Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

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The rock paper scissors element is there, but not with worker rushing. Worker rushing is a huge disadvantage.

The term means you take your initial workers and charge the enemy. If you know where the enemy is you'll arrive about the time they are up one or two workers on you, then you just have to fight when you're down one or two workers and you can't back off (they'll return to mine).

A human can win like this if they are so much better at micro that they can overcome the material disadvantage (unlikely) or if their opponent panicks and does something dumb (e.g. pulling only half their workers to fight).

Because worker rushes arrive so early it doesn't matter what plan you have for the match, you'll have at least as many workers (if you are also worker rushing) or you'll have more. Maybe if you're going six pool you'll have fewer but you'll also be able to get lings and win with them.

The computer can lose to worker rushing only because it can get caught in loops of poor decisions (e.g. you lure away a couple workers and kill them).

Worker rushing is always a bad plan.

Maybe certain races have stronger workers if you have perfect micro (e.g. probes w/ shields)

Possible, but I highly doubt the differences are significant enough to make up the deficit. The other side has one or two more workers, which is just an insurmountable material advantage. If you back off to recharge your shields, I return to mining and get the resources for another worker or two (plus, my guys can recharge, regen, or repair too).

A web search turns up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AtqgaJzJP4

It should be noted that this is one of, if not the shortest map to ever have been played in official matches.

I thought Idra was notoriously against "cheese" of any kind?

That's why he apologized when he won.

Very weird how the zerg somehow got their drones trough the scv line, it looked pretty bad until they got that surround going.

Workers can fade through units (unless they are sieged) when they collecting resources (minerals, vespene). So Idra commanded his drones to mine minerals and canceled the command shortly after.

This is common technique, mostly used to get scouting drone back through a walloff (own unit stands on "hold" in a small choke) or when a mineral line is under siege (e.g. Siege Tank, Liberator), the player can select all his workers to mine a single mineral patch (has to be spammed, otherwise workers redistribute) outside of the siege range until they siege is cleared up.

I'd argue that with AI level micro, the Protoss probe shield regen advantage would definitely come in play. Shields regen only when out of combat for 10 seconds and they regen at 2/second after that so it just takes 20 seconds to regen 20 shields.[1] This could definitely come into play enough, if micro'd enough, to make a difference, maybe... It'll be exciting to find out.

[1]https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Plasma_shield

20 seconds is pretty long. Your opponent is up 2 workers on you, so assuming perfect micro from both sides, the defender can use one worker to continue to mine minerals and pump out more workers, while microing with the other 11 vs the attacker's 10 workers.

Zerg have faster build time for drones, so they can get a numeric advantage (or at least parity, once you account for travel time).

The very fact that it's a bad plan means that it is surprising, which means that it is occasionally a good decision!

I think the chess equivalent would be choosing to play with only your King and your pawns under the logic that your opponent won't have practiced playing against only pawns and won't be expecting you to do it. If you're up against a novice they might panic or fail to react and you win! Otherwise, not.

Chess is not a good analogy I think because there is perfect information in Chess.

If you didn't get any other pieces until the 10th move and then you got one piece for each pawn that hadn't moved, then that analogy would work.

Most cheese in SC2 is a micro check; you're testing to see if you can control your units better than they control theirs, even if they might have an economic advantage. A worker rush isn't nearly as stupid as what you're describing in chess -- especially if it's a ZvZ match, because in that case you can start planting spine crawlers on their creep.

The surprise for a human player won't gain the deepmind AI much advantage. A human can recognize the concept "I am being worker rushed" and immediately counter it, necessarily having more workers at their starting site than the attacking player who sent only their starting workers.

As the grandparent stated, a worker rush only works against the built in starcraft computer player, because the computer AI is too dumb to recognize "I am being worker rushed" and may not commit all of its workers to defending.

I disagree. The part that everyone seems to forget about Starcraft is the micro; humans are imperfect at controlling their units, and even relatively decent players (say Diamond-ish) will sometimes lose to something like a worker rush.

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