They’re trapped in a mess of buildings with no way out. Usually, they’re tight fitting and get forced out, but sometimes, it doesn’t always work. I’ve known some who just haphazardly place them around since it’s much quicker than aligning them to some grid.
It’s a minor thing, but still annoying none of the less (since they appear when you press F1, but you can never really do anything with them). With Karax, I just leave them in there since I hardly exceed my supply cap anyways. Plus, you really need to wail no them since they have Unity Barrier, and you’ll need to be able to overcome global repairs. If I have a ranged unit, I’ll have them kill them. Otherwise, I’ve never had to upgrade Overlords to carry units, and typically do NOT use unit transport units anyways.
As terran I like to build a wall around my scvs with my structures, usually barracks and factory one one side of the CC closer to the attack waves, and engi/armory on the other side, connect them to the refineries. This way attack waves will usually stop at that wall and cant hit my scvs. These placements are pretty easy and dont get my workers stuck until I start filling it all with depos.
As protoss, which Ive recently started learning, I do a similar wall with mostly gateways and all the other tech near the outside and I have had a lot of probes getting stuck. I think it is just easier for probes to get stuck since you can queue up multiple buildings you may not realize when placing the next one that your route out will be gone.
If you want stuck workers out of your idle worker hotkey, make them patrol. Even if they can’t reach the destination, they should move around enough to never be idle. I guess they still take up 1 supply, but that usually won’t add up.
Alternatively, if you happen to have your worker stuck in a hole that’s exactly 2x2 large, make a pylon or turret right there. The worker will be forced to move to a nearby open space, phasing through buildings. One cheesy Protoss (parting, I think?) used this to get a probe out on the map through a full wall in versus.
As Defence oriented commander Karax’s probe has it the worst. Swann - can get out with buildings salvaging themselves or by lift Stukov - Buildings can move themselves
Karax -… end their suffering, they cannot be saved.
There are proposals to add blink and/or extend their building range to 5. Karax should have one of these abilities especially when he is encouraged to cannon play.
Btw, I tried to extend their building range through Galaxy Editor but I wasn’t able to as their attack range does not correspond with Build range.
I dont know if I can find them in Effect or behaviour but they are very hard to find.
There’s that one corner behind the left base’s mineral line. It’s a great spot for your first upgrade building (eng bay, whatever), but gets SCV’s stuck 60% of the time. i do it anyway, since i usually have enough time to spare one scv lol
The AI on the workers is programmed to do this because of ladder play when people are sealing off their entrances with buildings the worker will seal itself to the closest base. In co-op this often leads to workers almost always getting stuck because the way most people build their base (clumping buildings together in 1 area) in co-op is not the same as ladder and vice versa.
Yeah, I’m not sure this can be fixed. As a player, you can avoid it with multiple means as outlined above:
Build in a way that doesn’t block
Shift click away from where it’l be trapped
Use available means to get it out (tele, bunker, nydus, load, etc.)
Yeah, it gets annoying but so are units produced trapped in a similar fashion. You would do exactly the same to prevent it (or deal with it).
It’s all about planning. To me it’s no different than Artanis building 1 pylon to support all structures, or tanking ramp with Nova’s Barracks, or Alarak first pylon to expand or push, etc. All of these are strategy learned from experience playing - not trapping a worker is the same, just a little less skill required.
Also, the 4 Terrans who need to build supply tend to get trapped via Supply Depots, but that’s moot since all of them can just lower them to allow passage over them.
I usually don’t have a large enough area when I play as Fenix. Most of the time, the extra space that i can use is from the expo but some of them are just too far away or too exposed to enemies so i had to build them in the main base.
I believe if their prison is too small, they will give up on the patrol command. However, hold position will also remove them from the idle worker list.
I don’t think so. I used to try the worker wall during Aggressive recruitment when hold positioning workers between buildings to distract propagators and the F1 button had light.
As Zerg, I built 4 Hatcheries in a perfect square cluster, and some units were stuck the middle. Next time, I left a 1-tile wide path, thought it would be enough. Zerglings and Drones could walk out, but not the big fat Aberrations and Ultralisks. Since then, I always leave at least a 2-tile wide path in a cluster of Hatcheries.
AFAIK, this indeed shouldn’t work since they try to move to where they can’t, it’s not something they can execute, so you get a “error beep”, and the worker is now idle again.
I learned this when making towers at ramps and chokepoints. Best to have at least a 2-square opening for the big units. Haven’t seen Thors in a while, but them too in addition to Ab’s and Ultras.