Scout and build up your economy. Scouting is one of the most crucial things you can do because half of your success in any game is knowing how to beat an opponent's army. If you scout and get an idea of what type of force he's making, you can create a force specifically designed to counter his. Building up your economy is important for obvious reasons. A good tip to know when your economy is stable is that each mineral is being mined at max efficiency when there are three workers mining it, and each gas is being mined at max efficiency when it's got three workers on it. So if your mineral bank has 10 mineral clusters and 2 gas, you'd need about 36 workers mining it to get max resources.
Outside of game, it's also a good idea to get build orders down. Getting a routine down is good because that's less time you spend not doing anything, thinking "umm... what should I do now?"
__________________
"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
I figured out the "harvesters" thing about my 3rd game with a homey. I remember just sitting there, not being able to do jack for a while and it was due to a lack of resources.
I also noticed that there are yellow crystals to mine..prolly worth more.
I tried micromanaging by even assigning each of my buildings into a group, making way points for each "unit" making building, and using a ghost to scout out. That took my APM to around 50 as I would double tap my "4" or "5" to go back to the unit buildings to micromanage my new troops. But it didn't really give me that much more of an advantage. Yes, I understand that at higher gold levels, even 10 seconds shaved off of a 5 minute building period could be the difference between victory and losing.
I really don't see how those Korean dudes are making good use of their time using 200 APMs. It jus seems wasteful...but, that's why they are the champs and I'm a newb.
Constantly build worker units. You want 20-24 on your minerals on each base, and a total of 6 for gas on each base. You should never stop making workers until you have enough for 2 full mineral fields.
Scout. Get a worker into your enemy's base and use the intel you find. It can be hard to really find anything that early in the enemy base that seems important, but there are specific things to look for. Send your worker unit over right after your first supply depot/pylon/overlord is built, if you see he already has 2 gas up and running, that means he's probably going to tech and you don't have to worry too much about an early push. If he has say 2 gateways and no cybernetics core or gas, that means he's going to go heavy zealot pressure, in which case, beef up your defenses and start getting your own military units out Asap. If you're playing a zerg and he already has a spawning pool built or about to finish when you get your worker into his base, zergling rush is incoming, be ready. If you are playing a protoss or a terran and you get to his base and don't see any military buildings like a gateway or a barracks, that means he's doing a proxy attack of some kind and you need to find it immediately. Really the most important thing to look for in general is what his gas is looking like. Basically double gas = teching, no gas = rushing.
That first scouting is very important and can win or lose you many games.
As far as the insanely high apm of pros, many do artificially inflate it by spamming buttons for no reason. Especially in the first few minutes of the game. They'll spam hotkeys, or when they issue a move command they'll spam right click 15 times in one second. This is how they get to those insane numbers at such a constant rate, they're always doing something, even if they don't really need to be.
My average apm at the moment is around 70 or 80, and that's without artificially increasing it. During a battle it goes up to about 300, and that's all doing things that are necessary. Don't worry too much about that number. Just concentrate on being able to multitask and your apm will just naturally go up.
You know, that's all great advice. But, it's all quite obvious advice and I feel ashamed that I didn't realize any of that . the vespene gas vs. rushing is an excellent point and that carries over from the original Starcraft.
Also, I experienced what I am going to deem as a "Reaver Rush". Dude just built out reavers, as fast as he could and rushed my scvs and destoryed most of them. I survived because I was in the middle of building a bunker. Is the 'reaver rush' a term used? Seems like it is similar to the "zergling rush" from the old days: it's very quick and can end the game in less than 6 minutes.
One problem I have is building out to multiple bases: I get pwned at one base or the other before I get a chance to harvest like a mad man.
I wanna try other races but from what people are saying here, playing as the other races will be a hard task for a newb.
Edit - BTW, thanks very much, Blaxican and Backfire, for your advice. It will certainly help me get victory.
__________________
Last edited by dadudemon on Aug 20th, 2010 at 01:34 PM
Yeah the reaper rush is a *****. That's one of the things to look for in early scouting, if you get to his base and he's already got a barracks with a tech lab and a geyser up and running, then a reaper rush is likely. All you can do is try to pump out marines as quickly as possible to stop it.
And expanding can be tricky. Normally the safest time to expand is when you are attacking because that means your opponent will be busy fighting your army and so won't attack your base. Also if you see your opponent expanding, that means you should as well because that means he's probably going to be concentrating on getting his expo up and running rather than attacking you.
Expanding is one of the hardest things to learn. But eventually you'll just get a feel for it.
Really the best way to learn the game besides playing it is to watch replays of pro matches. Not only are they educational but they can be really entertaining. http://www.sc2rep.com/
I've been watching some of those live vids and replays. Those have helped a ton.
Getting a feel for the "safest (all around)" build order, the "turtle" build order, and the "rush" build orders for each race. And, I still don't see how I can improve beyond 50APMs. I've increased it quite a bit to around 40-50, but I have no way to actually improve. I'm assigning buildings, using hot keys to build all units and structures, and assigning units. I can MAYBE squeeze out another 10 by remembering to use more automated micro processes..but that's it. I'm winning most of my matches, practice league, at the moment. I hear it gets tought after the practice league.
I got Borderlands, so this game will probably be on the backburner for abit. Especially considering NHL 11 comes out in a week or two and looks awesome.
It sucks because when I get back online, I'll be destroyed.
The practice league is the culprit there. The game speed is slowed down significantly in the practice league, so your APM has no reason to be high. Once you start playing real games everything will be going much faster and so your speed will have a reason to increase.
The practice league isn't really useful. It's kinda pointless because the game speed is so much slower than real games that you don't learn much of anything. It just gets you used to playing slowly, then when you jump into the real game you'll get overwhelmed by the speed.
Then I've pwned myself. There are times that I'm just sitting around, doing nothing. So I guess my APMs should go up. I feel that APMs are important because if you, usefully, use your APMs, it can lend itself to victory. The only thing that you'd have to do, if you could legimately get your APMs up, is adjust your strategies: from there, it's easier to get victories.
So, anyway, my favorite thing to do is ghost cloak and nuke "turtles." They usually quit when then end up with 3 nukes in less than 3 seconds. (I space them out across their 'detector' buildings and units and I try to do 3 at a time.)
I'm beginning to hate Terran specifcally because of the nukes.
Nukes really aren't that powerful. They can wipe out a worker line and do damage to some of the weaker buildings, but when I see a terran nuking it's more annoying than anything.
It seems to wipe out all of the smaller buildings and just about any unit which is quite powerful. You can quickly build up to a nuke and cloaked ghost. (bout 7 minutes.)
For protoss: that's all pylons, phase cannons, and any other small buildings, in addition to most of the protoss units. For me, the protoss are the hardest to play against. (Terran can be difficult, too, but the protoss seem the most difficult unless you can get them early.)
Most people give up if you nuke them early. One person gave up when a nuclear launch was announced....they didn't want to stick around to see where it landed.
I wish they would remove the nuke from the game, though. They could easily replace it with a strong unit..
Indeed. If a terran can turtle...all they have to do is survive about 2 rounds of attacks and they can win with a ghost nuke storm.
I find Thor's to be greatly overhyped and vastly underpowered.
They need to be the ultimate weapon. 1 Thor should have an attack, default, of 60 or more.
It's armor should start at 4 (or more...a marine or zergling should never be able to get through the armor, at all.) It should take up 8 "people" units instead of 6.
The "pro" community has quite an aversion to "ultimate units" as you call them. They say it appeals to newbs, and bla bla bla. Basically, it's what gotten the Mothership nerfed.
__________________ And from the ashes he rose, like a black cloud. The Sin of one became the Sin of many.
This vid covers quite a few powerful units and it's hard for any of us to say that we are better than any of these two guys (Maybe Backfire could win against either one of these two players...)
I'd say that Starcraft 2 has made top tier units a much better option in games.
Case in point: yesterday, I got to make 7 Battle Cruiser's and I won because of that.
The other player succeeded in destroying my economy (he destoryed both my bases and I had less than 400 crystal, so I couldn't rebuild.)
But, because I built 7 BCs before he could completely destroy me, I was able to wipe out his entire forces and bases with just the 7 battle cruisers. The game lasted about 17 minutes.
BTW, the tactic I used was one of attrition: I'd fire 2-3 Yamato shots, pepper their economy units and take out 3 or 4 of their military units...then run away and my SCVs would repair my BC's just a short distance away. He made the mistake of tryinig to overpower my BCs and it is hard to target all of the SCVs underneath the BCs. We weren't playing long enough to level up or armor/attack too much, and the BCs come default with quite a bit of armor. So I was able to power through his main force without losing a single BC. He gave up after I destroyed that attack group and I started to take down his Nexus.
__________________
Last edited by dadudemon on Aug 25th, 2010 at 05:33 PM
KMC Community Forums
Aug 20th, 2010 12:35 AM
