Learning SC2

I know i'm supposed to scout, but what am I looking for?

I know and i’m sure that you know that it is important to scout. You may even know specifically when you should scout, “Scout at 9/10 after building a Pylon”. I’m sure that sounds familiar. But the harder part to understand is why? The answer to that may seem simple, “To see what our opponent is doing”. But I have been noticing in my games that maybe that idea is causing all of my problems. I don’t really know what indicators of my opponents strategy i’m looking for when I scout, so I usually try to see exactly what they are doing. It can be pretty scary when you don’t know what your opponent is doing so it’s natural to feel like you want to watch their actions as much as possible. But you cant always have vision of your opponent, and on top of that you cant spend all of your time looking at your opponents base. We have to be building things, upgrading, expanding and building workers!

In the upper levels (the Pros) players are familiar with all of the possible things that their opponent could be doing in that particular matchup. They narrow down the possibilities based on what indicators they see until they know exactly what their opponent is doing. For example, DIMAGA recently played a game against MouzNaama, DIMAGA saw one indicator from his opponent, a Hellion. From this he was able to narrow down Naama’s plan to: A tank marine push, probably with Thors. See Day[9] Daily #254 for a cast/analysis of this game.

You will want to move towards learning all of the possible strategies for the match ups you play as you improve in league and skill. However, at the lower levels this seems to not be so important. Strategies are rarely executed cleanly and the indicators that the pros use will not really apply. Put simply, the lower leagues are super unpredictable and you will see all kinds of wacky strategies.

Because of the unpredictability of the games I see and because I couldn’t spend all day looking at my opponents base I settled for just checking if my opponent was doing something funky and then trying to see when he was going to attack. But with this approach I was never ahead of my opponent, I would just do what I was doing, hoping that it was right.

More recently I have been thinking:

“What if it’s not important to see what our opponents are doing, but rather, to see what they are not doing?”

Once I had this thought I started trying to use anything I saw to tell me what my opponent was not doing instead of trying to see exactly what my opponent was doing. I found that by noticing one thing, I could cross off another.

Some common examples I have been noticing include:

• My opponents not getting gas early. That eliminates any tech options from their early game plans, they are either going to expand or rush with mineral only units. “I should stick around to see if they build a bunch of unit producing structures. They aren’t? Okay they are expanding, I should push or expand myself.”
• I dont see an expansion early in the game. I can assume without seeing anything else that they are either building a large force to attack with or they are trying to race towards a particular tech. “I’d better build some units to defend with so I don’t die!”

Scouting in line with this thinking has greatly helped my early game knowledge of what my opponents are doing, and allows me to decide on an appropriate overall strategy. But after this the unpredictability of low-level play really prevents you from predicting your opponents plans with any great degree of accuracy. So how should we scout after this? I have come up with a list of your priorities in scouting that extend throughout the rest of the game.

These scouting priorities are:

1. Finding out if or when an attack is coming. Your first priority is always to not die and knowing when the next attack is coming allows you to decide wether defences are necessary or whether you should expand.
2. Maintaining map control. Map control is vital to your long-term prospects of winning and winning is your first priority after not dying. Vision helps give you map control as it allows you to detect you opponents troop movements and expansion attempts which you can then block.
3. Intercepting harassment attempts. If you have map control your opponent will likely react with attempts at harassment with the aim of reducing your economic advantage or forcing you to pull your forces back. Having excellent vision will allow you to intercept any harassment attempts and prevent your opponent from taking map control from you.
4. Finding out your opponents unit composition. Finding specifically what units your opponent has will allow you to build an attacking force that will be more effective against his.
5. Seeing exactly what your opponent is doing. It’s easy to see why this is the least important function of scouting after listing the above. If you have map control and have denied any attempts at harassment, it doesn’t really matter what your opponent is doing inside his base because you have already won.

Scouting with these priorities in mind rather than trying to see exactly what my opponent was doing has given me a massive boost to my confidence in game. I realise now that wanting to see exactly what your opponent is doing is a natural response to the fear and uncertainty you have when you first start playing Starcraft 2. But it really is the wrong way to dispel that fear and uncertainty as it causes you to simply react to what your opponent is doing rather than taking control yourself.

After all, what makes you feel more confident? Reacting to what your opponent is doing or taking control yourself?

Strategy and economics go hand-in-hand in Starcraft 2. For those of you who are unfamiliar with economics; economics is not just related to money but also to production and consumption. These things are the basis of some of the most important concepts in SC2. These concepts are: spending all of your resources, the idea of constant production, the relationship between tech and army size and the idea of expanding. In this article I will introduce you to these concepts and explain why they are so important.

Spend!

Dual forges can help you spend that extra money.

There is this feeling that carries over from other games or perhaps even from life where we think that having a lot of resources is a good thing. One of the first things to do in Starcraft 2 is to destroy this notion. Your resources are not points! If you lose a match with 2000 minerals in the bank you should immediately know why. To further clarify, 400 Minerals is too much, 500 and you should start to panic!

Having trouble spending your minerals? Make sure you are:

• Building workers.
• Building army.
• Expanding.
• Researching upgrades.
• Putting pressure on your opponent.
• Building more unit producing structures.
• Building static defences.
• Not getting supply blocked (Build pylons/depots/overlords early and often).

If you get to the bottom of the list and still have resources, great! Now repeat those same steps.

The Idea of Constant Production

This is the first and probably the most important economic concept in Starcraft 2, and probably in other real time strategy games. You should be constantly producing both workers (SCV’s, Probes & Drones) and army units non-stop, back-to-back for the entire game. Constant production will help you both spend all of your money and get more (to spend).

Workers

From the very beginning of the match you should be constantly building workers. The optimum (saturation) amount of workers for one mineral patch is 3 per mineral patch and 3 per gas geyser. Thats about 36 workers in total. But don’t stop there, keep producing those workers. Once you have an expansion every additional worker you have produced (and probably a few more for greater efficiency) can be transferred over to begin mining immediately, giving your income a boost right away. Eventually there is a point where you will want to cut worker production, generally you will learn this point when you will get killed because your army is too small. I have found this point to be anything greater than 90 workers, on three active bases. Any more than that and I have found that my economy is much greater than what I can spend and that my army is too small.

Army

Unlike worker production you will almost never want to cut production of your army. If a unit producing structure is not currently doing anything then it is a waste of resources. You should train yourself to cringe whenever you notice that you are not building units from a building, I know I do whenever I watch my replays. In my article on ‘Getting Used to the Keyboard‘ I wrote about the idea of producing units whilst in battle and the advantage it can give you. If you can manage to do this without any pause you will find that you will be able to reinforce your army enough to overcome most opponents regardless of how well they control their army. Zerg players are known for doing something called a ‘300 food push’ where they are able to rebuild their army almost as quickly as it is destroyed.

Focusing on constant production alone can improve your play more than anything else can. It should always be in your mind and you should even play matches where your main focus is simply to produce non-stop. If you are having trouble maintaining constant production then I highly recommend you check out Day[9]’s Daily #132 where he talks about ‘The Mental Checklist’. Remember not to be too hard on yourself, even the pros miss a worker sometimes.

Note: Don’t queue up units, those queued up units cost resources that could be spent on other things. If you have the money to queue then build another production building and build from it.

The Idea of Expanding

It takes a while for an expansion to become valuable, at the moment this one is still a 400 mineral loss.

Generally speaking, expanding is a good decision as it effectively doubles (for each expansion) your unit production ability. If you were able to build constantly out of four unit producing structures on one base you will be able to do the same with eight on two bases. Each expansion also adds two more Vespene geysers that can be used to build a higher tech army. However, there is one additional thing to note.

An Expansion is a Long-Term Investment

An expansion costs a decent chunk of minerals, and those minerals could have been used to add more units to your army. So if you spend those minerals on an expansion you must be prepared to wait for the return on your investment. It is a good idea to expand when you are being aggressive, but if you were planning on trying to kill your opponent with your attack those minerals would have been better spent bolstering your force. So have a plan before you begin. Do you want to put all of resources into one powerful attack to crush your opponent? Or do you want to expand and play a longer game with the intention of out producing and strangling your opponent? It is very important to make this decision and not to sit somewhere in between.

I will cover the topic of expanding in a future article as knowing when, where and how to expand is difficult to learn and requires a detailed discussion.

Tech vs. Army Size

A small high-tech Protoss army faces an overwhelming low-tech Terran army.

How you spend your resources is almost as important as how quickly you spend them. It’s important to know that there is a direct relationship between level of tech and initial army size. In the beginning of each match you have only limited resources, specifically, 2 Vespene geysers available to you. This creates a a situation where you must make a decision to either have a larger army or a technologically superior one. Generally, a larger army is better than a smaller one, but higher tech gives you more options. With a higher tech army your objective will be to take advantage of your opponents weaknesses (such as exploiting your opponents lack of detection to harass with cloaked units) in order to buy yourself time to create a larger, more effective army.

How This Changes in the Late Game

As you move towards max supply you should begin to favour more expensive, higher tech units instead of the basic units. This will ensure that your maxed army is efficient, that is, more durable and useful. Day[9] discusses this concept in great detail in his Daily #249. It is important to realise the difference between the early stages of the game where you make the decision between a large army or a high tech one, and the late stages of the game where you almost certainly need to be favouring higher tech units.

My experience is that at the lower levels army size wins out over a teching opponent more often than not. Prior to writing this article I played approximately ten matches in which I built mainly Stalkers and Zealots in mass quantities whilst expanding and investing in upgrades. I won 80% of those matches, which is unusual because my win/loss ratio is usually around 55%. I am going to continue to test this method and I may end up writing an article on my findings.

Spending all of my resources and constant production are two things which I am struggling with. I always seem to end up with over 2000 minerals! But practicing Day[9]’s ‘Mental Checklist’ is seeing me steadily improve.

Which of these topics do you have the most trouble with? What have you done to improve?

Thanks to FaDeMeatex and the rest of SEA BattleNet for their input into this and other articles. Feedback is always appreciated.