EPT
). I'm competing solidly at a mid-gold level... facing opponents ranging from top silver to top plat. Some games I found I was rolling my opponent, others that I'd simply get rolled. The good majority of my games lately have been going 20+ minutes though which I found interesting... generally my games of the past were under 15.
After finally getting a better taste of mid-to-late game scenarios I have come to realize that I'm falling apart after the mid-game. Once I enter the late game I tend to expand either way too early or way too late, and my macro is developing, but not in any directed way... I just spam whatever units I was warping in prior.... my transitions have been garbage.
My APM has risen a little bit due to my increased number of games... sitting at a whopping 66 Average per game (very low still I know, but it's up from 45... so it's a start :D). I've lost a few games yesterday that really made me angry... I felt I should have been the victor as I was the one with map control, better macro and map vision... and yet I still ended up being smashed. I took a few hours to watch a movie and cool off... and realized that it was probably time that I perfect my Mechanics. If I really want to start diving into builds and real scenarios I need to have very sound mechanics.
Having no clue where to start... I fired up the Day9 Daily #257 (regarding mechanics) [Click here to check it out].
After the episode I decided to put together a little Mechanics Drill that I'll put myself through every few days or so to attempt to focus my progression at the Mechanics level. What I do is pretty simple... I fire up a custom game on XNC against a very easy computer opponent, and I perform a 3 gate opening, and expand. All the while practicing my hotkeys and particular focus on creating constant probes and minimizing my active warpgate time (aka macro). I expand only when my minerals are at a point during constant macro that they allow me to (unrefined, but good enough to practice macro). When I reach 200/200 I go kill my PC opponent and then fire up the replay.
I assess the replay for the following:
1) Constant probe production -- if at any point I miss probes, I write down the time interval in which it happened, and I check to see what was going on in the game by focusing on my player camera. This helps identify what sorts of actions make me neglect my macro.
2) Constant Warpgate production -- I watch the replay again and note any timings where my warpgates were ready to warp units in, and I didn't do so. Just like before, I check what was going on IG that made me miss my warps.
3) I speed through the replay and check my APM.
There are more advanced things that one could do I'm sure... but these 3 benchmarks will help me master the first part of good mechanics.... constant macro!
Additionally I sat down and took a good hard look at my current hotkey setup and refined it a bit to be a bit more "speed" friendly.
I've decided to use my Mouse buttons (I have a 5 button mouse... not sure why I never thought to use the extra 3 buttons as hotkeys) to store my forward pylon warp in location, my active observer, and a builder-probe for easy and quick access to these 3 commonly used things. This alone should speed my play up considerably. I'm also considering tweaking a few minor unit-spawn hotkeys to make it easier to use 4-5-6 ctrl groups for my macro buildings.
Plan is to significantly tighten up my macro mechanics, and once that's done, then look to break myself of the 1-control group syndrome of my units.
Anyways posting this up to ask if anyone else has any particular drills they run to work on mechanics? Or if you've come up with any cool hotkey setups that work well for you?
Thanks!
