| 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. |