[G] Bumblebees Guide to Playing with Low APM - Page 4

At the beginning of the game, hotkey a single probe. When the first building is made, hit P and click the furthest point on the screen in the base. This makes the unit move back and forth between the initial building placement and location far from the last placement. When the 7 hotkey is pressed twice, the screen will center on the probe and the player can build at the location the screen has centered on. This has the effect of allowing the protoss player to quickly cover their base in power fields without having to rely heavily on screen movement. This also means the probe is always where the building is to be placed, which reduces the time required for a mining probe to goto the building location. This also eliminates the need to use an action to rally the worker back to minerals.

On November 01 2010 11:09 Merlinius wrote:


I'm not sure I really understand this. Are you suggesting to take a probe off mining permanently and have it patrol in your base? If so, I don't see the advantage over just hotkeying a probe and taking it off the minerals for 3 seconds at a time in order to warp in a building when necessary.

Btw. I don't like the idea of hotkeying the production facilities on 2-6. This will lead to 1A syndrome because you only have one (close) hotkey for your army. Personally, I would reserve 1-3 for the army (or other temporary stuff like the scouting probe).

Unit Hotkeying - Unit hotkeying is putting units into a hotkey for easier access. Low APM players should embrace "one hotkey syndrome", and rely on box and click control of unit groups. This may seem counterintuitive since box/click control requires more actions and more accuracy than simply having multiple unit groups, but like building hotkeys, having to redo or incorrectly making multiple unit groups is usually far more disadvantageous than relying on box/click control. As you advance, I do suggest slowly splitting up unit groups starting with ground and air units. This really should only occur at the point when you have advanced to the stage where basic harassment is possible without causing disproportionate disadvantages to self. Most low APM players will never honestly make it to this point.

A very major advantage to primarily controlling with a single hotkey and box/click selection is that the player can frequently and easily click their main building hotkey once to bring it into the center information window. Since the player is not using hotkeys for primary control, they can monitor energy and spawn larva constantly throughout the battle. This allows the low APM player to substitute their lack of micro with a hyper-awareness of their macro.

A similar method to building hotkeying is recommended for unit hotkeying with a minor difference. The procedure is: ctrl-click, shift-hotkey. This selects all of the unit type on-screen, then adds it to a group. Ctrl-click is more accurate than boxing, and significantly less action intensive than clicking each unit. Ctrl-clicking will require adding each type of unit to the hotkey.

On October 29 2010 23:46 Bumblebees wrote:


People with low APM due to limitation are not going to benefit by using the minimap for spawn larva. That requires fast fine motor skills where inaccuracy requires repeating the action again with the same requirement.

Minimizing the number of errors greatly increases efficiency, so relying on clicking a very large hatchery is more efficiency than clicking a very small spot on the minimap.

Not only that but your method requires removing eyes from the 'game-screen' for a period of time, and those who have low APM due to focus problems will have difficulty with that as well.


It's a good technique for people to try, but I suspect it's fairly useless if not outright harmful for the people this guide was aimed at.

On November 02 2010 03:14 SilverPotato wrote:


I can see where you're coming from with this. However I'd like to point a few things out about the differences between Minimap injection and Regular injection in terms of how they limit the user:

Regular injection:
Pros
- Easy to inject comparably (size)

Cons
- Must be done one at a time at a slow pace
- Requires sight of each individual hatchery
- Requires a large number of hotkeys to be used nearing late game
- Draws players attention away from forward attacking units
- Requires more APM overall (mostly more key presses)


Minimap Injection:
Pros
- Fast
- Only requires 1 hotkey (for queens)
- Only requires as many actions as there are hatcheries + 3 (Queen hotkey and then Shift+V)
- Lets the user maintain a view of the battlefield
- Requires fewer key presses and mouse clicks

Cons
- Requires accuracy due to smaller size

Really what I'm saying is, is that yes you're removing your eyes from the "game screen", but if you think about it, you're not removing your camera from the battlefield like you do with traditional injection. So basically you get back to the important things like creeping or attacking unit placement quicker because your camera isn't having to jump around your base Also, the hatch is one of the biggest squares on the minimap, so this method is easier on small maps like Steeps of War, but is still doable on maps like Metal or even Scrap.

I assume though that minimap injection would be harder for someone who is having problems with their mouse hand. However, I can see it really benefiting a person who has issues with their keyboard hand due to the decreased amount of key presses.

Hope this helps clarify everything, keep up the awesome work Bumblebees ^^

On April 14 2011 03:33 Milqman wrote:
I hope I don't get banned for bumping this but it would be worth it anyway so I'm willing to take that risk, this is an incredible guide that barely got looked at.

On April 14 2011 03:43 Wrongspeedy wrote:Oh my I completely agree. Even for players with high APM. Its just a well written piece about the game that has good info on all the races. I had never seen it before. Thank you for bumping it Milgman!

On April 14 2011 08:02 HARMevent wrote:
Hi everyone, I have had some issues with my hand/arm as a result of bad posture. I replaced my mouse with a Wacom Intuos3 2-3 years ago and have used a large variety of PC tablets for graphic purposes since 1999 or 2000.


Wacom Intuos series

I will share some tips in case someone thinking about getting a tablet stumbles upon this.

1) Never use the "1:1" ratio option.

- Some games will actually not register your mouse position properly (I believe this is the case in Company of Heroes).
- It works in SC2, but going from the center of the screen to the minimap on a decent sized tablet will kill your muscles.
- Use as high of a cursor speed as you can work with. Mine's maxed out (Intuos 3 drivers).

2) Get a pen with at least 3 buttons (tip click, thumb 1 and thumb 2)

- Default for 3rd button is usually double click. However, this double click often does not register in SC2, thus rendering it useless.
- Remap 3rd button to mouse1 or wheel click. Mouse 1 if you feel the need to press mouse 1 quickly (and if your hand's muscles allow it). You can imagine shift-deselecting army is much faster with a secondary mouse1 than trying to accurately click your pencil rapidly in the same spot (trust me - this is difficult)
- If you feel you can't/don't need to spam mouse1, mapping wheel click to thumb2 makes navigating the map real smooth. It feels nice to draw your camera around with a pen.

3) Consider your tablet placement

- Mine's to the right of my keyboard. Thanks to my high sensitivity I can easily navigate SC2 using mainly the bottom left of my tablet. If for some reason you cannot work with a high sensitivity or are forced to use 1:1, I recommend putting the tablet in front of the keyboard or angling your keyboard and tablet to slightly resemble upside down V shape, with you at the center of the gap, of course.
- Needless to say, all this requires sufficient desk space - especially if you are going A5 or A4 size, which you should, for reasons related to precision

4) Don't expect your pen to work (well) in every game.

- I believe Company of Heroes won't let me mouse scroll the map even with the 1:1 option disabled. Real annoying.
- I can play minecraft, but don't expect to be able to play shooter games. No, mapping mouse1 to a keyboard key won't help much (again, I've tried :D).

5) Using a tablet doesn't mean you'll automatically suck

- I'm the worst RTS player in history. I played approx 20-40 online games of Warcraft 3 and I actually didn't win a single one of them (I was using a mouse at the time). Company of Heroes and Dawn of War I was simply terrible at. I can safely say SC2 is my "first" RTS and I ended season 1 as 3200 diamond (zerg). If someone like me can do that as zerg, so can anyone else.

(edit: cleaned up)

Terran - As discussed in the race section, terran has the most APM intensive macro.