List of New Zerg Changes

After attending the various panels at the Blizzard World Wide Invitational in Paris and getting some hands on experience with the game itself (not even Rob Pardo himself was up to date on all the details and changes), I have begun compiling a list of all the new Zerg related changes to the game. While not all information in this compilation comes directly from the WWI you can be sure that they are all recent ones (the oldest is a few weeks old at most).

Zerg threatening to destory the Protoss Probe workers.

Basics: the workers

Increase worker count at the start: All 3 races now start off their games with 6 worker units instead of the 4 we are used to from the original game.
Minerals are down to 5 per trip. Due to improved pathing they had to decrease the amount of minerals a given worker carries to 5 per trip (down from 8) in order to keep the gathering rate in line with StarCraft I.

Unit Mutation Change

With the introduction of Multible Building Selection or MBS, Blizzard found it to be necessary to make a few balance changes to the way the Zerg unit production works.

In the original game, the Zerg production mechanic differed greatly from that of other races. Where the Protoss and the Terran had a linear production system (you could only produce 1 unit at 1 building at any given time), the Zerg where able to start production of up to 3 units in parallel.

While this seems like an imbalance, it worked out quite well since the Zerg needed to spawn all of their units from Larva which only spawned (to a maximum of 3 and all linked to the Hatchery that spawned them) at their Hatchery (primary Zerg structure). In order to increase unit production beyond that the Zerg had to build multiple Hatcheries.

Commanding a group of Larvae was done by using a “select all” button at the selected Hatchery after which the Mutation of choice could be selected. The introduction of MBS practically removed this command limitation since it allowed you to give the same command to all identical selected buildings.

In response to Blizzard have now "nerfed" this ability in their latest StarCraft 2 build. It's no longer possible to start the production of 3 or 4 units by pressing a single key. With the new system the player has to give a separate command for each unit that he wants to produce. Example:

You select 3 Larva and want them to mutate into 3 Drones. Pressing the Drone production fastkey “D” once will cause only one of the 3 Larva to start the mutation process. So in order to create 3 Drones you now actually have to issue the command 3 separate times after you have them selected as a group.

Continue to the next page for the new changes in Zerg gameplay.

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