EPTNo no, don't runaway just yet. I intend to leave it. However, I still think the journey of a Bronze player is still... interesting. And hopefully this will have other Bronze players look at their journeys and say to themselves "wtf am I doing???".
Unfortunately my first replays were not saved, so I have no pictorial demonstration of early mistakes. However I do remember the first conversations when I was being taught by my lovely partner. No experience of Starcraft BW, and little exposure to the game, convos went a little something like this (after watching some games):
Expand to read.
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Partner: "You want to play Terran, Zerg or Protoss?"
Me: "Uh, Zergs look yuck and you play Terran... so Protoss?"
Partner: "Okay, I'll teach you your first build: 4gate"
Me: "Okay"
(entered AI game)
Partner: "Make some probes then make a pylon."
Me: "What's a probe? What's a pylon?"
P: "That's a probe and that's a pylon."
M: "How do I make them?"
(etc... after awhile)
P: "Okay make another pylon."
M: "What's a pylon?"
P: *facepalm*
I was either slow or didn't pay much attention. I choose the latter.
Basically I started at zero and had to learn everything! At the time for me 'cheese' was a delicious dairy food and 'creep' was to sneak around or a word to describe myself.
After a few games I was taught to use hotkeys and my keyboard for selecting things instead of my mouse. This created a lot of miss clicking, miss pressing, weird hotkeying and just weirdness.
Example of army hotkeyed below:
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The gateways were accidental
![[image loading]](http://s19.postimage.org/3m1ba3o5v/hotkey_1.png)
progressing in the game... I managed to throw more random in the mix.
![[image loading]](http://s19.postimage.org/m2vq0x443/hotkey_2.png)
You can just imagine what this would create. Each time I moved my army, I'd tell my nexus to shoot out probes exactly to where my army was walking towards. Great strategy.
Then when I knew A-clicking like a charm, I abused it to suicide my army. Common was to have no idea what the enemy had, select my whole army and A-click into their base. And then wait and see what happened.
Here I am blue protoss:
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![[image loading]](http://s19.postimage.org/74db6hp1v/army_suicide_1.png)
Should I back away? Nah, I'm invincible!... Oh, maybe not.
And of course not understanding the game at all. There were important numbers my partner mentioned to me, but I thought was fluff. Below are the numbers I am referring to. I am the blue player.
Guess who won. Hint: It wasn't me.
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![[image loading]](http://s19.postimage.org/sum53rt3n/income.png)
![[image loading]](http://s19.postimage.org/jqnq3brir/supply.png)
Not to mention things that I just can't explain...
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My opponent could see what I was doing the whole time. He may have asked:
"Why are the probes lingering with the army? How did they get there? And why aren't they mining instead?"
Or just simply state:
"I'm going to win this no worries"
![[image loading]](http://s19.postimage.org/kwn4odqfn/army_1.png)
This I call a nexus probe hug. How it happened? Beats me. Should I find out? Maybe.
![[image loading]](http://s19.postimage.org/7niefrggj/Nexus_Probe_Hug.png)
So I guess a Bronze player's journey is mistake after mistake after mistake. When you fix one thing, there are still way more to fix. The random mistakes are due to bad manual movement (e.g., miss clicking). That corrects itself through practise. For me, a lot of the mistakes was not understanding what was important (e.g., building workers and not getting supply blocked). Also being quite careless (e.g., letting my whole army enter an unscouted base and not retrieving if necessary).
They are simple things, but easily forgotten by someone who is still figuring out how to click and select things. I know it has taken me a while to understand even with constant hassling of my partner when he looks at my replays and makes me focus on my nexus and says "you're not making probes."
My journey as a Bronze has been learning, forgetting what I have learnt, learning again, practising what I have learnt and then learn something else whilst forgetting the previous thing I learnt. Let's just say I am easily distracted.
However, I feel like my Bronze journey is coming to an end. My win ratio is increasing and I am taking things a little more serious now. I feel like I am starting to 'get it'.
I've shown some of mine, so what random mistakes have you made?
