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On December 27 2011 18:57 endy wrote:Show nested quote +On December 27 2011 18:47 inbox24 wrote:
What do you mean? I'm not trolling at all. Just wanted your opinions on it that's all. I seriously heard from the internet that just a-moving with 'perfect' macro would get you up from silver and gold at the very least. Now I'm not claiming to have perfect macro but my opponent was floating in the thousands I think. You know, you can also have a perfect macro, never having more than 100 minerals in stock and build pure SCVs and no army ? Is that gonna win you games ? I let you guess the answer. PS : Let me know if you need a hint. In the case you're really not trolling, let me give you a very simple math analogy. We usually advice beginners to focus on macro, because of how important it is compared to other aspects of the game at low levels. We could define (arbitrary formula by myself) efficiency by : efficiency = Macro^3 * Unit compo * 0.5 decision-making * sqrt(Micro). You can have an awesome macro, if the rest equals 0, then your efficiency = 0.
If you mean that decision making is less important than macro and unit comp at low levels, then shouldn't it be raised to a lower power instead of adjusting the entire formula with a constant? 
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On December 27 2011 19:14 Emporio wrote:Show nested quote +On December 27 2011 19:12 inbox24 wrote:On December 27 2011 19:08 Emporio wrote:
Though I think it's pointless to give another serious reply, you actually didn't really have that good macro during the game.
At 14:40, when you are maxed and move out, you have four mining bases. Your main has a reasonable amount of minerals left so you have four full potential mining bases. To have good saturation, you need between 16-24 workers at each mineral line. At that time point, your 4 bases have: 7/22/41/5 workers. This is the equivalent of having 2 bases mining. The protoss has only 2 bases, but full saturation at both of them, including the gases. The income rates are 1900/0 and 1420/448 for the two of you.
Essentially, you really didn't have a better economy than your opponent. In order to legitimately beat someone going mineral only and without micro, you have to have like double their economy or something. At best, you had an economy about 30% better than his, but that's forgetting the gas. When you include the gas rate, you two have identical economies. And since his units also use gas, his army is far superior to yours in efficiency.
You lose your entire army in the worst choke possible. Honestly, if you had just move commanded into his main and forgot about your army you would have had a better engagement. After the battle, you don't have a superior economy so you are crushed since you cannot reinforce.
tl;dr You actually had a crap economy and macro But the thing is for the 'important' part of the game, that is, getting to be maxed, I had closer to max saturation on 3 bases. It was only after I got maxed I thought I could effectively now ignore my SCV building and saturation and just A click and win the game. Absolutely not. The important part of the mineral drill is to have an overwhelming economy so that you can have terrible engagements and still win because you are making so many marines it doesn't matter how terribly you are trading them. You can ignore making SCV's when you are maxed but if you saturate badly, you might as well have no SCV's. If you rewatch the videos, he does a very good job of making sure he always has good saturation on all his bases and expanding when he doesn't.
Interesting point about the not having SCVs part. I guess you're right about that. But then I should've just transferred about 15 SCVs to my fourth and that would have given me full saturation right?
I think I will practise the build that Probe1 suggested. It sounds more well rounded, making medivacs will take me some time to get use to as I only have 20ish apm lol.
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On December 27 2011 19:14 Probe1 wrote:
Ehh, Emporio I think the finer notes of his macro are pointless. Although misguided, he's asking what went wrong. Gas production went wrong. Next time open 1 rax expo without getting an orbital command first (CC on 15) then get your orbital, first gas and then add two additional barracks. From there saturate your two bases while teching up to medivacs and making marine/marauder and adding on additional gas. Around 12 minutes add on a third base and start scouting heavily to see what his tech paths are. That should be good enough to get out of bronze/silver.
He's using a guide on youtube + Show Spoiler + that advocates simplifying the game to its absolutes to concentrate on macro at the expense of absolutely everything in order to see how much more powerful macro is compared to unit composition or micro or anything.
While I might not agree that this is the best way to improve, it's a legitimate practice and means of improving a very (very) specific aspect of play, and I wanted to point out to him why improving by macro alone is not a myth. He has been disillusioned that macro alone isn't enough and that you need sprinklings of micro and unit comp and stuff like that, and while for the normal silver/bronze player trying to improve, that is how you develop, by focusing on macro but also improving on other aspects, I wanted to clarify that "perfect macro" is indeed enough at his level of play. The sooner a player realizes that his macro is deeply flawed even down to the simplest and easiest parts of it, the sooner he will drastically improve.
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this is painful to read troll or not
being maxed on unupgraded marines 14 mins into the game is not indicative of good macro
getting to be maxed is not the "important" part of the game
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Ok so what is the optimal saturation per base then? Is it 2 lines of SCVs or 3?
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On December 27 2011 19:19 inbox24 wrote:
I think I will practise the build that Probe1 suggested. It sounds more well rounded, making medivacs will take me some time to get use to as I only have 20ish apm lol.
apm at that level can ALWAYS be improved by doing the same build over and over again. hell, i was able to go from 90 apm to 110~120 just from refining a couple of builds for each matchup over 6 months or so. going from 20 to 50 shouldn't be that difficult or take a long time.
most of apm comes from always knowing what to do next. more practice = more apm. (but only to a certain level, of course. please don't apply this in the same way you have applied MACRO BETTER so far)
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On December 27 2011 19:21 inbox24 wrote:
Ok so what is the optimal saturation per base then? Is it 2 lines of SCVs or 3?
2 lines. it's not OPTIMAL, but it's as good as you get before you start getting diminishing returns, and it's easy a level to maintain during a game when you have so many other important tasks to do.
eventually you will be able to eyeball and tell that you have the right amount of workers.
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So it's 16 scvs on minerals per base then. That means in my replay I should have had almost 6 bases with the amount of SCVs I had?
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On December 27 2011 19:25 inbox24 wrote:
So it's 16 scvs on minerals per base then. That means in my replay I should have had almost 6 bases with the amount of SCVs I had?
yes, you had too many scvs. around 60 is fine for terran after you've gotten your third up and running given they also have mules.
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On December 27 2011 19:21 inbox24 wrote:
Ok so what is the optimal saturation per base then? Is it 2 lines of SCVs or 3?
Personal preference.
At 2 lines (16) you are getting the maximum minerals/second PER WORKER. At 3 lines (24) you are getting the maximum minerals/second PER MINERAL LINE. In otherwords, 24 workers gives you the maximal economy possible with the number of bases you have while 16 workers makes each worker as efficient as possible.
Most Zergs I've seen tend to go closer to 16 since Zerg expands so much and has weaker army units, it makes sense to lower saturation and free up supply, while Protoss tends to go closer to 24 since they expand slower and have stronger individual units, ending up with a deathball which is less sensitive to an additional 12 supply. Terrans seem to be anywhere in between since they have mules, so mineral saturation isn't quite as important.
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Macro and a-move will get you to at least platinum (i am a platinum terran), but you NEED gas. You can't expect to beat ling/bling, colossus or siege tanks with 0-0 marines, no stim, no shields. Try this: Get 3 geysers after you set up your expansion and saturate them all at once. Get 2 tech labs on barracks, start stim and shields, (start producing marauders and get concussive shells as well if you're playing vs toss). Next 100 gas goes to factory, then immediately a starport with a reactor (maybe get the factory to make the reactor for the starport while this is building and then swap). You should also have 2 engineering bays by this point since they only cost minerals (try not to forget them). After you have the reactor starport all the gas goes to marauders, medivacs, one armory and bio upgrades. Keep up the macro and start a-moving after stim and combat shield finish (should be way before 14 mins and you'll have a much stronger force anyway). I know that getting the first gas at 13, second when you start factory is better, but I figure this would be easier for you to execute since you want to emphasize macroing so much. Try to practice this vs ai in "very easy" mode so you can refine your timings somewhat before taking it to the ladder.
This is pretty much how i got to platinum and it was pretty fast. Pure macro is about 90% of it, the rest is your build order execution (getting tech buildings and upgrades as soon as you have the gas) and reacting well to cheese/rushes as you'll encounter plenty of those along the way. good luck!
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Sorry Emporio I didn't realize what you were referring to! My bad.
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On December 27 2011 18:08 ymir233 wrote:
I'm assuming "don't blindly follow gross oversimplifications on how to play", "don't be stupid", "have a better unit composition", and "seriously, don't be stupid" are also parts of getting promoted...
yeah, seriously.
OP, of course you can prove the 'myth' wrong by macroing perfectly while making sure you do everything else as wrong as possible. Macro, and don't be dumb basically.
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Edited out unnecessary flame.
The objective of macro is to get a more potent army. That includes gas and timing your tech and upgrades right so that you don't float resources unnecessarily.
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On December 27 2011 18:00 inbox24 wrote:Hey guys, I'm a Silver level Terran player on the NA server and Bronze on the SEA server. I was playing a game against a Protoss player on the NA server and basically I feel like I macroed pretty well. Non stop SCV production, expanding every 5sh minutes, minerals below 250 95% of the time (except when saving for a Command Centre or maxed out), was not supply blocked etc. Eventually I got up to 4 bases versing a 2 base protoss. I pushed at the 14 minute mark with about 110 marines (with the rest of my supply tied up in workers). He destroyed my push and proceeded to destroy me. I had a food lead for the whole game and when I was maxed I had about an 80 food lead. So the point is, does this game illustrate why simply just macroing better and just 'a clicking' cannot get you to platinum league? I feel like I've been fed this fantasy that just producing SCVs and units and keeping money low will guarantee an automatic promotion into at least platinum if not diamond. Cheers PS: Here is the obligatory replay for you guys to ridicule - http://www.mediafire.com/?8my8qzjn03n3m1p
I don't understand your issue. You had an 80 supply lead, nearly double his. You don't see the power in that when it's actually a GOOD unit composition?
On December 27 2011 19:25 inbox24 wrote:
So it's 16 scvs on minerals per base then. That means in my replay I should have had almost 6 bases with the amount of SCVs I had?
Depends on the map. 20 is full saturation usually. In most games you don't have the luxury of more than three mining bases.
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There's a lot more to macro than just massing minerals.
Mineral and supply management are only two of the many components of macromanagement, and to think that you can win by merely massing resources and a single unupgraded unit is, quite frankly, idiotic (or massive troll)
Macromanagement also includes, critically, gas management, unit composition, and techs.
It's actually amazingly easy to coordinate barracks and command centers pumping 50 mineral, 1 supply units all game long. It's also amazingly useless. It's incredibly difficult to manage multiple types of buildings that are producing 3-4 different types of units with different costs and build times while also managing research for them.
Basically, micro just covers unit control. Macro covers almost everything else.
The only things left out of the micro/macro view are scouting and certain types of decision making. Scouting is often critical but it can't be done well without good multitask (which comes naturally from having the good mechanics of solid micro/macro) and decision making just comes from practice.
Mechanics are the majority of this game. That's why macro is stressed so much, because mechanically it's almost always the most taxing part.
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LMAO
Macro is about managing your resources, notice the ''S'' at the end of resources. Yeah, that includes gas...
Macro is also about keeping up with your upgrades...
Marines without stim, smh...
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This was said before, but if you are going pure marines, attack when you have 20 to 30 of them. They have diminishing returns after this point. You have to go full aggression the whole game for it to have a chance. I have beaten protoss players that went 1 base colossus against my marine only and beat terran players that went marine only with one base colossus because they attacked too early and with bad micro.
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United Kingdom20284 Posts
If you want to compare macro, dont look at how much stuff you had, look at average unspent resources relative to income
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United Kingdom20284 Posts
On December 27 2011 21:35 TiTanIum_ wrote:
This was said before, but if you are going pure marines, attack when you have 20 to 30 of them. They have diminishing returns after this point. You have to go full aggression the whole game for it to have a chance. I have beaten protoss players that went 1 base colossus against my marine only and beat terran players that went marine only with one base colossus because they attacked too early and with bad micro.
The latest attack id do with pure marines would be 8 from a 6 rax all in, you really do need to be agressive with them, they are unarguably one of the best if not the best t1 units, and need to be used as such
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EPT
