Quote:
Originally Posted by blah-blah-blah
its because you want to balance how much you mine from each mineral patch at all of your bases.
just as a theoretical example, lets say you are only allowed to mine with 1 worker per mineral patch and there are 2 mineral patches. 200 minerals per patch and the worker mines 50 minerals/minute. if you keep your first worker on just one patch for 2 minutes, then put the 2nd probe on the other patch, your first probe will be done mining in another 2 minutes while the 2nd probe has to mine an extra 2 minutes. basically it will take 6 minutes to mine every mineral.
if instead, you take your first worker and have him mine for 1 minute on each patch, then send the 2nd worker to mine, it will only take 5 minutes to mine all the minerals.
hope that makes sense and illustrates why you want to transfer workers so that you have an equal amount per base.
You can't oversimplify like this. It would only come into play way later and would be way less significant than your example. Like willd said, you are better off not losing the minerals early on. It snowballs. If you send the wrong number of workers you will always be mining less efficiently than you could be or you will be giving up mining time for no gain in efficiency. One of those is always true.
Now 18 might be slightly more efficient than 16, I'm not sure. I usually aim to keep 16-18. I can't remember where it starts to diminish. But as long as it's close it's fine.
24 is a waste as long as you have another base. Try it out in your head. Keep 16, send 8. Rally 4 more from each base to the second base. You send 12 total and have 16 at each base. Or, keep 12, send 12. Then rally 4 more from each base to their respective patches. You send 12 total. But for a short time you have only 12 workers mining at your main where you could have 16 and you get no gain over sending all but 16.