• Log InLog In
  • Register
Liquid`
Team Liquid Liquipedia
EDT 08:29
CEST 14:29
KST 21:29
  • Home
  • Forum
  • Calendar
  • Streams
  • Liquipedia
  • Features
  • Store
  • EPT
  • TL+
  • StarCraft 2
  • Brood War
  • Smash
  • Heroes
  • Counter-Strike
  • Overwatch
  • Liquibet
  • Fantasy StarCraft
  • TLPD
  • StarCraft 2
  • Brood War
  • Blogs
Forum Sidebar
Events/Features
News
Featured News
Serral wins HomeStory Cup 2915Serral wins Maestros of the Game 243ByuL, and the Limitations of Standard Play3Team Liquid Map Contest #22: Results and Winners7Code S Season 2 (2026): RO4 and Finals Preview12
Community News
Weekly Cups (Aug 3-9): Protoss get shut out1RSL goes to London! 2026 Offline Finals Nov 21-2212Weekly Cups (July 27-Aug 2): SHIN's big week0SC4ALL II: Brood War - $2500 - Dec 5-69SC4ALL II announced - $10,000 prize pool, Dec 5-64
StarCraft 2
General
Weekly Cups (Aug 3-9): Protoss get shut out SC4ALL: II Talent Announcement! Protoss AoE skill expression August World Ranking: Clem climbs to #2 Balance hotfix patch 5.0.16b (July 16)
Tourneys
PIG STY FESTIVAL 8.0! (13 - 23 August) Sparkling Tuna Cup - Weekly Open Tournament RSL goes to London! 2026 Offline Finals Nov 21-22 RSL Revival: Season 6 - Qualifiers and Main Event Tasteless Time Warp: SC Evo Showmatch (May 25)
Strategy
[G] Having the right mentality to improve
Custom Maps
Nexus Wars 2021 GUIDE [M] (2) Industrial Park
External Content
Mutation # 538 Media Blackout The PondCast: SC2 News & Results Mutation # 537 Hostile Territory Mutation # 536 Railroad Switch
Brood War
General
BGH Auto Balance -> http://bghmmr.eu/ ASL22 General Discussion Are you ready for ASL 22? NEW HYPE VIDEO How FlaSh Nearly Forfeited MSL Finals being late BW General Discussion
Tourneys
[Megathread] Daily Proleagues 2v2v2v2 Tournament KCM Race Survival 2026 Season 3 Escore Tournament - Season 3
Strategy
Fighting Spirit mining rates Odyssey Mineral Stack Saturation Any training maps people recommend? Simple Questions, Simple Answers
Other Games
General Games
Nintendo Switch Thread General RTS Discussion Thread EVE Corporation Stormgate/Frost Giant Megathread Diablo 2 thread
Dota 2
Looking for a Dota Mentor Official 'what is Dota anymore' discussion
League of Legends
[TL LoL EUW IHs] Teemo shall perish TSM pausing esports and CLG Dead
Heroes of the Storm
Heroes of the Storm 2.0
Hearthstone
Deck construction bug
TL Mafia
TL Mafia Power Rank TL Mafia Community Thread NeO.D_StephenKing vs This Guy From 1 Million Dance
Community
General
US Politics Mega-thread Russo-Ukrainian War Thread Iain M Banks Says He Has Cancer And Months To Live European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread The Games Industry And ATVI
Fan Clubs
MarineLorD Fan Club The ShoWTimE Fan Club The herO Fan Club!
Media & Entertainment
Movie Discussion! Anime Discussion Thread Series you have seen recently... [Req][Books] Good Fantasy/SciFi books
Sports
Football (Soccer) Thread NBA General Discussion TeamLiquid Health and Fitness Initiative For 2023 Formula 1 Discussion MLB/Baseball 2023
World Cup 2022
Tech Support
Computer Build, Upgrade & Buying Resource Thread Simple Questions Simple Answers FPS when play League Of Legend on laptop
TL Community
The Automated Ban List Northern Ireland Global Starcraft
Blogs
Are High-Level Gamers more A…
TrAiDoS
Cathedral Of CS And NY pizza a…
FuDDx
Please support my new stand…
Peanutsc
Hello guys!
LIN1s
ASL S22 English Commentary…
namkraft
Poker (part 2)
Nebuchad
Customize Sidebar...

Website Feedback

Closed Threads



Active: 3602 users

[G] Improving on one's own - Page 4

Forum Index > StarCraft 2 Strategy
Post a Reply
Prev 1 2 3 4 All
Fencar
Profile Blog Joined August 2011
United States2694 Posts
June 04 2012 08:01 GMT
#61
On April 23 2012 01:54 ShatterZer0 wrote:
Why steal a pro build order? Just make one yourself if you have enough time on your hands to be practicing it a dozen times on a build order tester. Better yet, don't test it. Ladder it and see where it's funky.

Make a style for yourself

Don't justify things with "Because MC does it", justify it with your own strategic sense and logic!

I can testify that this works, but don't go too off the rails.

My own example is from TvP. I would go 1rax FE into 4rax Stim/Shield marine/marauder push that hit earlier than a lot of timings and often would outright win the game, which was awesome. I stopped doing it around diamond, when I dabbled in a variety of builds, but I could probably do that build again if I wanted to.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
decaf
Profile Joined October 2010
Austria1797 Posts
June 05 2012 16:15 GMT
#62
On June 04 2012 12:20 Belial88 wrote:
Show nested quote +

I strongly disagree with both of you.
@ShatterZer0: First off, you simply do not have the time or experience to make up your own build orders that will keep up with build order pros came up with. Plus as I already stated, if you do something different everygame you're going to make extremely different mistakes everygame and you'll have an insanely hard time fixing those mistakes.
Even pros like Stephano who supposedly have their own styles all learned from other pros until they were good enough to justify such deviations. Why would you try to reinvent the wheel?

Im an EU Bronze level player, and I have found that Build orders and pros replays don't apply at this level.

I follow building groupings, and play in a style that suits me - this way I UNDERSTAND why I need to do something rather than doing it by memory.

I don't want to fall into the trap of seeing PvZ (for example) and my brain ticking...9 Pylon (Scout) 13 Forge etc etc. I want to think, okay dependent on what the Zerg is doing when I scout i'll switch my build order. FFE is a very open build and if I see early pool, I cannon up and get that gateway down and chrono out that Zealot to wall off vs his lings. If I see hatch first I can match him by taking an expansion before I pop down a forge so I can keep up with him in terms of macro.



Listen to decaf. He's much smarter and better than you, and he's telling you that pros are much smarter and better than he'll ever be. If your build order doesn't look similar to a pros, then 100% you are fucking up. The pros have played more than 1000x games as you, you can guarantee that there isn't any build that you can come up with that they haven't done already.

100% - if the pros don't do something (like go infestors in ZvZ before hydras), it's because it's bad. You just are too low level to know why yet. I just learned at about 1000 points masters how much better hydras are than infestors in ZvP and ZvZ.




As always decaf, great guide. Your stuff is always completely top notch, and I hope one day my guides will be viewed as half as good as yours. I'm a 1100 points masters (random mid-masters scrub ;/ ) and I took a lot away from it.

Your bit about watching streams, can be applied to posting to forums (the reason I'm not in code s right now -_- ), reddit (the worst of all), and watching tournaments (i try to only watch match-ups that I'm currently questioning or struggling with, and only in the gsl, and in fast forward, as well as macro timings of zvp). All this stuff just kills your ranking - there's a reason you always hear the pros on SOTG (yea another horrible rank killer, but i listen to it at work on recording) like nony, nestea, destiny, naniwa, incontrol, idra, all say "i didnt see that game" or "i heard about it but didn't watch it" - it's because they are busy playing. You will very, very rarely see top players post on this forum, because they know to play more. Just perusing a couple series of GSL, and posting on TL for replay analysis (something thats really helpful actually) is all you need.

One thing though - I try to watch all of my replays, win or lose (unless it was a stupidly easy win), to see if maybe I won because he didn't push out, if I lost because I didn't push out, and macro benchmarking. I don't think it's bad to watch 100% of your replays, you can always 8x through them, and just check out the questionable parts. The worst is when you rage over a game and refuse to watch it.

Another tip I'd add though - saying glhf/gg. I'm seriously the most bm person on b.net, I'm a huge rager, I offensively gg and everything. But I decided to start saying that stuff just to try it out, and I realized very quickly that it helps you log in more games. It lets you get over losses much quicker and keep playing, it just lets you play with less tilt... you don't need to be GM to do it (every time someone says 'glhf' to me i'm so tempted to just say 'fuck you'), just robotically do it, and walla, your gaming will increase as will your rank.

That's too much appreciation x:
I actually thought about adding the stuff about teamliquid as well, because it really consumes a lot of time, but I thought better not tell people to sturp lurking TL 24/7 on TL. Don't think mods would appreciate it~ But yea, all those tasks that actually do nothing else but waste time - watching streams, browsing TL or doing whatever might as well be spent on improving (at least if it's time you're kind of investing in sc2 anyway).

I always gl hf but I never gg. That's simply how I do it, if you go into a game and simply gl hf you rarely ever get tilted, like you said. I used to rage occasionally, too, but one of my sc2 friends got banned for it so I quit raging and turned into a gl hf robot. But I really don't wanna start one of those useless "to gg or not to gg" discussions so I'm not gonna add it to the OP.

And about the replay thing, I still believe watching 100% of your replays is a waste of time. If you know why you lost, you really don't need to watch it, the chance of maybe finding something you might improve on is so small, you're better off starting anothe game.

Just for information, because you seem to enjoy my guides, it'll take a couple of months before I can write my next guide simply due to the fact that I don't get to play a whole lot - my tendonitis still is not cured, I've been having it for 3 months now - 3 months of not playing TT My next guide will be TvX anyways, oh well. The terran section is lacking anyways
MilExo
Profile Joined September 2011
South Africa139 Posts
June 11 2012 04:41 GMT
#63
@decaf: Regarding mechanics and spamming your macro cycle, would you recommend tabbed production or separate production? I really love the guide and want to make sure that I get the right habits down when practicing. As a protoss player I normally have separate hotkeys for Nexus, Gateways, Robo/Stargate, Forges but have read that some people recommend just doing Nexus/Upgrades and Production as two separate control groups as this makes the macro cycle easier. Your thoughts on this?
zmansman17
Profile Joined March 2011
United States2567 Posts
June 11 2012 05:08 GMT
#64
This is a Great guide. However, 2 seasons ago when Terran was starting to have trouble as a race, I opted to learn how to play Protoss. I used 1v1 obs for about 30 games and then took to ladder on another account. In only a few days I was able to hit rank 1 master Protoss (same point value as my Terran). While that may not be the experience of everyone, I do recommend testing the waters in 1v1 obs before purchasing another account or using your first account.
♞ - His EKG is flattening get me a defib stat! Prepped and Ready! - ♞
decaf
Profile Joined October 2010
Austria1797 Posts
June 11 2012 09:57 GMT
#65
On June 11 2012 13:41 MilExo wrote:
@decaf: Regarding mechanics and spamming your macro cycle, would you recommend tabbed production or separate production? I really love the guide and want to make sure that I get the right habits down when practicing. As a protoss player I normally have separate hotkeys for Nexus, Gateways, Robo/Stargate, Forges but have read that some people recommend just doing Nexus/Upgrades and Production as two separate control groups as this makes the macro cycle easier. Your thoughts on this?

I'm sorry, I'm completely clueless when it comes to protoss TT I've played only like 3 games or so to show a fellow zerg how easy it is to all in with that race lol. Maybe someone more experienced with the protoss race can answer your question?
All I can say is that as a terran player I think hotkeying raxes, facs and ports individually is better than tabbing thru them. I guess both works though, since Mvp uses the individual hotkey setup and MKP tabs thru it so it's just a matter of practice. Something that's simply a good habit though is having both ebays and armories on one hotkey and tab thru those, since you don't need them that often so you don't waste much time tabbing thru things. I guess that applies to your Nexus/forge thing, right?

Btw, I'm finally coming back a bit from my hand injury. Haven't been able to play for 3-4 months and on day 2 of playing again I already defeated a GM player ^.^(the game only took 5 minutes, because I countered him perfectly, but oh well). My tendonitis is still there, but I think it'll go away soon. Prepare for more guides as I heal up~
scrub96
Profile Joined August 2010
United States76 Posts
June 11 2012 16:23 GMT
#66
I am not familiar with the build order test map you listed. I cannot seem to find a good one on the NA server. Is there a link to a map site with the specific map you use (orions?).
9-BiT
Profile Blog Joined January 2012
United States1089 Posts
June 11 2012 17:47 GMT
#67
Scrub, YABOT is the typical one. It has one for most commonly played maps.
kwark_uk: @father_sc learn to play maybe?
DAKnockout
Profile Joined August 2011
Germany3 Posts
June 21 2012 22:00 GMT
#68
Thanks a lot, this has helped me improving much quicker, though it can be hard to keep up the discipline at times
Prev 1 2 3 4 All
Please log in or register to reply.
Live Events Refresh
PiG Sty Festival
12:00
Qualifier #2
PiGStarcraft450
IndyStarCraft 110
Liquipedia
Sparkling Tuna Cup
10:00
Weekly #141
Nicoract vs IbaLIVE!
Shameless vs TBD
CranKy Ducklings127
LiquipediaDiscussion
[ Submit Event ]
Live Streams
Refresh
StarCraft 2
SHIN 996
Lowko504
PiGStarcraft450
Classic 202
ByuN (SOOP) 163
Maru 140
IndyStarCraft 110
herO (SOOP) 105
Rogue 80
Cure 79
Trap 61
mouzHeroMarine 41
TKL 29
StarCraft: Brood War
Shuttle 4388
Bisu 1720
Jaedong 1231
firebathero 860
EffOrt 720
Mini 584
Hyuk 420
Soulkey 407
Light 274
Stork 242
[ Show more ]
Snow 203
Barracks 142
Killer 113
Pusan 108
Rush 85
hero 83
Sea.KH 67
soO 58
Sharp 52
Free 43
sorry 21
Sexy 19
yabsab 14
zelot 13
Terrorterran 12
IntoTheRainbow 9
Icarus 8
Dota 2
Dendi2436
XBOCT1555
Counter-Strike
olofmeister2036
byalli838
x6flipin551
Super Smash Bros
Mew2King75
Heroes of the Storm
Khaldor53
Other Games
singsing2248
B2W.Neo479
crisheroes276
hiko233
Sick181
Liquid`LucifroN144
Livibee67
KnowMe58
QueenE52
Organizations
StarCraft: Brood War
lovetv 11
[ Show 10 non-featured ]
StarCraft 2
• CranKy Ducklings SOOP10
• AfreecaTV YouTube
• intothetv
• Kozan
• IndyKCrew
• Migwel
StarCraft: Brood War
• BSLYoutube
• STPLYoutube
• ZZZeroYoutube
Other Games
• WagamamaTV243
Upcoming Events
PiGosaur Cup
11h 31m
Replay Cast
20h 31m
Kung Fu Cup
22h 31m
Replay Cast
1d 11h
The PondCast
1d 21h
Replay Cast
2 days
Escore
2 days
CranKy Ducklings
3 days
Sparkling Tuna Cup
4 days
Afreeca Starleague
5 days
Rush vs Hm
Bisu vs Shuttle
[ Show More ]
WardiTV Weekly
5 days
The Patches Monday
6 days
Afreeca Starleague
6 days
Sharp vs Shinee
Action vs Shine
Liquipedia Results

Completed

Proleague 2026-08-10
CranK Gathers Season 4: BW vs SC2 Team League
Eternal Conflict S2 Finale

Ongoing

KCM Race Survival 2026 Season 3
K-JUNGMAN
Acropolis #5
RSL Revival: Season 6
Esports World Cup 2026: LCQ
BLAST Bounty Summer 2026
BLAST Bounty Summer Qual
Stake Ranked Episode 3
XSE Pro League 2026
IEM Cologne Major 2026
Stake Ranked Episode 2

Upcoming

Escore Tournament S3: W7
CSLAN 4
ASL Season 22
Escore Tournament S3: W8
Acropolis #5 - TRS
Blizzard Classic Cup 2026
Acropolis #5 - GSA
HSC XXX
SC4ALL II: StarCraft II
Kung Fu Cup 2026 Grand Finals
RSL Offline Finals
PiG Sty Festival 8.0
Big Dog Cup 2026 Div 1
META DYMY #4
PGL Masters Bucharest 2026
Thunderpick World Champ.
ESL Pro League Season 24
Stake Ranked Episode 4
Logitech G Connect 2026
SL StarSeries Fall 2026
FISSURE Playground #5
BLAST Open Fall 2026
Esports World Cup 2026
TLPD

1. ByuN
2. TY
3. Dark
4. Solar
5. Stats
6. Nerchio
7. sOs
8. soO
9. INnoVation
10. Elazer
1. Rain
2. Flash
3. EffOrt
4. Last
5. Bisu
6. Soulkey
7. Mini
8. Sharp
Sidebar Settings...

Advertising | Privacy Policy | Terms Of Use | Contact Us

Original banner artwork: Jim Warren
The contents of this webpage are copyright © 2026 TLnet. All Rights Reserved.