The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Starcraft 2: Trus is home! EVERYBODY PAY ATTENTION TO TRUS ALL THE TIME FOREVER
3cl1ps3
I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered User regular
I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered User regular
The Starcraft II discussion thread
So you wanna craft some stars, huh?
It's cool, we've all wanted to play Starcraft 2 even when we didn't want to admit it. Sure, we'd say mean and hateful things like, "Supreme Commander is sooo much better." or "Starcraft 2 is just Starcraft 1 with better graphics." You may be right, you may also be extremely stupid but who's to say?
The truth is that this SC2 thread goes a million miles per hour and will leave you in the dust if you aren't prepared. All things are open to discussion here from build orders, practice partners, race match-ups, tournament talk, and general bizarre Korean stuff (usually brought to you by the letter S and the number 86). In order to keep up, I highly recommend you bookmark the following sites:
The Day[9] Daily Live Stream. Sean "Day9" Plott is an 11 year Starcraft veteran, so he knows his shit. He does a live stream Sunday through Thursday that airs 7pm PST/10pm EST. If you miss a stream, you can watch it, and every other streams he's ever done, in his archives. BOOKMARK HIS SITES! You will not be disappointed.
State of the Game A weekly podcast hosted by Day[9], JP, Tyler, and inControl. If you don't know who these people are, you clearly aren't watching enough SC2 tournament stuff. Just bookmark the damn site and listen to it on the go.
HD Starcraft. Good site for beginners to learn from and watch higher end players as well. Being Youtube videos, you can fast forward and rewind to help learn strategies and build orders.
HuskyStarcraft. The brother site of HD Starcraft. Another good site for watching videos of foreign tournaments and for general learning by watching pros.
Gretorp's live stream. A high level Terran player who has amassed quite a following.
Team Liquid. Team Liquid is the biggest Starcraft related fan site out on the Internet today. They follow everything Starcraft related including the pro scene. Many great articles, forums, and information can be found here. A must bookmark for any Starcraft fan.
Starcraft II Liquipedia. Team Liquid has created a wikipedia site for everything SC2 related. This will be updated as time goes on and all information found here should be legit as possible.
Team Liquid Tournament Tracker. Want to play in some SC2 tournaments? Bookmark this link to see what's running now and upcoming in the future.
GOM TV.net. The only officially Blizzard backed tournament spot in Korea. Has a dedicated pair of English casters in the form of Artosis and Nick "Tastless" Plott, Day[9]'s older brother. Great high-end play to be found here. No really, watch this if you've never seen how insane the Korean's take to SC2.
OK that's all cool, but I want to play with some PA people. Easy, follow these 5 simple steps.
1) Start by joining the master PA friend list. DO THIS FIRST. It also doesn't hurt to add your battle.net ID into your signature. If you can't do either of these, then we don't want to be your friend.
2) Bookmark the PA SC2 master list. This will help you find other players without begging in thread for other players to play against. It will also help you find other players to help practice with that are in your skill range. If you use the "view" -> "list view" options found at the top, you can reorganize the list to help you find what you need. On the list view page, you can click on the pull down tabs to look at just players of a certain race or rank. Whatever you want. Use this resource!
3) Sign up to gamereplays.org. This is a site where you can upload your replays. The perfect way to share your replays with the thread and get advice on how to get better. The site also gives you an awesome image when you link it to the forum making it stand out more.
4) Download Mumble voice chat. Since the forum has been back and forth about having a large voice chat system in place but can't decide between Skype and Ventrillo, we've decided to go with Mumble instead. Download it via the link above, install it, and follow this information to get with the rest of us:
Connect to the server: vx36.commandchannel.com (or v.exosquad.net) port 31117
Password is: wang
Update: Exoplasm has set up a webpage detailing how to make Mumble work. Go here to learn more.
5) The PA SC2 1v1 Ranking site. Sign up for this awesome site to see where you stand in the standings amongst fellow PA members. Remember, this is important in the nurturing and expanding of your e-peen. Add yourself by clicking on [Manage Characters] on the top right side.
2) Bookmark the PA SC2 master list. This will help you find other players without begging in thread for other players to play against. It will also help you find other players to help practice with that are in your skill range. If you use the "view" -> "list view" options found at the top, you can reorganize the list to help you find what you need. On the list view page, you can click on the pull down tabs to look at just players of a certain race or rank. Whatever you want. Use this resource!
3) Sign up to gamereplays.org. This is a site where you can upload your replays. The perfect way to share your replays with the thread and get advice on how to get better. The site also gives you an awesome image when you link it to the forum making it stand out more.
4) Download Mumble voice chat. Since the forum has been back and forth about having a large voice chat system in place but can't decide between Skype and Ventrillo, we've decided to go with Mumble instead. Download it via the link above, install it, and follow this information to get with the rest of us:
Connect to the server: vx36.commandchannel.com (or v.exosquad.net) port 31117
Password is: wang
Update: Exoplasm has set up a webpage detailing how to make Mumble work. Go here to learn more.
5) The PA SC2 1v1 Ranking site. Sign up for this awesome site to see where you stand in the standings amongst fellow PA members. Remember, this is important in the nurturing and expanding of your e-peen. Add yourself by clicking on [Manage Characters] on the top right side.
A list of other PA related SC2 stuff.
Livestream for our friend Exoplasm. Good quality. Watch it.
Livestream for our friend Trus. Beware of loud music.
Livestream for our friend Ash. Broadcasting the SC2 Arcadia tournaments.
PA SC2 Steam Group. A great place to meet up with other PA forum people and set up games, talk strats, or just bullshit around. This is the most common place for us all to meet before big tournaments and stuff. Very useful!
Comprehensive unit spreadsheet. A publicly editable spreadsheet that details all of the costs, build times, damage, and other unit specific information you could ever ask for. Make sure to read this first before asking how much damage hydralisks do versus air units. Special thanks to our very own Vin for making it.
The beginner's guide on how to play SC2 and tips to get better. If you are brand new to Starcraft or RTS games in general, start by reading this beginners guide written by our very own forum member, eeSanG. He is a Diamond level player who knows his stuff and was generous enough to take the time to write out this very informative piece on the basics of SC2. It's a long read, but quite worth it. (spoilered for size)
Livestream for our friend Trus. Beware of loud music.
Livestream for our friend Ash. Broadcasting the SC2 Arcadia tournaments.
PA SC2 Steam Group. A great place to meet up with other PA forum people and set up games, talk strats, or just bullshit around. This is the most common place for us all to meet before big tournaments and stuff. Very useful!
Comprehensive unit spreadsheet. A publicly editable spreadsheet that details all of the costs, build times, damage, and other unit specific information you could ever ask for. Make sure to read this first before asking how much damage hydralisks do versus air units. Special thanks to our very own Vin for making it.
The beginner's guide on how to play SC2 and tips to get better. If you are brand new to Starcraft or RTS games in general, start by reading this beginners guide written by our very own forum member, eeSanG. He is a Diamond level player who knows his stuff and was generous enough to take the time to write out this very informative piece on the basics of SC2. It's a long read, but quite worth it. (spoilered for size)
eeSanG's basics of Starcraft 2[/size] for all you new players to SC2.
I have written this to help anyone who is interested in playing but have little experience and no one to teach them.
There are many things in Starcraft that are so basic that no one mentions them. However, they’re also incredibly difficult to find out for yourself without a natural intuition for Real-Time Strategy. This makes it extremely difficult for people new to RTS’s to learn about them so they get trashed by everyone and everything; the entire process can be extremely demoralizing and leaves only a bitter taste in the neophyte as they quit in frustration. These basics are so fundamental that without them, every player is doomed to failure against someone with solid mechanics.
I am going to go over many of these basics. Here are some simple tips that apply to almost every RTS that involves resource management:
* Keep building workers/harvesters.
* Don’t let resources build up.
* Learn build orders.
* Don’t play blindly, scout often.
The slightly more advanced mechanics all branch off from these principles.
Why you want to keep building workers.
Workers in Starcraft are great investments; you spend time and resources building them and they’ll provide great returns on those investments. The most significant mechanic behind Starcraft is resource management: you need minerals and gas to do everything. The more you have, the more you can do; but, the reverse also applies: the less resources you have, the more limited you are in options. This is macromanagement.
Okay, so more workers mean more resource gathering, but where do you stop? You don’t. In Starcraft 2, every base has 8 mineral patches and 2 gas geysers. Maximum saturation is 3 workers per mineral patch and 3 per gas; however, the optimal amount of workers on minerals is actually 2. There are heavy diminishing returns after 2 workers per mineral patch and returns stop altogether after 3. So why don’t you only make 22 workers, 16 for minerals and 6 for gas? Because you will want to expand.
Expanding is a critical aspect of micromanagement. Two fully saturated bases have double the production of one: this means twice the upgrades and twice the units. That is an unfair advantage over your opponent if you’re playing 2 bases to 1. Expanding does require an investment though, you cannot recklessly place bases all over the map or you risk losing everything to an aware opponent.
So back to workers: Why don’t we stop at 22? Because you will want to expand and you will want your investment to make immediate returns once you do. How do you do this? By transferring several workers from your first saturated base to your second (For future reference, transferring of workers will be called maynarding, as that is the term used by competitive Starcraft players). So say you kept building workers and you have about 34 (6 on gas, 28 mining), 4 of your workers mining are actually doing absolutely nothing. You still want to produce this many workers because once you expand (which you should when you safely can) you can maynard 17 workers to your expansions and put 6 on gas with 11 on mining.
Doing this, you’re now fully saturated on gas in two bases and have 11 workers on minerals each base. This is clearly insufficient and suboptimal but now you have 2 worker producing buildings and by splitting evenly, you can hit optimization in both bases with 5 worker production cycles. Well, 11 isn’t an optimal amount, so why not only move 16 and have 16/6 on minerals? You could, but because you have 2 worker production buildings you would have to go through 0 and 10 worker production cycles to hit optimization and that is inefficient because you have only one building doing all the work instead of dividing it equally. This doubles the amount of time for your bases to hit optimized mining and every worker built at an optimized mineral line is worth less and less.
So to keep the first facet of macromanagement strong, worker production is required beyond optimization. You’ll want to keep producing workers at both bases after your first expansion because the late game phase is usually played on 3 or more bases and you will want to continue maynarding workers to new expansions.
Why you don’t want resources to build up.
Worker production is the first stage of macromanagement: actually getting the resources. The second facet of macromanagement is actually using those resources. As you gather resources, you use them to make units for fighting. Every resource hoarded is a potential investment you did not make. If you engage in a battle with 1000 minerals hoarded, that is 1000 minerals worth of units you could’ve had at the fight had you macromanaged better. 10 Zealots, 20 Marines, or 40 Zerglings can significantly change the outcome of a battle. Unused resources mean smaller armies and smaller armies usually mean battles lost. Having 10 Marines is not going to win against 10 Zealots; you need more Marines for it to be a fair fight.
To prevent yourself from running into unfair fights, you want to be continuously spending your resources on something. It can be workers, buildings, upgrades, or units. Just spend it. But! Don’t waste it on things you will never use. Don’t get speed upgrades on a unit that you never plan on using. Efficient spending is implicit. It is not obvious; it is not shouted at you when you lose. Players will have excuses on why they lost, but underlying all that is usually because they did not spend their resources efficiently.
Another bad habit that many players have is immense amounts of unit queuing. Yes, you are spending resources, but it is not being spent efficiently. You make absolutely no returns on unit production until those units are actually made. Filling a unit queue right as or before a fight starts means those are units you could’ve already had. How? By making more unit producing buildings. Learning how many unit producing buildings you can have per base is difficult to learn, precise amounts can only come from experience.
Using Protoss as an example: A single mineral line can support roughly 3 Gateways running full time with minimal ‘teching’ (unlocking upgrades or new units). It can support 2 with heavy tech investments and it can barely support 4 Gateways with absolutely no tech investment. Running 4 Gateways usually ends in disastrous results for the Protoss player unless the opponent is quickly killed or there are no tech investments left to make. This is because if the opponent can get severely ahead in tech, the Protoss is at a significant disadvantage due to a lack of viable options.
If you have resources piling up, you have two options: make more unit producing buildings or expand and then making more unit producing buildings. Being choked on unit production is an easy way to lose after trading armies with your opponent. Having too many buildings is better than not having enough.
There are two ways of losing via smaller army: not having enough or not spending enough resources. Both of these are easily avoidable.
Now that we’ve covered resource management, we continue onto build orders.
Learn build orders.
Build orders are a prearranged order in which you construct your buildings. Good build orders are those that everyone uses; they are cookie cutter. Now, some might rant about how cookie cutter builds destroy innovation and creative play. No! Build orders allow innovation and creative play to be efficient. They are cookie cutter for a reason, because they are the most effective openings in regards to resources and time. Starcraft and Starcraft 2 are battles of resources, but they’re also battles for time. A few seconds difference can change the entire game through a delayed unit, a building, or an entire expansion. Many openings trade time for resources or resources for time. Time creates advantages in tech, resources, or army size.
Learning build orders is more difficult in Starcraft 2 because it’s so new, not everything has been discovered or tested. It’s your job now to create, adopt, or steal build orders that are the most efficient. Constructing a building 5 seconds earlier than normal can lead to enormous advantages but not learning or refining build orders can lead to constructing buildings later than necessary!
For Starcraft 2, there are two ways to create the opening Pylon as Protoss. You can either make it at 9 supply and have it finish at 10 so you can Chrono Boost or you can cut an early Probe to create a Pylon at 8 and Chrono Boost the 9th Probe immediately. The difference between these builds provides a difference of about a second in the first Gateway, so this is an extreme example. I myself enjoy placing the Pylon at 8.
The difference between a solid and shaky build order can mean living or dying during the early game.
Don’t play blindly, scout often.
Map hacking, the most prominent hack in Starcraft, provides perfect information on the map and the opponent. This third-party program is looked down upon by the competitive community because it provides such an unfair advantage and because it is cheating.
You can simulate these same advantages through proper scouting. A player’s first scout is usually their worker. Many beginners believe that they are sent out for the sole reason of finding where the opponent is. Naïve! Keeping your scouting worker alive reveals so much valuable information, but only through proper analysis that comes with experience.
The subtle things will tell you much: the progress on the spawning pool will tell you whether to expect early Zerglings or not. A 10pool (a spawning pool created after the 10th Drone but before the 11th) will most certainly make Zerglings while a 13pool may only make 2 or skip them altogether. A surviving worker can reveal a Protoss player’s entire tech tree if kept alive: 1 Gate into Cybernetic Core? 2 Gate? THREE Gate (3 means you are going to get rushed)? 0 Gates? You just got proxy’d, get ready for a fast rush. A scouting worker can easily dodge Zealots through proper micro, many will need to get a Stalker or Sentry to kill it if they don’t want you to see their tech tree and that means gas spent, unit created, tech delayed.
When the first scout dies, many no longer scout for the rest of the game. Foolish! Continue to send out scouts; they can be either workers, a fast and inexpensive unit (Zergling), or a unit that is concealed and difficult to kill (Observer). Knowing where your opponent’s army is, knowing what it’s made of, and knowing when they expand are all critical intel. Location allows you to set up flanks or ambushes. Composition allows you to create the correct counters to their units, and knowing when and where an expansion is built opens up an opportunity to attack before they make returns on such a heavy investment. However, don't needlessly sacrifice units into the maw that is your opponent's army. Scout often, but be conservative with them.
Scouting is much harder and is much more demanding on your multitasking than macromanagement. You shouldn’t let your macromanagement suffer for the sake of scouting, but neither should you forsake scouting altogether. Balance is key to consistent success, though knowing when to take risks is also important.
Combining these fundamentals together means that your armies will be as large as possible, your economy as efficient as can be, and the knowledge of your opponent’s play are as clear as crystal.
These basics are just that, fundamentals. A lack of fundamentals means that defeating an opponent with strong mechanics and safe play will be an impossibility. Real-Time Strategies incorporate strategic play but that is meaningless when lacking in basics. Smaller armies, weaker economy, and blind play are disadvantages the player only gives himself; they are completely unnecessary and preventable.
So here they are again so you can drill them into your head. The basics of resource based RTS’s are:
* Keep building workers/harvesters.
* Don’t let resources build up.
* Learn build orders.
* Don’t play blindly, scout often.
It can be difficult to do everything simultaneously at first, but it becomes more natural through practice!
Good luck and have fun. Until next time.
I have written this to help anyone who is interested in playing but have little experience and no one to teach them.
There are many things in Starcraft that are so basic that no one mentions them. However, they’re also incredibly difficult to find out for yourself without a natural intuition for Real-Time Strategy. This makes it extremely difficult for people new to RTS’s to learn about them so they get trashed by everyone and everything; the entire process can be extremely demoralizing and leaves only a bitter taste in the neophyte as they quit in frustration. These basics are so fundamental that without them, every player is doomed to failure against someone with solid mechanics.
I am going to go over many of these basics. Here are some simple tips that apply to almost every RTS that involves resource management:
* Keep building workers/harvesters.
* Don’t let resources build up.
* Learn build orders.
* Don’t play blindly, scout often.
The slightly more advanced mechanics all branch off from these principles.
Why you want to keep building workers.
Workers in Starcraft are great investments; you spend time and resources building them and they’ll provide great returns on those investments. The most significant mechanic behind Starcraft is resource management: you need minerals and gas to do everything. The more you have, the more you can do; but, the reverse also applies: the less resources you have, the more limited you are in options. This is macromanagement.
Okay, so more workers mean more resource gathering, but where do you stop? You don’t. In Starcraft 2, every base has 8 mineral patches and 2 gas geysers. Maximum saturation is 3 workers per mineral patch and 3 per gas; however, the optimal amount of workers on minerals is actually 2. There are heavy diminishing returns after 2 workers per mineral patch and returns stop altogether after 3. So why don’t you only make 22 workers, 16 for minerals and 6 for gas? Because you will want to expand.
Expanding is a critical aspect of micromanagement. Two fully saturated bases have double the production of one: this means twice the upgrades and twice the units. That is an unfair advantage over your opponent if you’re playing 2 bases to 1. Expanding does require an investment though, you cannot recklessly place bases all over the map or you risk losing everything to an aware opponent.
So back to workers: Why don’t we stop at 22? Because you will want to expand and you will want your investment to make immediate returns once you do. How do you do this? By transferring several workers from your first saturated base to your second (For future reference, transferring of workers will be called maynarding, as that is the term used by competitive Starcraft players). So say you kept building workers and you have about 34 (6 on gas, 28 mining), 4 of your workers mining are actually doing absolutely nothing. You still want to produce this many workers because once you expand (which you should when you safely can) you can maynard 17 workers to your expansions and put 6 on gas with 11 on mining.
Doing this, you’re now fully saturated on gas in two bases and have 11 workers on minerals each base. This is clearly insufficient and suboptimal but now you have 2 worker producing buildings and by splitting evenly, you can hit optimization in both bases with 5 worker production cycles. Well, 11 isn’t an optimal amount, so why not only move 16 and have 16/6 on minerals? You could, but because you have 2 worker production buildings you would have to go through 0 and 10 worker production cycles to hit optimization and that is inefficient because you have only one building doing all the work instead of dividing it equally. This doubles the amount of time for your bases to hit optimized mining and every worker built at an optimized mineral line is worth less and less.
So to keep the first facet of macromanagement strong, worker production is required beyond optimization. You’ll want to keep producing workers at both bases after your first expansion because the late game phase is usually played on 3 or more bases and you will want to continue maynarding workers to new expansions.
Why you don’t want resources to build up.
Worker production is the first stage of macromanagement: actually getting the resources. The second facet of macromanagement is actually using those resources. As you gather resources, you use them to make units for fighting. Every resource hoarded is a potential investment you did not make. If you engage in a battle with 1000 minerals hoarded, that is 1000 minerals worth of units you could’ve had at the fight had you macromanaged better. 10 Zealots, 20 Marines, or 40 Zerglings can significantly change the outcome of a battle. Unused resources mean smaller armies and smaller armies usually mean battles lost. Having 10 Marines is not going to win against 10 Zealots; you need more Marines for it to be a fair fight.
To prevent yourself from running into unfair fights, you want to be continuously spending your resources on something. It can be workers, buildings, upgrades, or units. Just spend it. But! Don’t waste it on things you will never use. Don’t get speed upgrades on a unit that you never plan on using. Efficient spending is implicit. It is not obvious; it is not shouted at you when you lose. Players will have excuses on why they lost, but underlying all that is usually because they did not spend their resources efficiently.
Another bad habit that many players have is immense amounts of unit queuing. Yes, you are spending resources, but it is not being spent efficiently. You make absolutely no returns on unit production until those units are actually made. Filling a unit queue right as or before a fight starts means those are units you could’ve already had. How? By making more unit producing buildings. Learning how many unit producing buildings you can have per base is difficult to learn, precise amounts can only come from experience.
Using Protoss as an example: A single mineral line can support roughly 3 Gateways running full time with minimal ‘teching’ (unlocking upgrades or new units). It can support 2 with heavy tech investments and it can barely support 4 Gateways with absolutely no tech investment. Running 4 Gateways usually ends in disastrous results for the Protoss player unless the opponent is quickly killed or there are no tech investments left to make. This is because if the opponent can get severely ahead in tech, the Protoss is at a significant disadvantage due to a lack of viable options.
If you have resources piling up, you have two options: make more unit producing buildings or expand and then making more unit producing buildings. Being choked on unit production is an easy way to lose after trading armies with your opponent. Having too many buildings is better than not having enough.
There are two ways of losing via smaller army: not having enough or not spending enough resources. Both of these are easily avoidable.
Now that we’ve covered resource management, we continue onto build orders.
Learn build orders.
Build orders are a prearranged order in which you construct your buildings. Good build orders are those that everyone uses; they are cookie cutter. Now, some might rant about how cookie cutter builds destroy innovation and creative play. No! Build orders allow innovation and creative play to be efficient. They are cookie cutter for a reason, because they are the most effective openings in regards to resources and time. Starcraft and Starcraft 2 are battles of resources, but they’re also battles for time. A few seconds difference can change the entire game through a delayed unit, a building, or an entire expansion. Many openings trade time for resources or resources for time. Time creates advantages in tech, resources, or army size.
Learning build orders is more difficult in Starcraft 2 because it’s so new, not everything has been discovered or tested. It’s your job now to create, adopt, or steal build orders that are the most efficient. Constructing a building 5 seconds earlier than normal can lead to enormous advantages but not learning or refining build orders can lead to constructing buildings later than necessary!
For Starcraft 2, there are two ways to create the opening Pylon as Protoss. You can either make it at 9 supply and have it finish at 10 so you can Chrono Boost or you can cut an early Probe to create a Pylon at 8 and Chrono Boost the 9th Probe immediately. The difference between these builds provides a difference of about a second in the first Gateway, so this is an extreme example. I myself enjoy placing the Pylon at 8.
The difference between a solid and shaky build order can mean living or dying during the early game.
Don’t play blindly, scout often.
Map hacking, the most prominent hack in Starcraft, provides perfect information on the map and the opponent. This third-party program is looked down upon by the competitive community because it provides such an unfair advantage and because it is cheating.
You can simulate these same advantages through proper scouting. A player’s first scout is usually their worker. Many beginners believe that they are sent out for the sole reason of finding where the opponent is. Naïve! Keeping your scouting worker alive reveals so much valuable information, but only through proper analysis that comes with experience.
The subtle things will tell you much: the progress on the spawning pool will tell you whether to expect early Zerglings or not. A 10pool (a spawning pool created after the 10th Drone but before the 11th) will most certainly make Zerglings while a 13pool may only make 2 or skip them altogether. A surviving worker can reveal a Protoss player’s entire tech tree if kept alive: 1 Gate into Cybernetic Core? 2 Gate? THREE Gate (3 means you are going to get rushed)? 0 Gates? You just got proxy’d, get ready for a fast rush. A scouting worker can easily dodge Zealots through proper micro, many will need to get a Stalker or Sentry to kill it if they don’t want you to see their tech tree and that means gas spent, unit created, tech delayed.
When the first scout dies, many no longer scout for the rest of the game. Foolish! Continue to send out scouts; they can be either workers, a fast and inexpensive unit (Zergling), or a unit that is concealed and difficult to kill (Observer). Knowing where your opponent’s army is, knowing what it’s made of, and knowing when they expand are all critical intel. Location allows you to set up flanks or ambushes. Composition allows you to create the correct counters to their units, and knowing when and where an expansion is built opens up an opportunity to attack before they make returns on such a heavy investment. However, don't needlessly sacrifice units into the maw that is your opponent's army. Scout often, but be conservative with them.
Scouting is much harder and is much more demanding on your multitasking than macromanagement. You shouldn’t let your macromanagement suffer for the sake of scouting, but neither should you forsake scouting altogether. Balance is key to consistent success, though knowing when to take risks is also important.
Combining these fundamentals together means that your armies will be as large as possible, your economy as efficient as can be, and the knowledge of your opponent’s play are as clear as crystal.
These basics are just that, fundamentals. A lack of fundamentals means that defeating an opponent with strong mechanics and safe play will be an impossibility. Real-Time Strategies incorporate strategic play but that is meaningless when lacking in basics. Smaller armies, weaker economy, and blind play are disadvantages the player only gives himself; they are completely unnecessary and preventable.
So here they are again so you can drill them into your head. The basics of resource based RTS’s are:
* Keep building workers/harvesters.
* Don’t let resources build up.
* Learn build orders.
* Don’t play blindly, scout often.
It can be difficult to do everything simultaneously at first, but it becomes more natural through practice!
Good luck and have fun. Until next time.
An additional guide to SC2, by Dhal:
Newbie tips to improving the way you play Starcraft 2
Hey guys. I've been preparing this for quite a while.
This is a bit of a different guide than most, I'm not going to look at any gameplay tips here, because a) I am far from the best person here to be providing those and b) there's plenty already.
What I will do is give a few tips for people stepping STRAIGHT into Starcraft 2, little things, that make a relatively big difference for how easy to do they are, and to stop you from, like me, realising them 2 months down the line and wishing you knew them all along.
Lets go!
Interface tips
1. Turn off mouse acceleration for your mouse. For those who don't know what it is, mouse acceleration is a technique used to move the mouse further the faster you move it. With it on, moving your mouse 1 inch slowly and 1 inch fast will result in different screen travel time. Needless to say, this is bad as it makes your mouse movement unpredictable.
2. As a followup to the above, you will need to crank up your mouse sensitivity, by a LOT, as your mouse will feel slow and cumbersome with acceleration turned off. To give you some idea, my SC2 mouse sensitivity was increased from 30 to 90 when I turned off acceleration.
3. Increase your mouse scroll speed at the same time. While for the majority of the time, you should be moving around the map by double-tapping your hotkeys, scrolling is still necessary and you want to be able to do it fast. Experiment to find the sweet spot.
4. Consider tweaking your graphics settings. While your computer may be able to handle ultra settings, being able to handle it is not the same as having a smooth and consistent framerate, and smoothness is critical. That said, if your computer can handle it, using low or high settings is a preference thing only and those who say it makes it easier to see things on low settings are just being silly.
5. Have your Health Bars set to Always shown. This is important to know which enemy units are hurt worse so that you can focus fire on them, and conversely, when you begin to learn how to micromanage your units better, to retreat your own wounded units.
Beginning your first games
1. Skip the practice league. It teaches you nothing, games are played on a much slower speed, even a monkey could play a perfect game at that speed. You also have rocks protecting your front door, which can't be destroyed easily. While this seems like it'd be good to protect you from early rushes while you learn the game, what it actually does is promotes high-tech strategies, such as rushing for air units, strategies that will get you killed in normal games. You learn nothing from the practice league. If you need time to figure out what buildings do what, play the campaign (if your race has campaign missions at the time of reading this) or play some games vs Very Easy or Easy AI.
2. Don't stress about losing your placement matches. If you do your best in them and lose four or five of them, you will most likely be placed in the bronze league. Don't despair! This is a good place to be if you struggled with your placement matches! You will not be facing amazing idiot savant gamers with 500,000 APM and perfect knowledge of every build order in the game when you're in Bronze. You will most likely be facing a lot of people just like yourself, and you will win as many games as you lose.
3. Save your losing replays. Look at them later. See if you can figure out what you've done wrong. There are numerous guides out there that tell you what you should be doing. Applying them to your game is the hard part, but you should be able to soak up a lot of knowledge, even if you can't necessarily apply it to your gameplay yet. Everyone is the world's best Starcraft 2 player when they're watching themselves or someone else play, you will be amazed how easily you spot mistakes you didn't even notice in game.
4. Ask for help! Penny Arcade has a thriving Starcraft 2 community, and frequently people post replays in the threads for advice, critique, and sometimes just to show off a particularly fun or exciting game. Use the resource! the most common site used for replays is www.gamereplays.org
Etiquette
You will notice that, in some of your games, perhaps, at the beginning of the match your opponent might say something like "gl hf" or "gl gl". This means, in essence, "good luck, have fun". When the game is over, the loser, when they decide they've been beaten, rather than simply opening the menu and leaving the game, will sometimes say "gg", and if they want to be extra nice, "gg wp", which means "good game, well played". While some scoff at this, I find it is a good practice to adopt. Quite apart from being respectful to the human being on the other end of the computer (Sometimes people forget this, I know I sure do), it also makes you feel better yourself. When I lose a game and just quit right out of it (called rage-quitting, sometimes), I feel awful about the loss. I get angry and I sometimes just stop playing for the night. However, in the same sort of loss, when I bite back the anger, relax, and say "gg" to my opponent, I feel inexplicably better about the loss. It feels more like a friendly match between good friends rather than an intense competition between strangers.
This is especially true if you lose to something sneaky like a Photon Cannon rush! Resist the temptation to swear and scream at your opponent (feel free to do it in real life of course!). For someone who enjoys sneaky tactics for the cheap wins, getting angry only makes them happier, you will deny them the satisfaction if you remain respectful. And for those who are simply using those strategies because they think they are a fun way to play and win, being respectful is just good manners.
That's about all the very early beginner tips I have. Remember, Starcraft 2 is a game about losing as much as it is about winning, and while winning is obviously more fun, losing can be fun too if you are gracious about it and if you learn from it! Don't get too disheartened when you lose, and if you lose a few games in a row and are getting frustrated, take a break! play a different game, or try some Custom games, analyze one of your replays and see if you can learn what to do better next time, or even watch a pro-level match on Youtube or something similar!
Go out there and have fun!
Hey guys. I've been preparing this for quite a while.
This is a bit of a different guide than most, I'm not going to look at any gameplay tips here, because a) I am far from the best person here to be providing those and b) there's plenty already.
What I will do is give a few tips for people stepping STRAIGHT into Starcraft 2, little things, that make a relatively big difference for how easy to do they are, and to stop you from, like me, realising them 2 months down the line and wishing you knew them all along.
Lets go!
Interface tips
1. Turn off mouse acceleration for your mouse. For those who don't know what it is, mouse acceleration is a technique used to move the mouse further the faster you move it. With it on, moving your mouse 1 inch slowly and 1 inch fast will result in different screen travel time. Needless to say, this is bad as it makes your mouse movement unpredictable.
2. As a followup to the above, you will need to crank up your mouse sensitivity, by a LOT, as your mouse will feel slow and cumbersome with acceleration turned off. To give you some idea, my SC2 mouse sensitivity was increased from 30 to 90 when I turned off acceleration.
3. Increase your mouse scroll speed at the same time. While for the majority of the time, you should be moving around the map by double-tapping your hotkeys, scrolling is still necessary and you want to be able to do it fast. Experiment to find the sweet spot.
4. Consider tweaking your graphics settings. While your computer may be able to handle ultra settings, being able to handle it is not the same as having a smooth and consistent framerate, and smoothness is critical. That said, if your computer can handle it, using low or high settings is a preference thing only and those who say it makes it easier to see things on low settings are just being silly.
5. Have your Health Bars set to Always shown. This is important to know which enemy units are hurt worse so that you can focus fire on them, and conversely, when you begin to learn how to micromanage your units better, to retreat your own wounded units.
Beginning your first games
1. Skip the practice league. It teaches you nothing, games are played on a much slower speed, even a monkey could play a perfect game at that speed. You also have rocks protecting your front door, which can't be destroyed easily. While this seems like it'd be good to protect you from early rushes while you learn the game, what it actually does is promotes high-tech strategies, such as rushing for air units, strategies that will get you killed in normal games. You learn nothing from the practice league. If you need time to figure out what buildings do what, play the campaign (if your race has campaign missions at the time of reading this) or play some games vs Very Easy or Easy AI.
2. Don't stress about losing your placement matches. If you do your best in them and lose four or five of them, you will most likely be placed in the bronze league. Don't despair! This is a good place to be if you struggled with your placement matches! You will not be facing amazing idiot savant gamers with 500,000 APM and perfect knowledge of every build order in the game when you're in Bronze. You will most likely be facing a lot of people just like yourself, and you will win as many games as you lose.
3. Save your losing replays. Look at them later. See if you can figure out what you've done wrong. There are numerous guides out there that tell you what you should be doing. Applying them to your game is the hard part, but you should be able to soak up a lot of knowledge, even if you can't necessarily apply it to your gameplay yet. Everyone is the world's best Starcraft 2 player when they're watching themselves or someone else play, you will be amazed how easily you spot mistakes you didn't even notice in game.
4. Ask for help! Penny Arcade has a thriving Starcraft 2 community, and frequently people post replays in the threads for advice, critique, and sometimes just to show off a particularly fun or exciting game. Use the resource! the most common site used for replays is www.gamereplays.org
Etiquette
You will notice that, in some of your games, perhaps, at the beginning of the match your opponent might say something like "gl hf" or "gl gl". This means, in essence, "good luck, have fun". When the game is over, the loser, when they decide they've been beaten, rather than simply opening the menu and leaving the game, will sometimes say "gg", and if they want to be extra nice, "gg wp", which means "good game, well played". While some scoff at this, I find it is a good practice to adopt. Quite apart from being respectful to the human being on the other end of the computer (Sometimes people forget this, I know I sure do), it also makes you feel better yourself. When I lose a game and just quit right out of it (called rage-quitting, sometimes), I feel awful about the loss. I get angry and I sometimes just stop playing for the night. However, in the same sort of loss, when I bite back the anger, relax, and say "gg" to my opponent, I feel inexplicably better about the loss. It feels more like a friendly match between good friends rather than an intense competition between strangers.
This is especially true if you lose to something sneaky like a Photon Cannon rush! Resist the temptation to swear and scream at your opponent (feel free to do it in real life of course!). For someone who enjoys sneaky tactics for the cheap wins, getting angry only makes them happier, you will deny them the satisfaction if you remain respectful. And for those who are simply using those strategies because they think they are a fun way to play and win, being respectful is just good manners.
That's about all the very early beginner tips I have. Remember, Starcraft 2 is a game about losing as much as it is about winning, and while winning is obviously more fun, losing can be fun too if you are gracious about it and if you learn from it! Don't get too disheartened when you lose, and if you lose a few games in a row and are getting frustrated, take a break! play a different game, or try some Custom games, analyze one of your replays and see if you can learn what to do better next time, or even watch a pro-level match on Youtube or something similar!
Go out there and have fun!
Play in our weekly PA SC2 tournament hosted by S_86!
CSL3 | Saturday Dec.18.10 8:00pm EST
Sign Up Page | Website
Please sign up with the naming format: Name.IdentifierRace (Simon.505P)
Extra sign ups will be listed as reserves. If you are not sure you will be able to make it and want to sign up as a reserve, please send me a PM via PA at s_86 or an Email to curvystarleague@gmail.com with your Name.IdentifierRace
Maps
1 Metalopolis
2 Blistering Sands
3 Shakuras Plateau
Maps were picked randomly from the 1v1 map pool
Format
16 players
Single elimination. Players are seeded randomly
Every match is a best of 3
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Posts
you didn't think I would do it did you
Duration of novelty notwithstanding I don't think you can have that many characters or any underscores
:^:
Thread title is good now, perhaps add a Malkovich! at the end.
Huh? What? I'm just getting more confused.
I'm trying to figure it out...is that an internet cafe thing? A warning to parents that there is drug use in the game? No steroids while playing? Stim packs not advised IRL?
Forget the 'Truth' ads. I'd never start using drugs if they cost 10 hp and only lasted for 15 seconds.
Maybe get a smoking jacket, join a vulture gang.
I mean seriously
you can buy so much stuff for the price of drugs or cigarettes. or alcohol. I mean not that I don't drink alcohol but you can get drunk off a $6-7 bottle of wine just as easily as you can from a $40 bottle of liquor and don't bullshit me that you like the taste because if your aim is to get drunk then you won't taste it after long anyway.
Dhal: I usually drink the good stuff in small amounts because it tastes good; if I want to get drunk, I start on the good stuff until I'm kinda buzzed and then drink cheap stuff to actually get drunk xD
Wine is not about getting drunk. I can understand your argument if you said...oh....pabst. But wine? Baaaad example.
Drugs and tobacco will fuck you up though, it's not about the money in my case.
Also, you're from Australia mate! Yous guyse make great wine down there. Start supporting your own industry ffs.
I have tasted an $80 bottle of wine and an $8 bottle of wine immediately after each other and I could not discern any noticeable difference in taste.
I will pray that your taste buds will fully develop one day, because you are missing out on a lot of things in life.
Although, seeing how most shit down there will outright kill you if you try to eating it, maybe the loss of one or two sensory organs is an evolutionary advantage.
Australia has come a long way in wine, gotta give them credit. Just needs to try more than 2 bottles...go out on a tasting sometime. He's in luck too...quite a few wineries around perth.
Also, fuck marauders.
they're all an hour+ from where I live in Obsorne Park...the Swan wineries are miles to the east, Margaret River is ages away. Taxis cost a small fortune to go 20kms let alone more than that, buses out that far take ages.
My work occasionally does winery tours, with buses from work to the winery and back again, but whats the point of that? I still have to get home.
I'll be going on a wine tasting tour early next year when we go on a holiday to Margaret River but one-day wine tours are too hard, logistically.
Funnelled a bunch of speedlings and speed banelings into a corridor vs 3-4 collosi.
Glorious
Its a good example, I feel, of how to transition into a normal game after being both the victim and the perpetrator of a failed cannon rush, when you're still feeling a bit shaken and "okay, whoa, lets sort this out".
I didn't really have a plan at first. Had a vague idea of going DTs, so i put down a twilight, then I remembered he'd cannon rushed me so he'd have cannons (turns out he didnt build any at home but the point stands), so I got blink with that and went colossi. He expanded quickly but I was ahead on workers so when I threw down mine later I caught up. Only one major battle really occurred and I crushed him due to 1/1 upgrades against his 1/0 as well as superior colossi positioning.
Still, I watched the replay and he did well to transition into that force from being behind on workers and having failed at a cannon rush, so worth watching him too if cannon openings are your thing and you'd prefer not to insta-lose when its held off.
The key, really, is to stay calm, and hold off the rush with the bare minimum economy of effort. I sort of failed in that as I got supply blocked and didnt throw down a pylon for a LONG time, but it worked out okay in the end.
I was also too exhausted and hungry to think about actually reaching T3 (because why would I want that) so I kept throwing away max-food armies through force-fieldable, cannon-and-colossi guarded ramps. Cost ineffective to say the least.
Luckily 6 bases versus 2 eventually starved him out.
NEXExcrement.
Whaaaaaaaaat?
this one has a bit of a twist though. I've hit a bit of my wall in my replay analysis. I can watch my play and see that I'm doing some good stuff...but I don't know if its only working due ot mistakes by my opponents or if I'm actually still improving, and because my knowledge of terran and zerg is limited to what they do to me, I'm having trouble accurately evaluating the skill of my opponents.
this was a 2100 rated Terran, same level as me, but it seemed like I absolutely slaughtered him. I didn't notice any glaring holes in his macro, but I also wasn't watching him very closely and don't know a lot about Terran to begin with.
Can anyone poke holes in his play or even poke holes in my play, things that only worked because he didn't do X, etc?
1) He didn't make enough SCVs.
2) Really poor attack timing. For his first attack, he had just finished building an Engineering Bay, a Missile Turret, a third Barracks, a Factory, and Starport + Reactor. The only benefit he has gotten out of all of those investments is a couple of Medivacs. Also, he starts building a Command Center as he attacks. Plus, he hasn't even started researching Stim. His army could've been a lot bigger and more effective at that point.
For his second attack, he has expanded but has not made use of any additional production facilities. He has Stim + Combat Shields, but has not finished or started Weapon or Armour upgrades (you're at +1 Weapons by now). He's built a Raven, but he attacks before it has enough energy for a PDD and it does nothing but absorb some shots. He also has no purpose behind the attack: he clearly doesn't have enough to outright kill you, so the best he can do is trade armies. So what if he does? You'll both still be on 2 bases. All he ends up doing is ceding map control and more supply, allowing you to take a third (and then kill him).
edit: wait, I forgot that he went to attack a third time, which is just hilarious.
I pretty much crushed it with half my army because I noobed up and split around the centre cavern.
This is very disheartening though. Everytime I post a win you guys mercilessly harangue my opponent's skill, I wonder if I've ever beaten a good player.
Speaking of DTs vs Terran, it is hilarious how many Terrans just don't wall in against Protoss. When I see that I immediately rub my hands together and go DTs as fast as I possibly can. 1 gate production can keep you safe against infantry pushes, marine/scv allins can be handled by pulling probes, and with no wall you can walk the DTs right into their base.
Terran rarely build detection until there is a concrete reason to, simply because of scan. Forgetting that unless you have three scans or more stockpiled, the three DTs from a 3gate DT rush will exhaust all your scans then murder your scvs or army, and they can just keep sending them.
Once DTs get into your base, they can effectively shut down all attempts to actually get detection.
And as Terran, you have an easy way to prevent them doing much damage, which is to wall.
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So 4 days, 18 hours and 12 minutes from now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-rh0VZqyng&feature=player_embedded#!
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gah, dragoons were so much cooler than stalkers
They did stand up in a fight though, which stalkers are pretty terrible at.