u/otikik

I hope I am not the only one who sees this.

In the race selection screen, the marine and the hydralisk look quite faithful to how they are depicted in the cinematics.

The zealot, however, looks very odd.

1. The head looks like half of his torso, instead of 1/3rd of it
2. Because his torso is so small, his arm length is shortened in a similar way
3. The head armor leaves a big part of the head exposed
4. The pectoral armor connects to the waist, without any exposed abdomen (which is practical, but still a deviation from the cinematics)
5. As a result his psionic blades overlap with his shoulder pauldrons

I can justify 3, 4 and 5 due to the fact that Protoss have different tribes with differences in body armor, and there are differences even in the same tribe (on the LoTV cinematic we can see that some zealots wear a facemask, and others don't, for example).

However, I can't justify the differences in body proportions in the same way.

I extrapolated how human body proportions change from newborn to adult and I reached the following conclusion:

The zealot in the race selection screen might be a 3-5 years old Protoss child.

That would explain his body proportions and unusual (practice?) armor very nicely. Protoss, being a race of warriors, wouldn't necessarily have the same qualms that humans have in putting their young into battle. Perhaps Protoss infants develop faster than humans.

It would make him the only depiction of a Protoss child in the whole game, as far as I know.

Hello Zerospacers,

I am a Bazitte Linux user. I would like to report significant stuttering / framedrops while playing the demo.

Installation in Steam worked well, and the game launched. The demo missions were ... "playable", but they would get into "slideshow mode" relatively often. The cutscenes/dialogs would have very distracting stuttering. Sometimes the graphics would stop for 2-3 seconds (while the sound continues).

I tried to lower the graphics settings to see if that would help with the stuttering, but I could not find a way to do that in the options menu (I could find and change the option, but I could not find a way to "apply the changes". All I could find was the "x" to close the options without applying them). The game didn't have a crazy resolution anyway, it was 1900xsomething.

Given this state of affairs, I didn't even consider playing 1v1.

I bought my machine in 2023. Specs:

• Graphics card: XFX Speedster SWFT 210 AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT Core 8GB GDDR6
• RAM: Acer Predator Vesta II RGB DDR5 6000MHz 32GB 2x16GB CL30
• Motherboard: ASUS TUF GAMING B650-PLUS
• Hard Drive: WD BLACK SN770 1TB SSD PCIe Gen4 NVMe

I have tried many other games and they tend to work just fine. Recently I finished Jedi Survivor on it, and it worked flawlessly.

I did click the "send a 5-seconds perf assessment" button on your bug menu.

I understand that a team with limited resources and manpower can't test things out in all possible environments, and linux is probably low on the priority list. Nevertheless, I hope that this information is useful. Have a nice day!

When the second PTR patch was released, I tried it, and did not notice a lot of changes. I did some back of the envelope calculations, and that seemed to confirm that the change wasn't really that significant.

Since then, many of you, including some Zerg players, have mentioned that the larva spawn increase is too strong of a buff. So I have decided to look at the numbers in a different way. People were mentioning that "it is compounding". I wanted to formalize it a bit more, and see what truth there was there.

I had to dust off my calculus for this one, and draft 3 equations. I verified them with AI. But, well, title.

Let:

• L(t) be the larva production over time
• M(t) the number of minerals over time
• D(t) the number of drones over time

Then here's the first equation:

[1] dD/dt ≈ min⁡(L, M/50)

This means "drone production is conditioned by the number of larvae and the number of minerals divided by 50". If we have plenty of minerals but no larva, we can't make drones. Same if we have plenty of larva but no minerals.

Second equation is for the rate of minerals a drone can mine - which is 55-60 per minute, let's call it r:

dM/dt ≈ r⋅D 

If we differentiate with respect to time, we get:

[2] d²M/dt² ≈ r·dD/dt 

Which means "the rate of change of mineral income roughly equals the rate at which drones are added". Notice that we are now talking about the second derivative of minerals: how quickly mineral income increases instead of how mineral count increases. The change in drones is "mineral acceleration", not "mineral velocity".

Now we can substitute dD/dt from [1] into [2] and we remove the Drones:

[3] d²M/dt² ≈ r·min(L, M/50) 

This reads: mineral acceleration is approximately limited by either the available larvae or minerals. I other words: the larva spawn rate acts as an *accelerator* for the zerg economy, not as its velocity.

This effect also scales with hatch count: additional hatcheries generate additional larva, which increases production capacity later in the game.

Conclusion 1: fixes for the 8 worker start

If the intention was to fix the lack of larva in the early game due to the 8-workers start, this was probably not the right dial to touch, as it has effects way into the late game. Protoss/Terran would have to have something similar that helps them through the game, not just a change at the start.

Some suggestions that may solve the lack of larva at the start (any of these should suffice):

• The first zerg hatchery starts injected. It will spawn 3 larva in 29 seconds. Zerg still has to build a queen in order to get more injects.
• Zerg starts with 2 overlords instead of just 1. This means 1 less larva is dedicated to the overlord early, and those 100 minerals can be used for an earlier pool or more early drones.

Anyway, something in that direction. I am partial to the injected method, it looks small and self contained.

Conclusion 2: Why didn't I feel the effects

Basically because I am a scrub and I was hampered by an inappropriate build order.

On the Live patch I always go 15/15 in all of the matchups (1 extractor trick allows building the hatchery and pool before building the second overlord). This is a relatively "middle of the ground" opener, between safe and economical.

On the PTR I had been doing a 13/13 opener instead. Which is similarly "safe and economical", except that with the increased larva production speed, I would have 3 larva idling on my base for a while. Opening with an overlord first is better.

And critically, all of the above near-perfect larva spending. The rest of my macro sucks so bad compared with the optimal that any advantages provided by the larva spawn increase are masked by it. ViBE was onto something when he mentioned "macro, macro, macro".

Thank you for reading.

EDIT: somehow Reddit published an older draft of my post instead of the more recent one, I have gone over it again and tried to redo all of my recent changes.

I am trying to figure out how good/bad the PTR change is:

• Larva spawn rate increased from 10.7s to 9s.

So, larva spawn rate is the rate at which a hatchery spaws larvae naturally. This is independent of injects.

An inject still lasts 29 seconds, and then it spawns 3 larvae. So for every inject cycle:

• On the PTR, the hatchery will spawn 29/9 = 3.22 larvae naturally (plus the 3 from the inject, 6.22)
• On the live game, the hatchery spawns 29/10.7 = 2.71 larvae naturally (plus the 3 from the inject, that's 5.71)

So a hatchery will produce 12.4 larvae per minute (58 seconds) in the PTR, while on the live server it produces 11.42.

In other words, roughly one more larva per hatchery per minute. (Assuming perfect injects and instant larvae consumption, at least when there's 3 or more larvae)

I was thinking about attending, but the only reference I had that it is actually happening is the Liquipedia page which lists a date ("Jul 03–05, 2026") and prize pool. I could not find any other mention of it anywhere.

I was considering attending, but I would hate getting there and finding out that the event was cancelled or something.

So, will it actually take place?

cc u/takeTV

Acquired Jedi Survivor on May the 4th, then I started seeing ads for hair stylers in Youtube (not the specific ones I'm showing here, I just looked for some examples).

I am a male with very short hair, I am absolutely not interested in this kind of product.

There's a couple accessories that resemble Jaro Tapal's emitter.