EPTNow it's time to hit the battlefield. What I wanted to do was test my macro in a real life situation against people. The first time was pretty tough. I lost all 5 of my placement matches and was sent straight to bronze. I was recommended by many on the interwebs to work on that macro. I went from 15 APM and a bunch of accidental clicks while trying to memorize my hotkeys to around 50-60 APM and I now have a much smoother macro experience. I have hit a wall though at top bronze though. What do I have to do next?
What I did was open up a spreadsheet with the following columns: Win, Loss, Vs Race, Map, and Notes. I did what I felt for me was a large sample of games. My initial goal was to get around 10 games but I went for 15. I recommend this for anyone trying to get good at any game. What I noticed was that I was totally missing evolution chambers with my tier 1 buildings. I was missing upgrades. There was no timing. Even though I'm building a lot more stuff than my opponent, I'm not finishing anyone off.
A common bronze player symptom is bad turtling. I am getting beat by bad turtling. Why do I feel that it's "bad?" It's bad because a lot of these players aren't even going for expansions and I'm effectively blocking them off. I initially planned to starve my opponents. So I have the "big picture" down, but why aren't I winning even if they are starved??
Here are some reasons: I'm not scouting correctly. I've lost twice because I didn't scout for a command center in the far corners of the map. I should suicide scout with my overlord inside at 7:00ish just to see what they're up to. Even though I was busy killing my opponent's expo, I didn't scout a second or third time at their base when I very easily could since I'm twice as fast as my opponents in APM and probably macro (I have more food and supply then them but I STILL lose).The next reason is lack of game knowledge and execution. I generally do not make many banelings but I will start doing it. I should also Hotkey my zlings and banes (DO NOT FORGET BLING SPEED!) to separate hotkeys because my banes are sometimes at a choke and my zlings aren't polite enough to move aside. Lastly, I need to work on my timing. It's time to watch pros use the builds I'm using and I should take note of what they do. I'm very sloppy after /40ish supply.
Anyways, that's my post for this week. Every Thursday, I'll try to post on my progress. Hopefully you enjoyed this little blog post. I'm going to make my adjustments and i'll let you all know what's up.
