Learning SC2

Game settings are something people will often neglect, but optimising them is simple and it can benefit your play immediately. In this article we will go through some of the settings that you can change in-game and what they will do for you.

Display the Command Hotkeys

In a previous article I discussed the importance of learning to use hotkeys in SC2. This setting shows the hotkey for each command on the command button itself rather than the tooltip (popup box when you mouse over the command).

Benefits

Having the hotkeys for each command easily visible can make learning them just a little bit easier. Once you have learned them all you will simply forget about even looking in that corner of the screen but for now this setting is one you should definitely enable.

How to Change This Setting

To display the command hotkeys:

1. Go to the ‘Options’ menu,
2. Open the Gameplay tab, and,
3. Check the ‘Command Hotkey Text’ box.

The Game Timer

This handy addition to the game simply puts a timer above the mini-map in the user interface. This timer shows the current time of the match in Starcraft 2 time (1.38x Normal time on the ladder).

Benefits

The game timer may seem unimportant but it serves as an easy point of reference whilst in game. This allows you to note timings and have an idea of what you could see from your opponent at certain points in the match. You can also set times for yourself to aim for with certain things. For example, in Protoss vs Zerg I try to expand by 6:00, referring to the game timer lets me know if I have been delayed and by how much.

How to Change This Setting

To enable the Game Timer:

1. Go to the ‘Options’ Menu,
2. Open the ‘Gameplay’ Tab, and,
3. Check the ‘Show Game Timer’ Box.

Enable Friend or Foe Colours

This setting is one of my personal favourites. Changing this setting changes the team colours from their defaults to green (yourself), red (enemies) and yellow (allies).

Benefits

Friend or foe colours make identifying enemy units via the mini-map and main screen much easier in 1v1 games. I am still undecided about it’s usefulness in team games, however, as it makes communicating with your allies a little difficult as all enemies are red. Being able to quickly identify the enemy will make it much easier to spot drops or enemy troop movements in your peripheral vision.

How to Change This Setting

To enable/disable friend or foe colours press ‘Alt+F’ whilst in a game. Alternatively, you can click the bottom button besides the mini-map. Your friend or foe colours setting will carry over into future games so you do not have to enable it every game.

Disable Operating System Shortcuts

This setting is worth changing if you have a problem with accidentally hitting a button that minimises the game or interferes somehow. If you don’t have a problem with this don’t worry about this setting.

How to Change This Setting

To disable the operating system shortcuts:

1. Go to the ‘Options’ Menus,
2. Open the ‘Controls’ Tab, and,
3. Check the ‘OS Keyboard Shortcuts’ box.

Show Unit Status Bars

It may look messy as a viewer but as a player the status bars provide a lot of vital information.

Enabling the display of unit status bars will show  the health, shields, energy and production status of all units and buildings on the main game screen.

Benefits

• Makes it easy to see the condition of your units so that you can make a decision to micro or retreat.
• You can see the condition of enemy units allowing you to focus fire them easily.
• Allows you to easily make out enemy spell-casters to focus fire, EMP or Feedback.
• Allows you to easily see the current production or research status of any of your buildings, assisting with macro.

How to Change This Setting

I highly recommend setting the display of unit status bars to ‘always’, however, if you find this too messy you can set it to ‘selected’. You can change this setting by:

1. Going to the ‘Options’ menu,
2. Opening the ‘Gameplay’ tab, and,
3. Selecting ‘Always’ or ‘Selected’ from the drop down ‘Show Unit Status Bars’ menu.

Un-clickable or Hidden Control Groups

If, like me, you find yourself accidentally clicking the control group icons at the bottom of the main game screen or you just want to get the most amount of screen space possible this is a good setting to change. There are two options available to you instead of the default visible and clickable setting: Visible but un-clickable or hidden.

How to Change This Setting

To set the control groups to unclickable or hidden:

1. Go to the ‘Options’ menu,
2. Open the ‘Gameplay’ tab, and,
3. Select either ‘Hidden’ or ‘Unclickable’ from the ‘Control Groups’ drop-down box.

Display Build Grid

The build grid shows unbuildable terrain as yellow allowing for easier wall offs.

Enabling this setting will show a grid whenever you attempt to place a building. The grid shows unbuildable terrain and gives you an idea of how much space there is betweeen your buildings.

Benefits

The build grid makes walling off and base planning much easier. For example, as Protoss you need to leave a one square gap in your wall for units to pass through. Enabling this setting will help you set up your base just a little better so give it a try.

How to Change This Setting

To enable the display of the build grid:

1. Go to the ‘Options’ Menu,
2. Open the ‘Gamelpay’ tab, and,
3. Check the ‘Display Build Grid’ box.

How do you set up your game? Are there any useful settings that I haven’t mentioned here? If so let me know in the comments below!

This article was a collaborative piece between ZiggyD and Ramzdale, a big thank you to Ramzdale for his help! If you are an aspiring writer and would like to write for LearningSC2 let me know!

In another article (“Getting Used to the Keyboard in Starcraft 2”) I talked a little about the Shift key and if you have been playing SC2 for a while you probably have a bit of an idea of how versatile it can be. Players are still coming up with creative new ways to use the functionality of the Shift key, it’s just such a great tool. If you are keen to improve your play, then you should try and take advantage of what the Shift key can do for you.

What the Shift Key Does

Before we move onto all of the nifty things that you can do with Shift lets take a brief moment to understand the mechanics of what it actually does.

Shift basically ‘Adds’ something to a list

In nearly all situations holding ‘Shift’ tells the game to ‘add’ something to a list. This list could be a list of commands or it could be a list of units/structures. There are a few situations where it acts a little differently but this is its main function. For example, ‘Shift-clicking’ a Marine whilst already having a Marine selected adds it to your current selection group. However, ‘Shift-clicking’ an already selected Marine will Deselect it. So in that situation it acts in reverse to its normal function.

Shift can be combined with other Keys

Using the Shift key with other keyboard keys can produce some interesting results. For example, “Shift-[Control group ‘1-0’]”. While ‘Control-[1-0]’ creates a control group, using Shift with a control group number will ADD the current selection to that control group. Use this frequently to ensure that all of your units are bound to a control group.

Now that we have that covered we can move on to the ways that you can use the Shift key to ‘pwn n00bs’ in SC2.

Using the Shift Key: The Basics

The following uses for Shift are more than just ‘cool’ or ‘tricky’, these are the crucial things that you should use every game if you want to play well.

Hands Free Scouting

You can queue up multiple move commands with any unit by holding the Shift key and right clicking for each point you want the unit to move to. Using this your unit can scout for your enemy’s base, proxy buildings and expansions without your direct control, freeing you up for more important things. You can even do this via the mini-map!

Attack-Move Scouting

This is merely a variation on the previous Shift technique. Instead of queueing up multiple Move-commands you can queue up multiple Attack-move commands. Simply press ‘A’ (or your equivalent attack hotkey) and left click each point you want your unit to attack move whilst holding Shift. You can use this technique to find and attack any stray workers or Overlords around the map. Having a few units Attack move scouting around the map can really help you maintain map control and deny your opponent’s scouting attempts.

Queuing Buildings

This works best for Protoss and can be useful for Terran but if you’re Zerg you’re not going to get too much use out of this one. To do this simply hold shift every time you place an additional building and your worker will add them to their ‘to-do’ list. I’ll run with the Protoss example because it works so nicely for them. You can tell one worker to build a heap of Pylons at once or you can easily place different buildings such as a Pylon, a Nexus and 2 Assimilators (Instant Expansion, just add water!™). It works the same way for Terran, but much more slowly due to the worker having to physically build each building. Unfortunately for Zerg each Drone can only morph into one building.

Automatic Return to Mining

This is most useful for Terran, quite useful for Protoss but, again sadly, of no use to Zerg. Once you give the order for a worker to construct a building hold Shift and Right-click a mineral patch. Once your worker is finished building he will return to mining with no downtime. You should be doing this 100% of the time, so start getting into the habit!

Using the Shift Key: The Fancy Stuff

Leapfrogging Siege Tanks is much faster using Shift.

The following uses of the Shift key can be extremely useful but usually only in a very specific circumstance. Take the time to learn the ones that are relevant to you Race and play-style.

Easy Siege Tank Movement

Using Shift you can tell a tank to un-siege, move, and re-siege on arrival. Moving your Tanks in this way allows you to leap-frog your tanks towards your opponent much more easily.

To perform this technique you select a Siege Tank and whilst holding shift  press ‘D’ (Un-siege), issue a move-command and then press ‘E’ (siege-mode).  A tank army pushing forwards using this technique can be quite hard to engage.

Smart Blink

This technique allows an entire group of Stalkers to Blink across a gap one at a time without leaving any behind. It is quite a complex technique to explain and its best done in this video by StarcraftScientist. This is an awesome technique to watch and even better to execute.

Overlord Creep Highway

Spine Crawler, Hydra, Queen pushes are only possible with a fast creep highway.

You have probably watched Fruitdealer or another top Zerg player use Overlords to make a creep highway to their opponents base, but if you have attempted it before you probably realised how fiddly it is to tell each Overlord to go to each point along the highway.

However, there is a much faster and easier way to do this. Select a large group of Overlords and tell them to generate creep. Now send the entire group to the first point on your highway. Now, holding Shift, de-select one Overlord and then tell the rest of the group to move to the next point. Continue for each point along the intended highway.

It only takes a few seconds to set this up and the result is that the entire group travels along the highway leaving one Overlord behind at each point.

Move To and then Patrol

Using the patrol command will cause a unit to patrol between its current location and the selected one. Using Shift you can tell a unit to move to a location and then patrol from that location. Simply tell the unit to move where you want it to start patrolling from then hold Shift and press “P” (Patrol) and left-click where you want the unit to patrol. You can use this technique to easily tell a unit to patrol between two of your opponents potential expansion locations.

Kill That Constructing SCV

Ever notice that your melee unit stops attacking the constructing SCV when it moves? Simply hold shift and tell your unit to attack it multiple times. Your unit will now follow it whenever it moves. Deny the Terran’s wall-off with 50% more ease!

Rally to Your Units

You may already employ the tactic of attaching a rally point to a unit so that your forces stay together even when you move your army. But what happens when that unit dies? You lose your rally point. This can be especially painful when you lose a battle because half of your units are back in your base.

To avoid this you can select a building, hold Shift and Right-click on multiple units. Now if one of those units dies, your newly built units will still move to your army. Unless of course your entire army dies.

Easy Drops

Want your untis to drop as soon as your Medivac/Overlord/Warp Prism arrives? Simply tell your loaded transport to fly to where you want to drop, hold Shift, Press “D” (Drop) and left click at the drop point. With the Warp Prism you can also hold Shift and press “E” to tell it to enter Phasing mode after it unloads.

Similarly, you can tell a Viking to fly to a location and then transform upon arrival using the same technique of Move > Shift + “D” (Assault Mode).

As you can see there are a lot of useful and creative uses for the Shift key. I am sure that there are even more creative uses that are yet to be discovered. Do you know of any other uses for the Shift key? If so let me know about them in the comments below!

Starcraft 2 is Played With Two Hands

The function and control of the mouse in Starcraft 2 is natural and easy to pickup for new players. In fact the entire game can be played with just the mouse hand. However, to do so limits your options and efficiency in the game severely. How so? The keyboard allows you to look at one thing and do another. Let me illustrate this with an example; your troops are currently engaging the enemy, whilst watching the battle using only your keyboard hand you can: build SCV’s/Probes/Drones, build reinforcements for your army, research upgrades. Lets suppose that this battle ended with both teams losing equal amount of troops, who would be ahead? Well, the person using their keyboard to do all of those things of course!

Learning to use the keyboard effectively is essential to becoming an efficient player.

You will also find that the keyboard has other useful functions such as finding idle workers, queuing commands and using abilities. Ok so I have sold you on why you should be using the keyboard. But getting comfortable with using it can be very difficult for newer players, I myself have had a lot of difficulty with this in the past. But with some thought and good practice techniques you will be comfortable with using the keyboard in no time.

Learning Build Command Hotkeys

This is the starting point for learning to use the keyboard as it is the most simple and easy to learn. Build command hotkeys are letter keys which represent one of the options in the bottom right corner of the screen for the building of units and structures. If you mouse over one of these buttons take note of the keyboard letter that represents that button. It is good practice to learn all of these hotkeys even if it is for something you only use once a game.

Never click build commands, always use their hotkeys.

Why is it Important to Do This?

Once you learn a hotkey something interesting happens, you no longer have to think about it. This is because of the way muscle memory works, your fingers remember what to press and your mind is free to think of more important things, like what your next move is.

What is the Best Way to Learn This?

Day[9] describes a method in his Daily #132 which I have used with great success. It is a really simple and a very effective way to train your fingers and develop that muscle memory. Basically, every time you do not know a hotkey for something, mouse over it but do not click it. Instead, read which hotkey it is, move you mouse back to the centre of the screen and press the hotkey. Using this very simple method you will find your fingers will quickly learn which button to press and you will start doing it without thinking. Be sure to do this every time you do not know a hotkey.

Learning Unit Hotkeys

Unit hotkeys are very similar to build command hotkeys in that they each represent a button in the bottom right corner of the screen. These hotkeys include unit abilities and unit commands such as stop, hold and attack. Being able to execute these commands quickly is vital to effectively controlling your units.

Unit commands (Top) and Abilities (Bottom)

Why is it Important To Do This?

Battles in Starcraft 2 happen very quickly, in the one or two seconds it takes you to move your mouse, select an ability and move your mouse back to the screen, much of your forces could already be dead. Learning hotkeys allows you to keep looking at the action and use abilities or issue commands much more quickly.

What is the Best Way to Learn This?

For ability hotkeys the same technique as above works quite well, although I suggest doing this in practice matches. However, there is no trick to learning the unit command hotkeys like attack, hold and stop. Only by practicing these can you commit them to muscle memory. Thankfully, there is not many to learn, and once you are familiar with them you will start to learn what you can do with them. But we will save that for another article.

Note: For both Build Command Hotkeys and Unit Hotkeys it is worth mentioning that you should trial using both the ‘Standard’ layout and the ‘Grid’ layout. It is mainly a matter of comfort but ‘Grid’ layout is generally considered to be the more efficient layout. Essentially ‘Grid’ layout moves all hotkeys over to the left side of the keyboard, where every key represents a physical space within the unit/building control panel. If neither layout feels comfortable SC2 supports custom hotkeys (as of patch 1.2). – Thankyou to FaDeMeatex for pointing this out!

Getting Familiar With Control Groups

Control groups are units or structures that are bound to your numerical keys (1 through to 0), once bound pressing the corresponding number key will select those units or structures. You first create a control group by selecting a unit, structure or group, holding the Control key and then pressing the number key you wish to bind them to. Once a control group is created you can add any unit or structure to that group by selecting it, holding the Shift key and pressing that same number.

Control groups are easy to learn but difficult to master.

Why are Control Groups Important?

Control groups allow you to select a unit or structure without first moving your screen to it. They also allow you (by tapping the control group twice) to quickly jump the screen to any bound unit or structure. Say your main force is bound to control group 1, and reinforcements are bound to control group 2. Your main force engages the enemy and you wish to bring your reinforcements to support them. You can do so without moving the screen, simply press “2” and tell them to move to your main army. Control groups also allow you to build units from structures without moving the screen by simply pressing its control group number and pressing the units hotkey. You can then even rally your troops to wherever you want!

What is the Best Way to Learn to use Control Groups?

I will not discuss particular control group setups because it is important that you play around with different setups and see which one suits you best. I am constantly changing and refining my control group setup and I have a different setup for each race.

A good start is to define before a game what control groups you will use, and make sure you at least plan to use all ten numerical keys, even if you don’t end up using them. You may say something like “I will try to use keys 1 to 3 for my army units, 4,5 and 6 as my Nexus/Command Centres/Hatcheries, 7,8 and 9 as tech structures and 0 as my scout.” Now this particular setup may be good or bad, but as long as you use all of the control groups you can refine your setup later.

A forgotten unit is wasted resources.

The next step is to try to add each new unit to you’re existing hotkeys as you make it. This will do two things: get you more and more familiar with your setup and ensure that you do not forget or miss any unit. A forgotten unit is wasted resources. You will constantly change and refine your setup, and you may wish to try what other people use but just remember there is no right or wrong setup, only what works for you.

Queuing Commands

I chose to make this separate as I feel that it is something that is underused by newer players. This could be because it is a little bit more complex or it could be simply that many do not know of it’s use. Simply you can queue up commands  for units by holding the shift key. Very simple premise but it allows you to do many things such as:

Queuing up commands lets you set a scouting route.

• Tell a unit to take a specific route, such as setting up a scouting route so that you do not have to constantly tell the scout to change its destination. Simply right click first destination, hold shift then right click all subsequent destinations. You can even do it via the minimap!
• Move to a location then attack. Useful for getting ranged units into range so that they all attack. Do this by right-clicking then holding shift, pressing “A” (attack) and left-click where you want them to attack.
• Directing your units to kill things in a particular order. Useful for telling your units to focus on workers rather than structures or hostile units. Right-click unit to be attacked then hold shift and right-click each subsequent unit.
• Telling units to move to a location then use an ability. Terran players might like to note that you can simply tell a tank to move to a location then hold shift and press “E” (siege), then it will siege up once it gets there. Also works well for Blink stalkers (making them all able to blink across a gap, see this video).

So start using your keyboard hand! Once you get comfortable with it you will wonder how you ever did without. I also think that it makes the game more fun to play and less strenuous on your mouse hand. Does anyone know of any useful keyboard features or tricks that I haven’t mentioned? If so please let everyone know in the comments section below!