[nopinsight]

One macro technique used by AlphaStar agents that is not used by human pros is building extra workers beyond currently exploitable capacity.

This gives them reserves when attacked and some workers killed. They can also ramp up mining at a new base quickly by moving the extra workers there.

Apparently the benefits outweigh the costs for these workers for AlphaStar. It will be interesting to see if some pros decide to adopt the technique and if it improves human performance as well.

Disclaimer: I do not have much Starcraft experience.

[jammygit]

Workers mine 40 minerals per minute and cost 50, taking... 15 seconds to build? I forget. Workers beyond 24 provide zero benefit (better to send them to the natural).

Let's say you make 4 extra at a cost of 200 minerals and then lose 4 workers to harassment. You are out 200 minerals in both cases, but the prebuilt workers in the prebuilt case will mine an extra... 100 minerals? (40 + 30 + 20 + 10).

This doesn't take chronoboost into account though. I don't know, the gain is marginal, and the opportunity cost is having a smaller army (2 zealots for example)

Please correct my numbers if I've made a mistake, I forget build times and havent played since hots

[keerthiko]

The numbers you cite are close enough that your estimations are good to work with (12 seconds to build, closer to 60 minerals at full efficiency but down to 40 for probes #17-24, etc)

The extra workers aspect was the most interesting decision-based adjustment AlphaStar made on conventional pro level wisdom of "standard" play. It has a couple of factors in play, that I trust the AI factored in and more and tested over several games for its long-term benefit to winning a game:

- every 8 probes you build requires a pylon as well. total cost of 500 minerals

- workers are safer in the main than in an unoccupied natural (long distance mining) to harassment and pressure

- when your expansion completes, having 4 workers vs 8 workers vs 16 workers potentially has huge impact to the immediate spike in income

- what you mention -- the prebuilt workers will dampen the impact of most worker harassment to purely the resource cost of the lost workers.

My guess was that well executed harassment by an opponent in practice games put AlphaStar in very limited situations with a crippled economy that it couldn't fight its way out of, so this was a catch-all harassment "counter" -- it's ok if you kill a few probes, at least it won't throw off my economy completely and I can still continue my overall gameplan.

After that I think the next most important aspect was planning ahead for a bigger income spike when their expansion was done without waiting to build out another 16 workers after the nexus was ready.

[TulliusCicero]

Yeah, it looked like Mana was copying this behavior somewhat in the live game.

[proc0]

I bet there's a sweet spot in-between that will come out of this, like saturating your natural to 24 workers minutes before expanding.