Zerg Hex Forum

Thank you very much for the fact checking. I have further investigated this issue due to your remarks.

Indeed, it is not an issue with the parsing of the value. The value can be negative and the int that is internally used is signed, you are totally correct here.

However, negative scores cannot be displayed by the game logic due to some specific implementation detail.

Details: To print the leaderboard, the game logic initializes it first with some sorting. The sorting is based on the score, which is calculated by number of games played and number of wins.
The game logic uses a variable to store the highest score while iterating over all players. This variable is then used in a typical way to calculate a maximum (simplified): if (current > highest) highest = current
This approach requires to initialize the variable highest with a value that is lower than all regularly expected values. In Hex, the initial value is -1. A negative score does not pass the check as described beforehand and the leaderboard is (I assume) incorrectly calculated and not drawn.

Conclusion: Do not edit your stats, there are no benefits.

Well, unfortunately, there is no thing like "just" a better CPU. Due to thermal limitations, single thread CPU performance has basically not much changed for the last 15 years. SC2 does not really utilize multiple cores. Therefore, this problem cannot be solved by buying new hardware.

I agree that it is not the zergs fault, they just use a possible strategy. Hence the bug thread here.

I know that bumping a topic is not very nice, but I would really, really like to see a change here.

I had again several games as zerg where the other zerg had the opinion that either focusing solely on mineral extractors or only look for his gain while calculating would be the best strategy for high income.
This leads to games that are lost like after 15 to 20 min without anything that I can do. Terrans on the side of my zerg ally expand and grow because no units and we both have less income as we could have with more unit spawners. A loss-loss situation that ruins mid-game.
I also lose initiative on my side if I focus only on unit spawners because my income practically does not increase if I built only unit spawners and zerg ally only mineral spawners.
And still, leaving the game would only improve the situation for the other zerg. There is nothing I can do but only get frustrated.

Please note that there is a checksum. Therefore, editing the bank file requires a bit more effort than just setting different numbers. Zerg Hex will reset all stats to 0 if the numbers do not match with the hash.
The hash function of Zerg Hex is not completely trivial, it requires some amount of minutes to reverse engineer it.
(Technically, there are 2 checksums: Starcraft 2 itself encodes the xml files with a checksum and Zerg Hex calculates its own checksum within the xml. However, the Starcraft 2 checksum calculation is well documented and therefore not relevant. It is just a one time effort to solve for all bank files).
High stats have no benefit in the game. I rarely, very rarely encounter stats that look modified and if, it just does not matter.

In conclusion, the effort to modify this is it quite high and the benefits are quite low to questionable. It is impossible to fix this in a secure way, one can always find ways around it. That is maybe a bug in the game design as saves are stored locally, but not a bug from Zerg Hex side.
Therefore, in my humble view, it is good as it is.

I am still sad that Zerg Hex parses the integer in the bank file as unsigned and I cannot have negative statistics (corrected: Zerh Hex does not display negative scores, thanks to Hecari in the post below for correcting this)

One can get rid of the leaderboard if you reverse-engineer the bank file format, and in addition the hash algorithmus that is used by Zerg Hex to protect the values and then setup a number for games won that results in an overflow for the signed int that is used here. That deactivates the dashboard for all players. I did this for some time to remove this clutter, but other players were very confused because they got used to it.

So, people got used to the board, let it have them. Nobody gets hurt.

Note: This post targets casual gamers and may not be relevant for all these pro gamers here because they anyway play perfectly anytime (obviously).

I am a rather average casual player who typically plays random (i.e. gets in the worst team that nobody else wants) to have interesting games.
It happens quite often in such a situation that I play zerg together with someone else who does not fully understand how zerg income is generated. This can generate a very, very frustrating situation and has wrong incentives that are unable to fix from my side (i.e. it is a lose-lose situation for me).

To explain, let me first summarize how income is generated and optimized in Zerg Hex.
Very roughly, mineral income = #unit spawners * #mineral spawners (I omit details that are not important for the case)
To maximize income, one must consider a) the formula (income spawners * mineral spawners) and b) the game mechanics that unit spawners are shared between zerg players but mineral spawners are not shared.
To simplify, I have ignored the (fixed) cost of spawners.


Example income calculation

Let us look at an example:
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Here, top player currently has 1606 income, bottom (me) has 1388 income.
Player 1 (me) building a new mineral spawner increases income for player 1 by 79. That means 79 per 15 supply.
Player 1 (me) building a new unit spawner increases income for player 1 by 12. That means 60 per 15 supply (with 5 x strikelings) or about 48 per 15 supply (~4 x zerg spawner).
Therefore, it seems that adding mineral spawners provides more income per cost.
However, adding a unit spawner also increases the income of player 2. That means, for 15 supply, I can increase the total zerg income by 130 (with 5 x strikelings) or about 104 per 15 supply (~4 x zerg spawner).
In conclusion, to maximize the total zerg income, I have to consider that zerg share unit spawner counts.

What does this mean in practice? Well, let us consider 2 players, each with 5 supply upgrades (225 supply) and 3 cases:
case a) Both players invest only in mineral spawners. Total income increases by 30*79=2370.
case b) Both players invest only in unit spawners: 2x30 strikeling spawners (2x90 supply), rest 2x34 zerg spawners (2x34*4 supply). Makes 64 spawners for each player and (with the above numbers) and total income increase of 2*64*(12+14)=3328.
case c) Both players build 5 mineral spawners and rest unit spawners. Makes, per player, 30 strikeling spawners and 15 zerg spawners or 45 unit spawners. That makes an income increase of (2 simple ways to calculate: mineral spawners first or unit spawners first) 10*79+90*(26+10) = 90*(26)+169*10 = 4030.

As you can see, focusing on mineral spawners for income leads to significant lower income by already up to a factor 2 in this rather typical example.


What casual players do

Let us look at how different kind of players behave. I see these types of players in my games with rather casual players:

A) Players who do not know anything about how income is generated in Zerg Hex
What happens is that they understand "Mineral Spawner provides income -> Build a lot of mineral spawners to maximize income". And this conclusion looks totally reasonable for them.

B) Players who have a false understanding about how income is generated in Zerg Hex
Some more experienced players understand that (roughly) mineral income = unit spawners * mineral spawners. They look at how much they gain from a unit spawner and from a mineral spawner and build mineral spawners. This conclusion looks reasonable to them (and they even argue then that this is the right way to maximize income). However, as shown above, one has to consider the game mechanics that unit spawners are shared.
For the rest of this discussion, I can consider that Player B leads to the same problems as Player A, but with a weaker significance.

C) Others (ignored here, not relevant)

To the pain points

Why is all of this a problem?
Now here I am, a player that wants to optimize economy.
The other player builds too much mineral spawners (Player type A or B, see above), i.e. the other player plays in a way that will lead to less income compared to an optimal way (see example at the beginning). What options do I have?
option a) I can build unit spawners to balance. However, I cannot build enough unit spawners to balance 3 mineral spawner. Even more, my income will grow less compared to the other player. Which means I will fall further behind to balance. We make less income than possible and I penalize myself. Lose situation for me.
option b) I can mimic building mineral spawners. This will keep my income balanced to the other player. However, focusing only on mineral spawners leads to the worst total income and in addition we have no unit spawners to stop terrans. Lose situation for me.
option c) I blame the other person and/or try to teach them. This sometimes works, but most often does not. Maybe they are all more clever than I am. At least, this costs a lot of writing and I cannot play. Lose situation for me.
option d) I leave the game. This destroys my experience. Counterintuitively, this improves the situation for the other zerg player. That means, they will not even stop to play like this. Lose situation for me.

Conclusion

As you can see, all options result in a lose situation for me and there is really nothing I can do to balance a second zerg player that focus on mineral spawners only. In practice, this gets even worse because focus on mineral spawners means that terrans will get an ever increasing advantage due to less zerg units they have to deal with (but this depends on terrans, therefore I ignored it until here). It typically ruins the game for me and I really hate it because there is no action for me to get out of this issue. Now we could argue, thats life, your problem. But I would argue that not building unit spawners is bad enough for the zerg, creating serious disadvantages for me due to the playstyle of the other zerg is just frustrating.


I would be very, very happy if there is an adaption that allows me as a more experienced player to balance the playstyle of a less experienced player here.
Unfortunately, I do not have a very good idea. One I was thinking about that I can hijack or use parasite on mineral spawners of my zerg ally. That means, there could be a game mechanic that I can benefit from mineral spawners build by the other player. The more the other player builds, the more I can benefit. Making it a bad move for the other zerg player to focus on mineral spawners only, but keeps me in the game while I build unit spawners.
Maybe make mineral spawners shared instead of unit spawners? Then I am completely fine with newcomers that focus on mineral spawner and I do the rest.
A more elaborated approach would change the ingame mechanics completely. But this is up to the game designer and not my business as an average mortal player.