StarCraft2: Easy way to calculate number of harvesters

Question

During game play one of the most important questions is: how many harvesters do you have right now. Will it be effective to build 3 more harvesters or it is better to build additional production building (for example)?

AFAIK optimal number of harvesters per base is 30: 8 minerals + 2 gas multiply by 3.

But often is hard to detect how many do you have right now. From what I see you could go to your minerals line, select all harvesters and see how much do you have. But sometime it is hard to do that (other units, non-harvesting SCV/probes). Time - is also factor. I would like to look into my supply numbers and know something like this: currently I have 50/64 supply.... how much harvesters do I have 20? 30?

Usually in replays that I lost my opponents have around 27-35 harvesters on 1 base and 43-48 with expand... Usually I have less...

Probably I just need to build those harvesters CONSTANTLY till supply id less then 60/80? (don't forget to build army too)? Probably I don't need to worry that I have too many harvesters?

Any thoughts are welcome!

Answer 1

The easiest way to count harvesters is probably going to be to double click on a worker mining at each base. A full page is 24 workers and don't forget to add one for each geyser you have going (the double click won't select the worker currently inside of it). Just add up the results from there and it should be pretty close at least.

If you want your full worker count, you can also look at the bottom left to see your idle worker count and if for some reason it is not zero, then presumably these will have been missed by your mining worker counting and can be added as well. Other than that you are probably only going to miss a couple guys currently building things if you are terran. As far as non-mining workers though, this will really mostly apply to terran and even then will probably never average higher than 3 workers.

As for production, you should really never stop scv/probe production unless one of the following is true:

• You are planning a one or two base push and are at your desired number of workers for it.
• You absolutely have to to stay alive.
• You have in excess of ~70-75 workers.

The 70+ workers is enough to give you three bases worth of decent saturation while leaving enough room for an army.

As zerg things get trickier as you don't have a building dedicated to worker production, but since you didn't mention drones I won't get into that for now.

Answer 2

The pro way is to know exactly how many military units you have out and how much supply they use; from there, you know your harvester count because it's (supply total - military supply).

Also, with the "select all harvesters" approach you mention, other units don't enter into it if you double-click on a harvester to select all of them on the screen, rather than drawing a rectangle. (Faster, too.) Non-harvesting harvesters still confound that count though.

Answer 3

Nowadays, one can just hover over the supply indicator and popout will appear with army and worker counts.

Answer 4

you can duoble click your harvesters and set them to a hotkey then see the # then you can reset your the hotkey

Answer 5

The optimal "efficient" amount is 2 harvesters per mineral patch, and 3 per gas. Someone did some testing, and the third harvester per patch does a little bit of waiting, so you would be better off sending that third harvester to another base, rather than just pile him up on an existing one, although if you are still trying to secure an expansion a little oversaturation could be a good idea.

For most normal bases, that's 8 patches * 2/patch + 2 geysers * 3/geyser = 16+6 = 22.

Gold bases have 6 patches, so that would be 12+6 = 18, but maybe you don't mind a little inefficiency at a gold base to mine it out quicker, given that gold bases are usually in risky positions.

Answer 6

After some time of playing I've found the following: doesn't matter how many harvesters do you have, you always need to build more! At least till the time when you have 2 bases fully covered with harvesters.

How to see if they are fully covered? I would say by eye - it will come with practice.

And when you are getting the 3rd expand usually you will have almost finished main and some harvesters loses. So you will move almost all harvesters from main to the 3rd expand and again you need to build them more.