all in a row so that one queen can spawn larvae for two hatcheries. In-base extra hatcheries are pretty much a necessity if you find yourself gas-locked on two bases into the mid-game and just want to pump roaches or zerglings until you can secure some more gas.
Really nice! I'd love to see a summaries considering a few common builds; for example, if I run 2 gate + Robo, what would be the optimal number of production buildings to invest in when I expand?
@jojopojo333 here's a quick splash guide split into 500 character chunks:
Part 1:
nukes and siege tanks have 3 damage areas: 100%, 50% and 25% damage done. For tank, the 1/2 range seems to be the biggest, while a nuke will deal full damage in most of the area.
Ultralisk seems to have only 2 areas in my experiments: 100%, which is very small (rarely hitting more than initial target) and 33.3...% (1/3), which has a HUGE radius (~5 range). However, 1/4 of the area is the ultra itself and in a fight a lot more ground will be occupied by friendly troops.
Hellions and colossi both do 100% line damage mitigated by armor. There are no zones to talk about, it should be noted, however, that a hellion has 5 attack range, but 6 splash range.
Finally, there are abilities such as fungal growth and psi storm. These do full damage in entire area and can not be mitigated by any means but evading them.
P.S.: the Thor AA is pretty weird in its behavior, but I am fairly confident it is just like nuke, i.e. fairly big 100% radius, very small 1/2 radius; I have not managed to get a 1/4 shot with a Thor. I got one 75% hit, which I believe were 2 100% and 2 50% hits from 1 volley. As I said, Thor is hard to test :)
@ab11de It's a bit more tricky with gas, because the cap (224 per base) is quite limiting; so while it will not earn you any interest, it may be reasonable to save up for later stages if your gameplan is gas intensive.
@Mr42 yes, saving it up absolutely makes sense in order to quickly pump out gas-intensive mid- and late-game units, but don't say that it earns interest because it doesn't. I skipped a little bit in the beginning and then stopped the video completely as soon as I heard this nonsense. It's so ridiculous when someone is trying to make something sound more complicated and official than it really is.
@p0801 not quite, as 22 workers per normal-yield base is more efficient.
Assuming you're at or near 200/200, about 80 workers on 4 bases (there is a good chance one will be a gold) is a very healthy economy/army balance supply wise with very reasonable minerals-to-gas ratio and overall income per minute.
Really great stuff, man...People can just look your videos and polish their macro, and as macro is the most needed thing in SC2 for starters, your videos are great...!
Crota I think you have some of your numbers wrong. I did a similar spreadsheet and ran into a similar problem that I didn't sync the game speed with the numbers i was giving for build time and mineral economy. First of all with the normal game speed which equates 1 game time unit into 1 second the build time for a zealot is 33 (23 with a warpgate) but also the mineral economy is like what you said 800 (828 was my number). Just make sure you're getting both numbers on the same game speed ^^.
This was quite helpful. The one thing you might have wanted to mention is when you train a mix of units, you want an average of the optimal number of buildings for each of those units. Not quite sure but like with Protoss you might stick with a 3 gate because you won't just be training zealots, but at the same time you might want more gates because of imperfect macro haha.
One more thing about AtK from your prev video: you should scale by attack speed to get "Time to Kill".
This was very helpful. But people usually just follow a good rule of thumb such as "4 gates per base" or "3 gates + 1 robo per base." But this should give some players the a fundamental understanding and perhaps come up with their own super efficient builds! Maybe.
@piquibonitao 3 harvesters per patch is the hard cap, 2+ harvesters per patch has some serious diminishing returns, though (24 harvesters between 2 bases mine noticeably faster than 24 harvesters on 1 base)
Actually for Zerg it's a lot more efficient to have 1.5 hatcheries per mining base to have enough larvae to keep up with your mining, otherwise you'll just bank resources and not be able to spawn units.
WTF! this is harder than my calculus lecture! You know with skills I don't care how I spend money. Key is if you know how to map control and make right units.
my impression is that its best to get as many workers as possible and once you start reaching full saturation you should expand so you can dump your extra workers into a new patch. So rather than thinking of it as 24 per expo think of it as 50-60 across your 2-3 working expos.
Although this is coming from a non-pro random guy, so take it with a grain of salt.
Hi Crota, I just played one of the single game challenges and in the beginning of it they had a hint stating that the most efficient way to mine minerals was to have three scvs on each mineral patch. I have always thought that it was two. Do you know what the best number is?
@Mrydberg87 3 per node is a full saturation... but the fact of the matter is that after the 2 per node mark, when you start getting into the 20+ miner range, you get diminishing returns per each additional worker, up until the full saturation of 3 per node... that being said, once you reach that number of workers, you should have expanded by that time.
@Mrydberg87 It's three, however with three, you start to have diminishing returns. I don't know the exact math, but with 3 workers on a single patch you gain more minerals but less per worker trip. It is best to have 3 on a patch.
As a zerg player ive been implementing the C (shift) technique for about the first 20 supply or so and ive noticed a huge increase in surplus minerals. (typically 100-300 extra min) So much so I'd often make an in base hatch as well as an expansion to keep up with army and drone production. Your info made me realize how inefficient my macro really is and how much there still is to improve on eco.
You forgot about supply, hatchery's don't make more larvae if they have more then 3 larvae so it's closer to about 8 larvae per minute, but a zerg will never be able to keep up with injections perfectly, apart from that thanks man.
Did i miss something? you said you get 6 more larve with a queen, but doesnt each spawn make 4 larve? so assuming larve pops twice a game minute, thatd be 8 larve from queens, let me know where i went wrong if the above is incorrect :D ty
your voice sounds as if you had a lot of spit in your mouth all the time - awkward..
honktonksponk 1 year ago
7 people suck dick
FlaminStarcraft 1 year ago
3 workers per mineral field is the best thing right?, so 1 normal base should contain 24 workers per mineral field.. my question is if u have an expansion with 12 workers for each base does that actually get minerals faster then when u have 24 in one base mining? i ask this cause i always thought that when a 3rd worker is mining he may actually have to wait 1-2 seconds before the 2nd worker finishes mining ... if this makes any sense.
decimalss 1 year ago
So essentially Warp Gate gives you an automatic Chrono Boost on every unit.
Mattmon2 1 year ago
@Mattmon2 Ye aswell as the freedom to make thme everywhere you got pylon power :)
TheKungFuBEAR 1 year ago
im a zerg player and i feel that microing for zerg is a whole lot ezier than macroing. I dont know if pro zerg players feel this way, but this is just how i feel when i play zerg.
joelpalkia 1 year ago
@joelpalkia I feel the opposite. Its easy to pump out a swarm but i fong it hard to control them all in an effective way... Maybe we could learn something from each other? :)
TheKungFuBEAR 1 year ago
yeah, more often gas is the limiting factor though esp. late game with high tech. Pls, pls do a separate video for gas
kb27787 1 year ago
Would it be possible for you to share the spreadsheet you used to create these numbers? I'd like to add the gas calculations for the different units.
kevinkyao 1 year ago
QUESTION: What's the technique behind waypoints for workers to mine 7% more effective. My attention got called to by Day9 Daily #188 at 2:40.
Friedrich713 1 year ago
@Friedrich713 Doesn't matter - its been fixed in Patch 1.1.1
BlizShouter 1 year ago 2
i wIll want a remix on you from mike realm :)
makemebad35awsome4 1 year ago
crota mans fix the chart for the patch
miamibadboi 1 year ago
You should write sun Tzu art of war SC2 style.
EntranceDenied 1 year ago 3
nah terran is pretty easy once you learn how much you can support based on how many bases you have.. 1 base = 3 rax, 2 base = 5 rax, then add a factory/starport and your great. Then you can swap some addons around and build additional buildings if you need different units instead of infantry.
SuperVeetz 1 year ago
I have 100 wins for P and Z, and 250+ for T. Im a diamond player, and trust me when i say this, T macro is hardest to keep up with. You have to keep up with your production buildings, and they take allot of time to build if your behind, wile your scrambling to pump as much as possible from the little production you have. Also, with mules you can all of a sudden have an extreem cash of minerals for multiple reasons. While the majority cry over T, they fail to realize there the hardest race toplay
thewrathofshane 1 year ago
@thewrathofshane im a good platinum terran and it seems we have completely different opinions o.O
RubenMGMatos 1 year ago
V. informative. Heres a good Q&A. movement speed. It'll be good to know which units could out run which, for good harras
StMaule 1 year ago
is the highest league diamond or onyx
KillaTtheboss 1 year ago
what do you mean by "game minute"?
is it something like at fastest 1 actual minute (am) = 1.33 game minute (gm)?
is the apm tab calculated based on am or gm?
so for example on fastest if it is gm then actual apm would be equal to 1.33*apm?
jalalhugo 1 year ago
Please make a QandA about BO's. you could even split that up into the 6 matchups, you could evaluate which BOs are advantageous against which others, and give the respective timings. i know this is a lot of research but there is no need to hurry. Also, i love your wc3 vods because i dont really know wc3.
jie900 1 year ago
When I play zerg, I almost always get too many minerals. It's incredibly difficult to dump your minerals in zerglings since they're so cheap. I watch game casts all the time, I still have no clue how the pros are keeping their minerals low with fully saturated mining bases.
bionikspoon 1 year ago
@bionikspoon They are not fully saturating each base. They fully sat the first, then expand. This is good because two bases with 30 drones > one base with 30 drones. Also think this way, if one base gets attacked you can lose 30 drones, or 15 depending if you have your units spread between two bases.
humenbean 1 year ago
@bionikspoon If you find that you are swimming in minerals, and particularly if you want to produce a lot of low-gas units like roaches, zerglings, or even hydras, then you should put extra hatcheries in your own base. You can put them all in a row so that one queen can spawn larvae for two hatcheries. In-base extra hatcheries are pretty much a necessity if you find yourself gas-locked on two bases into the mid-game and just want to pump roaches or zerglings until you can secure some more gas.
MrAchambe 1 year ago
Really nice! I'd love to see a summaries considering a few common builds; for example, if I run 2 gate + Robo, what would be the optimal number of production buildings to invest in when I expand?
bionikspoon 1 year ago
Would having 400 minerals stashed be good? So you can make a quick nexus/hatchery/command center if needed?
xShadowsaur 1 year ago
Nice =D
JamezNumber1 1 year ago
Your behind the #s posts rock!
snaxlepaxle 1 year ago
did any one else pick up on the joke "50 minerals is alot of money?"
hint Russle peters
bigbangXxXx 1 year ago
how many minerals do you get with 16/17/18/.../24 harvesters on minerals?
fotonator 1 year ago
set 0.00 will be lot easier to see
but excellent information. :D
K55C 1 year ago
nice videos crota, keep it up!
chaNo121 1 year ago
Dont forget the extra 5 sec of warping from warp gate. !
adrianodekker 1 year ago
@adrianodekker
The extra 5 sec make no difference for the calculation as the cooldown starts as you warp them not at the end of the warp.
ThisNameIsBanned 1 year ago
@tripgod 800 for 1 base, 24 workers on minerals, 33.33 minerals per minute for 1 worker
gwith 1 year ago
do a why are terran so op
69lol69 1 year ago
How many minerals can be gathered from one worker in one game minute?
TRiPgod 1 year ago
Hey man, love your Q&As. I learn more from them than your shoutcasts
RyuBao 1 year ago
Thanks for the instructional videos Crota, these are very informative.
ronkrepps 1 year ago
do one for splash damage
jojopojo333 1 year ago
@jojopojo333 here's a quick splash guide split into 500 character chunks:
Part 1:
nukes and siege tanks have 3 damage areas: 100%, 50% and 25% damage done. For tank, the 1/2 range seems to be the biggest, while a nuke will deal full damage in most of the area.
Mr42 1 year ago
@jojopojo333 Part 2:
Ultralisk seems to have only 2 areas in my experiments: 100%, which is very small (rarely hitting more than initial target) and 33.3...% (1/3), which has a HUGE radius (~5 range). However, 1/4 of the area is the ultra itself and in a fight a lot more ground will be occupied by friendly troops.
Hellions and colossi both do 100% line damage mitigated by armor. There are no zones to talk about, it should be noted, however, that a hellion has 5 attack range, but 6 splash range.
Mr42 1 year ago
@jojopojo333 Part 3:
Finally, there are abilities such as fungal growth and psi storm. These do full damage in entire area and can not be mitigated by any means but evading them.
P.S.: the Thor AA is pretty weird in its behavior, but I am fairly confident it is just like nuke, i.e. fairly big 100% radius, very small 1/2 radius; I have not managed to get a 1/4 shot with a Thor. I got one 75% hit, which I believe were 2 100% and 2 50% hits from 1 volley. As I said, Thor is hard to test :)
Mr42 1 year ago
You can save your gas, but it stays the same - it doesn't earn you interest.
ab11de 1 year ago
@ab11de It's a bit more tricky with gas, because the cap (224 per base) is quite limiting; so while it will not earn you any interest, it may be reasonable to save up for later stages if your gameplan is gas intensive.
With minerals it's a bit easier :)
Mr42 1 year ago
@Mr42 yes, saving it up absolutely makes sense in order to quickly pump out gas-intensive mid- and late-game units, but don't say that it earns interest because it doesn't. I skipped a little bit in the beginning and then stopped the video completely as soon as I heard this nonsense. It's so ridiculous when someone is trying to make something sound more complicated and official than it really is.
ab11de 1 year ago
DPS
draphin8 1 year ago
Next q and a unit eps
draphin8 1 year ago
mothership is missing. what if i want to know how many nexuses i need for mass mothership?? ;)
Hardc0re73 1 year ago
Warp Prism :)
DaZeMW2 1 year ago
i watch this vid in 720p -_-
schnellnful 1 year ago
also, don't stop training workers until you have 4 bases mineing ;D
Shuubbie 1 year ago
@Shuubbie 120 workers? :D
p0801 1 year ago
@p0801 :D Maybe 85ish :D
Shuubbie 1 year ago
@p0801 not quite, as 22 workers per normal-yield base is more efficient.
Assuming you're at or near 200/200, about 80 workers on 4 bases (there is a good chance one will be a gold) is a very healthy economy/army balance supply wise with very reasonable minerals-to-gas ratio and overall income per minute.
Mr42 1 year ago
is it possible to Download as Pdf?
Shuubbie 1 year ago
Really great stuff, man...People can just look your videos and polish their macro, and as macro is the most needed thing in SC2 for starters, your videos are great...!
Thanks
kumaar1000s 1 year ago
Crota I think you have some of your numbers wrong. I did a similar spreadsheet and ran into a similar problem that I didn't sync the game speed with the numbers i was giving for build time and mineral economy. First of all with the normal game speed which equates 1 game time unit into 1 second the build time for a zealot is 33 (23 with a warpgate) but also the mineral economy is like what you said 800 (828 was my number). Just make sure you're getting both numbers on the same game speed ^^.
Aelidas 1 year ago
Very helpful, as always very nice work with the charts ;)
slakers100 1 year ago
thx
Menderen 1 year ago
This was quite helpful. The one thing you might have wanted to mention is when you train a mix of units, you want an average of the optimal number of buildings for each of those units. Not quite sure but like with Protoss you might stick with a 3 gate because you won't just be training zealots, but at the same time you might want more gates because of imperfect macro haha.
One more thing about AtK from your prev video: you should scale by attack speed to get "Time to Kill".
divineiniquity 1 year ago
Crota, did you take into account that you also have to build supply depots, pylons and overloards?
Delpifo 1 year ago
stop watching that minerals shit and go to school dudes..
i even dont listen to the teacher when they give me charts like this : D
DerUnbekannteFremde 1 year ago
222 likes 2 dislikes Lol
sibenikkk 1 year ago
2 people need more minerals.
700007123 1 year ago 9
I love how SC2 teaches me economics :)
bendyamin86 1 year ago 4
Who spotted that the mothership was not included
KostadinovAl 1 year ago 2
This was very helpful. But people usually just follow a good rule of thumb such as "4 gates per base" or "3 gates + 1 robo per base." But this should give some players the a fundamental understanding and perhaps come up with their own super efficient builds! Maybe.
sor3999 1 year ago
You're my fuckin hero crota
Taurenspoon 1 year ago 3
wow one dislike... what a loser...
pimpeth 1 year ago
@pimpeth Probably a poor macro guy ::( so hard to understand basics of Sc2
rawenkeke 1 year ago
@pimpeth
That's probably another sc2 commentor. =)
evilpuppy 1 year ago
How many harvesters do I need to saturate a mineral spot?
piquibonitao 1 year ago
@piquibonitao 3 harvesters per mineral patch = saturated.
DevilsTreasure 1 year ago
@piquibonitao 20 for 8 patches (the typical base).
HydraliskX 1 year ago
@piquibonitao 3 harvesters per patch is the hard cap, 2+ harvesters per patch has some serious diminishing returns, though (24 harvesters between 2 bases mine noticeably faster than 24 harvesters on 1 base)
Mr42 1 year ago
great vid, should have included gas though to make sure both constraints were on it
JohnMKow 1 year ago
Can someone sticky this for SC2 players? Oh wait youtube doesn't have this function...
People, Like Crota's vids so that more noobs can be save from total humiliation!
k1awdttt 1 year ago
Actually for Zerg it's a lot more efficient to have 1.5 hatcheries per mining base to have enough larvae to keep up with your mining, otherwise you'll just bank resources and not be able to spawn units.
CristyS89 1 year ago
your my hero crota =D
DrakHBJ 1 year ago
WTF! this is harder than my calculus lecture! You know with skills I don't care how I spend money. Key is if you know how to map control and make right units.
ny1fanta 1 year ago
@ny1fanta There must be a balance between both macro and micro. You won't hold map control for long if your opponent overruns you.
DevilsTreasure 1 year ago
my impression is that its best to get as many workers as possible and once you start reaching full saturation you should expand so you can dump your extra workers into a new patch. So rather than thinking of it as 24 per expo think of it as 50-60 across your 2-3 working expos.
Although this is coming from a non-pro random guy, so take it with a grain of salt.
cerevox 1 year ago
Hi Crota, I just played one of the single game challenges and in the beginning of it they had a hint stating that the most efficient way to mine minerals was to have three scvs on each mineral patch. I have always thought that it was two. Do you know what the best number is?
Mrydberg87 1 year ago
@Mrydberg87 3 per node is a full saturation... but the fact of the matter is that after the 2 per node mark, when you start getting into the 20+ miner range, you get diminishing returns per each additional worker, up until the full saturation of 3 per node... that being said, once you reach that number of workers, you should have expanded by that time.
ryolastangel 1 year ago
@Mrydberg87 It's three, however with three, you start to have diminishing returns. I don't know the exact math, but with 3 workers on a single patch you gain more minerals but less per worker trip. It is best to have 3 on a patch.
fatrend 1 year ago
As a zerg player ive been implementing the C (shift) technique for about the first 20 supply or so and ive noticed a huge increase in surplus minerals. (typically 100-300 extra min) So much so I'd often make an in base hatch as well as an expansion to keep up with army and drone production. Your info made me realize how inefficient my macro really is and how much there still is to improve on eco.
blackisbeautiful89 1 year ago
you forgot scv xD
hankyulkim93 1 year ago
thank you for the info , to make things more complicated maybe add supply cost to the chat. Thor cost 300 + 6supply = 300 + (6/8) * 100 = 375
yungchiahsu 1 year ago
yoyu and ur krazy asia mathematics
INCsheep 1 year ago
WAHT..?
INCsheep 1 year ago
Thanks for this.
Susanmugen 1 year ago
No interest- IN THIS Q&A OH SNAP!
just kidding crota, good to know.
JeffSims009 1 year ago
do one for vespene gaz xD
DavidTiglidi 1 year ago 3
@DavidTiglidi You'll have to read it. I added the link in the description, YouTube wont let me post it as a comment.
BlizShouter 1 year ago 12
@BlizShouter R34deng is he|2d
leeroyjenks 1 year ago
your awesome
chrisdeimos 1 year ago
crota is the best.....that it!!!
acflex4 1 year ago
Thanks Crota! These QA videos are very helpful and informative.
SuperMatthew345 1 year ago
Question - how much mineral per minute can you mine - given you have fully saturated your mineral line? i.e. 24 harvesters?
and what is it when it's high yield (7 mineral patches)?
lamentra123 1 year ago
Do you know the numbers on the decreasing amount of minerals mined per trip as the mineral patch gets lower?
thinkbeforespeaking 1 year ago
LMFAO NO INTEREST HAHAHAHA
Grushstp 1 year ago
Zergs generally allow you to expand much faster than normal so that may be something to keep in mind.
Machdude 1 year ago
My eyes have not deceived me, you are Asian and have lived up to the name figuring out all of this math. :) Love this Q&As keep 'em coming!
IfRayWasntBlind 1 year ago 2
lol, no interest. I was gonna write to Blizzard and complain about that
tenchi77 1 year ago
PHURST
dns15r 1 year ago
CRAZYYY
soopavillan 1 year ago
lol battlecrusier last the red underline
XplosiveProductZ 1 year ago
Great video! You only forgot the Queen in the Zerg Army... unless that was on purpose. :P
Sidtreefish 1 year ago
You forgot about supply, hatchery's don't make more larvae if they have more then 3 larvae so it's closer to about 8 larvae per minute, but a zerg will never be able to keep up with injections perfectly, apart from that thanks man.
Mralec007 1 year ago
female robot voice - warning . . . level 12 overkill strategy detected . . . use extreme caution""
srsairbags 1 year ago
How many minerals one worker can gather over "x" number of minutes? -How many workers over what period of time makes the expansion pay for itself?
Thanks again Crota.
ZhaoyunStarcraft 1 year ago
18th.
I can count:D
flamablesteve 1 year ago
Did i miss something? you said you get 6 more larve with a queen, but doesnt each spawn make 4 larve? so assuming larve pops twice a game minute, thatd be 8 larve from queens, let me know where i went wrong if the above is incorrect :D ty
Shlunty 1 year ago
@Shlunty 40 seconds for 4 larvae, not 30
Joesterisk 1 year ago
@Shlunty it's one and a half minutes
Mralec007 1 year ago
7th
DarkXxXNightmare 1 year ago
its good foodforthought. did get a bit confusing at the zerg portion but meh. good to know, thanks crota
dwightasian 1 year ago
FIFTH
Joesterisk 1 year ago
lol
sadfghhj 1 year ago
nice
36tod 1 year ago
intersting
MrMarson123456 1 year ago
This has been flagged as spam show
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SoccerG777 1 year ago