EPTI posted thi in the mechanics guide thread, but I had a lot to say with a lot of time on my hands so I am continuing on from that post. for your convenience I added the post below but instead of ending there will be more information.
ya basically what the spam like an idiot does is it improves your hand eye coordination between your actions and your thoughts. I can do this pretty flawlessly but only because ive done this for a while now.My main race is terran, but I like to offrace as zerg and protoss sometimes. It is very appearent though because i can get 270apm with each race that there is an underlying similarity between the three races that allows me to play so fast with little practice.
An argument can also be supported that no race is "faster" than the other. My personal opinion on that though is that I think zerg gives me the most eapm and least spam while terran has more redundant actions and protoss macro is "easiest" because of the simplicity of warpgate.
My personal record highs are
Terran - 297 apm/188eapm
Zerg - 331apm/210eapm
Protoss 272apm/163 eapm
Edit: Dont look at apm as actions per minute. There are aimply too many things going on during a minute of sc2. In reality I have about 3 effective actions per second and 4-5 actions per second. How can this be applied to improvement? Well lets see how long it takes to do something like make 3 scvs. The hotkey command for me would be 4sss. Well hitting 4sss is pretty easy to do in one second. Thats 4 hotkeys, or actions, in about a second and thats pretty accurate to my overall records.
Heres where the "art" is applied to truly create masterpiece execution games. Now almost everyone can hit 4sss to make 3 scvs in a second. Hell Im even betting that people with mechanical keyboards can clear that in half a second easy. Lets add in another macro command, lets say making 5 marines. To make 5 marines I hit 5aaaaa. Now we have 2 different things that we can do. What happens when are in an intensive micro fight at the opponents main and he is attacking our third with a small counter attack? Well heres all the issues that have to be addressed.
- we have to make marines/scvs
- we have to micro our troops
-we potentially might need to make some supply depots or lift up buildings or start an uograde.
We have all of this to do all seemingly at the same time. This is called multitasking as Im sure you know. I outlined several tasks that all have to be done at around the same time. First we have to make some priorities. The most important thing that takes our attention is the battle on hand. The rest can be looked at as a bonus. Its a bonus if you keep your macro going and keep making units. Now that we have our maib attention focused on the battle the subtle thing that gets done to be able to micro and macro is actually more reliant on micro more than anything.
We normally micro our units to gain an upper hand during a battle by trading more cost effectively compared to the other guy. That is the goal if you want to win a micro fight. However the goal changes slightly when you change the objective from solely winning a fight to wining a fight AND macroing. As stated earlier, for us to "macro" all we need in this situation is to make 3 scvs and 5 marines by pressing 10 keys on the keyboard.
Now during the fight, different micro tactics become available through this train of thought. As stated earlier it should take you 2 seconds max to carry out all the macro tasks at hand. During the fight now we need to obtain about 2 seconds of downtime where we can hit 10 hotkeys. 2 seconds might sound like a lot but in reality we dont have to have those seconds uniformly. In other words those 2 seconds can be split up. The best opportunities for this are to do your macro before and after the important parts are over such as casting spells and before the main battle actually commences.
The most effecient way of getting things done would ultimately be able to stutter your army backwards for a moment which allows you to get most macroing done. Things do get more complicated but I just used an easy example that would make more sense and cause less confusion
Lets look at another example scenario in a typical tvp match.
Micro - bio ball kiting vs zealots and templar based army. You are harassing the protoss at the third which he has just started to take.
Macro - you have to land your third, place an armory and a depot, and macro 3 mauraders 4 marines and 2 medivacs.
Unlike the situation before, this scenario is someth aing you will typically run into on laddr. I will give an example for tvz after this. Typically during harassment, it is up to the terran player to abuse stim mobility and try to pick off units which can be done by kiting zealots. For me to macro, I need to press a total of 5dddaaaa, click cc and press L and land it, and select an scv to make an armory which i have to press va for.
Breaking this down further, how I get this done would be to wait a few seconds before harassing to place the cc and then attack. Now looking at the harassment situation the only time we cant attack the zealots is when we get in range of storms. High templar are usually situated behind the general army for safety purposes thus giving a valuable second or two to attack zealots before we get into storm range and need to back up. during this time while you are keeping an eye for high templar (scan if you dont know how far away they are) and after you stim and are killing zealots would be the best time to macro (5dddaaaa). Then when the high templar are in range and you have to back up, you can now safely build the armory(va) because your retreating away and dont have to focus on the fight. Then after thats done you can then go in and pick off more zealots or snipe templar or bait out storms and the game continues
Here is the scenario for a TvZ
Micro - 200 food army maxed out and moving out to establish defense for your 4th base, pressure the zerg, and clear creep. When I do this I usually send a drop along the expansions that im not harassing to deny any hidden expansions.
Macro - landing your cc at the fourth base, macroing 2 medivacs, 2 siege tanks, and 13 marines.
You are positioned right on the creep of the zerg but with your main force not on creep and instead only 1 siege tank on the creep. The zerg maxed out on mutas and speedlings and banelings.l and tries to attack into your army. The micro steps to win this would be to target banelings, run marines back, and then split after the siege tanks clear most of the banelings out.
Once again I would try to land the 4th but if he is attacking right when you do it the fight would become top priority. So as the zerg force starts to attack into you, target banelings quickly, then stim back with marines. When the marines are running back and before you split this gives you enough time to make all the marines (5aaaaaaaaaaaaa). Heres the cool thing. Medivacs and siege tanks take significantly longer times to build for marines. As a result you can break down the macro further by building the tanks and medivacs after the fight because you should almost never start building tanks medivacs and marines all at once because of different production times.
Hope this is intuitive and comprehensive for further accomplishments in sc2 and thx for reading
