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Hello everyone!!! I am not the fastest player, but i am usually calm of thought while i play and can scrap and multitask fairly well, but my macro is what i have been working on consistently now for a while. I have some things that i do while i play some times in games that i wanted to share with you all. I do play with both Terran and Zerg equally and normally alternate games playing a couple with each before switching.
Note: These tips are just ideas targeted mostly at players of a lesser caliber. They reduce the amount of things you have to remember or help you spend extra money fast. I hope they help you fellow bronze/silver players so we can move on up to diamond like everyone else 
1. excess money: After i have 2-3 bases, when my minerals are starting to come in faster and have more than 60 drones, my minerals start to add up quickly. I counteract this by making a cluster of 3-4 hatcheries w/ usually 2 queens (i like 1 queen for each 2 hatches, because i generally miss injects and when i hit them i can do 2 hatches at once w/ each)
These clusters of hatcheries help me to make an entire army at once instead of buildup up an army w/ consistent injects and macro.
Also, when i have excess minerals, i often use it to make like 8 overlords at once, for instance making my supply something like 70/150, allowing me to forget about having to make ovies or getting supply blocked and am free to just spam unit keys on my larva w/o stopping.
2. gas: I will normally select 2 drones, tell them both to build extractors, then i select 6 larva, build 6 drones, rally all 6 of them to the extractor, shiftclick 3 off, tell remaining 3 to go to the other extractor. Then i can leave, forget about it, when the extractors finish and 6 drones build, they will split up and fill both gases, and i go macro/fight elsewhere w/o worry.
with terran i will often build a refinery, then immediately select 4 scvs, send 4 to one refinery, deselect 2 of them and send remaining 2 to the other, similar to zerg.
3. supply: As said above, i dont normally get supply blocked due to spending my extra minerals on a ton of ovies. With terran i will normally tell my scv that is building a depot to que up another depot build next to it when hes finished, i always come back to him telling him to keep on doing this over and over.
plz tell me if these tips help.
The other purpose of this post is i was hoping people would also add tips that you use to keep your macro solid as well. I would appreciate any input on other tricks/tips that could help me.
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I agree that these tips will probably aid bronze level zerg players to win since unspent money is pretty much useless until you get into 200/200 time on lots of bases late. The idea of macro hatches is a part of the game for zerg.
I think a more constructive plan for helping them while not training them into bad habits would be, to implement a self check. I think most low level players lose awareness of the fact they aren't producing units/etc once battles start. If you can remember once a minute (more frequently as you get better) to say
Am I supply blocked or soon to be (make ovies)
Do I have more than 500 minerals ? (expand or macro hatch, + queen)
Have I kept spending my gas on tech and/or units (upgrades, tech structures)
If everything is good, keep making units and saturating with drones, if not spend the money to increase production, income, or tech. The most important part is to be aware of it. Throwing down 3-4 hatches at once is way too late.
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My tip for bronze/silver zergs would be to switch race as soon as possible. You hadn't invested a lot of time in this game yet. With switch you save yourself a lot of desparation, frustriation, saving your neurons and prolonging your life. Do it now 
User was warned for this post
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thats why i play both terran and zerg
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On January 31 2011 06:28 Pitrocelli wrote:My tip for bronze/silver zergs would be to switch race as soon as possible. You hadn't invested a lot of time in this game yet. With switch you save yourself a lot of desparation, frustriation, saving your neurons and prolonging your life. Do it now What kind of advice is that?
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On January 31 2011 06:37 Skamtet wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2011 06:28 Pitrocelli wrote:My tip for bronze/silver zergs would be to switch race as soon as possible. You hadn't invested a lot of time in this game yet. With switch you save yourself a lot of desparation, frustriation, saving your neurons and prolonging your life. Do it now What kind of advice is that?
Best advice any zerg will ever get.
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I agree that the above tips will help bronze/silver and even some gold zergs win more games. However, it's basically just putting a band-aid on top of a larger problem. If you start out doing things the wrong way, and win, when you finally get promoted to gold/plat, the problems will become more pronounced. And you'll get super frustrated because you're losing a lot more. You'll have to unlearn the bad habits and relearn new good habits to compete in the higher leagues. If you start out learning the good habits, you wold never have to unlearn the bad habits. It's kind of like the people that cheese their way to diamond, then come here and start threads asking for help, because they can't win anymore.
I agree that macro hatches are good, but if you need to build 4 macro hatches (on 2 or3 bases) to spend your money, something is wrong. You need to focus more on your larva injects, and make sure your getting gas. I find when i have a major amount of minerals, it's because I forgot to put guys in gas.
I'm not super good at larva injects by any means, but I'm starting to get better. I use 5-9 for my queens. I am trying to get in the habit where when whenever there is a lull, I am doing 55,66,77,88ing to try to inject. Also, I force my self to look away during a battle to inject. I think that's one of the most important things to learn, because that's when most people's macro fails. Just get in the habit of not worrying too much about your army, and try to inject. 1 round of injects during a key battle can make a huge difference.
I do get supply blocked a lot as well and have been known to get frustrated and build 10 ovies at once, just so i don't have to remember it. However, I know that is bad. I'm starting to train my self to look at my supply every time I'm about to build a round of units. if I'm close to supply block, I'll throw an ovie or two in that round. At about 50 food, start building 2 ovies at a time.
It's all about building up chains and rhythm. Constantly look at your supply, and your queens to make sure you're injecting, and not getting supply blocked. Teach yourself that every time you do X, you should also do Y, no matter what. For example, every time you build a round of units, check your supply. Every time you check your supply, check if it's time to larva inject. Every time you larva inject, make sure your creep is spreading. Things like that are what will bring you as any race, not just zerg, out of bronze/silver into gold/plat. Refining it more will bring you to diamond, where you have to start worrying about micro a little bit.
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I like the gas tip for double extractor + drones, though I've been focusing on getting my gas timings better so I'm not floating a ton of minerals, and taking double gas + building 6 new drones to man the geysers sounds like an emergency response when you're already floating. Good to know though.
Since I recently moved and don't have the internet I've been playing against the fyn AI, on 2v2s mostly. You get a lot of practice at refining your opening because until your macro is halfway decent you will get stomped repeatedly. In a 2v2 you have to either hold off a lot of early pressure, or present early pressure on at least 1 opponent. Otherwise your teammate will get wiped and you'll fall shortly after.
Over the weekend I've tightened up to the point where in the first 10 minutes of the game I am:
- No longer getting supply blocked
- No longer missing injects
- No longer neglecting to scout
- No longer floating >500 minerals
I've still got a ton to work on, since I'm fairly lost at the mid game and of course the fyn AI has its limitations, but I feel confident about getting back to laddering once I get my internet back.
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On January 31 2011 07:06 Fugue wrote:
Over the weekend I've tightened up to the point where in the first 10 minutes of the game I am:
- No longer getting supply blocked
- No longer missing injects
- No longer neglecting to scout
- No longer floating >500 minerals
Are you doing anything specific that helped you tighten that stuff up? How did you teach yourself not to miss injects or get supply blocked?
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I'm not super good at larva injects by any means, but I'm starting to get better. I use 5-9 for my queens. I am trying to get in the habit where when whenever there is a lull, I am doing 55,66,77,88ing to try to inject. Also, I force my self to look away during a battle to inject. I think that's one of the most important things to learn, because that's when most people's macro fails. Just get in the habit of not worrying too much about your army, and try to inject. 1 round of injects during a key battle can make a huge difference.
Hey, two things, and both about Queens.
1.) Queens are a great place to dump minerals. Usually by end game I have 4-5 queens per hatch, because they are so great at tanking/transfusion is amazing/creep EVERYWHERE.
2.) You're gonna love this one, it blew my mind when I learned it (on these forums, actually): Put all your queens on a single hotkey. I use 3. Then, select all queens, press v, and click the location of the hatch you want to inject ON THE MINI-MAP. So, 3, v, click, v, click, v, click. The nearest queen will inject. Makes staying on top of injections WAY easier.
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On January 31 2011 06:28 Pitrocelli wrote:My tip for bronze/silver zergs would be to switch race as soon as possible. You hadn't invested a lot of time in this game yet. With switch you save yourself a lot of desparation, frustriation, saving your neurons and prolonging your life. Do it now
while i found this amusing, as i'm sure many others will, your wit is beyond measure... telling zerg players to switch races isn't helping anyone.... Zerg is weak atm, at another point they will be strong. In the future, as we converge on perfect balance they will have an advantage over people switching to zerg because they will have played it when it was weak.
Playing the weaker race is a great way to get better, if you are playing the weakest race and wining then you are obviously way better than your opponents because you are overcoming the weakness.
This thread was about helping people, if you had made a joke and then followed it with something constructive then I'm sure we would have all appreciated the humour and then carried on reading the post without pause.
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I've been working on my Zerg overall gameplay a lot lately too. A great way to learn your injects and work on multitasking in general is take an hour or so and pay a custom map, vs easy ai, where you expand as fast as possible up to 5-7 bases. From here on out marco hard by checking after an hour how count many times it took greater than (5-10secs based on skill) to inject.
A few side notes and tips with this though;
-This forces you to use hotkeys if your not already.
-Focus on injects 1st then add little tasks to do( Wanna know how many banelings it takes to kill an Ultralisk? Make a Command center using NP) just make sure your macroing too!!
-Zerg's army generally wants to surround, etc... so focusing on positioning your units at the start of a fight is more important than missing 5-20secs of injecting
-Check each base in a replay 4x or 8x for your missing injects and why if you dont know.
-Doing this 3 times I never miss my injects much anymore and when I do, my mental alarm goes off
-I almost always use SP as my map of choice
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On January 31 2011 07:41 code_ wrote:Show nested quote +I'm not super good at larva injects by any means, but I'm starting to get better. I use 5-9 for my queens. I am trying to get in the habit where when whenever there is a lull, I am doing 55,66,77,88ing to try to inject. Also, I force my self to look away during a battle to inject. I think that's one of the most important things to learn, because that's when most people's macro fails. Just get in the habit of not worrying too much about your army, and try to inject. 1 round of injects during a key battle can make a huge difference. Hey, two things, and both about Queens. 1.) Queens are a great place to dump minerals. Usually by end game I have 4-5 queens per hatch, because they are so great at tanking/transfusion is amazing/creep EVERYWHERE. 2.) You're gonna love this one, it blew my mind when I learned it (on these forums, actually): Put all your queens on a single hotkey. I use 3. Then, select all queens, press v, and click the location of the hatch you want to inject ON THE MINI-MAP. So, 3, v, click, v, click, v, click. The nearest queen will inject. Makes staying on top of injections WAY easier.
1) I don't like having that many queens. 4-5 queens per hatch is a lot of food that can't really be used for an offensive army.
2) I'm not a huge fan of this method. You have to be pretty precise on the minimap click, and if a queen dies, or you forget a queen at a hatch or something else goes wrong, u have queens trying to trek across the map. But to each his own.
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On January 31 2011 07:15 Herks wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2011 07:06 Fugue wrote:
Over the weekend I've tightened up to the point where in the first 10 minutes of the game I am:
- No longer getting supply blocked
- No longer missing injects
- No longer neglecting to scout
- No longer floating >500 minerals
Are you doing anything specific that helped you tighten that stuff up? How did you teach yourself not to miss injects or get supply blocked?
Essentially, I played 2v2s against easy FynAIs. I'll switch to medium when I start winning too many of those (I outright lost about 25 games before I won even 1 - Fyn AI is miles ahead of the Blizzard AI)
I focused on a 14 pool 14 gas 18 hatch opening. Not exactly standard, but nothing ridiculous, either. When I started playing, I was droning up with just a handful of lings, and then they got wiped out and I was playing blind, overdroning, and getting stomped ~6 minutes in.
I already knew I had problems hitting my injects and getting supply blocked in the early game, so I focused primarily on smoothing out the kinks in my opening, making more initial lings, remaking them if I lost them, droning and getting overlords at better times. I was still getting stomped ~7 minutes in though, because I was building forces late, or screwing up with my lings and getting caught out by early aggression, etc.
Before long I was pretty tight with the opening, hitting the first 5 or more injects every time, spreading overlords nicely, using ling scouts. But I was just blindly building roaches or lings, and needed to scout a bit better. Now I was dying to banshee/void ray/mutas ~8 minutes in.
I also was paying almost no attention to what was going on outside my base. Thus, my computer ally might be getting double teamed and at that point it didn't matter how good my macro was, I wasn't going to hold against 2 computer players. But I might survive ~12 minutes if that happened
So I started trying to scout, and either my macro slipped or I just didn't pay attention to the overlord was saccing. But I started to get the hang of that, too, and now I was getting decent information on 1 of the computer players, and being able to do some harassment, keep an eye on when it expanded, etc.
I've still only won maybe 3 out of 30 games. Basically I learned these specific things because I died if I didn't do them. An AI will only take you so far, but this AI has enough different builds that you aren't really predicting what it's about to do and instead just try to react based on what you see. And even I saw it do some stupid things like constantly trying to take a 3rd in the same spot 4 times, but it'll force you to at least macro well if you want to stand a chance.
I used to play vs easier AIs and just try to expand all over, but I don't feel you learn as much when you aren't actually punished for mistakes. I'd start out feeling energised but I wouldn't even notice myself getting lazy and distracted.
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remap the townhall key (backspace) to tilde (`) then put queens on 3. spawn mutant larva on grid is X sooo you can inject all your hatches thusly:
`3xCLICK
all you need to do is make sure you click the center of your screen. You can accomplish this so fast that you may need to do a cycle of "`````" ensure that you made the injects work but pretty soon you will know what to look/listen for to determine the success of the maneuver.
Make sure you are looking at a hatch the has a queen other wise you will order a queen to travel to that lone hatch.
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On January 31 2011 06:28 Pitrocelli wrote:My tip for bronze/silver zergs would be to switch race as soon as possible. You hadn't invested a lot of time in this game yet. With switch you save yourself a lot of desparation, frustriation, saving your neurons and prolonging your life. Do it now
I say that to people all the time but I find myself always running back. Zerg for life! Even if they do have to overcome questionable issues. Go Zerg <3
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I'm a gold level Zerg that is starting to get the idea of how the race works. The tips everyone is giving is very helpful.
To me, the key to playing Zerg is knowing when to build drones and when to build units.
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At some point as zerg, you're going to accrue thousands of minerals with literally nothing to use them on. That's when you start army trading and using all your stored larva injects.
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Don't get into the habit of having "2-3" extra hatcheries. On two or three bases with one extra macro hatch, drone saturation and consistent larva injection you should have more larva than you can conceivably use. Building extra hatcheries once you have 1K unspent minerals is a short term solution destined to prolong bad habits.
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On January 31 2011 13:46 Ten Tron wrote:
I'm a gold level Zerg that is starting to get the idea of how the race works. The tips everyone is giving is very helpful.
To me, the key to playing Zerg is knowing when to build drones and when to build units.
*Cough* http://day9tv.blip.tv/file/4210235/
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EPT
