The first 3 minutes of a Zerg brood's existance

Since patch 1.08 and its Replay function, games played by famous players have become quite popular. One thing clearly different from one player to another is the way he builds up early on (although most of them go for the same strats). What I would like to focus on in this strat is how a Zerg player builds up within the first few minutes of a game. You can hear some of these famous players stating that this or that build order would do better for a Zerg's economy, and since some of them strongly recommend the Extractor Trick while others ignore it, I decided to make a few tests:

-- How the testing was done --

To see how my economy would do depending on the various build orders, I modified the map "The Lost Temple" to always spawn me at the same spot (9 o'clock) and added a trigger to start a countdown timer at 3 minutes. Then I executed every build order, from Overlord at 6th Drone to Overlord at 9th and also tried out two types of Extractor Tricks (one, where you morph the extractor before morphing the Overlord, and one where the Overlord comes first), always building up to the 11th Drone.

Disclamer: I do NOT guarantee for the accuracity of my results!

Still, although the results you'll see here are only from 1 or 2 test per build, I took great care to not execute them differently (if a Drone "got lost" I immediatly restarted the game and I assigned mineral patches in the same order (with a some minor differences in the builds using the Extractor Trick)). If anyone believes that these numbers are not valid, I urge him to try out and see for himself (and also to drop me a line if his results are totally different from mine).

-- Results and interpretation --
Build Order Average minerals mined after 3 minutes:

Overlord at 6th Drone 464
Overlord at 7th Drone 488
Overlord at 8th Drone 496
Overlord at 9th Drone 496
Extractor Trick, Overlord at 10th Drone 475
Overlord at 9th Drone, Extractor Trick 491

I'd also like to state that you'll probably not get the same results as I did; what I'm trying to show here is not that one build order would be better than the other, but rather that the differences are minor. I can hear people say: "But 20 minerals this early make a GREAT difference!!"; yes, they do make a difference, but if you'd have the choice to pay 8 minerals to get an Overlord 30 seconds sooner, would you do it? I sure as hell would! And there's a second aspect you should consider: some of the build orders are easier to screw up than others. Building an Overlord at the 7th Drone doesn't require you to do anything special afterwards, you'll even be able to build Drones almost without having to wait for the Overlord to pop up. Pulling off the Extractor Trick on the other hand, requires additional micro-managing and could easely cost you a few seconds if you make a mistake. Noticing that with one build order I finish morphing Drones sooner than with the other, I decided to do another set of tests, to see how soon I can get 300 minerals after my 11th Drone is built (since so many Zerg players still go Hatch before Pool). This is what I got:

Build Order Avarage time until 300m
Overlord at 6th Drone 2 : 38
Overlord at 7th Drone 2 : 36
Overlord at 8th Drone 2 : 37
Overlord at 9th Drone 2 : 35
Extractor Trick, Overlord at 10th Drone 2 : 34.33
Overlord at 9th Drone, Extractor Trick 2 : 35

There you have it again. If you're concerned about minerals only, there's practically no reason to prefer one build order instead of another. However if you're a lazy person, such as I am, and/or if you want to have a second scouting unit early on, you'll choose not to do the Extractor Trick and rather to go for one of the simpler builds. (As a side note: Similar tests for the other races led me to the conclusion that for Protoss the best moment to get warp in the first Pylon is at the 7th Probe, while a Terran player should build his first Supply Depot at the 9th or 10th SCV. Need I mention that these results are also probably not 100% accurate?) Holgerer. Send comments, opinions, threats, hate-mail, love-letters and so on to holgerer@yahoo.com