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How to stay on top of macro?

Forum Index > Brood War Strategy
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1 2 Next All
TonDan04
Profile Joined October 2025
51 Posts
October 28 2025 19:06 GMT
#1
I seem to have a short term memory problem. I'll make a star port and forget about it until a minute after it is done. A minute in Starcraft time is a long time. I'll do a drop and pull dropship back only to forget where I sent it.

How do you not forget? Or do you know how progamers do it?
WolFix
Profile Joined December 2009
Poland43 Posts
October 28 2025 21:35 GMT
#2
You bind ur building that is being produced and press the button every now and then to check the progress of it. Same when building units, workers etc.
perfectspheres
Profile Blog Joined September 2025
108 Posts
October 29 2025 01:21 GMT
#3
On October 29 2025 04:06 TonDan04 wrote:
I seem to have a short term memory problem. I'll make a star port and forget about it until a minute after it is done. A minute in Starcraft time is a long time. I'll do a drop and pull dropship back only to forget where I sent it.

How do you not forget? Or do you know how progamers do it?


Just be dilligent about it (have heard some people set timers to remind themself).

Macro is probably one of the most important aspects of Brood War. Don't miss macro cycles 💯💯
perfectspheres6.wordpress.com | instagram.com/perfectspheres28
iopq
Profile Blog Joined March 2009
United States1130 Posts
Last Edited: 2025-10-29 06:46:14
October 29 2025 06:45 GMT
#4
On October 29 2025 04:06 TonDan04 wrote:
I seem to have a short term memory problem. I'll make a star port and forget about it until a minute after it is done. A minute in Starcraft time is a long time. I'll do a drop and pull dropship back only to forget where I sent it.

How do you not forget? Or do you know how progamers do it?


Hotkey a location inside your base (let's say F2) that has most of what you need and go back there every 15.12 seconds to make a marine. You should be able to see at least one starport and check if it's blinking

then hotkey a rally point to something like F4 and do the F2 click on production building F4 right click on the rally point combination so every building rallies to a useful place

hotkey all your units so you can easily F2, macro a cycle and then double tap 1 or whatever hotkey to go back to what you were doing
Highgamer
Profile Joined October 2015
1470 Posts
Last Edited: 2025-10-29 09:31:10
October 29 2025 09:21 GMT
#5
It's most likely not that your short-term memory is worse than average, it's just that everyone's gets overloaded in RTS-games once you try to play fast. That's why up to B or even A-rank people "forget" stuff for minutes, even after thousands of games...

It gets better though the more you play, because you build more and more habits and that frees up brain-capacity to actually think while playing. How fast and how much it improves varies a lot though from person to person.

The best you can do is focussed practice, working on individual problems, like forgetting your starport: You play some (custom) games where you keep telling yourself that this is your only concern: not delay/forget the starport. It should click after a while and become a habit.
I'm pretty sure progamers do (or: did when they were younger) a lot of this kind of focussed practice. They probably had people pointing out such mistakes and developed personal benchmarks to avoid them - and they did this for 10 hours a day...
Ze'ev
Profile Joined May 2025
159 Posts
October 29 2025 22:01 GMT
#6
yeah its basically an organizational issue; shift hotkeys and or rationalizing your hotkey usage in general. like maybe your starport should be bound to 4 because, your factory on 3 and your army on 2-- so you cycle between them very naturally while camera shifting back to your base for depots/scv production and such. Some of this is creating a system which is fluid and some of this is practice at actually maintaining that system. tbh 60% of starcraft probably just comes down to organizational aspects like that.

When I was first taking bw seriously I would play sp a lot, turn on power overwhelming and then try to nail a build with a certain minimum apm while using my camera keys. in your case maybe find a tvp build -- like fd into a starport drop -- that forces you to utilize multitasking micro/macro.
WGT-Baal
Profile Blog Joined June 2008
France3510 Posts
October 29 2025 22:45 GMT
#7
On October 30 2025 07:01 Ze'ev wrote:
yeah its basically an organizational issue; shift hotkeys and or rationalizing your hotkey usage in general. like maybe your starport should be bound to 4 because, your factory on 3 and your army on 2-- so you cycle between them very naturally while camera shifting back to your base for depots/scv production and such. Some of this is creating a system which is fluid and some of this is practice at actually maintaining that system. tbh 60% of starcraft probably just comes down to organizational aspects like that.

When I was first taking bw seriously I would play sp a lot, turn on power overwhelming and then try to nail a build with a certain minimum apm while using my camera keys. in your case maybe find a tvp build -- like fd into a starport drop -- that forces you to utilize multitasking micro/macro.


Exactly. Also if y all want a glimpse at korean practice you should check this (use google auto translate) :
https://m.blog.naver.com/PostView.naver?blogId=kcw4908&logNo=10156387470&proxyReferer=https://www.google.com/&trackingCode=external
Horang2 fan
Jealous
Profile Blog Joined December 2011
10353 Posts
Last Edited: 2025-10-29 23:06:02
October 29 2025 22:59 GMT
#8
The famous BBC StarCraft documentary from ~2005 or so which did an fMRI on NaDa's brain (IIRC; may have been Xellos) showed that the majority of the time spent playing BW for them was in the more "primitive" part of the brain where it borders on "instinct." What this means is that they don't "think" or have "short-term memory" in the traditional sense, but more like practiced, intuitive, and instinctualized responses to the game to a certain extent. As others have mentioned here, it is a combination of developing a repetitive habit of cycling through hotkeys to check on progress for everything and using that to time their next macro cycle. In other words, they are not sitting there and thinking "hmm, has been a while since my last Siege Tank queue, should check the Factory to queue another," it's more like they do 123451234512345 "oh Tank is close to done, 4t5t6vv7vv" or similar. It's on the level of reaction, or "instinct" as the program calls it. To get to that point, it will take a lot of grinding to get out of the low rank doldrums, to get to the point where more people play more consistently "meta" builds, and letting your training take over IMO.

ETA: To expand, a large proportion of hotkey usage for pro gamers is always the "select" action as opposed to "select + interaction" with the target hotkey. This is obviously more true for production facilities than it is for armies which often benefit from constant movement/shaping of the concave. When Flash is hitting 350+ APM in the midgame, it's not because he is interacting with every hotkey every time (a la 1a2a3a4s5s6t7t8vv 88 move screen click macro vv vv 9s 0s) it's more like 1a2a3a456781a2a3a4s5s6781a2a3a4s5s6s7t8t 88 click vv click vv etc. So basically, Flash's ~350 APM "rhythm" is constantly "checking" the progress of certain buildings and units and only acting upon them when necessary.

TLDR: Practice and repetition, not conscious effort or time-sensitivity.
"The right to vote is only the oar of the slaveship, I wanna be free." -- бум бум сучка!
XenOsky
Profile Blog Joined March 2008
Chile2356 Posts
October 30 2025 03:13 GMT
#9
45645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645646
ἡ τῆς Νεμέσεως τάξις
Jealous
Profile Blog Joined December 2011
10353 Posts
October 30 2025 04:07 GMT
#10
On October 30 2025 12:13 XenOsky wrote:
45645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645645646

Yea this is my TLDR instead of everything I posted.
"The right to vote is only the oar of the slaveship, I wanna be free." -- бум бум сучка!
Nirli
Profile Joined February 2023
Bulgaria387 Posts
October 30 2025 07:05 GMT
#11
There's no reason to know how progamers do it. Nobody else is humanly capable of replicating what they do.
Seems like you might need to practice vs the computer, maybe using the immortality cheat.
Just set a goal, practice that for 10 mins, e.g. if it's getting a dropship out and doing a drop, quit and do it again.
Move on when you feel comfortable and that's it. Might take like 500 tries. Maybe more, maybe less.
`Myst
Profile Joined September 2024
26 Posts
Last Edited: 2025-10-31 14:09:48
October 31 2025 14:01 GMT
#12
Basketball players dont "think" about dribbling the basketball.

As others have said, you hotkey everything and then you play enough to where you dont have to think about hotkeys. Until late game, if you have to look away from your army to macro you're doing it wrong. Finger placement (pros use two fingers) is as important as the hotkeys themselves.
"one of the guys came with a nice build the other came to win"
FlaShFTW
Profile Blog Joined February 2010
United States10529 Posts
October 31 2025 16:34 GMT
#13
On October 30 2025 16:05 Nirli wrote:
There's no reason to know how progamers do it. Nobody else is humanly capable of replicating what they do.
Seems like you might need to practice vs the computer, maybe using the immortality cheat.
Just set a goal, practice that for 10 mins, e.g. if it's getting a dropship out and doing a drop, quit and do it again.
Move on when you feel comfortable and that's it. Might take like 500 tries. Maybe more, maybe less.

huh? Progamers arent some special human variant, they're human beings just like you or I. The difference is that they have thousands of hours of practice. We can all practice to be as close to a progamer as we want.
Writer#1 KT and FlaSh Fanboy || Woo Jung Ho Never Forget || Teamliquid Political Decision Desk
TL+ Member
Highgamer
Profile Joined October 2015
1470 Posts
October 31 2025 22:09 GMT
#14
On November 01 2025 01:34 FlaShFTW wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 30 2025 16:05 Nirli wrote:
There's no reason to know how progamers do it. Nobody else is humanly capable of replicating what they do.
Seems like you might need to practice vs the computer, maybe using the immortality cheat.
Just set a goal, practice that for 10 mins, e.g. if it's getting a dropship out and doing a drop, quit and do it again.
Move on when you feel comfortable and that's it. Might take like 500 tries. Maybe more, maybe less.

huh? Progamers arent some special human variant, they're human beings just like you or I. The difference is that they have thousands of hours of practice. We can all practice to be as close to a progamer as we want.

[image loading]
tankgirl
Profile Blog Joined May 2016
Canada480 Posts
Last Edited: 2026-02-25 00:04:32
October 31 2025 22:57 GMT
#15

Oblivion Awaits...
https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/627255-progamer-settings
TL+ Member
Nirli
Profile Joined February 2023
Bulgaria387 Posts
November 01 2025 17:49 GMT
#16
On November 01 2025 01:34 FlaShFTW wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 30 2025 16:05 Nirli wrote:
There's no reason to know how progamers do it. Nobody else is humanly capable of replicating what they do.
Seems like you might need to practice vs the computer, maybe using the immortality cheat.
Just set a goal, practice that for 10 mins, e.g. if it's getting a dropship out and doing a drop, quit and do it again.
Move on when you feel comfortable and that's it. Might take like 500 tries. Maybe more, maybe less.

huh? Progamers arent some special human variant, they're human beings just like you or I. The difference is that they have thousands of hours of practice. We can all practice to be as close to a progamer as we want.

Sounds to me like OP is maybe doing something just for the sake of it, i.e. has seen someone doing it or someone has told him to do it.
Which is basically what "see the pros" is. Doing something should have a puprose, that's why I recommended what I did. If you do something with a purpose and understanding, then you won't be forgetting your units (most of the time).
I get a sense that he's not playing at a very high level, the information is rather limited. For example, why play for drops when you can go more tanks and push earlier for a win. Are you playing to win, to have fun, to learn?
What he's shared is more about game planning rather than macro anyway.
iFU.pauline
Profile Joined September 2009
France1730 Posts
November 02 2025 10:15 GMT
#17
Delete social networks and throw your smartphone, most of us here are old and hard-wired the 20th century's way. Improve your focus to crocodile level.
No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere, I see Heaven's glories shine, And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
[sc1f]eonzerg
Profile Blog Joined February 2010
Belgium7009 Posts
Last Edited: 2025-11-03 17:34:12
November 03 2025 17:33 GMT
#18
Like this
https://i.imgur.com/sWNu3HZ.mp4
prosatan
Profile Joined September 2009
Romania8982 Posts
November 04 2025 05:14 GMT
#19
Amazing post tankgirl !!
Lee JaeDong Fighting! The only church that illuminates is the one that burns.
iopq
Profile Blog Joined March 2009
United States1130 Posts
November 17 2025 08:21 GMT
#20
On November 04 2025 02:33 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote:
Like this
https://i.imgur.com/sWNu3HZ.mp4


For Zerg, making a bunch of hatcheries in one base and ctrl-clicking the larva can be a huge help in the late game. Before I neglected it and got thousands of minerals in the bank instead of units

it's good to do it in in the 4th base in ZvP and then you'll be able to do like 10+ hatcheries of production late

if you need to, you can increase the number of army hotkeys as well (which will make your macro slower, but control better)
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