Plat 1600 1v1 random player, 1400 diamond 2v2 on my original account. 800 Diamond on my friends acct I use for 1v1 sometimes.
I just realized you can chrono boost the Warpgates cooldown time as Protoss. The reason it's funny is because I play ALOT of Protoss and I win ALOT!
What have you recently learned that should have been obvious that will now make you even better than you were 2 seconds ago before you knew it. (Any Race)
Updated with this nice summary of the tips inside.
On November 02 2010 04:30 Skrattybones wrote: Hey guys,
I just went through this entire thread and have pulled (almost) every tip posted in here. I will now proceed to put them in here, separated by "All", "Terran", "Protoss", and "Zerg". If the OP wishes to copy this list and add it to the original post, awesome.
Also note that I attempted to only include tips which are absolutely true, but as I only play Zerg I haven't gone through and verified them. --
- Hitting Ctrl+F1 instantly selects all Idle Workers.
- You can hold down a hotkey instead of pressing it over and over (IE: Hold down F and click everywhere you want multiple fungal growths with multiple Infestors). This stands true for practically everything, across every race.
- You can add new units to an existing control group by holding Shift and setting them to the group you want.
- Transferring some harvesters to a new expansion is better for your economy than simply saturating from scratch.
- MULEs can be spotted dropping by everybody, even in fog of war.
- 'Alt' shows/hides health bars, depending on whether you have them turned on or off.
- Spacebar will center you on your base.
- Backspace will cycle you through multiple bases.
- Tab will cycle through multiple things on the same control group.
- pressing 'C' on a worker with resources in his hand will send him back to deliver the resources automatically.
- You can target fire with any form of static defense (IE: bunkers, spine crawlers, photon cannons)
- Holding shift allows you to set multiple waypoints, making it easier to scout multiple bases automatically.
- By selecting units and right-clicking on another unit you order them to follow that particular unit. This is helpful for ordering faster units to follow behind slower units.
- workers pinned/trapped by enemy units can be rescued by ordering them to a mineral patch. They will phase through their obstacle to get there. This also works for scouting an enemy base walled-off with a unit guarding the path.
- Massive units (Thors/Colossus/Ultralisk) will break forcefields.
- You can turn on a Flier Helper option to help accurately target flying units with spells.
- You can move the camera by holding the middle mouse button, as opposed to dragging your cursor to the edge of the screen and/or using the arrow keys.
- If you are under attack at your mineral line by lings or zealots early on, and have fewer units to defend, grab all of your probes and select attack, then mine, then attack, then mine, with a few game seconds in between each command. What you are doing is changing their priorities so that unless your opponent has queued attacked every single one of your workers, their attacking units will face your probes, then switch to your units, then to the probes, then to your units, effectively making them only hit your actual attackers about half the time. You can also trap units between the probes because they will ignore pathing to mine, then attack, then ignore pathing, then attack.
- You can start production on units even when supply blocked. Once you remedy the situation the units will begin production automatically.
- You can have more than 24 units bound to a control group. It will open up a new page within that control group to display those units.
- You can call MULEs down directly on to mineral patches.
- SCVs can attack.
- Tech Labs/ Reactors are universal. You can swap buildings around to make use of them without needing to build more add-ons.
- You can drop Vikings and Thors from Medivacs.
- MULEs can repair mechs. Calling them down in battle is a fast way to get repairs done.
- You can use Medivacs to quickly load up your army and fly away from a battle, instead of just using them for healing.
- SCVs can repair Protoss mechanical units as well. (great for team games.)
- Medivacs can heal all biological units of any race on the same team (also great for team games.)
- If you have multiples of the same production building selected (IE: Four Barracks) the game will automatically spread the production of that unit evenly across all the selected buildings.
- Hellions can target and effectively damage/destroy zerg larva.
- Pressing 'D' and clicking a Medivac while loaded with units will begin dropping units while the Medivac is moving.
- SCVs can be set to auto-repair.
- The Hunter Seeker Missile will destroy zerg larva in one shot.
- Splash damage will hit burrowed units if unburrowed units are being targeted.
- Marines and Marauders can be stimmed inside bunkers.
- EMP temporarily uncovers cloaked units.
- You can que up movement and re-sieging your tanks while they are un-sieging.
- You can drop MULEs anywhere you have vision. You can drop MULEs on the enemy base after a scan to force sieged tanks to attack them, damaging buildings by the splash.
- SCVs on auto-repair loaded into a Medivac will repair everything they can inside the Medivac (possibly at a higher resource cost).
- If you have a Lair you can research Lair upgrades at other Hatcheries.
- Overlords can spew creep on buildings to keep them safe if your hatchery gets destroyed.
- You can bind all Queens to a single hotkey, then select all and inject larva to a hatchery. The closest Queen will inject.
- Nydus Canals can spawn multiple entrances.
- You can rally units directly into a Nydus Canal.
- Nydus Worms can spawn anywhere, and generate Creep when they successfully form.
- Banelings can be detonated manually while burrowed.
- Burrowed units can have Burrow set to autocast. They will unburrow when an enemy is in range and attack.
- Inject Larva has a slight cooldown during the animation. If you try to inject multiple Hatcheries side-by-side, the Queen might skip the second and move straight to the third.
- Hatcheries still being morphed can be added to a control group, regardless of whether they are finished morphing or not.
- Having multiple Queens at a base makes for a good defense against early aggression.
- You can select multiple drones and command them to make a building. Only the closest drone will make the building.
- You can select multiple drones and que up multiple buildings. Only one drone for each building will leave the mineral patches.
- You still need to research Burrow to make use of the Tunneling Claws upgrade for Roaches.
- Creep Tumors can clone themselves to continue the spread of creep.
- Multiple creep tumors in the same area will speed the spread of creep exponentially.
- Queens can spawn larva through the minimap.
- Infestor's Fungal Growth works on/ reveals cloaked units.
- Infestor's Neural Parasite will instantly kill a zerg egg.
- Infestor's Neural Parasite works on Motherships. You can use the enemy Mothership to Vortex his own army.
- Infestors can spawn Infested Terrans while burrowed.
- A well placed burrowed unit can stop a building from being built on that spot.
- The Overlord Speed upgrade affects morphed Overseers as well.
- You can cancel a cloned Creep Tumor before it finishes to return it to the tumor you cloned it from.
- Overlords are no longer a detector. They have to morph to Overseer, which is available once you have a Lair.
- You can Shift-add eggs to a control group. (IE: If you have mutas bound to '1', and you make more you can use Shift to add them to '1'.)
- Hatcheries larva cap extends past seven, but caps in the high teens/early twenties.
- Burrowed roaches are slightly visible while moving.
as Zerg i just learned that once you have 1 lair but 2 hatches you can get Overlord speed on one and Overlord drop on the other. I always thought i could only research them at the Lair. =/
On September 21 2010 23:23 hEndO wrote: as Zerg i just learned that once you have 1 lair but 2 hatches you can get Overlord speed on one and Overlord drop on the other. I always thought i could only research them at the Lair. =/
took me awhile to recgonize this change from BW as well
I just discovered something that is very situational, but still I feel this thread is an appropriate venue to share it. If you are zerg and you reach lair tech, always have some OL's pooping creep asap. I mean, you should be doing this anyway but I found the additional advantage that if your Lair gets sniped, you can move the OL's around and they will continue pooping creep. This is very useful to keep your buildings alive while you rebuild your hatchery, either there or somewhere else.
I still don't know how to drop units from medivac properly.
You can bind all queens to one hotkey. Then select all queens and inject larva to a hach. The closest queen will inject which means the queen which actually guarding the expansion.
Tech Labs and Reactors are modular (a barracks tech lab works with factory etc) :p I still don't really make full use of this feature even though i've known about it for a few weeks now..
I know how larva works, but never brought myself to realize this means Zerg must use all available larvae asap, in order to force hatcheries to renew them. Otherwise there's likely some waste of resources on boosting larva production. It's obvious, but so important, and I'm pretty sure not many zergs optimize their strats enough to cover that.
I also learned that selecting larva along with a drone, hitting stop (and re-mine the drone) forces larva to move closer to the minerals if it's not. In addition, in the first seconds of the game, it may be useful to build the drone directly from a larva of your choice (click on the larva, not the hatch), so that it's the closest position to the minerals.
On September 21 2010 23:23 hEndO wrote: as Zerg i just learned that once you have 1 lair but 2 hatches you can get Overlord speed on one and Overlord drop on the other. I always thought i could only research them at the Lair. =/
:O Holy crap I just became a better Zerg, thank you thread (and starter)
On September 21 2010 23:28 teh_longinator wrote: That you can hotkey a nydus canal, and have more than one exit per entrance :s
Did you know you can make an exit at each hatchery, and rally your units to the worm?
It's good for bases far away to let you quickly unload the units it makes near the rest of your army.
Haha yeah, I found out that point in the same game. I meant to set my rally point CLOSE to the entrance, and ended up mis-clicking and setting my rally point in there.
On September 21 2010 23:28 teh_longinator wrote: That you can hotkey a nydus canal, and have more than one exit per entrance :s
something that took me a while to learn to, useful on certain maps LT/Desert Oasis, can work on kulas ravine as well, but haven't tried it there yet!
I tried it on Kulas Ravine (2nd/3rd time using them. I made one at every expansion, since the 'Toss I was against decided he'd contain my base with cannons -_-.
dunno if this is obvious! but i learned to drone harder at the beginning of games even against the 4gate and get units last minute. unless of course its super early pressure or 2gate. I guess just knowing when to drone. Always made too many units and got miffed on econ
On September 21 2010 23:23 hEndO wrote: as Zerg i just learned that once you have 1 lair but 2 hatches you can get Overlord speed on one and Overlord drop on the other. I always thought i could only research them at the Lair. =/
I also learned that selecting larva along with a drone, hitting stop (and re-mine the drone) forces larva to move closer to the minerals if it's not. In addition, in the first seconds of the game, it may be useful to build the drone directly from a larva of your choice (click on the larva, not the hatch), so that it's the closest position to the minerals.
I've been trying to replicate this in sc2 to get the larva to move closer to the mineral patchs but it never seems to work for me at least. I remember it used to work in BW with an ovie.
Shift + # to add units to a group instead of selecting a group and shift selecting then Ctrl + # to reassigning all to the group is much faster way of reinforcing.
When you make a new expo, if you actually take like half your workers from the original one (supposing it's still with 8 mineral patches), then you will make your mineral income rise a lot faster then if you just made new SCVs for that expo, instead of transferring half of them...
And mules give you around 300 minerals, basically for free. So this is what the scan costs - 300 minerals, or 2 1000 hp barracks you could build to fly over and survey your opponent's base.
On September 22 2010 00:06 BigAndrew5000 wrote: When you make a new expo, if you actually take like half your workers from the original one (supposing it's still with 8 mineral patches), then you will make your mineral income rise a lot faster then if you just made new SCVs for that expo, instead of transferring half of them...
And mules give you around 300 minerals, basically for free. So this is what the scan costs - 300 minerals, or 2 1000 hp barracks you could build to fly over and survey your opponent's base.
Flawed logic there friend... Mules don't cost minerals, you still have the minerals even if you don't use a mule, they just come in slower.
I didn't know Mules could repair until I heard in some tournament game somebody called down a mule in the field to do emergency repairs on their army (I assume thors or bcs)...
I've learned that spit on Z's queens has an invisible cooldown while the animation is cast. If you have 2 queens and 3 hatches and spit the main, then the hatch next to it, then a far away hatch, your queens will decide it's time for an exodus. Thus:
Spit main first, then expo, then inbase hatches.
Stops the wonky queen exodus.
Also realized creep tumor is 20 and not 25 energy... wow man that made me feel stupid.
On September 22 2010 00:06 BigAndrew5000 wrote: When you make a new expo, if you actually take like half your workers from the original one (supposing it's still with 8 mineral patches), then you will make your mineral income rise a lot faster then if you just made new SCVs for that expo, instead of transferring half of them...
And mules give you around 300 minerals, basically for free. So this is what the scan costs - 300 minerals, or 2 1000 hp barracks you could build to fly over and survey your opponent's base.
Flawed logic there friend... Mules don't cost minerals, you still have the minerals even if you don't use a mule, they just come in slower.
Still, if you use a scan there's 300ish minerals you won't have after the mule would've finished mining. With a mule you might be able to get that extra upgrade/unit/whatever, without it you wouldn't.
On September 22 2010 00:09 VirtualAlex wrote: I remember when I realized that I could have many larva at a hatch and not just 7. I would just not bother injecting because I thought 7 was the max.
I also learned that banelings could explode from burrowed position if you do it manually.
You can also right click on burrow and they'll autocast it as soon as something comes in range if you're a noob like me who isn't quick enough to catch them manually (actually they unburrow and attack that thing so you still have to manage it if your enemy knows they're there)
On September 22 2010 00:10 mololu wrote: I've learned that spit on Z's queens has an invisible cooldown while the animation is cast. If you have 2 queens and 3 hatches and spit the main, then the hatch next to it, then a far away hatch, your queens will decide it's time for an exodus. Thus:
Spit main first, then expo, then inbase hatches.
Stops the wonky queen exodus.
Also realized creep tumor is 20 and not 25 energy... wow man that made me feel stupid.
Wait, what? I remember having to wait for 25 energy to drop a creep tumor on several occasions...
I found out that you don't need to select an individual drone to make a building. You can select all of them build an extractor and only the closest drone to the extractor do build it.
if you expand as Z and once you ordered the drone to build an hatch you can right away add the drone to your hatchery hotkeygroup. when its done later you will have the hatch in your hotkeygroup!
After Day9 last night i played around with carriers a little.
Interceptors go back to the carrier after their target is killed, unless you have a target queued up or you tell them to attack while they are en route to the carrier.
You can issue an attack order then move orders and the interceptors will continue focusing fire until the target is out of range or dead.
On September 22 2010 00:14 Azro wrote: if you expand as Z and once you ordered the drone to build an hatch you can right away add the drone to your hatchery hotkeygroup. when its done later you will have the hatch in your hotkeygroup!
This thread is GOLD! I just realized that as zerg, it is so much better to have at least all tier 1 tech buildings -even if u dont plan to use them- then having to build a baneling nest only when you see their 40 marines.
On September 22 2010 00:06 BigAndrew5000 wrote: When you make a new expo, if you actually take like half your workers from the original one (supposing it's still with 8 mineral patches), then you will make your mineral income rise a lot faster then if you just made new SCVs for that expo, instead of transferring half of them...
And mules give you around 300 minerals, basically for free. So this is what the scan costs - 300 minerals, or 2 1000 hp barracks you could build to fly over and survey your opponent's base.
It is not actually only 300 minerals for 2 barracks. it is 300 + lost mining time on 2 scvs for the duration of construction.
On September 22 2010 00:10 mololu wrote: I've learned that spit on Z's queens has an invisible cooldown while the animation is cast. If you have 2 queens and 3 hatches and spit the main, then the hatch next to it, then a far away hatch, your queens will decide it's time for an exodus. Thus:
Spit main first, then expo, then inbase hatches.
Stops the wonky queen exodus.
Also realized creep tumor is 20 and not 25 energy... wow man that made me feel stupid.
On September 22 2010 00:13 J7S wrote: I found out that you don't need to select an individual drone to make a building. You can select all of them build an extractor and only the closest drone to the extractor do build it.
Wait, what? Why did I not know this? I've been playing Zerg for the last 2 years :s.
Well, now that I know this, I won't be so careful to select 1 Drone, and 1 Drone only haha... Actually, I probably will, simply because sometimes I like to scout (move command) before expanding or making buildings.
On September 22 2010 00:14 Coufu wrote: Couple things:
You can right-click burrowed banelings to make them automatically unburrow when an enemy unit comes over (although it is better to micro them)
You can right-click the interceptor button to make carriers auto-make interceptors.
Auto-cast unburrow? That's pretty awesome. So if they make mass Marines, I can have banelings just pop out like Spider-Mines?
On September 22 2010 00:15 btlyger wrote: Massing queens as defense instead of rushing roaches against zealots actually works extremely freaking well.
I meant to try this, but my queens always send up dying to the Zealots. Maybe now that I've learned to play with health bars always showing, I can micro my Transfuse better.
Oh, also, game improving discovery... playing with health bars = better micro with Transfuse/burrowing roaches.
Burrow can be put on autocast allowing things like using banelings as mines.
Always making harvestors especially in the mid-game and during battles. Once you get an expo up, use both bases to make harvestors.
Neglecting the dropship aspect of the medivac during the MMM ball. I'd get medivacs purely for their healing. But if a bunch of banelings are coming or you are outnumbered, just load up and fly away.
Banelings: Used to think they sucked and were impossible to use until i saw a video with a guy using the move command to wrap them around the opponent's forces instead of attack move or something like that...
Spam click move into the juicy part of the army. Anything that dies in transit will explode. These days I almost never let my banelings 'attack' and always wait for the opponent to kill them while they're right in the middle of his troops.
neural parasite and fungal growth with the infestor while burrowed... God i hope this doesn't get patched.
Sorry everyone on the 20 energy thing. Indeed tumors cost 25 energy. Man now I feel stupid.
Then what on earth was it that cost 20 energy?! Something cost 20 that I thought cost 25...
I found out that you don't need to select an individual drone to make a building. You can select all of them build an extractor and only the closest drone to the extractor do build it.
On September 22 2010 00:29 bonifaceviii wrote: Getting tunneling claws doesn't give you burrow for your roaches =(
I always wondered about this. It was a huge debate when BW was in beta whether lurkers should be given burrow without having to research it first at lair. Ultimately, of course, they were given the burrow ability automatically, so I thought that it would have only made sense to give SC2's new burrowing unit some kind of automatic burrowing ability without having to research burrow tech =/
You can manage your replays using the standard windows file system without even opening the client. It's help immensly with organizing my replays and the ones I download into managable groups that share similar themes so I can quickly find the ones I need to refine a specific build or tactic.
Even while the extractor is building, you can take 3 drones and tell them to go mine. They will wait near it until it's complete and then start harvesting. Amazing for super late game when you really don't have time and instead have to go back to microing your army or fight off harass or whatever. I use this in early game too, espeically when getting harassed hardcore -_-
The autodetonate on banelings sucks, because the unburrow animation is slow.. it's better to babysit and just press X.
SCVs can repair all mechanical units (duh). The not 'duh' part of that is that they can also repair protoss units, which is excellent for team games. Repairing my buddy's collosus or mamaship = yummy.
On September 22 2010 00:35 DuneBug wrote: Banelings: Used to think they sucked and were impossible to use until i saw a video with a guy using the move command to wrap them around the opponent's forces instead of attack move or something like that...
Spam click move into the juicy part of the army. Anything that dies in transit will explode. These days I almost never let my banelings 'attack' and always wait for the opponent to kill them while they're right in the middle of his troops.
neural parasite and fungal growth with the infestor while burrowed... God i hope this doesn't get patched.
You can neural parasite and fungal growth while burrowed? That makes it so much better. I thought it was just Infested Terran you could do that with.
Man, now I hope this doesn't get patched. I'd love to have more than 5 hours to enjoy it before it gets patched.... I guess I'll see tomorrow evening.
On September 22 2010 00:14 Azro wrote: if you expand as Z and once you ordered the drone to build an hatch you can right away add the drone to your hatchery hotkeygroup. when its done later you will have the hatch in your hotkeygroup!
WEIRD
but awesome
Noticed that when I did the gas steal (and cancelling), but too stupid to think of hatcheries. Sweet!
On September 22 2010 00:13 J7S wrote: I found out that you don't need to select an individual drone to make a building. You can select all of them build an extractor and only the closest drone to the extractor do build it.
You can also build multiple buildings with a selection of drones. Works good for 13pool/12extractor. Also when maynarding (sp?) drones to your expo, direct all of them to the minerals, then build 2 extractors. All drones except the two will start mining.
On September 22 2010 00:14 Coufu wrote: Couple things:
You can right-click burrowed banelings to make them automatically unburrow when an enemy unit comes over (although it is better to micro them)
You can right-click the interceptor button to make carriers auto-make interceptors.
Unfortunately this ability was implemented rather badly. They unburrow when a unit is in site range which is not very good against large amounts of MM with concussive shells. It would much preferable if they just blew up when a unit was in their explosion range.
On September 22 2010 00:14 Azro wrote: if you expand as Z and once you ordered the drone to build an hatch you can right away add the drone to your hatchery hotkeygroup. when its done later you will have the hatch in your hotkeygroup!
You can set rally points while a hatch is building as well, both worker and larva.
Speaking of, another big one for me was realizing you could rally individual eggs and add them to groups before they hatch. On good use for the individual rallying is for workers so they don't all go to the same place when they pop.
In the campaign with the drop pods protoss tech I noticed I could keep my barracks on one hotkey group by themselves to que up units and them also include the barracks in my army hotkey groups so the rally points would constantly be updated when i moved my units for continuous reenforcement in the field.
On September 22 2010 00:06 BigAndrew5000 wrote: When you make a new expo, if you actually take like half your workers from the original one (supposing it's still with 8 mineral patches), then you will make your mineral income rise a lot faster then if you just made new SCVs for that expo, instead of transferring half of them...
And mules give you around 300 minerals, basically for free. So this is what the scan costs - 300 minerals, or 2 1000 hp barracks you could build to fly over and survey your opponent's base.
Flawed logic there friend... Mules don't cost minerals, you still have the minerals even if you don't use a mule, they just come in slower.
Looking at just minerals is silly. By your logic you would never make additional SCVs...after all, you still have the minerals even without more SCVs, they just come in slower :S
You see, economy in SC2 isn't about minerals/gas, it's about how fast you're getting them, also called income. Using scan instead of MULE doesn't cost you minerals, but it does cost you income. MULEs don't give you free minerals, but they do give you free income, and that's what makes them so good.
When people say "scan instead of MULE costs you 270 minerals", what they mean is that it costs you 3 min/sec for 90 seconds
I just realized you can chrono boost the Warpgates cooldown time as Protoss. The reason it's funny is because I play ALOT of Protoss and I win ALOT!
What have you recently learned that should have been obvious that will now make you even better than you were 2 seconds ago before you knew it. (Any Race)
Hi, I knew that since early beta... and I was a Terran player back then.
If you have multiple nexus in one hotkey group and use chrono boost it will always use the first nexus's energy first if it has 25, even if other nexus have 100. You have to manually manage which nexus you're chronoboosting from in order to not waste potential energy.
I just realized you can chrono boost the Warpgates cooldown time as Protoss. The reason it's funny is because I play ALOT of Protoss and I win ALOT!
What have you recently learned that should have been obvious that will now make you even better than you were 2 seconds ago before you knew it. (Any Race)
Hi, I knew that since early beta... and I was a Terran player back then.
I just realized you can chrono boost the Warpgates cooldown time as Protoss. The reason it's funny is because I play ALOT of Protoss and I win ALOT!
What have you recently learned that should have been obvious that will now make you even better than you were 2 seconds ago before you knew it. (Any Race)
Hi, I knew that since early beta... and I was a Terran player back then.
Plat ~800 random player.
wow good for you man :D
you can make your tanks siege when they reach their destination with shift. Not good for covering long distances but great for pushing forward while still microing mm,helions, thors.
edit: I just learned in this thread that I should be using 'stop' with an mm ball rather than a-move...
You can quickly create a forcefield wall by selecting your sentry group and holding f while spamming click.
Bunkers add +1 range to units.
Anyone have any tips for dealing with mass repair planetary fortress in the early midgame without splash as P (i.e. no storm or colossus) shift queuing attack commands on SCVs seems to always kill the first one so quickly that my units retarget the planetary and try to finish killing it before moving onto the next attack queued scv.
I just realized you can chrono boost the Warpgates cooldown time as Protoss. The reason it's funny is because I play ALOT of Protoss and I win ALOT!
What have you recently learned that should have been obvious that will now make you even better than you were 2 seconds ago before you knew it. (Any Race)
here's one. Not very usefull but still is funny to do:
you can use the mother ship to teleport larve.
Now I'm not sure if this may work in team games (having a team mate teleport the larve of another), but it does work if you mind control a probe, make a nexus, and tech up to mother ships.
once teleported, the larve MUST be on creep, or they die right away. After you teleport them, they start going back to the hatchery they came from (and I think, that hatchery will not make new larve, as long as 3 of them are alive).
May be a "cool" way to sneak an expantion (move an over lord, make creep, teleport larve, and make drones), but you can just as easly teleport the drones.
maybe alow the innocent larve crawl next to an enemy base (units will attack them), and morph them into ultra's when no one's looking.
With queen you can spawn larva on the minimap. You do have to be a bit precise with the cursor though but it saves the hassle of going back to your base in mid-fight.
On September 22 2010 02:48 Liquid_Chaos wrote: here's one. Not very usefull but still is funny to do:
you can use the mother ship to teleport larve.
Now I'm not sure if this may work in team games (having a team mate teleport the larve of another), but it does work if you mind control a probe, make a nexus, and tech up to mother ships.
once teleported, the larve MUST be on creep, or they die right away. After you teleport them, they start going back to the hatchery they came from (and I think, that hatchery will not make new larve, as long as 3 of them are alive).
May be a "cool" way to sneak an expantion (move an over lord, make creep, teleport larve, and make drones), but you can just as easly teleport the drones.
maybe alow the innocent larve crawl next to an enemy base (units will attack them), and morph them into ultra's when no one's looking.
either way, not very useful, but nice to know.
This does not improve your play, it's just a cute trick. This thread is different than the one on battle.net forums which is called "TRICKS YOU DIDN'T KNOW WORKED!". This one is called "Learning something obvious that improved your SC2". Why can't some people understand what they read ?
since I played sc:bw a lot, I always wait to have 200 mineral to build a cybernetic core, even if they cost 150...
same for gas extractor, wait for 100 when they cost 75
--- so many tricks in mind
scv can be set to auto repair.. (hello medics in mech armies) if you're on health bar always on, you can use alt to hide them (and the other way around) you can queue a rally to multiple points with shift you can hallucinate air units, and scout with them you can use sc2gears to autosave your replays (since the old one get auto deleted if not manually saved) you can't blink somewhere you don't have vision you can chronoboost gateways so you can warp in units faster if you double press a number, you'll go the group location (not new..) you can feedback the crap out of thors if you make multiple tumors, the creep will spread much faster (4 tumors is the magic number) archons make a nice front vs mass ultra if you kill a pylon while units are being warped, all the units die
On September 22 2010 03:05 some_noob wrote: When warping units as protoss, you can [hold unit hotkey] + click click click instead of hotkey+ click, hotkey+ click, hotkey+ click,
More reliable to press unit hotkey, hold shift + click click click
On September 22 2010 03:05 some_noob wrote: When warping units as protoss, you can [hold unit hotkey] + click click click instead of hotkey+ click, hotkey+ click, hotkey+ click,
More reliable to press unit hotkey, hold shift + click click click
Why is that ? and wouldn't this be less effective if you want to warp different kind of units ?
You can feedback Corruptors, banshee's Thor, Queen. To me it was always obvious I could feedback Ghosts, and other high templar. but some of those other units don't really stick out as "Psionic"
Since most people don't use corruption or 240 MM cannon most of the units sit there with full energy, ripe for feedback.
I find myself going Templar tech a lot more often rather than predictable Colossus.
alt+htoky is the toggle of certain spells ie: repair, build interceptors. Fungal growth makes phoenix very weak vs muta You can spread creep tumors up and down cliffs using ovs.
On September 22 2010 03:05 some_noob wrote: When warping units as protoss, you can [hold unit hotkey] + click click click instead of hotkey+ click, hotkey+ click, hotkey+ click,
More reliable to press unit hotkey, hold shift + click click click
Why is that ? and wouldn't this be less effective if you want to warp different kind of units ?
The hold key method works because of key press repeating, there is a small delay after your press the key before it starts repeating, if you inadvertently click on something between your first warp in and the start of the key repeating (say the unit you warped in for instance) you'll deselect your warpgates.
Raven's Hunter Seeker Missile will one-shot larvae, and, having a pretty decent AoE, it will likely take out all available larvae at a hatchery if targeted correctly.
i never played sc1 and i remember when i learned about shift clicking to queue stuff during the beta. blew my mind. probably the one thing that improved my game the most. (though totally obvious to you guys), oh that and the hold command for choke points. learned that one shortly after.
some other stuff i use a lot and take for granted:
- hitting spacebar if you happen to fly off your base at the start of the game and haven't hotkeyed it - backspace for toggling bases (though i map it to a diff key on my keyboard since it's so far away) - ctrl-f1 to select all idle workers (shift f1, f1 also work for single units) - shift queue blink-attack moves (via the hdstarcraft demo on LT) - alt to show healthbars - exploding banelings while burrowed without having to unburrow - shift V on hotkeyed queens and spam clicking minimap to inject larvae - shift c resource gathering queuing (though arguably can mess up your build if you get carried away) - 10 OL with hatch trick is slightly greater than 9 OL without hatch trick (tested multiple times) - spawning location of Z slightly affects econ/rush (12oclock being the worst since larvae are farthest from mineral patch) though it's best for ling rushes. - sending workers to gas before it's done will still get them to mine once it's done - fungal growth on cloaked units - tab for cycling units / buildings that are all on one hotkey - hotkeying tech labs
On September 22 2010 00:01 ChaosWielder wrote: I learned how to shift queue Stalker blink. Needless to say, I have a new build under my belt.
What does this do? What is the point?
it's good for getting a group of stalkers up a ledge so they don't get stuck after the blink and prevent the rest of the stalkers from getting up the ledge. hdstarcraft has a video tutorial on his youtube channel.
Don't make units to defend until you have to. Probably the single most effective piece of advice I've learned. And tips on using Overlords (sac'ing, positioning, etc)
alt+hotkey is the toggle of certain spells ie: repair, build interceptors.
wow that's gonna hugely help me when i need to pull scvs with my army
Raven's Hunter Seeker Missile will one-shot larvae, and, having a pretty decent AoE, it will likely take out all available larvae at a hatchery if targeted correctly.
also, Helions kill larva in just a few shots as well
On September 22 2010 00:01 ChaosWielder wrote: I learned how to shift queue Stalker blink. Needless to say, I have a new build under my belt.
What does this do? What is the point?
it's good for getting a group of stalkers up a ledge so they don't get stuck after the blink and prevent the rest of the stalkers from getting up the ledge. hdstarcraft has a video tutorial on his youtube channel.
Wow, that seems really useful. Thanks for the heads up about the video. Time to switch races -_-
If you have 8 larva and morph them all into a unit that fits into the same control group, hit shift + control group to add them instantly. When you move the real group around it will set the egg rallypoint to meetup with your units.
On September 22 2010 01:11 Jaeger wrote: If you have multiple nexus in one hotkey group and use chrono boost it will always use the first nexus's energy first if it has 25, even if other nexus have 100. You have to manually manage which nexus you're chronoboosting from in order to not waste potential energy.
Why does it matter which Nexus you're chrono-boosting from? Seems like a waste of time to manually manage which nexus you're boosting from.
Learning how to kite Holding down a key to spawn lots of units Learning how to quickly spawn larva Learning that you can creep tumor across the rocks at scrap station
On September 22 2010 01:11 Jaeger wrote: If you have multiple nexus in one hotkey group and use chrono boost it will always use the first nexus's energy first if it has 25, even if other nexus have 100. You have to manually manage which nexus you're chronoboosting from in order to not waste potential energy.
Why does it matter which Nexus you're chrono-boosting from? Seems like a waste of time to manually manage which nexus you're boosting from.
Because if one of your Nexi are maxed on energy, then you're losing energy by not spending it.
Kind of a complicated one, but still really useful!
The background info: If a work has money in his hand, pressing "C" (return cargo) causes the worker to return the cargo and then go back to collecting resources. This is useful if you select a worker to go build something, but it's holding some money, you press "C" and once he returns, you tell him to move towards building again.
The cool thing: Suppose a worker is mining minerals and you want him to go mine gas. Suppose the worker is holding minerals too (ie on a return trip!). If you tell him to mine gas, then you press the "C" button, he'll return the minerals AND THEN GO MINE GAS ZOMG. It's pretty impressively awesome subtlety that makes it SO MUCH EASIER to send guys into gas in mid game. woowoo.
I learned that when Terran can mass a bioball and 1 a into a well microd army they have a good chance unless the opposing player is on two bases, so I play League of Legends now.
On September 22 2010 04:22 Day[9] wrote: Kind of a complicated one, but still really useful!
The background info: If a work has money in his hand, pressing "C" (return cargo) causes the worker to return the cargo and then go back to collecting resources. This is useful if you select a worker to go build something, but it's holding some money, you press "C" and once he returns, you tell him to move towards building again.
The cool thing: Suppose a worker is mining minerals and you want him to go mine gas. Suppose the worker is holding minerals too (ie on a return trip!). If you tell him to mine gas, then you press the "C" button, he'll return the minerals AND THEN GO MINE GAS ZOMG. It's pretty impressively awesome subtlety that makes it SO MUCH EASIER to send guys into gas in mid game. woowoo.
I'm not sure if pressing "C" qualifies as complicated.
You can inject larva on the mini map, without having to look at each hatchery. A cross-hair will come up, and if it's green, you can inject on that hatchery.
On September 22 2010 04:50 ArgonSC2 wrote: You can inject larva on the mini map, without having to look at each hatchery. A cross-hair will come up, and if it's green, you can inject on that hatchery.
On September 22 2010 05:06 some_noob wrote: In scrap station, you can queue blink stalkers from your base to the island, and from the island to the enemy's base. (you prolly need vision)
You can also blink to the islands on LT if your opponent floated to the island or isn't protecting it. At least the bottom right, I'd assume top left as well.
As other people have mentioned, HP bars on. Makes feedbacking an incoming medivac drop only to watch 3 out of 4 of them blow up delicious, and makes bad terran players run away when they lose their raven and they realize I had DTs flanking them. Prior to that, I don't think I used feedback very much due to not knowing what had enough energy to get 1 shotted.
During beta and for some time after release I didn't know how to spread creep, I thought that I had to make the queen spawn a new creep tumor each time I wanted to spread more creep...
Until I saw in a VOD a player clicking on a creep tumor...
Back in beta, I didn't realize you could swap terran tech labs. I thought they were building specific. It also took me awhile to realize robo is 100 gas and not 200 like in bw.
On September 22 2010 04:22 Day[9] wrote: Kind of a complicated one, but still really useful!
The background info: If a work has money in his hand, pressing "C" (return cargo) causes the worker to return the cargo and then go back to collecting resources. This is useful if you select a worker to go build something, but it's holding some money, you press "C" and once he returns, you tell him to move towards building again.
The cool thing: Suppose a worker is mining minerals and you want him to go mine gas. Suppose the worker is holding minerals too (ie on a return trip!). If you tell him to mine gas, then you press the "C" button, he'll return the minerals AND THEN GO MINE GAS ZOMG. It's pretty impressively awesome subtlety that makes it SO MUCH EASIER to send guys into gas in mid game. woowoo.
I'm not sure if pressing "C" qualifies as complicated.
..a burrowed zerg unit can prevent a building from being placed in that location (particularly fun if you drop a zergling or a roach at someone's natural expansion).
This could screw up your opponent so much. I am definitely going to try this.
I noticed a significant improvement in my play if I have slept and eaten well and am not tired.
Its really obvious but has nothing to do with actual in-game stuff so many people don't think about it at all. Sometimes its more beneficial to your play to go have a decent meal and make sure you've gotten your 8 hrs of sleep rather than staying up to watch korean streams and massing games to the point where you realize you haven't eaten in 8 hours lol.
For me I just figured this out a few days ago (i'm zerg)... and it's been working wonders... Against any player 1k~ in rating I have trouble keeping up with very aggressive builds especially against players who know how to spend their minerals.
As zerg usually you would find good times to power up super hard on drones, and then change your production to pure army units- I think quite a few players do that. So yeah FE, drone up hard, scout out w/e and start making your all-star unit composition. Against players who aggressively 4gate in a non-all-inish way, or Terrans who chug out cheap units and keep sending them to you within that timing window where you just don't have the "right" units, you will automatically lose no matter how long you can try to outlast the guy.
What I found, which I think is stupidly obvious and makes me want to slam my head into my keyboard- is to just make drones while you make units, with one exception... BE REALLY GOOD ABOUT IT lol! So after doing this, I crush every aggressive 1k+ player, to make sure I was right about doing it, I experimented by doing in one game and not doing it in the other. And it works, I'll probably be sailing myself to 1500 before I run into my next wall of frustration, go on a 8+ games losing streak, rage on TL, and get banned again. =P Ah yes, the woes of a zerg player.
not too sure if it improved it at ton, but i found out a few days ago that as playing random, you can find out which race you're going to get into the game during the loading screen by looking at your mouse cursor, it changes depending on what race you are and it's always 100% correct :D
On September 22 2010 05:06 some_noob wrote: In scrap station, you can queue blink stalkers from your base to the island, and from the island to the enemy's base. (you prolly need vision)
That's brilliant! I didn't realize this.
For me i was a really basic thing. I went through my first 10-15 ladder matches building around 20 probes/drones/scvs and then quitting. I started watching Day[9]'s dailies and I gotta tell you, pumping up the economy explained so much - mostly how my 40-food army would get stompe by something 2x that size, and how they'd do it. :p
You can target fire with static defense: cannons, spine, spore, bunkers
If you burrow a bunch of units and use one unit as bait, the splash that hits your unit hits burrowed units too. doesn't make a lot of sense imo but had a friend who burrowed 20 hydras and had 3 roaches on top of it. hellion splash pwned those hydras lol
banelings that explode do dmg regardless of whether they were attacking your units or if your units killed the baneling. ergo if you think your dark templar can go around sniping banelings you're sorely mistaken
The fact that you dont need to unburrow banelings to blow them up. It did blow my mind. I always thought I had to unborrow and then attack move. I feel so sneaky when i have 10 burrowed banelings in a control group and I get to bait the bioball into it with some lings or whatever.. wait until they're above the banelings and then just press X. It's the greatest feeling ever.
Shift-queueing both patrol and move commands. It means that my scouting is a lot easier to do nowadays, because I don't have to waste half my time telling my SCV to move anymore.
Took me a while to get used to it though, even though I played BW to a worse-than-village standard back before beta.
My zerg 14 gas 13 pool build order had a flaw in that I always kept three drones at gas so that i always had like 300 gas in the bank when toss came and killed me with 7 zealots. Once i started taking two drones of gas i found myself with just enough gas to get lair in a timely fashion but with lots of minerals for droning and expanding.
Those two drones made a surprisingly big impact on my early game.
What I've learned: Select a unit and right click on another of your own unit to make it follow that unit.
Background I used to hotkey units with same speed on same hotkey so that i can micro and make for example zealots go in front of stalkers. If i had them in same control group stalkers would get faster to the target and zealots slacking behind.
Now i just make stalkers follow zealots and just move my zealots which gives better army positioning.
You can even A-move only the zealots and the stalkers will also A-move by just the "follow trick".
If your worker is stuck (getting attacked from another worker early game) and you cannot get away. Click on the nearest mineral patch and the worker will simply go threw the attacking worker and live.
Obv does not work for zealots etc, since they cannot mine so they dont "phase out" when they try to go to mine minerals.
On September 22 2010 06:02 Ghad wrote: My zerg 14 gas 13 pool build order had a flaw in that I always kept three drones at gas so that i always had like 300 gas in the bank when toss came and killed me with 7 zealots. Once i started taking two drones of gas i found myself with just enough gas to get lair in a timely fashion but with lots of minerals for droning and expanding.
Those two drones made a surprisingly big impact on my early game.
Taking drones off gas has helped blocking 4 warpgate for me as well as transition into mass ling-dimaga style.
Amazing stuff.
Also pretty much using infestors in every matchup.
On September 22 2010 05:24 YunhOLee wrote: not too sure if it improved it at ton, but i found out a few days ago that as playing random, you can find out which race you're going to get into the game during the loading screen by looking at your mouse cursor, it changes depending on what race you are and it's always 100% correct :D
There's a cursor during the loading screen? I've never gotten that and I always complained how Blizzard needs to implement it.
The unit selection cap is unlimited, not just 24 units. Took me a while to figure out that you could tab through if you had more than 24 selected. I watched a replay of some z controlling like a 100 lings at once and was like whattttt.
On September 21 2010 23:23 hEndO wrote: as Zerg i just learned that once you have 1 lair but 2 hatches you can get Overlord speed on one and Overlord drop on the other. I always thought i could only research them at the Lair. =/
took me awhile to recgonize this change from BW as well
whoa really? I don't play z much but that is crazy.
On September 21 2010 23:23 hEndO wrote: as Zerg i just learned that once you have 1 lair but 2 hatches you can get Overlord speed on one and Overlord drop on the other. I always thought i could only research them at the Lair. =/
omg I just learned this by reading your post bahahaha! That's awesome!
what i recently learned which is really really helpful is that if you press (for example) d ( d is hotkey for drop) on your medivac it will start dropping units while you control the medivac to move everywhere
Zerg: Corruption (Corruptor special ability, of course) can be cast on ground units. Very handy against high hp ground units (thor, ultralisk,etc.)
Protoss: a low attention/quick way to expand to resource nodes blocked by rocks ~ use a pylon/photon cannon to destroy the rocks, while you manage your army and do other things. With proper placement, it'll also provide defenses as your nexus warps in.
Terran: seems a lot of my opponents forget that I don't need to get air units to get into their base even if they've blocked their choke. Fly in a few barracks and land them in a tucked-away corner. Even if your opponent finds them, it's easy to just lift off and make your army elsewhere.
EMP uncovers cloacked units for a moment. With the help of it, you can hunt observers.
9 overlord is more efficient than 10 overlord in most standard bos.
It's possible to turn flyer helper always on in the options. Henceforth, every unit will graphically be supported by a marker, which shows their exact position above ground.
It is possible to spot if mineral fields are being mined, by scouting in a range of them which not already uncovers the mineral field itself. You can already see some flashes. But you still have to be quite near.
Massive units like the thor, ultralisk and colossus break force fields, but it doesn't work with hallucinated colossi.
Shift patrol is generally possible and allows workers to change their direction without hesitating. If the starting and end point of the patrol command are the same, the unit will run in circles.
Blink works despite fungal growth being cast upon the stalkers.
Destructible rocks have an armor of 3, which makes it almost impossible for Zerg to kill them with queens and zerglings.
A thor needs eleven shots to shoot down a void ray. Don't run with a void ray from a thor, no matter, how many scvs are repairing them!
When tanks are unsieging, the player can already queue up move commands and a siege command and vice versa.
strg+alt+f will let the camera follow (a) unit(s).
Shift + # to add units to a group instead of selecting a group and shift selecting then Ctrl + # to reassigning all to the group is much faster way of reinforcing.
On September 22 2010 19:39 kickinhead wrote: One thing that has greatly improved my success on the Ladder was to acknowledge how bad Zerg is and switching to another race...
same here: by switching form Z to T for a week, I realized, you don't need 50 apm or a gameplan to play Diamond Terran.
* You can neural parasite a mothership and use it to vortex your enemy units while focus firing the mothership.
I dont know if this is obvious, but yesterday in a really long game against a zerg, I finally teched up to Carriers+ mothership to break the deadlock....and got RAPED. The zerg just got 1 infestor along with his hydra army and just NPed my mothership and vortexed my entire carrier + zealot + stalker force...and then focus fired the mohership. 400 minerals/gas down the drain, and I lost the game right there. I was sooooo pissed when this happened.
On September 22 2010 20:03 inTheMood wrote: I've just noticed how good +1 lings are.
Seriously, it has totally changed my zvp!
Kinda similiar story, after watching TLO on GSL I realized how epic fast upgrades are, ok its like 5-6 units less but in an actual fight it makes SO much of a difference. I was rather like many other (even obviously korean) players that I tended to go +1 (+2 for collosi eventually), perhaps in a long game +1 armor and then totally forget about upgrades.
It doesn't cost much, it doesnt take any space in the production cue, most of the time I can afford a forge anyway (later also a 2nd) and it suddenly makes my units feel so much stronger (especially Stalkers and Guardian Shields for instance, soo good).
I realized how good feedback is in TvP against Mass Medivacs over a bioball. I used to psi storm a lot which is ok if there are only a few medivac. However, if there are more it's really nice to feedback some and then storm the rest. If there are 2 many medivacs they simply will heal all units (which run away from storm anyways) and it's like wasting a storm for almost nothing. Draining medivacs will in principle have a similar effect like psi storm only longer lasting. And feedback is also great against medivac drops, so leaving 1-2 HTs in every base will work wonders.
On September 22 2010 04:32 Demarini wrote: I learned that when Terran can mass a bioball and 1 a into a well microd army they have a good chance unless the opposing player is on two bases, so I play League of Legends now.
On September 22 2010 19:39 kickinhead wrote: One thing that has greatly improved my success on the Ladder was to acknowledge how bad Zerg is and switching to another race...
same here: by switching form Z to T for a week, I realized, you don't need 50 apm or a gameplan to play Diamond Terran.
On September 22 2010 00:04 TheFinalWord wrote: You can hold down a hotkey instead of spamming it.
the point of spamming is to maintain high apm so that you are "on the go" and to warm up your hands. Holding down a key doesnt really help anything.
@ OP, i hate to shit all over your parade but 900 is pretty low diamond, or low-middle
What does this thread have to do with being in Diamond? Seriously, retards like you want to turn everything into an e-peen measuring contest.
On-topic - Learning stutter step micro / attack animation cancelling helped me to win a lot of micro wars, especially allowing me to get into good positions much faster and not wasting dps time by simply a + moving.
On September 22 2010 00:01 ChaosWielder wrote: I learned how to shift queue Stalker blink. Needless to say, I have a new build under my belt.
What does this do? What is the point?
If you select like 20 stalkers and have them blink up a cliff, some of them will overflow and might not make it up the cliff, instead go to the side or something. Whereas if you move command them to below the cliff, and issue the blink command (while still holding shift) they'll each make it to that point one or two at a time and blink up the cliff (also issuing a move command away from the ledge in the queue is a good idea as well)
I dunno if anyone mentioned it before but.. If you have 2 OC in a group, they will produce 1 scv each if you press 'S' twice. Likewise with 2 CC, but if you have 1 OC and 1 CC grouped, then the OC will queue scvs instead of having one building in the CC.
Thanks for reopening, this thread isn't like a "post your shit thread" because people actually read every post and learn stuff before posting their own things.
Might be obvious but you can que up things like going into siege mode right when the tank arrives at the location or for toss move unload, power mode. Freeing up a few moments to make a perfect two pronged attack.
edit: because i didn't see it in here rotating view to nuke behind buildings, hence outside of the view of the person you are nuking, they wont be able to see where you are nuking unless they turn their camera.
On September 21 2010 23:23 hEndO wrote: as Zerg i just learned that once you have 1 lair but 2 hatches you can get Overlord speed on one and Overlord drop on the other. I always thought i could only research them at the Lair. =/
HAHAHAHAA thakn you, never thought about that. Good to know :D even if i dont often upgrade OL drop.
I just learned with custom maps that making early rax depot etc really gets u behind economy ... Edit: Just learned that ppl generally dont scout proxy rax if u r low level. ..
On September 23 2010 10:43 WithRespect wrote: So much info in this thread!!
Might be obvious but you can que up things like going into siege mode right when the tank arrives at the location or for toss move unload, power mode. Freeing up a few moments to make a perfect two pronged attack.
edit: because i didn't see it in here rotating view to nuke behind buildings, hence outside of the view of the person you are nuking, they wont be able to see where you are nuking unless they turn their camera.
IS THIS SECOND ONE TRUE If it is, that's the most frightening thing I've ever heard. I might have to end up going through on that switch to R, just so I can use this. No joke.
about the stop kiting thing. i dont think its all that good. the units up front might end up idling instead of atacking. i switched back to attack command because of that.
learned that phoenixes while having a bigger range than mutas have deceleration which makes them fly up IN the range of the mutas when you attack-move; if you wanna stay out of muta-range and still get shots off you have to order a simple "move"-command and right-click on the closest muta once you get in range, afterwards move away; changed my PvZ on LT and I'm going to use it on the improved DO as well (which I now happen to kinda like, since the ledges are also gone)
On September 23 2010 11:34 tchan wrote: Cybernetics core don't cost 200 minerals?... Far out I've been waiting for 200 minerals each time. Damn you Starcraft 1.
What seriously? o_o
Creating this thread was a great initiative. Kudos OP!
On September 22 2010 00:06 BigAndrew5000 wrote: When you make a new expo, if you actually take like half your workers from the original one (supposing it's still with 8 mineral patches), then you will make your mineral income rise a lot faster then if you just made new SCVs for that expo, instead of transferring half of them...
And mules give you around 300 minerals, basically for free. So this is what the scan costs - 300 minerals, or 2 1000 hp barracks you could build to fly over and survey your opponent's base.
Flawed logic there friend... Mules don't cost minerals, you still have the minerals even if you don't use a mule, they just come in slower.
supossing you have 8 workers and I have the same 8...
and since we are playing the same game whereas is going to end at the same time, if I've used a mule i'll gonna have 300 more minerals than you... you are thinking like a long-term payment whereas you gonna be paid sooner or later... but on starcraft the income depends only on time no on the amount...
On September 23 2010 12:42 Mindspider wrote: Just recently learned that creep tumors can actually spawn more creep tumors. My god, that was a great day.
Was going to say the same thing. When the game came out I was getting like 5 extra queens because that seemed like the only way I could spread as much creep as what I'd seen the pros do (had only seen the game casted, hadn't watched any replays to see what they were actually doing).
I learned a few cool things, most of them purely by accident.
1. You can set rally points directly onto your other units in a control group. Meaning that u dont have to scroll to your buildings to select them.
2. You can use mules for more than just mining. In tvt when your enemy its turtling up you can use his tanks against him. Just scan, drop a mule right next to anything in the tanks range but out of any other units. For example drop scan and drop a mule at the outside of his wall choke to make his tanks auto fire at the blocking buildings. The splash damage will damage severely everything around it. Depending on how many tanks he has it can cause alot of damage. You sometimes even force him to waste scans thinking there are tanks outside his base when there is nothing there.
You can do the same thing to cause premature detonation with blings. Sure its 300 minerals lost but sometimes its better than losing a large army to them.
3. Using patrol is sometimes better than using attack move especially when harrassing
Hey long time listener first time caller. Great thread btw I will throw in a few things mostly obvious ones as it seems most of the gems have already been posted here previously.
~ If your Zerg each time you make an overlod if you shift add them all to one control group when your lair tech finishes you can select them all and hit the pewp creep hotkey and it can be very handy
~ If you have zealot charge you can manually use it to charge your own stuff, this can be handy if you are retreating from a battle and have some z's lagging behind and you don't want them to die or take extra damage from scary things chasing them.
~ I'll mention the magic box trick for using mutalisks to fight thors this is ultimately extremely helpful if the situation presents itself using it perfectly can prevent your mutes from taking any splash damage whatsoever. If you don't know what I'm talking about there is an hdstarcraft video or husky video or somethin on it. I can't post the link from my phone so maybe someone can add that later.
~ Another mute trick is attacking your own units to have the bounced waves hit invisible units. For example you have a DT partying in your mineral line and you figure your gonna lose those drones anyway you can mob the invis DT and start owning your drones and he will start eating bounces. (can someone confirm this I might just be making crap up)
~ Something simple that if I remember to do that helps alot is hotkeying my proxy pylon so when the heat is on I don't need to waste time clicking on the mini map or scrolling to start reinforcing my army via warpgates.
All of these can be found in other discussions I'm sure but I thought I would share them here as well for the sake of getting them out to more people.
I suppose this was obvious in hindsight, but I just found out you can tab between the burrow and unburrow commands if you have selected a mixture of burrowed and unburrowed units. Since both commands share the same hotkey, this makes it easier if you want to unburrow all of your units as you wont be required to select only those units that are currently burrowed. You can just press TAB + R instead, which is very handy to know if you're doing some cute burrow micro.
Haven't made it through all the posts, but something I just recently learned was that you could shift queue your rally points, allowing your troops to take a path around a fortified area when they and are runing to reinforce, instead of taking a direct path there which may be fortified.
Creep tumor spreading used to take me forever until I found out: - 4 tumors right next to one another (or even just two) spread creep way quicker than one. - you can ctrl-click a tumor to grab the whole pack and then shift-spam spawn creep tumor to spread them to the next spot really quickly. - adjusting your mental checklist to do spread creep after each round of queen injects makes it way easier to remember.
On September 24 2010 15:44 numLoCK wrote: Roach Warren doesn't cost gas o.O I always thought it was like the BW hydralisk den.
Lol I also just recently learnt this.
ALSO, you can figure out how long something has left to build by dragging the mouse over the status bar. This helps so much with me working out the timing of everything =D
-You can add eggs as zerg to your control group. So for example, your mutas are on 4, you create let say 5 more, you Ctrl clic on the eggs ( to deselect the larva that are not used ) then press Shit+4. So when they'll pop out they will be already in your control group.
-Also, when you make an overloard, i find it useful to think about his placement right away. So usually ( considering my hatches are on 1 ) i go for : 1,s,v then right clic on a good spot. So you don't have to get back to him then. I will definitely add that kelstar tips ( right above ) and add them in one control group, so all my ovi will spread creep when i reach T2.
Edit : Ho and another one that i used when i played Terran :
-When you want your rally point to follow your army, it can be annoying cause if the unit with the rally point die your reinforcement will go at the spot where it happened. So just Shift right clic on several units of you army, so when one will die, they will go for the next one. My English is bad, hope it's understandable. :/
That holding down a key with multiple larva queues them up really fast.
On the downside, the speed which it does this is directly related to your computer speed, so for me it starts giving me a disadvantage around mid/late game
That when casting Fungal Growth on flying units, you need to target not a unit itself but a flier helper. I didn't know this thing before and I missed ton of FG because of this.
On September 21 2010 23:28 teh_longinator wrote: That you can hotkey a nydus canal, and have more than one exit per entrance :s
Did you know you can make an exit at each hatchery, and rally your units to the worm?
It's good for bases far away to let you quickly unload the units it makes near the rest of your army.
Haha yeah, I found out that point in the same game. I meant to set my rally point CLOSE to the entrance, and ended up mis-clicking and setting my rally point in there.
On September 21 2010 23:28 teh_longinator wrote: That you can hotkey a nydus canal, and have more than one exit per entrance :s
something that took me a while to learn to, useful on certain maps LT/Desert Oasis, can work on kulas ravine as well, but haven't tried it there yet!
I tried it on Kulas Ravine (2nd/3rd time using them. I made one at every expansion, since the 'Toss I was against decided he'd contain my base with cannons -_-.
On September 22 2010 03:05 some_noob wrote: When warping units as protoss, you can [hold unit hotkey] + click click click instead of hotkey+ click, hotkey+ click, hotkey+ click,
*mind assplodes*
This would work so much better than me always scrambling to hit the shift button after selecting my unit of choice. I must try this.
And yes, I fail at keyborading in the sense that I can't just leave my hand there without any attention so every button that I can avoid having to press is a big advantage for me =o.
On September 23 2010 10:43 WithRespect wrote: edit: because i didn't see it in here rotating view to nuke behind buildings, hence outside of the view of the person you are nuking, they wont be able to see where you are nuking unless they turn their camera.
I tried this out today and popped a nuke down with rotation behind several terran buildings. The dot shines through the building itself so unfortunately you can't hide them. I'm going to have to look into zerg/toss buildings as well as natural terrain but so far, doesn't look good.
Found out last night in a team game that you can mine out of a teammate's gas geiser even if their refiner/extractor/assimilator isn't the same race as you. I ended up taking his old expo that got taken out and rather than build my own extractors used his refineries. Was kind of funny seeing drones return oil barrels rather than gas globules though.
Didnt realize Nydus Worm could spawn anywhere, thought it had to be on creep. I would fly an Overlord to the spot I wanted it and generate creep. But Im only in Bronze.
I am a diamond Zerg now but back when i was rank ONE in my plat division I found out you can spread creep tumors with your last creep tumor I had been using an extra queen and 25 energy every time up till then HAHA!
Blistering Sands, you can use your first ovie to go directly behind the mineral lines against T. There is enough space where a marine does not have enough range to hit the ovie and the timing works out where only 1 marine is out as you are making it past the opponents CC.
You can use the minimap to chrono boost. If you have all your nexii on 1 hotkey and want to chrono probes it's easy to tell which is the nexus because they will be a slightly brighter green (because they're selected).
This is theorycrafting but if toss uses FF to cut zerg balls in half and doesn't have an observer you can just burrow and wait for the FF to go away.
On September 24 2010 23:20 GaussWaffle wrote: That holding down a key with multiple larva queues them up really fast.
On the downside, the speed which it does this is directly related to your computer speed, so for me it starts giving me a disadvantage around mid/late game
It is actually a system setting, in windows you can just go to keyboard settings and set the "repeat rate" down, så that you can keep up, and stop in time...
O SHIT? cybercore is 150 min? .... no wonder sometimes it would build when i had like 190.... i NEVER thought to look at building cost... WOW.... i knew the gas but CYBERCOREEEE
this will change things.... holy shiet.... im just speechless... gaping mouth lol.... wow....
On September 22 2010 04:22 Day[9] wrote: Kind of a complicated one, but still really useful!
The background info: If a work has money in his hand, pressing "C" (return cargo) causes the worker to return the cargo and then go back to collecting resources. This is useful if you select a worker to go build something, but it's holding some money, you press "C" and once he returns, you tell him to move towards building again.
The cool thing: Suppose a worker is mining minerals and you want him to go mine gas. Suppose the worker is holding minerals too (ie on a return trip!). If you tell him to mine gas, then you press the "C" button, he'll return the minerals AND THEN GO MINE GAS ZOMG. It's pretty impressively awesome subtlety that makes it SO MUCH EASIER to send guys into gas in mid game. woowoo.
when sending banelings to kill a PF, group them with 2-4 zerglings. When you move in for the kill, the zerglings will arrive first (since they're faster) and draw the fire from the PF. This lets your baneling ball reach the PF without any casualties.
Also, when you do this, detonate your banelings on the side next to the mineral line, so that you kill workers too.
It's not totally obvious, but it has helped my ZvT vs PFs.
I always created control groups with shift - so if I accidentally hit the wrong number when adding to or creating a new group, I messed up my control group for the rest of the game. That is until I found out about alt.
hallucinated phoenixes soak up energy of the PDD even when detected from the raven
since I found this out I'm trying to incorporate hallucination vs marine/banshee/raven timing-pushes and try to hallucinate 2-3 phoenixes right before the push arrives
On September 22 2010 02:40 Jaeger wrote: You can quickly create a forcefield wall by selecting your sentry group and holding f while spamming click.
Bunkers add +1 range to units.
Anyone have any tips for dealing with mass repair planetary fortress in the early midgame without splash as P (i.e. no storm or colossus) shift queuing attack commands on SCVs seems to always kill the first one so quickly that my units retarget the planetary and try to finish killing it before moving onto the next attack queued scv.
Hold shift after you hit f the first time and then you can just spam the forcefields by clicking, you don't have to keep hitting F.
When you are attacking the SCVs, click a to attack, then hold shift while you simply click on each SCV.
If you're transferring workers to a new expansion that already has gas up select all your workers right click the first gas, shift click 3 portraits to deselect them, right click second gas shift click 3 more portraits to deselect them, then right click the remaining workers on a mineral patch.
1300~ (and bad) Z here, just learned that F1 selects idle workers from listening to Artosis's tournament commentating. After hundreds and hundreds of matches.
for plat protoss: W is the hotkey for warpgates...yeah
I used to use 3 just fine and have my army on 4-6 (BW style!) After accidentally hitting W a few times I figured it out. Now I just ignore 3. BW muscle memory for the win!
On September 24 2010 19:33 Super_bricklayer wrote:
-When you want your rally point to follow your army, it can be annoying cause if the unit with the rally point die your reinforcement will go at the spot where it happened. So just Shift right clic on several units of you army, so when one will die, they will go for the next one.
This is a good one thanks.
-Warp prisms can load/unload while in phase more or even moving into or out of phase mode. -When your probe is at exactly 1/4 build time, rally the nexus to a patch that a worker just finished mining from. This times out so the probe gets there right as the other one leaves and does not have to wait or look for a different patch.
I didn't just learn this but I'll post it because it's usefull:
-Workers ignore unit pathing while mining. This means with scouting workers, if you right click on the mineral patch in or out of the enemy base, your worker will go right through the enemy units. This is specifically usefull in ZvP scouting a base with 1 zealot on hold position.
The one thing that improved my sc2 tremendously was listening to Day9's oldschooll broodwar podcast about winning with an advantage. It really puts things in perspective and it made me almost instantaneously understand how to respond after i've won or lost a battle. My games tend to be longer because id rather control the map than push in for the win. I rarely push for the win in any game and most of the GG's come because im controlling the map and they are mined out. I like the idea of winning fight after fight in a match and creating a bigger gap in my advantage over time.
This didn't help me learn anything helpful but it was definitely fun: If you play zerg and mindcontrol protoss and terran, you can chronoboost terran structures xD.
Watching day9's casts... no really, just tons of dumb stuff that i usually do. But mostly, figuring out that i was able to hotkey all of my nexuses into one key to chronoboost -_-
On October 05 2010 03:18 Xenom73 wrote: I always created control groups with shift - so if I accidentally hit the wrong number when adding to or creating a new group, I messed up my control group for the rest of the game. That is until I found out about alt.
If you destroy the pylon where someone is warping in wg units the units are automatically cancelled (with 75% resources returned) and their production cycle is wasted.
On October 06 2010 00:53 Malinor wrote: That each creep tumor can throw down an additional creep tumor.
Finally made me figure out how some guys can spread this creep so damn well. Though my Queens are lazy now.
I was shocked as well. I was watching decembers stream after playing zerg a whole month and going "how are all those creep tumors popping up with no queen??!?! Hax.
On October 06 2010 04:06 Kikuichimonji wrote: If you destroy the pylon where someone is warping in wg units the units are automatically cancelled (with 75% resources returned) and their production cycle is wasted.
No, it cancels the units but it also ends the warpgate's cooldown. I'm fairly sure it also returns 100% of the cost rather than 75%, but I'm not entirely certain.
On October 05 2010 03:18 Xenom73 wrote: I always created control groups with shift - so if I accidentally hit the wrong number when adding to or creating a new group, I messed up my control group for the rest of the game. That is until I found out about alt.
What did you find out about alt?
I have this problem all the time, what does alt do?
People almost never use the corruptor's spell. You can feedback corrupters, which have 200 max energy and 200 health, to one-shot them a lot of the time.
playing 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 and you get a dropped player immediately, you need to rush with the extra income you get to even the odds. wait too long and its GG.
That there isn't a cap of seven larvae on hatcheries. I thought that no more larvae can be made on a hatch that a queen had spawned larvae on and the larvae weren't used.
This is outside of SC directly but... Maintain your health!
The only activity where I notice my recent eating/health habits as much as in SC is off road mountain bike riding. If I'm caffeinated up and low on protein my skill level drops wildly. My mother came into town and cooked me good food that lasted about a week, I jumped something like 300 points up from 1200->1500 diamond Z.
Of course, now that she went back home and I'm back to Ramen and Redbull, i'm back to my normal losing streaks
But yes, it's a bit weird for a video game, but I force myself not to ladder when I'm drunk/stoned/tired/hungry etc. Eat well, maintain your health and keep a good mood and you'll be -amazed- at how much better you play.
This really applies to everything in life, but let's be honest. No one wants to be in peak condition all day long. The couch and the TV have a sacred place in every westerners life
On October 06 2010 04:06 Kikuichimonji wrote: If you destroy the pylon where someone is warping in wg units the units are automatically cancelled (with 75% resources returned) and their production cycle is wasted.
No, it cancels the units but it also ends the warpgate's cooldown. I'm fairly sure it also returns 100% of the cost rather than 75%, but I'm not entirely certain.
On October 06 2010 12:10 instantdry wrote: If you borrow a roach and double tap unborrow at a cliff, it will go up or down the cliff.
Mind=Blown........
2 creep tumors are the most efficient number for spreading creep, more than that and your increase is nominal.
1 spine crawler, 1 queen and 4-8 lings will hold off almost all 2 gate pushes.
Zergling +1 atk reduces "hits to kill" on marauders by 7.
The longer a map is the better fast expanding is (this may seem obvious but may help zergs realize why they are losing more on smaller maps).
Here's an important one- 5 RR is flat out beat by 2 stargate VR (Like everytime I have ever gotten into that situation). The zerg push starts out very effective but won't be able to kill the toss opponent completely before the vr's pop up and then it takes about 90 secs to get proper AA to deal with the VR's.
Hydras have 80 hp which is equal to the notoriously weak sentry (40H and 40S).
2 base w/ 2 queens is outpaced by 3x reactor rax 2x rauder rax (which is 950 mins to zerg 900 spent). While this logic is flawed, it shows that 2 base T>>>> 2 base zerg and zerg expanding is dangerous because of lack of wall ins that other races have. fully populating the rax would take 1050min and 75g per minute. To go along w/ this rant mules are about as effective as 4x workers and the time on 50 energy is approx the same as the lifetime of mules (95 secs).
Hatcheries make 3x larvae in the time that vomit larvae gives you 4. Because of this I have been testing delaying queen production and 2 dudes off gas to get a quicker hatch (and making queens after the hatch is down).
I remember when I worked out that queens could be used to spawn extra larvae on a hatchery... I was like WOAH! I have potential to produce soo many more units. I never played BW and this was pretty early on. I remember calling up a friend who's in diamond and told him about my amazing discovery, you can imagine his reaction.
I play T but decide to try Z since it seems really interesting, so i play and get surprise on how easy was to drone, and actually over did it, when my oponente when to atack i had like 10lings, 5 roaches and 4 hydras vs a colosi, 2 inmortals, 5 stalkers and a shit loat of zealots... Of course i add like 4 spineCrawlers and get more units asap, i losse my natural but had so many drones on my many(save most of the natural drones before it went down that after i fend of the atack at my main with the queens and the new units i was able to put my natural, a hatch on my main and saturate the natural just at it finish, Make units hard and rape the P...
I learn i must no drone whore to hard, but if i manage to save the drones after i losse a hatch i can still come back XD
On September 22 2010 00:04 TheFinalWord wrote: You can hold down a hotkey instead of spamming it.
Wait... what? :O
I'm 1200 diamond Zerg and I didn't know this :D
I use this all the time to spawn drone 11 and 12. If you 9OL you will have a bit more than 100 minerals when the overlord pops. So if you hold down the button when the overlord is about to spawn, you'll have great timing. One trick I learned here is to turn up your repeat if you use the "hold-down" thing a lot.
On September 22 2010 00:04 TheFinalWord wrote: You can hold down a hotkey instead of spamming it.
Wait... what? :O
I'm 1200 diamond Zerg and I didn't know this :D
I use this all the time to spawn drone 11 and 12. If you 9OL you will have a bit more than 100 minerals when the overlord pops. So if you hold down the button when the overlord is about to spawn, you'll have great timing. One trick I learned here is to turn up your repeat if you use the "hold-down" thing a lot.
On October 06 2010 12:10 instantdry wrote: If you borrow a roach and double tap unborrow at a cliff, it will go up or down the cliff.
Can you explain this some more?
i can't get it to work
That's because I don't think it actually works...
That's interesting, does holding the hotkey down pre-having enough minerals queue it as soon as you do? I've never actually done that I've just usually spammed the hotkey near to having enough minerals..
On September 22 2010 03:07 monx wrote: shift + "control group number" to add units to a particular group instead of remaking the whole group each time. Learned that at end of beta -_-
holy shit i can't believe i didn't know this. glad i read this thread now
On September 22 2010 00:04 TheFinalWord wrote: You can hold down a hotkey instead of spamming it.
Wait... what? :O
I'm 1200 diamond Zerg and I didn't know this :D
I use this all the time to spawn drone 11 and 12. If you 9OL you will have a bit more than 100 minerals when the overlord pops. So if you hold down the button when the overlord is about to spawn, you'll have great timing. One trick I learned here is to turn up your repeat if you use the "hold-down" thing a lot.
On October 06 2010 16:21 Fyro wrote:
On October 06 2010 12:10 instantdry wrote: If you borrow a roach and double tap unborrow at a cliff, it will go up or down the cliff.
Can you explain this some more?
i can't get it to work
That's because I don't think it actually works...
That's interesting, does holding the hotkey down pre-having enough minerals queue it as soon as you do? I've never actually done that I've just usually spammed the hotkey near to having enough minerals..
Yes, it does. You keep hearing the "Not enough mineralzzzzzzz" a few times but when the larvae pop, drones are immediately built. Don't know if and how much faster it is than spamming. Would depend on your apm I guess.
On October 06 2010 07:00 erulabs wrote: This is outside of SC directly but... Maintain your health!
The only activity where I notice my recent eating/health habits as much as in SC is off road mountain bike riding. If I'm caffeinated up and low on protein my skill level drops wildly. My mother came into town and cooked me good food that lasted about a week, I jumped something like 300 points up from 1200->1500 diamond Z.
Of course, now that she went back home and I'm back to Ramen and Redbull, i'm back to my normal losing streaks
But yes, it's a bit weird for a video game, but I force myself not to ladder when I'm drunk/stoned/tired/hungry etc. Eat well, maintain your health and keep a good mood and you'll be -amazed- at how much better you play.
This really applies to everything in life, but let's be honest. No one wants to be in peak condition all day long. The couch and the TV have a sacred place in every westerners life
A poor diet will typically impair cognitive function.
Try adding in more meat into your ramen or something
I dont know if this has been posted before but you can CTRL CLICK the TOP LEFT icon of your production cycle to select these units. Somehow helped me when 24 Zerglings hatched.
Zergling + Baneling easy micro: 1. Put them in one group. 2. Identify target, and issue a move command BEHIND it. 3. Once your speedlings have moved past the target, a-move for the win.
This works because your speedlings are faster than the banelings. The banelings get dragged behind like a deadly kite, while the speedlings soak up fire and form a wall behind your target. Clearing out a mineral line can be hilarious: you run the speedlings to the far entrance, he panics and moves all the harvesters out the other entrance... into the banelings.
On the second to last mission of the campaign on normal a friend was having a go at it and he showed me a magical feature. You could press V to open the advanced buildings tab and get factories and starports and all those other amazing things. I felt a little bit silly afterwards and suddenly realised why the campaign was a bit more difficult than it should be.
On October 06 2010 07:00 erulabs wrote: This is outside of SC directly but... Maintain your health!
The only activity where I notice my recent eating/health habits as much as in SC is off road mountain bike riding. If I'm caffeinated up and low on protein my skill level drops wildly. My mother came into town and cooked me good food that lasted about a week, I jumped something like 300 points up from 1200->1500 diamond Z.
Of course, now that she went back home and I'm back to Ramen and Redbull, i'm back to my normal losing streaks
But yes, it's a bit weird for a video game, but I force myself not to ladder when I'm drunk/stoned/tired/hungry etc. Eat well, maintain your health and keep a good mood and you'll be -amazed- at how much better you play.
This really applies to everything in life, but let's be honest. No one wants to be in peak condition all day long. The couch and the TV have a sacred place in every westerners life
A poor diet will typically impair cognitive function.
Try adding in more meat into your ramen or something
To tie into this, I've noticed a general trend. I spend the first half of my day pretty hungry because I generally do class work/go to class/study before about 4pm. After then, I'll come back and play a game or two before dinner (usually my first proper meal). I WILL LOSE THESE GAMES. Then after dinner I go 4/0.
The moral, EAT BEFORE YOU PLAY. If you're starving, you'll play badly.
On October 07 2010 07:14 nanoscorp wrote: Zergling + Baneling easy micro: 1. Put them in one group. 2. Identify target, and issue a move command BEHIND it. 3. Once your speedlings have moved past the target, a-move for the win.
This works because your speedlings are faster than the banelings. The banelings get dragged behind like a deadly kite, while the speedlings soak up fire and form a wall behind your target. Clearing out a mineral line can be hilarious: you run the speedlings to the far entrance, he panics and moves all the harvesters out the other entrance... into the banelings.
You can almost non-stop chrono boost probes out of 1 nexus minus a few seconds delay here or there. This is unreal for fast expansions. You just need to chrono the nex and nothing else.
One more thing I forgot to mention - splash damage takes weapon/armour types into consideration.
If a marine and a marauder are standing right ontop of eachother, and a tank attacks one, the marauder will invariably be hit for (99% of) the full 50 damage, from the tank's 35+15, whereas the marine will take his 35, no matter which one is targeted.
On September 25 2010 02:17 Alpina wrote: That when casting Fungal Growth on flying units, you need to target not a unit itself but a flier helper. I didn't know this thing before and I missed ton of FG because of this.
Is this the same with corrupt? I have the feeling this might explain why I did hit a few times in some games
no,corrupt is no aoe spell and you can just click on the unit to apply it, while fg and storm only hit in their dedicated aoe on the ground(means the flyer helper has to be inside the ground aoe, not the unit itself)
That sacrificing units can be beneficial. I used to get raped by banelings, until i realised that you could feed individual units to them as you retreat.
If you are spreading your creep and the new tumor is under attack, you can cancel it (by pressing escape) and you stil can spread the creap elsewhere/later. You just saved your creephighway. Very useful early game ZvT.
On September 25 2010 02:17 Alpina wrote: That when casting Fungal Growth on flying units, you need to target not a unit itself but a flier helper. I didn't know this thing before and I missed ton of FG because of this.
Is this the same with corrupt? I have the feeling this might explain why I did hit a few times in some games
Actually if you turn on the flying target help you can click on the unit itself too (for any spell). It automatically moves your target to where the flying unit really is.
On September 21 2010 23:23 hEndO wrote: as Zerg i just learned that once you have 1 lair but 2 hatches you can get Overlord speed on one and Overlord drop on the other. I always thought i could only research them at the Lair. =/
Oh shit seriously? I was used to back in the day BW when you have to have multi layer to multi research.
Is that Roach thing real? Someone please comment, that is the most interesting thing I have read here in a while
EDIT: I forgot my contribution: If you want to preform a concave, it is easiest to do it by moving your troops in a line to a certain direction, then hitting stop. When they stop they will all be in one giant line that should be at a right angle to where your opponent will come from.
EDIT: If you are under attack at your mineral line by lings or zealots early on, and have fewer units to defend, grab all of your probes and select attack, then mine, then attack, then mine, with a few game seconds in between each command. What you are doing is changing their priorities so that unless your opponent has queued attacked every single one of your workers, their attacking units will face your probes, then switch to your units, then to the probes, then to your units, effectively making them only hit your actual attackers about half the time. You can also trap units between the probes because they will ignore pathing to mine, then attack, then ignore pathing, then attack.
On October 06 2010 04:36 disflipgotsgame wrote: playing 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 and you get a dropped player immediately, you need to rush with the extra income you get to even the odds. wait too long and its GG.
I am a bronze leauge dude ~420.
If I see some one on the opposite team drop in a 3v3 or 4v4. I immediately 6 pool, 6 rax reaper or cannon rush with fast double warp gate support..... Wait I 8 pool, 6 rax reaper or cannon rush in every 3v3 or 4v4 game when nobody drops...
I learned that building multiple unit producing structures isn't considered cheating.
The Unload All button can be set to autocast. Its not so good for dropships, but amazing for a single point in a nydus network.
A clever zerg can rally ground troops from hatch to nydus, and provide those units instant travel to any expansion or (with 20 in-game seconds of foresight) any battle location.
Edit: Doesn't work anymore. No idea when it was changed though.
On October 08 2010 05:21 WooFreakinHoo wrote: The Unload All button can be set to autocast. Its not so good for dropships, but amazing for a single point in a nydus network.
A clever zerg can rally ground troops from hatch to nydus, and provide those units instant travel to any expansion or (with 20 in-game seconds of foresight) any battle location.
You sir, are a mean genius. I would really love a function like that. It would make dropping stuff and using nydus so much easier.
But you are mean since it doesn't work And now I cry :...(
On October 07 2010 22:10 Metaspace wrote: Also:
You can Ctrl+right click to issue an A-move (instead of going A+left click)
Hard to adapt after years of BW...
This is also not working for me. Maybe it depends on your control scheme or maybe you are wrong
On October 08 2010 05:21 WooFreakinHoo wrote: The Unload All button can be set to autocast. Its not so good for dropships, but amazing for a single point in a nydus network.
A clever zerg can rally ground troops from hatch to nydus, and provide those units instant travel to any expansion or (with 20 in-game seconds of foresight) any battle location.
On October 08 2010 05:21 WooFreakinHoo wrote: The Unload All button can be set to autocast. Its not so good for dropships, but amazing for a single point in a nydus network.
A clever zerg can rally ground troops from hatch to nydus, and provide those units instant travel to any expansion or (with 20 in-game seconds of foresight) any battle location.
You sir, are a mean genius. I would really love a function like that. It would make dropping stuff and using nydus so much easier.
But you are mean since it doesn't work And now I cry :...(
Used to, I swear. Double checking now
Edit: Wow, cant be used anymore. I play mostly P and as a result never noticed this change.
On October 08 2010 04:26 tehemperorer wrote: Is that Roach thing real? Someone please comment, that is the most interesting thing I have read here in a while
EDIT: I forgot my contribution: If you want to preform a concave, it is easiest to do it by moving your troops in a line to a certain direction, then hitting stop. When they stop they will all be in one giant line that should be at a right angle to where your opponent will come from. EDIT: If you are under attack at your mineral line by lings or zealots early on, and have fewer units to defend, grab all of your probes and select attack, then mine, then attack, then mine, with a few game seconds in between each command. What you are doing is changing their priorities so that unless your opponent has queued attacked every single one of your workers, their attacking units will face your probes, then switch to your units, then to the probes, then to your units, effectively making them only hit your actual attackers about half the time. You can also trap units between the probes because they will ignore pathing to mine, then attack, then ignore pathing, then attack.
Woah, seriously? That's going to help so much! o_o
I just realized last night that scv's are biological and can be healed by medivacs! That makes repairing my planetary fortress even more awesome!
Also realized last night, that repairing cost minerals. I was just letting lings hit my wall while I had 4 scv's repairing and all of a sudden they made it in. I said WTH, and my teammate pointed out that I ran out of minerals. (Good to know!)
Hallucinated collosus walk through force fields like ghosts and real ones break force fields (just like ultras and thors). you can build a pylon next to an elevated surface and once you get vision of it warp units on it Zealots are amazing against pretty much everything on the ground early in the game, except when they get kited by faster ranged units of course
Some things that absolutely amazed me so far - setting interceptors on auto-buy, holding buttons while warping units in
To make an easy creep highway with OL's, select them all, right click where you want the first one, shift click one away, right click where you want the next one, shift click etc.
Much easier than selecting and moving them individually.
I realized I need to cry after seeing all these Diamond people not even reading what's on the screen, and spreading tumors with traveling queens, AA-ing with banshees etc...
But the REAL thing is... you can see burrowed roaches moving! I didn't think that's the case, as burrowed units can't attack unlike cloaked ghosts, banshees, templars, but anyways... was watching a replay if my opponent had a map hack, as he moved on top of my burrowed roaches every single time, without detection nearby.
Turns out there is a very thin, shadow-like spot over every roach (playing on Ultra settings). It moves slowly, but if you are actually looking for it, you can't miss it. Makes a burrow-harass quite hard.
Edit: needs to be tested tough from opponent's pov. Maybe it was just the replay.
Edit: needs to be tested tough from opponent's pov. Maybe it was just the replay.
nope, definitely possible, also on lower quality (there you see a shadow kinda like a black "blob"); really awsome to know if you have teched templar and don't have an observer around because you built your robo late
On October 08 2010 04:26 tehemperorer wrote: Is that Roach thing real? Someone please comment, that is the most interesting thing I have read here in a while
EDIT: I forgot my contribution: If you want to preform a concave, it is easiest to do it by moving your troops in a line to a certain direction, then hitting stop. When they stop they will all be in one giant line that should be at a right angle to where your opponent will come from. EDIT: If you are under attack at your mineral line by lings or zealots early on, and have fewer units to defend, grab all of your probes and select attack, then mine, then attack, then mine, with a few game seconds in between each command. What you are doing is changing their priorities so that unless your opponent has queued attacked every single one of your workers, their attacking units will face your probes, then switch to your units, then to the probes, then to your units, effectively making them only hit your actual attackers about half the time. You can also trap units between the probes because they will ignore pathing to mine, then attack, then ignore pathing, then attack.
Woah, seriously? That's going to help so much! o_o
Shit just got real.
My tip: Hold the S key of your Terran, or E key if your Protoss in the loading screen, then immediately select your CC/Nexus after the game is done loading, your worker should build right when you select.
You can Ctrl+right click to issue an A-move (instead of going A+left click)
Hard to adapt after years of BW...
This is also not working for me. Maybe it depends on your control scheme or maybe you are wrong
I use standard key setup. It is even documented in the key configuration options. Hold Ctrl and right click, with units selected to make them attack-move to the clicked location.
Honestly? I finally learned what 1a2a3a is. I'll have to try Ctrl right click and see how many hands like doing that. Pre building my creep highway while teching up to lair and leaving all my overlords in a control group so i just have to press the 7 or 8 key and boom, instant creep highway to my opponents base.
I learned that you don't have to EMP your banshees in TvP (to prevent one-shotting from HT's feedback ) but smashing decloak and cloak button (which costs 25 mana) is enough to burn the useless energy.
Well, I feel like I wasted a lot of time reading the whole thread because 85% of it is people repeating each other...
On topic:
When chasing a unit that is just out of range of your marauders, don't stim the whole group to chase it down, just stim the front marauder to apply the slow and the rest will catch up. Saves medivac energy.
A lot of these things seem much better for people completely new to StarCraft, as there are a lot of bw techniques popping up:
On October 08 2010 08:25 MonsieurGrimm wrote: To make an easy creep highway with OL's, select them all, right click where you want the first one, shift click one away, right click where you want the next one, shift click etc.
Much easier than selecting and moving them individually.
Just fyi, this is called cloning.
On October 09 2010 00:12 CidO wrote: Honestly? I finally learned what 1a2a3a is. I'll have to try Ctrl right click and see how many hands like doing that.
I don't think my hands would like this... 1, ctrl+right-click, 2, ctrl+right-click. You'd have to release control each time you switch groups, otherwise you'll just override previous control groups and mess up the attack.
Hitting C to return cargo after building something with a probe or sending them to gas will make them return the cargo then proceed with what you told them to do, without the need to queue. I've been using it like mad.
You can Ctrl+right click to issue an A-move (instead of going A+left click)
Hard to adapt after years of BW...
This is also not working for me. Maybe it depends on your control scheme or maybe you are wrong
I use standard key setup. It is even documented in the key configuration options. Hold Ctrl and right click, with units selected to make them attack-move to the clicked location.
They took that out in beta. How is it still working for you?
I'd say that one thing I've started doing as a zerg player is if I am ever supply blocked, I spend the small amount of extra resources that accumulate while supply blocked on some sort of tech building. Even if it is something that I don't need at the moment. The prime example of this is infestation pit. GET ONE EVERY GAME ASAP EVEN IF YOU DON'T PLAN ON USING INFESTORS. This will greatly quicken you ability to go tier 3 so the moment you see the terran player switching you mech you can go hive->ultra.
I see too many zerg players that go muta/ling/bling and never throw down a roach warren or don't tech to hive. Its 150 minerals and I can guarantee you that at some point you are going to wish you had it.
On October 09 2010 05:12 kweer wrote: I'd say that one thing I've started doing as a zerg player is if I am ever supply blocked, I spend the small amount of extra resources that accumulate while supply blocked on some sort of tech building. Even if it is something that I don't need at the moment. The prime example of this is infestation pit. GET ONE EVERY GAME ASAP EVEN IF YOU DON'T PLAN ON USING INFESTORS. This will greatly quicken you ability to go tier 3 so the moment you see the terran player switching you mech you can go hive->ultra.
I see too many zerg players that go muta/ling/bling and never throw down a roach warren or don't tech to hive. Its 150 minerals and I can guarantee you that at some point you are going to wish you had it.
True this, not only can you go hive instantly. as soon as he makes 5 thors you just parasite all of them and his army disappears! happy bday you kweer
I was high Platinum as Zerg before a friend who I played against a lot mentioned creep tumors can spawn more creep tumors. I thought only queens made them and I had queens running all around the map all game long spitting out creep tumors. It blew my mind.
i learned how to read opponents build orders and early game play. now instead of having to guess for the next 10 minutes after my scout died, i can pretty much predict what build/tech path my opponent is going by his opening and unit comp.
On October 09 2010 05:12 kweer wrote: I'd say that one thing I've started doing as a zerg player is if I am ever supply blocked, I spend the small amount of extra resources that accumulate while supply blocked on some sort of tech building. Even if it is something that I don't need at the moment. The prime example of this is infestation pit. GET ONE EVERY GAME ASAP EVEN IF YOU DON'T PLAN ON USING INFESTORS. This will greatly quicken you ability to go tier 3 so the moment you see the terran player switching you mech you can go hive->ultra.
I see too many zerg players that go muta/ling/bling and never throw down a roach warren or don't tech to hive. Its 150 minerals and I can guarantee you that at some point you are going to wish you had it.
True this, not only can you go hive instantly. as soon as he makes 5 thors you just parasite all of them and his army disappears! happy bday you kweer
heh thanks man i'm late for my work happy hour in my honor. Is this website's date off because it is still the 8th of October here in the US.
On September 22 2010 06:16 papaz wrote: What I've learned: Select a unit and right click on another of your own unit to make it follow that unit.
Background I used to hotkey units with same speed on same hotkey so that i can micro and make for example zealots go in front of stalkers. If i had them in same control group stalkers would get faster to the target and zealots slacking behind.
Now i just make stalkers follow zealots and just move my zealots which gives better army positioning.
You can even A-move only the zealots and the stalkers will also A-move by just the "follow trick".
Some very cool things about follow. Say you have a stalker following a zealot:
If the zealot is moving with a move command rather than an attack command, and enemies are nearby, the stalker will keep following rather than attacking as long as the zealot is moving, but as soon as the zealot stops, the stalker will attack anything in range.
If the zealot is on attack-move or attacking an enemy directly, the stalker will attack things within range. Unfortunately, it doesn't focus on the zealot's target, just attacks things in range based on priority.
So, following units try to mimic the leader's behavior.
I learned that Archons are bad in SC2 recently. I was like, "WTF, why is my Archon army dying, it's UNSTOPPABLE!", and then I read about it on TL and was like, "Oh, right."
There's another thread, but learning that you can check the races of the opponents by clicking that icon in the top right has helped a lot in casual team games.
Back to the OP's realization that you can use chrono boost on warp gates to reduce their cool down, if you time it right, you can benefit from it speeding up more than just one cool down cycle. I've warped in Zealots, boost some gates, warped in more Zealots, and I notice that the gates I boosted still finish cooling down a little earlier than the non-boosted gates.
On September 21 2010 23:24 bokeevboke wrote: I still don't know how to drop units from medivac properly.
You can bind all queens to one hotkey. Then select all queens and inject larva to a hach. The closest queen will inject which means the queen which actually guarding the expansion.
There is one huge problem with that tho. If you got good macro and is perfect on your inject timings, the closest queen will have 23/24 energy when inject is done, if you atempt injecting then the closest queen with the highest energy count will make a run for it, and that can be quite far.
Personally I got all hatches on one key(1), and then uses backspace to cycle through the hatcheries and just targets the queen and inject hatch (you can target pretty much anything, the queen takes presedence). Also I got backspace keybound to macro button (G19), but you can keybind it to caps lock or pipe or some other as well.
Not me, but my friend learned that you can move a unit by right clicking. For whatever reason he thought you had to press "m" even though he has seen my friend and I plenty of times.
Something that I have recently found out is that you can shift queue up patrol move. This is especially useful because if you shift queue it so the start point is at the same place as the end point the unit will go around in a triangle/rectangle/whatever shape you made. Super super nice for scouting cause you just shift patrol queue a probe and make a rectangle around his base and he/she/it will continuously move, so you dont have to keep updating the shift normal move.
Someone could confirm this, but I believe any unit immediately put inside a warp prism will instantly start regaining shields without the pause that usually occurs after they exit combat. This is very good for immortals.
After several weeks of hearing about muta "magic boxes" vs thors and only having a vague idea what it was about, I finally looked it up tonight. Doh! I've lost matches for not having researched that earlier...
Delta Quadrant / Tarsonis Assault have spots with "gaps" instead of cliffs allowing Protoss easy access to behind walls... warping-in across the gap very early in the game.
This may sound really dumb, but what exactly do people mean if they talk about shift+queue stalker blink? I mean in what situation and how should it be used? Like in move to certain spot then shift + blink ?
I really dont see it lol .. would be nice if someone could explain this to me hehe thx
basically you can queue up a blink, like you want to jump up a ridge, you can click next to the ridge, then shift-queue blink up the ridge, and then do something else on the other side, attack move maybe.
On September 22 2010 00:00 santoki wrote: dunno if this is obvious! but i learned to drone harder at the beginning of games even against the 4gate and get units last minute. unless of course its super early pressure or 2gate. I guess just knowing when to drone. Always made too many units and got miffed on econ
People keep talking about ctrl right clicking =ing an attack move. I like hotkeying units to 98, so this would be very useful for me. But whenever I try it, it just plain doesn't work. Was it patched out? Do I need to use a different scheme? What?
On October 11 2010 23:51 -_- wrote: People keep talking about ctrl right clicking =ing an attack move. I like hotkeying units to 98, so this would be very useful for me. But whenever I try it, it just plain doesn't work. Was it patched out? Do I need to use a different scheme? What?
I'm like 99% sure that was patched out a long time ago when everyone kept getting pissed about it. I could be wrong however.
i'm not sure if anyone already mentioned it but i just realized that workers can get through units without gettin blocked just by clicking the mineral in direction... of course it's not really that big of a deal and there are not really that much things you can do with that information... but especially against protoss in early stages walling of with buildings and 1 or 2 units it's good to know if you wanna get into the base to scout...
On October 20 2010 15:34 gaizka wrote: Banelings on move command are better than attack command banelings.
why is that?
They won't blow up on anything that is infront (eg; when a terran MMM ball has marauders at the front), and instead die when they go like in the middle of the army due to auto attk by marines
On October 20 2010 15:34 gaizka wrote: Banelings on move command are better than attack command banelings.
why is that?
they can surround the enemy instead of just all exploding into the first one they see.
imagine a scary marine maruader ball vs 6 banelings: Attack Move = 6 banes blowing into the marauder standing in the front, terran still kinda scary Move = 6 banes walking past the marauders and blowing up beside the marines as they die. ball is now less scary.
Scenario: TvT and you and your opponent have tank/marine/marauder. It is lategame with both players having their side of the map with plenty of orbital commands. Your enemy is positioned well and has sieged up his ridiculous amount of siegetanks.
Tip: Having so many orbitals allows you to save up energy for scans/mules more easily. So before you move in for the kill, scan his army and drop some mules into his bioball so his own tanksplash will soften his army quite allot. Or choose to drop some in the tanks to have the same effect. Your push will be quite stronger especially when it is a 200 food vs 200food army battles, every little thing helps.
On October 20 2010 16:38 sniverty wrote: I've been trying to find out how I can drop units from my dropship/overlord while moving, your help would be much appreciated.
I learned from day[9] tv that towers (with detectors) have detect range much bigger that actual attack range. One turret in mineral line is enough to help repeal cloaked banshee.
You can drop units from a moving dropship (or w/e) by issuing the move command, and then issuing the unload all command and targeting the dropship itself.
I kept seeing it in pro games (and actually saw myself do it once completely by accident) but couldn't figure it out until finally, one day it i tried this and it worked! And it was in BW of all places (yes it works there too!)
I just learned that you can shift command patrol with your scouting worker in the opponent's base. That way it can make circles continuously while I do something else :D
On October 20 2010 16:38 sniverty wrote: I've been trying to find out how I can drop units from my dropship/overlord while moving, your help would be much appreciated.
You order the transport unit somewhere, click or press "Unload", then click on the transport unit itself.
Alternate method: While the transport unit is selected, click on the wireframe model of a loaded unit (displayed in the center display at the lower edge of screen) to unload it at the transport unit's current location.
I recently discovered that scvs inside a medivac will repair any siege tanks/hellions inside with them. This is very handy for early hellion drops as you can take 2 scvs along with your 3 hellions (or 4 scvs and a siege tank if that's your thing) and pickup and repair them as they get damaged then drop them back again.
On October 20 2010 22:57 Slutfish wrote: I recently discovered that scvs inside a medivac will repair any siege tanks/hellions inside with them. This is very handy for early hellion drops as you can take 2 scvs along with your 3 hellions (or 4 scvs and a siege tank if that's your thing) and pickup and repair them as they get damaged then drop them back again.
Seriously!? That is just awesome. I have got to try this out.
On October 20 2010 22:57 Slutfish wrote: I recently discovered that scvs inside a medivac will repair any siege tanks/hellions inside with them. This is very handy for early hellion drops as you can take 2 scvs along with your 3 hellions (or 4 scvs and a siege tank if that's your thing) and pickup and repair them as they get damaged then drop them back again.
Omg it's actually true. Put them on auto-repair. Thank god there's no room for SCVs when there's a thor in a medivac. Is this a bug?
OMG nr 2. Just imagine a hellion drop with 3 hellions and 2 SCVs in a medivac! I am gonna cry for zerg
On October 20 2010 22:57 Slutfish wrote: I recently discovered that scvs inside a medivac will repair any siege tanks/hellions inside with them. This is very handy for early hellion drops as you can take 2 scvs along with your 3 hellions (or 4 scvs and a siege tank if that's your thing) and pickup and repair them as they get damaged then drop them back again.
Seriously!? That is just awesome. I have got to try this out.
I don't play terran so I dont know this for sure, but some one said that it takes much more resources to repair in a drop ship, like 2-3x more
It is much easier to target air units with Fungal growth when you have the air markers turned on in the game settings. I would always end up missing my first or catching 1 out of 8 units. Now I just target the dots
Just gonna throw this one out there because I play a lot of 2's and people ALWAYS ask what the opponents race was.
If you click on the top right corner icon where you can give your partner unit control, it will also tell you the races(or if they picked random) of you partner and opponent. This might be obvious but 1 out of like 3 games my partner asks what their races were so don't know how many know this. I'm sure there is a hotkey for this menu to just not sure what it is.
On September 22 2010 06:16 papaz wrote: What I've learned: Select a unit and right click on another of your own unit to make it follow that unit.
Background I used to hotkey units with same speed on same hotkey so that i can micro and make for example zealots go in front of stalkers. If i had them in same control group stalkers would get faster to the target and zealots slacking behind.
Now i just make stalkers follow zealots and just move my zealots which gives better army positioning.
You can even A-move only the zealots and the stalkers will also A-move by just the "follow trick".
Some very cool things about follow. Say you have a stalker following a zealot:
If the zealot is moving with a move command rather than an attack command, and enemies are nearby, the stalker will keep following rather than attacking as long as the zealot is moving, but as soon as the zealot stops, the stalker will attack anything in range.
If the zealot is on attack-move or attacking an enemy directly, the stalker will attack things within range. Unfortunately, it doesn't focus on the zealot's target, just attacks things in range based on priority.
So, following units try to mimic the leader's behavior.
thast sick this thread is so asome will the stalker out run the zealot if there kinda nearby or will he always stay behind him ? (wanna use my zeolt as a meat shield!)
On October 21 2010 00:33 FLuE wrote: Just gonna throw this one out there because I play a lot of 2's and people ALWAYS ask what the opponents race was.
If you click on the top right corner icon where you can give your partner unit control, it will also tell you the races(or if they picked random) of you partner and opponent. This might be obvious but 1 out of like 3 games my partner asks what their races were so don't know how many know this. I'm sure there is a hotkey for this menu to just not sure what it is.
Actaully, this is extremely useful for me! I am very guilty of either zoning out or checking up on my email while the loading screen is on, thanks
On October 20 2010 16:38 sniverty wrote: I've been trying to find out how I can drop units from my dropship/overlord while moving, your help would be much appreciated.
On October 21 2010 00:46 raf3776 wrote: If u control group multiple buildings, you can tab to each different building. Like from warpgates (tab) stargates.. Etc
Would be nice if someone with a lot of extra time on their hands went through the thread and gathered up all the things people have learned... I've only had time to read a few pages, and I learned stuff on most of the pages.
I recently learned from another thread that you can hold down a key to do certain things. I already knew this for building units (esp as zerg, select all your larva, hold down z to build a ton of zerglings), but its also useful for things like fungal growth: select your infestors, hold down f, click on each spot you want a fungal. Bam, multi-fungals, no need to do: f click f click f click just hold f and click click click.
EDIT: And with a bunch of corrupters, just hold down C and multi-click to corrupt a bunch of their units. (This way it takes much less time and you can get right back to microing other things.) I'm totally gonna need to remember to do this in the heat of battle... cause right now I don't use corruption that much, usually just an initial cast on a unit or two...
On October 06 2010 18:06 Scheefe wrote: I dont know if this has been posted before but you can CTRL CLICK the TOP LEFT icon of your production cycle to select these units. Somehow helped me when 24 Zerglings hatched.
Huh? What do you mean by "icon of your production cycle"?
On October 21 2010 02:14 Morik wrote: Would be nice if someone with a lot of extra time on their hands went through the thread and gathered up all the things people have learned... I've only had time to read a few pages, and I learned stuff on most of the pages.
I recently learned from another thread that you can hold down a key to do certain things. I already knew this for building units (esp as zerg, select all your larva, hold down z to build a ton of zerglings), but its also useful for things like fungal growth: select your infestors, hold down f, click on each spot you want a fungal. Bam, multi-fungals, no need to do: f click f click f click just hold f and click click click.
I don't know if this has already been posted but the cybernetics core dosen't require power to build stuff at your gateways if say the pylon gets killed I found out a while ago which is pretty nice! what i'm not sure about is does it work the same for all protoss tec buildings ?
I was watching a day9 vid and I learned that making more drones is good for economy and that you don't need to make too much of an army until an attack is imminent
On October 21 2010 03:50 TheDon1 wrote: I don't know if this has already been posted but the cybernetics core dosen't require power to build stuff at your gateways if say the pylon gets killed I found out a while ago which is pretty nice! what i'm not sure about is does it work the same for all protoss tec buildings ?
and this is my first post so hi all = )
i witnessed that with the templars archives i think.
so i guess it's the same for robo bay and fleet beacon
When I first started playing SC2 I didn't know you could just right click the mineral patches to set the drone waypoint, i was hitting G all the time or whatever the damn hotkey is.
Shift clickig siegetanks, hold down shift, press D(unsiege), click a spot and click E(siege) now they will unpack, go to the marked location and siege while you do other stuff
Queens on creep are have a faster movement speed than Battlecruisers and if given sufficient time and area with creep spread can kite them without being hit. While not being viable all game or against mass BC since queen GtA is 9 dmg (1 atk) with BC plating being 3 and 550 hp, it will at least help delay the while Spire tech or hydra tech can come out. Especially if the Terran has been 1-base BC rushing/cheesing, the army count with be significantly lowered due to investment in fast tier 3 tech. Hanging on without dying will win you the game so finding any way to buy time is crucial for your econ and tech to catch-up. A single queen will take 92 GtA shots to kill a BC. 3 Queens will take a 1/3 of the shots/time and with transfusion can at least soften the BC before muta/corruptor/hydra can come out. At worst let buildings or at best the Hatchery/Lair tank the dmg to buy time.
After like 100 or more games I learned that more than 3 (or 4) drones on gas is 100% useless, since they just wait in front of the geyser....
I rallied more drones to them when I needed a lot of gas so sometimes they had 7 or more drones.
Spawns a thought which pro's will use in time. the 4th drone on the geyser is often almost a waste. But since often has a lot of spare minerals it could be worth it to sometimes put 4 drones on one geyser
I would think some geysers are so close to the hatch the 4th drone does nothing, but some are farther away.
yea more than 3 is such a negligible improvement its better to get minerals... ONCE in a while you will see a pro doing some specific strategy that even a little more gas may help... (speaking from SC1) But basically almost never will you see more than 2.
However many new people dont consider that you can throttle your gas intake, especially early game depending on your build and not automatically keep 3 on your gas. Depending on your build order many times after you get that first 50, 100 or whatever you need, pull your workers off for minerals. Giving you more minerals for more unit producing structures, FE etc.
I learned that sometimes rather than trying to figure out how to beat a strat, it is better to come up with your own strat that prevents the other player from doing the strat you don't like, thus giving you control of the flow of the game.
On October 21 2010 02:14 Morik wrote: I recently learned from another thread that you can hold down a key to do certain things. I already knew this for building units (esp as zerg, select all your larva, hold down z to build a ton of zerglings), but its also useful for things like fungal growth: select your infestors, hold down f, click on each spot you want a fungal. Bam, multi-fungals, no need to do: f click f click f click just hold f and click click click.
This is great info, thanks! This will help me with my ghost sniping. At the moment I have to frantically press R,left-click target, R, left-click target to snipe enemy units. Now I will just hold R and click away.
The best "mechanic-discovery" I've had so far is that you can drop mules on minerals (as has been mentioned earlier in the thread). For the first few games I thought it was so annoying how I had to drop the mule next to the mineral patch, wait for his little container to drop away, then select him and tell him to mine. Eventually I saw a pro replay where the mule got dropped and straight away started mining, so now I have it locked down.
On another note (don't know if this has been mentioned), but if you destroy the pylon Protoss units are warping in on, they all die immediately (as long as they haven't finished warping obviously).
On October 08 2010 08:25 MonsieurGrimm wrote: To make an easy creep highway with OL's, select them all, right click where you want the first one, shift click one away, right click where you want the next one, shift click etc.
Much easier than selecting and moving them individually.
Do you mean shift-click in the unit selection screen?
How to have my medivacs follow my MM ball: M + left click on a guy in the ball Even better: hold shift and have them follow 5-6 different ones in case the first guy dies.
While walking across the map, you can now a-move the army and the medivacs don't get ahead. In combat, you now just select and move the ball to where it needs to go and the medivacs follow automatically.
If youre enemy has less gas spend in units than he should have he 99% hides his tech somewhere (or has horrible macro).
ie. protoss has 2 gas but only zealots -> theres very high chance of a stargate or robo that you didnt scout.
Of course this is a very simple example and its a very logic conclusion, but this helped me a ton playing zerg against protoss hiding double stargates for example.
On October 08 2010 08:25 MonsieurGrimm wrote: To make an easy creep highway with OL's, select them all, right click where you want the first one, shift click one away, right click where you want the next one, shift click etc.
Much easier than selecting and moving them individually.
Do you mean shift-click in the unit selection screen?
On October 22 2010 00:18 jaelerin wrote: How to have my medivacs follow my MM ball: M + left click on a guy in the ball Even better: hold shift and have them follow 5-6 different ones in case the first guy dies.
While walking across the map, you can now a-move the army and the medivacs don't get ahead. In combat, you now just select and move the ball to where it needs to go and the medivacs follow automatically.
i dont play terran but whenever i rallied it to units itd pick them up and i never knew how to fix it -___- yaaay
On October 20 2010 16:38 sniverty wrote: I've been trying to find out how I can drop units from my dropship/overlord while moving, your help would be much appreciated.
Hit 'D' and click on your dropship/overlord. You have to do this for each overlord or dropship, but they will drop while moving.
Better yet, you can shift+queue the drop command to start dropping at any specified location while moving.
On October 11 2010 12:01 Pfhor wrote: Someone could confirm this, but I believe any unit immediately put inside a warp prism will instantly start regaining shields without the pause that usually occurs after they exit combat. This is very good for immortals.
One thing i found on my own but havent told anyone till now is that at the loading screen, if you hold ctrl+f1 while the game starts, you will start with all drones already selected.
Idk if anyone else knew this but ive always done it. Also ctrl+f1 at any point selects all idle workers.
Don't know if this has been posted, but I didn't know you could select more than 24 units per hotkey until a few weeks back, just that the extra units go into another tab. I used to have 3-5 hotkeys for all my units, guess its cause of playing too much bw last time haha. Since I noticed microing became much easier
if someone leaves in a team game obviously you get control, but you also gain resources from their harvesters.
So If someone drops at the start of a game I always spam build their harvesters and do a tier1 / early tier2 tech push (typically timing push on +1 attack) to take advantage of the spike in early economy.
On October 21 2010 02:14 Morik wrote: I recently learned from another thread that you can hold down a key to do certain things. I already knew this for building units (esp as zerg, select all your larva, hold down z to build a ton of zerglings), but its also useful for things like fungal growth: select your infestors, hold down f, click on each spot you want a fungal. Bam, multi-fungals, no need to do: f click f click f click just hold f and click click click.
This is great info, thanks! This will help me with my ghost sniping. At the moment I have to frantically press R,left-click target, R, left-click target to snipe enemy units. Now I will just hold R and click away.
The best "mechanic-discovery" I've had so far is that you can drop mules on minerals (as has been mentioned earlier in the thread). For the first few games I thought it was so annoying how I had to drop the mule next to the mineral patch, wait for his little container to drop away, then select him and tell him to mine. Eventually I saw a pro replay where the mule got dropped and straight away started mining, so now I have it locked down.
On another note (don't know if this has been mentioned), but if you destroy the pylon Protoss units are warping in on, they all die immediately (as long as they haven't finished warping obviously).
Better is to:
Right click move your infestor towards their army, press f, hold shift, spam click your fungals out, right click back to your main army, let go of shift
will start with all of them moving to your target rather than 1 by one
they will all thrown fungals as soon as in range
soon as done with fungals they will queue back to safety
It's been mentioned that you can burrow banelings and detonate them while still burrowed.
What hasn't been mentioned is how to most effectively mine up an attack lane with them. It takes 8-16 banelings to wipe a terran bio-ball clean of marines, leaving only marauders at low HP and whatever mech was chilling in there.
Simply burrow them (in groups of two) with about 2 units of space between each pair of burrowed banelings. Form a grid as wide as you need to, and when the terran army walks over this attack lane.. goodbye marines. Possibly one of the most cost effective ways of killing marines as zerg.
There are positioning concerns with this, but generally there are only 1-2 viable attack paths a bio ball can take. If the heat is on, do it at the choke(s) to your natural.
It's a beautiful thing to watch 400 minerals and 200 gas wipe out 40+ supply of upgraded marines.. more so when it's all you had left for army >.<
On September 22 2010 00:14 NukeTheBunnys wrote: After Day9 last night i played around with carriers a little.
Interceptors go back to the carrier after their target is killed, unless you have a target queued up or you tell them to attack while they are en route to the carrier.
You can issue an attack order then move orders and the interceptors will continue focusing fire until the target is out of range or dead.
That is useful, I should try a carrier rush/harrass (lol)
Ok so this isn't really obvious but I just found out the other day you can chrono boost a building by clicking on its vicinity on the minimap...I know for sure this works on Nexus, haven't tried it on other buildings yet... Pretty awesome while you are microing your probe around the opponents base or doing phoenix harass, etc.
I learned this: In ZvZ, If you use the infestors Neural Parasite(Mind Control) on the enemy players larva, and build for example a drone with the Neural Parasited larva, the larva instantly dies after the Neural Parasite time runs out. I don't really now what you can do with this, but it's good to know I guess
I just learned last night from watching Day9's Wednesday cast that there is an upgrade for the Medivac's starting energy . I completely ignored all those upgrades at the Starport tech lab except the Banshee cloak since I assumed they were for Ravens.
On October 08 2010 17:06 whave wrote: I realized I need to cry after seeing all these Diamond people not even reading what's on the screen, and spreading tumors with traveling queens, AA-ing with banshees etc...
But the REAL thing is... you can see burrowed roaches moving! I didn't think that's the case, as burrowed units can't attack unlike cloaked ghosts, banshees, templars, but anyways... was watching a replay if my opponent had a map hack, as he moved on top of my burrowed roaches every single time, without detection nearby.
Turns out there is a very thin, shadow-like spot over every roach (playing on Ultra settings). It moves slowly, but if you are actually looking for it, you can't miss it. Makes a burrow-harass quite hard.
Edit: needs to be tested tough from opponent's pov. Maybe it was just the replay.
I just realized this in a custom when a guy had literally 150 roaches burrow moving, I thought I must have been crazy.
On September 21 2010 23:50 figq wrote: I know how larva works, but never brought myself to realize this means Zerg must use all available larvae asap, in order to force hatcheries to renew them. Otherwise there's likely some waste of resources on boosting larva production. It's obvious, but so important, and I'm pretty sure not many zergs optimize their strats enough to cover that.
I also learned that selecting larva along with a drone, hitting stop (and re-mine the drone) forces larva to move closer to the minerals if it's not. In addition, in the first seconds of the game, it may be useful to build the drone directly from a larva of your choice (click on the larva, not the hatch), so that it's the closest position to the minerals.
I learned that you can continuously produce larva with the queen without having to use them. That way you can stack up a lot of larva.
I recently learned from another thread that you can hold down a key to do certain things. I already knew this for building units (esp as zerg, select all your larva, hold down z to build a ton of zerglings), but its also useful for things like fungal growth: select your infestors, hold down f, click on each spot you want a fungal. Bam, multi-fungals, no need to do: f click f click f click just hold f and click click click.
For future reference, this is called smartcasting. You'll see it referred to on wikis and such. Took me forever to learn this, too.
I recently learned from another thread that you can hold down a key to do certain things. I already knew this for building units (esp as zerg, select all your larva, hold down z to build a ton of zerglings), but its also useful for things like fungal growth: select your infestors, hold down f, click on each spot you want a fungal. Bam, multi-fungals, no need to do: f click f click f click just hold f and click click click.
For future reference, this is called smartcasting. You'll see it referred to on wikis and such. Took me forever to learn this, too.
i actually never put together that you can do that without holding shift. I mean i would hold z to make zerglings and stuff like that but for some reason i would always hold shift for units abilities which made it unnecessarily complicated (dealing with waypoints).
This finishes at the same time as Twilight council (50) + Darkshrine (100). This makes the timing of DT rush very easy... just have proxy pylons up in time!
You can scout Terran expansions without vision because the mule droppods are visible.
If you do a Thor drop, you can micro it so that there's no reload between shooting at the overlord and shooting at the queen. Little trick to increase your DPS.
On October 27 2010 16:09 Reptaur wrote: One thing i found on my own but havent told anyone till now is that at the loading screen, if you hold ctrl+f1 while the game starts, you will start with all drones already selected.
Idk if anyone else knew this but ive always done it. Also ctrl+f1 at any point selects all idle workers.
What a wealth of information! Needs a synopsis though. About the only thing I can add is you don't have to use the keyboard at all ! There are little icon thingys on the screen and you can do everything with the mouse. This leaves your other hand open for the all important beer or smoke. I would suggest a bottle however, as cans tend to get crushed in the excitement...
When controlling phoenixes, they will fire-on-the-run when you MOVE them. That means you want to move them around and NEVER A-move with them because then they will simply stop and come within range of the mutalisks.
When i first started playing SC2 it was on LT and i made my 3rd in my main so i could lift and take it to gold, but I made a planetary fortress before lifting. So I learned that if u make a planetary you cant lift
The raven's seeker missle does friendly fire! I approached his 5 ravens with my 10 mutas (magic boxed), the missles went off then suddenly EVERYTHING was dead. Though it might take some killer micro, I can see this being abused.
On October 05 2010 03:21 sleepingdog wrote: hallucinated phoenixes soak up energy of the PDD even when detected from the raven
since I found this out I'm trying to incorporate hallucination vs marine/banshee/raven timing-pushes and try to hallucinate 2-3 phoenixes right before the push arrives
This is huge!
I will most definitely start using this too but maybe its better to hallucinate stalkers since you get 2 instead of one. Maybe they will also soak the energy.
This is so going to get patched. I can feel it coming already.
I just went through this entire thread and have pulled (almost) every tip posted in here. I will now proceed to put them in here, separated by "All", "Terran", "Protoss", and "Zerg". If the OP wishes to copy this list and add it to the original post, awesome.
Also note that I attempted to only include tips which are absolutely true, but as I only play Zerg I haven't gone through and verified them. --
- Hitting Ctrl+F1 instantly selects all Idle Workers.
- You can hold down a hotkey instead of pressing it over and over (IE: Hold down F and click everywhere you want multiple fungal growths with multiple Infestors). This stands true for practically everything, across every race.
- You can add new units to an existing control group by holding Shift and setting them to the group you want.
- Transferring some harvesters to a new expansion is better for your economy than simply saturating from scratch.
- MULEs can be spotted dropping by everybody, even in fog of war.
- 'Alt' shows/hides health bars, depending on whether you have them turned on or off.
- Spacebar will center you on your base.
- Backspace will cycle you through multiple bases.
- Tab will cycle through multiple things on the same control group.
- pressing 'C' on a worker with resources in his hand will send him back to deliver the resources automatically.
- You can target fire with any form of static defense (IE: bunkers, spine crawlers, photon cannons)
- Holding shift allows you to set multiple waypoints, making it easier to scout multiple bases automatically.
- By selecting units and right-clicking on another unit you order them to follow that particular unit. This is helpful for ordering faster units to follow behind slower units.
- workers pinned/trapped by enemy units can be rescued by ordering them to a mineral patch. They will phase through their obstacle to get there. This also works for scouting an enemy base walled-off with a unit guarding the path.
- Massive units (Thors/Colossus/Ultralisk) will break forcefields.
- You can turn on a Flier Helper option to help accurately target flying units with spells.
- You can move the camera by holding the middle mouse button, as opposed to dragging your cursor to the edge of the screen and/or using the arrow keys.
- If you are under attack at your mineral line by lings or zealots early on, and have fewer units to defend, grab all of your probes and select attack, then mine, then attack, then mine, with a few game seconds in between each command. What you are doing is changing their priorities so that unless your opponent has queued attacked every single one of your workers, their attacking units will face your probes, then switch to your units, then to the probes, then to your units, effectively making them only hit your actual attackers about half the time. You can also trap units between the probes because they will ignore pathing to mine, then attack, then ignore pathing, then attack.
- You can start production on units even when supply blocked. Once you remedy the situation the units will begin production automatically.
- You can have more than 24 units bound to a control group. It will open up a new page within that control group to display those units.
- You can call MULEs down directly on to mineral patches.
- SCVs can attack.
- Tech Labs/ Reactors are universal. You can swap buildings around to make use of them without needing to build more add-ons.
- You can drop Vikings and Thors from Medivacs.
- MULEs can repair mechs. Calling them down in battle is a fast way to get repairs done.
- You can use Medivacs to quickly load up your army and fly away from a battle, instead of just using them for healing.
- SCVs can repair Protoss mechanical units as well. (great for team games.)
- Medivacs can heal all biological units of any race on the same team (also great for team games.)
- If you have multiples of the same production building selected (IE: Four Barracks) the game will automatically spread the production of that unit evenly across all the selected buildings.
- Hellions can target and effectively damage/destroy zerg larva.
- Pressing 'D' and clicking a Medivac while loaded with units will begin dropping units while the Medivac is moving.
- SCVs can be set to auto-repair.
- The Hunter Seeker Missile will destroy zerg larva in one shot.
- Splash damage will hit burrowed units if unburrowed units are being targeted.
- Marines and Marauders can be stimmed inside bunkers.
- EMP temporarily uncovers cloaked units.
- You can que up movement and re-sieging your tanks while they are un-sieging.
- You can drop MULEs anywhere you have vision. You can drop MULEs on the enemy base after a scan to force sieged tanks to attack them, damaging buildings by the splash.
- SCVs on auto-repair loaded into a Medivac will repair everything they can inside the Medivac (possibly at a higher resource cost).
- If you have a Lair you can research Lair upgrades at other Hatcheries.
- Overlords can spew creep on buildings to keep them safe if your hatchery gets destroyed.
- You can bind all Queens to a single hotkey, then select all and inject larva to a hatchery. The closest Queen will inject.
- Nydus Canals can spawn multiple entrances.
- You can rally units directly into a Nydus Canal.
- Nydus Worms can spawn anywhere, and generate Creep when they successfully form.
- Banelings can be detonated manually while burrowed.
- Burrowed units can have Burrow set to autocast. They will unburrow when an enemy is in range and attack.
- Inject Larva has a slight cooldown during the animation. If you try to inject multiple Hatcheries side-by-side, the Queen might skip the second and move straight to the third.
- Hatcheries still being morphed can be added to a control group, regardless of whether they are finished morphing or not.
- Having multiple Queens at a base makes for a good defense against early aggression.
- You can select multiple drones and command them to make a building. Only the closest drone will make the building.
- You can select multiple drones and que up multiple buildings. Only one drone for each building will leave the mineral patches.
- You still need to research Burrow to make use of the Tunneling Claws upgrade for Roaches.
- Creep Tumors can clone themselves to continue the spread of creep.
- Multiple creep tumors in the same area will speed the spread of creep exponentially.
- Queens can spawn larva through the minimap.
- Infestor's Fungal Growth works on/ reveals cloaked units.
- Infestor's Neural Parasite will instantly kill a zerg egg.
- Infestor's Neural Parasite works on Motherships. You can use the enemy Mothership to Vortex his own army.
- Infestors can spawn Infested Terrans while burrowed.
- A well placed burrowed unit can stop a building from being built on that spot.
- The Overlord Speed upgrade affects morphed Overseers as well.
- You can cancel a cloned Creep Tumor before it finishes to return it to the tumor you cloned it from.
- Overlords are no longer a detector. They have to morph to Overseer, which is available once you have a Lair.
- You can Shift-add eggs to a control group. (IE: If you have mutas bound to '1', and you make more you can use Shift to add them to '1'.)
- Hatcheries larva cap extends past seven, but caps in the high teens/early twenties.
- Burrowed roaches are slightly visible while moving.
On September 22 2010 02:40 Jaeger wrote: You can quickly create a forcefield wall by selecting your sentry group and holding f while spamming click.
Bunkers add +1 range to units.
Anyone have any tips for dealing with mass repair planetary fortress in the early midgame without splash as P (i.e. no storm or colossus) shift queuing attack commands on SCVs seems to always kill the first one so quickly that my units retarget the planetary and try to finish killing it before moving onto the next attack queued scv.
I guess you dont have to shift click. Only klick a without the shifth then. An other way is to forcefield the pf so scv:S cant repair. I guess it requires 4 forcefileds or something to be effective
On September 21 2010 23:23 hEndO wrote: as Zerg i just learned that once you have 1 lair but 2 hatches you can get Overlord speed on one and Overlord drop on the other. I always thought i could only research them at the Lair. =/
What really? I didn't know that. I mean i knew once you reached Lair tech you can research burrow, from just a hatch. But the icons for speed, and drops don't show on hatches.
For toss, if you build a structure in a power field, and then the power field is lost the structure will still finish, though it will be unpowered this makes Warp prisms just a little more fun to use
On September 23 2010 10:43 WithRespect wrote: edit: because i didn't see it in here rotating view to nuke behind buildings, hence outside of the view of the person you are nuking, they wont be able to see where you are nuking unless they turn their camera.
I tried this out today and popped a nuke down with rotation behind several terran buildings. The dot shines through the building itself so unfortunately you can't hide them. I'm going to have to look into zerg/toss buildings as well as natural terrain but so far, doesn't look good.
you can aim at the very corner of a nexus and they wont see it.
Zerg extractor trick where u build one to be under supply cap then cancel to have more drones then you can have at the time.
Also, with mules you can call them down in the field, (generally with thors), and have them repair on the spot - helps out when ur scv's are getting sniped .
Pressing spacebar will NOT get you to your base. Spacebar will get you to the most recent event. In other words, if you got attacked on the top of the map, your camera will go there.
However, if an unit just finished producing and you press spacebar, you will get to the building that produced the strucuture.
Just wanted to clean that up.
Also, you can double extractor trick, I didn't realise until I saw an opponent do it.
I wanna see this used. You can Warp in buildings using power from a Warp Prism. Maybe hide some tech since you dont need any power to make those units once it's completed
On November 02 2010 11:26 Mukester wrote: Zerg extractor trick where u build one to be under supply cap then cancel to have more drones then you can have at the time. Also, with mules you can call them down in the field, (generally with thors), and have them repair on the spot - helps out when ur scv's are getting sniped .
On November 02 2010 23:14 jHERO wrote: blue flame helions hard counter chargelots........... never knew that and im 1.6k diamond
Fixed
I love getting 3-4 blue hellions in my army to burn through those pesky devils. Plus its fun to imagine the toss players face when they see 4 hellions destroy all their zealots... it probably looks something like this ._.
You can't spawn directly north/south of your opponent on Shakuras Plateau.
I figured everyone knew this, but I'm recently seeing some high-level reps where players are using their worker scout to scout the spawn above/below them XD
Having really good macro will win you more games than anything else. Banshee's in your base...I couldn't care less, keep on making workers, they're probably so focused on harass that they have less workers than you anyway.
that Creep tumours could Spawn another Creep tumour when playing Zerg. I Always thought that the Pros had such insane APM to be able to get such a big massive highway by constantly using queens to make a Creep tumour. I always wondered how they did it and experimented with getting an extra queen purely for Creep tumours until 2 months later I finally realised from watching a PSY starcraft tips and tricks video that you could actually Spawn another tumour from the original one. Man did I feel dumb!
ooo maaaan i got quite a lot tricks and lil stuff which might help a lot during a game but i never figured out how to drop units while moving the transporting unit...tried it once and somehow i was too stupid or i don't know. but i never paid much attention anymore on that... and after years ( ) of wondering how to drop units out while moving your transporter i finally got it... so obvious and i was just one single click away
On September 27 2010 05:34 Massiv wrote: Didnt realize Nydus Worm could spawn anywhere, thought it had to be on creep. I would fly an Overlord to the spot I wanted it and generate creep. But Im only in Bronze.
though there are many things new for me here (bronze as well) I was like "WTF?!" when I saw this one :O
On November 02 2010 04:30 Skrattybones wrote: Hey guys,
I just went through this entire thread and have pulled (almost) every tip posted in here. I will now proceed to put them in here, separated by "All", "Terran", "Protoss", and "Zerg". If the OP wishes to copy this list and add it to the original post, awesome.
Also note that I attempted to only include tips which are absolutely true, but as I only play Zerg I haven't gone through and verified them. --
- Hitting Ctrl+F1 instantly selects all Idle Workers.
- You can hold down a hotkey instead of pressing it over and over (IE: Hold down F and click everywhere you want multiple fungal growths with multiple Infestors). This stands true for practically everything, across every race.
- You can add new units to an existing control group by holding Shift and setting them to the group you want.
- Transferring some harvesters to a new expansion is better for your economy than simply saturating from scratch.
- MULEs can be spotted dropping by everybody, even in fog of war.
- 'Alt' shows/hides health bars, depending on whether you have them turned on or off.
- Spacebar will center you on your base.
- Backspace will cycle you through multiple bases.
- Tab will cycle through multiple things on the same control group.
- pressing 'C' on a worker with resources in his hand will send him back to deliver the resources automatically.
- You can target fire with any form of static defense (IE: bunkers, spine crawlers, photon cannons)
- Holding shift allows you to set multiple waypoints, making it easier to scout multiple bases automatically.
- By selecting units and right-clicking on another unit you order them to follow that particular unit. This is helpful for ordering faster units to follow behind slower units.
- workers pinned/trapped by enemy units can be rescued by ordering them to a mineral patch. They will phase through their obstacle to get there. This also works for scouting an enemy base walled-off with a unit guarding the path.
- Massive units (Thors/Colossus/Ultralisk) will break forcefields.
- You can turn on a Flier Helper option to help accurately target flying units with spells.
- You can move the camera by holding the middle mouse button, as opposed to dragging your cursor to the edge of the screen and/or using the arrow keys.
- If you are under attack at your mineral line by lings or zealots early on, and have fewer units to defend, grab all of your probes and select attack, then mine, then attack, then mine, with a few game seconds in between each command. What you are doing is changing their priorities so that unless your opponent has queued attacked every single one of your workers, their attacking units will face your probes, then switch to your units, then to the probes, then to your units, effectively making them only hit your actual attackers about half the time. You can also trap units between the probes because they will ignore pathing to mine, then attack, then ignore pathing, then attack.
- You can start production on units even when supply blocked. Once you remedy the situation the units will begin production automatically.
- You can have more than 24 units bound to a control group. It will open up a new page within that control group to display those units.
- You can call MULEs down directly on to mineral patches.
- SCVs can attack.
- Tech Labs/ Reactors are universal. You can swap buildings around to make use of them without needing to build more add-ons.
- You can drop Vikings and Thors from Medivacs.
- MULEs can repair mechs. Calling them down in battle is a fast way to get repairs done.
- You can use Medivacs to quickly load up your army and fly away from a battle, instead of just using them for healing.
- SCVs can repair Protoss mechanical units as well. (great for team games.)
- Medivacs can heal all biological units of any race on the same team (also great for team games.)
- If you have multiples of the same production building selected (IE: Four Barracks) the game will automatically spread the production of that unit evenly across all the selected buildings.
- Hellions can target and effectively damage/destroy zerg larva.
- Pressing 'D' and clicking a Medivac while loaded with units will begin dropping units while the Medivac is moving.
- SCVs can be set to auto-repair.
- The Hunter Seeker Missile will destroy zerg larva in one shot.
- Splash damage will hit burrowed units if unburrowed units are being targeted.
- Marines and Marauders can be stimmed inside bunkers.
- EMP temporarily uncovers cloaked units.
- You can que up movement and re-sieging your tanks while they are un-sieging.
- You can drop MULEs anywhere you have vision. You can drop MULEs on the enemy base after a scan to force sieged tanks to attack them, damaging buildings by the splash.
- SCVs on auto-repair loaded into a Medivac will repair everything they can inside the Medivac (possibly at a higher resource cost).
- If you have a Lair you can research Lair upgrades at other Hatcheries.
- Overlords can spew creep on buildings to keep them safe if your hatchery gets destroyed.
- You can bind all Queens to a single hotkey, then select all and inject larva to a hatchery. The closest Queen will inject.
- Nydus Canals can spawn multiple entrances.
- You can rally units directly into a Nydus Canal.
- Nydus Worms can spawn anywhere, and generate Creep when they successfully form.
- Banelings can be detonated manually while burrowed.
- Burrowed units can have Burrow set to autocast. They will unburrow when an enemy is in range and attack.
- Inject Larva has a slight cooldown during the animation. If you try to inject multiple Hatcheries side-by-side, the Queen might skip the second and move straight to the third.
- Hatcheries still being morphed can be added to a control group, regardless of whether they are finished morphing or not.
- Having multiple Queens at a base makes for a good defense against early aggression.
- You can select multiple drones and command them to make a building. Only the closest drone will make the building.
- You can select multiple drones and que up multiple buildings. Only one drone for each building will leave the mineral patches.
- You still need to research Burrow to make use of the Tunneling Claws upgrade for Roaches.
- Creep Tumors can clone themselves to continue the spread of creep.
- Multiple creep tumors in the same area will speed the spread of creep exponentially.
- Queens can spawn larva through the minimap.
- Infestor's Fungal Growth works on/ reveals cloaked units.
- Infestor's Neural Parasite will instantly kill a zerg egg.
- Infestor's Neural Parasite works on Motherships. You can use the enemy Mothership to Vortex his own army.
- Infestors can spawn Infested Terrans while burrowed.
- A well placed burrowed unit can stop a building from being built on that spot.
- The Overlord Speed upgrade affects morphed Overseers as well.
- You can cancel a cloned Creep Tumor before it finishes to return it to the tumor you cloned it from.
- Overlords are no longer a detector. They have to morph to Overseer, which is available once you have a Lair.
- You can Shift-add eggs to a control group. (IE: If you have mutas bound to '1', and you make more you can use Shift to add them to '1'.)
- Hatcheries larva cap extends past seven, but caps in the high teens/early twenties.
- Burrowed roaches are slightly visible while moving.
Could we place that post on the OP so we don't get another 30 pages of the same tips ?
I mean, i really like this thread, don't want to be too rude here, but i don't think we saw something new since this post for example.
I don't want to force anyone to read the all thread, but as Skrattybones made this ( by the way, thanks a lot dude ! ) now it would be a shame to see that thread go on as it was before. Don't ya think ?
Zealot charge increases movespeed of zealots by .5. This makes them faster than unupgraded roaches and hydras off creep and faster than the entire un-stimmed terran army execpt hellions and reapers. Even when charge is on CD.
Also, With chargelots and blink stalkers, you can manually charge at a blink stalker then quickly blink up a cliff and the zealots will charge all the way around to the stalker.
~1500 Platinum Zerg player with over 300 games played (since beta). I RECENTLY discovered that creep tumors can produce MORE creep tumors. I've been using nothing but queens before that.
Recently saw/found out that Overlords can drop Banelings while moving. This means that the Baneling splash/damage is evenly distributed through the mineral line, instead of just blowing up a few SCV/Drones and auto-targeting the main building.
if you neural parasite a probe and build a nexus with it, you can chrono boost your zerg buildings. /thread
edit-just double checked it and it'll speed up lair->hive as well as upgrades/queens. not too sure about it speeding up larva inject though. animation for chronoboosted hive morphing is pretty silly
The esc (escape)-button cancels units. Took me a while, and was pretty annoying producing an extra queen (queue) and have click the hatch, then click the queen to cancel it. Now it's a dream if stuff is queued since it cancels the unbuilt stuff first :D . Allthough not as crucial for zergs compared to terran (and to some degree, protoss).
I missed this thread when it first started and I too picked up a few tips.
Props to Super_bricklayer for consolidating it all. I did notice a few that I beleive to be incorrect.
You can't feedback Thors anymore, you have that as a feedback example.
Spacebar doesn't center you on your base, it centers you on the last notification (The ones on the left of the screen). Since most things that happen happen at your base, space USUALLY brings you to your base, but not always. If your units engage the enemy in the field and the game says that your forces are under attack, space bar will bring you to the battle. If you're macroing and your scouting prob gets hit, space will bring you to the probe so long as it gave you the probe attack notification. Hitting space again will bring you to the notification that happened second from last, hitting again goes to the one before that and so on. Since, as I said, most things that happen, happen in your base you can usually get your base within 1-3 taps of the space bar, giving the illusion that space brings you to your base.
You can't blink to islands anymore, I don't think the scrap station tip works now.
Might be worth mentioning that EMP even reveals cloaked units that don't use energy, like observers and dark templar. The effect only lasts a few seconds, but is often enough to kill those low hp units.
And here's a contribution of my own: Nydus exits from the same source automatically queue even without holding shift. So you can tell the network to build multiple exits all at once and it will start working on them in series.
Units retreat into a nydus network twice as fast with two exits (at the cost of 100/100). While your nydus is building, queue a second exit. When reinforcements arrive you can retreat back into the two worms twice as fast and suffer fewer losses. You have to manually send half to one worm and half to the other.
You can build two or more worm exits at once if you build two or more nydus entrances at your base. (Useful late game when you're close or at max and money is building up and you want to move a HUGE army through a network quickly.
You can hit stop on a nydus worm to stop it from unloading. This is useful if the enemy shows up right when you start unloading a large force, so you can abort the attack and don't unload your units one by one into a bloodbath.
I noticed while watching the GSL (totally worth the $20 without a doubt) that some players at the beginning of the game get a single worker on each hot key super quick, almost instantaneously. How are they doing this? They can't just be select each worker individually and assigning them their own hot key that quickly...?
Second, you have a pack of drop ships, and a pack of M&M, how do you get them in the pack of drop ships super fast? I select both packs together then have to keep clicking on the drop ships, but there's a better way I suspect.
Second, you have a pack of drop ships, and a pack of M&M, how do you get them in the pack of drop ships super fast? I select both packs together then have to keep clicking on the drop ships, but there's a better way I suspect.
On November 04 2010 01:56 ashaman771 wrote: Couple pretty noob questions, so be gentle
I noticed while watching the GSL (totally worth the $20 without a doubt) that some players at the beginning of the game get a single worker on each hot key super quick, almost instantaneously. How are they doing this? They can't just be select each worker individually and assigning them their own hot key that quickly...?
Second, you have a pack of drop ships, and a pack of M&M, how do you get them in the pack of drop ships super fast? I select both packs together then have to keep clicking on the drop ships, but there's a better way I suspect.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean about the workers, but I'd guess it's just one worker on multiple hotkeys. People tend to hotkey stuff to more then one butten at the beginning (I use to hotkey my first scout on 1-3, dunno why honestly... just a habit)
Edit: Nevermind, missunterstood the second question.
On November 04 2010 01:56 ashaman771 wrote: Couple pretty noob questions, so be gentle
I noticed while watching the GSL (totally worth the $20 without a doubt) that some players at the beginning of the game get a single worker on each hot key super quick, almost instantaneously. How are they doing this? They can't just be select each worker individually and assigning them their own hot key that quickly...?
Second, you have a pack of drop ships, and a pack of M&M, how do you get them in the pack of drop ships super fast? I select both packs together then have to keep clicking on the drop ships, but there's a better way I suspect.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean about the workers, but I'd guess it's just one worker on multiple hotkeys. People tend to hotkey stuff to more then one butten at the beginning (I use to hotkey my first scout on 1-3, dunno why honestly... just a habit)
Edit: Nevermind, missunterstood the second question.
this has to be it. it's the same worker on different keys, it's done too fast to be anything else i suspect.
Second, you have a pack of drop ships, and a pack of M&M, how do you get them in the pack of drop ships super fast? I select both packs together then have to keep clicking on the drop ships, but there's a better way I suspect.
On November 04 2010 01:56 ashaman771 wrote: I noticed while watching the GSL (totally worth the $20 without a doubt) that some players at the beginning of the game get a single worker on each hot key super quick, almost instantaneously. How are they doing this? They can't just be select each worker individually and assigning them their own hot key that quickly...?
I think you're just talking about sending each worker to its own patch correct? They're just hitting F1 to select an idle worker and sending it to a patch.
On November 04 2010 01:56 ashaman771 wrote: I noticed while watching the GSL (totally worth the $20 without a doubt) that some players at the beginning of the game get a single worker on each hot key super quick, almost instantaneously. How are they doing this? They can't just be select each worker individually and assigning them their own hot key that quickly...?
I think you're just talking about sending each worker to its own patch correct? They're just hitting F1 to select an idle worker and sending it to a patch.
Nope, i know that F1 'trick'.
I forget which match i was watching, but all of a sudden SCVs were on each hotkey in a second. thanks to the post above, i know it's all the same SCV. I thought maybe I was missing something
F1 to split your workers at the start is a neat trick and would have been awesome in BW, but I fear that it will take me almost exactly the same amount of time to hit F1 and click six times as it does for the game to auto-split them when you tell them to all mine the same patch.
On September 21 2010 23:21 Tenks wrote: Playing with HP bars always on makes micro a ton easier.
Also calling MULEs down right on a mineral patch. I think I went like 5 beta patches without knowing that.
How does this exactly works? I know you can hold the alt key but the bars disappear when you release the key. This tread is great btw I just learned some new zerg stuff.
~420 BronzeLeagueDude here. I learned that if a Protoss goes for a forge Fast expand on LT, you can safely drone hard tech up to lair and drop a nydus in his main. Bringing two queens in the nydus can stuff the two void rays with transfuse. if he got them, but you may be in trouble if he got 3 pheonix.
On September 21 2010 23:21 Tenks wrote: Playing with HP bars always on makes micro a ton easier.
Also calling MULEs down right on a mineral patch. I think I went like 5 beta patches without knowing that.
How does this exactly works? I know you can hold the alt key but the bars disappear when you release the key. This tread is great btw I just learned some new zerg stuff.
From day9 I learned to expand when I attack. That's something obvious in retrospect but was NOT obvious before. The best defense for a budding expansion is a good offense. Your new expo is defended by the mere fact that there's an army of units headed for his base that he has to go through or around to get to your expo and even if you trade armies at his front, your expo is still defended by the fact that he's got nothing left with which to attack. (Some exception apply) Coincidentally, it takes about as long to build an expo as it does to march across the map and engage in a skirmish, so when the attack is done your expo is up. I also learned that if you march across, find a bigger entrenched force and retreat that's ok too because you've lost nothing and still gained an expo.
Mass marines wins out over banelings! although im not as skilled as "Foxer" i actually have destroyed the last 9 zerg players ive fought with pure marines and medivacs
you can change the game speed of the campaing! i played for 3h hours on the normal game speed, it bugged me off how slow those scvs were moving... it's on the options gameplay tab.
The best thing I've done to improve my gameplay has been to tweak my mouse. Tuning the acceleration and movement was one thing, but even more significant was binding the middle mouse button to one of the buttons on the side. That middle button is unnatural to press, and with a side button, it's just so much easier to grab and scroll the map view. The other way of scrolling (bumping my mouse up against the screen edge) is way too error prone.
I just found the option to turn on the game time and health bars. I feel like I'm being cheap =P cuz I can micro so much better...I now always knowing which of his units are weak, and always knowing what time it is in the early game really helps my awareness. Up until a couple days ago I had to rely spidey sense.
So in rising through the ranks I got to diamond with almost never using mutas, i just never really saw the point. During MLG DC i was watching idra who basically goes ling, bling, muta in ZvT and so i started fooling around with them in that matchup, but still in ZvP i went exclusively roach/hydra.
Now I've been practicing muta/ling on toss and have figured out the timings for when to expect that 4 gate. Since I finally got comfortable with it, I am currently on a 9 match win streak (i only play like 2 games every 3 days) and am currently 90-65. I almost fear playing and ending the streak.
I learned this isn't SCBW and factories cost 150/100 not 200/100. I made it to I think about 1500-1600 diamond before I realized I had 50 minerals left over after factory building -_-
As zerg after you build a creep tumor, that creep tumor can build one creep tumor in a radius. Never Realized this until watching some random replay in first person, and the only reason I caught it was he was being pretty slow about it. Should be obvious as it states it on the icon from the queen, but was always in too much of a rush to notice.
As zerg, you can use progress bars and simple math to figure out how many larva you'll have when the structure finishes. Say you want to have 3 larva available when your roach warren finishes, but it is at 10/55 when a second larva pops on your hatchery. You can safely make 2 drones and still have 3 larva when the warren finishes (15 game seconds between larva pops.) I use the same technique when forced to make an early pool in zvz (scouting a 7 pool for example).
On November 04 2010 01:56 ashaman771 wrote: Couple pretty noob questions, so be gentle
I noticed while watching the GSL (totally worth the $20 without a doubt) that some players at the beginning of the game get a single worker on each hot key super quick, almost instantaneously. How are they doing this? They can't just be select each worker individually and assigning them their own hot key that quickly...?
Second, you have a pack of drop ships, and a pack of M&M, how do you get them in the pack of drop ships super fast? I select both packs together then have to keep clicking on the drop ships, but there's a better way I suspect.
I click nexus. Hit E, select workers , right click mineral, hit probe, shift + 1, hit probe shift + 2, hit probe shift + 3, hit nexus shift + 5, hit Y click on mineral patch. If you practice it a lot you can do it in under 1-2 seconds.
- You can drop MULEs anywhere you have vision. You can drop MULEs on the enemy base after a scan to force sieged tanks to attack them, damaging buildings by the splash.
LOL wow thats amazing im gonna try that my next tvt cause usually in tvt in late game ur like 5000k minerals and 0 gas. Lol seems fun cool find
My tip , holding shift down lets you do multiple things , like adding units to a group or building buildings. Also works for spells like Storm and fungal i think.
Day9's coaching stream with DJwheat actually had quite a few little obvious things that i just never did or realized. Actually that stream was the most helpful thing of all time in my RTS life. Just the little things of tapping back and forth, seperating the eyes and the hands. Checking food, checking money, checking queens, and glancing at minimap constantly and having that mental checklist. And also just not freaking out in battles. It was so eye opening to see how day9 was instructing wheat during the heat of battles. "ignore that, it doesn't matter, vomit larve, vomit larve!!" etc. I practiced those things for a day vs. very hard ai, and by the end of the day i went from always losing to VH Ai to beating them pretty handledly. I also went from low gold to platnium in the same day. Yeah i'm still a newb, but this has me on the right track of not completely sucking anymore lol.
Overseers dropping changelings *behind* buildings (in my case a factory) makes the changeling all but invisible unless you see it go down. Even then I'm not sure if you can even force your guys to attack him since the attack command will select the building.
I normally try to detect them by double clicking my marines and looking for the odd man out, but this hides the changeling from view.
That drones could a move..... lol i swear to god i never knew this till i was like 1500 platinum around ~100 games. I lost to 6 pool alot before then ....
Up until I was around ~1600 zerg I thought spine crawlers cost 150 + the drone.. So I never made them because I thought it was so lame that I had to actually pay 200 (I figured it cost more because it could move). When I found out they "only" cost 100... :O
If you have your buildings (rax/warpgate etc) rallied to a unit and that unit dies, you lose your rally point and your stream of reinforments stop....Im 2000 T and i could never figure out wtf i was doing because half my units would still be at my base.
Would be nice if someone else could test it, but a few days ago i got owned pretty hard as i destroyed the main of a terran and he got to the Island on ScrapStation which i couldnt reach anymore with my blink stalker.....and i did it a few patches ago with zero problems.
got me owned pretty hard and embarrassing (he safed 2 starports and turtled like crazy while building Towers all over the place while i teched blink stalker and massed hardcore....and then couldnt blink in.....after another neccessary tech switch on my side his BattleCruiser Battalion crushed me and i was so embarassed that i wouldnt want to try to fight back...)
Yo boogy, try a Mothership bust. Once it has enough energy just float it in and Mass Recall. Even try it before getting all the way in as it'll move units to the nearest safe landing zone.
On November 16 2010 17:06 hongster wrote: Overseers dropping changelings *behind* buildings (in my case a factory) makes the changeling all but invisible unless you see it go down. Even then I'm not sure if you can even force your guys to attack him since the attack command will select the building.
I normally try to detect them by double clicking my marines and looking for the odd man out, but this hides the changeling from view.
Delete and Insert rotate the camera to the sides, so you can snipe the changeling. Still a good tip though.
I have a question. Say you trade armies with your opponent in front of his base, only you have a few units leftover.
Should you:
A)Retreat those units B)Sprint to the mineral line and try to pick off a few workers before his next batch of units pop C)Try to take down a key building D)???
On November 17 2010 02:14 crescendo111 wrote: I have a question. Say you trade armies with your opponent in front of his base, only you have a few units leftover.
Should you:
A)Retreat those units B)Sprint to the mineral line and try to pick off a few workers before his next batch of units pop C)Try to take down a key building D)???
It depends. Usually if you only have like 3 or 4 or a similar small number of units left over, just go and pick off his workers. If they happen to be expensive units, then send them back home. Most of the time, with so few units left over though it's not a good idea to take down a key building, since you most likely won't be able to kill it.
A terran tip: When dealing with banes with rines, it is better to leave a very small amount of rines behind to be sacrificed, while the rest moves behind and fires, rather than running and firing with the whole group.
You can larva inject through the minimap. I prefer to have all queens in a group and press V between each time (instead of holding shift-V), then I know if I clicked correctly or not because the cursor will change.
Burrowed roaches regen pretty fast even without Tunneling claws. I always knew roaches were good with burrow, but for some reason I thought TC was necessary to get the regen... There's actually a little icon that says this isn't the case but HEY. Special thanks to MrBitter and his streaming, the coaching session with EGMachine on ZvP made me ask the question, "Why isn't he getting TC with this build?" and then I went, "ohhhhh." and thought of this thread.
Today emphasized the importance of surrounding your enemy and making sure your units prevent his retreat. I played a vs an early Marine push, and engaged on creep, being paitent until my slow 'lings could surround his small force, crushing it.
Then i sandwiched his 1 tank, 2 Marauder, 6 Marine push inbetween 'lings and Banelings, crushing that as well, then crushing his main with the left overs.
TOP RIGHT Corner, click the little blue bottom and you can see your alliance, and opponents race (unless they picked random)
Sometimes i miss the load screen and i would have to meekly ask... your race? Which was met with some nice people saying I am _____ T P Z. And others saying... I dont know lol.
Then one day when i asked one nice guy, he said, next time click the little button top right. And voila shows opponent ID and RACE... I thanked him profusely... although i won... which i felt bad about for some reason
When using broodlords, to have your broodlings on battlefield before engaging enemy sacrifice 1 zergling or other unit and attack it and then you can keep spamming attack on other broodlings already on ground to have a constant wall of them, also it might be a good idea to retreat using this trick which will make their effective range longer.
When trying to pick off an SCV constructing a building with your scouting worker, attack-move near it and your worker will automatically start attacking the SCV (if possible). Had been trying to manually click it for so long and it was such a pain. Much easier this way!
That a Reactor on a Barracks can be replaced by just getting another Barracks with no addon, not delaying production and not having a fragile slow-to-replace Reactor add-on for the enemy to shoot. Since the costs of the Reactor compared to that of a Barracks is pretty close, another Barracks is a valid option and you can always give it add-on later on.
The way that I decide on how many drones and how many fighting units to make is by scouting. When I learned this, I went up a division and my mind was blown...
When I kept losing to MM pushes at 9-11 minutes in, even though I spent well over the amount of resources on army compared to his and I had lost over 10x the amount he had according to the units lost tab, I realized how much balls gateway units actually suck.
Now I either collosus rush or 4gate v Terran every game.
you can change color so that you are teal and the enemy is red (makes it easier to see things on the minimap) by pressing the button next to the minimap or pressing alt+f
On November 03 2010 02:00 BlasiuS wrote: You can't spawn directly north/south of your opponent on Shakuras Plateau.
I figured everyone knew this, but I'm recently seeing some high-level reps where players are using their worker scout to scout the spawn above/below them XD
Haha thanks, you just saved me some scouting. I never knew this.
On November 07 2010 08:50 Arisen wrote: As zerg after you build a creep tumor, that creep tumor can build one creep tumor in a radius. Never Realized this until watching some random replay in first person, and the only reason I caught it was he was being pretty slow about it. Should be obvious as it states it on the icon from the queen, but was always in too much of a rush to notice.
Im a 1600 dimond zerg and i didnt know this... Fuck! Oh well, my game is gonna fucking skyrocket
On November 23 2010 06:14 s4m222 wrote: TOP RIGHT Corner, click the little blue bottom and you can see your alliance, and opponents race (unless they picked random)
Sometimes i miss the load screen and i would have to meekly ask... your race? Which was met with some nice people saying I am _____ T P Z. And others saying... I dont know lol.
Then one day when i asked one nice guy, he said, next time click the little button top right. And voila shows opponent ID and RACE... I thanked him profusely... although i won... which i felt bad about for some reason
OMG!!!! i forget to pay attention to the loadscreen ALL THE TIME!!!! THANK YOU!
- You can drop MULEs anywhere you have vision. You can drop MULEs on the enemy base after a scan to force sieged tanks to attack them, damaging buildings by the splash.
LOL wow thats amazing im gonna try that my next tvt cause usually in tvt in late game ur like 5000k minerals and 0 gas. Lol seems fun cool find
what if you drop the mule in his mineral line and they have tanks sieged to protect it @@?
Hitting Alt- Windows still takes you to your desktop even with alt-tab and windows key disabled.
No idea why I even hit those buttons, but it was frusterating as hell when I was about to beat this Zerg and I do that crap and end up having to close SC2 and take that free loss
On September 24 2010 03:51 kelstar wrote: ~ If your Zerg each time you make an overlod if you shift add them all to one control group when your lair tech finishes you can select them all and hit the pewp creep hotkey and it can be very handy
I would love to do this, however.... shift-# also adds the larvae, not just the eggs, to the control group. Thus if I hit SV for an overlord, there's likely other larvae in my selection, so SV Shift-2 will add the new overlord to group 2, but it also adds all the other larvae to the group. So then later on in the game I end up with weird units in my 'overlord' group.
Ctrl-Clicking the SV egg before hotkeying takes some mouse aiming, which sort of defeats the savings to me. It would be nice if larvae wasn't able to be added to control groups, and only eggs, then this would work well for me.
Hmm the first week of retail I didn't know about chronoboost. So figuring that out helped. Also about three weeks later I figured out what feedback did :O
No, I didn't play the beta or much rts before SC2 lol
On December 02 2010 02:58 awang0830 wrote: Storming at the shadow not on top of air units
I was so bad at infestor play because I didn't know to fungal BENEATH the air units and always clicked directly on them. It took me a while to figure out why I was only catching some of the air units on the top half of a flock
On December 02 2010 02:58 awang0830 wrote: Storming at the shadow not on top of air units
I was so bad at infestor play because I didn't know to fungal BENEATH the air units and always clicked directly on them. It took me a while to figure out why I was only catching some of the air units on the top half of a flock
Im diamond in everything 1900 rating in one v one and i just realized that there is a idle worker picture in the bottom left and i play terran so you can imagine how many times that happens. I picked up game late and never looked into any minor details so i might still be missing some things but whatever this one made me feel stupid, also always play with bars on MICRO FOR THE WIN.
On December 02 2010 02:58 awang0830 wrote: Storming at the shadow not on top of air units
I was so bad at infestor play because I didn't know to fungal BENEATH the air units and always clicked directly on them. It took me a while to figure out why I was only catching some of the air units on the top half of a flock
OH SO THAT'S HOW YOU DO IT.
Try going to options and turning on "show flyer helpers". Then all you have to do is to aim for th small dots under the air units with your storms/fungals. Your minds ill be blown
As for me I have had several big "aha!" moments. Including but not limited to spawn larva on minimap as well as spamming spells while holding down shift. Also learnt that building hatcheries spawn creep, so if you cancel them you can actually put down an evo chamber at your oponents natural to block expansions. Right back at you, protoss and terran!
On December 11 2010 13:51 ZeromuS wrote: I learned today that drones can sneak UNDER forcefields on LT Yup They can get under the forcefield and escape my army
On December 11 2010 13:51 ZeromuS wrote: I learned today that drones can sneak UNDER forcefields on LT Yup They can get under the forcefield and escape my army
The Hatchery has rallypoints for Drones and Units ....Just noticed last week rallyes all units and Drones right from the Larva....Decreased my APM drasticaly.
I've learned this recently, and this is pretty obvious...
When you get hooked on losing streak for days, the most common thing is to look at whats wrong with your gameplay. But there is no real answer to that. Instead you should think more outside the box. What can you do to destroy your enemy? Do you feel like you would be able to Nydus his main while attacking his workers in his expansion?
Strike yourself with opportunity, rather than just making the same mistakes all over again. This thinking pattern gets more evaluated the higher you get into the game.
Small tip and it may have been mentioned already, but Ghosts can EMP Nexus' and Orbital Commands (likely queens too, didn't test, but I'm sure it'll work).
Limited usefulness but dropping a few ghosts to cancel Scans can be interesting in nuke play. Nothing groundbreaking, but fun to play with :D
No idea if this was mentioned already, but when I was watching jinro during some of the GSL games, I saw his SCVS sometimes bugging out at the minerals...and then i'm like....OHHHHH...he was spam right clicking on the closest mineral patches to get that SCV in the queue on that patch so there could be two SCVs mining from the closest patches.
People might wanna start doing this every game...it's pretty much like the mineral boosting thing from b4 except legit on some maps like LT though it makes negligible difference because a lot of the patches are almost all the same distance, but on other maps it can make around a 50-70 mineral difference early game.
On December 12 2010 00:16 lakritzc wrote: I've learned this recently, and this is pretty obvious...
When you get hooked on losing streak for days, the most common thing is to look at whats wrong with your gameplay. But there is no real answer to that. Instead you should think more outside the box. What can you do to destroy your enemy? Do you feel like you would be able to Nydus his main while attacking his workers in his expansion?
Strike yourself with opportunity, rather than just making the same mistakes all over again. This thinking pattern gets more evaluated the higher you get into the game.
When this happens to me, I take a break and get enough sleep. Last friday, 1 win, 8 losses. Saturday, 1 loss, 8 wins. :-)
On December 02 2010 06:43 Roblicious wrote: Hitting Alt- Windows still takes you to your desktop even with alt-tab and windows key disabled.
No idea why I even hit those buttons, but it was frusterating as hell when I was about to beat this Zerg and I do that crap and end up having to close SC2 and take that free loss
Fixed by popping off the windows button though :D
I fixed this by deselecting the option "disable windows key", then re-anabling it.
"- on Scrap Station (with vision) you can blink to and from the island, and past rocks."
I tested this myself and couldn't get it to work, either the map has been changed since or I'm doing it wrong, is anyone able to upload a replay or a video of them doing it recently? I've attempted it from both bases and it doesn't even appear possible to even blink onto the island (and yes, I was spotting it with and observer).
On December 14 2010 23:21 Spammish wrote: "- on Scrap Station (with vision) you can blink to and from the island, and past rocks."
I tested this myself and couldn't get it to work, either the map has been changed since or I'm doing it wrong, is anyone able to upload a replay or a video of them doing it recently? I've attempted it from both bases and it doesn't even appear possible to even blink onto the island (and yes, I was spotting it with and observer).
This was patched recently, you can now only blink across gaps that are connected by land in some way.
On December 14 2010 23:21 Spammish wrote: "- on Scrap Station (with vision) you can blink to and from the island, and past rocks."
I tested this myself and couldn't get it to work, either the map has been changed since or I'm doing it wrong, is anyone able to upload a replay or a video of them doing it recently? I've attempted it from both bases and it doesn't even appear possible to even blink onto the island (and yes, I was spotting it with and observer).
This was patched recently, you can now only blink across gaps that are connected by land in some way.
Or something like that
Are you sure? Do you know which patch this was? how recently?
As far as I know, Scrap Station used to be possible to blink across before Blizzard adjusted the maps to prevent it. Nothing to do with weird blink coding, just distance was changed to protect against Blink Stalker cheesiness, like a space brolossus.
Well I was having a lot of trouble with tank pushes in pvt and then I found out a nice little trick. When you scout out that its going to be one-base tank push, 4 immortals can 1 shot tanks. So this has helped me a ton in defending these pushes.
Terran can load up units in a Command Center & lift it off Orbital commands can lift off but can't load up units Planetary fortresses can't lift off but can load up units
PROTOSS-Psionic storms can kill ALL the eggs in the hatchery. I wonder why it isn't mentioned since even 'Helions can kill eggs' was mentioned which is pretty common knowledge. ZERG- You can make creep highways by using overlord's 'Generate creep' ability. It allows for extremely fast deployment of Zerg forces. Also, Drones can burrow too, TERRAN-The nuke timing is perfectly aligned with the Protoss Mothership's vortex. So vortex your enemy's army then immediately ask your ally to nuke vortex. The nuke will fall on enemies EXACTLY when they come out and destroy his whole army in one shot. Extremely overpowered in team games.
Left clicking on the minimap has the same effect as left clicking on the map. I sorta knew this from an old queen inject method, but recently I've been putting it into play more with ling scouts, overlord scouts, and searching for stuff like proxy pylons. If you have a rough target, minimap clicks are waaaay faster than screen scrolling, and still faster than shifting view with the minimap and then clicking on the map.
On December 14 2010 23:21 Spammish wrote: "- on Scrap Station (with vision) you can blink to and from the island, and past rocks."
I tested this myself and couldn't get it to work, either the map has been changed since or I'm doing it wrong, is anyone able to upload a replay or a video of them doing it recently? I've attempted it from both bases and it doesn't even appear possible to even blink onto the island (and yes, I was spotting it with and observer).
This was patched recently, you can now only blink across gaps that are connected by land in some way.
Or something like that
Are you sure? Do you know which patch this was? how recently?
On 07.07.10, beta patch 16. There was a bug, where blink range was effectively increased, if there was unpathatable terrain in the way. You can still blink over gaps and such just fine, just the bug was fixed. This also fixed blinking on top of ramps blocked by rocks with no spotter.
Have I mentioned I love this thread? Here's my contribution:
If you CTRL+click on a unit or building, all units or buildings of the same type currently on screen will be selected. It's a lifesaver when putting together hotkey groups, or if you're in a big battle and want all of one unit type to focus fire in one place.
On December 08 2010 21:36 iMremedyz wrote: Im diamond in everything 1900 rating in one v one and i just realized that there is a idle worker picture in the bottom left and i play terran so you can imagine how many times that happens. I picked up game late and never looked into any minor details so i might still be missing some things but whatever this one made me feel stupid, also always play with bars on MICRO FOR THE WIN.
This should never happen at all, not even to a bronze player. You can queue up actions by pressing down the shift key while ordering them. Always order your workers to go right back to mining after building something.
When playing zerg you can have all of your hatcheries on the same hotkey. Then you can select all available larva and build units. Also makes it easy to rally lol.
I didn't read through all 33 pages but I'll add stuff I know that isn't in the OP
General - You can check how saturated your base is by highlighting all workers mining minerals. If you selected 3 rows of workers (looking at the bottom center of your screen) that means you have 24 workers (1 row can go up to 8)
- You can repeatedly use your scouting worker to mine from your opponent's mineral patch, cancel it just before your worker actually gathers minerals, go to another patch and repeat over and over effectively preventing your opponent to mine from 2 of the initial 8 mineral patches. Obviously this requires high apm, and just annoys your opponent more than anything.
- You can hotkey camera views with ctrl+(f5-f8). Usually a good idea to hotkey your ramp, backdoor rocks, proxy pylon, etc.
Terran - Unlike what is says in the OP, you CANNOT see mules being called down by your opponent in the fog of war. (patched)
- Add on's are universal not just for yourself but for your opponent/teammate as well. Even though you still have to destroy them to win the game, you can steal your opponent's add on's should you find yourself in the position.
- You can EMP a Nexus / Orbital Command
- SCV's can be healed by medivacs or repaired by other SCV's
Protoss - Unlike what it says in the OP, you CANNOT Feedback a Nexus / Orbital Command. You can however, cast Feedback on Point Defense Drones.
- Blinking Stalkers the instant before they get hit by an attack causes them to dodge the attack completely (the timing window is pretty small and not viable in a large battle, but very applicable in a small engagement).
- Hallucinated Immortals only take 20dmg with hardened shields
- You can turn off the auto-cast on Zealot Charge
- You can Chronoboost your ally's buildings. Chronoboosting a Hatchery results in faster larva replenishment, you cannot chronoboost eggs however.
- With your scouting Probe, you can usually place a proxy pylon in your opponent's mineral line to trap 1 or more of his workers. Does not work against Zerg for obvious reasons.
- Probes have less health (20/20) than SCVs and Drones (45). In a straight up a-click no micro battle, Probes will lose.
edit: Zerg - If you cancel a Hatchery, it will leave enough creep for you to build a 3x3 building. This can make baneling busts really difficult to scout if your terran opponent scans and doesn't see a lair or use of creep tumors (so he will think your main is the only place you can place tech structures).
- You can neural parasite a probe/scv and make any structure of the opposing race.
- Moving burrowed units onto supply depots prevents the terran from lifting them up.
- Larva are units and can activate a Xel'Naga watch tower if they are close enough.
On December 12 2010 01:27 LastLullaby wrote: Small tip and it may have been mentioned already, but Ghosts can EMP Nexus' and Orbital Commands (likely queens too, didn't test, but I'm sure it'll work).
Limited usefulness but dropping a few ghosts to cancel Scans can be interesting in nuke play. Nothing groundbreaking, but fun to play with :D
Not game-breaking...lol? Get ghosts vs t. Research cloak. Let energy build up. Cloak, then walk 2 to each OC, EMP all energy away from them. Snipe all scvs/enemy units with impunity. GG. I've seen this happen once in all my time watching SC2, and i have no idea why. T v T, if you don't go banshee, there is usually no detection available, as most Ts will just rely on scans for clutch detection, then build a raven or eng bay for future. But eliminate all scans...and you can knock off scvs so quick it's gg well before you could get nay detection out.
On December 28 2010 23:10 tuestresfat wrote: - Workers have a slight delay after gathering minerals, you can make them mine faster by repeatedly queuing "c + right click (on the mineral patch)" to make them return gathered minerals with no delay. Obviously this is rather insignificant but it's not like you have anything better to do at the start of a match.
Creep is neutral- In ZvZ units of either side get a speed bonus irrespective of the allegiance of the creep source, also u can build crawlers on 'his' creep
Terran add ons are neutral(just like in broodwar), you can land your buildings on your enemies add ons after their buildings are destroyed, they will change to ur colour and start benefitting ur rax
Sadly(or thankfully) psi isnt neutral, you cannot warp in units in the opponents pylon field.
Also most people know that mothership vortex affects all units(self and enemy). But many dont know that the mothership itself is immune to vortex(there was a recent game where a player, tester i think, tried to send his mothership into the vortex to save it but didn't work, even the caster thought it would work. can someone link the video it was a PvZ on metalapolis)
On December 28 2010 23:10 tuestresfat wrote: - Workers have a slight delay after gathering minerals, you can make them mine faster by repeatedly queuing "c + right click (on the mineral patch)" to make them return gathered minerals with no delay. Obviously this is rather insignificant but it's not like you have anything better to do at the start of a match.
On December 28 2010 23:10 tuestresfat wrote: - Workers have a slight delay after gathering minerals, you can make them mine faster by repeatedly queuing "c + right click (on the mineral patch)" to make them return gathered minerals with no delay. Obviously this is rather insignificant but it's not like you have anything better to do at the start of a match.
On December 28 2010 23:10 tuestresfat wrote: - You can Chronoboost your ally's buildings. Chronoboosting a Hatchery results in faster larva replenishment, you cannot chronoboost eggs however.
On December 28 2010 23:10 tuestresfat wrote: - You can Chronoboost your ally's buildings. Chronoboosting a Hatchery results in faster larva replenishment, you cannot chronoboost eggs however.
On December 28 2010 23:10 tuestresfat wrote: - You can Chronoboost your ally's buildings. Chronoboosting a Hatchery results in faster larva replenishment, you cannot chronoboost eggs however.
This isn't true at all. Was it ever?
I believe you can chronoboost your ally's structures.. if they have left. Not 100% on this, though.
On December 28 2010 23:10 tuestresfat wrote: - Probes have less health (20/20) than SCVs and Drones (45). In a straight up a-click no micro battle, Probes will lose.
Clearly someone saw Psy's tips and tricks videos regarding this one though, I believe drones actually have 40 health, although they'll still beat a probe one on one as they'll regenerate at least one hit point during the fight.
On December 28 2010 23:10 tuestresfat wrote: - You can Chronoboost your ally's buildings. Chronoboosting a Hatchery results in faster larva replenishment, you cannot chronoboost eggs however.
On December 28 2010 23:10 tuestresfat wrote: - Probes have less health (20/20) than SCVs and Drones (45). In a straight up a-click no micro battle, Probes will lose.
Clearly someone saw Psy's tips and tricks videos regarding this one though, I believe drones actually have 40 health, although they'll still beat a probe one on one as they'll regenerate at least one hit point during the fight.
True. Another wonder of SC2 though. Probes are weakest worker unit, however, with micro, you can circle hurt ones around until their shield regens, and then they are far better than drones and SCVs 1 on 1.
On December 28 2010 22:53 AXygnus wrote: Took me some time to notice that a Chrono Boosted Nexus doesn't mine faster :/
You just ruined my life...
Is this true??
CB on a nexus builds probes faster, which equals faster mining. However, the resource gather per probe remains the same.
Yeah when I played my first few games as Protoss I thought I noticed the probe animation moving faster when they were close to a CBed nexus. But it was just wishful thinking.
Oh i just figured out the coolest thing today. When playing as random you can tell what race you are going to be playing as about 30seconds earlier because of which cursor you have on the loading screen.
WOA, didnt know you could set burrowed zerg units to autocast!!! Does this mean you can randomly burrow 2 banelings everywhere all over the map, get them to autocast and they will unburrow when terran units are on top of them??? If so I can see this drastically changing my ZvT.
My contribution. An obvious thing, if your zerg and you want to quickly saturate a new expansion, have all your hatches grouped into one group and click it to the mineral patch of your new expansion. You can quickly build 15-20 drones to head there when they hatch without manually doing it yourself. Really helped me saturate.
On January 29 2011 05:41 HardCorey wrote: Oh i just figured out the coolest thing today. When playing as random you can tell what race you are going to be playing as about 30seconds earlier because of which cursor you have on the loading screen.
OH MY GOD THIS I realised this yesterday too after playing maybe my 80th game of random, I was so happy. I really like being able tell what matchup I'm going to be playing (unless the other guy is random of course) before the game starts, gives me a few seconds to think about my plan.
this is something that took me a while to figure out, but in options, if you go to the display page, you can change the resolution from windowed, windowed(fullscreen) and fullscreen. Windowed(fullscreen) is basically full screen but wen u click alt-tab or windows key you can look at other things while sc2 is still running in the background. in other words, you never minimize the sc2 window and lag. you can click back on the game and play straight away. i saw some of the casters do this but didnt realise how until a few weeks ago. its quite convenient as i can surf the net, change music tracks etc while in a ladder game and not worry about lagging or the amount of time it takes to get bak in the game
I found out you can select unload all and then select your dropship and it drops units on the move.
10 years of playing Starcraft and I didn't know this!! Please tell me others didn't know this! I thought you just had to always individually select the units within the dropship to do this.
I played through the entire beta thinking factories costed 200 minerals like in Brood war and all my build orders were made around a 200 mineral factory.
On January 29 2011 05:41 HardCorey wrote: Oh i just figured out the coolest thing today. When playing as random you can tell what race you are going to be playing as about 30seconds earlier because of which cursor you have on the loading screen.
OH MY GOD THIS I realised this yesterday too after playing maybe my 80th game of random, I was so happy. I really like being able tell what matchup I'm going to be playing (unless the other guy is random of course) before the game starts, gives me a few seconds to think about my plan.
The problem is how you make the cursor show up. Sometimes it shows up, sometimes the cursor's not visible until the match starts
I am pretty sure I read through all this and learned some great things. Read some obvious things too many times, and read some things that I personally already knew. All in all a GREAT thread!
As I'm sure this is obvious to some people I am going to post it because I think that is the point of this thread.
When I first started this game, I must have mis-read the chronoboost information, because I thought ONE chrono to your nexus would speed up all your buildings. I would waste every chornoboost directly on my nexus. I thought this would make my gateways that were warping in build faster while making probes build faster, while making every other building faster. It makes sense now that it's not this way, but I guess the main thing I thought was that by chrono-ing my nexus, it would make my buildings warp-in faster. Wasted a lot of chrono on that haha!
Since my RTS really started in War3. I've always known about Ctrl and Shift Click. I know it's been mentioned in this thread, but even friends of mine who play this game a lot don't seem to know Ctrl+Click will select all units/buildings of the same type. Shift+Basically anything will queue commands for a unit. eg scv build depot then go back to mining.
On January 29 2011 05:41 HardCorey wrote: Oh i just figured out the coolest thing today. When playing as random you can tell what race you are going to be playing as about 30seconds earlier because of which cursor you have on the loading screen.
OH MY GOD THIS I realised this yesterday too after playing maybe my 80th game of random, I was so happy. I really like being able tell what matchup I'm going to be playing (unless the other guy is random of course) before the game starts, gives me a few seconds to think about my plan.
The problem is how you make the cursor show up. Sometimes it shows up, sometimes the cursor's not visible until the match starts
omfg u serious??? I play random a lot and i never noticed ><
and yea if someone knows why the cursor comes up for some games and doesn't for others it'd be greatly greatly appreciated :D
You can take a group of zealots, turn auto charge off, and manually click charge on a marauder/marine in the back of a group of terran units. The zealots will go surround the entire army as they rush to the back to kill that single unit. A-move l0l zeal surround and storm away.
On January 29 2011 14:02 Befree wrote: I found out you can select unload all and then select your dropship and it drops units on the move.
10 years of playing Starcraft and I didn't know this!! Please tell me others didn't know this! I thought you just had to always individually select the units within the dropship to do this.
Sorry but I think pretty much everyone does this. But the most common way is to make the ship move and then when you want them to drop you drop click ON the medivac, then it starts to release the troops.
ONT: It took a while for me to discover that shift not only adds units to a group but also creates groups. Now I only use crtl to create groups if I accidentally added the wrong unit to a group.
Someone a couple pages up mentioned using 'Y' as a rally. Obviously, simply right-clicking sets the rally point. Also, something I didn't know right away, for Zerg's separate worker rally point, you don't have to hit 'G', right clicking on the minerals sets the worker rally.
The confusion about Chronoboosting your allies structures has been confused. You can only do this after your Protoss partner in a team game leaves and you are able to control what is left of his forces. At this point, you can chrono his buildings or yours. You can also build units with his structures, or otherwise spend minerals, which you can't do even with control given, while he is still in the game.
Here's something to make sure you never do. If you're essentially contained as PvT with Seige Tanks outside your base, but they don't have vision, don't get cute with Phoenix Graviton Beams ...
Also, a good way to hide Tech for Protoss, especially a Dark Shrine, is to simply use a probe dropped from a warp prism at some obscure location to warp it in and leave again. The structure doesn't have to be powered, since the building itself doesn't do any research. This goes for other buildings which are pre-requisites. Forges, Cyber Cores, Templar Archives, etc have to be present to make Photon Cannons, Stalkers and Sentries and higher tech buildings, and HT's, but they don't require power unless they themselves want to do some sort of research.
As for patches changing Blink Stalkers, they don't need a path in all cases, as you can still blink to the islands on Lost Temple. It was just particular maps that were changed.
On January 29 2011 05:41 HardCorey wrote: Oh i just figured out the coolest thing today. When playing as random you can tell what race you are going to be playing as about 30seconds earlier because of which cursor you have on the loading screen.
OH MY GOD THIS I realised this yesterday too after playing maybe my 80th game of random, I was so happy. I really like being able tell what matchup I'm going to be playing (unless the other guy is random of course) before the game starts, gives me a few seconds to think about my plan.
The problem is how you make the cursor show up. Sometimes it shows up, sometimes the cursor's not visible until the match starts
omfg u serious??? I play random a lot and i never noticed ><
and yea if someone knows why the cursor comes up for some games and doesn't for others it'd be greatly greatly appreciated :D
keep your cursor hovering over a chat box when you find a match, as if you were about to click it and type something. it should make your cursor show up during the loading screen
If I get really aggressive with my opening as protoss vs something like terran with an adel scott type build, I can make him crap himself into making bunkers and getting ready for an attack when i'm actually just safely expanding after just poking at his ramp.
On January 29 2011 05:41 HardCorey wrote: Oh i just figured out the coolest thing today. When playing as random you can tell what race you are going to be playing as about 30seconds earlier because of which cursor you have on the loading screen.
OH MY GOD THIS I realised this yesterday too after playing maybe my 80th game of random, I was so happy. I really like being able tell what matchup I'm going to be playing (unless the other guy is random of course) before the game starts, gives me a few seconds to think about my plan.
The problem is how you make the cursor show up. Sometimes it shows up, sometimes the cursor's not visible until the match starts
omfg u serious??? I play random a lot and i never noticed ><
and yea if someone knows why the cursor comes up for some games and doesn't for others it'd be greatly greatly appreciated :D
keep your cursor hovering over a chat box when you find a match, as if you were about to click it and type something. it should make your cursor show up during the loading screen
in the upper right hand corner the little icon that allows you to see opponents race... wicked frustrating to just forget it when game starts or not catch itin loading screen only to have to scout early to see... was super pumped to find that out
Location hotkeys, brought to my attention by Day[9].
Makes warping in units so much easier and way faster than the method I had previously been using with having hotkeys all over my keyboard.
I also changed them from F5 and up to F1 and up; moved idle probe to the ` button.
(Probably already listed in this thread, but seeing as how there are 34 pages and I don't have that much time I thought I'd just get my input in here!)
There is a visible change to the Roach model depending on wether or not he has researched Tunneling Claw. WITH the research completed the roach has coloured spikes on his back; without research there is no spikes.
On February 15 2011 17:58 Whitewing wrote: You can make terran buildings spin in the air in circles really freaking fast so that they tip on their side. Fun to do inside the enemy base.
That has to do with having the building patrol at a certain distance right?
On February 15 2011 17:58 Whitewing wrote: You can make terran buildings spin in the air in circles really freaking fast so that they tip on their side. Fun to do inside the enemy base.
That has to do with having the building patrol at a certain distance right?
Yup yup, you create a small patrol triangle (use shift) and if the distances are right, you can have so much fun with it.
A poorly placed creep tumor can block your ability to take an expansion... Seems obvious, but I guess I'd never actually thought about whether you can build on tumors before.
If u have 5 rax with 3 teach and 2 reactor, choose the barracks and hit 'D' 3 times and then hit 'A' 2 times to get 3 maraders and 4 marines . No mix up of units,!
until a few weeks ago, i didn't realize you can highlight multiple scvs and build with all of them... lol. i always thought the ones that wasn't making the first building would just idle
I would like to add as zerg, you can have a drone set to a hotkey and whatever that drone builds, the building will stay as that hotkey. So if you want to just save some time, set your drone to whatever you would normally make your second hatch on (this works with shift control groups too) and it the hatchery will automatically be on that hotkey.
[QUOTE]On September 22 2010 19:07 Perscienter wrote: [list][*]EMP uncovers cloacked units for a moment. With the help of it, you can hunt observers.
I dont know if wasting an EMP would be worth it to uncloak an observer? I wonder though which is better. Scan, raven, tower, emp. I would say tower since ebays will be up anyway for upgrades.
On February 17 2011 15:20 b0urne420 wrote: "SCVs on auto-repair loaded into a Medivac will repair everything they can inside the Medivac (possibly at a higher resource cost)."
i thought roach warren costed gas for my first 50 games(kinda like a hydra den in sc1) so i kept losing to 4gate and random terran cheese because my roach warren was delayed a good 30 seconds vs the worst players imaginable. Now it's sooo easy roach OP
You build a worker before sending your first group to mine, or so I was told. Made splitting drones much easier to do. Before this I would send drones and then make the first.
Also learning that creep tumors can make creep tumors.
"Backspace will cycle you through multiple bases."
I actually changed this key to the tilda key, ~, to make it easier for when I random zerg.
Also, I put all my unit producing structures (besides cc/hatch/nexus) in the same control group and tab through them. I think it's probably the best way to do it (and more of a nooby thing: I keep all my upgrade buildings on control group 6 or 7 so I won't forget about them)
Well, I learned more than one thing obvious. During Beta, Trump was doing video reviews of replays. At the time, I was Bronze league. There were a ton of things I got from watching Trump review my replay, and a few more from watching his stream. Overnight, I shot up from Bronze to Diamond pretty much (actually took about 2 weeks only to reach platinum from bronze. And on release, I placed platinum and ranked up to Diamond in 3 days.)
The biggest things I learned were:
Keep building workers. I usually built some workers in the early game, but stopped. I didn't realize the importance of workers.
Good build order. I learned the 3 rax push, and slowly branched into several different builds. But I got really efficient at build orders.
Scouting. I never thought about scouting ahead of my army before, or the importance of knowing where the enemy army is. I always do that now.
Stutter-step micro. So basic, but I never knew about it.
Also, I switched from Zerg to Terran. It just fits my style better.
I was playing a long game against a computer just to mass infestor and build all of the toss's buildings and units and tehn kill him with his own stuff and I realized the lair tech transfering to other hatcheries thing.
it's kinda' awesome. If I have two hatcheries and a lair, I can tech and go to hive all at the same time- if there's gas for it.
On March 04 2011 19:56 CountBarq wrote: I was playing a long game against a computer just to mass infestor and build all of the toss's buildings and units and tehn kill him with his own stuff and I realized the lair tech transfering to other hatcheries thing.
it's kinda' awesome. If I have two hatcheries and a lair, I can tech and go to hive all at the same time- if there's gas for it.
Hmm you believed that you needed a lair for each expansion in order to build lair tech units right?
It's not the first time I ear something like that it must come from another RTS logic pbly.
As for me I just learnt that you can repair units in medivacs if you have a auto-repair scv inside. The More you know...
On March 04 2011 19:56 CountBarq wrote: I was playing a long game against a computer just to mass infestor and build all of the toss's buildings and units and tehn kill him with his own stuff and I realized the lair tech transfering to other hatcheries thing.
it's kinda' awesome. If I have two hatcheries and a lair, I can tech and go to hive all at the same time- if there's gas for it.
Hmm you believed that you needed a lair for each expansion in order to build lair tech units right?
It's not the first time I ear something like that it must come from another RTS logic pbly.
As for me I just learnt that you can repair units in medivacs if you have a auto-repair scv inside. The More you know...
Not at all. I thought only the lair could research the upgrades(Overlord/seer speed, carry, burrow), but all hatcheries once you get lair can. Which could mean getting what I said up above all at the same time and not having timing tradeoffs.
All: -Buildings have certain animations when something is happening to them. This can range from the obvious, such as blinking lights on a Barracks, or big green blobs on Hatcheries, to the more subtle like how Baneling Nests shake when they're researching Centrifugal Hooks. If you can't learn them all, at the very least note the difference between buildings in "work" and buildings "at rest." -You can queue up movement and active abilities; for example select a Siege Tank, hold Shift, click to an area, and then push E to make your tank move somewhere and then siege up automatically. This applies to almost every active ability -- Changeling, Burrow, Vortex, Burrow, Siegemode, PDD, etc.
Terran: -If you're lazy and have lots of MULEs saved up, you can drop up to 8 (6 for Gold) MULEs onto a single mineral patch and they'll spread out automatically, just like SCVs. 2 MULEs cannot mine from the same patch, so don't call down more MULEs than mineral patches or it's a complete waste. -Interesting economical note: 1 MULE at a gold mineral patch gives 400 minerals, the cost of expanding there in the first place.
Zerg: -When dealing with super early marine aggression, remember that workers and zerglings are slightly FASTER than marines. Use the opportunity to surround, then attack. If you a-move, you will lose a lot more than you should -Fungal also reveals burrowed units! -You can break the 200 Food limit by selecting all your drones, building a bunch of spores (cheapest, smallest structure), and then building army units. Once the eggs are morphing, cancel the spores and you'll have a 200+ food army. -Morphing heals a unit completely. So morph your injured Zerglings and Corruptors first, as their evolved forms will start with full health. Additionally, don't waste fungals on Baneling Cocoons unless you're sure that Fungal will be able to kill them immediately, as finishing a morph heals fully and removes all debuffs (like Fungal)
Protoss: -Hallucinate can force your enemy to overbuild countering, but ultimately useless units such as Vikings and Corruptors in the case of Hallucinated Colossi. -You can break walls by using forcefield to push one or two units through walls.
Ok, I havent read this anywhere but it was something that I realised in the beta. I've kept myself from discussing it because I play toss and this sort of information only helps those playing against me :/
BUT DID YOU KNOW
Stargates are unique in the sense that you can see what unit it is producing by the shape of the half warped object in the middle?
On March 04 2011 20:13 graNite wrote: You can steal your enemies' Tech Labs and Reactors by building your own Barracks', Factories or Starports on it.
Did it improve your gameplay?
On March 04 2011 20:47 pandaminion wrote: Terran: -If you're lazy and have lots of MULEs saved up, you can drop up to 8 (6 for Gold) MULEs onto a single mineral patch and they'll spread out automatically, just like SCVs. 2 MULEs cannot mine from the same patch, so don't call down more MULEs than mineral patches or it's a complete waste.
Thats untrue. MULEs will spread only if there's free mineral patch nearby. If you drop 20 MULEs on gold expo they all will mine over each other mining whole expansion in few minutes.
On March 04 2011 20:47 pandaminion wrote: -You can break the 200 Food limit by selecting all your drones, building a bunch of spores (cheapest, smallest structure), and then building army units. Once the eggs are morphing, cancel the spores and you'll have a 200+ food army.
WTF HAX. Can you post a video or a replay with this trick? It almost feels like a bug; like the army units shouldn't hatch (same thing happens if the cocoon has no physical space to put its hatched units; see the When Cheese Fails episode with a proxy hatch)..
Now I want to see the zerg 400 food pushgogogo.
EDIT: Lemme pay it forward with some stuff I've found.
Zerg: * If you remap the basecam hotkey to capslock, you can do the mrbitter inject technique without moving your hand. General: * Use one of the camera hotkeys on your rally point, so you don't lose track of units. Get it the habit of hitting ctrl+f5 after you set your rally * When selecting a single building, mouse over the progress bar in the wireframe. It'll show you how much longer remains on production/research (unit is game seconds).
If you do fast pool in ZvZ, you can put spine on enemy creep, where he can't see it. Hatchery does not provide sight for whole creep, which it's spreading from it.
On March 04 2011 20:47 pandaminion wrote: -You can break the 200 Food limit by selecting all your drones, building a bunch of spores (cheapest, smallest structure), and then building army units. Once the eggs are morphing, cancel the spores and you'll have a 200+ food army.
WTF HAX. Can you post a video or a replay with this trick? It almost feels like a bug; like the army units shouldn't hatch (same thing happens if the cocoon has no physical space to put its hatched units; see the When Cheese Fails episode with a proxy hatch)..
Through the 38 odd pages this has probably already been mentioned but...
I learned a few weeks ago that I could ctrl+click to select all the same unit/building type on screen or in the bottom middle where the selected units are shown.
I'm sure its one of those things everyone else knows, but it was a revolution for me when a friend told me about it xD
Rally points don't gave to be straight lines. If you shift click rally points, the unit will move from one point to the other until it reaches the last point.
Simplest thing that improved my game more than anything is building supply depots more consistently.
O...its not really something i learned but something i started to do. I started to talk out loud to myself to keep up on my mechanics. so while playing ill be like, "ok spawn larva, make creep tumor, check drone count, scout, spawn larva, make creep tumor, make drones, move army around, build den, larva, creep, scout, units, drones. . . " you get the point, as the game goes on i just say larva, creep, drones, move, scout. This type of "mental checklist" really helpes me out a lot.
On April 10 2011 08:26 A.J. wrote: "shift + number" adds something to a control group.
This helped me a lot with zerg since I used to hotkey every single one of my queens/hatches to a separate hotkey.
Now I just need to learn how to remove an individual unit from a control group.
select a group of units, hold down shift, click the units' potraits of those you want to remove from that group (i mean the little picture of each unit in the bottom middle). reset your new group to ctrl+x if necessary/wanted
On April 10 2011 08:26 A.J. wrote: "shift + number" adds something to a control group.
This helped me a lot with zerg since I used to hotkey every single one of my queens/hatches to a separate hotkey.
Now I just need to learn how to remove an individual unit from a control group.
select a group of units, hold down shift, click the units' potraits of those you want to remove from that group (i mean the little picture of each unit in the bottom middle). reset your new group to ctrl+x if necessary/wanted
You can put workers on hold position to form a wall that enemy units won't attack. This is extremely useful for blocking ramps (I.E. protoss 4 gating tries to run past spine crawlers into your main) or to protect your ranged units from melee units. (I.E. using SCV's to form a wall between your marines and their zealots/zerglings.
Workers on hold position will not be attacked as long as there is a unit with a higher attack priority nearby. You have to tell your unit to specifically attack the worker on hold position in order to kill it.
Many things in the OP are "fixed" or changed now. Mules cannot be seen through fog of war anymore. I don't believe blink stalkers can blink to any island on any map anymore. There were some others.
This isn't really a trick or anything, but just adding lots and lots more production facilities as Terran as soon as you hit max and start banking is really amazingly useful. I was in a TvT today and due to just adding a ton of buildings I was getting 7 tanks a production cycle rather than the 2 I used to. Even if you shouldn't be able to support that many, banking minerals and gas really does add up when your maxed!
One point in the OP is wrong: Under the all races spoiler it says MULEs can be seen through Fog of War when they are called down. I forget which patch it was, but that has been corrected.
Aside from that, sweet thread. Didn't know about SCV's repairing from inside medivacs...thats pretty cool to know.
-you can hotkey locations on the map, warp-in spots or hatcheries, etc (the buttons are inconvenient so go to hotkeys-> global hotkeys, and change the location hotkey)
Terren - you can hide and build ur expo inside ur base and make SCVs til u r ready to take your expo.
-if you have big hands you can use the F-keys for hotkey groups, go change hotkeys in the hotkey menu
-there are custom maps that help you practice SPLITS, MACRO, MICRO, Build Order testing
-having specific mouse sensitivity settings matter (go read a guide about 1:1 mouse to pixel ratio)
-turning off/on music in sounds can help you play better
-you can import/export hotkeys to a different account by moving the hotkey folder from 1 account to another (this is in the mydocuments/starcraft 2/112321323123 <------ each number is a different account) remember to actually load the hotkeys
- being #1 in your league doesn't guarantee league promotion. Hidden MMR rating and being considered an active player (low bonus pool) determine league promotion.
-being inactive (high bonus pool) but having high MMR means your opponents could always be from higher leagues.
- 1 bonus pool point is generated every hour
-having all your production on 1 hot-key will allow you to produce from all of them (press tab to cycle through production facilities)
-holding shift and highlighting (with your mouse) a unit that is in the group will deselect or select them out of OR into your group.
-shift-clicking on portraits will remove units from your selected group.
-use the above method to send 1 unit to scout the tower. (click to move your army to the tower, shift deselect 1 unit using the above method, and then click where you want your entire army -1 unit to be at) Also remember to make a new hotkey for the army.. so the unit doesn't get moved off from the tower.
I just figured this one out the other day it wasn't really an issue for me because I rarely need to do it as terran but you can target flying units with spells by looking for the shadows as they are rather large for flying units. So this makes emp on void rays a bit easyer if your having problems clicking on one of them :/
On April 10 2011 20:35 xJaCEx wrote: I just figured this one out the other day it wasn't really an issue for me because I rarely need to do it as terran but you can target flying units with spells by looking for the shadows as they are rather large for flying units. So this makes emp on void rays a bit easyer if your having problems clicking on one of them :/
You could go in to the menu and turn on the flyer helper option which will colour the units when you're on top of them No need to look for shadows which can be quite difficult to see.
Terran: When you have an OC and a PF on the same hotkey, pressing S to queue up SCVs will max out the OC queue and won't queue up any on the PF. You have to press Tab to select the PF and then queue workers. Took me forever to figure this out while playing as Random.
Edit: Also if you have a regular CC in the mix, as well. When you have them all on one hotkey, it sorts it into OC -> CC -> PF. It'll select all the OCs by default (although all their portraits show up), so you have to tab through the CCs and PFs to get to them.
When watching replays, the "spending" tab often has useful information. Sometimes I don't understand why I lost, but then I see that I got hugely outspent on technology (of course, useful if understood correctly.)
On April 10 2011 11:16 Nate5911 wrote: Is there a Mac equivalent command of hitting Control + F1 to select idle workers?
Whatever modifier you use to select an entire group of something by clicking on one of them is that button you need. Probably also the same button you use to create a new control group.
On April 09 2011 05:52 vitaum88 wrote: u can use enemy's techlabs and reactors as your own... just land on top of it
wat? that's cool to know in base trade situations. I mean, guess you shouldn´t kill the addons then.
What, is this for real? No way dude, I have to tell my terran friends. This is probably the best thing I've ever learned from this thread.
Yep it's true. What I'd really love to see is the completely unlikely scenario where a TvT is down to one player with a tech lab, the other with a barracks. Barracks simply lands on tech lab and wins. Now that would be something to see.
Felt stupid when I used to a-move my blings at a group of marines instead of just moving at the ball and watching all the marines die instead of just half them dieing....Only works when the Terran doesn't split his army well of course.
An obvious one, but perhaps not everybody knows it: When buildings are building you can already add them to a control group, in addition when the building is a production facility, you can already set your rally point during construction.
It really helped me, so I neve forgot about extra buildings I made and so that no units would just stand idle near their facility ^^
I realised getting 21 sentries before a robo wasn't too good of an idea... I got into platinum doing that... somehow. Almost instantly got into diamond once I stopped doing that.
That when you are doing the backspace inject and having the nomadic queens problem that you can just hit S for stop and you will never have to lose games just trying to find your queens again!
Not sure if someone said this, but u can add unit to a control group by: selecting the units, hold shift, then hit the desired hotkey. this can be especially useful for zergs (with good macro). With roach ling on 1, make round of roach (spending all larva), hold shift, then 1. now all ur units can be instantly rallied to whever ur army is
Protoss: HT's storm can one-shot a good deal of saved-up zerg larvae. Found out when going for the Combat achievement where you need to kill 20 units with a single HT's storms.
Terran: (quite obvious but maybe worth stating): Battlecruisers' Yamato Cannon one-shots lesser air units and can't be dodged, which seems to be one of the best uses of that ability. Especially when unassisted battlecruisers run into vikings and especially since battlecruisers are so slow that retreating is practically pointless (because they will die anyway but without dealing damage before). So don't waste Yamato on isolated turrets (or any turrets when you have like 3 armour upgrade) and don't waste any time firing those Yamatos as any damage you deal from ordinary BC weapons before landing a Yamato is wasted (since Yamato one-shots). And don't think a second before firing Yamatos at capital ships, either (ONE each). And don't forget you have the Yamatos (used to happen to me).
Creep Tumors display a team color while they still retain the ability to spawn a new tumor. When the ability is used, the color disappears and they become "creep" colored. You can use this to quickly assess which Tumors can still be used.
When I transferred drones from gas to minerals or vice-versa, I used to either wait until they delivered their cargo, or didn't wait and so they lost it. Watching IdrA I realized you don't have to sacrifice either time or money! Tell the worker to go harvest something else, and then hit "C". If he has any cargo, he will deliver it, and then go to its new destination. I now hit C as a reflex whenever I redirect a worker.
I can't say this improved my play much though. What did, however, was realizing I didn't make enough drones and just massing drones all game long.
EPT
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