It seems like he's having low apm issues or something alike....you can watch that day9 guy ( he stresses the fundamentals a lot and almost all his videos will have some form of them ) his videos can provide you with almost every tiny detail you can improve on
If his eyes can't keep track of what he's doing, he's not going to be able to do it quickly and a lot of it simultaneously either... ( try spamming the hotkeys 1-2-3-4-5 with different units in each and on different parts of the map and see how quick you can go back and forth between them ) and you can try casting spells from each unit group and switch back and forth on different parts of the map...
hotkeys speed everything up greatly ( try not to click the spells or menus whenever possible to save time ) add all your nexus' to one hotkey if you want ( it doesn't change anything from having 1 on each or all due to smart cast ( made easier for slow ppl ))
Honestly, what helped me advance is to take one simple buildorder (like the 4gate as P), execute it nearly every game and get better and better. Spend all your resources and chronoboost, watch your micro, and just try to execute the build cleanly. Eventually you will start getting better and better with the build, up to the point where you have the basics down. Then you can experiment with other stuff, longer games, etc. In fact, you should, because only 4gate is kinda lame
Well second game you won and third you got rushed.
1) if you are 4gate attacking dont go through back door. make so zealots too, bad control, no forward pylon. 2) you saw him going mass marines and did not tech colo? dont take 3 so early. dont go attacking with 2 zealots and 1 immortal at beginning. Do not attack up the ramp! 3) could have easily scouted 1base play. you make robo bay way too early. missed forcefield lose.
Basicly your build orders need a lot of sharpening, cybercore and second pylon were always late. When your probe builds something, always shift click it back to minerals. Scout and adopt. Zero scouting in the front after first probe. You have start making mental notes not to get supply blocked. Your stategy should be always finding (safe) way to tech colo, then think about expaning. In other words making huge ass army should be your priority. Dont just attack randomly, find timings when enemy has expand or when your expansion has paid off itself.
There is alot of stuff to work on if you want to get to diamond/masters. I think you should focus on silver first, then steadily progress. If you end up in diamond now I think you will have quite a frustrating time ahead. And its a game witch is supposed to be fun, not 100% frustrating
Here's my 2 cents..
1. You didnt scout. Well you moved out with a probe against the zerg but you basically just moved it to his base, got hit a couple times, then moved back. Against the terran you were basically playing blind for the first 12 or so minutes. You made a ton of immortals against marines only. You somehow won even attacking up the ramp like that, but that is no good when you progress out of bronze.
2. Builds. Do you have a thaught prossess behind them? You went 1 gate into robo against the zerg, and you ended up loosing to a 7rr. Part of that was also because you were late putting probes in your second gas, but you would prob have been ok if you build a sentry instead of your second zealot. Then you would have had 2 sentrys to block the ramp witch would have given you more time. But why do you build your robo so early? Obs in that time of the game will not give you any more usefull info about the zerg then your initial probe scout should have given you. And blind immortals is no good. Same goes for the terran game I guess. Even though 2 gate robo is a good opening against terran, you started to mass immortals blind, instead of an obs to scout what he was up to. You were also late with putting probes in your first gas in this game. Its all about the little things when you advance up the ranks.
3. General mechanincs. I was watching your player view in both replays. I noticed missclicks. For example you were sending probes to gas but missclicked and ended up sending them far back in the terran game. You hotkeyed most of your buildings witch i good, but you didnt hotkey your army as far as I can tell. It could have cost you the game against the terran if he actually had an army, cause you didnt move your screen to your army until it was halfway up his ramp.
I recomend trying out the multitasking trainer thats on here somewhere. Just use the search function. It helped me out a ton back when I was in gold and I noticed my multitasking was not on par.
Also you say you have problems with food to pylon ratio. You should just sit down and think about how much food each unit types require. Then think about the requirements in relation to the ammount of unit producing structures you have. Then adapt. This doesnt take much time and it will help you if you want to get up the ranks. It is harder to do in game than to think about it, but I feel its much easier to remember if you have a general supply plan.
This post is getting quite long... My advice is to work on one thing at the time. I would actually advice on working on scouting first, since you have trouble with early pressure. Then think about pherhaps reworking your builds. And start analysing your own replays. After 1000 games Im sure you can tell what you didnt do as well as you could if you just invest some time and thaught into it. Dont think to much about the fact that you MUST advance in rank. Just focus on working on your game. When you work on your game, you will get better, and as you get better you will advance naturally as your skill increases.
Best of luck mate Hope my post was slightly useful.
On February 15 2011 17:44 Helicopter wrote: Based on your vocabulary and grammar (and being in bronze after 1000 games) I highly doubt you're 24.
look me up on facebook mark brewer. cheers.
now to the rest of you - thank you very kindly for all the information. ill keep you guys updated hopefully this thread helped others in some way too. to all the people offering to practice with me ill def be hitting all of you up. if theres anymore input you guys would like to add itd be most greatly appreciated.
And yeah, btw. Part of my issues was that I didnt have the multitasking ability to scout. If I scouted I used all my thinking prossess into focusing on moving the scout and macroing at the same time, so I didnt give any thaught into what it was that I actually saw. The multitasking trainer helped me alot. Do check that out. You do play pretty slow, atleast in the games I saw, and putting some hours into the multitasking trainer might help you in all aspects of your game
I dont care about age. I dont care about micro mistakes or what units you are making to countering the opponent. Just get your firth 3 minutes done. Just learn every single thing about probes and so during this time.
And it is as folowing (with constant probe production)
9 pylon --> scout 11 chrono 13 gateway 14 chrono 14 gas 16 pylon Chorono when nexus have 25 energy. 18 cyber
How well you get this done determine how good you will hold off any early agression (6-8 minutes), and if you are going into mid-game with a disadvantage or not.
Next step is to doing this (still perfect) and controlling your scout as well as possible, don't just do 10 loops with waypoints around the main building. You can do stuff in your base and locking at your scout when you becoming better at this 3 minutes.
In order to see your scout more you need to do things faster when you for the short moments visits your main base.
From this you will learn the main thing about starcraft 2. Make stuff at the right time. It is not hard. Requires the same apm as doing things late, but makes you a low master player instead of a bronze player. I think i can do a sc2 bot that macros a 200/200 protoss army with about 30 apm in 16 minutes.
On February 15 2011 13:49 ggrrg wrote: Ok, I just looked through the replays you provided and must say that I was highly surprised that your macro wasn't even close to being terrible (except maybe in the game against zerg). There are some minor flaws like not constant production of probes, supply blocks, stacking up a little bit too many minerals, but none of those are really a problem. In fact, I'd say that you could compete on diamond level with those mistakes.
I just watched a couple of the replays, and I have to disagree with ggrrg. The problem looks like it's related to macro. I know people always say "macro better" to get out of bronze, but it's tough to know what that means. Here are some tips.
1. Make more probes. In the PvT on Steppes, your probe production was pretty good for about the first 2:30 min, but fell off pretty steeply after that. By my rough count, you averaged missing about 1 probe per minute for the first 6 minutes, at one point chrono boosting a nexus with no probes being built. After that, it got worse. You're doing a good job spending your money, but not such a good job making money to begin with. It's pretty easy to spend all your cash from one base with 3 gate robo when you haven't been constantly producing workers and aren't fully saturated (and even when you are fully saturated).
2. Don't get supply blocked. Most of the times you got supply blocked were relatively minor, but there were a few that lasted quite a while. Every time you get supply blocked, you're limiting your army production AND your probe production. This means you're also limiting your potential income, since you're delaying workers. Each supply block has long term consequences, even if you're able to spend all the money in your bank upon getting unblocked.
3. Macro while attaching/being attacked. Whenever you attack or are being attacked, your money went up considerably. You might be able to bring it back down due to having low income or too many production buildings, but you weaken your army in the short term. Whenever you lose a game, look up at your unspent resources before leaving. Convert those resources into units, and imagine how nice it would be to have that army (1k minerals is 10 zealots...).
4. Expand. If you intend to play off one base for 10+ minutes, you should be pretty active with your units (poking, pressuring, harassing, and all out attacking). If you're not looking to do that, you can expand. You have a decisive defenders advantage in almost all situations (vs protoss is a little trickier). This means you should be able to defend against many attacks (and ALL bronze league attacks) while taking your natural.
A lot of people have mentioned scouting more. This is obviously an important skill, but likely wont make much difference in your games at the moment. It's nice to have a sense of your opponent's unit composition and react to it (marines are good against immortals, so don't make immortals vs marines), but it's better to have a large army (a large army will beat a small one, regardless of composition). You don't want to be surprised by 6 Battlecruisers, but beyond that you're probably better off just working on macro and saving scouting for later (though it's always easy to be active with observers).
Those are all valid points and would certainly lead to improvement. However, none of them is the bottleneck of the OP's performance. I can assure you that with proper scouting and invoking the proper responses the OP would crush these kind of opponents even if he had worse macro. No matter how good your macro is, if you have the wrong unit mix you will certainly lose to a weaker opponent that surprises you.
@OP Besides to scouting (which I still perceive as your biggest weakness) you should also try to work on Omnipresent's suggestions: 1. constant probe production 2. constant pylon production (not getting supply blocked) both are quite important 4. Expanding - you should really try to expand earlier, but you have to know what your opponent is doing to do so, otherwise you often will expand just when your opponent's push comes. as far as point 3. is concerned, it would indeed improve your gameplay, but it is really difficult to master and certainly not the reason why you are not in a higher league yet.
A good way to improve is to find someone who is alot better than you and have him beat you into the ground over and over again. After each game you and your practice partner should go over the game and see what went wrong; the next game should work on very specific things, i.e. constant probe production. The problem for you right now is that while you have 1000 games played, the quality of each game you play is making you a worse player (you will lose to stupid shit and win with stupid shit).
Try the practice partner thread on TL, and watch Newbie Tuesday episodes on Day 9. If you have the cash you can try getting coaching from a pro, but there are tons of free resources out there with good, solid build orders (like liquidpedia).
Finally, learning cheese defense is super important. I used to die to cannon rushes in PvP all the damn time, but once I learned the proper response, its pretty much a free win for me when it happens. Learning the early pool defense, the cannon rush defense, and the 2-gate defense will net you many many free wins in the lower leagues. There are many threads on TL that explain cheese defense.
I'm experiencing something similar at around 700 games in silver. I'm definitely improving, but it feels like the improvements I'm making don't change how often I win, just by what margin. Does that make sense? I mean, I'll play a game where before I would have scraped a win off two bases against one, and now I'll have four bases and utterly crush him. And then I'll lose to banshees. And then I'll lose to a half-assed 4gate. And then I'll lose because I wasn't aggressive enough versus a more economic build. And then to banshees again.
In short, tunnel vision keeps killing me. I'm getting better at the things I'm concentrating on, but the things I forget still kill me every time so my win rate never improves. It's a big challenge for me because I've always had a borderline autistic tendency to focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else. Having to spread my attention, run a checklist and keep an overall plan fucks me over something chronic.
Watch Day9's most recent Newbie Tuesday. He gives some really great advice about how to analyze your play.
Basically, watch a replay, and learn not just that you do get supply blocked, but *exactly* when it happens, and why it happens ie I always get blocked at 60 food because that's when I usually expand, so now I know before I expand to throw a pylon down immediately.
Watch a few games, and write down when you got supply blocked, and when you stopped making probes. Then, figure out where your find was via 1st person view, and see what caused it (when I harass with my probe, I forget to throw my 15/16 pylon down. from now on, i dont harass with my probe, or I throw a pylon first). Also helps with gamesense, instead of relying on your supply count or money, you can do things like "I should throw a barracks down when my SCV gets to his base" etc.
this is why team liquids the best site on the internet. guys thank you for your support i didnt expect so much help but you guys have basically broken my style down to a science thank you. i was wondering how can i attack and expand not lose? because maybe its my nub logic but wouldnt that leave me very vulnerable to a counter attack
no im the white guy with a mic in my mind wearing a skeleton t shirt but anyway another thing i forgot to mention is i dont play with standard hot keys i play with grid and my middle mouse button is the button i use to switch back and forth in between bases.
Watch live coaching sessions; watch day9 vods and live streams but most importantly don't just watch the game you are playing.... interact with it. Zero APM means you are not doing anything; this problem occurs a lot in the lower leagues. I call this a WATCHER, and its the biggest problem most lower league players face.
I haven't looked at any of the replays but I can assume that its a major problem in your play.
Biggest tips I can offer: - utilize hotkeys , learn them all - your mouse is for control/micro of units and that is it. everything else is done with left hand - produce workers/supply always - produce units while battling - rally to battles - never stop to watch the game, be active at all times - always have a game plan, but be adaptive and ready to change if needed - train your eyes to look at everything, one eye on the minimap, one eye on your econ, one on the game. If you don't have three eyes then I am sorry you can't play SC2
On February 16 2011 09:50 Ghost Reportin wrote: this is why team liquids the best site on the internet. guys thank you for your support i didnt expect so much help but you guys have basically broken my style down to a science thank you. i was wondering how can i attack and expand not lose? because maybe its my nub logic but wouldnt that leave me very vulnerable to a counter attack
Basically, the point is that you do not need to commit to an attack. You just put down an expansion, move your stuff forward, look what is up, and attack if you feel like you have an army advantage there. If you don't, just fall back and be happy about a juicy expansion. There are basically two possibilities. Either he expanded before you, in that case your army at that point should be ahead of your opponents because it is not yet effected by you having expanded. Or he has not yet expanded, in that case you are ahead in economy and as long as you don't lose your whole army, should still be fine because once you fall back, your expansion is already up, and you have your reinforcements there helping you to defend it. Just don't overcommit to your attack. And attack does not need to continue until your whole attacking force is dead. To avoid losing your whole army, you can for example send a probe, which you have at the front for the proxy pylon anyways, half a screen ahead so you don't run into some kind of trap.
EPT
