Starcraft II Tips

Its what makes the game interesting

 

Have to play like 50ish games or so before you get used to it.

I think I played over 400 games in beta, and I've already racked up 200ish games on retail.

It all comes with mass gaming and yes you'll lose a lot at first, but the ladder system will place you with people at your level after about 15 games. Then you'll start winning.

 

htwingnut, fun playing with ya. You're not that bad, seriously! You gave the impression that I was going to see a terrible player, and you're not! I guarantee you, I've played against - and with - much worse players. I play with my buddy in CA to keep in touch with him, and he started out way worse than what I saw of you. It just takes time. If you just play a couple games a day, I guarantee that at the end of the week, you'll have made significant improvement. You just have to be mindful of what mistakes you make and what you need to do to improve on them.

 

Regarding massing resources like mad and still was placed 5th or 6th in the resource score, the "average unspent resources" part of the score is such that, the higher your average unspent is, the lower your resource total score will be.

If you're already come as far as getting the economy down, why quit now? You just need to learn the next step, building faster. That won't be a problem once you get used to the race you're placing. Know what unit you want to build, then build multiple buildings that produce that unit as well as maintaining your supply depot production.

 

That doesn't make sense, why wouldn't the resource score show total resources gathered? I'm talking about the summary screen at the end of the round. In the end I was able to spend all those resources because I got trounced on and had to use it to build another base, SCV's, barracks, bunkers, etc. Basically start over.

 

Well in Brood War, they used to show minerals and gas that you've gathered. However, in SC2, they changed the resource score to something they think is more relevant to skill level. Skilled players tend to keep their resource low in the bank as to use every mineral and gas gathered efficiently for unit production. I mean, it's better to use the resources and go for the win rather than lose and go like "Hey I had 5k minerals and 3k gas I would totally own you with that". So they made it such that the higher your average unspent resource score is, the lower your economy score will be.

I don't know how they measure it though... I had 40k minerals in bank and 20k gas before when I was testing stuff with my friend and in the summary screen I got like 25k average unspent resources. In another game, I tried to use my resources as much as possible and ended the game with resources in the 2 digits and still get around the 400s as my average unspent :/ It's probably calculated throughout the whole game and not what you have left at the end.

 

@Histidine - it's just frustrating when you lose all the time, and not only lose, but get stomped. That game pace was crazy fast for me. Hard to think what to do next, and what to do to recover.

@Reizo - Ok, just seems odd. So it's an actual score and not a measure of actual resources gathered. Weird, but I guess it is what it is.

 

Well yea lol, its called "Average unspent resources" Which means most likely it takes the total value of your resources every so many seconds then averages it out over the length of the game.

 

Anyone know how promotion into the next league occurs? I'm currently rank 7? in my division, and won 10 games in a row, with half of them being diamond players. Do I need to lose before promotion? Are there certain time/days when promotion occur? Do I need to play more games and obtain a higher rank?

 

Just keep on playing and you'll eventually be promoted. It appears to be random on when they'll promote you but if you keep winning against higher ranked or more favoured players, you'll be promoted soon enough

 

Try this: Hot key all of your barracks to say, 4. (use ctrl+4 after selecting them)
Whenever you remember, just hit 4 and spam A (for marines) and keep doing this throughout the game. If you find that you still have too many resources, then just build more barracks, add the new barracks to the hotkey 4, and repeat.

 

I thought A was for attack move?

One thing that irks me is that even though you buy the packaged version they don't even give you a hotkey reference card or build order card. That would help too. But no, instead they give you a PAD OF PAPER and a useless manual and a bunch of spam material for WoW. If I wanted to play WoW, I would have bought it.

 

Ah, sorry for the confusion.

If you have barrack(s) selected and hit the A key, then it will build marines.

If you have units selected, then yes, A would be to attack move.


Edit: Perhaps the following adds to the confusion as well - you can group buildings the same way as you do for units.

 

I'm aware of grouping buildings and such. But is there a site the provides a comprehensive list of hotkeys? I probably will make my own reference in big font type for quick reference when I'm playing, for the ones I'd most likely use.

 

First to answer your question about lack of build orders with the boxed game.
Blizzard games are always in development. There will most definitely be patches to fix balance issues. Thus, build orders will change with these patches, making build order cards useless. A quick example is how spawning pool used to cost 150 minerals but now 200 minerals (this change occurred like a decade ago in starcraft 1 but whatever, a good example!)


I agree on the other hand that hotkey cards could be nice, as these won't change (unless you modify them). Honestly, the best way to learn hotkeys is to force yourself to never click and just use them. If you forget what a hotkey is, you mouse over it, then instead of clicking use the keyboard.

It's really the same for any software. (Assuming windows) you learn shortcuts like Ctrl+N to create a new window by using it constantly. If there's a new shortcut you want to learn, you first go through the menus, try to memorize the shortcut, and you'll eventually learn it through repeated use.

 

What race do you play? For beginners I always suggest playing Terran, because you can get good practice with them by playing the campaign.

 

There's always plenty of reference cards for hotkeys regardless the program or game. And build order may not change, only cost perhaps and/or hitpoints/damage. It's silly to have to FIND all the shortcut keys when they should be made readily available. Maybe I'll make one and make and share it if nothing exists.

I almost always play Terran. I can't stand playing Zerg, but Protoss are interesting and fun to manage sometimes.

 

Hmm but marines are like the counter to Muta and stimpack marines especially with medivacs even worse and they can get them way faster/cheaper than you can get muta.

If you go for the FE and they rush I dont know how you would survive. I have never lost to Muta we had a 2v2 the other day that they went mass muta and even for us being unprepared we still won the game. I think of Muta as a harassment unit but never as a main force, just not enough damage and too much cost.

 

I got a question, does SC2 autosave to online server or it autosaves to your hdd ?>
My new laptop came in and after playing for few days on my gf's 13'' laptop I finally wannna test it out on some decent graphics.
Is there a way to transfer save files to another machine if it saves to hdd ?

 

nope, they are saved in your mydocs folder.

 

It does save progress of the campaign in the "cloud" to some extent when I was playing single player when ever I beat a mission on my desktop or laptop and then played on the other machine and chose to continue it would load from where I left off.

However all the individual saves I made myself or the autosaves made are not transferred over, just your progress once you complete a mission.

Id imagine you can transfer saves easy and without issue just by finding them and coping them to another machine.

 

I have to say I REALLY hate how RT plays AT. Maybe blizzard did this to cut down on search times but this shouldn't be an issue since the game is so popular and besides I would rather wait a bit longer then get rolled by a team of people with a planned out strategy and strong communication. It just simply isn't fair.

 

Lol, that reminds me of the game I played with Vicious and Bacon, I am pretty sure the other team was no accident.
But I play with my next door neighbor (read flat mate) and we sit right next to each other, having good communication and talking things out just feels natural in an RTS, it's my favorite way to play. And it improves our win rate, we are ranked 4 in platinum, we call out selves TEAM CHEEZE, caps for cruise control victory.

 

I can give you a list of the Terran hotkeys if you want ._.

 

Yay, me and BaconPie and TakeItEasy have Platinum for 2v2. Me and Bacon were on a nice win streak up to rank 24 I think till our last game when we had a thor army come knocking on our door backed up with hydras.

Really caught us by surprise as it seemed like we were pushing pretty well early on, took out two of the Zerg players expansions. Thor units are starting to get more respect from me. Bacon went BC but between the thor and Hydralisks it just was not enough, and I had a big stalker army and it was just mowed down without effort.

Went on a last ditch void ray base race and did really well but they kept making new bases while they came and got ours so we lost in the end and I ran into the thor army and lost most of my voidrays right at the end.

-Hotkeys, I know I am in the minority but I chose on purpose to pick GRID shortly after I started and I do not regret that at all. I think grid is very logical since no matter what race, game, unit, the keys are always the same and in easy reach based on where the command lays in the command gui.

It would be hard for somebody to convert over if they were very used to the standard hot keys but if your new I recommend going with the grid setting early on a I think its more advantageous and should be easier to learn.

 

I've got to buy SC2 before my skills rust away. Being a beta monkey was my only advantage.

;_;

 

Dang it, I had a game last night where I was actually well ahead of my opponent, amassing units for an assault, and then my 1 year old woke up screaming, so I had to quit the game... I had almost double everything of my opponent

 

Well someone's been improving quite nicely Too bad that happened but it seems that you're capable of beating someone now

 

Haha great job! Next time, you should have selected your entire army and just attack-moved into the enemy base and set all your rally points there as well, then attend to your child... and hope you could win away from keyboard

 

The comeback of the century

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LOL. That's pretty awesome. Spine crawlers to attack buildings.

 

That video just proves it doesn't hurt to break from the norm
And that koreans are amazing at sc

 

Not bad to break from the norm, but only if you're really good. They obviously micro everything though. I don't feel so bad though now because that terran player didn't notice the zerg player building structures right next to him. That happened to me and afterwards felt like a tool. But I guess it happens to the best!

 

That announcer is pretty annoying. And I'm not so sure "ravage" was the best term to use to describe what the "tentacles" were doing. That just disturbs me more than a little.

But yeah, interesting game. I think the terran guy had it, he was just thrown so off guard by what the zerg player did that he didn't know how he should react.

 

There was nothing he could really do. Maybe pump out siege tanks, but banshees were probably the wrong choice.

 

Siege tank with siege tech will take too long to research as opposed to getting one banshee and shoot down the spine crawlers. Not to mention and siege tank sieged up is too vulnerable to the roaches. However, he probably didn't expect the cloak to be taken down before it finishes so the queens took it down/

 

I'm thinking that if he just hadn't spent the time and money teching, he coulda out-gunned the other guy's base. Not to mention, if he had gotten the new spawning pool in time (which he SHOULD have been looking for!), there would never have been spine crawlers in the first place. He easily had the means to take out the pool with his 4-5 reapers, if he wasn't too busy harassing the workers and queens.

 

If anything it proves that Reaper micro while effective can leave you extremely vulnerable

 

Actually the Zerg player got roaches out in his base. The Reapers wouldn't be able to do anything.

 

He also already had 2 spine crawlers in his base before the first spawning pool even went down, and spine crawlers can out-range reapers in a bunker and easily take out small groups of reapers especially when backed up by 2 queens.

The terran hardly did any damage at all after taking out the spawning pool, because the queens and spines held him back, he was already behind (because his strategy sacrificed his macro so much) before the proxy hatchery even went up.

 

If I could somehow describe how important it is to knock down a zergs spawning pool and a few of his drones in beginning play at least in diamond level terms it could be like chess.

It's as if a player got scot free of taking the others rook, but lost focus of the other players queen (some pun intended actually). If after he took his rook he safely retreated or scouted the queen (still talking chess) setting up an even more agressive counter attack he would've won. If ensnare would've gotten cloak he wouldve won since zerg was far from lair tech to detect cloak. It was just a bad gamble that cost him because of epic misfortune, especially ensnare probably not expecting checkprime to sac his queens to take out his cloak tech.

IMO ensnare was ahead the entire game until the moment the queens tookout the cloak tech.

 

he got the spawning pool, but the smart play with the queen prevented him from killing any drones. He never really lost any income just a spawning pool and a spine crawler. All the while the terran player lacked on the macro and got out played by the hidden hatchery. In this case the reapers did effectively nothing but cripple the terran player.

 

Just an honest question, are you at mid diamond level where the cost of one spine crawler and the loss of a spawning which costs money makes a difference?

I'm not being smart with you, I'm just trying to describe how in highest level of chess the loss of a single pawn means you will lose the entire game; similar to sc2 where in my division the loss of a spawning pool will pretty much guarentee a loss if you play perfectly.

 

Any way to keep replays saved permanently? Its annoying having the unsaved folder constantly delete it. I tried making a separate folder, but you can't access it from the game. you need to run each replay from the folder individually.

 

Just save the replay after you finish a game. They'll be saved permanently o_o

If you missed saving it, go to the unsaved folder, rename the replay you want saved and move it to the saved multiplayer replay folder

 

Sure he lost the resources he spent to make those things. But unlike chess in starcraft we have the ability to build more pawns... He didnt kill the income which is the real goal of any type of harassment. My point was sure he stunted the Zerg's growth, but he didnt cripple the longevity of it. And in turn because the zerg player was able to keep mining that mineral line he was able to pool the cash and finish the job.

If after he'd killed the spawning pool gone for the drones he would have come out further ahead and won.

Heck looking at it again he shoulda just bunkered those reapers and left them there while going back and macroing his base. His mistake was assuming he'd won. And if that doesnt relate to chess i dont know what else you want.

 

If cloak had finished, the banshee would have only delayed his loss because without any tech labs he couldn't produce anything to counter roaches and with only 1 banshee and 3 red hp reapers he couldn't deal with a single spore colony.

 

Whoa! guess what? I just finished my 3v3 qualification (random quickmatch not with friends) and got Platinum!

I went 4/5 wins but I think its because in every game by over double I had the highest score so it thinks I am a really good player

 

Vicious how much experience did you have with the original SC? You seem to be plowing through fairly well.

 

Not much I just am a fast learner.

I only played SC1 for a short while before deciding I suck at it and didnt like the highly competitive nature of the regular game.

I gave WC3 a chance and ended up sucking even more at it (never did like trying to micro both my army and a hero unit)

But I ended up being addicted to the WC3 custom games and that was fun. I figured I would end up the same way for SC2 but I am actually enjoying the regular ladder game this time around. I am not nearly as big of a sore loser I was as a kid so even when I lose I still had fun playing.

I still find 1v1 a bit tense so I take a break with 2v2 or 3v3 to relax some.

Im still only silver in 1v1 but that is a good thing but ranked #1 in my division if that really means anything.

My biggest weaknesses right now:

> I need to scout more to know what the enemy is doing and what to expect.
> Better micro especially in larger games that have 2 or 3 bases its hard for me to manage my army and my production at the same time.
> Keep my minerals down in a game where I do manage to get 2 or 3 bases (sort of the same as #2)

I am definitely not a platinum skilled player, maybe gold. I am just not consistent enough. I may be the best player in a game and really be on the ball and then the next game be the worst player. It think it has a lot to do with how much sleep I get, how many distractions the kids present, and lots of other random real life things.

Its time to replace my empty gallon of SC2 "play time wine"