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Note: I do not think this is common knowledge as I haven't ever seen it used and I could not find a thread about it. If it is common knowledge or has been posted elsewhere, I apologize.
As the title suggests, this trick I figured out can be used to drop units, attack a particularly important building and kill it, then load up and retreat with only a few commands.
Why is this useful?
Normally drops are most successful when there is lots going on in the game and even as a master's player, I lack the incredible multitasking of the pros. This trick would be helpful when you want to do multiple drops and can't micro all of them or if you are in lower levels, to have effective drops while you are back at your base macroing.
This could be used to pick off sensor towers, robo bays, spires, and basically any important structure while you drop somewhere else or micro your units in a big battle.
How it works.
Basically you drop off a medivac and units - in this example - marines. You identify a particular structure you want to destroy - ghost academy in this example. It is a good idea to then hotkey your marines and medivac into a single control group for quick access to them if needed but is not required.
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/UqMnW.jpg)
You then stim, a+left click or right click the building and then shift+right click the medivac (with both the marines and medivac still selected) and while continuing to hold shift, you right click where you want your medivac to return to after the drop. When the building is destroyed, the final commands of lifting up and retreating will automatically be executed.
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/VRXNp.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/9yD59.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/7BBz0.jpg)
Another Example (thanks Hoban!)
Assuming you are doing a 2-pronged drop, one at the 3rd or your zerg opponent, and one at the main to snipe the spire. It takes ~10 seconds for 8s stimmed marines (0/0) to down a spire. 850 hp / (56dps*1.5). If you get your 2 medivacs in place, queue up the main drop, queue up the drop at the third, queue up the stim, kill, load up, move away, then move back to your drop on the 3rd to micro for drone kills, you really put your opponent in a pickle. They have a few more than 10 in-game seconds (maybe more like 20) to respond to both drops. On one case, they catch your spire snipe and react immediately, you get an extra few seconds to melt some drones. On the other case they catch your third drop, you quickly load up and retreat knowing you just sniped their spire. In the third case where they respond to both drops asap and split their army, You have a few seconds of drone killing and you potentially loose your second drop.
The first two cases are obviously a win in your situation, while the third case may not seem like a win. Assuming the third case, your opponent must be very quick to react and have very good army splitting skills and be able to effectively micro the split in record time. This could potentially give you a positional advantage for your main army, letting you cut off the third ect.
All-in-all I find this may not be preferable for single drop attacks but for multi-drop's this type of technique could force your opponent to make some decisions they don't want to. Thank you for introducing me to this micro technique!
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I'm pretty sure this is common knowledge... I don't even play terran but I know this. Thanks for sharing anyways! I'm sure some people might find this useful..
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On April 05 2011 13:09 justindab0mb wrote:
I'm pretty sure this is common knowledge... I don't even play terran but I know this. Thanks for sharing anyways! I'm sure some people might find this useful..
It's so funny cause I have played hundreds of games as Terran and watched hundreds of hours of games/replays and never seen or heard anyone mention it. I know I can't be the only one who didn't know this and I spend more time with the game than a lot of people! 
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Really good to know actually... I'll be sure to start using this, and I'd love to see more "execution tricks" on these forums, mostly its just some random garbage about using unit x in matchup y. Thanks a lot Charger!
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Good find.
At first I thought you were gonna propose that Blizzard add a button that can give your drop to the AI to control....lol
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this is bad news for every other races, drops were already hard to deal with, this just makes it even more brain numbinly easy for terran
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On April 05 2011 13:33 Slago wrote:
this is bad news for every other races, drops were already hard to deal with, this just makes it even more brain numbinly easy for terran
1. This is very situational and even more risky than a normal drop precisely because I am not watching it AND my units are only set to attack a structure so if he comes to defend, the opponent can quite easily clean it up because my units won't be attacking his units and they won't be leaving until/if the structure dies.
2. You know other races can drop as well right? I am quite certain this exact same tactic would work just as well using overlords or warp prisms.
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Won't work if the opponent sees it coming. The best play isn't the cutesy stuff like this, its the stuff that you can see coming and still have trouble stopping.
However, it is a useful micro trick and very good in midgame/lategame scenarios when there are big battles going around the map and you can't possibly keep track of everything.
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On April 05 2011 13:45 Zombo Joe wrote:
Won't work if the opponent sees it coming.
Kind of like with everything in Starcraft you mean...?
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That's really cool! Good find man.
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i thought this was common knowledge as well lol, i ususally do it with blink stalkers where i would que blink 5-7 stalkers into their main and snipe a spire or something during a battle.
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Seems like it'll just degenerate into bad habits. i.e not paying attention to your drops.
I guess it's decent in certain situations.
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On April 05 2011 13:39 Charger wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On April 05 2011 13:33 Slago wrote:
this is bad news for every other races, drops were already hard to deal with, this just makes it even more brain numbinly easy for terran 1. This is very situational and even more risky than a normal drop precisely because I am not watching it AND my units are only set to attack a structure so if he comes to defend, the opponent can quite easily clean it up because my units won't be attacking his units and they won't be leaving until/if the structure dies.
What Charger wrote. You basically want to be sure that the cost of your units including the medivac are less than the benefit you get from taking out the building. If the opponent manages to spot your drop, not only are you not focused on it, but your units have a series of actions already setup making it more difficult to control. It is a cool idea but just be careful you don't setup a drop and forget about it.
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before i read this, i already guessed how does it works lol
User was warned for this post
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On April 05 2011 13:39 Charger wrote:Show nested quote +On April 05 2011 13:33 Slago wrote:
this is bad news for every other races, drops were already hard to deal with, this just makes it even more brain numbinly easy for terran 1. This is very situational and even more risky than a normal drop precisely because I am not watching it AND my units are only set to attack a structure so if he comes to defend, the opponent can quite easily clean it up because my units won't be attacking his units and they won't be leaving until/if the structure dies. 2. You know other races can drop as well right? I am quite certain this exact same tactic would work just as well using overlords or warp prisms.
yep, this might be useful when doing multiple drops though, like for your 2nd or 3rd drop at the same time you can do this and not have to worry about microing it
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I don't know, I feel like the only reason to do this would be because you plan on NOT multitasking your drop, and want to queue up a few commands and forget about it... which is pretty much never a good idea. It all depends on the response time of your enemy.
If he responds fast, because you issued such specific commands and aren't paying attention, you will lose 600resources of units to deal some damage to a tech structure (ie. do nothing).
If he responds slow, you're free to continue killing shit until he does arrive.
I mean there are three main reasons I can think of dropping a person as Terran,
1) Snipe tech
2) Eco harass
3) Multi-prong attack
Obviously this technique refers to #1) in particular, but the only instance where the only thing you want to do is snipe a tech structure and NOT follow up with eco harass or multiprong attack is if they place their tech somewhere stupid like in the screenshot... =\
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Thanks for the tip! Will make sniping tech buildings much easier while a battle is going on. Screw the haters in this thread because I know this will help a lot of people.
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Oh shit! I was 3600 masters and I didnt think about doing this. Thanks dude! Will keep it in mind.
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United States7483 Posts
This is good for taking out a single building, but it has one significant downside:
Often times, when you do a drop late game, you are doing it as harassment, and you want to pull the units back at the last possible moment. Doing this will cause one of two issues:
The units will show up to defend, and you'll have to micro anyway or lose the drop, no advantage gained, possibly a disadvantage because you'll be paying less attention.
You snipe the building, load up, and get out before your drop is in danger. You did free damage, yay! But you probably could have done MORE damage, and to save micro effort you got out early.
I suppose it'll work if you simply don't have the necessary multitasking to attempt to handle it, but if you can at all do it, or want to improve your multitasking, I can only forsee this causing problems vs. actually multitasking.
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as a long-time SC player with low APM, I say thank you sir =]
Any way to issue all the commands starting before loading the dship?
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I think this can actually be really useful to use. Assuming you use it as the OP suggests (multi-pronged assaults or during large engagements) to snipe tech, you could come away like a bandit.
Assuming you are doing a 2-pronged drop, one at the 3rd or your zerg opponent, and one at the main to snipe the spire. It takes ~10 seconds for 8s stimmed marines (0/0) to down a spire. 850 hp / (56dps*1.5). If you get your 2 medivacs in place, queue up the main drop, queue up the drop at the third, queue up the stim, kill, load up, move away, then move back to your drop on the 3rd to micro for drone kills, you really put your opponent in a pickle. They have a few more than 10 in-game seconds (maybe more like 20) to respond to both drops. On one case, they catch your spire snipe and react immediately, you get an extra few seconds to melt some drones. On the other case they catch your third drop, you quickly load up and retreat knowing you just sniped their spire. In the third case where they respond to both drops asap and split their army, You have a few seconds of drone killing and you potentially loose your second drop.
The first two cases are obviously a win in your situation, while the third case may not seem like a win. Assuming the third case, your opponent must be very quick to react and have very good army splitting skills and be able to effectively micro the split in record time. This could potentially give you a positional advantage for your main army, letting you cut off the third ect.
All-in-all I find this may not be preferable for single drop attacks but for multi-drop's this type of technique could force your opponent to make some decisions they don't want to. Thank you for introducing me to this micro technique!
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Not exactly common knowledge, but no I don't think people realized such a useful queue could be set up so easily :D
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This is a clever use of the advanced control system in SC2. I guess we don't see it often because drops usually go for mineral lines and just want to stay as long as possible instead of picking off a building and retreating.
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I thought this was common knowledge, simple use of the waypointing system. Still good to inform people who don't know about it though. Just be wary as this can backfire easily, if you are not paying attention to your drop and use this method the other player can literally 1a zerglings for example which will surround and kill your marines and they wont fight back at all since they have a command to focus down the building then leave, as opposed to raping zerglings like they should.
Still good post for those who don't know about it, just be careful with it.
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I didn't know about this, but at the same time I don't plan on using it strictly so that I improve multitasking instead of figure out a bunch of tricks that will let me appear to be better than I am.
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Oh wow.
As a terran player who loves to drop 4-6 places at once (it's how I kill toss), this is brilliant. I've been suiciding drops until now, thank you so much =D
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If it frees up APM for macro or controlling other units, why not have this tool in your arsenal? It's not like you have to drop this way just because you can. At first I thought it was some gimmicky A.I. trick but it's really just using waypoints right? In any case, thank you for the information, as my TvZ sucks lately.
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f the haters. I'm a top 8 Master Terran and i actually found this extremely useful. Thanks OP!
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This works fairly well from a zerg perspective.
I like to sometimes do huge mid-game baneling/zergling busts.
I select all my units and ovies in one control group and shift-right click the same location until everything loads up.
Then issue a move-drop-move command on the ovies.I then split half of them and send them to a different base.
In most cases Im not really looking to get those units back because I'm queuing 30-40 more at home. I don't really have to worry about creating an extra 5-8 overlords because you know you will be losing some if they hang out too long.
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I don't quite understand. I thought most people know what shiftclicking does. Can someone explain?
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kinda like how i do my muta and nydus worm harass. shift queuing is amazing. nice trick and thanks for sharing!
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On April 05 2011 15:43 Ansinjunger wrote:
If it frees up APM for macro or controlling other units, why not have this tool in your arsenal? It's not like you have to drop this way just because you can. At first I thought it was some gimmicky A.I. trick but it's really just using waypoints right? In any case, thank you for the information, as my TvZ sucks lately.
Indeed, just using the shift command to set up a series of commands. Of course using shift is nothing new as some have pointed out, however I had never thought of using it in this way and thought it would be helpful to some people.
I was 3100 master's last season and my apm is about 80. I play ~10 hrs. a week at the most so I don't have the time to get ultra gosu and work on being able to micro 2 or 3 drops at once while positioning my army and macroing effectively, it's just not possible for me and probably won't ever be. Everyone has their micro limit, hell think about qxc or drewbie or another drop heavy terran incorporating this - they could probably queue up 2 of these drops while dropping in two other places, it could get insane in the hands of a really good pro player!
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On April 05 2011 17:12 Diglett wrote:
I don't quite understand. I thought most people know what shiftclicking does. Can someone explain?
I think anyone who has played the game for more than a day knows how to shift click and knows what it does. However, I had never seen or heard of it used in this way for this purpose.
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On April 05 2011 14:53 Hoban wrote:
I think this can actually be really useful to use. Assuming you use it as the OP suggests (multi-pronged assaults or during large engagements) to snipe tech, you could come away like a bandit.
Assuming you are doing a 2-pronged drop, one at the 3rd or your zerg opponent, and one at the main to snipe the spire. It takes ~10 seconds for 8s stimmed marines (0/0) to down a spire. 850 hp / (56dps*1.5). If you get your 2 medivacs in place, queue up the main drop, queue up the drop at the third, queue up the stim, kill, load up, move away, then move back to your drop on the 3rd to micro for drone kills, you really put your opponent in a pickle. They have a few more than 10 in-game seconds (maybe more like 20) to respond to both drops. On one case, they catch your spire snipe and react immediately, you get an extra few seconds to melt some drones. On the other case they catch your third drop, you quickly load up and retreat knowing you just sniped their spire. In the third case where they respond to both drops asap and split their army, You have a few seconds of drone killing and you potentially loose your second drop.
The first two cases are obviously a win in your situation, while the third case may not seem like a win. Assuming the third case, your opponent must be very quick to react and have very good army splitting skills and be able to effectively micro the split in record time. This could potentially give you a positional advantage for your main army, letting you cut off the third ect.
All-in-all I find this may not be preferable for single drop attacks but for multi-drop's this type of technique could force your opponent to make some decisions they don't want to. Thank you for introducing me to this micro technique!
I hope you don't mind but I decided to include your example in the OP as well as my example. This is how I imagined this working but struggled to explain it correctly, thanks!
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Good stuff, definerly helps. I dont see why you need to keep your drop on a crtl group (not that its a bad thing, i just dont see the need). Sometimes, especially late game, I dont have many ctrl groups open, and I really dont like using the father ctrl groups (7,8,9), so it seems odd that you are forcing the control group.
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On April 05 2011 23:58 Fuzzymonkey wrote:
Good stuff, definerly helps. I dont see why you need to keep your drop on a crtl group (not that its a bad thing, i just dont see the need). Sometimes, especially late game, I dont have many ctrl groups open, and I really dont like using the father ctrl groups (7,8,9), so it seems odd that you are forcing the control group.
You are right, it is not required for this to work; I have updated the OP. Thanks
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I think you can even add the dropping of the units to the shift commands. So that it is completely automated including the first drop itself.
Also doesnt just right clicking the building with everything mean the medivac moves over it whereas attack move means the medivac 'attacks' ie. heals the marines?
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United Kingdom12022 Posts
I didn't know this either, thanks for the info!
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Incredibly useful! Seems like it would make multi-drops much more useful for lower level Terrans like me as I always had trouble watching more than one drop at a time.
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On April 05 2011 13:33 Slago wrote:
this is bad news for every other races, drops were already hard to deal with, this just makes it even more brain numbinly easy for terran
not really
any good player will continue to watch their units, not doing so can easily cost you the game
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thanks for posting, even though I kinda knew about this I wasn't exactly sure; and it's good to publish it to the common knowledge
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Thanks for this, I had no idea you could do this. Terran is my least played race though
Thanks anyway!
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Thank you does this work with Warp Prism+stalkers too?
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Hmm... really cool trick. Unfortunately, this technique is kind of limited, as it means you can at best only kill one structure and will lose the entire drop if there's any kind of interference. Even worse, it takes a while to set up, so if you have fast enough hands to use this trick without jeopardizing your attention in other ways, you'll probably have fast enough hands to just micro the drop. I don't think I'm going to see this become standard play anytime soon simply because microing it by hand gets such incredibly better results.
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Im a Learning Terran Player, and i find this thread to be very helpful. It seems like it should be common knowledge because of how well he described the idea. but i like the fact that u point out how its good for those how are not as quick as the pros. this is good for me because it allows me the few extra seconds i need to macro up without pressure. thx. Charger
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On April 06 2011 11:56 Lightningbullet wrote:Thank you does this work with Warp Prism+stalkers too?
I haven't tested it with either of the other two races but their respective dropships should behave in the same way so it should work just as well with zerg and protoss.
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i would be a little leery doin this. For one, it takes a while for marines/marauders in 1 dropship to kill any building so the protoss might be able to warp in units! Second, you could get greedier and maybe snipe some more shit!
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On April 06 2011 12:40 Acritter wrote:
Hmm... really cool trick. Unfortunately, this technique is kind of limited, as it means you can at best only kill one structure and will lose the entire drop if there's any kind of interference. Even worse, it takes a while to set up, so if you have fast enough hands to use this trick without jeopardizing your attention in other ways, you'll probably have fast enough hands to just micro the drop. I don't think I'm going to see this become standard play anytime soon simply because microing it by hand gets such incredibly better results.
I don't think this technique is particularly useful for a single drop while nothing else is going on as a player should be able to control a drop and still macro. However, I know people in the lower leagues struggle to micro and macro at the same time and it's even hard for me when there is a lot to micro. In my head when I thought of this what immediately came to mind was the 2nd scenario in the OP. Imagine Shattered Temple and the zerg has the 3 o'clock main and expands towards the bottom corner and is on 3 base. You move through the middle with your standard tank/marine/medivac army and setup outside the zerg's natural. Positioning and microing your main army vs. sling/bling/muta is crucial as one false move or too much time looking elsewhere can cause you to lose the game right there. So lets say from here I load up 2 drop ships with marines, one heads to the zerg's third and the other to his main. The one in the main is queued up to take out the spire while I alternate between microing my dropship and popping back to check on my main force/leapfrog tanks. In a perfect world, I could quickly double tap my hotkey for my automated drop if it starts getting denied and I can make a call whether to sac my drop and try to kill the spire or try to pick up and leave immediately.
So the question is (for me) should I try to micro everything and do an OK job at best or should I automate one drop and micro the rest pretty good? I think that answer will be different for people but me personally, I would rather micro well on 2 things while the 3rd thing does it's own thing and still (hopefully) does damage by taking out a key building. Worse case scenario my main army and 1 drop is microed well and I lose a mediac and marines with the other failed drop that did not kill the spire. That's a gamble that I would be willing to take in some cases.
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yea a lot of people don't really use this, but considering that getting an extra barracks or not missing a supply depot are more important in most cases than microing a drop, this should be really useful. But if I ever see some units in my base target firing something, I always go for their transport, especially bFlameHellions.
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This sounds very practical, (unlike most posts in SC2 strategy xD) I will definitely try this in my future games.
Thanks OP! :D
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This sort of thing would really annoy me as toss when I'm going for a colossus build. Pop in, pick off a pylon or 2, pop out, just as my stalkers are getting there.
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EPT
