EPTHow to Say Nothing with a Picture
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I wrote a thousand words on the disparity of skill levels between the top and bottom players of a game, and how the state of a game can change multiple times as someone climbs the ladder, and how it can be easy to forget while doling out advice from the top that you are probably within the top 2% of players, making it so easy to forget just how difficult it is to climb that ladder on advice like “practice ONLY this mechanic” or “NEVER use X”.
I had talked at length about how the Reddit post that is going around at the moment advocating getting into Diamond League with Macro alone was a brilliant and informative post, but ultimately, proved only that an expert player can beat lesser players essentially with one hand tied behind his back and that for a player who’s *insert strategy or game mechanic here* is not utterly perfect, it’s a moot point because he cannot perfect his game without –already- climbing the ladder at a normal rate, advancing in skill as he goes, it is not possible to perfect one aspect of the game to that level when you are currently below that level in all aspects of a game.
But then I realised I had spent about 1200 words saying little more than “While one aspect of any game might seem the most important, it may even be the most important, you can never improve as a player by ignoring everything else”. So I scrapped it, and wrote this instead.
First Week of Being a Bronze Devil
As some of you will know, I have been playing for roughly one month, and have zero previous experience with RTS games. So it came as no surprise to me that I totally lost the first 10 or so games that I played, even in Bronze league in spite of all the practice against the CPU to get to grips with the basic mechanics.
Although frustrating, there is always a huge difference between playing a CPU opponent, and those first steps into Human v Human matches, it’s easy to become comfortable with the fact that a CPU opponent will ‘probably’ do X in response to X, or at Y time. Then all of a sudden, the real live person you are playing against does something unexpected, or seemingly (and perhaps actually) stupid, and it throws you off.
Judging replays from those first few games I came back with three huge points that I needed to address, and quickly.
Scouting: One of the first things I noticed was that I was never quite as behind as I thought I was in any given match thanks to getting a solid idea of how to use the basic game mechanics somewhat effectively before diving into multiplayer. In fact, usually I was ahead on food, and would lose to something quite simple which confused me because of my inexperience.
The better example of this for me was in a TvP on Jungle Basin, two things happened which I had not experienced before but learned from greatly. First, my opponent noticed that I was hoarding units, and not pushing out or harassing, so in fact controlled very little ground outside of my natural and the third I was trying to take, and placed a Pylon right behind the tree line, and used it to warp in units for the rest of the game. Secondly, due to his army being very close, and making good use of observers, he was able to see precisely when I attempted to take down the rocks for my third, and used that opportunity to attack my army when it was in a compromised position.
Several times I held off his push, all I had to do was push back; even an inch and I would have spotted the pylon, and been better informed as well as buying time by delaying his next push. Whether or not I would have won the game is irrelevant, it made me acutely aware that I need to more actively scout for things like that.
Pressure: Continuing from the same Jungle Basin example, this game also made me aware of the need to push back, and to be aggressive to try and claw an advantage from your opponent. That is not to say I suddenly decided all-ins are the way to go, but I began to think that at the 6 minute mark, those handful of marines and 2 marauders could do some decent damage. At the 10 minute mark, an even bigger army might be able to take out an important building before retreating, or meet his army in the middle and prevent damage to my own buildings, maybe even making his macro slip in the process. All of these scenarios seemed more beneficial than having my army sitting around my base doing very little unless my opponent decided to attack. While correlation does not equal causation, I noticed that the more I started to think this way, the more games I started to win.
Macro: While I doubt I will ever be in a position to say that my macro does not need improving, I felt confident that it was good enough to put down YABOT and vs AI mode and jump into Bronze League. The part that I was not confident in was build order, I was essentially building random things, and when that didn’t work I decided to just build marines. Again, that didn’t work either because although I did have a goal in mind (get lots of marines, some medivacs, and hulk smash) I had not planned any kind of build order for that goal, I just sort of, built stuff.
This would not do, and I decided to look over a whole list of build orders to find one that would both be effective and fit my playstyle (The man likes marines! Needless to say I am a big MarineKingPrime fan) as well as not limiting my options too much, or relying on early game cheese.
Walk In See 3 Rax, Wat Do?
Even as a Street Fighter newbie back when I was a child, following someone else’s strategy verbatim never felt right, incorporating advice and idea into my own strategies felt like a more natural way to go about it. After all one of the most important things in any situation is to be yourself, right?
Last week I set myself the goal of developing a mid/late game strategy to work towards developing a build order, but what I realised is that I already had a very basic goal, lots of marines, lots of medivacs, some upgrades, and a handful of whichever supporting units my scouting information deemed the most useful, Siege Tanks or Vikings.
So very quickly my thought process turned to developing a build order and it became very clear that I had been making some pretty big mistakes, ones that I could definitely isolate as reasons for having lost games to an early push, or a rush. In my sprint to build ‘efficiently’ I had sacrificed unit production in the early game entirely, my brain was foolishly reporting that every marine I produced from a non-reactor’ed barracks was a lost opportunity cost of one additional marine. What had not occurred to me is that having three or four units out can defend from an early attack, whereas having just one (or none) will lose you the game, regardless of how much further ahead you might theoretically be later on. This also helped somewhat with my other goal this week, working on my unit production, as it showed me the value of having multiple buildings as opposed to putting down one building and an addon.
While I am sure this is not always the case, I found that I did not always need to rush for those addons, and indeed sometimes (particularly the very early game) it was beneficial to produce units before even thinking about an addon, suddenly I found that I had much less wait time before re-enforcements for a battle and that each expansion could actually sustain more buildings than I initially thought they could. Putting addons on one or two buildings at a time rather than all of them enabled me to continue to produce re-enforcements more consistently as well as bolstering my future production capabilities. It almost felt like being able to have the best of both worlds.
Almost immediately I was doing much better against my opponent, just by delaying my first tech-lab/reactor until 1 or 2 marines had popped out. So I decided to go a step further and overhaul my build order (which at this point, mind, was “Barracks! And then.. uhh… stuff!”) into something I felt could deal with most standard situations comfortably.
YABOT, by the way for any other newbies out there reading this, is a brilliant tool for practicing and developing build orders and was a great help to me in figuring out an efficient opening which fit my style.
The build I ended up with was not one I developed myself, as I had initially planned, but fit very comfortably into my style and was flexible enough that I felt confident in using it to deal with a range of standard situations. I had found my salvation in something resembling a 2 Barracks Fast Expand build. It did everything I wanted from a build order, while I am still playing with the specifics, it allows me to do something approximating this most of the time.
10 Supply Depot
12 Barracks
13 Refinery
15 or 16 Orbital Command
17 Supply Depot
(after 1 to 3 marines I get my Tech lab, then go for Marauders, and Concussive first at around 20-22)
17 Barracks #2
(Marine/Marauder and SCV until about 24 or 25 before putting a Reactor on Barracks #2)
Then I drop my expansion at the first 400 minerals after pumping out a handful more marines and SCV’s, if I scout some early aggression then I will either delay the expansion entirely, or start researching Combat Shields and then use the first 400 for the Command Center. After this I drop another Barracks and a Factory. Then if my expansion is doing alright I drop a fourth Barracks and use the Factory to make a Reactor for a Starport before using the Factory for some scouting.
It’s not particularly refined, and I tend to mess it up a lot, and I get my second gas at increasingly random times usually before the Command Centre, I try to have enough gas for MediVacs when my Starport drops.
By this point, if I haven’t deviated from the plan already, I drop an Engineering Bay so I can have access to turrets (Bronze leaguers love dem some Void Rays/DT’s/Banshees/Scouts) and upgrades and I think about dropping a second Starport or a fifth Barracks and gearing up for a third base.
What I have found happens is that I over-produce MediVacs quite horrendously, leading to one rather strange game in which I lost my entire base, but proceeded to cleanup almost all of my opponents buildings with a particularly hardy group of about 10 marines and something like 12 MediVacs. I lost that game but it made me chuckle, perhaps I should change my ID to MediVacKing?
In spite of the fact this build is far far from refined, it was a ridiculous amount more efficient and cohesive than what I was doing before, and although a build like this might make a lot of Diamond/Master league players vomit with rage, I was able to win 5 straight games after switching to this and have been very happy with its flexibility, it responds well to (sloppy Bronze League) cheese provided I don’t panic, but it may need some adapting against Zerg, I have only met Protoss so far on the ladder.
Dead Space 2 and More
This blog is getting pretty long; I tend to get rather carried away talking about my learning experiences so I will wrap this one up. It’s Dead Space 2 day today! (or tomorrow, or even yesterday depending on when I post this!) and so I am going to be spending a significant amount of time on that, and may not have quite so much to talk about next week but I do intend to get in some StarCrat 2 here and there. It’s been a pretty crazy week between University, someone setting fire to a car in my back garden (yes! This really happened, unfortunately) and my depression relapsing, but I am really beginning to enjoy StarCraft 2, and feeling more comfortable behind the keyboard the more I play even if I only have a few hours a week to do so.
My goals for next week will be quite similar to the previous week. I want to continue to focus on unit production and Macro in general while refining my build order a little more and seeing how it fares against some Zerg.
As always, any comments or feedback are very much appreciated, feel free to get involved. Have an awesome week guys!
This Week's Replays
1: This game proves that I need to pay more attention to the game in general, I had no idea he was even making Dark Templars, let alone had something like 14 of them at one point… In all honesty a simple scan or two should’ve won me the game. This harps back to what I said in the last blog, the conclusion a player should draw from this is not that DTs are too powerful, but that he dropped the ball by not looking out for them.
http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=details&id=184805
2: As I attempt to keep my calm and fend off a Protoss all-in I do exactly the opposite, panic, accidentally attack with my SCVs (and get them trapped at the same time) instead of my Marine, and it all goes horribly wrong. I learned a lot from this game, and will be interested to see if I am quicker to notice, and can react more calmly next time. Why I fired on the Gateway instead of the Pylon I will never know.
http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=details&id=184806
3: This replay made me laugh, I am not one for jumping on some of the silly things lower level players do, but I couldn’t help it with this one. Who makes just void rays? And then doesn’t even bother to make more one he moves out?
http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=details&id=184807
4: This one is an example of how the average game goes for me at the moment, my Macro is slow as heck, but it seems good enough to propel me out of Bronze League when I get the time to actually play, and that’s more than I expected under a month into playing a brand new genre.
http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=details&id=184810
