Learning SC2

I recently had a very good question asked of me on the SEA Forums. BlackTalyn, who had not yet started online multiplayer, wanted to know whether practicing against the computer AI was a good way to prepare for online play, or whether it would teach bad habits. He also wondered the same about practice league. Knowing that he was probably eager to get started I provided a short answer, but I also wanted to write a more detailed response here as it is quite a relevant question for brand new players. So in this article I will discuss the above options for preparing for multiplayer as well as a few more.

Playing the Computer AI

Playing against the computer AI can be an excellent way to prepare for online multiplayer provided you are aware of the differences between the AI and human players. Basically what you do to defeat the AI is quite different from what you will have to do to defeat a human opponent. The AI is predictable and uses very simple strategies that do not employ any of the tricks that human players use.

What is good about playing the AI:

You will never see the computer AI Proxy Zealot-Cannon rush like this person.

• Learn the units, hotkeys, and mechanics of each race with no pressure. I highly recommend playing at least a few games as each race before you decide which one to play online. See my article on the three races for more info on choosing a race.
• The AI (Medium and Hard) will do frequent and decently sized attacks. These attacks are predictable but can still be pretty hard to defend if you do not play well enough. If you can defend these attacks you are on your way to doing so online.
• You can practice you’re opening over and over. Set the AI to very easy and you can practice and practice until you’re opening is smooth. The first 10 mins of online games can be quite difficult when you first start, seconds can mean the difference between losing or defending an early attack. A tight opening can help you dominate this portion of the game.

I recommend playing against the AI for a while before going online. Before I went online I played a few games against the Easy, Medium and Hard AI and it helped me build my familiarity with the game and get my confidence up. Just remember that the AI cannot prepare you for all of the wacky and tricky things that your opponents will do online.

Challenges are mainly micro-focused.

Completing the Challenges

The challenges are a series of specially designed scenarios for the purpose of practicing certain skills. They were added to the game by Blizzard to help prepare new players for online play, so use them!

If there is a problem with the challenges however, it’s that they too heavily emphasise micro (unit control) which is actually less important for beginners then macro (production). Only one or two challenges focus on macro and even then they only focus on the opening few minutes of the game. As such the challenges will not teach you the skills required for constant production in the later stages of games.

I recommend trying to get a silver rating in most of the matches, particularly Rush defence and Opening Gambit. You can always come back and polish your skills by going for golds later on.

Watching Games/Replays

At any stage in your Starcraft 2 career watching casts of matches or replays is an excellent way to improve. Usually you are looking for new strategies, tricks, and other specific things. However, when you are just beginning the goal of watching games and replays is not to give you specific insight or even strategies, but rather to give you an idea of what the game is about.

So try not to pay too close attention to all the specific details of the games you watch. Focus instead on the broad strokes of play and the general way that matches play out. For example, if you notice that one player decides to build a second base really early take note of how that impacts the game. “Oh, he built a second base really quickly and almost died there for a while but later on he had a heaps bigger army”. Those are the types of things you want to take notice of because it gives you a fundamental understanding of the game to build upon. As such watching games and replays is the best thing you can do early on to improve your understanding of the game.

Want to know where to get videos of games or replays to download? Head to my Learning Resources section.

Playing in the Practice League

I am going to come right out and say that I do not recommend the practice league for preparing for multiplayer Starcraft 2. Practice league is designed as a way to ease very new players into the game with it’s lower speed setting and destructible rocks to prevent early attacks. I would only recommend this to players who have never played against a human before and are having severe confidence issues or to people who are looking for a super casual playing experience.

Unfortunately for the vast majority of players the design of the practice league creates bad habits such as not defending early on in the game or being too passive. The lower speed setting I feel just makes the real thing seem much more hectic once you do move on. I played a few (maybe ten) practice league matches and I would have preferred that I had just skipped it entirely, it has taken me a long time to break away from the passiveness of those games.

Preparing Mentally

Bronze league is nothing to be ashamed of!

All of the above things will help to prepare you mentally for online play and will help you feel more confident. But you should remember that it’s not your goal to go in and win a heap of matches because you are super prepared. The point of the above preparation is only to give you an appreciation of the game and an understanding of why you will lose most of your matches. Thats right, it is very likely that you will lose a lot of matches when you begin, particularly your placement matches.

Hopefully all of your preparation and understanding of the game will allow you to see this as a challenge to overcome rather than a deterrence to playing again. I get the feeling that those initial losses are a big deciding factor in whether new players come back for more. Hopefully by being better prepared this hurdle can be overcome.

Do you know anyone who is about to start playing online or has lost a heap of matches early on and has lost interest? If so share this article with them and hopefully we can get more people playing and loving SC2.

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.

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!

When you first begin to play Starcraft 2 against other human beings one thing will almost always happen; you will feel that the game is pretty clear cut. Starcraft is just about who has the better units or who can play faster right? The truth is Starcraft is just like many other learning experiences, the more you learn the more you realise there is to know.

“Starcraft 2 is just like many other learning experiences, the more you learn, the more you realise there is to know.”

Once I started to realise the scope of what there is to understand about this game I felt utterly lost. I had played a few other strategy games before I played SC2 but I had never ventured below the surface of these games, and when it happened with SC2 I knew that I wanted to learn everything but I had no idea where to begin.

Chances are if you are reading this post you are just starting to realise that there is a lot more to this game than you first thought. The question of “what are the crucial first things to learn?” has been bothering me for many months now, but I think I have finally got it down.

This series of articles (The Very Beginning) will be about those things which I have discovered were the most important things to learn in the very beginning. The first thing I will be looking at and the first thing you should learn about is the Races. This article will also talk about picking your race.

Starcraft 2’s Races

First of all, in Starcraft 2 there are three races; Terran, Protoss and Zerg. Right you already knew that but the important thing is actually the differences between them. It is important to note that no one race is better than the others, nor is any race easier to learn. But they are all very different and you may find that you prefer the way one race plays over the others.

“No one race is better than the others, nor is any race easier to learn.”

A very general description would see us describe the three races in the following way:

Terran

Terran is seen as the most resourceful race, they have many tactical options available to them and can come back from the brink of a loss if the opponent does not completely destroy them. As mankind is known for utilising their surroundings to their fullest advantage so to do Terran. On the scale of troop numbers to troop survivability Terran are the middle ground with a good number of fairly survivable units.

Planetary Fortress are the best defensive building in the game, especially when combined with the repair ability of the SCV.

Main features of Terran:

• The ability to wall of  ramps or choke points with buildings that can either lift off or submerge to allow units to pass.
• The ability for most buildings to lift off and fly to a new location make them able to relocate to a new base or tactical position with ease.
• SCV’s can repair buildings and mechanical units. This feature allows for easier defence as well as the ability to maintain an aggressive mechanical army.
• Free bunkers. Bunkers can be salvaged for a refund of their cost price. As such, they can be used defensively and aggressively with little economic risk.
• Planetary fortress are an extremely powerful defensive option and are even better when combined with SCV’s repair ability.
• Cloaked helicopters. Need I say any more?

Protoss

Protoss is an advanced and ancient race but their numbers are few. They make up for this by being the sturdiest of the three races and also by having an excellent selection of support units. This combination often sees deceptively small forces of Protoss units overcome much larger armies.

Forcefields can turn the tide of a battle for Protoss.

Main features of Protoss:

• Buildings warp in rather than build. A Probe need only start the Warp-in process after which they can move on to another task. This feature means that can a single Probe can set up an entire base very quickly.
• A selection of Protoss’ units can be warped in almost instantly anywhere a power grid exists (created by Pylons and Warp Prisms). This means that a large defensive army can be raised instantly or that an attacking army can be easily reinforced. Warping in of units can also be used to sneakily bypass opponents defensive forces.
• All Protoss units and structures have a good selection of Psionic abilities such as forcefields can change the course of any battle.
• Lasers are cool!

Zerg

Zerg is a race of insect like units that are controlled by a single mind entity. Zerg units are individually fragile but they more than make up for this with far greater numbers than the other races. If you are precious with your units Zerg is not for you. Zerg players are well known to expand, surround and chip away at the enemy army until an opening in their defences is found at which point they flood in and devour everything.

Attacks from a Nydus Worm can end the game for an unprepared enemy.

Main features of Zerg:

• Larvae system see multiple units able to spawn at the same time. Because of this it is possible for Zerg to replenish its forces almost as quickly as they are killed.
• Many units can burrow underground and some can even tunnel allowing for the repositioning of units and giving them the ability to carry out a surprise attack after which they can re-burrow and tunnel away.
• Nydus Network allows for entire armies to enter a giant worm at one end and exit at another end anywhere the Zerg player has vision. Using this an army can even be released in the back of your opponents base, attack, and when defensive forces arrive the army can retreat to the safety of the network. This mechanic easily makes Zerg the most mobile race.
• Zerg players are arguably the most badass of Starcraft 2 players.

Selecting Which Race to Play

Selecting your race can be difficult, so just pick which you think is the coolest!

Choosing one race to stick with is advisable at the beginner level, specialising in this way allows you to learn moreabout your race and how it plays. After you are confident with one race you may wish to learn another or to play random, but in the beginning pick just one. But how do you make this decision, what if you end up hating the race?

Well, the first thing to remember is your choice is not permanent. If you do want to learn another race at a later date you can easily do it and what you learned with your first race is not wasted. On the contrary, it gives you a deeper understanding of that race’s strengths and weaknesses which will benefit you when you play against them.

I recommend that you just pick your first race purely based on which one you think is the coolest, which one you think suits your personality the most or which one you think will be most fun to play. After all you want to identify with your race choice and to have fun with it.

Which race did you choose? If you have already decided how did you come to that decision? Leave a comment and let everyone know!