Note that in practice this isn't a *huge* difference: at the mineral rate of 17/second (3 mines), it takes you 15.9 seconds to save up for a $270 gateway for 4 zealots. At 3 mines, the bonus is 14.71% for a rate of 19.5/second, or 13.8 seconds to save up for a $270 gateway. Obviously the big ticket items like reavers, BCs and other air units will have a bigger differential. Alternatively, when someone has saved up for 7 gateways at normal rate, the other person would have money to build 8 gateways after the same period of time - this takes 111 seconds, or almost 2 minutes, before the mineral rate has an outright advantage in terms of zealots on the ground (the main advantage is getting zealots out quicker, rather than total number of zealots).
However consider it in this light: in 2 vs 3, if one of the weak team players builds a mine, that drops that teams mineral rate down to 50% (logically 57.5% if you include 15% bonus), whereas if one of the strong team players builds a mine, that team's mineral rate is still going at 67%. Sure, the strong teams 3rd spawn will be a little weaker, but they have 2 other spawns to help counter that, whereas the weak team only has 1 other spawn to back them up.
I have found while playing in 2vs3 or 1vs2 games before I made the change that the weak team is often under a lot of pressure just to pump units out to get HP onto the field, because whenever they build a mine and lose their income, the opposition team has a greater ability to pump units. This means the weak team often ends up putting out lots of cheap, but less effective units, while the stronger team can generally tech higher and has much more leisure to build mines, and eventually get an income advantage that the weak team can never hope to keep up with. This is also a downwards spiral - the more pressure the strong team puts on the weak team, the more the weak team has to defer building mines and must build cheaper units.
Ultimately the 15% bonus will not really help the weak team when it gets to end-game specials, so weak teams will generally need superior strategies to win.
Finally there is a psychology factor at play - if someone on your team drops or quits, knowing that you are being compensated with a bonus 15% mineral rate makes it more likely that you will continue to play the game, which is generally in everyone's interests. At first glance, coupled with the spawning mechanism, it seems like this 15% bonus is going to be of huge benefit to you, but I hope as my above points make clear, it really isn't a huge overpowering bonus, but really something that helps keep the playing field even.
And yes, there are units in this map that are based on their SC2 counterparts where possible, although many SC1 units remain (such as Dragoons, Dark Archons) and others have simply had name changes to make them more in line with SC2 but really they still behave the same (Corsair -> Phoenix, Firebat -> Marauder, Vulture -> Hellion).
Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on May 25 2010, 12:49 am by Lanthanide.
None.