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Hi, while playing games recently I have been running in to a very frustrating problem. My brain races ahead of my actual physical hand speed and it feels like I hit a brick wall and just overload and focus on one thing in the first place.
http://drop.sc/113012
This will happen to me while suiciding hellions for drones, doing drops, defending harass, or positioning for a final engagement.
This is not to say that I am choosing to do the wrong things (except in the final engagement of attached replay where I win anyway.)
The fact that I win in this replay should be completely irrelevant, I just finished this game about 10 minutes ago and had this feeling of 'UGH, I can't keep up...'
The major problems were not getting production facilities up properly during the hellion pokes, simply not being able to deal with any sort of harass while macroing, and the most defining gross factor for me was leading up to the final engagement.
My 4th and 5th CC's finished up, I was going to elevator up the main, and I needed to make thors and get +3 attack up. I also really wanted to do a drop at a potential 4th or 5th of the zerg.
The important thing I find, is that I am not saying this in hindsight, these thoughts were in my mind during the engagement but were simply overwhelmed on my ability to do anything other than micro and 4aaaaaaa5ttt6ss at any given time.
So the question is, how can I learn this FASTER than simply grinding out a million games?
When I practice an instrument, I don't practice a song. I play a difficult run, lick, or rhythm until I get it right.
It does not seem effective to me to learn to do 10 seperate actions in a 1 minute window of a 20 minute game. (And not all games will be that matchup, that situation, that length)
I don't feel satisfied with my ability to get things done in this game and want an effective method to learn how to allow my hands the skill to paint the portrait in my mind.
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I'm incredibly OCD in the game and I find that helps me a lot in getting stuff done. I have a lot of my upgrades next to each other so whenever I click back to them, I can see the status. I only click back to them when I'm building supply depots so I really often build supply depots around my upgrade facilities.
Otherwise the biggest is just getting familiar with the situation and doing it again. As much as you don't wanna practice a million games, it won't take nearly that long and it should just come naturally.
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go to custom game and type in Multitask trainer v0.95+bh. That is a custom map where you have to macro efficiently, hold a timing attack and mineral harass, save a protoss executor, all while microing a probe being chased by a ling (1 move qued allowed, max).
I discovered this custom map and have been using it to warm up every day before playing, originally i tried normal but couldn't beat it on that (with Terran). Then i played easy and finally beat it, a few more times. Then i reverted to normal. Now i beat normal every time rather easily. It is verry good for training your ability to mulitask, everything from quickly producing units to micro that probe. I believe this map is majorly responsible for my bust into master this season (with Terran).
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On February 16 2012 13:31 Sajaki wrote:
go to custom game and type in Multitask trainer 0.95+bh. That is a custom map where you have to macro efficiently, hold a timing attack and mineral harass, save a protoss executor, all while microing a probe being chased by a ling (1 move qued allowed, max).
I discovered this custom map and have been using it to warm up every day before playing, originally i tried normal but couldn't beat it on that (with Terran). Then i played easy and finally beat it, a few more times. Then i reverted to normal. Now i beat normal every time rather easily. It is verry good for training your ability to mulitask, everything from quickly producing units to micro that probe. I believe this map is majorly responsible for my bust into master this season (with Terran).
Multitask trainer helped me a lot. If it's mouse speed you lack, try playing osu.
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One really good way is just force yourself to play faster. Sounds dumb but it works. You will be less accurate for a time, but after practicing playing faster you will just naturally play faster and be able to do more. This is akin to practicing one set bar in music. Don't worry so much about other things just as long as you're playing as fast as possible. If you do that then it might be a good idea to rethink your hotkeys and make sure they're optimal. Its hard enough to switch hotkeys, so doing it with forcing yourself to play faster will help you learn them and it won't feel as frustrating.
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Day9, Tyler and Artosis have each stated that to increase your apm (im assuming this will increase your hand speed) you should constantly be tapping between your individual hotkeys, including your army hotkeys, while you are playing the game, and generally trying to perform actions as fast as you can. While you will get worse by doing this initially, over time your brain will adjust to the speed of your fingers and you will be making quicker decisions, macroing and multitasking better.
I can't speak from experience but I trust them since they have oodles of it 
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fap fap fap fap fap.
Seriously.... don't worry about it. You'll easily get ~70 average APM once you get used to the game. Then it's just a few months and you'll have 100. Play for a few years, 130+ won't be a problem. Really, APM is not a restricting feature of this game. Things like putting down depots will become muscle memory. And I know you said you didn't want to hear it, but given it's mostly muscle memory, playing more games really is the fastest way to increas eyour APM. You can maybe spam to help build it up quicker.
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Well the best ways to mastering playing faster is still up for debate. Those micro and macro and multitask customs are generally very useful, as they are more focused practice than mass gaming, but in the end mass gaming will give you the most organic growth in all the relevant skills of Starcraft.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
If you are limited by mouse accuracy and/or control (which you probably are even without realising it) then you can look into disabling mouse acceleration and messing around with a few other settings. Osu! is a good game to play to improve mouse control, and is free.
If it is just an issue with multitasking, you can do a few things, firstly, play vs AI or something and set up a chain of actions to do, etc move army to 1 place, command a drop to go somewhere, start 3 more barracks, an attack upgrade, a command center, make an scv from each CC you have, drop another CC, build a bunker, just set up lists of commands like that in your head and then race through them as fast as possible.
The other thing you can do is really just focus on playing FAST, even if it means with spamming, im not a fan of redundant actions, but you can do things for example early game - worker stacking on close mineral patches for the income boost (you can pull like 20-30 minerals extra from that at a timing that is crucial for a lot of things, etc 4gate, 1rax expand they will be directly dumped into your main strategy in an important way) and you can do a lot of bouncing around, hotkey your scouting worker and your cc, double tap to jump camera between them, camera hotkey your main cc, ramp, natural, natural entrance, his natural entrance while jumping to your scout, individually rallying scvs to the patches that dont have more than 1 scv on and wherever you want to build, that kind of thing in order to just be playing at a fast speed the entire game, instead of having to spike your activity levels when stuff happens as it is hard to get to your fastest speed quite suddenly.
Whatever you do, if you want to improve fast, focus on staying outside of your comfort zone (true for almost anything) and your body will adapt so that in a smallish (reasonable) amount of time, your new speed will be your new comfort zone.
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@Belial88
Thanks for watching the replay dude.
@Cyro
I like the advice of going outside of my comfort zone, perhaps during the times where I am hesitant to go back to my base to do something I should just say 'fuck it' and do it at the expense of anything else until it becomes so fast that it hardly makes a difference.
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On February 16 2012 14:15 Belial88 wrote:
fap fap fap fap fap.
Seriously.... don't worry about it. You'll easily get ~70 average APM once you get used to the game. Then it's just a few months and you'll have 100. Play for a few years, 130+ won't be a problem. Really, APM is not a restricting feature of this game. Things like putting down depots will become muscle memory. And I know you said you didn't want to hear it, but given it's mostly muscle memory, playing more games really is the fastest way to increas eyour APM. You can maybe spam to help build it up quicker.
What's with the fap fap fap fap fap fap fap fap?
This is SC2 forum, please, no need for that.
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Left hand vs right hand, think about it.... these comments don't even make sense
other than that, basically just play more, and play fast third style builds, you are more likely a fairly rounded player (as seen from your replay), and if you had the handspeed there, you wouldn't actually know the proper patterns of cycles to macro and micro effectively, and as such, you should improve them all at once, by playing the game. If you're having trouble with a specific aspect of the game, don't shy away from it, embrace that you've found something to improve, and then focus on having your games come to a convergence point where you can practice this. If you don't improve your early game as well, the late game hand speed won't help you at all.
Edit:
Also, use hotkeys for everything, hotkey dropships, hotkey engi-bays and armorys, use screen hotkeys for every base, and USE THEM, force yourself to use them, and suddenly you'll find yourself with much more time on your hands. If you never have to look at your base except to construct additional depots, you suddenly have all the free time in the world to stare at your army and the minimap (which is how you should be moving your drops around).
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@CatNzHat
Thanks for that advice. I try to hotkey as much as I think is necessary. I will be more diligent about army/drop ships, I will also try camera hotkeys.
I disagree with hotkeying engibays though, as then I would have to press 8, which is an uncomfortable stretch for something that is not all that big of a deal as I check for them out of habit anyway.
Edit: Is a rounded player defined as playing 'standard'? I don't know what that is supposed to mean.
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Thanks for reading the post evan! I really appreciate it along with Belial88 watching my replay.
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On February 16 2012 15:40 Thaniri wrote:
@Cyro
I like the advice of going outside of my comfort zone, perhaps during the times where I am hesitant to go back to my base to do something I should just say 'fuck it' and do it at the expense of anything else until it becomes so fast that it hardly makes a difference.
I've done that many times, and screwed myself over plenty of times too, i.e. all my lings die to a baneling, or my mutas suicide into an army of marines, etc. That being said, I think that it's helped me to think more carefully about how long it's going to take me to do the task at my base compared to how long it will take my units to move into danger. I am also much more aware of the mini map then I used to be, and I think it's because I've tried to stretch myself to do this kind of multi-tasking. That in turn, has helped tremendously in dealing with drops.
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EPT
