One thing I don't think has been mentioned yet:

You want to break the habit of always boxing units the same way (all my boxes tend to be made from the top left to the bottom right, for example).

If you are planning to move a group of marines up and to the left, it makes sense to start your box selection on the bottom right. That way as soon as you finish your selection your mouse is already as close as possible to where you want to send your troops. You want to minimize the distance your mouse has to travel as much as possible.

Sometimes making selections like this will help shave a split second between commands and sometimes it won't (but it will never add time, assuming you get good at it). It all depends on where your mouse cursor is when you first decide to box and move units.

This will never save very much time, of course, but sometimes a split second delay is all it takes for those banelings to close in and cause terrible damage.

Shikyo

Finland33997 Posts

November 10 2010 07:23 GMT

#24

I have no idea what Foxer does, but the BEST way is to select them all, move them to back and to the side. Then, you keep selecting about 4/5 of the group, moving them to the side, and select a large chunk again and again, splitting your whole army into a fan formation, with them all surrounding the area the banelings are coming from.

It's kind of like cloning except with way more units. You can also clone if you can de-select 10 marines with lightning speed, but that's faster.

You can do the whole split before the first group reaches their destination if you do it fast enough.

MayorITC

Korea (South)798 Posts

November 10 2010 07:33 GMT

#25

What I really wanna know was how oov did his spread in the pimpest plays. Was it three different control groups? Cause if it was through manual selecting and splitting, it makes Foxer look like a complete amateur.

junemermaid

United States981 Posts

November 10 2010 07:44 GMT

#26

On November 10 2010 16:33 MayorITC wrote:
What I really wanna know was how oov did his spread in the pimpest plays. Was it three different control groups? Cause if it was through manual selecting and splitting, it makes Foxer look like a complete amateur.

There was a FPVOD of that game floating around and he manually clicked each group. Impressive is such an understatement, too.

space_yes

United States548 Posts

November 10 2010 07:53 GMT

#27

Now that I've incorporated this technique it into my play I've really not had any trouble executing it. I credit this to the fact that I've been dodging lurker spines for many years and controlling your MM in BW is several orders of magnitude harder than marine control in SC2.

The biggest challenge is keeping your macro going strong while you micro your bionic. If you get caught out of position, or your marines aren't spread already, even if you are in your base for only a few seconds you can get completely wrecked by infestors and banelings. Your mini-map reaction time also needs to be pretty good.

Has anyone else noticed the similarity in Foxer style TvZ and Flash's TvZ on Fighting Spirit?

space_yes

United States548 Posts

November 10 2010 07:56 GMT

#28

On November 10 2010 16:23 Shikyo wrote:
I have no idea what Foxer does, but the BEST way is to select them all, move them to back and to the side. Then, you keep selecting about 4/5 of the group, moving them to the side, and select a large chunk again and again, splitting your whole army into a fan formation, with them all surrounding the area the banelings are coming from.

It's kind of like cloning except with way more units. You can also clone if you can de-select 10 marines with lightning speed, but that's faster.

You can do the whole split before the first group reaches their destination if you do it fast enough.

This is how to do it. In short: box click really fast. A lot of it comes down to reaction time.

Galaxy77

Hong Kong256 Posts

November 10 2010 08:01 GMT

#29

Just use small boxes, and after youve sent the command for 1 small group to go one direction, click on one marine from that group (as your mouse is still nearby) and hit S then continue to repeat that step. This causes a few banelings to hit the marine you stopped behind from each small group.

mazqo

Finland368 Posts

November 10 2010 08:25 GMT

#30

i bet foxer trained this for many hours, propably playing custom map where banelings keeps coming and he tries to split his marines fast as he can. With lot of training everyone can learn to do that, it will also help your overall micro skills.

EtherealDeath

United States8366 Posts

November 10 2010 08:39 GMT

#31

say your ball is clumped.
say the banelings are coming from a certain direction, and only that direction.

1) Move entire ball perpendicular to that direction in direction A.
2) split half the ball to move 180 degrees from A.

Repeat slitting in halves along perpendicular axis to get initial spread. Then move certain groups forwards or backwards as the need arises. Easiest to do the perpendicular split first though, followed by movement in the same direction as the banelings are going.

Chairman Ray

United States11903 Posts

November 10 2010 08:44 GMT

#32

Put marines in two control groups. When you hit roaches or hydras, you get a better concave since you have two control groups. If you hit banes, spread the group that the banes are going for, unless they split banes, then spread everything.

Dyllyn

Singapore670 Posts

November 10 2010 08:49 GMT

#33

I reccomend getting used to boxclick mouse control rather than hotkey shenanigans for the simple reason that this technique is broadly applicable and helps you tailor your response to battlefield conditions. Many hours playing tvz in sc1 teaches this : P

1Lamb1Rice

United States435 Posts

November 10 2010 12:55 GMT

#34

Doing a foxer split is insanely hard. Probably not many people on this planet who can do it like him. But most of the responses have it right: in a nutshell it's box, move, box move, box move.

Zip!

31 Posts

November 10 2010 17:37 GMT

#35

This may not help during a fight, but there is a Patrol trick you can use to spread out units before-hand with only three actions. Disclaimer: I'm a Zerg player, so I haven't tried this with marines, but it works very well with zerglings.

If you have a tight clump of units, box them all and tell them to patrol to just outside the radius of the clump. The pathing will cause them to spread out in an attempt to not bump into each other. Once they're spread, either stop or hold position. P-click-H.

I'll have to test it with marines once I'm not at work to see if it spreads them far enough to reduce baneling splash.

shutdown_exploded

United States133 Posts

November 10 2010 17:41 GMT

#36

Is it possible to pre-spread and magic box marine groups?
If you're going heavy bio and they're responding with banelings it might be worth looking into.

Shankapotamus

United States428 Posts

November 13 2010 08:59 GMT

#37

when i spread, i box units and send them in 3 directions, all in which they are moving backwards. I try to split each of those groups forming 6 groups but 3 of those groups will probably be the suicide marines to tank, so basically i just keep splitting my groups more. Sometimes i will throw some marines back at the incoming banelings.

[Atomic]Peace

United States451 Posts

November 13 2010 09:48 GMT

#38

Depending on control groups is a poor idea. That seems very situational and if you get caught in a position where you don't have your control groups you will lose. In this case there's simply no replacement for boxing and clicking. EtherealDeath has a perfect description for how that works.