How many workers per base sc2

To harvest minerals, these units travel to the mineral field, spend some time gathering at a mineral cluster, and return to base with a load of minerals. Workers continue this process to provide a steady stream of minerals which increase the counter on the upper right until all of the minerals at a base are depleted. Minerals found in a typical mineral field are blue, and workers harvest 5 minerals per trip from these clusters.

High-Yield Minerals Some mineral patches contain special rich minerals, which can be easily identified by their distinctive yellow or gold hue. Rich mineral clusters provide 7 minerals per trip, instead of 5 minerals as normal mineral fields do. These rich clusters contain the same total amount of minerals as normal mineral clusters do, but workers mine them faster--increasing your mineral yield.

Since more income means a bigger and stronger army, rich mineral fields are highly desirable. Beware that rich mineral clusters can be risky to take, since they tend to be placed in locations which are hard to defend and more exposed to attack. Gathering Minerals At the start of the game, you can select the workers available to you and direct them to harvest minerals by right-clicking a mineral field. Workers will automatically arrange themselves to harvest from 'unoccupied' mineral clusters; if no free mineral clusters are available, workers will get in line behind one of the occupied clusters and wait their turn.

Saturation is typically reached when three workers are harvesting each mineral cluster or vespene gas geyser though this can change if a base is located further away from available resources. Each mineral cluster represents a specific quantity of minerals. After those minerals are gone, the cluster is depleted, and it will disappear from the map. A notification message will play when the last cluster in a mineral field has been mined out.

It's wise to move workers from a field that is being depleted to a new, fresh mineral field in order to maintain a steady income. Placing New Bases. The farther that workers must travel to claim minerals, the longer they will take to return those resources, and the slower resource gathering occurs. While ideally new bases are placed as close to all resources as possible, because the rules for saturation apply to both minerals and vespene gas, it is better to place a new base as close to minerals as possible if a choice has to be made.

Vespene Geysers Vespene gas has an unusually high potential energy rating, and, as such, is highly valued for use as a fuel in high-performance engines and reactors. The zerg have adapted themselves to use raw vespene as a source of nourishment to drive their greatly accelerated metabolisms, and even the protoss require vespene to work as a catalyst for their psi-driven machines.

Geysers of this powerful green gas can be found on many planets along the Rim, and several space stations have been built over vespene-rich asteroid belts. To extract gas from an active geyser, terran players must build a refinery, protoss must warp in an assimilator, and zerg players must morph a drone into an extractor. Each individual geyser has a limited amount of gas within it. After a certain point, the geyser "collapses" and no more vespene can be refined from it.

To limit the impact on your economy, select all of the workers that used to mine the now-collapsed geyser, and move them to a new geyser. If the geyser is further away, you may need an additional worker or two to collect gas at the fastest speed. They can also be sacrificed lower the cooldown timer on Dehaka should he fall in battle.

Zeratul has access to the xel'naga precursor , which is identical to the probe unit. Mengsk can deploy Dominion laborers , which are cheaper than normal workers and produce faster. Laborers can work together to speed up construction, and can swap between being a laborer and Dominion trooper.

StarCraft Wiki Explore. Wiki tools. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Edit source History Talk 0. Do you like this video? Play Sound. The terran SCV Contents. Blizzard Entertainment. Accessed Activision Blizzard in English.

The accelerated economy in LotV decreases the impact of this decision in two ways. First, similar to the above Protoss tech example, the decreased difference in the time you put down the two sets of buildings makes the decision less discriminating. Second, the faster worker saturation in LotV decreases the value of an earlier third Command Centre.

Putting down an earlier third Command Centre supposedly boosts your economy by increasing your worker production by one per production cycle. But given that we reach worker saturation quicker in LotV, we stop producing workers from the third Command Centre sooner too. Thus, the supposedly benefit of a build decision is dampened by the accelerated economy, so the decision is less consequential. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, the strategic interactions in LotV become shallower as players have access to more choices quicker.

Generally, more options increases skill differentiation because better players pick the good options more often than the inferior players. That is, more options should increase the depth of a game. However, the access to many options could in fact have a negative impact on a game of imperfect information like StarCraft II. He said that see vod below :. It is about trying to figure out what your opponent can do [and] the ability to hide some of your cards.

If there are too many possibilities… the pros would have no idea what to do next. However, as I have discussed earlier, the increased number of starting workers reduces the opportunity cost of strategic decisions and allows players to do previously mutually exclusive options simultaneously.

Consequently, one has to account for a wider range of plausible moves from the opponent. A good example is scouting and attempt to deduce what exactly Terran wants to do.

Knowing Terran has a set up carries little meaning in LotV , as that is what Terran players do almost every game in every match up. In HotS TvZ, a after expanding is a unique tech path, as it is meaningfully different from other options e. Therefore, scouting a partial out a good number of options Terran could plausibly do.

When were the gas geysers taken was key to scouting in HotS, but this aspect is drastically simplified in LotV. With a standard worker scout in LotV, you normally look for the following:.

That is it. In contrast, in HotS, we went beyond that and paid attention to when the first geyser was taken. There was so much depth to whether the first Refinery was taken at 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, or 18 supply. These are essentially different openings, and they are meaningfully distinctive enough that you can deduce the plausible builds. For example, in TvZ, a 12 Barracks 12 Refinery Reaper expand usually has two Reapers, and the ratio of mineral and gas makes it smoother to go for a Reactor Hellion and early third Command Centre with two more Barracks follow up.

But a 11 Barracks 11 Refinery Reaper expand usually has three Reapers, and the resource ratio smoothly goes into a Reactor Hellion and early third Command Centre with defensive Banshee. Knowledgeable players would scout for these minor differences to further deduce what the opponent could do and planned accordingly.

To demonstrate that this is not an anecdotal example, let me give more examples of how the timing of the first gas geyser allows deduction of builds and even composition. The TvT Hellbat drop at the start of HotS uses a unique 16 Refinery opening , and no other build at that time uses a 16 Refinery opening efficiently.

Hence, knowing the opponent took a 16 Refinery allows you to narrow down the subsequent builds. The timing of the first gas geyser was so important that pros refined the gas first Reaper opening for mech by simply moving the Refinery from 12 to 11, and I wrote an article just to discuss this seemingly minor difference.

A 12 Refinery 13 Barracks opening was a common gas first opening, and it could lead to a wide range of options back then e. But the resource ratio of 11 Refinery and 13 Barracks makes it awkward to go into these options, so an 11 Refinery does not only tell you it is that specific gas first Reaper opening but also tells you the opponent is likely going for mech.

The comparison does not stop at the first gas geyser, as taking the second geyser or not allows you to deduce the plausible builds in HotS.

Conversely, Terran can go for Marine and Hellion drop only if the second Refinery is not taken. I even wrote a guide about which geyser to take first to better hide whether you took a second geyser in the different match ups. The additional starting workers in LotV shifts the mineral and gas ratio, so players almost certainly have to take the second geyser early for almost every build to balance the ratio as mentioned earlier.

The details of reaction toward specific build are more dedicated in HotS than in LotV. In contrast, one had to know different dedicated reactions based on the opening and build used to defend proxy Stargate Oracle in HotS , as you needed to have a specific counter ready before a specific time e.

To sum up this section, I argue that the increased starting workers from six to twelve in LotV led to:. Blizzard did a good job in making StarCraft II more exciting by increasing the pace. But as I argued in this article, faster does not equate to better. The change to the number of starting workers essentially increases the mechanics ceiling and dampens the strategic complexity. This shift in focus affects all stakeholders of the game.

Casual players, who already have relatively poor mechanics, find StarCraft II even less pleasant with the transition to LotV. I asked a number of friends who casually enjoy StarCraft II which expansion do they like to play the most. No one said LotV. They do not like LotV, because:. The first reason is perhaps something Blizzard regretted. I remember reading game designers of other games saying they avoid redesigning the existing heroes, cards, and whatnot, because they want returning players to easily pick up the game again.

The second and third reasons echo my criticism. I believe there is a fourth one, and that is they cannot copy their favourite proplayers like they did in HotS. People like to imitate their favourite players one way or another , and every marketer understands this. In NBA for example, Stephen Curry is one of the most marketable players, because his key skill sets of shooting, handling, and passing do not require him to be big, fast, and strong. The heightened emphasis on mechanics in LotV creates an unbridgeable skill gap between fans and pros.

The emphasis on mechanics over strategy could also affect the pro players. Older players could remain competitive by compensating their deteriorating mechanics with superior strategies. Understanding and planning should improve with experience, but these qualities are less valuable in LotV than in HotS. Thus, an emphasis on mechanics could result in shorter careers. As a content creator, I feel the impact too. The last part of the previous section shows there are more details to discuss in HotS builds than in LotV builds.

I often struggle to find interesting topics to write in LotV, as players just use very comparable builds over and over again. For example, Terran players often use Reaper expand into , should I consider getting a Liberator versus a Viking for the first Starport unit as different builds? I can talk about the implications on the metagame, but the complexity and depth cannot be compared to pre-LotV.

I am tempted to write the same build orders for consecutive entries of Metagame Build Orders , because there are best builds that do not get rotated out by newer strategies.

Mapmakers say they get affected too see tweet below. My mapmaking knowledge is extremely limited , so I have little to say about how the increased number of starting workers affects mapmaking.

But judging from what negativezero said, it seems like Zerg could take advantage of the worker difference better than the other two races, and the responsibility is placed on mapmakers to balance the game. Blizzard balance team should no doubt be affected too. One good example is the TvP proxy era in the later half of The strategy involves building multiple production buildings outside of the base, so Protoss players do not know which tech choice they are up against.

This strategy is only possible in LotV as a six starting workers economy does not allow Terran players to have access to that many options so early on. In an update of the annual balance revamp , Blizzard stated that:. The emphasis is mine. Without the old Cyclone, none of the plausible tech options in this proxy strategy requires immediate reaction, so the strategy got patched out of the metagame.

I spent many months on this article. I strongly believe this is an important topic that warrants a serious discussion in the community.