Thanks to a bad joke in a reddit HotS (Heart of the Swarm) beta key giveaway, I spent 2 or 3 hours this evening practicing StarCraft again. Yes, amidst all of the excitement of the new game, I didn’t play any games from matchmaking. I can explain, though, and this is really a good thing.

Julie and I were going to play HotS tonight since we’re both in the beta, but I didn’t know when she would be available. Not wanting to leave in the middle of a match, I instead just played some 1v1s against the computer, which is only available on very easy. This basically meant that I was practicing builds. Particularly, I have moved back into playing Terran recently, and with everything new in mech, I went mech.

After 5 games on different maps, I realized how much I needed to work on. Since playing with my friends a few weeks ago, I have been playing quite a bit of StarCraft: it’s all 2s and 4s, but still, I’m back to playing. It was rocky, and I had a sneaking suspicion that was macro was sloppy. Well, playing against a computer that doesn’t attack with more than 2 Marines was opportunity to focus on that alone, and it was bad. I

• was not building workers constantly
• was getting supply blocked a lot
• was allowing my money to get really high
• didn’t have nearly enough production buildings
• forgot key structures

A few games in, I smoothed out a lot of this and was playing much smoother than before.

Repeating basically the same mech build 5 times was also a good way to learn to refine the build. As it turns out, a lot of my macro problems were related to minor hiccups in my play. Money can get high if I’m low on gas because I don’t know when to build geysers. Supply blocks happen because I tied up all of my money at the wrong moment. In the course of working on my build, I made some small tweaks and discoveries that really helped:

• figured out when I needed to pay attention and not in the first few minutes so I could scout without forgetting a building
• learned when I would hit gas shortage later and built refineries earlier for that
• sequenced add-on building more optimally for the units I wanted
• played around with the timings (absolute and relative) for Starport/Raven, vehicle upgrades, and another Factory for production

It’s been quite awhile since I have hammered out games against the computer, and I don’t think I ever quite did it for mech. The ironic part of this is that the focus on macro meant that I didn’t really figure out how to use the battle hellions or widow mines. That hopefully will happen soon.

Hopefully, I’ll also do some matchmaking as well. There are a lot of good things going for HotS right now that aren’t true for WoL (Wings of Liberty):

• unranked matchmaking is less stressful
• the metagame and balance are shifting rapidly, so expectations should be low
• the novelty is just that much more exciting

I’ll report back on how that’s going if there’s anything interesting. In the meantime, let me know if you’re on the HotS beta and want to play. Preorders are now giving out beta keys for a lot of vendors, so they should be easy to come by.

Also, there’s a ton of good pro StarCraft happening until the end of the year. Specifically, the Battle.net World Championship starts tomorrow night, and I’ll definitely be tuned in. It really looks like WoL has matured, and I’ll report on anything interesting I see in the games.