On March 18 2022 05:35 fps_daniel AKA Xpert wrote: Ok so to make things staight: what actions should I take next time with this build? Just more units? And improve a bit on the macro?
Here are some things: 1. Try to use your resources as efficiently as possible (don't get supply blocked; don't queue up too many units in your unit-producing structures; if you can't keep your resources low and if you start to float them, then make more unit-producing structures; etc.) 2. If you're not going to be aggressive, then make sure you're scouting and aware of what the opponent is doing, when they're moving out to attack, etc. 3. If you're going for a bio-heavy army, you need medivacs with them. 4. Make sure you make enough siege tanks, and make sure you put them into siege mode and position your army when the opponent comes to attack.
yea ok thx for the advice and ill keep this in mind next time. But this isnt how the guide vids tell me to do while they claim these builds would get you to diamond.
On March 18 2022 05:58 fps_daniel AKA Xpert wrote: yea ok thx for the advice and ill keep this in mind next time. But this isnt how the guide vids tell me to do while they claim these builds would get you to diamond.
I think it would have been more tactful to write a first post with something like "I'm brand new to StarCraft, and I'm wondering what I can be doing better because I lost a game, here's the video, thank you" instead of the title/post you made.
@darkplasma I could have but im not just talking about a lost game, so thats not my point of making this thread. My point is that both winter and PiG claim you can get to gold/diamoind witha similair build which ive learned and try to replicate and that this - witth ofc taking into account im new - very often doesnt win vs elite AI. So the title makes sense since im using their builds.
It would have been more usefull to just give me advice on the stuff ive given instead of the last 2 replies with arent helpful in any way.
Everything always comes down to macro at low levels. You're behind on army supply. You're behind on SCVs. You're behind on production. I briefly looked at PiG's build and copied it.
At the 8 minute mark if you compare our army supply, production, and scv's i'm ahead. And I got totally out of position and he just walked up to my 3rd. In TvT you can never pushed a sieged tank line unless you are wayyyy far ahead on army supply. Just practice your macro. And it can be done wayyyy better than I did. I'm diamond and I don't even play terran. It's always macro, never the build up until around plat/diamond.
As others said, it has almost nothing to do with your micro. Your macro is very beginner-level (which is understandable, we all were there) which means "really sub-par". Floating 600 minerals at 1:40 is basically a death sentence. In early game you should always be resource starved because there's so much to build, and if you don't build/train stuff all the time - you fall behind.
Having only one baracks out of three producing and with max queue - is really bad for you too, ofc. Ideally you should always have enough production structures to easily spend your money without queues.
I.e. you would have at least 2x as big army if you just spent your money properly, and this alone would make you win most of the games vs AI that you lose. Yeah, running into siege line doesn't help, but if you have 2 or 3 times bigger army, these mistakes often don't matter as much.
Micro starts to matter when both players' macro and big picture decision making (like army composition) is good enough, so they have comparable armies. THEN you'll need better tactics and unit control than your opponent to win vs comparable army. If you have 100 army supply and I have 50-60 - you'll most probably win even if my micro is much better.
Hello! I just want to add to the wonderful responses you got, that Starcraft is an economic game and as such there are kinda exponential gains in time on everything you do. That's why your opening and first minutes are extremely important and you need to be 100% on top of execution and have tight timings. That means, for example, the moment you hit 150 minerals - bam! - barracks goes down, and you are back to zero minerals; the moment you hit 100 minerals - bam! - you queue up the second (but never third!) marine, ideally very close before the first marine finishes etc. Any excess queue or floating resources means wasted time and efficiency that could allow someone to be doing exactly the same build simultaneously as you but get more out of it.
Also please keep in mind any video that claims to have the build order to get you from A to B, is too short to cover all the basics you really need to actually execute that build order correctly. It just has the build order itself. There's a difference between having the perfect recipe for a cake and actually baking and presenting a delicious cake. Some of that you'll learn by more practice (and don't be afraid to fail!), and some will be helped by watching even more videos on the basics and fundamentals of how to play.
At this point, even after beating Hard and Harder A.I., I'm sure you can beat at least many Bronze human opponents on the actual ladder, so there's nothing better than going on the ladder. You'd get the satisfaction of losing 5 games in a row and then winning one clutch match vs someone at close skill level to yours - and that will give you the boost of confidence that at least some progress is being made. A.I. is very predictable, but makes a very concentrated attack, whereas human opponents are wildly unpredictable by comparison, but also at such skill levels are quite inefficient and you will be beating them by simply getting better and better with your macro.
Oke, thanks everybody for taking the time to reply in such detail. Then Ill continue trying to improve on this.
My main concern is - which I also encountered in quake later on - that I dont wanne get stuck with bad and wrong habbits which will be very hard to get rid of again when youve been doing em for a long time. So I wanne try to do it better here from the get go and get better more efficient.
On March 18 2022 07:39 fps_daniel AKA Xpert wrote: @jimminy why call me a troll?
@darkplasma I could have but im not just talking about a lost game, so thats not my point of making this thread. My point is that both winter and PiG claim you can get to gold/diamoind witha similair build which ive learned and try to replicate and that this - witth ofc taking into account im new - very often doesnt win vs elite AI. So the title makes sense since im using their builds.
It would have been more usefull to just give me advice on the stuff ive given instead of the last 2 replies with arent helpful in any way.
I called you a troll because you stated in your op that you were copying and doing exactly what the players were doing in the guildes. And that you "might fuck up here and there".
In the replay you posted you built one scv, then literally went AFK. Your gas is literally a minute and a half later than the players get their first gas in the videos. I didn't watch the rest because I refuse to believe you are being serious here.
Your build isn't remotely close to anything shown in the guides. You somehow don't see this, and make a post calling out PiG and Winter? I don't buy it bro.
If you are somehow being serious here, watch your own replays and compare what you are doing at what time vs the guide. Check the supply counts, count how many units they have in the guide at a set time vs how many you have. IE how many marines three minutes in. How many workers. Try your best to actually do the build properly and I guarantee you you will be able to beat the AI.
Oke fair, enough, you might have a point there. But I have a lot of matches/replays vs the very hard AI and some of then resembly the build very closely. What this demo just showed very well is that I have a decent sized army - might not as big as enemy's one but also not a lot smaller - and thats its just gone within a few seconds and that this is what often happens to me and I probably find the most frustrating thing. so yea.
On March 18 2022 15:54 figq wrote: Hello! I just want to add to the wonderful responses you got, that Starcraft is an economic game and as such there are kinda exponential gains in time on everything you do. That's why your opening and first minutes are extremely important and you need to be 100% on top of execution and have tight timings. That means, for example, the moment you hit 150 minerals - bam! - barracks goes down, and you are back to zero minerals; the moment you hit 100 minerals - bam! - you queue up the second (but never third!) marine, ideally very close before the first marine finishes etc. Any excess queue or floating resources means wasted time and efficiency that could allow someone to be doing exactly the same build simultaneously as you but get more out of it.
Also please keep in mind any video that claims to have the build order to get you from A to B, is too short to cover all the basics you really need to actually execute that build order correctly. It just has the build order itself. There's a difference between having the perfect recipe for a cake and actually baking and presenting a delicious cake. Some of that you'll learn by more practice (and don't be afraid to fail!), and some will be helped by watching even more videos on the basics and fundamentals of how to play.
At this point, even after beating Hard and Harder A.I., I'm sure you can beat at least many Bronze human opponents on the actual ladder, so there's nothing better than going on the ladder. You'd get the satisfaction of losing 5 games in a row and then winning one clutch match vs someone at close skill level to yours - and that will give you the boost of confidence that at least some progress is being made. A.I. is very predictable, but makes a very concentrated attack, whereas human opponents are wildly unpredictable by comparison, but also at such skill levels are quite inefficient and you will be beating them by simply getting better and better with your macro.
Yea I wanne go on the ladder and I might be able to beat a bronze here and there but when i watch the demos and stuff it loosk so easy to beat the AI that I cant help myself just first wanne be able to that before going in for real ...
On March 18 2022 15:54 figq wrote: Hello! I just want to add to the wonderful responses you got, that Starcraft is an economic game and as such there are kinda exponential gains in time on everything you do. That's why your opening and first minutes are extremely important and you need to be 100% on top of execution and have tight timings. That means, for example, the moment you hit 150 minerals - bam! - barracks goes down, and you are back to zero minerals; the moment you hit 100 minerals - bam! - you queue up the second (but never third!) marine, ideally very close before the first marine finishes etc. Any excess queue or floating resources means wasted time and efficiency that could allow someone to be doing exactly the same build simultaneously as you but get more out of it.
Also please keep in mind any video that claims to have the build order to get you from A to B, is too short to cover all the basics you really need to actually execute that build order correctly. It just has the build order itself. There's a difference between having the perfect recipe for a cake and actually baking and presenting a delicious cake. Some of that you'll learn by more practice (and don't be afraid to fail!), and some will be helped by watching even more videos on the basics and fundamentals of how to play.
At this point, even after beating Hard and Harder A.I., I'm sure you can beat at least many Bronze human opponents on the actual ladder, so there's nothing better than going on the ladder. You'd get the satisfaction of losing 5 games in a row and then winning one clutch match vs someone at close skill level to yours - and that will give you the boost of confidence that at least some progress is being made. A.I. is very predictable, but makes a very concentrated attack, whereas human opponents are wildly unpredictable by comparison, but also at such skill levels are quite inefficient and you will be beating them by simply getting better and better with your macro.
Yea I wanne go on the ladder and I might be able to beat a bronze here and there but when i watch the demos and stuff it loosk so easy to beat the AI that I cant help myself just first wanne be able to that before going in for real ...
While I can totally relate to your motivation to not get absolutely crushed when hopping onto ladder I think the issue with your approach are the fundamental differences between playing vs AI compared to playing against humans. Apart from getting used to execute a build order both have actually very little in common IMHO as the AI does really stupid stuff based on how it's been written so it will 'teach' you wrong things that you then need to correct later when actually playing ladder.
Sure, I can't really speak on how bottom-tier league games look nowadays, but it's not unreasonable to assume that despite undoubtedly being better than 10 years ago they still suck hard in a relative sense. Also people probably still tend towards executing simpler, so more pushy/aggressive/cheesy builds for obvious reasons and I could very well imagine you'd be hitting a brick wall at first when being confronted with that on ladder since the AI didn't prepare you for this.
Long story short, get on ladder and play against real people, as this will teach you each and every little thing you need at the time to overcome whatever league you may be in. You suck, they suck, vast majority of us still suck, it's no big deal and the real beauty of the game - you can ALWAYS improve on things and the whole experience is ultimately a journey of learning and improving and just speaking from my personal experience the game really started to expand/become interesting for me after reaching Diamond as having a foundation of mechanics (while not even remotely resembling 'perfection') finally allowed myself to incorporate the strategical aspect of the game.
To me it sounds a bit like you try to 'shortcut' this aspect of learning by playing with preparing a build order to the best of your current abilities and thus protect yourself from losing too much. If your ego can't handle losses because you want to win so badly even when starting out just in bronze, you should maybe overthink the expectations you set yourself up with.
Nevertheless I wish you best of luck in your games and hope you find what you're looking for.
Also remember that when people here say "only when my mechanics became good, I could incorporate strategical aspect of the game" - this doesn't mean there's no strategy before that point, and it's all strictly about who builds more stuff.
I believe strategy and decision making matter in Bronze too. Often 80 army supply with 6/10 strategy will beat 100 army supply with 3/10 strategy.
It's just that for most players with shaky basic mechanics, they cannot multitask effectively at all. And while they try to come up with something cool, their macro stops completely. So in the end it's not 80 supply vs 100 but more like 50 vs 100. And in this case usually no cool strategy will be able to help you much.
As long as strategic decision making doesn't slow your macro in noticeable way, it's all cool.
I think the best way to do this is to get a habit to check your macro cycle like every 10s, just to make sure CCs keep making SCVs, barracks/factories keep producing units you need, you don't forget any necessary ugprades, etc. With control groups and hotkey you won't have to move your camera away from your army, and it takes 2 seconds. It should become 2nd nature, i.e. you should do it without thinking much.
I created a video to show you how to refight battles against the AI which can be useful for learning how to control your army.
I also go over how to respond build order mistakes. Basically if you forget to build a worker it is better to just build stuff at an earlier supply rather than to delay your whole build 15 seconds.
Some other suggestions are to hotkey all your production structures. I put all army production structures on one hotkey and my Command Centers and upgrades on another hotkey.
You have to press the Tab key to cycle between building types eg: Barrack->Factory->Starport. The advantage is that you can see if you have any idle buildings.
For me it is especially helpful to notice an idle Engineering Bay when building SCVs.
Alright thx Creager and ZeroByte13, ill go play live games very soonish then.
And a special thanks to meadbert for even making a video for me, appriciated a lot! And the replay taking control option will indeed come in handy to replay situations where I didnt rly know why they went so wrong. Thx.
Since the advice has been so solid and theres a lot of good help. Here is one demo of me where I win vs Very hard AI:
What is it thats going on here that makes me win this? Did I do something well here or was is just that the enemy attacked me first and and then stupidly retreated that basically made this some lucky win?
On March 20 2022 00:06 fps_daniel AKA Xpert wrote: Alright thx Creager and ZeroByte13, ill go play live games very soonish then.
And a special thanks to meadbert for even making a video for me, appriciated a lot! And the replay taking control option will indeed come in handy to replay situations where I didnt rly know why they went so wrong. Thx.
Since the advice has been so solid and theres a lot of good help. Here is one demo of me where I win vs Very hard AI:
What is it thats going on here that makes me win this? Did I do something well here or was is just that the enemy attacked me first and and then stupidly retreated that basically made this some lucky win?
Fundamentally, until you are a significantly higher-level player, every game is won by macro. Whoever has more stuff will almost always win every game. Even in games that look like they were won or lost for some other reasons, unless you are at a pretty high level of play you will find that either player could easily have won if they had good macro, because they would have had a significantly better army than their opponent.
In this replay, you won because you had better macro than your opponent. Watch the replay and look at the supply; when their attack hit you, you had 153 supply and the AI had 112. Whether they had decided to retreat or not, they would have lost the game. You could have just pressed F2 and a-moved your entire army toward their base, and you would have won the game.
If you look closely at the replay, you will see a lot of places you could have actually been much further ahead than you were. Your first worker doesn't start for a very long time, almost enough time to have actually built a worker. Throughout the game, there are often times that you are not making workers, or when your other production facilities are not making anything. You often have large numbers of units queued up - that means you've spent the money to get those units, but you aren't actually building them yet.
If you cleaned up these issues, you'd likely be able to get to 200 supply by the time that attack arrived. And you would never lose - with 200 supply against a 112 supply AI, you can just select your whole army, hit "attack", and tell it to go to the enemy base. You don't need to do anything else. And my advice to you would be to focus on this aspect of the game as much as you can until you are generally always producing out of all your facilities, never queueing lots of extra units, and rarely getting supply blocked. These are the fundamentals upon which you can then layer more advanced but less impactful things like positioning, micro, and army composition.
EPT
