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Updated: All of the new GSL maps have now been added, and I have added the movement speeds of all the units in the game.
Hi there!
Thank you for taking the time to read this through. Some of you may know me on youtube.com as SiEGEstarcraft. For those that dont I am an enthusiastic player and (if I say so myself) a more that fair commentator, but unfortunatley when I play my knowledge of the game just hides somewhere in the back of my brain and refuses to come out. recently this has led me to get quite infuriated with the game and not ladder very much. However, I do want to get better at the game that I enjoy a lot and so I finally picked a race to focus on and stop playing Random. I decided that the race I liked the most was Zerg. It was the race I was worst at - but it was the one that I thought was most fun. However, regardless of the ammount of times that I watched the Day[9] Daily where Shaun looks at "to Drone, or not to Drone?... That is the question" I still cant seem to get the timings into my head for when I need to be making units, and when I need to be making drones and expanding and all that good jazz.
That was until today, when I decided, with the aid of the in-game clock, a drone, the very-easy AI and a few hours, to make a detailed-ish map of how long it took a regular unit like a worker, to get from one key point on the map to another. Snd so was born the SC2 Atlas. Now I did search this forum before I did all of this, and yes there have been threads about this before. However, there were none with pictures or diagrams, just some with spreadsheets. Thats not the most visually stimulating thing in the world. So I "borrowed" the map images from Liqui-pedia (Thank you TL, you're the best) And set about making notes on them with the timings.
Now its worth remembering that this has been done with a Zerg player in mind, but the information presented here should be of good use to a lot of players. It doesnt matter if its a case of you needing to build bunkers, roaches or a cannon or whatever. It is going to be helpful to know how fast the enemy can come and kick your teeth in. After doing this I know for sure that I can drone up as much as I like (whithin reason obviously) and still be able to make a couple of spine crawlers, some lings and some roaches when my opponent leaves his main and they will all be ready when he arrives at my base.
What you will see is an image (ideally viewed at full screen) with the map repeated on it several times. I had to do this rather than just have one picture of the map as it was looking extremley jumbled up and it was hard to follow. As I had room at the side of the image, I put in "newbie-tips". Most of the people reading this will know all of them but there may be one or two things that you didnt know in there.
If you guys could, I would like some feedback on the work I have done. I plan on making a video of me talking through some of my findings for my youtube channel ( www.youtube.com/siegestarcraft ) after getting some (hopefully constructive) critisism from you guys here.
Peace, love and fluffy Bunnies
SiEGE
Movement Speeds Table
+ Show Spoiler +
Blistering Sands
+ Show Spoiler +
Jungle Basin
+ Show Spoiler +
Scrap Station
+ Show Spoiler +
Steppes of War
+ Show Spoiler +
Xel'Naga Caverns
+ Show Spoiler +
Delta Quadrant
+ Show Spoiler +
Lost Temple
+ Show Spoiler +
Metalopolis
+ Show Spoiler +
Shakuras Plateau
+ Show Spoiler +
New GSL and GSTL Maps:
Crevasse
+ Show Spoiler +
Crossfire SE
+ Show Spoiler +
Tal'Darim Altar
+ Show Spoiler +
Terminus.RE
+ Show Spoiler +
I hope you guys find these useful!
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Looks great, but you should put image tags around the web addresses so they will be embedded into your post.
Even better, upload the images through TL.net's tool and skip the imageshack linking.
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Great summary of distances, I like it.
Would be really cool if you could make pictures for the GSL/iCCups maps that are used in tournaments for comparison
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The images aren't loading, it just says the url.
I'm a zerg, and I find this interesting.
I love fluffy bunnies too.
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Sorry about that, I got the images up now. you have to open them and then right click and view image. I didnt know there was a TL.net image hosting service or I would have used it - I already dont like imageshack and I've only used it once. I plan on doing the new GSL maps as well when I get the chance but I wanted to get the regular ladder maps out of the way first.
Let me know what you think.
SiEGE
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Interesting stuff. Does help put things in perspective. I never realized how damn close Delta Quadrant spawns can be.
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Yeah the DQ spawns can be horrible. I noticed quite a few things after doing this that I didnt expect to see, for instanceon Shakuras Plateau both of the Xel'Naga watchtowers aare the same distance from you base despite the fact that one looks further away than the other. Its because of the little choke that is to the right or left of them. Im now working on a list with the movement speeds of all the units in the game that I can incorporate into this post as workers are faster than most of the other units.
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Wow awesome thread i rly needed this, tnx!
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Thanks! Didnt realize how bad lost temple close positions are
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Nice work! I must ask though. On Blistering sands, how can the yellow path in the upper right map be longer than the teal path in the upper left? Am I missing something or have you simply made mistake?
EDIT: With some quick calculations I get that the teal path should be around 74 seconds, not 44.
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Doh! I'll correct that as soon as I get the chance to - thanks for spotting that.
The distance is 58 Seconds of travel time, but 44 if there arent any rocks in place. I got them mixed up.
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Nice! This is really cool!
I'm a little amazed that the rush distances on Shakuras are the same on close spots as they are on cross-spots. That's actually impressive.
I'm also amazed the rush distances on Jungle Basin are so long. No wonder 14 hatch always felt so safe. JB was so close to being a good map, alas and alack.
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Thanks! Your work is going to be useful when I plan out timing attacks. A lot of interesting facts that I normally would never have guessed - Delta Quadrant close spawns are really CLOSE spawns... and I never expected JB to have such a long rush distance while DQ had such short ones. A lot of perceptions change when the numbers are crunched out
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Er, you did the times from start location to start location, which is almost entirely worthless information.
It should have been from ramp of main to ramp of main, always.
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Buddhist, I have done the times for Ramp to Ramp as well as HQ to HQ, which in the case of zerg really isnt useless information as that is where all of your units come from. Also with the time's shown for the Ramp to Ramp distances, it is top of one ramp to bottom of the other ramp.
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This is great! What I would find really interesting would be pictures of maps that illustrate how far away an enemy's army would have to be for you to start producing say, a roach, or a spine crawler, and to have said unit finished by the time they reach your base.
For instance, a spine crawler takes 50 seconds to build (if I'm not mistaken), so a graphic illustrating 50 seconds of travel time from your base. Obviously, different units travel at different speeds, but mostly these timings apply to ZvT and ZvP, and unless you're talking about an entirely stalker army, or someone who stims their bioball as soon as it leaves their base, everything will tend to move at 2.25 speed, or the speed of a marine/marauder/zealot/sentry (as players tend to keep their armies together, not letting all the stalkers get too far ahead, for instance).
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Yeah, im currently getting all of the unit times together along with all of the build times for things. I have a lot of other things I needed to do today as well tho. I plan to have a table comparing the movement speeds of all the units in the game, before and after upgrades, on and off creep etc. as well as a table illustrating the build times of things as well. So there are a few things you can learn easily enough dependant on the map youre on and the race you play. I know that on Scrap Station for instance, I will just have time to get some spine crawlers up by the time my opponent gets to my base, assuming that I build them the moment he exit's his base.
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Woaw, i really like this! This could get my defend timing perfect! Thanks a lot!
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A lot of work, but honestly, I dont see any real-game-use for this.
Playing by feeling is MUCH more important than remembering 'Oh! It will take him exactly 25.4 seconds if he moves in a straight line towards my base!'
With the amount of maps you can just wing it by experience, this might be interesting for theorycraft, but that's not gonna make you a better player anyways.
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SS (Scrap Station) is not loading.
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@ ChickenLips:
I agree that having the experience and knowing "I have enough time to do X" is far better than having to look up something like this. However, for a lot of people a helping hand towards gaining that experience is really handy. I for one, when I switched to Zerg and it really mattered, was having great difficulty estimating it. So it helped me out and I'm hoping has helped out a lot of oher people too.
@ 3JeanPierre3
I have no problems viewing it, does anyone else? If so I'll re-upload it
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awesome stuff but please reupload the pictures with the TL uploader so we can see them as a whole.
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@ SiEGEstarcraft
SS It's ok
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On February 16 2011 03:10 ChickenLips wrote: With the amount of maps you can just wing it by experience, this might be interesting for theorycraft, but that's not gonna make you a better player anyways. When you "wing it by experience", your brain has already learned these timings and thus this may not be helpful for you, but to someone who hasn't learned by experience yet, these are extremely useful to associate different timings in your brain especially when combined with the unit production and build order timings which can be found in other threads here.
Great work, Siege. Are you looking to expand on these at all, such as with race specific unit timings?
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but how does this tell u to drone or to make units etc? :/ not that i paly zerg but im most interested in figuring out all races
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On February 16 2011 04:11 Dezire wrote:but how does this tell u to drone or to make units etc? :/ not that i paly zerg but im most interested in figuring out all races Since Zerg can only produce out of one production building, we have to choose between either making Drones for an economy or units to defend/attack. If you're scouting properly, you will be able to see a push coming from your opponent, and using the information Siege has given us, you can know when to expect those units to arrive at your base and plan accordingly.
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Great post siege, there is always discussion about distances and such. This will help out some BO timings knowing when to move out and such to hit a timing that is crucial.
Thanks for the post with detailed pictures.
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Yeah, I will be expanding this over the next week (I have vacation time from work). I'm working on the new GSL maps now and have 3 out of 4 done so far. Im also going to put in a table showing the build times and movement speeds of all the units in the game. Finally I will make a video of all of this and upload it to youtube for a video-guide to the material presented here. also - by popular request I will reupload the pics to the TL site and not Imageshack. Im really glad that this has been so useful to folks.
SiEGE
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Great job! This will be very useful in helping me compare rush distance between maps and spawn locations to have a better understanding of which cheese/all-in builds are viable in which situations. A few of the values surprise me. I knew BS had a long rush distance before rocks go down, but I didn't realize it was longer than Scrap Station! Likewise, I knew close positions on DQ are infamously close, but I strike that map on ladder and had no idea it's shorter than friggin' Steppes. I've also come to think of Shakuras as a big map that almost forces macro games and/or highly mobile forces, but in close positions it's really comparable to most other 1v1 maps.
ChickenLips: having a "feel" for things is certainly very important, but starting from numerical info like this helps inform those feelings. It's at least helpful to have a general sense of which maps are similar in rush distance and which ones are unusually short or long, with some rough idea of how much shorter/longer than average they are. Memorizing the exact values is probably a waste of time for most players, but having the exact info available to review and decide for yourself how much detail you care about is a good thing. For me, that's a ballpark figure for rush distance from main to main and a general sense of how much the shorter/longer alternate paths are (shortcuts blocked by rocks, the back path on XNC, etc.). Then again, I play mostly Protoss and rarely get an early Forge; if I played a race and build that was more reliant on static defense to survive early pressure, I might want a more exact sense of when I need to scout. I can see a Zerg player who likes hatch first builds being especially interested in the exact timings.
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I wish I knew how to program. Here's something I would love to see, personally: A page that changes dynamically depending on what's selected from a few drop-down menus:
Menu 1: Select the map Menu 2: Choose your starting positions Menu 3: Choose your desired match-up Menu 4: Choose which build order you or your opponent using
For example, I'll choose Shakuras Plateau, diagonal positions, ZvP, and then the 4-gate timing. The map will show the earliest time the Protoss can be knocking on my front door with his push, as well as key pylon positions, and maybe some other useful little details.
Just an idea.
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Excellent work! It's pretty sick to finally see the disparity in timing between Steppes and other maps.
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Hmmm, when I searched the forums for map distances I didnt find that thread, although I think I prefer the format that I have presented here. also I've just finished doing all the measurements for the newer GSL maps that arent on that thread som im still quite happy with what I've accomplished here. tomorrow I'll get all the movement tables and build times done as well to finish it off.
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Updated with 2 of the new GSL maps (the others will be up tomorrow) and I have rehosted all the images to the TL servers.
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This must have taken a while to put together. I am really impressed with your work. Thank you very much for the detailed information. Starcraft 2 community is tight because people make stuff like this.
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Oh wow, I didnt realize scouting cross positions and close positions on Shakuras took the same time. I've always argued with myself about which position to scout first, but I guess it doesn't make too much difference
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All of the maps are now updated. I'll be working on the movement and build time table's tonight and should have them done and uploaded by tomorrow.
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