EPTdecided to create this document on the basics of starcraft 2 mainly to just help out my co-workers for the AHGL and i thought, "hey, others people might find this helpful."
So here it is, any feedback is welcomed. Thank you! <3
LeetPandA’s 1v1 sc2 basics comprehensive guide
This is a guide for the people who are seeking to improve their competitive play in StarCraft 2. We will go over general game knowledge, how to improve, and useful tips. We’ll be avoiding race specific builds and strategies; this will be more of a comprehensive guide to the game.
Before we begin, I want to be VERY clear. This isn’t an end all be all “follow this guide or you’re a loser” guide. There are many methods to improve your play. The following is just the way I improved in the game.
Pre-Bronze
This section will be for people who are just starting out and have absolutely zero game knowledge of competitive sc2.
Where to start?
Typically before you start playing you’ll want to pick a race. Each race more or less reflects different play styles.
Zerg: The swarm. This race is for people who like to play reactive to what the opponent is doing. Relies heavily on good mechanics. Might be the hardest race to pick up for a new player. Only because conceptually it’s confusing, due to having larva as a 4th resource.
Terran: The space cowboys. This race is probably the easiest to pick up conceptually, however it’s probably the hardest race to master. Has the capability of being either defensive or offensive. Suits many different play styles.
Protoss: The high value, high reward race. This race is the strongest in terms of individual units, however that means they are the most expensive. Conceptually probably the 2nd easiest to learn, and might be the easiest to master. Protoss players usually set the tempo of the match, this means that typically Terran and Zerg need to react to what you’re doing.
Random: I would only recommend this for players seeking to learn every race. However once you’ve filled your knowledge, I would recommend to sticking to one race. If you play random that’s 6 more match ups (total 9) you need to learn. It’s definitely doable don't get me wrong. It’s just really difficult.
Race picked. Now what?
Time to learn a simple opening build order. Build orders are needed to maximize efficiency in the early game. Head over to http://lotv.spawningtool.com/build/ and find a build that suits your play style. Once you’ve picked a build, load up a custom game versus A.I or some A.I matchmaking, whatever you want, and practice the build. Try to get it as perfect as you can. Once you got that build down… try another one.. and another.. keep trying out builds until you’re comfortable.
If you find yourself losing too frequently, then lower the difficulty.. not too low though… one of the best ways to improve in this game is to play opponents who are better than you. So even though losses feel like shit, keep in mind that it’s actually a good thing. It just shows how much more you need to learn. When you’re first starting out, be prepared to lose A LOT.
Keep practicing your builds until you can easily beat the elite A.I.. Now, this is my personal opinion, but if you can’t beat elite A.I 100% of the time, I don’t think you should fight humans yet. To each his own though, do what you like; in the end, as long as you’re playing and critically thinking about your play, it won’t matter. You could even just practice your build orders versus humans from the get-go if you are so inclined. All that truly matters is you're focusing and practicing your build.
It's highly recommended, if not a necessity, to be using your keyboard for everything. This means no clicking on the icons to produce. The reason for this is because during the more heated moments you wont have time to move your mouse away from the center screen. It's also extremely helpful to get a ctrl group setup planned out in your mind. How you set up your ctrl groups is entirely up to you. I don't want to get too into it because everyone has their own comfortable setup, but I use 1-3 for army 4-0 for bases and/or production structures.
Time to hit the Ladder
In this section we will be focusing on what you should be focusing on to improve your skill depending on what skill level you are currently at in the ladder.
Bronze – gold
-Focus: Mechanics. Mechanics. Mechanics. & scouting.
This is the main thing lower level players struggle on the most. Now, what does mechanics actually mean? Mechanics are basically everything related to things you need to be doing no matter what. This means not getting supply blocked, executing your build order correctly, not letting your resources float, spreading creep, not missing larva injects, dropping mules on time, placing chrono boosts on the correct structures, and constantly keeping worker production up.
Typically, if you’re losing in bronze-gold it means that you’re making too many mechanical errors. After each match, load up the replay and see where you’re making the most impactful errors. Make a mental note about it and load into your next match and REALLY focus on not making that same error.
I order to proceed from the bronze-gold skill levels you’re mechanics need to be instinct. In higher levels of play you will not have any time to think about your mechanics, so these things will need to be automatically executed in your play even during micro intensive moments. I cannot stress enough how IMPORTANT this is for newer players.
Now, let’s say you’re mechanics are near perfect and you’re still losing to bronze-gold (not a likely scenario but I guess it’s possible). This is where scouting comes in. Overall, scouting will prevent you from dying to all-ins or pressure builds and will also give you an idea of what their army composition will look like proceeding into the mid-game. Please refer to the “scouting” section of the guide to get a better idea on what to look for while scouting and what it all means.
Plat-Diamond
-Focus: Decision Making / Tactics / Understanding situations.
At this level of play your mechanics should be almost, if not completely, instinct; and scouting your opponent is a very easy habit. At this level of play, a single wrong decision can end the game for you. Decisions are made ALL throughout the game. As soon as the game starts you make a decision on what build you want to do; after the first scout you decide on what kind of composition you want to proceed into the mid-game with; mid-late game you’re constantly deciding when and where to attack and when/if a tech switch is in order.
If you find yourself losing a lot of games, start watching your replays and try to remember what was going on in your head when you made the decisions you made. Ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing efficient and is it actually accomplishing anything?”
A very good rule to follow: If you’re blindly making a decision, it’s more than likely going to be the wrong decision.
For example, let’s say you’re playing as Zerg, and you make the blind decision to set up a zergling counter-attack, so you send a pack of 20 zerglings to a hidden location on the map, you see your opponent pushing out with his army, so you send in the pack of lings to counter-attack, the counter-attack gets ignored by the main army of your opponent and he keeps pushing; your lings deal some decent damage but eventually gets cleaned up, meanwhile your opponent pushes you and ends up killing you because you don’t have enough units.
So you lost that game. You load up the replay and start watching. The first thing you ask yourself, “Could I have held the push if I micro’d the battle differently?” You watch your micro and its spot on. Nothing could’ve been micro’d better. The next question you ask, “Was it wrong to send out those 20 zerglings for the counter-attack?” You continue watching and you notice that your opponent had not even started the 3rd base as he was pushing out; which means what he did was a 2-base all-in, therefore the 20 ling counter-attack actually accomplishes nothing because the opponent was all-inning and doesn’t really care about losing workers.
If you had scouted first and saw the army count you would’ve known an all-in was coming and would’ve made the correct decision to keep the zerglings home to defend. This is why blind decisions are NEVER good. Each decision you make needs to have a reason, do not blindly do things… unless of course you yourself are doing an all-in, in which case I say, “gl hf rolling the dice lol.”
TL; DR/Moral of the story: DON’T MAKE BLIND DECISIONS!
Scouting
In this section we will be focusing on effective and active scouting.
A lot of lower level players assume all the scouting is done within the first 3 minutes of the game; “I scouted his location, that’s all I need” WRONG. Scouting NEVER stops. NEVER EVER. You need to be scouting throughout the entire game. That’s rule number 1.
Before, we continue I want to say that the following examples are SUPER DUPER general. So take these examples with a grain of salt.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s get into the stages of scouting.
Stage One Scouting: What’s his opening?
This is at the beginning of the game, you send a worker out to scout your opponents location AND opening build. DO NOT just send your worker to your opponent’s location and just bring him back home as soon as you find him UNLESS you know without a doubt what the opening build is. The biggest thing to be looking for is an expansion. After scouting whether or not an early expansion is coming up, check out what’s going on in the main.
If you see literally nothing but the main base and 1 supply structure, that means you’re getting proxy cheesed (if playing against protoss, if you only see a forge, youre probably getting cannon rushed bro)
If you see 3+ barracks, or 2+ gateways, or early spawning pool you’re probably going to get attacked really early.
If you scout an expansion, you’re safe to make workers and expand yourself.
Stage two Scouting: What is his plan?
This scout comes in around 3:40 – 4:15. The method you get this information depends on what race you’re playing. Typically a scan from Terran or a marine, an adept from Protoss with the phase ability is a great way to safely scout, and for Zerg overlords are essential. The objective of this scout timing is to see what direction your opponent is going. i.e Is he being aggressive? Is he being economical? gimmicky?
If you see tons of production structures made, no 3rd base and a decent amount of army units. It’s an all-in. Prepare your butts.
If you see almost no production being made, but a lot of tech structures, it could also be some form of an all-in depending on the tech path… OR it could just be a way for them to secure their own 3rd base, keep watching to see what their decision is. You can usually tell depending on the tech you scout.
If you scout a 3rd base you’re safe to expand as well, OR you can decide to put pressure on your opponent, typically depends on your opening.
Stage three scouting: Keeping up.
Once you start getting into the mid to late game, you still need to be constantly watching your opponent’s army composition. Also getting vision of the tech structures can give you an idea of where your opponent is heading in terms of late game army compositions. Use things like scans, overseers, observers, hallucinated phoenix, changelings, or even just sending a single weak unit into his side of the map.
ALSO, more importantly, you need to be watching his base count. If you see no 4th base by 7-8 minutes that means he will start falling behind economically because the main base will start to mine out. A lot of players will opt to just do a 3 base all-in if they can’t secure a 4th base so keep that in mind.
Basically, always always ALWAYS be hungry for more information. Also try your best to get lots of map vision. Obtaining control of the xel’naga watch towers is one great way to maintain map vision.
Stage four scouting: Mind Games.
In higher levels of play. You need to be very wary when it comes to misleading information. Opponents are as aware as you that scouting is key to victory, because of this they will do things that they WANT you to see to make you think they’re doing something that they’re not.
A perfect example of this is the fakey 3rd nexus that a lot of Protoss players do. They will make a fake early 3rd base but then either cancel it or they just don’t saturate it with workers. Then they follow that up with a 2(3)-Base all-in. They ONLY made the nexus with the objective to throw you off from their all-in.
The key to preventing this, is relentlessly scouting. Don’t let their mind games throw you off. You scout his 3rd? Scout it again, and again, did it finish? How many probes? How many probes 30 seconds later? What does his main look like? Is there a lot of production? How many units does he have? Etc.etc.
again, BE STARVING FOR MORE INFORMATION! THIS IS KEY!!! Seriously can’t stress this enough.
Controlling tempo and general game flow
Tempo and game flow is something that is better learned with hands on experience, but I will do my best to try and explain.
Everything you do in a match should cause a reaction from your opponent, assuming they’re not playing on auto-pilot. This cause and effect chain is what creates the flow of the game. Typically, who ever decides on being aggressive first will control the tempo at that moment, and therefore will be dictating the flow of the game. Tempo gets shifted after this back and forth depending on what happens during the match.
For example, you’re playing in a ZvT match as Zerg. You open standard with hatch first, you scout your opponent and realize your opponent is bunker rushing you. BOOM already Terran has made a decision that requires you to react to this all-in. Terran currently has the tempo of the game under control. The flow has instantly gone from calm to tsunami. Now, let’s say you hold off the bunker rush, now YOU have the tempo of the match under your control, Terran can’t do anything to you at this point. Because you have tempo, you’re allowed to dictate the proceeding flow of the game. You can get aggressive yourself and attack his base, because you know he doesn’t have much at home. Or you can just sit back and play passive with a huge economic lead.
Tempo can be controlled in other ways besides being outright aggressive. Let’s say you’re Terran, playing versus a Zerg who is playing passive and economical. Your plan is to do a two base all-in, which just got scouted by your opponent’s overlord. This already gives you tempo, because he scouted your production he knows you’re all-inning. You get to control the flow of the game from here; you know that he knows your all-inning now, you either commit and hope he won’t be able to hold that attack anyways or you can play some mind games by taking a 3rd base instead of proceeding with the all-in.
This back and forth exchange of controlling tempo and flow is, for me, why the game of starcraft is so beautiful. It’s what makes starcraft such a complex game. People think startcraft is complex just because of the difficulty of the mechanics and how much you need to multitask just to play well. However that only scratches the surface of the TRUE complexity of this game.
Helpful tips
This section will be filled with little tips to help you improve your play.
- You can add units to any control group by selecting the units you want added and pressing Shift+#.
-You can drop units from dropships while still moving by pressing the “drop” button and clicking on the drop ship itself.
-Zerg eggs can be rallied individually, as well as be added into control groups.
-You can remove individual units from a group by shift+clicking its portrait, and then reassigning the control group as you would. (Useful for sending out a scout unit)
-Pre-splitting your army is a very great way to keep them safe from unexpected splash attacks.
-Look up “rapid fire how to sc2” in YouTube, to get some tips on how to rapid fire certain things, such as creep, warp-ins, spells.
-Use control groups for your production structures, this is used to keep your macro going while looking somewhere else (such as a battle, or if you’re harassing)
-Use multiple control groups for your army, this will make it easier for positioning the weaker army behind the beefier army; also will make spell casting easier.
-You can press “tab” to cycle through multiple selected structures or units.
-Watch pro matches. Pro players have a very deep understanding of the game, new timings and tricks are always being figured out, and the fastest way to know about them is to watch them happen first hand in the pro leagues.
-Watch high level players stream on twitch.tv. Having a first person view of a skillful player will help show you the proper way to play.
-Exercise, and eat healthy, drink lots of water. This may seem completely unrelated but your brain and body needs these things to function well. Sc2 requires immense brain power, and if it’s focusing on keeping your body alive, it can’t focus on sc2. This REALLY does help, I promise.
-When on a losing streak, take a break. Playing with a frustrated mind set will only make things worse for you. Actually, take frequent 5-10 minutes breaks during your ladder session regardless if you’re losing. Giving your mind a little rest can help tons.
-Seek practice partners, if you run into a guy on the ladder who you can’t, for the life of you, beat then ask if he’s willing to play some practice games with you. Remember, the best way to improve is to play people who are better than you.
-Don’t be a BM dick to random people on the ladder, seriously. The community is already toxic enough, and it’s just embarrassing.
