When playing as Mengsk I tend to deploy an Imperial Witness above both of my resource fields in an attempt to not only get more Imperial Mandate faster, but to hasten the speed in which my workers grab minerals and vespene. But does the latter really make that much of a difference? Have I just wasted resources and time from the start?
The IW increases worker movement speed, not gathering speed. This means there will be a slight increase in gathered resources when you (or your ally) aren’t fully saturated. Since Mengsk saturates really quickly you’ll hardly get any resource benefit from the IW.
It’s absolutely worth it for the mandate generation in many cases.
With the Trooper Mandate mastery and Amplified Airwaves, the approximate Imperial Support for two fully saturated bases is 154 (0.6 Mandate/second). Without the upgrade, the Imperial Support is 64 (0.27 Mandate/second).
I generally do not put IWs on my ally’s bases because by the time you already get one out you’re probably going to full on your bases so it’s a waste of resources, and the mandate generation only affects your own workers. I do try to get both expansions in the AoE like on Miner Evac and Trains.
TL;DR get them only on your own bases to maximize mandate points generation.
The gain is small… Stetman for example has a higher move speed bonus, yet only marginally higher benefit.
The reason is acceleration. The workers “would” move significantly faster when they moved continuously… but when gathering, they only move a short distance and have to accelerate and then decelerate right away, before they reach top speed.
I don’t know how high the mining speed benefit is, but its small. I would not bother doing that on your allies mineral line as Mengsk (different story with Stetman) as by the time you have a spare IW, your allies mineral line is saturated (or close to) anyway. Once saturated (=3 workers per mineral or gas) there is no benefit any more.
While we’re at it, reminder to all to get to Fusion Core and research Amplified Airwaves ASAP! It’s at the end of the tech tree, but double the Mandate from Indoctrined workers goes a long way!
The resource saving is not on workers gathering, but on the part where you can afford to use FEWER worker to achieve good gathering result.
That’s the long and short of it, you can get by with less workers. But, that’s better for your ally than Mengsk, cause you’d also be giving up some mandate generation by doing that.
That doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. IW costs gas, workers don’t.
On a 7 mineral patch base with 2 gas, your ally needs 21+6 workers. If he scales that down to 14+6 + IW, he saves 350 minerals, but you pay 100/100… so you could argue that its a saving of 150 ressources. But i think even with IW 2 workers dont saturate 1 mineral node. So he will mine less over time, and that 150 will be gone in a couple minutes and turn negative.
Even if i play stetman (with max stetzone bonus mastery) i still saturate bases fully, cause even with his greater speed bonus, i think 2 workers dont saturate a node fully.
You might be able to saturate the 4 nodes that are closer to your hatchery, but i dont thing that works on the far ones or gas.
For Mengsk as well as Stettman there is 0% mining increase when your base is fully saturated so always fully saturate and only put IW over your own mineral lines.
That said, Stettmans speed boost does give a great resource boost when you have 2 workers per resource so it’s a great idea to cut worker production at this point (and double check to make sure that there are actually 2 workers per patch) and develop your tech but remember to come back and finish worker production before you start switching Stettzones. If you play Stettman a lot you’ll find that there is a natural build order that develops that utilises this mechanic.
For Mengsk there might be a case to be made for some specific circumstances where you could put an IW over your ally so that they could have a 2/3rds saturation if they don’t need the extra minerals but this would only be via discussion on a specific map with a teammate and not a random queue.
Imperial Witness above the base can indeed help your economy. But not in the way you might think.
All you need to do is overproduce workers on one of the bases (50-60-more workers on minerals) and launch the UNN 24/7 marathon upon 'em all.
What you get as a result:
- Crazy mandate boost for calling bunkers from orbit on cooldown (6 free Troopers from each).
- Still enough mandate for the other top bar abilities, including mass nukes.
- A plenitude of able-bodied workers available for mass mobilization in any needed moment.
It’s definitely not an income boost, but you might call it a nice cashback 
At that point in the game, Mengsk has no issue with mandate generation at all.
But if you don’t put an Imperial Witness above your ally’s base, will they know that Korhal is a safe harbor for all those who would depart that wasteland?
Enlist today to have your sentence commuted by more than half!
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