EPTSo you're a StarCraft 2 player, who's either never played StarCraft: Broodwar before or never played it competitively. With SC2 Beta coming to a close, you're going to need to find something to do, and what better place to practice than in the original? In fact, it's a jolly great idea to head over to ICCup right now and start downloading and playing the computer, even if the server's down (or, if ICCup Season 13 has started, play online!)
This guide will try to ease you into it, and maybe even remind some BW vets about all the mechanical handicaps they'll be presented with when they return. This guide is NOT for people who already know how to play broodwar, but only for the newbie (INCLUDING DIAMOND) players who are not familiar with broodwar.
I'll be concentrating much, much more on mechanics than strategy, because there are many more places where you can find guides about zerg/protoss/terran strategy, and in much more detail than I could give you. And so, I present part 1:
i. Auto-Mining
This will probably be one of the most difficult things for new broodwar players to learn. There's two parts to this: (a) The initial split and (b) new workers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PXvTyjfHic
We've all jizzed to this before, no shame.
We've all jizzed to this before, no shame.
The split is something that definitely takes practice to learn. If you've been sending all 6 workers to the same patch, then you'll definitely need some practice. If you've been splitting 3 and 3, then maybe you'll only need a bit of practice. And if you're Idra and split 2&2&2, then go ahead and skip the part about splitting. Any of the methods shown in the video above are just fine.
Next thing is that you cannot rally your town hall directly onto the minerals. Well, you can, but the workers produced will not mine until you manually give the command. This means its often better just to rally the town hall towards the mineral line, but not directly on it. Then, box the lower left of the town hall (as this is where units will always pop, unless blocked), and command the worker to mine once it appears. And yes, worker production is just as important, if not more so, in broodwar than in SC2.
ii. Building Selection and Macro
Macroing is infinitely harder in BW than SC2. There is one very simple reason for this: Multiple Building Selection. In broodwar, you will only be able to select on building at a time, and so you will either have to hotkey each individual gateway/barracks/factory/hatchery or manually click on them. This not only makes producing units difficult, but it takes much more time and effort to re-rally your buildings to a new location. It is suggested that you hotkey as many of your production facilities as you can, and use the minimap to re-rally your buildings. Or you could hotkey your facilities from 1-6 and then cycle through the buildings, re-rally, and then overwrite the hotkeys back to your army.
A third solution is to use the location hotkeys, F2, F3, and F4. These keys will bind the location of your screen, so that a very easy way to re-rally your buildings would be to set the locations to your production facilities, and then to the rally location. To use the location hotkeys, simply hold shift and press down on the F2-F4 keys, whichever you wish to bind to. The default location for all these keys is your starting location. For example, we bind F3 when we can see all our factories, then bind F4 over where we want to rally. We then hit F3, click a factory, hit F4, right click the desired rally, and repeat.
iii. Army Management
StarCraft just gets harder and harder. Right now, I assume you're thinking, “well, I could just hotkey my army to 1, then hotkey buildings from 2-0”. WRONG. Not only are you stripped of the ability to select multiple buildings, but you are also unable to select MORE THAN TWELVE UNITS. This makes moving large armies of zerglings very, very difficult. Your army, however, is also naturally split up, as you will have anywhere from 2 to 5 control groups of pure units. Different players have different preferences on what should be hotkeyed together and to where, but the most important thing is to actually have your army hotkeyed somewhere.
iv. Army Pathing
This is perhaps one of the most frustrating things as a broodwar player, but also yields some of the funniest results. Broodwar units move in one of two ways. The first way is if the units are clumped together, then they will move together. This is called “Magic Box” commanding. Experience will pretty much tell you how big it is, or you can actually read the linked guide.
If any of the selected units are outside of the magic box, however, then your units will act as if you gave the order to each of them individually. This results in conga lines of zerglings, dragoons, vultures, and creates jams at every choke point. This is also a very inefficient way of engaging an opponent's army. To counteract this “conga line” effect, most players will set up an arc of units, then a-move them together in fast succession (ie 1a2a3a). This is used for practically every unit mix except terran mech.
v. Worker Mechanics
While this may seem trivial, individual workers have been known to change the course of the game. Be it a probe laying down proxies or blocking a hatchery or drones defending against zerglings or scvs playing the role of a linebacker. Just watch game 2 of the Nony vs Idra TSL2 ro8 match.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpmnIr_787w#t=02m50s
Every Terran player's nightmare, just add 12nex, dragoons, dark templar, arbiters, carriers... never mind.
Every Terran player's nightmare, just add 12nex, dragoons, dark templar, arbiters, carriers... never mind.
While your probes won't be gosu enough to take down entire command centers, you could trick around your workers well enough to get by. In StarCraft 2, you may have noticed that workers could essentially “phase” through each other. This isn't always true in the original. The only way a worker could pass through another worker, or any other unit for that matter, would be through mineral or gas walking. What this means is that if you were to command a worker from inside your mineral line to get out and build a pylon, it would get stuck on every other worker that bumps into it. However, if you were to tell the worker to mine from your side patches, the worker would phase through its comrades to get to the patch, and then there's much less travel distance to get to the site of the pylon.
This is also useful when defending with workers. For example, say you're defending a 5pool as protoss.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PenNxWYGZs4#t=08m30s
Probes are imbalanced.
Probes are imbalanced.
You could select a bunch of probes, and then tell them to mine a mineral patch together. All 12 workers would stack, and could block the zerglings from attacking the cannon, as well as doing damage simultaneously. Keep in mind that as soon as the workers are given a command other than to mine, they'll begin to unstack.
This video also shows how to hold position workers. There are 2 ways to do this. Because the worker does not naturally have the hold position command, you'll need to spam “stop” while selecting the worker to force it to stay in place. A second way to do this would be to select a worker along with a combat unit. For example, say you're playing TvZ against a 9pool. Instead of planting a barracks, we could simply pull 3 scvs to block the ramp, select them along with the marines defending the ramp, and hit hold position. Zerglings attacking the scvs will not force your linebackers out of the way, and instead get chewed up by marine shells.
If you're really kind of bad at macro (like me), then maybe you've found yourself queueing buildings in SC2. You can't do that in broodwar. If you plant a pylon, and then queue up an action after that, the probe will only obey actions that can be given by just a single right click (ie gather, move, attack). It cannot be told to build a second pylon. To make it even harder, your units will not move out of the way of a building site. You'll have to manually tell the marines at your natural to get out of the way before you can plant that command center. Or, even more annoyingly, tell you drones to move to the side so that you can plant a creep colony in your mineral line.
vi. Walling
I bet you think you already know how to do this. I'm also willing to bet that you're wrong. Not all buildings are unit tight in broodwar. Horizontally adjacent supply depots do not block zerglings, pylons block nothing smaller than a vulture, and walling as protoss is one of the most annoyingly hard things to perfect. There are individual guides on how to wall, so I just won't bother to say it here. Just go take a look at the
Sim City wiki.Conclusion
Seriously, though, broodwar isn't that difficult of a transition from starcraft 2. Once the new ICCup season starts up, play a few games. Because I gurantee you, StarCraft 1 is better for practicing for StarCraft 2 than WarCraft 3 is, and as of right now, once you learn the ropes, it's going to be a lot more fun :D
Search around our Broodwar Strategy Forum or Liquipedia for your race specific and more advanced techniques
Take a look at Recommended Threads if you don't know where else to look for broodwar help. But as always, the best way to improve is to play more games! Don't be discouraged if you're losing, because a D player on ICCup is likely to be at least a platinum player on Bnet2.
