Learning SC2

Harassment is very exciting to watch in professional matches and can be great fun to emulate. Harassment is usually done to gain some sort of advantage through economic damage, disruption of production or by throwing off your opponent. While it seems like harassment would always be good sometimes you will do what seems like a lot of damage and still lose. There are a few things going on below the surface when top-tier players harass and there are some pitfalls to be aware of if you want your harassment to be effective.

Guaranteed Damage

The concept of guaranteed damage is important in harassment and even in normal attacks. You have probably noticed that when people harass they will try and kill workers, Pylons, Supply Depots or Overlords. The reasoning behind this seems kind of obvious, kill your opponents workers and they will be getting less income, kill their supply and they will become supply blocked. However, there is another level of reasoning at work here, guaranteed damage.

This Pylon is known as a 'critical Pylon' and it is a high priority target as it powers four structures.

Guaranteed damage simply means that you will be able to kill what you are trying to kill. If, for example, you drop a Medivac full or Marines in your Protoss opponents base you have a few choices and it may be tempting to go for the one with the biggest reward – the Nexus. However, it may take 30 seconds to kill the Nexus and in that time your units could be killed or repelled, leaving you with no damage done. If, you instead went for Probes or Pylons, which have much less health and are easier to kill, you will be almost guaranteed to do some damage before your opponent can defend.

It is essentially a question of risk vs reward, and you are always much safer going for an easier to obtain but smaller advantage then going for an unlikely to obtain but larger advantage. The following are a few examples of things to target when harassing with the concept of guaranteed damage in mind:

Vs. Protoss

• Probes – Economic damage and easy to kill.
• Pylons – Disrupts production by un-powering structures and affects supply cap. Single Pylons powering multiple buildings are high-priority targets.

Workers mining gas are a good target as killing them can delay your opponents tech and some people will forget to replace them.

Vs. Zerg

• Drones – Economic damage and easy to kill.
• Overlords – Affects supply, easy to kill before speed upgrade and can often be found outside the bases of carless Zergs.
• Queens – Slow if caught off Creep, relatively easy to kill and slows down unit production greatly due to missed Larva Injects.

Two Places at Once 

When harassing your opponent you never want to only attack one spot at a time. It is much easier for your opponent to defend, you are more likely to lose your units without doing any damage. A good example is sending a Medivac full of Hellions to attack your opponents main base. It is very easy for your opponent to pull back their army and kill off your attack before you have a chance to do any damage. If in that same scenario you sent Two Medivacs, one to the main and the other to the opponents third base your opponent may be able to easily defend one (simply retreat the attack that he tries to defend) but the other will go undefended. If instead your opponent splits his army and defends both Hellion drops they will be weak to a frontal assault. If they do neither then they will lose a lot of economy.

Another excellent way to incorporate multi-pronged harassments is to harass while attacking with you main army. While preoccupied with your frontal assault your harassment will likely go unnoticed and will cause a lot of damage. You can then simply retreat your main army and your harassment having doen the damage needed to secure a long-term victory.

Always be on the lookout for ways to spread your opponents resources thin, multi-pronged harassment will achieve this even if it does not actually do any damage. The threat of harassment can often be enough to secure you an advantage.

Frame by Frame example of a two pronged attack.

In the first frame the main army prepares to attack the opponents front while a Warp Prism full of Zealots prepares to drop at the east. In frame 2 the main army engages and the Warp Prism unloads in the mineral line. Having done the damage required to secure victory, the main army retreats in frame 3 to avoid unnecessary losses. Unfortunately the Warp Prism is destroyed preventing the Zealots from escaping but it was a worthwhile trade.

Takes the Opponents Focus

Good harassment will cause your opponent to make mistakes, to let their units get out position and to forget key parts of their build. The threat of harassment, like a Warp Prism sitting just outside their base can stress your opponent out or cause them to make more static defences then they would otherwise like to.

Doesn’t Put You Behind – Micro vs Macro

If your harassment taxes your own attention too much you will macro poorly and may even end up in a worse position than your opponent. Some harassment tactics require more micromanagement than others. Banshee harass and High Templar drops, for example, require a lot of attention and unless you are able to continue macro-ing whilst doing them they should be avoided by beginners. 

However, there is no reason to not apply the same tactics to simpler harassment tactics. For example, attacking the front with your main army while running a few units to an unguarded expansion can be very effective in lower leagues. 

Don’t Force it

The worst thing you can do is to overcommit to harassment. Don’t make harassment your main objective, and if your opponent is able to easily defend themselves then don’t try and force it. Each failed harassment attempt weakens your main army and makes you susceptible to a straight up attack. Incorporate harassment into your normal play while being aware of the above things and you will see a lot of success.

Have you had much success with harassment? Sometimes harassment tactics can seem very powerful and can win you games outright. But then there are other times when you appear to do a lot of damage but actually fall behind. Hopefully this article helps you understand some of the less-known aspects of the popular tactics.

We all have a few (or many) bad habits when it comes to playing Starcraft 2, however, many either don’t realise what they are or don’t feel that they are significantly affecting their play. The following are bad habits that I have dealt with, am dealing with or have seen a lot of. Breaking our bad habits is one thing that we can do to really improve ourselves as players.

Entering ‘Spectator’ Mode

This is one that we have all been guilty of at some point. When it comes time for a big battle we stop playing and watch it happen, who will be the winner? Battles in SC2 look fantastic but save the spectating for replays. Whenever you find yourself just watching the game play itself remember that you should still be working! Macro-ing while battles play out is extremely important, often the winner is the one who was preparing for the next battle not just watching the current one.

Quite an epic battle but watch it in the replay not the game!

Not Using All of the Hotkeys

Often times we know and use the main hotkeys for our race but there is usually one or two hotkeys that we would only use once a game that we never take the time to learn. Whats the hotkey for the Warp Prism speed upgrade? I can’t think of it off the top of my head so I know this is one bad habit that I am personally guilty of.

Why is this an issue if we only use it once a game? It’s not so much the extra time it takes to go down and click the upgrade button but the extra thought it takes. Learn the hotkey and make it as second nature as building workers and you will free your mind up to think of more important strategic decisions.

Not Watching the Minimap

Keeping one eye on the minimap lets me see that there is a counter-attack force trying to flank my army.

On the main screen there are units, battles and all sorts of flashy stuff. The minimap by contrast is relatively dull, but it’s an extremely important tool and you should alway be keeping one of your eyes on it. Falling into the habit of not watching your minimap will result in you missing enemy army movements, drops and expansions.

Breaking this habit is hard work –  to do so you will need to incorporate minimap checks at least every few seconds into your mental to do list.

Your mental to do list should look something like this:

• Build workers.
• Check Minimap.
• Build Units.
• Check Minimap.
• High Minerals? Build Production.
• Check Minimap.

All of this happens in a few seconds, eventually it will seem like you are always looking at the minimap because you wont miss anything. The next bad habit ties in with this one.

Excessive Screen Scrolling

Screen scrolling is when you move your mouse to the edge of the screen (or worse yet using the arrow keys) to move around the map. Screen scrolling should only really be used for slight adjustments or for controlling units during battle. Every other screen movement should either be the result of hotkey use or minimap clicking.

There are two very good reasons why this is the case:

1. Using hotkeys to control your screen movements suggests that you are building units and checking the status of upgrades etc.
2. Controlling your screen position via the minimap ensures that you are looking there more often. Without using it to click around players often fall into the habit I mentioned earlier.

Neglecting Upgrades

Getting to max or have a lot of spare resources? Dual chrono-boosted Forges!

This bad habit has been costing me games lately. I will often get to 1/1 upgrades and forget as the game goes on. Neglecting upgrades becomes more and more of a problem as you start playing longer, more drawn out macro games where the difference in army strength makes a huge difference.

A simple solution to this problem is to make upgrades a part of your ‘getting to max army size’ routine. As you get close to the point where your army is getting maxed out build an extra Forge, Evo Chamber or Engineering Bay and start upgrading two upgrades at once. As your game refinement increases you will find out where you can more effectively squeeze upgrades in but following this ‘max army’ routine is a very good starting point.

Overreacting to Harassment

There are three things that can make harassment effective, direct damage (ie. killed workers etc), taking up attention (forcing you to deal with harassment when you should be macroing) and overreaction. This bad habit tends to develop early on in our Starcraft 2 career when we panic over how to deal with it.

The following are ways that you might overreact to harassment:

• Building a lot of static defences – Cannons, Turrets and Spore Crawlers all take up a lot of minerals that cannot be recovered.
• Sending your entire army to deal with a small harassment – Often this will result in your enemies main army being able to freely attack.
• Pulling all of you workers off of minerals when you only need to pull a few – You will lose mining time that you didn’t really need to.
• Sending everything for a panicked counter attack – Your enemy will likely be prepared and unless you are very far behind a panicked attack is never a good idea.

Each of those things has the potential to do more damage than the harrasment itself. It is, however, possible to avoid all of this damage simply by remaining calm. If you spot a red dot heading somewhere suspicious (you should be watching your minimap, remember?) grab some of your units and immediately send them to intercept via the minimap. Then go see what it is, if it turns out to be nothing then no problem send your troops back. If it is small enough for the units you sent to deal with, great! If it turns out to be much worse, send more of your army to deal with it. Above all else simply remaining calm is your best defence against harassment.

Queuing

This last bad habit is one that a lot of people struggle with even knowing they do it. Queuing up units in your production buildings is all round bad practice. Each unit that is queued up and not currently building is essentially wasted money that could be spent on expanding, upgrading or making more production facilities.

Ideally you want to be starting a new unit just as the one that is currently building finishes, however this can be quite hard to achieve. It requires constantly checking the production status of your buildings which takes time to learn. While you strive for ideal macro queuing up one unit when the first is almost done is a good start. I am still working on this habit myself, at the moment my main queuing problem is with workers – I tend to build them two at a time.

Do you suffer from any of the above bad habits in SC2? What other bad habits are you working on at the moment? I know that lately one of mine has been playing Starcraft when I should be studying for exams.

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.