Building Placement, eh? — Sean Pollock

12/31/2018

When you start to play at higher levels, every minor detail that saves you time or makes your build faster matters. When watching Lambo’s stream a while back, I noticed that he places his buildings a little differently than I do. Special thanks to Lambo for coming up with this little trick.

When sending a Drone to build any building, I would see Lambo highlight the area with an Evolution Chamber before then queuing whatever building he was then going to place.

With Evolution Chamber Trick

At first glance, you may think this is a misclick, but this is actually very deliberate. The goal is the use a cheaper building to show you the building-grid prior to having enough minerals for the building you are actually planning to build.

If you take a look at the GIF above, you notice that the outer most squares in the building grid for the Evolution Chamber are exactly 1 square away from the gas and then exactly 1 square away from the closest minerals. By using this measurement, we can find the exact placement of our Hatchery at the natural. So instead of ‘guessing’ where the center is and our Drone having the correct itself when we have 300 minerals, we can send our Drone exactly to the center of the natural so there is zero delay when that 300 minerals lands. This placement takes some getting used to depending on the map as well.

If you take a look at the GIF below, this is a rough view of not using the Evolution Chamber trick (keep in mind, after watching many replays, there are examples way worse than the one below).

Without Evolution Chamber Trick

This trick can be applied to almost any building, but is most commonly applied to Hatcheries and Spawning Pools.

I hope this guide provides at least a little clarifications as to why you may have seen this in some streams, or at the most is completely new to you.

Have a happy new year and if you are interested, follow me on Twitter or Twitch or here at Medium!