Starcraft II Tips

someone mentioned something called mock battle for testing unit configurations. anyone tried it and mind explaining what it is and how it works?

 

Dont know exactly whatcha mean! but here are a bunch of training maps!

Shaggy's List of Training Maps

edit: Wait a sec. I think these might be outdated

hmm they should still work tho? haha

I know Yabot is a build tester. You make a build then after ten minutes it will give you a score, if thats what ur looking for =)

 

Just search unit tester on battlenet and it will be there.

 

Got the game last week, so I'm still a noob :/
I did play SC1 like 3 years ago and was fairly good but 2 has a completely different feel to me, I have to really start anew.

Just played PvZ and got absolutely pwned by midgame mass mutas. I was trying to warp in mass stalkers and collosi with 5 gateways but only left a couple of stalkers and no cannons back at base. What is the most effective way to counter mutalisks? I'm thinking lots of cannons + phoenixes but I'm not really sure lol.

 

Blink stalkers and a phoenixes do the best against muta harass.

Don't get more than 2 cannons per mineral line, its a waste after that. Unless he is getting like 40 bajillion mutas.

 

Phoenixes are incredibly effective against pretty much every zerg unit excluding ultralisks. It's pretty hard to get enough out in order to defend with them alone if he's just rushing to muta and intends to build 7 the second his spire finishes.

Blink stalkers are ok.

The most important thing when defending against mutas, however, is the lowly Sentry. Why? Guardian Shield. -2 incomming ranged damage is very powerful just against units who have all their damage together in a single attack, but against mutas whose damage is spread out over the three bounces of their glaive attack? Tasty. The muta loses 2 damage on the first hit, 2 damage on the second hit and the entire 1 damage on the third hit. Since stalkers also have 1 armour once their shields have gone this means the mutas are essentially doing 6 damage per shot instead of 13.

 

Phoenix bad against mutas what? They can dance around them all day and not take a hit.

 

I don't think armor reduces damage from 1 to 0, ever. Probably 7/13.

 

Where did I say phoenixes were bad against mutas? I'm pretty sure "incredibly effective against every zerg unit excluding ultralisks" includes mutalisks

I said that if he rushes for mutas then you might not have enough out in time to use phoenixes and phoenixes alone to defend. Yes you can theoretically micro like Jaedong and never take a hit from mutas since Phoenixes have a 1 range advantage over mutas and so you could defend infinite mutas with 1 phoenix, but not everyone has 500 apm. A more normal person will tend to want a few phoenixes if he intends to use them to defend against muta harass without any support units like stalkers or sentries.

 

I'm still working on getting out of the mass production mindset that I've played RTS' with and get more strategic with a higher APM, but I just can't think or act quickly enough.

 

The mass production mindset will easily get you into mid-diamond.

Higher APM is only needed at the very highest level.

 

I'm the same. I can't think or act quickly enough either. A lot of times I know what I have to do, and even when I think I'm doing well, the opponent is ten times ahead of me. It's kinda sad really.

I realize this game isn't really strategy as it is a fast paced action tactical game. It's a rush to see who can click their mouse the fastest really.

 

I guess. I'll try more. The challenges are helping me a bit. I was in one game and I focused on getting many marines out asap to defend a rush. I made sure I always had 1 SCV building and as least 1 marine training, with 1 in queue, then got a refinery, maxed it, worked on a second barracks to get a tech lab while the first barracks kept pumping marines. The guy came over with 6-7 Zealots against my 9-10 marines and pwned me.

I guess if I go that route, I should get a reactor on the second barracks, switch that one to pumping marines, then build a tech lab on the first one so that I can get double marines pumping faster. I'll just keep working on the build orders. I haven't had much time to try more. 2 jobs and school wipes my time.

 

That's been my experience. No matter what I do I can't get enough marines out to defend against the initial rush. I've tried with bunkers, without bunkers, upgrading guns, upgrading shields, but you can only do so much before that initial rush.

I now against zerg you should crank out marines, block off any entrance to your camp, and maybe a marauder with concussion if you can get that managed. Against Protoss, marauders with concussion are key, again, as long as you can block them long enough, and maybe a couple micro'd reapers. But I have a hard time managing that even on normal game speed.

 

Matchmaking and Ladder Improvements - StarCraft II

 

I wish the build challenges went further up the tech tree. All they teach is 5 minute survival essentials, but the macro game is mostly lacking. I do like the rock-paper-scissor counter challenge though. The tips are very enlightening.

 

Most of it's your economy. The first 3-5 minutes are absolutely critical in getting your economy running, and helping you get enough things built and organized so you can defend properly.

 

Quick question. Is there a way to set the fps do display every time on launch?

 

Theres no way im reading through 92 pages of this so its probably been stated, but i will give one very, VERY important bit of advice.

Watch Day[9] videos.

Here is his archive: blip.tv (since 2005)

Heres a good video to get started on: Day[9] Daily #164 - Low Level Reps - In-game Decision Making

 

Just had a nice 2v2 where we won against a double protoss 2 gate zealot push.

They nearly took out my team mate, I was going gate/robo and when the rush hit I only had 1 gate and my cybernetics. Soon as I pushed out a stalker I microd that one stalker and killed all the zealots one by one as more stalkers kept coming out, by the time I got 6 stalkers they backed off on the rush and then I marched to there base and owned one of the guys, the other guy got a cannon wall up in time so I couldnt push into his base so I kept massing stalkers on his perimeter and expanded he kept trying to kite me into his cannons but I didnt let him (my team mate did...) once he finally got desperate and pushed out with everything he had and got wiped easily by my army of 3x more stalkers than him he quit before I could get the joy of destroying his base.

Was a good game, feels so good when you beat cheese.

 

Id rather shoot myself in the face than watch day 9, he is so annoying that I cant stand even one of his videos.

I like Force & Husky.

 

I quite like Day9. I prefer Husky and HD, but I like some of Day9s dailys, check out 169 on the four gate, that was pretty informative.

 

Cheese has feelings too!!!

I've decided that all strategies are viable options of winning...except worker rush. I want to punch pandas when that happens

 

How cruel!

 

Ugh.

Force and Husky are complete noobs compared to Day9. They're honestly at best only my level player-wise.

Day9 actually knows what he is talking about in-game, and is the commentator with most Starcraft experience. He's one of the very few non-Korean players who got to A rank on ICCUP, plus he's gotten to finals many times in WCG and won several tournys.

Seriously nearly all of Day9's Dailys are extremely informative and deserve a look. Especially when dealing with late-game play, and early game build orders.

 

Yeah not saying Day 9 is not a SC addict and good at the game, but his casting is too annoying, he goes off topic constantly, he likes to show his face instead of game play.

A 30 minute video from him contains like 10 minutes of actual tips and gameplay, somebody for me doesnt want to waist all my time watching and listening to all his off topic bull.

By all means its a valid suggestion to send people to his channel but me for one cant stand watching him, I tried 3 different times and by the end of each video I just hated myself for watching it, both from not learning anything and also because it was so darn annoying and I coudlnt believe I forced myself to watch the entire thing.

 

I thought I'd try again at MP since you guys said I might not be so horrible with the mass production mindset. At first I got owned by reapers getting to my SCV line and wiping them out, and then a guy sent void rays to the SCVs, so now I'm going to keep some siege tanks and turrets around the SCVs to protect them.

Another game was quite LOL. A guy made a mothership and I sent my marines and marauders looking for his base, not knowing about the mothership. As soon as I get outside one of his bases, the mothership flies toward my marines, lands on top of them and I realize my army has been cut down to 1/4 from the vortex. Little did I know, the guy's vortex ALSO caught his void rays and carriers in it! So, once the void rays came out, the marines came out also and proceeded to down the void rays and carriers in seconds. That was just....awesome. I didn't know what happened until he pointed it out in chat.

 

Wait what? So your marines survived the vortex? How is that possible?

 

Thats cause they arent commentaries... Your comparing apples to oranges. His dailies are a daily lesson and talk about starcraft. Husky and the rest are just commentating.

So basically watch day9 if you wanna really learn something in a fun "heh were all total nerds" way, watch husky if you wanna be entertained.

 

But when he talks about his toast, or his beard, or his webcam, or his XXX, YYY, ZZZ, its not a lesson its off topic pointless ramble that consumes time, I would just like it if he went off topic less.

 

Vortex just takes out the units for 20 seconds. Then they appear out again. It's handy if you have tons of templars and sentries. Vortex enemy and prepare to forcefield him in before he comes out and you'll get a nice storm or two on top of the whole army.

 

If your well coordinated with somebody the most powerful attack combo in the game is a mothership + ghost.

If your in a turtle game where everybody has teched up and its going to come down to this massive army vs army end game all or nothing fights.

A mothership can vortex pretty much the entire enemy army in, and immediately have your team mate put a nuke in the center of the vortex. The timing is so perfect that as soon as all the units pop out they will spawn right in the middle of a nuke and get eradicated.

Then watch as your opponents rage quit and throw there computer out the window.

Vortex is also good if you can sweep about half of an army into it so you can overwhelm the other half with your force, and then take care of the 2nd half after, or if you sweep up an entire army inside of the enemy base it gives you time to do a lot of base damage and get your positioning ready.

I find mass recall to be super great also, Rather than making ground forces follow the ship let them take the long route to the base and decoy while the mothership has some air forces with it and comes in the back. Then recall all the ground troops and really catch the opponent off guard.

 

I'd personally say mothership is underrated in terms of it's usefulness. People probably just throw it into big fights and never thought of more creative ways of using it

And yes I'm well aware of the vortex nuke combo Just that it requires a terran partner who can coordinate well with you.

I just wish that mass recall works on ally units too though Or at least have the option to enable or disable mass recalling allies. That'd make it much more powerful.

 

Mothership is great but not many of my games go that high up the tech line, or I do not go air and I wont go stargate & beacon if I am not going to be using air, thoug a mothership is a really strong companion for collosi witch is usually what I tech to if I am in a tech game.

Next time me, Fex, Koko, and BaconPie are on Vent playing we will have to see if we can pull off the vortex/nuke combo

Probably practice the timing an coordination in a vs AI game.

I need to do a triple zerg vs AI co-op game too with some of you guys for an achievement.

BTW its Friday our official try to get online for NBR SC2 games night

 

Heh i never go stargate. In fact, I never go air for all the races unless I really need them ._. My army always consists of ground units.

I should really learn to diverse... >.> Hm...

 

So I started to ladder again. Played 7 games today.

Reminded me why I stopped laddering in the first place, got reaper rushed, baneling busted, 2 gated and 4 warpgate rushed for all of my games. Also playing standard as random sucks.

Won 3 lost 4. So iffy at the moment.

 

You still have a killer W/L ratio compared to me. I do not see much cheese in Platinum but you know what they say, there is no such thing as cheese its all a viable strategy.

I do make sure to get that stalker out super fast now for reapers though, that one really sucks if they get you off guard. I have lost to mass reapers before too.

 

Was that changed since beta? Because I played a couple games with my friend back then just for fun and he used a mothership and a vortex that comletely obliterated most of my troops. His few units that got sucked down popped back up, mine were gone. I haven't encountered a vortex since then though, granted I've only played a dozen or so games online.

 

Another thing to remember when fighting against a vortex is that it may be a good idea to purposely enter it to save the units that weren't trapped from being overwhelmed.

Say if you have 12 battlecruisers and the vortex catches 8 of them, it may be a good idea to just fly the remaining 4 into the vortex intentionally so you'll still have a full 12 when the vortex ends instead of having the 4 get killed while the rest of your army is unable to fight.

You can also try to get the enemy to lead their own units into the vortex, especially if they're using zealots.

It's nice to know that, unlike say, stasis field, there's actually something you can do to try and mitigate or even take advantage of the effects of such a powerful ability your enemy can use.

 

Unless of course they do as Vicious suggests, is time a nuke so it obliterates the units as they come out. But I can't see that happening too often.

 

It's better to build more barracks if you need more stuff right now. A reactor takes 50 seconds to kick in, whereas if you build another barracks you can still produce constantly for the duration of the build time. Against a Protoss rush the best thing you can do is initially wall in with a rax and 2 supply depots, and if you scout him and it turns out he's rushing you then you lift the rax and build a bunker there. If you don't notice quick enough and zealots start turning up and eating your rax then you can still pull scvs to repair the wall while pumping marines to kill the zealots.

If you didn't bother to scout and didn't get the bunker and he's going for stalkers then you're just totally screwed. This is why you need to scout.

A decent opening is just something like 10 depot 12 rax 13 gas 15 orbital command. Scout with the guy who built the depot. That should be reasonably solid economically and able to defend against stuff like proxy gate etc.

Vortex does no damage. It's most similar to stasis from SC:BW, except the mothership is slower and less useful than the arbiter and the vortex is bigger, more annoying and less useful than stasis.

This is bad I think it is common so don't be put off though. People think "ah I got reapers in my base this game" and then you make the correct step that says "I should learn from this loss" which is great, but loads of people fall into this trap of thinking "ok so if I leave some stuff in my base I'm safe from this, cool, no problems with reapers now" "ok so if I build a load of turrets every game I'll never have to worry about banshees and reapers, great one less problem, one more thing learned".

The best way to defend against stuff is to know it's coming and react appropriately. You can't just build turrets every game, because any game you don't get rushed by air you've wasted ~500 minerals on turrets and an engineering bay. There is certainly nothing wrong with throwing up turrets if you know there are void rays coming. But guessing based on getting void ray rushed last game isn't so good. The more you play the more you will get used to seeing signs of what someone is doing from their base. Like if he only gets one gate, then cybernetics core (with no chrono boost on it) and 2 gas then he's certainly going to rush to some non gateway tech and void ray would be a prime candidate (or he could be going for the mothership rush ;D). Also try to build the minimum number of static defence structures: they are very efficient at dealing damage but if a turret never fires a shot then you aren't really getting your money's worth. Ideally you want the exact minimum number of turrets to cover your critical structures and no more, they don't necessarily need to destroy the entire air threat, just buy you time to react and send a load of marines over to save the day.

 

Just checked out a couple of vids from Force and Husky.

My response: Eeehhhhhh.....

I don't find them that informative. I'm not learning much from them. I don't find their commentary contributes to the videos - I can tell what's going on just by looking. I don't miss out on anything by putting them on mute.

Granted, I know what you mean about Day9. He takes a while to get to his point. But when he does get to his point, I feel like I've learned something.

I watched the Force video that describes a marauder rush in TvP, and all he does is describe the build order. I could have read that on Liquipedia if I wanted to. Now, if that same topic was covered by Day9, he would have described a more general way of going about the marauder rush, what its strengths are, what its weaknesses are, how to counter it, where to go from it, what kind of game to expect when it works/doesn't work... it's worth wading through his inane tangents to get to the much meatier parts of his videos.

Speaking of, does anyone know off hand of a Day9 video that describes some good zerg strategies? Especially if it's ZvT.

 

I'm glad I'm not alone on this, but I also very much dislike Day9's videos. Again for all the reasons Vicious points out. If he could cut his videos from an hour to 15-30 mins, and take all his random useless nonsense out ("oh, I have to go get water brb!" "this is what I got at the grocery store today" etc). Blech he's so frustrating. I should probably also mention that I've only watched two of his vids.

Histidine - random question that I've been wondering for awhile now - what does histidine have to do with water bears?

 

Not much. Well, not much specifically. I mean, they've got histidine on account of them being evolutionarily related to all other 20-amino-acid-using critters.

I'm a biologist/biochemist (well, technically a pharmacologist, but same diff). Histidine is my favorite amino acid, and water bears are pretty darn cool. And that's about all there is to that.

 

You peaked my curiosity... so I moved my lazy hand over to wikipedia:

Tardigrade - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tardigrades are polyextremophiles and are able to survive in extreme environments that would kill almost any other animal. Some can survive temperatures of -273°C (-460 °F), close to absolute zero,[5] temperatures as high as 151 °C (303 °F), 1,000 times more radiation than other animals,[6] and almost a decade without water.[7] In September 2007, tardigrades were taken into low Earth orbit on the FOTON-M3 mission and for 10 days were exposed to the vacuum of space. After they were returned to Earth, it was discovered that many of them survived and laid eggs that hatched normally, making these the only animals known to be able to survive the vacuum of space.[8]

 

Whoa that is awesome! Learn something new everyday

On topic, when are we getting the name change?

 

Probably when we get patch 1.1? Mid-September they say

It's a one time free name change and then it's a fee for more changes though o.o

 

I just want to change it to one of these":
Hau5, Mau5, or Hau5Mau5

 

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Lol that's totally epic xD

I should get around to learning the map editor... Hm...