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I have a serious problem with my play that I would like help with.
I am a diamond terran player but I have been doing this since gold league and thats why its such a bad habit to break. I make wayyy to many scv's... even if I dont lose any I continue to make scv's even after losing a maxed army. Im not sure why, it just happens. and Im not talking about only making 60-80 scvs, Im talking anywhere between 90-120 each game that lasts more than 15 minutes. As soon as I hit 3 bases, my scv count goes through the roof. dont get me wrong now, my economy is great but, it causes me to lose ALOT.. especially vs toss maxed army.
To be honest, I believe the reason that I make so many scv's is because my hotkeys make it so easy to do so. I use grid and my control groups are set at:
1. All CCs, OCs, and PF,s 2. Barracks 3. Army 4. Factory (Vs. toss, ghosts and vikings) 5. Starports
People say spamming is bad but, I believe thats another reason why I make so many scv's. My apm according to SC2 Gears is usually between 250-260 with around 40% redundancy because im constantly spamming 1,2,4,5,3,1,2,4,5,3.... over and over.
Do you guys think that changing my control groups would help anything or is it a good thing that I overmake scv's since I still see pro's who forget to build scv's constantly?
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im a protoss player but ,
the worker thing is an easy fix. Just constantly tell yourself to STOP. having high apm is no good if its doing harm.
About the hotkeys, i would strongly consider changing them around. When i started, i only left 2 hotkeys for army and i strongly regret it. Try to have at least 3 hotkeys for army and practice using them, and your control will get way better if you get used to it.
Terran definitely needs the least workers out of all the races. Make less, and spend that apm toward something more useful, like constant dropping/not getting supply blocked/better macro overall. good luck
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No. I don't think changing your control groups would help.
You just need to watch replays and challenge yourself into realizing when you have too many scvs, or when you need to stop producing them. Terran generally wants 65 scvs. Later game you can sack 40 of them for more army supply.
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Trust me, I have tried to tel myself to just stop making workers but its a mindless thing. I dont even think about it, I just do it. I dont tell myself to make workers, its just and automatic thing.
It has gotten so bad, that I cant even all in correctly. I cant proxy 2-rax or no shit like that because I have the bad habit of making scv's by accident so instead of doing 11/11 and stopping workers at 12, ill do 11/11 and make like 4 more workers and wont have enough to make marines and eventually get supply blocked because of it.
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If you have that many SCV then probably your bases are oversaturated, aren't they?
Maybe you could try checking the saturation of your bases often, so you can realize when to stop making scv's, as long as you don't plan to expand soon.
I don't think it has something to do with the control groups. I changed from nexus 1 to nexus 4, and once I was used to it, my production was quite the same.
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On February 21 2012 08:48 AeroEffect wrote: Trust me, I have tried to tel myself to just stop making workers but its a mindless thing. I dont even think about it, I just do it. I dont tell myself to make workers, its just and automatic thing.
It has gotten so bad, that I cant even all in correctly. I cant proxy 2-rax or no shit like that because I have the bad habit of making scv's by accident so instead of doing 11/11 and stopping workers at 12, ill do 11/11 and make like 4 more workers and wont have enough to make marines and eventually get supply blocked because of it. Then stop...
You can't just give up on breaking a bad habit. Changing control groups won't help at all, it'll just confuse your muscle memory for a while, then you'll go back to spamming SCVs.
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On February 21 2012 08:51 Antylamon wrote:Show nested quote +On February 21 2012 08:48 AeroEffect wrote: Trust me, I have tried to tel myself to just stop making workers but its a mindless thing. I dont even think about it, I just do it. I dont tell myself to make workers, its just and automatic thing.
It has gotten so bad, that I cant even all in correctly. I cant proxy 2-rax or no shit like that because I have the bad habit of making scv's by accident so instead of doing 11/11 and stopping workers at 12, ill do 11/11 and make like 4 more workers and wont have enough to make marines and eventually get supply blocked because of it. Then stop... You can't just give up on breaking a bad habit. Changing control groups won't help at all, it'll just confuse your muscle memory for a while, then you'll go back to spamming SCVs. Thats like telling telling a smoker of 30 years to stop. Its not that easy trust me, I've tried. I probably could slow it down or at least figure out how to stop it by checking saturation on my bases. I get over saturated quick on my nat because I want to be able to immediately transfer over my workers to my 3rd when I take it.
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Just watch couple replays and see when you have 65 workers. For me if I open 1 rax fe, I have around 65 when I'm taking my third. Usually I check how saturated bases are then and produce one or two rounds more or stop.
Or just check ingame clock, for me it's better to link things to my build.
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Well, if I am going for the macro game. I know I will have 60 SCV's by 15 minutes. So I pretty much almost stop building them all together by this time UNLESS if I have lost a fair few. Obviously, this method only works in games which run smoothly for me.
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On February 21 2012 09:00 AeroEffect wrote: Thats like telling telling a smoker of 30 years to stop. Its not that easy trust me, I've tried. I probably could slow it down or at least figure out how to stop it by checking saturation on my bases. I get over saturated quick on my nat because I want to be able to immediately transfer over my workers to my 3rd when I take it. So you're comparing having done something mindlessly for a year or so a 30-year long addiction to a substance that is known to be addictive. That's just insulting. Seriously, smokers can make a conscious effort to quit smoking but just can't fight the physical urge for nicotine. If you just make a conscious effort to think about not making SCVs, you'll be able to stop...
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Check your mineral saturation. Occasionally when you have the free time to macro and you're getting nervous about scv count, make little boxes in your worker line to select all your mineral scvs. You want 16 scvs on your mineral line for optimal saturation, which is 2 "rows" if you look at the unit selections on the bottom. Quickly send any excess scvs over to another mineral line. If you're oversaturated on 3 bases, either grab even more bases and saturate 4-5 bases (not recommended, maxed army will be too small) or build macro orbitals to spend any excess minerals and suicide excess scvs.
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I used to play TvZ where I would make over 120 workers and still somehow win.. basically, I've begun using F2-F5, etc to go through my bases for scv transfers and started to count how many scvs I have at each base. You know how much you want at each base for optimal saturation, so just box the number of scvs on your minerals, know that each row is 8, and then do simple addition.
Once you know you are saturated on 3 bases, just stop. It might take a while but it's pretty easy to not hit "1s" because towards that point in the game, you already have a good economy and your attention should be much more focused on army movement, adding production as necessary and drops, etc rather than worker production/muling.
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This is often a side effect of not actually looking at your base (Something p/t dont have to do as much as Z). I see this a lot when I watch replays of my opponents' perspective, they spend all their time microing their army and rarely look at whats going on at home.
As a zerg player i constantly count my drones and observe my level of saturation at each base. I aim for around 3 lines of drones (16 on minerals, 6 on gas = 22, 3 lines of drones is 24) per base for the early/midgame, thats a goal of around 75 workers total. Late game I might go up to 80, distribute them a little more spaced out, under saturate on minerals to harvest more gas. Anyway, the specifics of what I need aren't important, but knowing how to quickly count workers and assess your economy IS important.
Just make a habit of looking at how many SCVs are at your bases every few minutes. If they are criss-crossing and look cluttered like an ant colony, you have too many at that base. If you have that going on at all your bases, you're either mined out or have way too many workers! A simple ctrl+click will select them all at one base and you can count for yourself. If you've got more than 3 lines of SCVs at every base, you have too many and its time to stop making them or take more bases!
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Think about why you are pressing 1ss as opposed to just pressing them as some sort of conditioned reflex. If you are oversaturated (look at your mining operations from time to time), expand more or simply stop making workers.
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Sounds like Idra has this same problem.
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Why don't you just play macro then? if that is your issue, which i have had this, you want to go to your base, select all the workers and see roughly how many there are, then if therre are too many there, then you should probably send some to die and attack move them. Really i think its just a thing to condition yourself to not do this rather than find a trick.
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On February 21 2012 08:28 AeroEffect wrote: I have a serious problem with my play that I would like help with.
I am a diamond terran player but I have been doing this since gold league and thats why its such a bad habit to break. I make wayyy to many scv's... even if I dont lose any I continue to make scv's even after losing a maxed army. Im not sure why, it just happens. and Im not talking about only making 60-80 scvs, Im talking anywhere between 90-120 each game that lasts more than 15 minutes. As soon as I hit 3 bases, my scv count goes through the roof. dont get me wrong now, my economy is great but, it causes me to lose ALOT.. especially vs toss maxed army.
To be honest, I believe the reason that I make so many scv's is because my hotkeys make it so easy to do so. I use grid and my control groups are set at:
1. All CCs, OCs, and PF,s 2. Barracks 3. Army 4. Factory (Vs. toss, ghosts and vikings) 5. Starports
People say spamming is bad but, I believe thats another reason why I make so many scv's. My apm according to SC2 Gears is usually between 250-260 with around 40% redundancy because im constantly spamming 1,2,4,5,3,1,2,4,5,3.... over and over.
Do you guys think that changing my control groups would help anything or is it a good thing that I overmake scv's since I still see pro's who forget to build scv's constantly? You need to get into the habit of going to a CC, double click an SCV, and check the # of workers at each base.
If 2 pages, that's too many. Optimally, you should have exactly one page, or 1 page +2, depending on how you want to figure it out ...
Actually getting the right amount of workers is required in order to progress.
If you watch pro's, you'll see they constantly check the nr of workers at their bases.
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Actually-the easy fix is to get into the habit of cecking your scv count. If it gets too high--bring them with you on your next fight set to autorepair.
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On February 21 2012 09:00 AeroEffect wrote:Show nested quote +On February 21 2012 08:51 Antylamon wrote:On February 21 2012 08:48 AeroEffect wrote: Trust me, I have tried to tel myself to just stop making workers but its a mindless thing. I dont even think about it, I just do it. I dont tell myself to make workers, its just and automatic thing.
It has gotten so bad, that I cant even all in correctly. I cant proxy 2-rax or no shit like that because I have the bad habit of making scv's by accident so instead of doing 11/11 and stopping workers at 12, ill do 11/11 and make like 4 more workers and wont have enough to make marines and eventually get supply blocked because of it. Then stop... You can't just give up on breaking a bad habit. Changing control groups won't help at all, it'll just confuse your muscle memory for a while, then you'll go back to spamming SCVs. Thats like telling telling a smoker of 30 years to stop. Its not that easy trust me, I've tried. I probably could slow it down or at least figure out how to stop it by checking saturation on my bases. I get over saturated quick on my nat because I want to be able to immediately transfer over my workers to my 3rd when I take it.
Don't worry I've developed a patch(intended) for you that might be able to help with your worker problem. I call it muleorette(name a work in progress). When you start seeing you are saturated just put on the handy muleorette patch and you'll feel your need to make scvs drift away. Since you keep rationalizing why you cannot stop making scvs it is a good thing this patch exists!
Honestly it seems like more of a mental block where you are convinced you cannot stop, maybe try thinking / approaching the game differently, you shouldn't really be mindlessly doing things anyways and at diamond I think constant worker production is rarely ever a problem if you are macroing right for your other production you should be winning anyways.
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Really this is a great problem to have. Better to overmake than undermake.
I always under made workers with toss and terran when i started SC2, then i mained zerg and got better and now when i offrace i way way way over make workers.
My solution is just to get used to boxing mineral lines or control cliking workers and subtracting the stuck in geyser workers. Each row is 8 Workers so it's easy to say i have approx 2.5 rows of workers on minerals then i know i have about 20
+ Show Spoiler + If you know the total worker count you are shooting for its easy to set up the mental math in advance and then you can just box worker lines and know how to respond
you can control click as well but that requires as split second of mental math i would personally rather not do but its not hard to figure out (1 worker per geyser will be invisible due to mining if 3 are on each geyser)
TLDR: Box your mineral lines when you are getting close to saturation and expand when you start to get close to going over saturation limits. If you are saturating 3 bases send all SCV's or probes to the emptiest base and keep checking it, when its saturated cut workers and focus on army agression/army macro.
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