Too Many Minerals #8: Protoss Placement 2/5
In this episode, MikeXIV examines a placement match between Ender (protoss) and Dreaper (zerg). Thanks to Ender for supplying replays of all his 1v1 placement games!
TooManyMinerals
Starcraft II strategy for the rest of us.
Trading Bases
The enemy army is pushing up your ramp, and your army is out of position, halfway across the map. Time to make a decision: run your army home to defend your base, or attack his base and wipe him out before he can do the same to you. Making the right choice often means the difference between winning and losing the game on the spot, so it is important to get it right.
Good reasons to start a base trade
- If you can’t possibly kill his attacking units
- If both armies are about the same size, and your workers are already dying en masse
- If you think you can stop or greatly slow down the enemy army just by building a few more units
Of all the tactics in Starcraft II, trading bases is among the most drastic. If you let your opponent run wild in your base and don’t win the game shortly thereafter, he probably will. Here are a few tricks to make sure that you come out ahead in the base-killing race, divided into two handy lists.
How to kill a base
- Kill his workers first to 1) stop his income and 2) stop him from running off to build another base
- Against Protoss, if you can shut down buildings easially by killing just a few pylons, do that
- Kill unit production buildings next, to stop him from building reinforcements. This includes hatcheries for the Zerg.
- Leave geysers, supply depots, Zerg tech structures, and other buildings that don’t do anything for last.
How to slow down someone killing your base
- Keep building units to slow down the attacking units
- If you can, move workers near the front back to another base
- If that is impossible, send a few workers out to start new bases
- If even that is impossible, have your workers attack the incoming army rather than die without a struggle
- Cancel half-finished upgrades – you might need the resources to start a new base
- If you’re going to lift off Terran buildings to hide at the edge of the map, do so before they go into the red
A base race is one of the more dramatic an exciting ways for a game of Starcraft II to end. Win or lose, you’ll have a better idea if you can start a base trade in similar situations in the future.
-MikeXIV
Too Many Minerals #7: Protoss Placement 1/5
In this episode, MikeXIV examines a placement match between Ender (protoss) and JimTreeLivin (terran). Thanks to Ender for supplying replays of all his 1v1 placement games!
Back in the Saddle Again
I know I haven’t put anything up since approximately thanksgiving. Sorry about that. There is good stuff coming.
- I got a new monitor, so from now on all my videos will be in WIDE SCREEN format. Which is awesome.
- Too Many Minerals reader Ender sent me all 5 of his 1v1 placement matches. I recorded commentary of the first one last night, and will be uploading it ASAP. The rest will follow.
- I’m working on an article about base trades, look for that before the end of this week.
-MikeXIV
A Personal Milestone
If you’ve been checking Too Many Minerals in the last week and a half, I owe you an apology for not posting anything. Fact is, I’ve been busy playing a whole lot of Starcraft II instead of making new content for this site, and it has payed off:
I probably shouldn’t put up this post just to brag about making it into silver, so I’m going to try to offer some advice regarding promotion. It isn’t a big deal. The matchmaking system doesn’t restrict you to playing within your own leage – in fact I’ve been playing against a mix of Bronze, Silver, and Gold league opponents for the last month or so. (tip: to check your ladder opponents rating after a game, left click on their name in the score screen and click “view profile”)
Good matchmaking ensures that players lose half the time. This can be very frustrating, and I find that the best way to blast past that frustration is to have a goal with a broader scope than a single game. Promotion is completely out of your hands, and as such it is a pretty terrible goal. A month ago I wanted to be promoted to Silver, but I had no idea how close I was. Hoping to get promoted left me discouraged. In the last few weeks, I’ve been focusing on a tangible goal – getting my bonus pool points down. Games have been more rewarding because every time I win I’ve seen exactly how much progress I made towards my goal. You might set a goal of climbing up in your division, or just reaching a certain ranking, or just to play a certain number of games each week. At the end of the day, Battle.net might reward you with a promotion or an achievement for reaching some number of wins, and if it does, that will be the icing on the cake.
Too Many Minerals #6: Silver Terran vs. Zerg
MikeXIV examines a Silver league game on Steppes of War between Bronzite (Terran) and Skelpig (Zerg). Thanks to Bronzite for submitting this replay!
Matchmaker, Matchmaker…
I’m pretty bad at Starcraft II. Sc2Ranks pulls data from Battle.net, and it tells me that there are about fifty thousand people better than me, and that is just in the Bronze league. There are nearly one million player accounts in North America, and more than two million worldwide. And yet despite this, the matchmaking system always finds me a fair fight.
Why aren’t I being overrun?
In short, because of good math. Every Starcraft player has a score, called his Matchmaking Score. Blizzard keeps the exact formula secret, but it works something like this:
- A new player plays 5 games (placement) against random opponents who are already in the system.
- The Matchmaking Score of those 5 opponents and the results of those games determines the new player’s Matchmaking Score
- The matchmaking system tries to pair up players with similar Matchmaking Scores for games
- After every game, each player’s Matchmaking Score is adjusted – the winner’s goes up and the looser’s goes down.
- It’s that simple.
The real magic is in how much each score changes after a game. If the players had the same Matchmaking Score, then both players scores will change by some “average” amount. If a player with a very low Matchmaking Score wins against a player with a very high score, the winning player will get a big boost, and the loosing player will get a very big penalty. If, however, a player with a high score beats a player with a very low score, the winner’s boost will be very small, and the looser’s penalty will also be very small. In this way, the secret Matchmaking Score gets more and more accurate over time.
Don’t leagues and the visible rankings matter?
For the purposes of determining who plays who on the Battle.net ladder, no. A player’s league, division, division rank, and league points do not matter to matchmaking. If someone would like to compare his skill level to that of another Starcraft II player, they aren’t a bad place to start, especially since the real Matchmaking Score is kept hidden by Blizzard. In the end, leagues, divisions, and the bonus pool are all just clever mind games that Battle.net plays with us, but that is a matter for another post.
-MikeXIV
TeamLiquid forum threads used as sources used for this post are here and here.
Husky and the Baneling Song
I don’t watch every single video that Husky “H to the usky” Starcraft puts up in his youtube channel, because I only have so much time in a week to watch Starcraft II commentaries. That said, Husky just celebrated his 300,000th youtube subscriber by posting this hilarious music video. Check it out.
Husky mainly does commentary of high-level games, but he has also posted a series of tutorial videos in which he demonstrates build orders and strategies for each of the races in Starcraft II. His enthusiasm and energy level in his videos is alway super high, which is an area where my commentating could use some work. HuskyStarcraft’s youtube channel can be found here, and you should definitely check him out if you haven’t already.
-Mike XIV
Too Many Minerals #5: Bert vs. Pish
MikeXIV examines a game on Scrap Station between Bert and Pish, two Bronze league players. The replay file can be found here, from gamereplays.org.
Supply Depots Suck
Its story time.
6/10.
7/10.
8/10.
9/10.
10/10.
“Spawn More Overlords.”
Shit.
Being at the supply cap stops your income from growing and stops you from spending money
In the story of Too Many Minerals, supply is the villain. Nothing gets in the way of acquiring and spending money like the supply cap does. That pesky pair of numbers in the top corner of the screen ruins the ideal worker curve like nothing else. Pylons and Overlords take 25 seconds to build. Supply depots take 30. That is almost two complete workers worth of time that a supply-blocked player cannot build workers, which keeps income lower than it could have been for the rest of the game. On top of that, running out of supply puts a halt on all unit construction, which puts a halt on most kinds of spending.
The best way out of supply block is to never get supply blocked in the first place
There’s only two ways out of supply block – waiting while more supply is built and getting units killed off. Those are both pretty awful things to have to do. Supply block is a problem that is best avoided rather than solved. This is probably best shown by example. Almost every popular Terran build order starts by building workers until there are 9 SCVs, then building a supply depot and continuing to build workers. Terrans start out with 11 supply. Starting the first supply depot alongside the 10th worker means that the Terran player will go from 9/11, to 10/11, to 11/11, to 11/19 supply just before the 11th SCV is finished, and he can smoothly start his 12th worker right away.
Carry this simple early game example forward through the entire game. After the first supply depot, overlord, or pylon, it will be some time before another one needs to start, but it does need to start before you reach the cap again. After that one, you are probably building units from more than one structure and/or building many units that consume more than 1 point of supply. To keep up with this increased flow, you have to build supply depots one after another after another.
A few notes for different races
My best advice to Terran and Protoss players is to start a new depot or pylon as soon as the previous one is finished – just like with workers, except instead of being stuck with one at a time, you are choosing to be that way. If you fall behind, go ahead and start two or three at once.
Since I play Zerg, I’ll share the trick I use to stay ahead of my supply cap. First, I try to get ahead by one or two overlords. Then, when I go to make units, I select all my larvae and make an overlord first. Then I start making units, counting supply cost as I go, for example: Mutalisk (2), Mutalisk (4), Roach (6), Zergling (7), Zergling(8) … As soon as I hit 8, the next unit I make is an overlord, and then I start the counting again at zero until I run out of larva or money to spend.
TooManyMinerals 