[BW] Some of the Mechanics of Terran

APM doesn't fucking matter and foreigners get so infatuated with it. Turn off your APM counter and focus on what really matters: the game. Spamming for APM is fine if you enjoy it, or want to warm your hands up. I do these things and so does most everyone else. What isn't okay is to spend focus on what your APM is like, when you really should be focused on mechanically executing what is most important (link) at any given point in the game.

If you want to play and improve with good habits, your focus with every mouse movement and keystroke should be on accuracy. The rule of thumb is anything that can be done with your keyboard instead of your mouse should be done on the keyboard. The mouse is a very important input device, but easily bottlenecks. Because of this physical input bottleneck as much work needs to be offloaded to the keyboard as possible. The mouse should only do the most important of tasks.

Mouse Movement
Whenever you make a click with your mouse don't try to click there quickly, try to click there accurately as fast as your mind permits. If you find yourself missing clicks on mineral patches, or unit orders because you're trying to go to fast, this is a sign to slow down. The idea is to gain extremely fast and precise mouse actions, not just fast actions. You have to start with precise to learn to have a speed that is useful.

You can really tell between an amazing player and a decent one by how they execute commands in game. A great player will click on a building once, and order his unit a single time. A bad player trying to play fast and forgetting his precision will order his units many times, miss mineral patches, and make consistent mistakes all game long.

It makes sense to me that accurate and fast movements are something that will come almost entirely from muscle memory. How do you want to train your muscle memory? Do you want to have jittery movements and many mistakes, or speed and elegance? This is about habit forming.

Control groups remain very subjective. There are a few guidelines to follow, but as for what is most efficient there's quire a large grey area. I feel this is one of the only grey areas in terms of mechanical efficiency.

All Terrans need roughly 4-7 army hotkeys to move their army. In the early and mid game I usually see 2-4, and it actually isn't too common to ever see upwards of 7. 7 usually came from a 200/200 mech army where a couple individual Science Vessels or a Dropship made an entire control group. Nada comes to mind when he likes to take on 9 base Protoss with 3 base mech, and win.

In the earlier portion of the game, for both Mech and Bio, the number of control groups for an army always starts as one or two and grows into the mid game. Bio requires way more control groups and mechanical skill once the late game comes on. This may be one of the contributing reasons as to why late game Mech switches have become so popular in TvZ, but I won't pretend to intimately know the details of Mech switching.

Many players use 1-6 for their army. I myself prefer to use 3-8, as hitting 3a4a5a6a7a8a is much easier in my poor hand than cringing around to hit 1a2a3a4a5a6a. Again, this is a subjective area up for an amount of personal preference.

Command Centers
Following the idea of applying focus where it is most needed, command centers are only important until SCV saturation is achieved. Once mineral saturation is achieved the Command Center becomes a location of little importance, and hotkeys can be freed up to be used on something more important. If SCVs are lost at some point in the later portion of the game and new ones to be constructed, it would make sense to re-apply the earlier control groups until no longer necessary.

However it is important to note that some players don't even hotkey more than their original CC. As I type this I see sSak only had his first CC hotkeyed and used Fkeys to move screen location for this second command center. The motivation here may be that in order to move an SCV to mine minerals you must jump to the location of your CC. This can be done with a single keystroke with an Fkey, so Fkey is superior to a double tap on a control group. Additionally the Fkey does not take up a vital control group! These control groups that were once used for CCs can now be applied to the first two Factories for easy constant production mid-micro.

Medics
Medics really should go on their own control group so you can stim all of your Bio at any given moment. It is a good habit to have even with your first Bio that moves out towards the Zerg's third Hatch as it's constructing.

Science Vessels
Science Vessels are pretty useful for their detection abilities, so they don't have to be in their own control group. To cast a Science Vessel spell you must individually click on each Vessel to avoid overkill casting anyways, so Vessels can go great along with your Goliaths in Mech builds.

Siege Tanks and Science Vessels
When playing Bio in the mid-game, especially during the 3 Siege Tank timing against Lurkers I often see the Siege tanks in an entire group of there own. This makes sense as Siege Tanks obviously need to siege at key moments in time, but more importantly Siege Tanks don't actually belong in the same location as Marines or Medics much of the time in TvZ. They belong in their own defined location, and so require special treatment in their own group.

However beyond this timing when Vessels arrive in TvZ I do often see Tanks and Vessels in the same group. Mong has done this, and so has Mind. The idea here must be that if it isn't too important to use Siege Tanks extremely efficiently, then they don't require their own group. Perhaps there aren't many lurkers, or your bio force is just too large and requires much attention. This lends to the idea of making a judgement call on what is most important to focus on, and is what sets great players apart from decent ones.

Rally Points
In key points of the game when rally points need to be set it is important to know how to efficiently do this. There are two ways: control groups and fkeys. Which one you choose is a judgement call, but that judgement should be made to choose whichever is least important at the time. Do you really need Fkeys at this point in the game for other things? Then use control groups. Do you have a lot of spare control groups currently, and not too many production facilities to rally? Control groups might be best.

However when huge numbers of production facilities are rallied it seems more efficient to use two temporary Fkeys (more details in Fkey section).

Brood War only has 3 screen keys for use. Since I'm used to SC2 I have endless screen keys at my disposal, so I didn't have to do much intelligent prioritization of what my screen keys were doing. In Brood War screen keys are a precious resource much like the mouse, and have to be treated with care.

TvZ
In TvZ much of the focus is at your natural and at your ramp in the early and mid game. The ramp is an area of focus due to Mutalisk harass, and represents the only connection between your two SCV lines, which are the points of focus for the Mutalisks. The other point of focus for the Mutalisks, which usually only comes into play when a good Zerg faces a bad Terran, are your Barracks. If not defended properly Mutalisks can kill all Marines spawning from Barracks to prevent a small critical mass of Marines from forming.

In understanding these points of interest in ZvT, TvZ screen keys can be optimized. Mong commonly uses one key for his main CC. This acts as an access point for constructing Supply Depots, getting upgrades, etc. The second screen key is over the Barracks because Marines build so damn fast. Some players in the early game will use 3-5 normally unused control groups specifically for Barracks to avoid spending an Fkey, but this always devolves into just 1 control group, or an Fkey.

The last is used at the Natural for obvious reasons. By the time a third is taken a mech switch is usually made, and a third base is taken. Fkeys are swapped around slightly. There is often a screen key applied to the Factories, one at the Factory rally point, and the last screen key seems to be used much more dynamically and varies from player to player. As the late TvZ onsets the locations of actions spread across the map as the Terran constantly attacks the Zerg to make the Zerg dizzy. This might explain why the last dedicated Fkey becomes less important. It may be a good idea to leave it in your main for fast Supply Depot and upgrades, or perhaps at your third/fourth as they are each set up.

TvP
In the early game I usually see 2 Fkeys on each CC (main and Nat), and the last is either not used too often, at the Rally point, or placed onto the Third expansion preemptively. Fast thirds are very common in TvP so SCVs from each CC is quite common.

Once saturation is nearly achieved on either 2 or 3 bases the Fkeys are almost always placed in the main, the nat and the Factories. The reason it is not as important in the mid-game to have an FKey on the rally point is because often the 2-5 Factories can quickly be hotkeyed to move the rally point to the enemy's base while playing aggressive. This does not work so well for Bio for obvious reasons. The second is that Protoss love to both recall and use Shuttles in the mid game. Often quick transfers of SCVs or moving of the mech army is necessary.

As late game rolls around the screen keys seem to be dedicated just to the Factories and rally point.

Setting Rally Points
Fkeys for rally points are most common in the late game when many (upwards of 6 and beyond) production facilities need to be rallied. Using 2 screen keys means you'll have to reset at least one of them, and usually immediately. The simple trick employed by Mong is to temporarily re-control group his Natural CC, double tap the hotkey number to center the screen, and place the Fkey screen location. This is a reliable and consistent way to reset your screen location onto any CC.

Fine Tuning the Screen Location
Some players are very good at setting screen positions in black fog of war. Often times though a player will finely adjust the screen location once vision of the base (usually the Nat) is viewable. There are two ways to do this: flick the mouse or use the arrow keys. I cannot remember the Terran, but on in particular used very low-sensitivity arrow keys to accurately and quickly fine-tune the screen position that was set by a more wild mouse click onto the minimap.

Scanners should be hotkeyed for quick access game round. However much of the time you don't want to use them. They belong quite objectively on hotkeys 9 and 0. When energy runs out you can manually set 9 or 0 to a full comsat.

One aspect of SC2 is that your army hotkeys will likely never really change throughout the game. You'll have a max of 3, and they are pretty much in stone. In Brood War you'll have much more, and they are way more dynamic. Often times Goliaths and a few tanks will be the focus, even though there exists 150 supply of Terran on the map. Another moment you will need to hotkey two groups of vultures to move them and lay mines. In another game at times you'll need to move Marines and Medics up a ramp to assault a Zerg's third Hatch, and after up the ramp you can overwrite those groups for more important ones at your Nat as the Zerg counter attacks. These are examples of the dynamic nature of control groups that is largely absent in SC2.

Again, as Flash said, it's important to focus on what is most important. You don't need all of your mech army hotkeyed at all times, unlike SC2. You just need what is important at quick access, and the focus can shift around the map a lot. Sometimes just select moving groups of tanks/vultures from the rally to the battle is the best idea.

Moving around with Bio is still mostly a mystery to me, and I'm horrible at it. You need a lot of control groups and to be very comfortable with them. It's just difficult, and maybe in the future I will have more to say about this. For now the key point seems to be to not stress out about playing badly, but to form good habits and not be afraid to play badly while forming them.