redditpickedmyhobby
A Year of Starcraft II
A FULL Night of Starcraft II
I have finally begun playing Starcraft II, and for more than 20 minutes. My mac can play the game, with the additional memory and at low settings. I am returning the graphics card I bought, and will be purchasing another next week. Hopefully that is the problem (I’m 90% sure it is).
So, I played for almost three hours (minus a small break) and I have to say it is a very fun game but I don’t understand much of the story. It seems that I would have to know a lot of the lore to know what’s going on. But I only played the first four missions, so maybe I’m just not far enough in. The rest of the time I played a few games vs. the AI on Medium (I was told Easy and Very Easy are a joke). Four games, to be exact. One as each of the races and an extra of Protoss. I lost the first two (I played as Protoss and Zerg) and won the last two (Terran and Protoss).
I think I’m beginning to understand what everyone was saying about how much of the game is macro. Once I’m about five minutes or so into the game, I don’t know what’s going on. I just blindly build shit, trying to send out a force if I have what I think might be enough to kill some of the opponent. And I don’t really know what to build yet.
I remembered hearing about a Protoss Deathball on r/starcraft, so I made my own with a bunch of stalkers and void rays plus some zealots thrown in there and sent that out on the last game. It was cool to watch my little army destroy the enemy Terrans. I had also realized how much extra cash I had available at the end of the other games, so I was trying to keep up building units and buildings so that I didn’t have too much money just sitting there. But after five minutes, like I was saying, I lost focus and couldn’t keep up. I laughingly kept building probes, which turned into more money, which I spent building more probes. But I won, and thought it was a good game to end on. I learned a little bit and had fun doing it.
Zerg… Zerg is confusing as hell. It took me way too long to figure out that I had to change the larvae into the different units. And how do you keep clicking on those little things when other units start to stack on top of them? I think I built my first zergling at around four minutes. I also wish I had known that the overlords were the “supply”. I made one to go check out the enemy (like I had seen almost all Zerg players do on the streams I have watched) and then forgot about supply until all of the sudden I couldn’t make anything. I don’t think it helped that the AI played Zerg also on that game. It was over quickly.
I believe I won as Terran simply because I had been playing it all night in the campaign. I knew what to make (in the beginning) and grabbed some bunkers to keep my base locked down, which destroyed the AI’s Protoss force that was sent. I even made some tanks, but didn’t realize I had to research something to get the siege bit (or even what it did, really). Then I had to figure out which building did that research. By then, the army I had sent out had already arrived at the enemy base and taken out the little Protoss defense left. I don’t know what I did right there, other than build those bunkers. It was probably the longest of these games, and I never even expanded. I had the new base unit sitting in my main base for about the last minute of the game (I was trying to figure out how to make it fly and move it to an expansion like I had seen the pros do in MLG).
As of tonight, I would say I’ll be playing either Terran or Protoss when I move on to the multi, unless I can somehow figure Zerg out and it is as fun as it looks. Tomorrow I will play a few more missions of the campaign, then move to the AI games. I think I’ll just play on random, forcing myself to at least get used to all the races.
I also wanted to say thanks to everyone who expressed their support in the comments here and in the game. It was very cool to have twenty or so people pop up as I was playing with GLHFs and offers of games. Sorry if I didn’t respond quickly enough to all of you, I couldn’t figure out how to pause the game and chat at the same time. I thank all of you for the advice and help, and look forward to playing, and maybe beating, you in the coming year.
TL;DR: Herp, Derp, Starcraft II.
redditpickedmyhobby 
This is awesome! You can select larva by clicking the hatchery and pressing “s.” There’s a neat little button for it, but hotkey’s are important to learn as well! Zerg is very fun, and it sounds like you’re playing the game correctly (ie: build lots of workers) Most of the game is figuring out how to spend that extra money. Also, think of zerg like this, you can only make attacking units, or workers. So pump workers and scouting the map until you see them attacking, THEN you get units. It’s sort of like playing chicken.
Thanks for the tip. I’ll try that when I play as zerg tomorrow night.
4sd 4sd 4sd 4sd
What max is saying is that you should hotkey your Hatchery (the main building where larvae pop out) as 4.
If you aren’t familiar with hotkeys, they’re very important. You can select any unit, building, or group of units and buildings and make sort of like a bookmark for them. So select your hatchery and press Ctrl+4 (Command+4 for mac I suppose). Now whenever you press 4, it will automatically select your Hatchery. ‘S’ is the shortcut to “select all larvae at this hatchery” and D is the shortcut for building a drone.
You can add units to a hotkey group later by selecting the unit(s) you want to add and pressing Shift+#. So lets say you’re playing protoss and you hotkey your nexus as 4. Then you expand, and you want to add your other nexus to the hotkey group. Click your second nexus and press Shift+4. Now whenever you press 4, both of your nexuses are selected. This is handy because you can now build probes from both of them without having to go find both of them on the map and click on them. Plus you can use Chronoboost from both of them.
I should note that double-tapping a number will select the group, and centre the screen on that group. This is an easy way to check on your forces if they are in a battle.
Usually players will hotkey their scouts or armies as 1-3 and their main (hatchery, command centre, nexus) as 4, and their other unit-producing structures as 5-7. You’ll hear Day[9] talking about “1A-ing” an army, which means selecting your entire army, hotkeying it as 1, and then pressing 1 to select it, then pressing A to do an attack-move, then clicking somewhere on the map to have your entire army attack the same place at the same time. You may have notices that if you simply right-click an area on the map your army will just walk straight in and not bother to attack anything along the way. Attack-moving is key.
I believe Day[9] covers a lot of this stuff in daily #252. You should check that one out.
Note that you can just hold down the build key once you have your larva selected.
So if you have your hatchery hotkeyed as 4 (and you should DEFINITELY hotkey your production buildings as every race), you can hit 4, then s, then just hold down the key for the unit you want (d for drones, z for zerglings, etc…) and it’ll use up all your larva very quickly.
Also, if you end up with the “too much money” problem as zerg, you can build what’s referred to as a “macro hatch”, which is an extra hatchery (or two) in a base you already have, for the simple purpose of having more larva.
Note that you can (and often should) have multiple buildings hotkeyed together. This will enable you to hit 4 to select all your hatcheries, then “s” to select all your larva, and then you can spam out a ton of units simultaneously.
You should probably practice with someone who is pretty familiar with each race before you chose a race going into multiplayer. Zerg really isn’t any harder than the other two. It’s just different. To be honest, it probably has the easiest and most convenient method of building units out of the three races once you get the hang of it.
I’m not endorsing one race over the other, but you should probably learn to play each race before you choose one. Don’t ignore one just because you don’t understand it as much at first.
At a boy! Keep on it. I’m very excited that you’re not even done the campaign but you’re already playing custom games. Impressive. One quick question: what difficulty level are you playing the campaign on?
Thanks! I’m playing the campaign on Normal. I didn’t want to go too easy on it.
I had such a good laugh while reading about Zerg experience, thank you.
There is no need to select larva individually, select a hatchery and press S, then hold down the button for the unit you wish to make. Actually Zerg race is the easiest one to spend your money with. With other races you have to manage 3-4 different production facilities and manually choose the place for supply structures. With Zerg you simply put all your hatcheries on a single hotkey, and turn all larva into whichever units you wish to make. It’s not uncommon to see Zerg make 20-30 units at once. Just make sure you have enough hatcheries (and queens) to produce larva. Many Zerg builds involve making a second hatchery as a very first building for this reason.
You may have gotten the comment already, but definitely turn on the hotkey option (so it directly shows the keys for the hotkeys instead of having to hover over them). Hotkeys are super helpful and make it easier to spend things faster, and once you learn them it just makes things so much easier. Get into the habit now of never having to click anything in the bottom right of the screen 😛
Also, Zerg is pretty traditionally considered the “hardest” to play well, as you discovered, although those who do definitely enjoy it.
This is Awesome! Excellent write-up and great project. I’m subscribing to this rss to follow your progress!
Brings back memories of how confusing SC2 was for me in the beginning. Talk about a steep learning curve!
I’m sure you get flooded with tips, and heres a small one from me :
Turn on the following “Gameplay settings” :
“Show Unit Status Bars : Always”
“Display Build Grid : On”
“Command Hotkey Text : on”
The last one lets you see the shortcut in the lower right corner, for every action or unit-building shortcut. Makes it easier to learn the hotkeys which is very important.
I did this as soon as I got on tonight. Thanks!
Hey, cool to see this!
i play Zerg, and if you want to i could help you understAnd it? i think when you get it Zerg is the most versatile of the three. you can do so much with it. Now i’m top 8 gold in 1v1, not really good but i’ll get there.
My starcraft name is Dutchkid, i’ll add you in a bit and maybe i can teach you? 🙂
Your best bet to learning counters and possibly working on micro/macro are the challenges. Do those and you’ll have a better understanding of it all.
Nice!!
Awesome to see you get started! If you ever decide to pick zerg as your main race in multiplayer, I’d be really happy to attempt to coach you (even though Z can be a bit frustrating at times) :D.
Building probes to get more money to build more probes is a skill you need and already have. This is good, most new players build a few new probes and just stop production, capping their economy very early. As Day[9] says, probes and pylons.
As many others have, I would definitely encourage you to continue to play random for some time. I definitely recognize that the Zerg is the weirdest of the bunch, and this isn’t helped by the fact that you don’t get to play them in the single-player campaign.
At some point you’re going to start learning about “builds” or “build orders”, which is simply a script that you are following at the beginning of a game designed to reach a certain point very efficiently. A well designed build order will have Building A finish just in time for you to have exactly enough resources to start Building B (which requires A). That sort of thing.
I think it may be a bit too early for you to start memorizing different opening build orders, but I wanted to give you a super-simplified (and non-optimal) zerg one to keep in mind.
Build drones until your run out of supply. You should be entirely focused on having your larva already selected and be spamming your “d” key as you near the 50-mineral mark every time, to try to get your drones out as quickly as possible. When you run out of supply (at 10/10), do the same thing but with the “v” key to get an overlord the moment you hit 100 minerals.
Here’s an example of sweet timing: When the overlord pops out, you should have 3 larva waiting and have 150 minerals available, allowing you to just hold down the “d” key and turn all three into drones (remember that you can click the hatchery then hit “s” to select all larva).
Now you’ve ensured that you have a good economy quite quickly and will be in a great position against medium-AI and Bronze-league players.
A very simple way to follow this up would be a spawning pool followed by nothing but zerglings followed by an overwhelming attack once you have two or three dozen. Note that this will NOT work against anyone but the newest of players, but it will get you started. It will work even better if you can get a gas extractor (at the same time as you build the spawning pool) and research the zergling speed upgrade at the spawning pool.
Heres a rundown of the SC1 story and tips for general and zerg play.
The Xel’Naga created the protoss. The protoss were meant to be a ”perfect race”, but they were too violent, so the Xel’Naga abandoned them and created the zerg. They created a collective consciousness called the overmind. The overmind was not meant be be sentient, but it became sentient. It made the zerg kill the Xel’Naga and start a war with the protoss. They started the war because the Zerg wanted the physic abilitys the protoss possessed. Neither side was winning, until the overmind discovered the Terrans. They were a primitive (In galactic terms) race that had fledgling physic abilitys. So they attacked them. The terran government didn’t care and was basically a bad government. Jim Raynor, Sarah Kerrigan and Arcturus Mengsk became rebels, trying to overthrow the government and save the terran from the zerg. Arcturus became power-mad, tricked the zerg into attacking the capital of the terran empire (Not that they were complaining) so that he could make people think the government was bad, overthrow them and make him emperor, abandoned Kerrigan on that planet and basically became Jim Raynors mortal enemy. Kerrigan had physic powers, so the zerg captured her and made her into Kerrigan, Queen of Blades. At around this time the overmind discovered the protoss homeland Auir and invaded it. The protoss leader Tassadar (Think it was him) flew a protoss ship into him to kill it. Meanwhile Zeratul, leader of the Dark Templars, a renagade faction of protoss, took them to their homeworld Shakuras. So now Kerrigan leads the swarm, Mengsk is a power-mad emperor, Zeratul is the leader of the protoss and Raynor is a rebel that has been labelled as a terrorist, but just wants to help everyone.
Whew, that was a wall of text. Now for the tips:
Protoss and Terran:
As P or T keep making workers. Always. As you get better you will learn to have no more than around 70 (3 bases worth of miningish) but as a low-level, probably bronze newbie it’s best to just create them all :). Keep making units. General rule is 3 gateways per base if you constantly warp in (Warp gate research is a must-have!). Not sure what the best amount for terran is, but it’s probably around 4-5.
Zerg:
Zerg takes more skill at low levels than the other races for a few reasons: 1) You have 3 primary resources, rather than the 2 other races have (Minerals, Gas and Larvae) and 2) Drones and units come from the same things. The reason I didn’t say to always make workers with Zerg is because of this. As a zerg player you would have to make drones when you can make drones and units when you need to defend. Making too many units = not enough drones and your economy goes down the plughole. Too many drones and the opposite happens. Too many drones and you lose to the first push. You need to find a balance between the two to win games (Scouting is incredibly important as zerg. Generally you would drone up until you see him push out then counter what he has. Early game at least. Late game you should always have an army). A unit you need to have per base you get is a queen. A queen has 4 uses: Creating Larvae, Spreading creep, healing units/ structures and countering cheeses (Due to her relatively powerful air attack). You should have a queen per base to inject larva into your bases and an extra one spread creep. Note that you can create a creep tumor from creep tumors, so you shouldn’t be sending your queen to the centre of the map to poop tumors unless your active one gets killed. If you see an early starport/ stargate, get an extra queen or two to defend and connect your bases with creep asap. 2 queens > 1 banshee or 1 void ray. 4 queens do it even quicker. Most builds revolve around an early hatch (Drone to 14 supply, make a hatchery, drone back to 14, make a pool). If you choose to play zerg, remember to master this opening, even if you don’t like doing it. Oh, and infestors are OP, build them 😛
So much text D:. Hope you get at least some good information out of it.
Also, you can click your hatchery and press S to select your larvae 😉
Thanks for the rundown and tips. That little blurb was what I needed to understand a bit more of the campaign. And the Zerg info was very helpful tonight.
I am glad you are blogging this, in just a month or twos time you will be able to look back at this post and laugh 🙂
It’s cool that you write about your experiences, I really like reading what you try to do at your first tries at the game :D! What I would encourage you to do is just playing every race and basically building everything there is and trying out every button in the UI you find.
The important difference with Zerg is that you build everything from larva, which is produced by hatcheries and Queen’s “Larva Inject” ability. This means that you have to choose between workers and units, which you don’t necessarily have to with the other races. Finding the best time to build workers/units as Zerg is one of the most difficult aspect to master with this race. Often this part is not intuitive, that’s why Zerg is generally considered the hardest race to start with, but not necessarily the hardest to master.
do you use the grid hotkey setup? if you haven’t checked it out, I’d suggest it. it makes it super easy to learn the hoykeys for all the races.
gl hf.
Hmm. Lore. Well this does a pretty ok job with backgroudn information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQa8co522zc
The rest should be told through flashbacks (specifically the stuff they want to emphasize for the story).
Have fun with the game early on. You’ll be playing this game for a year, you can worry about being good later.
Keep up the good work man! I’m excited to keep reading how you progress!
I just want to let you know, that you have hundreds of people fallowing your progress. no preassure at all! its a game thats not for everyone.
But just to let you know, multiplayer is where the game shines. the beauty of hopping on skype or ventrillo and playing team games against other players from the country. Also hotkeying is the way to go!
This is absolutely awesome! dont let the learning curve deter you at all, this game is something beautiful which you can reap rewards with. Keep at it, you got a lot of support.
And i love reading these, very personable and remind me when i first started playing. Now i’m masters. So keep at it and we can all help you
I just want to say how cool it is you are doing this. I really appreciate your “nuubness” – it makes me realize how much I take for granted having played this game and it’s forerunner for the last 15 years (like not knowing you had to research siege mode, etc).
The game can be foreign, and no race is more foreign than zerg when learning how to play, but hang in, try everything out, and most of all, don’t be concerned about losing, especially now, and especially against the AI. Take your time. Don’t feel pressure to jump into ladder games. It will seem like you are missing out until you do play ladder, because the entire community is focused on multiplayer. But the more you familiarize yourself with the game now, the happier you will be later when you make the jump to lightspeed.
gl HF
Good advice so far from everyone. Some things that have been said, but I REALLY need to emphasize that you start doing immediately:
1. Go in to game options, and look for the option (it’ll be a checkbox) to enable the display hotkey option. This way, in the lower right corner of the screen during games (where you see all of the boxes to click on to build stuff), the hotkey to build that unit will be displayed. So, you’ll see the picture of the marine with an “A” on the image. NEVER USE THE MOUSE TO BUILD STUFF! ALWAYS USE THE KEYBOARD KEY! It’ll slow you down at first, but it will GREATLY speed you up as you get better.
2. ALWAYS put buildings and units in to control groups. I’d suggest this basic setup:
• Command Center/Nexus/Hatchery: 4 (control + 4 to set when selected)
• Main army: 1 (control + 1 to set when selected)
• Barracks/Gateways (before they become warp gates): 5
• Factories/Robotics Facility: 6
• Stargate/Starport: 7
Why do this when it’s easy to click on a building then build stuff? Well, with these hotkeys, you don’t even need to be able to see the buildings to build stuff. For example, you just remembered that you need to build an SCV. No problem! Hit 4 (select command center), then hit s (make SCV), and you’re done. This way, you can macro using a few quick button presses from anywhere on the map.
Example: I have 2 command centers, 4 barracks making marines, 1 factory making tanks, and 1 starport making medivacs. I can be telling my army to attack one second, then in the next 2 seconds I do this:
4ss (selected command centers, made 1 SCV at each)
6aaaa (selected all of my barracks, made 1 marine at each)
6s (selected my factory, made seige tank)
7d (selected starport, made medivac)
Then, since my army is on hotkey 1, I just press “1” after all of that macro and boom, I’m back in control of my attacking force.
3. So, your army is on hotkey 1. Good start! Uh oh, you just made 4 more marines but your army is on the other side of the map. How do you add your 4 new marines to your main army? Simply select those 5 marines, and instead of control+1 to set the control group, press shift+1. Using shit+number will add any selected units to a pre-existing control group. This same idea goes with production facilities, too. You can add the new barracks you made to the 4 you already have in control group 5 without having to reset the whole control group.
4. Shift-queue. What this is is the ability to give units more than one command at the same time. Meaning, you are on a 4-player map, and you want your scouting probe to go to every base until it finds the enemy. However, you dont want to have to wait for the probe to reach point A, then go find the probe and tell it manually to go to point B.
This is what you do: Select probe, right click on desired location. Then, hold the shift key down. While holding shift, right click the 2nd location, then right click the third location. Let go of shift.
What will happen is that the probe will execute command 1, and when it finishes moving to the spot, it will execute the next command in it’s queue, then the third. When I learned this, it kicked me from bronze to gold overnight.
This will also allow you to send out SCVs and probes to build stuff and then automatically come back and start mining minerals when they finish.
Select SCV, click b,s, then place your supply depot. Hold shift, right click on minerals. The SCV will go build the supply depot, then when it finishes, come right back and start mining again (instead of just standing next to the completed depot like an idiot).
That’s enough to start with I think. Go and prosper.
This was a lot of help. Thank you for writing it all out like that. I was trying to go with the general advice of using hotkeys, but this system of putting all the buildings on hotkeys helped me out a lot.
When I first started playing SC2 – I couldn’t win a game as Zerg. I played Protoss for the first six months or so of having the game, and have just come back to playing Zerg.
Slacker had some great pieces of individual advice – I can’t recommend his comment enough. Especially the point he made about building from the keyboard. The more you can use your keyboard for taks – the faster you can keep up with things in the game, and the more comfortable games will become. That said, the Macro aspects of Zerg are fundamentally the same as the other races (constant production via inject larvae, always keep your money low) – but at the same time are much less forgiving. Most newer players find Zerg very difficult to play for this reason.
Also another macro related note – especially in the lower leagues – you could really just make enough of any single unit and win through overwhelming force. There are a lot of folks like you (Bronze-Gold even) that have difficulty keeping track of all the things they need to do to keep their macro up. It really is a lot to keep track of for sure.
If you ever feel like practice games feel free to add me: Statistics 485
Good luck!
One thing about the campaing, you mentioned that you didn’t know that you needed to research the option to allow tanks to siege.
The first time I played multiplayer after playing the campaign, that caught me by surprise as well. I was desperately trying to build medics (they are a unit in SCI multiplayer too), but didn’t know that they did not exist in multiplayer. So don’t get very attached to any units in the campaign, because some of them will not appear in the multi player – specially medics, firebats, wraths, science vessels, and the huge transport (forgot the name now).
Cheers!
I just bought SC2 on Tuesday, myself. I was mostly reading your blog for curiosity, but I think I’ll stay for the heaps of advice your other commentors are giving 😀
If you ever want to try out some noob v noob, I’m Tonamel (and in the game!)
redditpickedmyhobby if I may suggest. You might want to start with just 1 race and focus on that. It can be difficult to study them all at one time. But awesome I hope you fall in love with this game just like everybody else on /r/starcraft
I realize some of these guys dont agree but by the time you understand most aspects of one race such as how to lift and land buildings where to find upgrades etc you can move to another race….
By the way, L is used for both “lift” and “land” on the command center.
Most of us have problems REMEMBERING to build more drones. So you having tons of drones/probes/scvs is a good problem to have =)
“I laughingly kept building probes, which turned into more money, which I spent building more probes.”
That’s the secret to about 90% of Starcraft you’ve just discovered there.
As imballin has asked, have you tried the grid system for hotkeys? that way the units and actions are mapped positionally against the keyboard, eg for column wise it’s ‘Q’ to ‘T’. row wise it is ‘Q’ to ‘Z’ on the keyboard. I personally prefer it over the classic system. eg to make a drone when your hatch is keyed to 4, it will be ‘4QQ’, 4 to select the hatch, ‘Q’ to select larvae, ‘Q’ to select drone.
The other thing that you might find useful is the “cycle to next base” hotkey (might have got the name wrong though)
I don’t really understand how that would work. I will look into it, though.
Grid keys aren’t for everyone. Essentially, the align your keyboard hotkeys to visually match the buttons in the lower right. For example, in the lower right build menu, you see this layout (completely fake, but just go with it)
marine/marauder/reaper
medivac/viking/banshee
helion/tank/thor
on your grid keyboard layout, you’d see this:
q / w / e
a / s / d
z / x / c
where q = marine, s = viking, z = helion, e = reaper, etc
so, visually, you can look at the units, see you wanted the tank, and know to pres the lower middle button on the keyboard.
Hey man, I really like your writing style. Glad you’re enjoying yourself and learning a new hobby. Thanks for sharing it with us. 🙂