Everyone is talking about the economy if Double Harvest is good if legacy is good or if X model is good. So I thought I would put in my 2 cents.
What Legacy does well is Decrease the number of minerals and gas per base to encourage expanding. It also gets the game rolling sooner because of the 12 harvest
Other Modes like the Double Harvest try and give advantages to the expanding player, but as David Kim pointed out they can be a bit too extreme.
Idea-Harvest Degradation
Less minerals across the board 1250 on every node (gas changed accordingly)
-6 starting workers who mine 10 minerals each trip
-Keeps the burst of the 12 workers but carries it all game long
-More per trip means aggression (especially for zerg) is less detrimental because they are getting more
-Less sit back and max out because you are making more per trip and can be aggressive sooner and more often
-Carries it all game long instead of just a burt at the start of the game
-Longer Harvest times (it’s like 3 seconds now) 5 second harvest time
-8 workers on 1 base would harvest 10 minerals per trip so each worker would get 120 resources per minute
-After 8 is the degradation. So workers would actually interrupt other workers as they are trying to mine
-So 2 workers on a path would harvest 8 minerals per trip (basically 2 minerals per second last cycle is interrupted causing only 8 to be mined)
With this it is better to expand and have 8 workers per patch but it it doesn’t give the expanding player a huge advantage only a small one
2 bases of 8 would harvest 960 per minute and 1 base of 16 would harvest 768 per min. It would operate at 80% efficiency. So Expansions have meaning but those on less bases don’t suffer a severe penalty.
The current model doesn’t start rewarding players until patches mine out, this one the advantage would start sooner but be small and build up over time. You can still expand later than the opponent and not be severely behind but the expanding players is getting small advantages because they chose to expand.
I’m interested to hear what you guys think. There will obviously have to be some adjustments if something like this is to work but on paper it speeds up the game, it creates aggressive opportunities and it rewards expanders without checkmating those who do not expand as fast. Which is what they are trying to do.
Sorry if the math is bad XD it’s not my strong suit.
Edit: 3 per patch would be 5 minerals per trip 2 second harvest and 2 per patch would have 4 second harvest.