Tag Archives: practicing

Doing some cross-training in Azeroth

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I haven’t played any SC2 in about a week now, but I have managed to squeeze in some of the campaign from The Frozen Throne. I had played Reign of Chaos a long time ago but never got TFT, so I’m just completing my Blizzard experience. I figured all of my Starcraft experience would make it much easier, and I could just crash through it. I was so wrong.

The campaign on hard has been pretty difficult for me. A large part of my difficulty is that I still haven’t learned the interactions between types of attack and armor. I actually haven’t even really figured out how much damage units deal and how many hit points they have. I mostly play by instinct, try to form balanced armies, and mass up for big pushes. It doesn’t work well.

Warcraft is clearly a very different sort of game, and I can’t quite wrap my head around it. Worse, it’s revealing my poor micro control as I can’t keep up with all of the spells I need to use while pulling units back and target firing. That problem is probably exacerbated by me not really knowing what’s effective.

In any case, I’m undeterred. I don’t know how to play any differently, so until then, I’ll just rely heavily on auto-saves and the knowledge that I’m making steady, if slow, progress, and that I’ll be done soon enough.

My new command group setup

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Back in Brood War, I played with my first hatchery on 5, and following hatches on subsequent control groups. That was as complex as it ever got (well, comsat on 0, but I didn’t play much Terran anyways). At some point during the Starcraft 2 beta, I switched over to put all hatches on 4, all queens on 5, and units on 1 through 3. This was pretty consistent with other races as well: nexus/CC on 4, gateway/rax on 5, robo/factory on 6, stargate/startport on 7.

I don’t think I’m good enough to take advantage of having the hatches on multiple control groups, and since I use the backspace inject trick, I need all my queens on 1 as well. The main problem, however, was that only 3 groups wasn’t enough for my units. Moreover, I needed to use them differently with different unit compositions, and I can’t hold that much in my mind either. Tragedy hit when I put my mutas and banelings on the same control group: while harassing with mutas, my banelings just rolled in to their death.

As such, I’m switching it up so that my hatches are on 5, queens on 6, and units on 1-4 as such:

  1. Main army (lings, roaches, hydras, etc)
  2. Banelings/secondary army (I like the idea of being able to split my army)
  3. Infestors
  4. Mutas/Brood lords

This new setup has been giving me a lot of grief as I’m trying to unlearn my old ways. My muscle memory should figure it out pretty soon, however, and I think it will help me avoid silly mistakes.

And just to finish up, here’s a replay from today: I think this is the first conventional ZvT that I have ever won. He did some hellion harass that I held off, I did muta harass, we had a marine/tank versus ling/baneling/muta battle that I crushed. I think the 2 keys to victory here were 1) not allowing him to hold his 3rd and 2) having great map vision with OL spread to see incoming attacks and drops. The 2 big things to improve on are 1) droning (he had more workers than I did for most of the game!) and 2) larva injects. I missed a lot of them, unfortunately, and it meant that I was really skimpy on units at times where he could’ve walked over and killed me. That should help with the drone count, too.