I was going to record a video tutorial with audio commentary, but my throat is not well. So it is going to be audio-less first person videos accompanied by text commentary.

The Basics

In spawns where your workers move diagonally from the gold mine to your town hall, you can “micro them” to get extra gold with less than five peasants. To do this, select a peasant after it returns mined gold and right click the gold mine. Sometimes a peasant will be really slow when returning gold; to remedy this, hit the “return resources” hotkey on your keyboard and then shift-right click the gold mine. Note that you can’t do this last part with every single peasant, because they will start running into each other.

Also note that you will mine less gold if you micro your peasants when the spawn is not diagonal.

The following video also shows my basic build order.

Exploiting

Being able to mine gold sufficiently with four peasants allows you to temporarily not send a fifth peasant to the gold mine and use it to do other things instead. In this next clip, I send the peasant that would normally go to the gold mine after finishing the farm to harvest lumber. I also send the next peasant that comes out of the town hall to the trees. The early lumber allows me to tech slightly faster.

Adapting

Now that we’ve seen how to deal with spawns that are diagonal, in this final clip I am going to show something you can try when it is not. Because normal build orders generally build the second farm earlier than it needs to be built, I am going to send that peasant to mine gold first and start my second farm later.