TheJaKaTaK - Page 13

TL has lots and lots of guides on how to improve in different ways in sc2, most of them tells you what someone think you should focus on first, what's important and what to prioritize. What... Not HOW, and HOW is key. Not many guides gives you tools on HOW to actually learn a specific task better. The Levels offers this!
To analyze your game play and to find out what you need to improve is actually the easiest part. And thankfully if you need help with that, there are excellent guides for this on TL, or you can just ask for help in a [H]-thread.
To find out how you fix them flaws is the real task. Methodology is one of the most important aspects of learning, but is unfortunately often forgotten.

I've been planning for making a guide on HOW to improve for a long time, offering various methods for people to try out. The Levels might save me the effort since I don't have enough time right now to make a guide that is good enough anyways.
I loved to find lots of the methods I've been using for years put on paper in a way that isn't to hard to grasp. I guess the spreadsheet could be hard to understand for someone new to sc2, but I think the video explains it good enough to get started.
It's great to see that we have such a similar background and that might be a big reason for our methods being so similar.

I was a pretty high level soccer player in my youth but quit due to lack of motivation and decided to focus on my music carrier instead. I worked as a musician for about 10 years and during that time I was also teaching music both individually and in small groups. After my music carrier I learned the carpenter trade and worked in construction for 6 years. Injuries made me change trades again and right now I'm studying Construction Design and Building Instruction Modeling. I am not a SC2 pro by any means, tbh I'm not even a decent player. However I have been a professional teacher and I am a pro learner. I have learned more trades than most people learn during a lifetime, I have learned how to play 5 musical instruments on a professional level (counting the numerous percussion instruments I play as one). Fact is I know what buttons to push to get things to stick to my brain and I know what to avoid. As I said I do not mean to brag about my accomplishments in life, because there are none to brag about. However people on the Internet tend to question the size of other peoples e-penis. This is mine, its not big, its just simply my standpoint from which I approach learning and improving in SC2.

Lets say that you want to learn how to juggle. You went to a show and saw this guy juggling with 1 ball 1 apple, 1banana, 1 torch, 1 knife, 1 chainsaw and 1 penguin while riding a unicycle, and now you are desperate to learn how to do that!
So where do you start? Do you just pick up all the stuff and give it a go? No?
Well, everything is pretty much guarantied to end up on the floor right next to your left arm and right thumb... where to start then? Well it would depend on the experience you have. Maybe you tried something easier before? But if you never tried juggling, starting with two balls would probably be a good idea. Hell, if you have no experience with any type of ball, why not start with one. Throwing a ball from one hand to another can actually be quite a challenge for some people.

So why pick a ball and not a banana or a penguin? Or even a chainsaw?!?! well, the chainsaw is pretty obvious. The ball is by far the easiest object both to throw and to catch due to its shape, size, weight and it's center of gravity.
To make things simple, lets say we already know how to juggle with 3 balls, so how do we move on? Well to be honest we have options. We either ad, or change. We don't do both. It is not recommended to ad one chainsaw. You either ad one ball, or change the balls to other objects. We could change one ball to a banana, but that would make one object feel a lot different from the two others, so it would actually be easier to swap around to 3 bananas, and when we are comfortable with those we can start mixing in the balls.

Think of it like this:



X represents the number of things you ad
Y represents the of different items you can use

(for those who wants to say that this actually has 3 dimensions you are absolutely correct, but we are gonna keep it simple).

the human brain is pretty much monotone, meaning it can only handle one thing at a time. (not entirely true, but close enough for this purpose), therefore YOU DO NOT WANT TO EXPAND YOUR SUCCESSION DIAGONALY!
You either go one step to the right followed by one step up or vice versa, otherwise your brain will not function at full capacity. You do not have to aim at getting as far diagonally as possible but maybe that feels more fun to you so it is totally OK to do so. Its just as good (or even better)to go all out X until you get your 7 balls rollin. Than when you wanna swap items you just go back to 3 items and start swapping, this way juggling with three items will feel like a breeze compared to seven, so your brain will have lots of focus leftover to spend on adjusting to the new items. Now keep going until you hit 7 of the item you chose to practice then start over again until you got used to them all.

Now think of it like this:
The ball is your zergling, the apple are your roach, the banana are your mutas and the chainsaw are your infestors. Think of the unicycle as your strategy/game plan and the ground underneath you as your opponent. The ground might change and it's all beyond your control, whether its uphill, downhill, flat, slippery or hard as a rock you still have to keep riding your bike and you are not allowed to drop anything.
As a reference to learning through one base play and build orders, mind this: If your opponent throws you off your unicycle, you either fall to the ground with an airborne chainsaw somewhere close, or you land on your feet still juggling.

Oh yeah. You also need to learn how to ride that bike, are you going to do that with or without them chainsaws?

For a low level player, or someone that is new to sc2, (or someone that have changed their hotkeys) this is a great way to start improving. The fact is that level one can take you really far. I know the levels say that people below plat should start at level 1, plat should start with level 2 and diamond should start with level 3. I somewhat disagree with that. I think everyone should start on level 1. If you have no problems with preforming the tasks on level 1, then you'll run through it in a couple of hours and now you actually know that you can spend your money before you implement micro.

I just swapped to using the Core so starting at 1.0 was the obvious choice for me. I play zerg on the EU ladder and my mmr is generally going up and down a little making me play vs anything from mid masters to low diamond. Fortunately I have a smurf account that I have used for off-raceing as terran every now and then. Unfortunately it's also around diamond mmr.
I thought this would be an issue but to my surprise it was not. Ofc. I have lost games, lots of games, but I actually also win games. And not just a few, I haven't made any counting but about 50% give or take a little. Now I am still at 1.2, and I win about 50%. I am doing the 1.2 step poorly, I manage to keep my energy low enough, spend my money good enough and avoid blocks all at the same time about 10-20% of the time, I am using minimal micro during battles and still I am winning about 50% of the time vs diamond and platinum players. Now the winning isn't at all important, but for me this shows that the average plat/diamond player have some really big flaws in the most rudimentary skills of playing sc2.

When watching replays from my games I often notice that I have a lot more stuff than my opponent, I have seen my unupgraded ling/roach army die to an army half the size of mine lots of times. For some this might not seem satisfying at all, but for me it only shows the potential of the work I'm putting in. Imagine if I would have had an army twice the size of my opponents, with a good army composition, with upgrades, and would have used good micro. I would obviously have crushed him. (Ofc if I would have more tech, my army would be a little smaller, but I wouldn't have upgrades that cost more than half my army.)
So, we are back to the juggler again. When I know how to juggle with all 7 balls, lets start working on the quality of my army!
Go through the rounds of level one and suddenly you have access to all the units and upgrades you need to get that good army composition WHILE having strong macro to support it. You could probably A-move to win already, but now lets get to the micro.

So, you have gone through level 1. (if you have done this and been honest to yourself, I will be very surprised if you are not at least in platinum or above by now). What now then? Well 2.1 is the answer. Now this is where the fun begins, this is where strategy, tactics and even build orders can be implemented in the game. I know people have mentioned that level 2 and 3 do not have that good documentation about how to execute level 2 and 3. I agree. But. Think about this: When you can execute level 3 at its fullest potential to perfection, you will be a GM ranked player and you might even be out there challenging famous people for big titles. If the levels was stated as “the true guide to become a pro” it would not have been a 1 page long document. Seriously it would not.
This is simply a tool to help your brain learn new stuff.
At level 2 and 3 you have to start using your own brain. JaK held your hand through level 1and now its time to let go.

To start the first obvious things too try out is to try to move units around wile keeping up the macro up and make sure you don't loose track of your army or scouting probe or whatever you choose to move around. The goal of this is just to get used to the idea of doing other things while macroing. If you never done this before it will be hard at first, and if you have been scouting while doing a FFE for 2 years it will be a walk in the park. We all start from different points. After this, think of what you want to do with your units. Micro needs a purpose. Don't micro your units if you don't have a goal to achieve with your micro. e.g. I micro to increase my dps, I micro to try to stay alive. Etc. If you are not sure what to do, just try stuff: I do “X” to se what happens. That is actually a purpose. But there is a big difference in just randomly microing stuff and actually doing stuff to se what happens.

Every round in level 2 has tons of things to be explored. Every unit can be microed to some extent. Find out what you can do with every unit on every round. This does not mean that you have to do all the work yourself. Look at pro games, check guides on forums and video guides on the tube find it all and try it out.
When you start microing your macro will start failing, its just the way things work. Luckily you have the benchmarks in the levels to make sure you are not messing up your macro. If you start failing a lot, just go back a little in difficulty and micro a little less but don't go all the way back to level one and stop microing totally, you need to push yourself outside your comfort zone. Check your replays to see when you fail, check what you are doing when u fail. Where is your camera, where are you looking? The benchmarks in the levels are great tools for finding out whats wrong, SQ is a really smart and simple way to check if you are spending your cash. I would suggest to complement this with SC2Gears, which is an awesome tool for finding flaws in your macro.
The hard thing with level 2 is knowing when to move on to the next step, sure you have the benchmarks but they only judge your macro. This is because we micro “on top” of our macro. Meaning our macro is constant and we micro with whatever capacity our brain has left over. Agin, the benchmarks are there to make sure we don't fuck up the rudimentary stuff with the icing on the cake.

Why no benchmarks for micro? Well honestly that is freaking hard to do: I blinked 44 times this game! Is that better than 33!? well not necessarily. Its totally up to you to decide what goals you have with your micro. Move on when you feel like you have explored the content of the tier you are working on, there is nothing stopping you if you one day realize that: Hey, my burrow micro is not on par, just go back to 2.1 and work it out!

It is at this point using strategy and build orders can help you. Imagine this:
You are a protoss player and just started working on 2.2. You feel like experimenting with blink micro, but so far you just haven't been able to make any good use of it. You have seen some blink guides and videos and understand the basic of the mechanics, it just don't seem to be efficient when you try it out. Find a build or strategy that someone uses with great success. Try it out a little and compare the difference with what you have been doing before. Maybe you will find out stuff about this type of micro that you didn't know.
“Hmm it seems like a blink timing at 22mins isn't nearly as good as one at 11min”.
“People going blink seem to favor +1 and +2 attack before armor or shields I wonder why, I have to try this out”.
Look what other people do and try it out, and try to understand why it is good or bad, some things might even be good sometimes and bad other times.
Since the level of skill required to move on is vague and it's defined by you who might not even know what good micro is. Make sure to criticize your play. Play against a friend, do that mc style 7gate you just implemented and play 10 games. He will defend it better and better every time since he knows what is coming. Is there any way you can extend the life of your units, when do you go for the kill, when do you pull back for reinforcements, where do you attack, how do you position your units, what hot keys do you use. Is there any way to abuse the units he have with the units you have.
If you are not sure if you can improve or how to improve, make a help thread on the forum with some replays ask people to give you advice on your MICRO. Now people usually are not good readers, so some people will tell you to macro better. Ignore them, you already know if your macro was bad on that replay or not since you already have the tools to find that out. Hopefully (and most likely) someone knows how to read and can give you some good advice. (sorry for the sour undertone, but people freakin suck at reading =P ).

Level 3 is basically level 2 on steroids, this is still far beyond my skill of game play. I could do some strategic things that requires some multitasking, but to be honest with my self I probably can't preform many of them without fucking up level 1 or 2.
Depending on what level requirement you set for yourself in level 2 you can be at a pretty low level (in terms of ladder ranking) or a very high level when you get to this point.
Think of multitasking like this: how rough can the ground be when you are on that unicycle? How much information can your brain handle before the foundations start to shake.

For people who have a hard time finding a way to start working on this level:
take your exercises from level 2 and think about how to use them at several places at once, or how to perform several of them at the same time.

Can you do a 2 pronged attack while using burrow micro on both fronts? Can you nydus his main base at the same time? Are you still macroing?

Can you do storm drops at the same time as you are controlling your protoss death ball using all the spells and abilities that are available for you?

Can you defend vs drops while setting up your army positioning and preparing a flank for his army?

Multitasking isn't only about what you can achieve with great multitasking. It's also about understanding what your opponent can achieve, what are strategically beneficial with multitasking?

“shit he is dropping my main, GOTTA DEFEND!!”

is quite different from: “he is dropping my main, what is he trying to achieve with that? Is he dropping my third too? Is he moving his main army? Are there hellions or banshees inbound somewhere?
Multitasking is often linked to strategy.