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StarCraft20 years agoGosu "GosuGamers" Gamers

3 extra workers @ LT

Playing Lost Temple with a faster start works perfectly without any major race balance changes and saves you time. It has a great resemblance to how chess has changed during the times with the peons - try the new Lost Temple with 7 instead of 4 peons in the beginning.



[s]starcraft[/s]Those of you who play chess may know that the way chess was played 1000 years ago was not how we play it today. Chess the game itself evolved into what we know as modern chess. One of the evolutionary leaps of our modern chess came when a very clever gamer decided that the initial pawn should jump two squares rather than one square (1295.) 'Shortly' there after another added the 'en passant' move (1490.)

These two rather small unremarkable changes revolutionized the game. It became a more active and less stuffy game and it of course added a little more complexity. The long chains of pawns could now easily be broken and all tactics and strategies were transformed.

While I pondered in an early game how boring the early routine of making 4 to 5 workers and sending them to mine I came up with a rather simple idea. Why not save 51 to 60 seconds of each game by adding 3 extra? How would this change the game? How many hours of the boring part would I have saved myself? I estimated that if you played 2000 games you would save yourself around 33 hours of mindless worker making!

Thus, soon after I asked the map maker United States Jurgis to make me just such a map. I asked him to also please add 3 extra workers every time an expansion was made. Initially, aside from the fact that you don't have to waste time making the three initial workers, the changes are not easily perceptible. However soon I realized that this could be viewed as humble analogy of the chess changes described above.

The game tends to be have a much faster pace early on, timing is as critical if not more critical than before, splitting 7 workers is actually fun and expansions are up and running a little faster. Although many will argue, the balance of the game is not changed. The early game is indeed more active and less stuffy. Nothing really changes and yet everything is changed.

I tried it with 2, 3, 4, 5 initial workers and decided that 3 extra workers was the best number as it does not change all the working build orders including most rushes in all maps with the exception of 4, 5 and 6 pool for Zerg (fortunately all losing strats.) I hope you enjoy this rather simple idea.

chess.jpg

I would like to dedicate this article to United States Jurgis from Entropyzero.org who made the map and also to Peter Sweden "X_ZeeD" Engström for his die hard support of our community.

Links
GosuGamers.net - Download the 3' xtra LT Map
Entropyzero.org - Fog of war Worshipers and home of Jurgis the Map Maker

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