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Originally posted by jtsisyoda
Or am I missing the point?
Or am I missing the point?
The cost per mineral on that buy will then go slightly up and down while you decide whether buying a few more or less.
But those would be just marginal decimal shavings, other factors would be likely driving your decision, as we all expounded above.
Let's look for instance at the 13 missing minerals line.
The actual costs for buiyng just 1 to all the 13 minerals are
3 6 8 11 14 16 19 21 24 27 29 32 34
individually, "mineral per mineral" this means
3 3 2 3 3 2 3 2 3 3 2 3 2
Imagine you planned to buy 5 minerals, which cost you 14. You realise "Hey, if I add 2 measly more ec I gain 1 whole extra mineral". Same from 10 to 11.
But instead, adding the 12th costs you 3 (from 29 to 32).
You see that what Kody stated is not a general principle, it's only a collateral effect of roundings.
Kody made clear what he meant, if you read the following sentence in his original post: when you have less minerals missing, those minerals cost you less each than rushing when you miss many.
Take a 15 missing minerals unit: 41ec to completion.
If you miss just 4 minerals, you pay them just 8ec.
With 40ec you can buy the 4 last minerals in 5 bases (or 5 times in the same base), getting 5 more minerals for 1ec less.
When you just rush the last 4 missing, you won't probably gain a turn on THAT build, as it would have been very likely been completed the same with production alone. But you'll have accumulated those 4 more for your *next* build, and THAT might be sped up gaining one turn on completion. And a compund effect might build up over time.
The rationale behind it is that *if you are not pressed*, you should prefer to make several small unit purchases, rather than a few big ones. Of course when you need a unit "here and now", you can't choose.
WHAT I wanted to stress, is that when you miss those example 13 minerals, they ALL DO cost 2.62ec each, before you take roundings into account.
In the beginning there were several players saying:
"The last 5 cost 11. Completing for 10 missing costs 25. THUS the next 5 cost 14. Then next 5 again cost 16, as completing 15 missing costs 41"
So they thought that when missing 15, buying just 5 (from the 15th to the 11th) would have costed those 16, instead of the actual 14.
This is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. They completely misfigured the units rush cost structure and mechanism.
And Kody's intial phrasing could have been misunderstood this way by the unadvised reader, and I wanted to avoid that the original misunderstandings were once more perpetuated, just because of an ill phrasing spoiling all the good work you had done.
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