[G] Marine Splitting Guide: How to do "Pro" Splits

It is possible to split in any direction - not only in diagonals, but you should practice splitting in each direction separately. People usually find splitting in certain directions harder than others. This is because your hand uses different muscles to move in different directions. This is why it is important to train your “muscle memory” for each direction separately.


Hopefully you don't get surrounded from all directions like this!

Pick 4 directions to practice - You may choose to do diagonal directions or straight compass directions, it doesn't matter which you choose. Realistically, you're not going to need to practice all 8 directions separately, as that is very unnecessary in an actual game and makes little difference whether you go a few degrees one way or the other.

You will find that you progress faster overall if you stick with one or two directions first and get good at them before moving onto other directions, instead of practicing in all directions randomly. In a real game, you don’t get to decide which direction you run towards, therefore you should practice all of them.

To start off, I’d recommend starting by practicing on Unit Test Map. If you think you are already quite good at marine splitting, you could still do this to improve. Make about 16 marines and bunch them up, and try to split them in just 6 moves in a particular direction, where 1 move means 1 move command.

Start with 16 marines bunched up:


So what you do is split up your 16 marines in 6 moves, then bunch them back together and repeat, until you can split them well. You should aim to get your split down to under 3 seconds if possible (that gives you half a second per move).
Don’t try to go too fast at the expense of accuracy. You should be able select what you want to select with reasonable accuracy. It doesn’t matter if each move takes a whole second to do. Do this over and over again until you can split them well, and at less than 3 seconds, for each direction.

This is what your 6 moves might look like if you choose to run to the right first.

The order in which you do moves 1-6 in the picutre is irrelevant. You may find doing 1, 4, 2, 5, 3, 6 easier, or any other order. This is not the only way to split, it is just an example.

Remember, there are no banelings involved in this, you should be splitting against “imaginary” banelings. This is to speed up the initial learning process (if you had to remake your marines and banelings each time, it would take a lot longer and not really help).

Keep in mind that splitting in larger groups of marines (30+) is not as simple as this. If you split out 60 marines into groups of 3s, you'd be clicking 20 times, which is ridiculously inefficient. There are more efficient ways to split which you will learn later.

Once you are good at this, you should test doing it against some banelings and see how many marines you can keep alive. Against 6 banelings, you should only lose at most 1-3 marines out of 16. Against 12 banelings, you should be able to have 5-6 marines remaining.

Practise this with banelings approaching from all directions – above you, below you, right or left. You should be able to do it in any direction.
Then move up to a higher number of marines and do the same. Keep limiting yourself to 6 moves – this is important because anyone can split up a large group of marines in 20 moves. You won’t have time for that in a real game.

All these techniques are demonstrated in my video guide below, in more detail.

If you’ve been doing practising the first stage in the above sections, the chances are you’ve got bored of it before being able to reach perfection, and that’s understandable. You probably want to try practicing in a more realistic scenario and to test your skills. This is where marine split challenge helps.

In this map, Banelings come at you from any of 4 random directions each round. It can be hard to focus splitting in one direction because each round gives you a ¼ chance of getting the direction you want to improve at, which can be frustrating. One way around this is to wait until they come from the direction you want, or to just do your split pretending that they are coming from the right direction and see what happens.

In my opinion, marine split challenge is the best map to practice on (You can choose to enable or disable creep and stim). There are other maps out there though (There was one I found a while ago in which banelings always spawned in the same place and you start with many more marines, but I can’t find that map anymore). And the advantage to marine split challenge is that your progress is easy to measure.

Try getting up to level 10 first, then try to beat that level the next time you play. You will find that it becomes increasingly difficult and you will not perform consistently every day. You may find it easy to get up to level 20 one day but then very hard the next – this is natural. Consistency is learnt with time.

Don’t over obsess about the level you can get to (like I did). This ends up being counter-productive as you start to play in a way that gets you a higher level, but is rarely applicable to real games. I’ve linked a couple of videos that show some micro techniques used which can be copied.

This video demonstrates the things mentioned in this guide and quite a bit more on how to do certain marine splitting tricks. It breaks down the whole splitting process into smaller chunks that can be practiced and improved on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh8qAocDNyo

And here’s another guide which I made just over a year ago. It explains how to split by selecting lines of marines from a group, which is a good way to improve mouse accuracy and speed.

In most pro games, marine splits last about 5 or 6 moves. It’s normally over in a few seconds but can be longer with late-game armies of 80+ marines. If you spend over 10 seconds just marine splitting without macroing in a 1v1, you could be wasting time that is better spent macroing. An exception to this is late game with very large armies (e.g. in that Happy video) where winning the fight and maintaining map control is a top priority.

You don't have to have insane APM to do efficient splits, and that is shown in this video. Each move is paused and demonstrated, showing which marines are moved where at every move. There are only about 7 moves in total, and all the clicking in between isn't entirely necessary.

Learning splitting in practice against an AI is one thing, splitting in a real game is another. However, the skills you need are roughly the same in either one, and there is a link between how well you can do in practice and how well you can do in a real game.

As you get better, you find yourself wanting to make more and more marines in TvZ to put your skills to the test. And then when the moment comes where you need to do a good split, you mess up and your hands freeze, or you completely forget what you've learned. This is normal, and can be removed with experience. It doesn't take that many games to be able to reach a similar level in a real game to what you can do in practice.

You may also be distracted by the addition of zerglings and mutas, or roaches. There is a custom map that throws lings into the mix (I think it's called Ultimate Marine Split challenge or something), but from what I've noticed, the addition of lings doesn't make that much difference to what you need to do - split your marines up as best you can. Obviously if there are only 2-4 banelings, you target them with your marines before they explode on you, however if there are too many banelings to target, splitting up is the best way to fight it. Keep in mind that you should be watching where the banelings are going and splitting appropriately, and once the banelings are dead, you should no longer be splitting but stutter stepping if possible.

Another difference of playing in a real game to practicing is the map's influence on which direction you can run. Don't get trapped in narrow areas where you can't escape, or surrounded from two directions. All of this can be avoided with experience.

Keep in mind that applying your practice skills to real games takes time, but no where near as much time as it takes to improve your skills in practice. I personally spend a lot of time marine splitting. However keep in mind that if your goal is to become better at 1v1s, then you should spend more like 80% of your time practicing 1v1s and only a small portion of your time practicing marine splitting.

Here’s a slow motion video of IM.MVP’s marine split – this shows how marine splits usually involve only 6 or 7 “effective” moves for the duration of the fight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7EWCMC0-uE

Innovation splitting in front of the crowd - not sure which event this was but it was on GOMTV. Btw the crowd and casters are getting a little over-hyped. Sure the split is good but far from the best I've seen!

Beatimg Innovation's split in practise


MKP Splitting in first person - this was captured from his stream. This is also analyzed near the end of my second guide.


And of course the original MKP micro that made him famous in the community.

I'll try and keep this as short as possible, but I've got quite a lot to say!
Marine splitting is a technique that I fell in love with a couple of years ago after seeing the insane splits that MarineKing was doing in tournament matches. After seeing his amazing micro I was inspired to copy his technique and have been practicing regularly to try and achieve that goal.

So I practiced for hours, not only because it is a decent way to improve at TvZ in 1v1s but also because I thought it was a very cool skill to have in SC2. The other reason for practicing it was to measure my own abilities and see if I could rival that of the top players, at least in theory.

Having practiced marine splitting regularly (maybe 30mins-1hour a week on average) for over a year, after each month or two I was getting significantly better at it than before - and I started to get more satisfied with my improvement. It’s a good feeling when you split well in a 1v1 match and get complimented by your opponent for playing well or having good micro.

I have made a couple of video guides on marine splitting - if you're interested in watching them, check out the video guides spoiler below.