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:
- Main army (lings, roaches, hydras, etc)
- Banelings/secondary army (I like the idea of being able to split my army)
- Infestors
- 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.