You can either hall 5 spaces away or you can chop a tree. I like to chop the tree. Timing it puts me approx. 30 seconds behind if I chop but I have 100 more wood. What does everyone else prefer ?

I hope everyone knows i'm talking about this for low resources.. high of course go five away.

I don't see any reason to play classic pos, but if I draw r2 in it, I think chopping is actually a pretty smart thing to do.

on low its clearly better to put it an extra space away. absolutely no doubt in my mind

I go with 5 spaces away. I hate that damn spot, which is why I go with posbne..

INcin... think about it... with that spot you're fux0red anyway.. if you don't have a neighbor you'll be fine with the chop. Without the chop EVERY single peon has to take two more steps round trip

extra spot away...

The chop will take an extra 25 seconds where you cannot mine. It will slow you down even more in the long run. 2 extra spaces takes like .3 seconds to walk. Plus they don't get stuck moving in/around the hall as bad. Chopping will put you so far behind even to the 2nd rax. At the very end of when your mine explodes, though - if nothing happens - you are going to mine it out slightly faster than if you chopped (but when does that happen?)

Do the math..

Chopping costs 25 seconds.
Each trip costs .3 seconds each
You have wasted 25 seconds when you've made
25/.3 = 83 walks. At 100 gold per walk, that's at 8333 gold. That's not even on 1/4th of the mine..

Furthermore, if walking 2 costs .3 seconds, a short trip costs 4*.3= 1.2 seconds, while a longer trip costs 5*.3=1.5 seconds.
having to make 400 trips, this results in a speed difference of .3*400 = 120 seconds. That's 2 minutes...

Walking 2 extra may only take 0.0625 seconds extra in order to have the loss compensated when mine blows.

I'd say chop.

Mathematically your calculation might be right. You are forgetting however a multiplier (snowball) effect. When you dont chop you get peon peon 2 faster. You also get peon 3 faster because of peon 1 and 2 mining earlier than in the chopping scenario. This keeps adding up all the time...
Because of this and because of experience I'm pretty sure not chopping is better from a "I want to win the game" point of view.

I don't think that's quite right Guan... lets use moving s9 as an example. It is a 20 second head start for your opponent; nothing more. You start 20 seconds behind him and later on in the game, all things being equal, you will still be 20 seconds behind. The reason chopping at r2 is plausible is because like s9, you have a faster gold flow.

One space and 6 spaces is a big difference. Also, s9 has a good dual.

Well Sluggo, we're talking low resources here. When you have s9 on gow (high res) you dont have to wait for gold to make additional peons.

Where did .3 seconds come from? =/ Guan that snowball effect is invalid... Anyway it's an interesting question.. Keep in mind on low res u have enough gold for a second peon, so if u chop with first 2 peons u won't even need to chop later for farm 2... I wouldn't rule out chopping. However, on high res, I just use my first 3-4 peons to wall the left side of my hall in so that the peons pop inside, get a ct, and go dual rush. Usually I take top let becuse u can wall with a hall and 2 farms. That strat 0wns.

somebody came up with the .3 seconds, but the math holds for intervals as short as 0.0625, which I'm sure a peon can't walk (or run.. :-) ).

Because you chop first, you should make a little change to your order:

normally, what I do, would be:
p1,p2 gold
p3 get gold once. when it's brought in, switch the first 2 peons popping out to lumber.
p4 gold
etc...

In the chop situation, you need 100 lumber less, so you can keep one of those 2 peons on gold, which lets you train peon 5 earlier (!). This actually helps making up the delay a little. The gold peons get 500 gold just a little bit faster, so farm2 is built faster. Don't forget to switch 2 peons to lumber while farm is building, not 1.

In the end, you'll get gold faster and the chop delay is somewhat compensated. Or am I wrong?

wrong. If you're going to chop first, it only makes sense to mine 100 gold before you make your hall. That way, you can make peon 2 before you chop in, and can chop 200 wood before you stop mining, so all of your first 5 peons go on gold. Of course, you won't NEED 5 peons on gold after you build your farm, so you can start chopping again, and probably get farm 3 around peon 6 or 7 while still being able to continuously train.

That makes me think... 4 on gow low kinda blows. It would probably be much better to move to 5. Just be careful when you move to 5 : if it's hot, stay out of sight of his building, and make ur hall off to the right. Then peon rush him with no farm.

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Peace and Love,

Ash

Depends on the wc version... You should do that in the old wc2, but you have enough gold for 2nd peon in the bnet edition.

Ash, the gold thing works with old wc2, but on bnet, I think it is fastest to build hall first, then chop with 2 peons so you can indeed put all on gold afterwards.

That's even faster as chopping out first, because of relatively early p2, and hella faster then building 5 spaces away..

btw, old wc has the lumber bug you can use on mines too..

I made a test pud which has 2 r2pos spots. Time to test this shit out

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Originally posted by The Ghost:
Depends on the wc version... You should do that in the old wc2, but you have enough gold for 2nd peon in the bnet edition.

Ash, the gold thing works with old wc2, but on bnet, I think it is fastest to build hall first, then chop with 2 peons so you can indeed put all on gold afterwards.

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