Learning SC2

The Protoss vs Terran early game is one of my favorite things in Starcraft 2 (Heart of the Swarm or Wings of Liberty). As Protoss your goal is to take a safe but fast expansion to be able to deal with anything Terran can throw at you. Scouting is crucial and micro can play an important role in defending early aggression or in dealing some damage yourself. In this guide I explain one early game situation that can arise in a PvT 1 Gate Fast Expand – early marine pressure.

Check out the video above for a full guide to micro and strategy for dealing with early Marine attacks in PvT. It also goes over how to follow up with your own counterattack and how to bust a bunker with gateway units. In this article I’ll go over some other important points to know about this sort of situation.

Scouting with your first Zealot and Stalker is crucial. If you see a few marines and no Barracks add-on then you can assume the Terran is either looking to expand with some light Marine pressure or is looking to tech up to Starport or Factory on 1 base. Have your Stalker(s) hang out near the Terran expansion to find out which. If by 6:30 there is no expansion it’s time to head home to prepare for any drops or air attacks. 

If your opponent pressures with Marines like in the video above then the best way to deal with it is to send Stalker out to meet him as close to his base as possible. Stalkers out range and outrun Marines so the more space you have the longer you can kite them. It’s possible to kill off a large group of Marines with only two Stalkers.

If you kill off a few of his Marines and scout his expansion then you can potentially follow up with a Gateway unit attack of your own. Simple take your expansion and make 4 Gateways total. A light 2-base 4 gate pressure can be enough to break the front of an under-defended Terran, especially if you can use a ForceField to prevent the repair on the bunker or wall.

Don’t over commit, if you sense you can’t break the front just pick off whatever you can and start teching to either double Forge + Twilight Council or Robotic + Colossus.

Helpful Resources:

• ZiggyD Coaching a 1 Gate Expand Build [Video]
• A General Guide to Scouting in SC2 [Article]

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!

Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” has been read and interpreted throughout history by many different people for many different purposes. Occasionally, in between University, Work, Playing SC2 and writing about SC2 I find a little bit of time to read (on my lunch break at work if there are no new Dailies). Reading through one particular section of this book I couldn’t help but apply it’s lessons to SC2 because it was just so clearly relevant. In this particular section Sun Tzu states the best things a general can do in war in descending order.

“Thus the highest form of Generalship is to balk (destroy) the enemy’s plans.” – Sun Tzu

This is the moment when you cheer as Terran, an almost guaranteed victory!

To destroy your opponents plans is clearly the best thing you can do in Starcraft 2. Note that Sun Tzu says to destroy your enemies plans, not just to counter them. Generally, countering implies that you merely defend or survive – not really the best thing that you can do. But to destroy your opponent’s plans puts you in a dominating position in the match which is where you always want to be.

A good, but extreme example of destroying an opponent’s plans would be having your opponent’s 6-pool rush reach your base after you are completely walled in. Anyone who has been in this position will know that you are at a massive advantage at this point. You haven’t just countered your opponent’s plans, you have destroyed them. Even in less extreme examples having their plans destroyed will throw off all but the most experienced of players. It can be very hard to formulate a new plan mid-game, so take advantage of that.

You can achieve the destruction of your opponents plans in SC2 by scouting, covering your vulnerabilities (adequate detection, anti-air etc.), and by always being aware of what your opponent could do — this means having prior knowledge of the possibilities at any given point in the match. This type of knowledge comes with experience and research.

“The next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces.” – Sun Tzu

Pick off every undefended unit you can, this Probe is extra valuable because he is also holding a little gift of minerals.

If you fail to destroy your opponent’s plans or if your opponent plays straight up without any ‘tricks’ then this is your next best step. In war, cutting off your enemy’s supply lines or reinforcements would give you an obvious and great advantage. And it works much the same way in StarCraft 2. Simply, its all about not letting your opponent’s army reach its greatest potential strength.

You can achieve this by harassing your opponent, attacking and retreating (particularly against Zerg as it forces them to waste Larvae on defensive units) and by picking off all undefended units or structures. All of these things will weaken your opponents overall army strength as well as their resolve. Utilising highly mobile units (Blink Stalkers, Medivacs, Hellions, Speed Zerglings, Mutalisks etc.) is the key to succeeding in this style of indirect engagement.

This is the method I favour in most of my matches, I always attempt to destroy my opponents plans first but lack of experience often makes this difficult. Letting your opponent mass a powerful army without any intervention is nearly always a bad move, if you have ever had a maxed out Stalker/Colossus army bear down on you then you will know why. Suffering this too many times I have resolved to always pressure and do everything I can to reduce my opponents ability to mass an army.

“The next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field.” – Sun Tzu

Having Zealots flank an attacking army like this will deny their retreat whilst you cut through them.

If you allow your opponent to amass their forces unopposed, then a straight up engagement in open ground is your next best option. In this situation the winner will be the player: who has the best unit composition, who can micromanage their army better and who can best continue production to reinforce their army throughout the conflict.

Why should you ever let the situation get to the point where you and your opponent are in equal positions? It is always better to be in a dominant position in each match. However, your opponent will be making their own efforts to get an edge over you and it is sometimes unavoidable that you will need to enter a battle on (nearly) equal grounds.

In this situation there are a few things you could do to tip the scale in your favour;

• Position your forces well just before the conflict ensues (such as creating an arc with your ranged units and moving your melee units to the front),
• Send some units to flank and trap your opponents forces, and,
• Take advantage of terrain such as high ground, choke points and visibility blocks (smoke or grass).

Using these tactics you can turn an equal situation into a one sided victory. For an excellent example on how to do this as Zerg against Terran see Benji’s Guide on How to Control Zerg Units.

“And the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.” – Sun Tzu

What if your opponent amasses their forces but does not leave their, well defended city? The most common reaction in this situation is to attack their base. In StarCraft 2 when your opponent is being completely defensive you should realise that you have the advantage. Attacking your opponent at their base where they have defences effectively hands that advantage over to your opponent.

Why attack this straight up? He isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

So instead, use the fact that your opponent is not putting pressure on you to secure a long-term victory. Attrition is the name of the game here, starve your opponent of resources and deny their attempts at expansions. At the same time you should expand yourself, improve your tech, research upgrades and create a formidable army. Whilst doing this probe for weaknesses in your opponents defences with gentle harassment, this will force them to plug those gaps with more defences — further weakening his army. Put pressure on your opponent but never feel like you need to break in and kill them, instead let them kill themselves with their passivity.

Eventually your opponent will have to move out, as they will have exhausted their resources and if they delay attacking any further they will become weaker and weaker. Usually this attack will come in the form of a ‘doom push’,  just remember that although this may be hard to deal with your opponent has no capacity to replenish their forces. So just whittle them down slowly or if they head straight for your main base you should simply fall in on theirs. Because of the amount of expansions you should have by this point and with your ability to restock your army you should have no trouble destroying their base first.

So don’t waste your army against a walled in opponent, if you have ever attacked a turtling Terran player with siege tanks and turrets ringing their base you will know how little you can achieve and how swiftly defeat can follow. Take the advantage when it is given to you and don’t give it away for nothing.

I recommend that anyone interested in strategy (that should be you!) should read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” for themselves. It’s one of those things that you read and then it becomes a part of your character, helping you in any area of your life where a strategic decision needs to be made. And its like $10 on Fishpond with free postage in Australia, so you have no reason not to. On that note I also recommend “Go Rin No Sho” (“The Five Rings”) by Miyamoto Musashi, it talks about mentally dominating your opponent and seizing any advantages you are given. It’s probably my favourite book in this genre.

At which of the above points do you have most of your wins? Do you scout well and destroy your enemy’s plans? Or do you engage in the field and win with superior tactics? Which one do you most commonly lose to? Comment below and let me know!

Every race in Starcraft 2 has its own unique methods of scouting and detecting cloaked units. This presents a challenge for new players, as there are multiple options available to you and the best one to use is often not so clear. Protoss has a few obvious and a few not so obvious ways of scouting. Much of these are simply personal preference but some are more effective in certain match ups than others. Detection, however, is a bit more strict in its use, specifically Photon Cannon placement. Below is what I have learned to be the effective ways to scout as Protoss as well as the best ways to use your detection options.

Scouting With Your 9 Supply Probe

Use that scout and count those drones.

The ‘standard’ time for Protoss to scout with their probe is at 9/10 supply. Typically, this probe warps in your first Pylon and then heads off to the opponents base. For ease of scouting I set this probe to a control group right at the start of the game (control group ‘0’ is my scouting control group). What this Probe is looking for is the key. First off he wants to eliminate the possibility of your opponent doing a ‘cheesy’ or all-in build. Signs of these types of early builds include:

• Vs. Zerg – Very few Drones and a Spawning pool indicates a ‘6 pool’ Zergling rush or similar.
• Vs. Terran – 2 Barracks and no Refinery indicates a possible ‘2 Rax’ Marine rush.
• Vs. Protoss – 2 Warpgates, no Cybernetics Core indicates a ‘2 Gate’ Zealot rush.
• Vs. Protoss – Empty Protoss base, or only a Pylon and Forge indicates a Cannon rush or Proxy gateways. Go scout in and around your base!

The second objective of that Probe is to identify what your opponent might be planning. There are many small things that you might see that can indicate what your opponent’s plans might be and there is an excellent list of these things on the Team Liquid forums here. Please check them out. While this scouting is important do not let it maintain all of your focus. There is nothing worse than knowing exactly what your opponent is doing but not being able to do anything about it because you have been to busy scouting too build anything.

Protoss Scouting Options

Scouting options for Protoss begin limited, just Probes, Zealots and then Stalkers, but as your tech level increases those options increase exponentially. I will simply list the options that I have heard of/discovered, if you know of any more please let everyone know in the comments section!

Hallucination

Hallucinate is available from the Cybernetics Core and you can begin research on it as soon as your Warpgate Tech is finished. Hallucinate allows you to use a Sentry to create a hallucinated unit of your choice. And your choice will almost certainly be to hallucinate a Phoenix to scout your opponents base. There are two nice things about this tech: firstly, if you are not planning on getting air units a few hallucinated air units can force your opponent to build unnecessary air defences. Secondly, you can use this to scout throughout the game without any further financial cost. Note: Do not attack with the Hallucinated units, they don’t do any damage and your opponent will know that it’s a fake!

Observers

Observers are almost a necessity later in the game, and can be a very effective way to scout before then. Often Protoss will settle for just getting one Observer to scout the opponents base/keep an eye out for cloaked units. Observers are cheap, quick to produce and are cloaked. So get lots of them, you can have one at your opponents front, one at each edge of their bases to watch for drops/air unit harass and one checking for your opponents expansions. With the vision provided by your observers and by having units on Xel Naga watchtowers you will be able to instantly shut down any harass or drops before they do any damage.

Phoenix

Dark Templar can do more than just kill workers.

Phoenix are quick to produce, are one of the fastest moving units in the game, have good harassment capabilities (especially against Zerg) and can provide excellent air superiority. With a few Phoenix it is possible to scout and harass your opponent at the same time. A drawback of using Phoenix for scouting is that their costs will weaken your ground army production by a decent amount. By using them to harass your opponent you can negate this somewhat.

Dark Templar

In a similar fashion to Phoenix, Dark Templar (DT) can harass and scout at the same time. Since they are cloaked, your DTs can just wander into an opponents base and scout before popping over to their mineral line for harassment. DTs usefulness for scouting your opponents base is limited if your opponent is prepared with detection. They can still be extremely useful for watching your opponents front and delaying enemy troop movements (as your opponent cannot move out without first getting mobile detection).

My Scouting Experiences

I have had personal success with using lots of observers, particularly against Terran. I find that I am able to shut down drops much better and can keep Terran contained much more effectively with the mobile vision provided by the Observer. Keeping Terran contained provides me with the extra confidence I need to dominate this matchup. PvT is currently my best matchup as Protoss, and I believe it is due to having excellent vision at all times. When I lose that vision is usually when I lose.

Against Protoss opponents I often use Dark Templar to scout, contain and harass and I have had decent success with this approach. I have found that it is necessary to also get Observers in PvP due to the increasing amount of players that seem to be using Warp Prism harass. I feel that PvP is currently my worst matchup and I need to work on maintaining good vision to overcome this hurdle. I may experiment with using Hallucination in this matchup.

I typically use DTs and Observers against Zerg, but I have had success with the Phoenix approach in the past. Zerg can, however, react very quickly to DTs if they are at Lair tech (if not DTs will be the end of them). As such I think I may lean more towards Phoenix in the PvZ matchup in the future.

Photon Cannons

Tucking a Cannon into the minerals like this will help those probes feel safe.

Its good practice to put at least 1 Photon Cannon in each of your mineral patches. This is mainly for the detection they provide but they also act as a deterrent for any light harassment. For as long as your army is fairly close to your bases this will be pretty much all you need. Once you expand more or start to move your army out it is always a good idea to put up extra cannon in the back of each base. This will effectively defend you from any harassment or counter attacks that may come.

I have had many, many games in the past where I have ended up trading bases with my opponent due to a counter attack drop in the back of my main base. I have also lost a lot of games due to cloaked Banshee harass. After I started putting up one Cannon in each of my mineral lines cloaked Banshees have not been a problem. However, I am still having trouble remembering to throw up those extra Cannon later in the game, and it has ended up costing me a few wins.

Do you have any other tips or strategies that you use to scout/detect with Protoss? If so, share them with me below!

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?