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On January 24 2011 13:56 Tomo009 wrote:
I dunno, he didn't play many games and was playing high leaguers pretty quickly. Also, I want to see him try again as zerg. As zerg, you must adapt or you will die, at any level. You would have to have ridiculously good macro to beat for example a deathball protoss or biomech terran. As with no micro, you will get crushed in one battle and lose it all.
Of course macro is the main skill that will increase one's rank, but simply saying "only macro and you will be in diamond" is plain wrong. I'm in gold now, playing sivelr-platinum level players and there are a lot of timing pushes and aggressive plays that I just wouldn't be able to handle at all if I didn't scout and react.
EDIT: And ZvZ, it just won't work there period. Such a volatile match-up, being beaten in a paper, scissors rock without scouting your opponent you don't have a hope.
if you're in gold I can almost guarantee you that no one will do timing pushes. You might think they're doing timing pushes, but what they're really doing is moving out when they think they have a good sized army. Hell, I'm in mid diamond and I don't timing push except if they're putting up an expansion. I don't go, oh look this guys making a reactor on his factory, its going to take a while so I should push because he only has 2 rax and I have 3 gate robo.
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I guarantee you will go to diamond with ok, nothing great, just macro focused play. Just rally units to one place, when attacked, attack his base and rally there, as zerg.
And it works z v z too. Just need to mass units earlier.
"Macro" doesn't mean always fast expo, mass drones before units. Against lower leagues I'd just mass speedlings, then banelings, then expand. Better mechanics would mean you nearly always win. Just like mid to high masters would beat me 9 of 10 times.
I
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I dunno if this was all ready posted, but starting at bronze league would make things much different. You can't really practice macro until you are able to hold off the cheese and one base builds that you see from the bronze league, which is really where the problem would be. To get good at macro, you need to practice is longer, macro oriented games.
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On January 25 2011 06:28 Soulish wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2011 13:56 Tomo009 wrote:
I dunno, he didn't play many games and was playing high leaguers pretty quickly. Also, I want to see him try again as zerg. As zerg, you must adapt or you will die, at any level. You would have to have ridiculously good macro to beat for example a deathball protoss or biomech terran. As with no micro, you will get crushed in one battle and lose it all.
Of course macro is the main skill that will increase one's rank, but simply saying "only macro and you will be in diamond" is plain wrong. I'm in gold now, playing sivelr-platinum level players and there are a lot of timing pushes and aggressive plays that I just wouldn't be able to handle at all if I didn't scout and react.
EDIT: And ZvZ, it just won't work there period. Such a volatile match-up, being beaten in a paper, scissors rock without scouting your opponent you don't have a hope. if you're in gold I can almost guarantee you that no one will do timing pushes. You might think they're doing timing pushes, but what they're really doing is moving out when they think they have a good sized army. Hell, I'm in mid diamond and I don't timing push except if they're putting up an expansion. I don't go, oh look this guys making a reactor on his factory, its going to take a while so I should push because he only has 2 rax and I have 3 gate robo.
I think what he means is they're pushing based on the timing of *their own* upgrades, e.g. "I'm going to build as many marines and marauders as I can and attack the minute stim finishes" or "I'm going to build as many gateway units as I can and attack when zealot charge finishes". These attacks are almost always off of one base, so if you are trying to do any two base play you have to know how to fend them off. It's not rocket science, but it's one step more than "have good macro and expand, you'll always have more stuff then them and you can just a-move to win".
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
On January 25 2011 06:39 TheBrofessor wrote:
I dunno if this was all ready posted, but starting at bronze league would make things much different. You can't really practice macro until you are able to hold off the cheese and one base builds that you see from the bronze league, which is really where the problem would be. To get good at macro, you need to practice is longer, macro oriented games.
The Reddit guy started in bronze league, throwing his 5 placement matches. Assuming you macro well, you should be able to hold off bronze league 1-base play... since bronze league 1-base play is backed up by bronze league level macro.
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the reason everyone tells sub-diamond players to improve their macro is because it is the most sure-fire way to improve. And because there is sort of this macro ceiling, where if your macro does not improve you CANNOT win against a player with macro of a certain caliber, no matter how clever your strat and tactics are.
macro is to sc as cardio is to pro football. Yeah, strength and stamina are only one small part of the game, but as a demographic the NFL player pool is probably one of the fittest groups in the world, because if you're not huge, doesn't matter if you're standing in the right place; that running back is just going to RUN RIGHT THROUGH YOU. Unless you can get your macro into a certain range, you will never hang with diamond league players. So why force yourself to be 2x smarter than the other guy—sometimes that's not even enough!—when you can match his macro and just be a tiny bit smarter?
Edit: what sub-diamond players also often dont' realize about the game itself is taht its not stricktly counter-based. Yeah, rock beats scissors beats paper, but sometimes, if you do it right, 3 rocks will beat paper, and since a timing window exists where you will have the right number of rocks, rocks become the right answer to paper for a certain part of the game. And as timing windows open and close, counters and ideal compositions constantly shift around. And what determines when and where timing windows occur? Your macro! So if your macro isn't up to par, you're not even playing the same game as top level players—which means that you're going to have a lot of trouble countering their strongest timings.
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On January 25 2011 06:55 Blazinghand wrote:Show nested quote +On January 25 2011 06:39 TheBrofessor wrote:
I dunno if this was all ready posted, but starting at bronze league would make things much different. You can't really practice macro until you are able to hold off the cheese and one base builds that you see from the bronze league, which is really where the problem would be. To get good at macro, you need to practice is longer, macro oriented games. The Reddit guy started in bronze league, throwing his 5 placement matches. Assuming you macro well, you should be able to hold off bronze league 1-base play... since bronze league 1-base play is backed up by bronze league level macro.
Really? I dont see that anywhere in his post, the sentence "I created a new account with my extra guest pass, insta-quit my first 5 placement matches, getting myself into Bronze." kinda makes it sounds like he was zbove bronze all ready. Does he say somewhere else that he was all ready bronze?
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On January 25 2011 06:55 Blazinghand wrote:Show nested quote +On January 25 2011 06:39 TheBrofessor wrote:
I dunno if this was all ready posted, but starting at bronze league would make things much different. You can't really practice macro until you are able to hold off the cheese and one base builds that you see from the bronze league, which is really where the problem would be. To get good at macro, you need to practice is longer, macro oriented games. The Reddit guy started in bronze league, throwing his 5 placement matches. Assuming you macro well, you should be able to hold off bronze league 1-base play... since bronze league 1-base play is backed up by bronze league level macro.
Also adding that the common misconception of bronze players being able to cheese correctly is almost everywhere.
Low-mid bronze players really don't know how to cheese, but the top bronze usually do. Usually, you find cheese in silver+ because they actually know what a pylon is.
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On January 25 2011 07:04 TheBrofessor wrote:Show nested quote +On January 25 2011 06:55 Blazinghand wrote:On January 25 2011 06:39 TheBrofessor wrote:
I dunno if this was all ready posted, but starting at bronze league would make things much different. You can't really practice macro until you are able to hold off the cheese and one base builds that you see from the bronze league, which is really where the problem would be. To get good at macro, you need to practice is longer, macro oriented games. The Reddit guy started in bronze league, throwing his 5 placement matches. Assuming you macro well, you should be able to hold off bronze league 1-base play... since bronze league 1-base play is backed up by bronze league level macro. Really? I dont see that anywhere in his post, the sentence "I created a new account with my extra guest pass, insta-quit my first 5 placement matches, getting myself into Bronze." kinda makes it sounds like he was zbove bronze all ready. Does he say somewhere else that he was all ready bronze?
Actually, he said exactly that.
http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/f7e8j/seriously_guys_if_youre_in_platinum_or_below_your/
I created a new account with my extra guest pass, insta-quit my first 5 placement matches, getting myself into Bronze. I then used this super-secret strategy developed by oGsMC, Tester, and NsPGenius in a joint pro effort to defeat all opponents as Protoss:
MACROSTOMP THE FUCK OUT OF YOUR OPPONENT USING ONLY STALKERS.
No, really. That's all I did. Here's what I did:
9-probe scout.
Make stalkers.
Get upgrades.
Make cannons to defend bases.
Expand when I felt like it.
A-move directly into opponent's base when near-max.
Use absolutely minimal micro when necessary. I'm sure after watching the replays none of you will complain about micro, since I'm not even looking at the battle 80% of the time.
I especially did not:
Scout after my 9-probe scout.
Threaten my opponent in any way prior to max-army attack.
Multi-prong attack.
Result: Currently 13-win streak. Highest-rated opponent was Platinum, but I'm confident pure-macro will get me into Diamond, since none of the games were even close at all. I didn't get 6-pooled, but I did get speedling and roach "rushed", but their forces were so pathetic that I beat them with my stalkers with almost zero micro.
So, if you're in Platinum or below and you want to improve: Stop doing whatever fancy strategy you're doing, stop overthinking everything, and just macro.
Ninjaedit: Oh, I also got observers because they're kind of necessary.
EDIT: Obviously he was beyond bronze level as a player, but he gave himself every possible handicap to force practically all of his wins to be the result of macro alone.
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To all of you here still saying this macro = diamond is non sense, its like you literally assume that is what a player would do.
What the guy in the OP did was prove that you can, in fact, do nothing but macro and get into diamond. Yes, he massed stalkers which also serve the purpose of being anti air, but it doesn't change the fact he could get into diamond, you could do the same with hydra or marine maurader as well.
I'm also seeing alot of people say "well if you don't scout them I'm going to lose to cloaked banshees or mass voids, or X unit composition. And your totally right. If you played games and just macroed your going to lose some games to unscouted stuff, but remember you don't have to win anywhere near 100% of your games to get into diamond. Those losses to cheese (which you can often defend at very low levels with no scouting just because of macro differences) and to various unscouted unit compositions are accounted for in this. The guys still gets to diamond, which is the whole point.
I'm also seeing alot of people react to this as if its being advocated that you only macro and do nothing else. No one is saying that you have to be a brainless idiot and just macro; I mean its not exactly difficult to click a scout once to the opponents base and take a quick look at what he is doing. Even if you did that (only macro), its a great way to improve.
Let me explain. I think everyone pretty much agrees that macro is the most important SC fundamentals and usually one of the biggest weaknesses of anyone in the lower ranks. What people seem to forget is the best way to practice something is to pick a particular weakpoint and focus specifically on that. For instance if you know you're taking the too far to the inside in the golf swing, you would focus specifically on trying to move the club on a more normal path going back. There might be many other flaws you need to fix, but taking them one at a time makes it much easier to isolate once and fix it. In SC if you tried to say alright I'm going to work on my macro, my scouting, my multitask, and my battle micro when I play you're basically saying alright I'm going to practice playing better.
Most people don't like it when the advice their given is "play better". Its pretty difficult to just straight up "play better". So, knowing that macro is typically the biggest weakness and the most significant one if its weak, what do we do? Fix it of course.
How do you do that? The answer is isolate it and work specifically on that. You start off and you have one goal for the game, constantly make workers in while doing your normal build. What matters is that because habit. If it takes all your APM/multitask to make the workers and you dont even get your first pylon or pool down, so be it. But you keep trying to make workers and follow your normal build. Let me stress though, the priority is workers, if you can't do your build, oh well. Eventually as you do it a few times making workers because instinct and you begin to have some freedom to follow your build and develop a better innate sense of when you need to 0p or 4d or 1s or whatever. After maybe 10 or 20 games you'll probably be doing a pretty damn good job making workers up till 200/200.
After that you move on to step 2 which is doing the same thing as before but keeping constant gateway production. Constant probes is still top priority, but this is the new commandment, nothing else matters. So what if your base is getting run over by the opponent and you dont have the APM to go micro it, just forget it and let yourself die and keep up the macro. Keep in mind we aren't doing this to win games, this is not a strategy to win by any means. This is, in essence, a drill. We aren't worried about the results, but rather about the process and what we are trying to improve
Step 3 has the same as the previous steps, but we also add in that you now don't want to miss any pylons/OL/depot.
Step 4 ties it all together, you do the previous three while also trying to control your army in the field, at first you might only be able to do something with it a few times per game, but as you keep trying, while still keeping 1-3 as gospel, you'll start finding more and more places where you find you can do some army control.
At this point, you should have decent macro, and the ability to control your army to a reasonable degree while macroing. Now that you have the key fundamental down, you can begin to look more at improving the other aspects of your game. Additionally since your build is tight and your unit production is what it should be things like timings and how various strategy's play out will make a ton more sense than if your trying to focus on those aspects with 3k/3k banked of two unsaturated bases.
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On January 25 2011 06:22 zeek0us wrote:Show nested quote +On January 25 2011 03:51 snazbaz wrote:
Jeez, if I was gold or below and I read this thread I'd be copying the exact idea of ignoring everything but macro - copying the exact order and quantity of production buildings from the replays and practicing it until I was diamond, not whining that it's not a valid demonstration and there's nothing wrong with my macro.. I'm a 2400/#5 gold Z. I've played over 700 1v1s starting as a complete multiplayer RTS noob (i.e. no more exploiting predictable AI), so if nothing else I've seen a lot. Like most people at my level, I need to improve macro. It's not so much being unable to do it as not being sure exactly what I want to do. I'm pretty good at losing because I have too many drones, but that's still losing and clearly is still a failure, even if it's failing with the right overall mindset. I haven't watched his replays, but it seems to me that the thought process would be thus: Always have a probe building on every nexus. If a mineral line is saturated, expand and maynard extra workers. Always have a stalker building; if you have resources for more stalkers than you can build, add a gateway. Always be building pylons so you never get supply blocked while you pump stalkers. Throw in a few cannons for detection/basic defense if you have leftover mins after the first three priorities are covered. Mass your stalkers where they can access all of your bases, hold off any pressure that comes while you're massing and once you're maxed attack. So as Z, how would you proceed in an equally simple manner? If you max capacity on drones, you'll have no army and 6 undefended bases. If you pump roaches (T1 the analog to stalkers), you're at risk of being impotent to stop air attacks. Hydras come too late to help much if you get attacked off one base (which still happens in 95% of my games). I don't see the Z version of "massing a safe-against-any-kind-of-attack unit faster than the opponent", but it seems like there should be some way to compensate. If the answer is "you just have to know how to do it right" then the idea of "macro into diamond" doesn't apply to Z, right? It would be "be a diamond-level Z, nerf your account, then diamond-macro your way back to diamond". Don't get me wrong -- I love the experiment and I'm just trying to figure out an equivalent "macro cheese" to practice myself. I'm interested to hear what better Z (or vZ) players would suggest for one.
Your best bet with Zerg is Roach/hydra, in my opinion. Though my opinion probably matters little, I am a protoss player. 
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It's still somewhat more complicated as Zerg -- since you can build drones or army. T or P can do both at once, so it's easy to "constantly build workers" while massing an army, but for Z it's not so simple.
Is the message actually "have one drone building at each base at all times" a la P or T production (with the rest of your larva going to army), would it be more like "spam drones for a cycle, then army for the next", or is the real answer "know the right combination from being good at macro and use that"?
The problem I have is that everyone says "just macro better", but for Z specifically, the only details tend to be along the lines of "learn when you can drone and when you can't." Unfortunately, I've seen precious few guidelines on how to determine that given what's happening in the game. Or even how to plan to use your larvae in an ideal situation, knowing that you'll be forced to audible at some point.
I'm not trying to complain or gainsay the point others have made, namely that macro is the most important thing to be good at and you'd do well to "spam" it at the cost of auto-losing the odd game when it's inappropriate. But for Z specifically, it's harder to follow that general advice correctly without any more information. If the answer to my concerns is simply "well, zerg is more complex and you have to figure out the complexities in order to improve", the idea of "macro is all you need to get to diamond" doesn't really hold water. I suspect that there are maybe just a few rules specific Z to keep in mind while "spamming macro" that aren't often enumerated . . .
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Simply put this way. Even at plat league, it's so easy to expand inwardly because of he time they will nothing about it. You could even take the whole map before they even attack while they just make 2 void rays.
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xD
This is so great...I'm gonna show this to all my whiney, "but that's not strategic" friends.
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I dunno, he didn't play many games and was playing high leaguers pretty quickly. Also, I want to see him try again as zerg. As zerg, you must adapt or you will die, at any level. You would have to have ridiculously good macro to beat for example a deathball protoss or biomech terran. As with no micro, you will get crushed in one battle and lose it all.
Of course macro is the main skill that will increase one's rank, but simply saying "only macro and you will be in diamond" is plain wrong. I'm in gold now, playing sivelr-platinum level players and there are a lot of timing pushes and aggressive plays that I just wouldn't be able to handle at all if I didn't scout and react.
EDIT: And ZvZ, it just won't work there period. Such a volatile match-up, being beaten in a paper, scissors rock without scouting your opponent you don't have a hope
for zerg, macroing is, well, what zergs are known for. So zerg shouldn't work as well. Zerg is zerg for its cheap units and fast macro. That's why zerg won't do that well. If you are protoss and terran though, out macroing your opponent will be a good way to ensure victory. Most times. Unless the fact that strategy and micro balances it out
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I got into Diamond with solid macro and minimal micro (scoot and shoot).
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DayNine made a vid not long ago on pretty much the same topic. He literally just went through a low level replay showing how the [protoss in this case] player wasn't focusing on probes and pylons, and ended up quite far behind in supply and income.
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On January 25 2011 06:55 Blazinghand wrote:The Reddit guy started in bronze league, throwing his 5 placement matches. Assuming you macro well, you should be able to hold off bronze league 1-base play... since bronze league 1-base play is backed up by bronze league level macro.
*sigh* look, yes, there are people with bad macro at the bronze/silver level, but it's just not that hard to learn how to 3rax or 4gate or do a big 1-base roach push, which starts showing up at high bronze. In fact, if you look at the army value for "typical bronze macro", you'll notice that their army values are about even at the 8-minute mark, which is roughly when those 1-base pushes come. http://i.imgur.com/nU1W7.jpg
...
Anyway, I thought Blazinghand was wrong and that there is a window where you will be "behind" if you try to expand against someone doing a hardcore 1-base push. There is but it's earlier than you think, and by the time a one-baser a-moves his army you can probably have enough to hold it off. If you expand early against a one-base player, you are behind in army value at 6:00, tied around 7:00, and ahead at 8:00, with some static defense (turrets/bunkers/spinecrawlers/cannons) to boot.
So the two pieces of advice I'd give TLers who haven't gotten to gold or platinum are:
(1) watch your replays to see how your macro is (all parts --- don't supply blocked, build workers, etc)
(2) play defensively after you expand.
EDIT: Yes I realize losses to this sort of attack are already accounted for in terms of getting to diamond in the redditors post.
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So, I'm currently testing this and the results so far are (surprisingly?) amazing. I just rickroll every of my opponents, especially if they don't pressure me early on. My results so far are 6-1 or 7-1, not certain, and the game I lost was a 4Gate I have not been able to defend properly due to my lack of sentries. Adjusting his bronze-mindset (no Micro) a bit by adding blink and actually microing a littttttle bit, I seem to overwhelm most of the armies I face just by massing 3/3 Stalkers.
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This is common knowledge I think.
Nothing new.
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EPT
