I don’t get the hate that’s been going around recently in regards to Protoss economy when compared to Terran. The argument is that Chrono Boost allows them to get out workers faster, but there are a few things to consider:
Terran has MULEs to supplement their income, effectively returning as much as 5 SCVs for a while (not exactly this since a MULE takes longer to mine).
With a very remote similarity to Zerg Larvae, if you’re using Chrono on Probes, then it’s probably not being used on research or getting army units out faster.
Once 3 bases are saturated on both sides, it evens out, although arguably Terran can pull ahead with MULEs again if needed (although you’ll most likely want to use scans by this point).
With the exception of when building structures, SCVs are probably the most resilient to harassment because their HP prevents Oracles and Adepts from 2-shotting them, the ability to be fully repaired or healed, and they don’t die to a single Widow Mine’s splash damage (so you can’t just send a Hallucinated Phoenix over the mineral line when you know there’s a mine there, unless you do it multiple times and the SCVs haven’t been healed).
Of the three races, Protoss is arguably the most vulnerable to harassment due to their relative lack of mobility, poor map awareness (you have to place your Observers very well), lack of reliable anti-air on the standard tech paths, and the high price to pay if you don’t defend well. A single Widow Mine can kill scores of Probes, and the Sentinel Missiles tend to do more damage if you try to pull them and it’s already locked onto one of them. Liberators can be a nightmare because of the relative expense of a Photon Cannon and Stalkers being a soft counter at best. Zerg has the long-range Queens and movable Spore Crawlers, while Terran can use a Cyclone or Viking, or even a group of marines. Building a Void Ray, for example, is not ideal because it requires a tech tree that doesn’t give access to splash damage that is practically essential against mid- to late-game bio.
One thing to note with static defence: for Terran and Zerg, their anti-air structure will continue firing on the transport if it’s in range; with Photon Cannons (and Stalkers), unless the player has the presence of mind to manually target the transport, it will switch to whatever gets unloaded, which usually gets immediately healed.
The balance isn’t going to be perfect on account of the asymmetry of the races - in this case to summarise: faster worker production, but more vulnerable to harassment. Or am I missing something fundamental here?
That’s actually a misconception. Sure, Protoss can produce workers faster if chronoboosted (about 50% faster than typical production time for 20s, with a chronoboost being roughly available once per minut), but that’s only a 10% boost to workers production (5.6 workers per minut instead of 5) supposing you’d only CB your nexuses.
Yet in fact, the superiority of Protoss’ economy doesn’t comes from this 10% boost, but from the fact nearly no worker time is lost during the construction of buildings, while you have -1 worker per building in construction for the two other races. And that means a temporary +1 worker/per constructed building for vs Terran, and a permanent +1 worker/constructed building vs Zerg.
And this last reason is why, in the first minuts of a standard game, Protoss do have equal to more workers than Zerg at first, despite Zerg being the fastest race at producing workers. Then at some point depending on the build used, the workers curves will cross and, if left undisturbed, will get the worker lead.
According to Liquipedia, a MULE returns 5x more than an SCV per each trip ; but takes 3.85x more time per trip. So that means they’re only 30% more efficient than SCVs, not 6 times more. Yet, they work like +1.3 worker regardless of the patchs’ saturation, so the income boost compared to a regular worker increases greatly with the base’s saturation. Liquipedia settles for around 3.5x more efficient than a regular worker overall.
As we said, Chronoboost is in fact not the main factor in Protoss’ economy relative speed/efficiency compared to others. So even while purely chronoboosting upgrades or units, they would still retain that efficiency.
Furthermore, as you said, larvae can be spend on army as well. Yet you forgot that CC’s energy also can be spent tactically on scans instead of economy. So all three races have strategical choices to make there.
It depends a lot of said harassment. If your harasser (let’s say a scout) deals 5 dmg per shot, then drones would in fact have the same durability than SCV’s due to them regenerating 1 HP from the very first second they are hit. And probes can regenerate faster than any worker after a few seconds.
Yet, all those come to nothing against damage sufficient to oneshot (or even two shot with enough margin) probes or drones. Hence the durability advantage of SCVs against mines or oracles.
Yet, the workers that are the most vulnerable to harassment aren’t probes nor SCV’s, but most of the time drones due to the lack of wall. You’d have to go for a way to bypass walls in order to kill probes or SCV’s, most of the time.
And then, if you’ve got an harassment tool bypassing walls, SCV’s durability would indeed give them an edge over probes.
Yet, probes can be produced faster than SCVs, and drones can be produced faster than probes. So overall, things would balance themselves out if taking worker harass in account.
You missed the superior worker efficiency due to the worker time lost by the other races. And that zerg workers are the most vulnerable. Yet technically, vs terrans, to me that paragraphs seems true.
There’s also another fundamental that comes into play, which is the expansions’ timings. Zerg expand fastest, with Protoss second, and Terran arguably the slower (though some risky builds can mitigate that, those being riskier vs protoss). So Protoss being able to land their third base before Terran in PvT, even more combined to the production stalls due to CCs being morphed into OCs, gives them even more edge in that regard.
And that is why the devs often mentioned protoss 3rd bases timings, as they’d want it more defendable vs Z, and not too quick vs terran (which was one of the determinants of the stim timing buff). And why mines superior efficiency vs protoss is one of the aspects that balances things out.
Ultimately, undisturbed,at 6:00 mark :
— Zerg can be 70-72 workers high (standard B3 speedlings build)
— Protoss can be 60-62 workers high (standard gate expand SG B3)
— Terran can be 48-50 workers high +2MULEs ≈ 54-56 (2-1-1 standard B3)
From there the incentive for Protoss to harass Zergs, and for Terrans to harass both Protoss and Zerg. And that doesn’t even takes in account the different economic efficiencies.
To sum things up :
Workers production rate : Z > P > T.
Economy efficiency : P > T > Z.
Harassment worker vulnerability : Z > P > T.
Hence why the pressure to harass in each MU is often on the Terrans’ side, and why those three components would balance themselves out with proper harassment.
Hate can come from fear, which is primitively triggered by ignorance. The less you know about something different, the more you’ll be likely to fear it, then to hate it (same mechanism than racism, sadly on the foreground of current international actualities). That’s part why so much battlenet forums single race players seem to hate so deeply one race, and why they whine too much over it : ignorance of concerned race → fear → hate. And by that, ignorance of the tools they’d have to deal with their opponents.
Interesting to see that mining rate in PvT looks almost the same.
Zerg starts without queens, and loses a drone every time they build something.Just for the basic opener you lose 3 drones (gas hatch pool).P has chrono and does not lose a single probe so they have the lead until Z can drone safely and then that’s when their drone count can skyrocket at around 6-7 minute mark.
Wrong, MULEs only compensate income lost on workers who are building buildings. Protoss buildings build themselves. Terran buildings are built by workers.
Because of how strong Protoss early game is, Terran 3-d starts mining MUCH MUCH later than Protoss third.
Once Terran acquires a third base since Terran was using MULEs he have much less mineral patches that Protoss, so he still mines less.
Besides, Protoss is taking 4-th at this moment.
So only when Terran grabs forth he is even in income via SCVs and could get ahead if he uses CCs energy on MULEs instead of scans (and this entirely depends on how aggressive Protoss is on the map).
Very few games make it to this point. Usually game is over long before. However if its not, Protoss should have extremely cost efficient army by that time consisting of Colossus, Disruptors and HT so while Terran will probably mine more, he will also trade less cost efficiently.
Mate try playing Terran
Since when Blink is not on the standard tech path?
If you have dozens of buildings going simultaneously, you are either so far ahead economically that it doesn’t matter, or are doing something extremely dumb.
Until 3 hatch production kicks in, Protoss does indeed outproduce Zerg when it comes to workers. That changes after 3 hatch production comes into effect, however.
Many players open with charge-robo/archon instead of blink, from a point of view is probably the safest way of starting the game if you are going to play macro.
