EPTAnalysing One’s Own Progress
One of the most difficult things to do as a new player (and something that took me forever and a day to be comfortable with in Street Fighter) is the idea of analysing your progress or weaknesses by looking back over your own games. It took me a long time to adopt the notion that the other guy didn’t simply win because he was better than me, he won because I did something wrong. This attitude forces you to recognise your own mistakes irrespective of whether or not your opponent outclassed you and allows you to look back and pick out areas of your game that need improvement. It is so much easier to improve on something once you have a solid idea which part of that thing needs improving. So that mental stumbling block of “Well, I didn’t do anything wrong, my opponent was simply better than me.” was something I was determined to avoid with StarCraft 2.
With this in mind and without compromising on my goals for this week I watched almost all of my replays at least once and tried to completely ignore my opponent’s actions no matter how curious I was. I wasn’t looking to answer the question “Why did he win?” but rather “What did I do that resulted in him being able to win?”
My suspicion is that a lot of new players will focus on Micro and Unit Positioning which is something that as somebody on the outside looking in I had also assumed would be the most important part of the game. Instead, thanks to the fantastic community StarCraft 2 has I was quickly able to discover just why Macro was more important than Micro and why it should be the absolute first thing a new player focuses on. Throughout my placement games I noticed one thing right away, even the small amount of Macro practice I had done by this point had improved my chances of winning drastically.
While my opponent fumbled over the clever positioning of Banelings, or Sentry Force Fields I found that I was able to replace my units so rapidly that sometimes my opponent simply could not keep up, despite the fact I may have felt like I was losing at the time a view of the replay might reveal I was in fact double his supply and in control of many more bases than him. In one game I even managed to box my opponent in until he ran out of minerals. While he fumbled about training Ghosts to launch Nukes, I had taken the entire map. While all this made me feel good about my decision to practice Macro techniques I was still acutely aware that I was playing against really bad players which made me even more determined to pick out faults that could have caused me to lose a game.
Being In Two Places At Once
One of the most difficult things for me at the moment is adjusting to managing upwards of two locations at once. As a player coming from Fighting Games while there is a huge range of possibilities you must consider before taking a course of action, only one of those can actually play out at a time; however, in StarCraft 2 you are tasked with managing a minimum of two locations, your main base (and any expansions) as well as your battlefront. Then when you begin to attempt (or defend from) drops and other forms of harassment it becomes even more daunting. All of these things must be kept track of simultaneously which is taking a lot of getting used to. A friend recommended a MultiTask training map, in which you are tasked with rescuing a unit, keeping a Probe away from a Zergling, and building a big enough army to defend against an opponent all at the same time. This sounded like a great way to improve not only multi-tasking, but to improve my usage of hotkeys as well.
Make Some More Marines, Boy!
My goal for this week were to improve my Macro abilities by practicing SCV and Unit Production up to 200/200 and trying to get a feel for the rhythm needed to produce SCV’s on time and consistently. I felt that I had reasonable success with this, I was able to get reasonably comfortable constantly producing SCV’s although I suspect it will be a while before this becomes second nature and I intend to keep practicing every spare moment I get. For now, I am going to continue to focus on SCV production, even though keeping up with unit production has been quite difficult, I feel that focusing on the economy side of things is going to be much more beneficial to a new player like myself than any other aspect of the game.
Enter The Rat Race
The other goal I set myself for this week was to complete my placement games and enter into the league ladder. While initially I thought that this would be easy, something unexpected happened. I could load up Street Fighter IV, and play 20 games without batting an eyelid, but playing StarCraft 2 I could not shake the feeling that I was somehow an imposter, or that I was punching above my weight. It was a bizarre feeling that was not helped by the fact I am not used to single games taking so long, 15 to 30 minutes feels like a long time compared to the average 50-ish second round of Street Fighter, and left me quite drained mentally. These two factors combined actually made the task of finishing my placement games a lot harder than it should have been.
I am sure that these issues will fade once I become more accustomed to the longer games, and as planned I finished my placement games, even managing to win two of them, one thanks to my Macro practice and one because my opponent was face-rolling the keyboard.
Overall though I am pleased with my progress so far, I have gained a reasonable understanding of most of the main strengths and weaknesses of the units at my disposal, I have managed to set myself a clear focus for improvement and can begin to look forward to improving my Macro game over the next few months.
In the more short term however, I intend to satisfy two goals; I want to continue to improve my economic abilities, this time by focusing on Unit Production, one of the main things I noticed from watching my replays is that even when my SCV production is reasonably consistent my unit production is sporadic at best. The other thing I intend to do is to begin thinking about adopting a mid/late game strategy to work towards and use this to begin thinking about what sort of openings I should use to fulfil those mid and late game goals rather than simply throwing down another random barracks or factory as I am doing for the moment.
Hope you all have an awesome week, and I will be back to discuss more of my tentative steps into the world of the StarCraft 2 Ladder next week.
Update:
What I will try to do from now on is to include a replay or two with each blog post, feedback from anybody who wants to watch them would be greatly appreciated but it will also help to catalogue my improvement, I want to be able to come back here in say a month, or 3 months and be able to see clearly how much I have, or have not improved.
TvT Replay - Jungle Basin (About 40 minutes long)
~The_A_Drain
