A long long time ago, back when we still had 1500 minerals on each patch, a abusive protoss style emerged where you essentially camp on 2 bases, get double upgrades and get a lot of zealots, observers, and collosus.
Here's a link to the day9 daily on this build
This style worked because of how efficient mining is in sc2 with worker stacking. If you are on 2 bases, with 60 workers, (3 on each mineral patch, 3 on each gas), your income is only marginally less than an opponent on 3 bases with soft saturation (2 on each patch, 2 on each gas). As a result, you could just camp on 2 bases until you obtained a large enough army to secure your third base- and once you secured the third base, you could just transfer workers and be on equal economy to your opponent while having had the advantages of remaining on 2 bases (mainly an easy defense).
Since there are some new changes coming to LoTV, (where some mineral patches are getting extra minerals), I am wondering if this style will become relevant again in the PvT matchup.
Because you now have more minerals per base, I wonder if camping on 2 bases while getting up some fast upgrades will be viable in PvT.
With the mothership core gone, I certainly feel more comfortable defending 2 bases vs 3.
u wot m8? optimal mineral saturation is 16 (2 per patch), any more and they start bouncing, 20 is like max, any more and the income increases by 1% up to like 24 max
On October 09 2017 12:54 Saggymidgetbooty6969 wrote: u wot m8? optimal mineral saturation is 16 (2 per patch), any more and they start bouncing, 20 is like max, any more and the income increases by 1% up to like 24 max
16 is optimal in terms of efficiency, but you don't get the highest income unless you have 3 per patch. Also, i don't know where you got that "1%" figure, but when you mine with workers on mineral patches, the first two workers mine 40 minerals per minute, and the third worker mines ~20 minerals per minute.
So, the third worker is still adding ~20 minerals per minute to your economy which is fairly decent. It's actually closer to 50% efficiency. Ultimately, having those 8 extra workers will increase your income, (from that mineral line) by ~20%, which is actually significant.
On October 09 2017 12:54 Saggymidgetbooty6969 wrote: u wot m8? optimal mineral saturation is 16 (2 per patch), any more and they start bouncing, 20 is like max, any more and the income increases by 1% up to like 24 max
16 is optimal in terms of efficiency, but you don't get the highest income unless you have 3 per patch. Also, i don't know where you got that "1%" figure, but when you mine with workers on mineral patches, the first two workers mine 40 minerals per minute, and the third worker mines ~20 minerals per minute.
So, the third worker is still adding ~20 minerals per minute to your economy which is fairly decent. It's actually closer to 50% efficiency. Ultimately, having those 8 extra workers will increase your income, (from that mineral line) by ~20%, which is actually significant.
lol no. its not worth making 16 more workers to mine 20% more minerals, and its 20% only for far away patches, on close patches it doesnt increase, so its maybe 10% total
On October 09 2017 12:54 Saggymidgetbooty6969 wrote: u wot m8? optimal mineral saturation is 16 (2 per patch), any more and they start bouncing, 20 is like max, any more and the income increases by 1% up to like 24 max
16 is optimal in terms of efficiency, but you don't get the highest income unless you have 3 per patch. Also, i don't know where you got that "1%" figure, but when you mine with workers on mineral patches, the first two workers mine 40 minerals per minute, and the third worker mines ~20 minerals per minute.
So, the third worker is still adding ~20 minerals per minute to your economy which is fairly decent. It's actually closer to 50% efficiency. Ultimately, having those 8 extra workers will increase your income, (from that mineral line) by ~20%, which is actually significant.
lol no. its not worth making 16 more workers to mine 20% more minerals, and its 20% only for far away patches, on close patches it doesnt increase, so its maybe 10% total
It's actually 20% total. To prove it to you here's this link: http://haploid.nl/sc2/unit_production/protoss.php . Basically, its a unit production calculator. If you click on the income tab, you can find that 24 workers on minerals produce 13.6 minerals per second, whereas 16 on workers produce 11.2 minerals per second. Going from 11.2 to 13.6 is roughly a 20% increase.
Regardless, you don't stay on 2 bases forever. You simply overprobe initially and build up until you have enough units to defend an expansion (you dont have as many units early on because of double forge upgrades), and then when do you expand, you simply transfer workers over (as you overbuilt probes earlier on).
Although you could argue that its still not worth building those probes and you should just build units instead to take a third base, this style was used in a tournament set match and proved very effective against standard bio play - proving its viability (albeit in hots). I'm wondering whether or not it would still be viable in the balance test mod.
On October 11 2017 09:29 FataLe wrote: You'll die to cocainevacs when you take your third.
Typically this build has ~5 observers and a collosus by the time u take your third. I do think that you could die if a terran went very greedy early on and then did a mightly attack on your third, but this style typically fares well against multi-pronged aggression simply due to all of the observers that see the drops coming. (You literally get a ring of observers around your base).
The thing about drops is that they are very easy to stop if you see them coming. 4 stalkers in position can deny 2 medivacs full of units.
u wot m8? optimal mineral saturation is 16 (2 per patch), any more and they start bouncing
Patches give a flat amount of minerals but some patches need 2 workers and others need 3 to achieve that income
In the past the range has even been wider, some patches so close that they bounce 2 workers and others so far that 3 isn't enough
In other words, sometimes you can gather 55% of a patch with 1 worker and other times only 28-30%. That second worker is being way less efficient than the first one even though it has its own patch and isn't bouncing, the first major dropoff in minerals-per-worker comes after you've taken up the close patches which is often only 8 workers per base
Many bases then hold about 20 workers before bouncing happens, 4x2 and 4x3 or similar layout but filling out the further patches to get to that point isn't as efficient. After they start to bounce there is still often some leftover minerals that will be even less efficient still to gather
In the end it really depends how you're using "optimal", the absolute maximum income from a mineral line can be around 22-25 workers but near maximum minerals-per-worker can happen at 8 or less. There are popular breakpoints along the way to get almost maximum per-base income without the least efficient workers at the end, around 20 on a mineral line.
Worker production/transferring is also a significant factor, it may be less efficient to hold your workers at a specific base but even more inefficient to walk them all the way to the other mineral line. If a guy is making 30mpm here and would make 35mpm over there but you'd lose 5 trips in the transfer time, it would take 5 minutes for him to pay for the transfer; factor in that this worker is then stealing the efficient patch from a freshly built worker on the other mineral line and that a mineral at 3:00 is worth more than a mineral at 5:00 and it could be not worth doing at all.
You should check out Stats's double forge Colossus build from r/allthingsprotoss. It gets early Colossi and a total of 3 Observers, and takes a later (6:00) third than most builds. Very defensively oriented, and quite a solid style.