spawn larvae system helps make up for actual lost workers for buildings for zerg,
You seem to think I said zerg was easy...? Which is the polar opposite of what I actually believe.
I was discussing mules vs. chronoboost, and in my humble opinion mules are a stronger resource to have for a variety of reasons, such as:
Mules provide a 90 second massive income boost and if energy is stocked up a large number can be called down to mine from a new base while it still undergoing saturation thus allowing a terran player to instantly receive high income from a base without the need to oversaturate beforehand. This effect is increased even further when the terran player uses the mules on a gold mineral patch.
Mules also don't bounce around mineral patches thus you can have a theoretical infinite number of mules on a single mineral patch thus allowing things like the 4OC build seen on teamliquid where players can make extra orbital commands just for the sake of mules, and these OC's are extremely quickly paid for by the mules.
Mules allow crazy stuff such as the recent uprise in 3 marine scv all-ins, most notable a certain terran player (TSL_Rain) who made it to the ****** final of the GSL by basically doing that every single game of the tournament, and the one time he actually played vs. an opponent who had skill in the matchup he got demolished. Another example of this was the final of the Intel Extreme Masters Cologne where the final was IdrA vs. Morrow (who played terran at the time) and in every game of that final, morrow brought all his scv's to attack with 5 rax reaper, and due to mules still had the capacity to temporarily produce more units.
It is a flawed argument to say that a terran player also has to use scans and supply drop so they can't always have mules, let's look at those one at a time.
Scans: Right, so let's say you don't use scan at all. not once. The only way you can gain information on your opponent is to send units (scv's in the early game) to his ramp, send a flying unit over his base, open your eyes while harassing with one of your many units (vikings, banshee's, raven auto-turret, ghosts, tank drop, thor drop, mm drop.) Now there is, of course, that obstacle of having your opponents army in or around his base so you need to be careful to avoid that with the above mentioned units. But let me ask you, where does this hypothetical situation put you? that's right, in exactly the same boat as the other 2 races.
The need to defend vs. cloaked units (i.e dark templar) can be entirely nullified with a single missile turret, the same way as a photon cannon. If you're scratching your head and wondering how you can have turrets when engaging the opponents army, the solution is easily available. Much like protoss has to build observers for mobile detection, consider investing in a raven. You'll also find that said unit can fly to your opponents base when not in use, and drop turrets for probe harass, or use a hunter seeker missile to destroy large groups of clumped up units.
Should you also happen to be a competent player, you can use them to insanely good potential in nullifying stalker fire, at the simplest form, or go as far as to base entire builds off these units, an example being the polt prime timing attack.
Supply Drop: I really don't have much to say to this, except that any decent terran shouldn't really have to use this unless he has lost a lot of depos for some reason and happens to have some stockpiled energy (which he probably shouldn't.)
Due to the above factors, we can conclude that in regular circumstance, all the energy you have in your orbital commands can go into mules.
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Ok so now let's talk about chronoboost: (i'll keep this short since it's 2:15 am but i'll expand on this later should there be the need.)
- Costs less energy than a mule
- Only lasts approx. 20 seconds
- Nexii have a maximum of 4 chronoboosts (100 energy)
- The majority of things that chronoboost can be used on require much more than 1 CB to have a decisive effect
- Proven with experiments and formulae, if specifically used on economy only, 1 mule = 6 chronoboosts
- chronoboosts does not allow the protoss player to come back from dire situations with lack of workers as mules do
- while mules can specifically be used on economy the whole terran game, after a point protoss stops using CB on probes
There's probably more but i'll finish this up later.
Last but not least i'd like to draw your attention to this screenshot taken from a Day [9] Daily.
I eagerly await your thoughts.
EDIT: Just realised I can show the maths part without needing to find that experiment done on teamliquid and with unit tests etc etc., since it's shown in the screenshot above.
3 Mules = 38 probes
1 Mule ~= 12 probes
1 Chronoboost gives ~=2 probes
therefore 6 Chronoboosts = 12 probes
and by extension, 6 Chronoboosts ~=1 Mule.
Still, i'd advise looking up that thread since it's much better explained with algorithms and the like i'm sure.
Out of curiosity, what league do you play in?
. This wasn't a 'throwing the toys out of the pram screaming imbalance moment', but I really wanted to see see pvz from their perspective. What made 4 gate so powerful, and why was I getting it so wrong?
. The only problem is I'm now in a situation where I don't know if I should switch to protoss fully, go back to zerg or learn some terran and go random...
. Will be good to properly learn the matchups.
