Gold Harvesters
Many of my bot games occur over one of the enemy gold resource locations on the enemy side of the map. I have noticed that over the 10 to 15 minutes before we win we will kill a ridiculous number of enemy Harvesters, this will yield a ton of gems lying around that don't get picked up.
I really like the idea of harassment of enemy resources through destruction of these workers, however I have noticed that for the majority of resource locations, picking these guys off is extremely difficult, collecting the gem they drop more so.
I wonder if it would make more sense to forgo the workers entirely and move to an upgrade based system, where the player may opt to upgrade the building that is mining out the resources. In this way there would be a more direct loss when an upgraded resource structure is lost. Another approach would be to have the workers cost gems to create, again adding value to the resource node.
What are your guys thoughts about these workers, do you find them meaningful to the game? What are your favorite strategies for picking these guys off?
Comments
In my limited experience the workers seem sort of superficial. I'm much more worried about denying my opponents gems than gold, since all of the super scary neutral weapons are bought with gems. Killing workers is just an alternate method of earning more gems myself.
There is one important quality about workers though: they can move! If attacked, I can run them away to another base until it's safe to return. At least then my opponent won't get the free gems, and rebuilding won't take as long.
For us, the basic concept of "workers vs base" is the difference between "harassment vs destruction" of a base. We eventually want harassment to be a bit more of a first class behavior for players. Currently, it's a bit off. This will hopefully be addressed when we rebuild the map!