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Just to clarify my earlier tiger analogy. I'm not disagreeing with the fact that perhaps macro is the single most important fundamental. Just as poor macro will cause you to lose every time, a poor golf swing will cause you to lose every time. Just as having a lousy swing will hardly be affected by fancy new shoes, poor macro will hardly be affected by any strategy, but as wearing uncomfortable shoes could have a negative effect, so could unit comp. If you are a complete newbie and you don't see your opponent going void ray and just mass zealots.,you can macro all day and still lose. "Duh" you say, but its still a unit comp decision, if even a small one. In this experiment, he used the stalker, perhaps one of the most versatile units in the game. He admittedly used observers "because they are necessary". Observers are tech. It takes a decision to make those. These all sound "duh", but that's my point. There are things that you may not even think about, that matter to someone who doesn't understand the game well.
Multitasking is perhaps the biggest challenge to a new player. And yes, focusing on macro is an excellent way to build that skill and greatly improve your game. However, just because you should focus on it, doesn't mean to ignore absolutely everything related to it. If you have extra minerals, build more production, right? Well, what production? More of the same is a very valid answer, but still a unit comp decision. And it has to be made while a dozen other things are happening at the same time. Don't scout? Well, if you are newer, and you don't scout his fast expand, you get behind in macro and lose.
Basically, what I am trying to say is at the lower levels, yes 100 times out of 100 the reason you lost was bad macro, but that doesn't mean pigeonholing yourself by not developing overall is a great idea either. Focus 100% of your focus on macro, and as that gets better then you can spend 99.999% on macro and the rest on scouting, etc. Then 99.998 on macro. But this idea that saying "you're new. just macro macro macro and it'll be easy to get to the top" to someone who doesn't even know how to properly macro is like saying "swing swing swing and in a week you'll be as good as tiger woods"
TL;DR
Just because macro is the #1 fundamental, dont ignore #2
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On January 24 2011 16:42 Turo wrote:
starcraft is a game about making units and multitasking. i would say most gold and below players have no idea what that actually means. i am speaking from experience here. i was in gold to start, until i had my epiphany: make as many units as you can, and do a lot of things at once.
with these two skills you will go high on the ladder.
(Warning! Crap zerg posting!)
That (points up), in a nutshell, is it. However, the elephant in Mr. Roflstomps nutshell is the multitasking element.
From a personal perspective, the replays in the reddit post were very interesting (watched a couple, not all). If anything, I'd say my macro is only marginally behind Mr. Roflstomps*, but my overall level of play isn't grand enough to reach the underside of his boots to lick them because I just can't multitask like that. He could 1-A three stalkers to a random, unscouted likely expo location on my side of the map and literally halve my macro efficiency thanks to my inability to macro and scout / move army / read game / respond to pokes at the same time, and yet the superficial, crass response to viewing the replay of said "make TFB multitask attacks" would be "you've got a trust fund, look at all those injects you missed, your macro is crap" rather than the correct response of "you've to learn to do two things at once with no loss of efficiency in either".
As far as I'm concerned, all the reddit post proves is the absolute fallacy of "you only need macro to get to yada yada".
* In a left-in-peace situation, I'll hit 200/200 roach hydra with upgrades noticeably quicker than he gets there with stalkers, with my extra speed to 200/200 being entirely accounted for by my lower resource costs.
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I am terran and got to diamond just by macroing =).
All my games are at least 18 minuts long, unless the other guy try to cheese his way into victory, which will make the game end quickly one way or another.
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On January 24 2011 20:52 TehForce wrote:
Of course i am implying some normale intelligence in gameplay, so i expect them to know that blue flame hellions are not the right way to fight mass marauder
Although I completely agree with the OP, I think you just can't take this "normal intelligence" for granted. I have a (former) bronze-reallife-friend with whom I like to 2v2 - the first thing I had to teach him was to frickin a-move instead of rightclick. His macro was "fine" after a week or so, but it doesn't matter if your superior army just runs around instead of fighting.
While macro may get you into Diamond, I feel that for getting from Bronze to Silver or Gold it's mostly much more fundamental things than macro (even if it seems hard to believe that these even exist). To put it this way: Gold players usually have horrible macro, but they must do "something" right that puts them above Bronze and Silver players.
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I try and do this every game, I just had a match where my opponent didn't expand until 15m, that was fun Lol.
Sure you're gonna get cheesed, but that's just how it goes! Least you can practice your cheese defence in amongst your macro play 
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When I was teaching myself how to play Starcraft (this was way back in 2001) I would play 1v3 protoss computers on lost temple. I would also choose protoss and deliberately only mass dragoons (no forge or cannons for defense). I would begin the game by sending a worker to each enemy and distracting their workers (BW ai sucked, if you attacked their nexus early on they would send every worker to chase you for a minute). When the inevitable zealot rush came, I would dance my dragoons endlessly while maintaining constant probe, dragoon, and pylon production.
I did similar things where I would choose zerg and only focus on making hatcheries and drones, with a bare minimum of units required to hold off the initial rush (I would do this against 1 AI). For those who don't know, no MBS and no auto-mine made it relatively way more difficult to maintain a constant drone production and keep your money low when you hit 4+ bases than compared to SC2. It was these very simple training method I used to increase my APM, my multitasking ability, and my ability to continually update control groups as new units and buildings were completed.
After having these skills down, everything else required to learn BW (and subsequently SC2) came to me so easily, because I had a solid foundation of macro/micro multitasking ability to apply to any situation. For those who struggle in low leagues, following these strict training regiments really is the best way to improve. Being good at these things are applicable to ANY situation and will make you play better no matter what is happening in a game.
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only macro -> leads into platinum and low diam. hmm. you just can't tell a gold level player to just macro, thats no fun. i think it is always possible to fokus on macro and still do some other things, even for low ranked players. and btw why do all low ranked players want into diamond?^^ its kinda hard and stressfull there....^^
but i played 5 placementmatches for my friend, and i always took terran, produced 1 scv and then attacked with all my workers and won 5 times xD
well i guess it was just pure luck.
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Its funny how you talk about Tiger Woods because thats actually very true.
when you take golf lessons you will start with an 7 iron and stay with that untill your swing is correct. after that you can try to do it with a hybrid or a driver, while still making sure your swing is correct.
People talking about teching and upgrades and chronoboost and w/e. Thats all macro too. Macro isn't making workers and expanding. Its spending all your money and building everything whenever it's possible, its having enough but not too many buildings, never letting them stand still, using your chronoboost and all that good jazz. when you do all of that very well ( your prob in diamond now), you can try a driver for a change.
Yes you can try the driver earlier but remember that it might be the swing that's wrong, not the driver.
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To all the people that see it so black and white.
Yes, obviously silver/gold/plat players shouldn't focus 100% on macro alone and forget all other parts of the game, they could have avoided 99% of their losses if they macro'd better, but obviously they should still improve their multitasking/army control/hotkeys/strategy/tactics/etc.
The problem with a lot of these lower level players, and something that I also have noticed.
They don't want to focus on macro, everytime you let them analyze their own mistakes they say everything they did wrong except talk about those 4k mins/4k gas on 2 bases.
That's why higher level players always have this tendency to give "macro better" as advice, because altough improving those other aspects of your game will improve you as a player, macro is the fundamental thing that will get you into the higher leagues really fast.
It's like trying to teach someone to play guitar, and you are telling him, you should really get some lessons on basic music theory, and notes and learn some good fundamentals, and get a good playing style, and the other guy basicly goes, "no man, I'm just gonna practice playing this awesome metallica solo"
And then when you have worked on macro, and you have that more solid base to work on (no one has perfect macro ofcourse) they can start improving the other aspects of their game more.
And this is even true all the way into the master's league, for this I will use my own experiences:
I played zerg since I got into the beta (wich was around the time the friend invites came), and I played zerg since release untill a few weeks ago.
Now for the past couple of weeks (altough I haven't played a lot) I have been playing terran, taking a dip down to very low diamond, and yesterday being at around 2.6k diamond.
But everytime I look at my own replays to see my mistakes, it always boils down to, I should have made more production facility's, I should have put another expo down with those spare minerals, I should have macro'd better (because I always end up with excess resources).
Yes I could have looked at those games and said, well ye doesn't matter, I should have micro'd better, I should have harrassed more, but the truth is, if I had actually spend those excess resources I would probably have won instead of lost about half of my losses.
So even for an average diamond player like me macro is still the primary concern of my play, and if I can get the biggest flaws out of that I could probably start playing maybe some high-diamond/low-masters.
(and believe me, the rest of my play is also just mediocre at best, depending on who your comparing to, none of the other aspects of my play are noteworthy)
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Edit: I totaly agree with OP. Lower level player probably can't and shouldn't try to do this. I am a lower league zerg player, and micro helps a lot aswell as macro.
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To the people saying
"no, you need to work on multitasking as well as macro"
Herp.
Multitasking is a prerequisite of Macro.
Macro requires your attention to be split in at least 3 different places at any one time. (Resources, supply, Workers)
Focusing on macro will naturally raise your multitasking ability as you slowly get used to splitting your attention across multiple activities. Once macro starts to become natural to you, you will experience that happy moment where you can actually think clearly in game.
Once bouncing through your hotkeys to check production is second nature, even when someone drops your 3rd, you will be able to reposition your army whilst macroing, because you dont need to think about macro.. it becomes flow state.
Man i love saying exactly what other people are saying but in a much less refined manner.
Fuck the police
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On January 24 2011 22:20 Scrimpton wrote:
Multitasking is a prerequisite of Macro.
Macro requires your attention to be split in at least 3 different places at any one time. (Resources, supply, Workers)
Nah, can't go with that at all. Macro is a single process in which a number of variables must be balanced, and all said variables are controlled entirely by the player - press structure hotkey, press hotkey for desired unit, desired unit pops out. In short, with macro we know what's going to happen. Yes, we're balancing a few things, but they're all very predictable indeed - it's "Whack-a-mole" with three holes, with the only real "complexity" being the speed at which the moles appear.
Real multi-tasking in SC2 is, for the lack of a better way of putting it, playing that game of three-hole "Whack-a-mole" whilst carrying out a mobile phone conversation with your girlfriend without letting on you're playing "Whack-a-mole".
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I will try this when I get home (platinum ranked at the moment), and post results in this thread.
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On January 24 2011 14:21 Black Gun wrote:
other than that, mass stalkers is by far the strongest t1 unit to mass mindlessly.
If you micro. Otherwise stalkers are the most cost inefficient t1 unit in the game. They simply suck in a straight up fight. You need to take advantage on their runspeed and/or blink for them to be at all effective.
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Being a scrub myself it also took me only 27 games reaching Diamond by focusing purely on macro ... something like A-Move and then not caring for my armies at all anymore, until i finished the macro cycles. Of course... often times you lose everything, but due to far superior macro, you just won't die and have another army ready in a short period of time.
Was ranked silver after my placement matches, never been playing rts games other than the single player. Zerg.
So the higher you get, the more important micro is ... but wtf... bronze up to low diamond - lawlz
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If you micro. Otherwise stalkers are the most cost inefficient t1 unit in the game. They simply suck in a straight up fight. You need to take advantage on their runspeed and/or blink for them to be at all effective.
I think the reason that he picked protoss to do this test with, is because you cannot mass lings to 200/200 and win easily. There's alot of hard counters to them, that cause them to literally deal no damage. Same goes for marines, there's far too many things that cause them to melt into piles of goo. Stalkers, while they do have counters, do not get countered on the same level as marines versus banelings/colossus/HT/Tanks, or zerglings versus forcefields/banelings/stimmed marines+medivacs.
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On January 24 2011 23:20 goiflin wrote:Show nested quote +If you micro. Otherwise stalkers are the most cost inefficient t1 unit in the game. They simply suck in a straight up fight. You need to take advantage on their runspeed and/or blink for them to be at all effective. I think the reason that he picked protoss to do this test with, is because you cannot mass lings to 200/200 and win easily. There's alot of hard counters to them, that cause them to literally deal no damage. Same goes for marines, there's far too many things that cause them to melt into piles of goo. Stalkers, while they do have counters, do not get countered on the same level as marines versus banelings/colossus/HT/Tanks, or zerglings versus forcefields/banelings/stimmed marines+medivacs.
That's not my point. A max stalker army is incredibly weak, especially if you 1a it because stalkers deal shit damage. Perhaps stalkers were chosen because they have the ability to hit everything. Regardless, 1a'ing a stalker ball into master league isn't impressive. Master league is not impressive.
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On January 24 2011 22:43 TFB wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2011 22:20 Scrimpton wrote:
Multitasking is a prerequisite of Macro.
Macro requires your attention to be split in at least 3 different places at any one time. (Resources, supply, Workers)
Nah, can't go with that at all. Macro is a single process in which a number of variables must be balanced, and all said variables are controlled entirely by the player - press structure hotkey, press hotkey for desired unit, desired unit pops out. In short, with macro we know what's going to happen. Yes, we're balancing a few things, but they're all very predictable indeed - it's "Whack-a-mole" with three holes, with the only real "complexity" being the speed at which the moles appear. Real multi-tasking in SC2 is, for the lack of a better way of putting it, playing that game of three-hole "Whack-a-mole" whilst carrying out a mobile phone conversation with your girlfriend without letting on you're playing "Whack-a-mole".
No this is just yourself trying to kid yourself that it's not the same thing so that you have an excuse to not improve your macro tasks.
Multitasking between building probes, warping in units and building structures/pylons all at the right timings and quickly is no different between adding in other tasks like also moving a scout at the same time or splitting your army in two to defend a drop. It's just that the macro tasks make far bigger difference for amount of effort required than fancy stuff like killing off his scvs with your scout probe, or laying down the perfect force fields or microing back a couple of units in a battle.
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Most of us has probably experienced being slapped here and there and then you scout him and notice he's yet to expand and you realize that you have a huge lead
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That's not my point. A max stalker army is incredibly weak, especially if you 1a it because stalkers deal shit damage. Perhaps stalkers were chosen because they have the ability to hit everything. Regardless, 1a'ing a stalker ball into master league isn't impressive. Master league is not impressive.
Now, excuse me if I'm not following correctly, since I haven't read all the posts in the thread, but wasn't the point of the experiment to prove that you can just macro a 200/200 stalker ball and get into diamond league with that? I don't think this was made to show that stalkers are good, and it didn't even mention master league.
My point was, is that stalkers were chosen because they will not be instantly negated at a low league level (like marines/lings), which applies to this experiment, as it specifically deals with getting out of low level leagues. Do you disagree with this? It has nothing to do with stalkers being terrible, it has alot to do with other unit compositions instantly making your ball of units dissapear.
On January 24 2011 23:38 snazbaz wrote:
No this is just yourself trying to kid yourself that it's not the same thing so that you have an excuse to not improve your macro tasks.
Multitasking between building probes, warping in units and building structures/pylons all at the right timings and quickly is no different between adding in other tasks like also moving a scout at the same time or splitting your army in two to defend a drop. It's just that the macro tasks make far bigger difference for amount of effort required than fancy stuff like killing off his scvs with your scout probe, or laying down the perfect force fields or microing back a couple of units in a battle.
I think that there's alot of truth in your post. I can't count the amount of games where I've done stuff like killing off building SCV's, gas steals, early ling harassment, killing 10 workers off with banshees, but still lost to him because he just had more units than me. Macro does seem like the aspect that has the most effect in a game, and it does correlate well into multi-tasking.
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EPT
