2011 Summer Starcraft Session

Week 2: Mechanics, then more mechanics

Hey guys, last week was good and I'm glad we're getting more people involved. We have a channel set up named "summer session" so look that up or hit me up in game to play a bit (Ripsin 973). You can still join us anytime, or just follow along in the shadows. Good luck this week, and send me a replay from last week so I can post it. Preferably a really ugly loss to laugh at at the end of the summer.

Method
Tweak and perfect your hotkey / mouse layout to be the most efficient possible at translating thought into finger movement. Once the setup is how you like it, then work on pounding all of hotkeys into your memory with custom maps and practicing with eachother. Pay really close attention to memorizing all the unit specific hotkeys such as drops, forcefields, and fungal growth. Get the five games in using the builds you chose last week, but force yourself into using hotkeys at all times.

Logic
This week is gonna suck. But if you do it right, this will improve your play faster than any other week. The logic here is the more and more you perfect your mechanics, the faster your brain can translate strategy to your fingers. I'm not going to say that APM is the end all be all of measuring skill. I will only say the more you increase the number of purposeful actions toward executing your strategy, the better you will become.

References

• The Thinking Gamer on youtube has a pretty good practice routine: Advanced Hotkeys [TTG]
  
• Another Thinking Gamer video, this one on control groups is really helpful: Mastering Control Groups [TTG]
  
• A TL Post the does a pretty good job to help you with setting up the hotkeys / mouse. See section 6: CecilSunkure's How to Improve Really detailed. May be guilty of going overboard.
  
• This blog has a good layout of the applicable Day[9] mechanic dailies (252, 257, 261): Improve your mechanics in SC2 The rest of the blog isn't really worth it though.

What I Did
This week I switched my controls to the grid layout so my fingers won't have to move as much from the regular location. I play on a Razer Naga, so I have all my control groups set up through that plus I change backspace to the "browser forward" button, and the Fkey views to the rest of the buttons. I've found that the views are really optimal for going back to your current mining base that you builder probes back to and for your proxy pylons as toss. I played a lot of the custom map 'unit control (something something)', where it basically gave me free reign to build things. I practiced different building combinations with probes, going as fast as possible using hotkeys.

My hotkey configuration (remember razer naga):

• 1: main army
  
• 2-5: different unit groups in army
  
• 6: scout
  
• 7: all nexus grouped
  
• 8: all production facilities that are not warp gates (includes gateways early game)
  
• 9: all tech structures
  
• 0: I don't think I use this yet. up for suggestions.