6 Pool

Introduction In the 101 post on Larva Economy  we looked at larva production and spending larva with some round numbers. In this post we will take a harder look and use more exact numbers.  I started writing this as part of the 101 series on production-income matching, and then I fell down a Nydus Wurm and when I came back up it was clearly not 101 material anymore.  I also want to note for anyone who doesn't know that Ctrl-Mousescroll or Ctrl +/- will change the zoom level on most browsers so you can see the graphs better. The big punchlines if you don't want to read all of this are: Stacking injects is really important if your queen is building up energy. It is better to spend your larva separately from your inject cycle but it is okay to do it all in one shot while you are learning. If both are available to be done, it is better to spend larva first and then inject. The zerg macro cycle is really more complicated than 30 second cycles.  It tak...

Someone posted that they'd found a way to dramatically increase their keyrate in Linux, and that brought me to wonder if it can be done in Windows.  Turns out it can. I found this discussion on Stack Overflow , which provided sourcecode and also linked to the executable on GitHub. The program is called keyrate, and you just open up a command prompt and type keyrate followed by 2 numbers, like this: keyrate 150 20 This sets a delay of 150ms before beginning to repeat, and a delay of 20ms between repeats. I set mine to 150 and 10 and I rather like it. You can see the result below: Holding down 'D' is also valid. It appears that setting a repeat delay shorter than 10 has no effect.  1 or 2 or 5 are not noticeably faster than 10 even though they should be very obviously faster, so there is perhaps a floor on what Windows will allow.  Your directory in the command prompt needs to have access to the file location, either by path or by changing the current dire...

This post will detail how larva production works, what role it serves in the Zerg economy, and why managing larva is a fundamental skill when playing Zerg. One of the beating hearts of Starcraft and of RTS generally is production efficiency.  If it were just about the big picture decisions and then army control then there would be more tools to do things automatically.  Needing to manually control your production is an important part of the game. The first part of this is setting an income level.  A mineral patch can be mined optimally by 2 workers, and a standard base therefore needs 16 workers to mine optimally. This generates about 900 minerals per minute.  Terran can get more with mules but we're not Terran. This income is then spent on production, tech and upgrades, and/or economy.  Unspent money goes into the bank, and the bank can be used to spend from in the future. This post will focus on production because Zerg production is different in in...