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Hey guys,
I recently joined the community and have learnt quite a bit. Two weeks ago I was bronce league, today Im platinum and was number 1 ranked until I faced off against a cohort of upper tier diamond league players.I have had little rts knowledge, so thanks to you all for sharing.
Anyways, aside from dumb mistakes, such as falling behind with my macro or, even worst, getting supply blocked, what is slowing me down most atm is my expansion timing. I find it difficult to find a good window to take the natural unless its glaringly obvious like when I beat an incoming push convincingly. How do you guys determine when to expand? Which factors are most important for you to decide that it is the right moment to expand?
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Often a good time to expand is when you're pushing yourself. Day9 often bangs on about this in his dailys. This means your expo isn't threatened by an enemy push, since your army is defending the route to the expo as you push to his base and obviously he cant attack while you are attacking him
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This depends on your race and build order/strategy.
For example, the TvZ 5rax-reaper build that MorroW used in ESL and the fast hellions that TLO used in GSL puts a lot of early pressure on zerg and allows them to take an expo sooner than terran usely would. Notice that this was part of their strategy: put pressure on opponent->expand->transition to bio using the 5rax made for reapers. Or TLO's strat: put pressure on opponent with hellions->take SCVs off gas once factory finishes->expand->transition in to mech with the tech you already have. TLO's strategy is actually very similar to the 5rax reaper one it's just that you don't have to keep constantly farming gas as hellions only cost minerals and you get to transition in to mech a lot more smoothly (mech being generally stronger than bio in TvZ).
On certain maps protoss likes to wall off at the choke leading to their natural so they can safely take a fast expansion ("forge expand").
If zerg you can get hatchery before even spawning pool depending on how safe you are from early rushes (map dependant).
Really it depends on your strategy. If you are going 4gate push as protoss it's a good idea to expand as you are moving out for the push (keep macroing after you expand/while you push so that if the other player has anything left from the push you are safe from counter attacks). If you are playing a turtle-terran with siege tanks then it's when ever you have enough siege tanks to move down your choke and into your natural safely (people build the CC in their base a little bit early so that when it finishes that's when they have enough forces to move out of their base).
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You expand when they won't be able to successfully attack it before it pays off:
- when you have the better army but don't think you can break their defensive position
- when you just reached a key tech that beats their current army forcing them to take time to switch up
- when you can threaten their base to stop them moving out, for example with air units
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14 hatch 15 pool all the way baby. 
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If you scout the opponent early and can tell he's teching heavily, you're often safe to expand. This is mostly applicable against T, since it's almost impossible to push up a walled Terran, but it also works somewhat vs P, since ff splitting your army will ruin your day.
For example, if I do a gate robo gate and my obs scouts banshees, you can expand immediately and get the appropriate response (I tend to get council+blink and a 3rd gateway). It's okay to cut units now to get more units later; it's one of those counter-intuitive things. In this situation, think that the terran has to wait until he gets 2-3 banshees and likely cloak to push out -- if he goes out sooner, then your army should crush his small bio army. If you cut 1-2 units to add a 4th/5th gate, then right as your nat finishes you can afford to be producing out of 5 gateways and possibly a robo (this depends on what units you get and what he has; since he's 1 basing a gas heavy strat of cloaked banshees, then his bio army should be marine heavy. Since it's marine heavy with banshee support, robo units are fairly lackluster, so you want to go zealot/stalker (assuming you already have sufficient sentries for gs/ff), rather than zealot/sentry/immortal.)
That's just one example, but the overarching idea is that if you know his push can't come out till later, you can get an expansion and subsequently a superior army before the attack comes.
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EPT
