The game is played at a high level, sure, but I'd call this a slight exaggeration. 1% of a player's income is less than a single worker even in the late game (when most players have around 70 workers), and a single worker kill never really makes a huge difference.

Killing a single mining worker can make a difference very early in the game if they're using a very timing-heavy strategy, but that's really only at the very tip-top levels of play.

Depends when the kill is. A single worker from your initial 6? Big problem.

You can't even get a scout worker to your opponent's base before they're up to 9-10 workers or more on most maps. Anyway, killing one worker of 6 is 17% of someone's economy, not 1%.

Killing a worker early is subject to compound interest, so that 17% (or 10% more realistically) of an early worker kill is going to grow exponentially all game long.

>an early worker kill is going to grow exponentially all game long.

That's a very unrealistic claim, though yes, losing a worker very early can have a measurable effect. But that pretty much never happens, outside of all-in cheeses like 6 pool or proxy 2 rax/gate.

Are you defending the original claim that games are decided over affecting 1% of one's opponents economy?

> the original claim that games are decided over affecting 1% of one's opponents economy?

The original claim wasn't that the game was decided over 1% of someones economy. Rather, that games were decided over many small advantages gained, things like affecting someones economy by 1%. You do that 5-10 times throughout the game, and that's a good 5-10% of their economy.

Well that's not actually how games are decided these days. It's often something like "did Z have queens blocking his ramp before the blue flame hellions got there?" or "did P get scout the tech lab on the starport and put down a robo in time?", even at the pro level. A lot of other games end with a two-base timing attack (e.g. fast blink stalkers). Good games will have some eco harass, but more along the lines of dropping 8 marines and killing several workers, or totally taking out an expo with infested terrans. I don't think I've ever seen a single worker kill be significant, or even multiple instances of similarly small magnitude. The APM and attention it costs to harass often isn't worth killing a single worker.

There's a lot of depth to SC2, but I think it's a mischaracterization to say that it's a game of such tiny advantages, at least at the level it's played today.