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(Background: I'm in the gold league, and play Protoss, though I've done very few 1v1s -- I think only 2 after the placement matches in fact, both of which I lost. I played some SC1, but mostly coop with a friend vs comps and almost no vs other people, for a variety of reasons. Mostly I've just watched the Koreans.)
One problem I've always had, and it seems to have gotten worse in SC2, is keeping up with pylon production. There are so many things going on at one point in time, even during "normal" time in the game, that I'll just not think about them.
Case in point: just got done with a game a little while ago, PvT. (I can post a replay if people want to see.) I went through the replay, and estimate that in a 18:55 game, I spent 3:07 supply-blocked (almost exactly 1/6th) between six separate times. (Not counting a couple seconds that I basically always have right at the very very beginning.) Okay, so one of those was just momentary, and one of those was fallout from an almost completely failed bunker rush. But even if you ignore those, I still had four times during the game where I basically had to wait for an entire pylon-building time before I could continue producing. (Of course when it comes to the total time, there's an anology to "if a tree falls in the forest" -- "if you're at 34/34 food and not trying to build anything because your macro sucks, are you supply blocked".  )
So: any suggestions for how to fix this? Anyone out there used to have this problem and got around it?
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Don't pylon hate. Anticipate!
Let x/y be the ratio of units currently under your command to your total possible supply. If y-x < expected unit supply to be produced within the next few moments... construct additional pylon.
Simple.
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I'm unsure what kind of advice you're expecting? As with anything that needs to be worked on in the game, the best way to improve is practice. In this case, either do some isolation practice by just probing, expanding, and making sure you're not ever blocked, or try to pay extra attention to your supply throughout the games you play.
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Osaka27139 Posts
Moved to strategy.
You must construct additional pylons. Earlier than before :p
If you have 4 gates, and you make a stalker from each, you know that it will use up 8 total supply. You know you need a pylon for each round of production. If you are making probes and obs units, you need supply for that too.
Think about what you are producing in the time it takes to warp in a pylon, and warp in the correct number prior to that. Develop a rhythm and you won't get blocked.
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- build a pylon everytime you switch to your gateways to produce units
- stick a piece of paper to your screen: "SUPPLY111"
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Yeah, Protoss must needs be especially wary, since we heavily use Warp Gates.
Everyone's played that sort of game. SoLaR has the right idea, but I also like Trump's quick-fix(which you can sometimes hear on his stream): A couple minutes in, he hits a 'play' key on his keyboard, which starts an audio loop of his voice saying "Please construct more supply depots" every minute or so. The audible reminder certainly must help; could easily do the same for toss.
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You have to mind how many production buildings you have. As protoss one round of production from 3 gates + probes from the nexus is about 8 supply. When you have one gate you can get away with building them about 4 supply in advance, but you have to start building them much faster when you add gateways.
With warp gates I go through a period where I just build one after I warp in some units. This lasts up until the big fights start, at which point I'm usually losing units fast enough that just building pylons "when I remember" is usually fine.
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Also, learning to quickly shift click/queue multiple probes for pylon building then back to mineral gathering will do wonders for not getting supply blocked.
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On August 31 2010 14:44 forgotten0ne wrote:
I'm unsure what kind of advice you're expecting? As with anything that needs to be worked on in the game, the best way to improve is practice. In this case, either do some isolation practice by just probing, expanding, and making sure you're not ever blocked, or try to pay extra attention to your supply throughout the games you play.
I guess I could have been more specific, in the following sense.
I could envision a couple different ways people go about deciding when to build supply. You could get into some rhythm, like Manifesto suggests (sorry for the misplaced thread BTW), where you just sort of "know" that when you build units, you need to go build a pylon. (This seems a bit harder if you have a weirder number of structures -- 4 gates would be nice, because then it's every unit-production round. But 2 is every other round, which seems harder, especially as you need to take into account probes and stuff. Then building every production round seems too much, but every other round would be too little. Stuff like that.) Or you could do some sort of periodic scan of the screen (I know looking at the minimap is something I need to do more) that involves looking up at the supply count, and make decisions that way. Or you could sort of combine the ideas; always say "I'm doing a production round, I may need to build pylons" and do a check, where *usually* you'll build, but not always. Or maybe you just gave sort of the game sense to have a decent idea of when you need to build without putting that much conscious thought into it.
I'd guess the second to last one is probably what good players do, but I guess my question is really more how do you think about the problem of supply creation (or even do you actively think about it).
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EPT
