{"id":135,"date":"2012-11-16T00:09:12","date_gmt":"2012-11-16T08:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/starcraft.kevinleung.com\/?p=135"},"modified":"2013-03-17T13:35:51","modified_gmt":"2013-03-17T20:35:51","slug":"hots-beta-the-perfect-reason-to-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/?p=135","title":{"rendered":"HotS beta: the perfect reason to practice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/HotSBetaKeys\/comments\/12yenm\/inuniverse_jokes_begins_november_10_ends_november\/c6z7250\">a bad joke<\/a> 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&#8217;t play any games from matchmaking. I can explain, though, and this is really a good thing.<\/p>\n<p>Julie and I were going to play HotS tonight since we&#8217;re both in the beta, but I didn&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s all 2s and 4s, but still, I&#8217;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&#8217;t attack with more than 2 Marines was opportunity to focus on that alone, and it was bad. I<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>was not building workers constantly<\/li>\n<li>was getting supply blocked a lot<\/li>\n<li>was allowing my money to get really high<\/li>\n<li>didn&#8217;t have nearly enough production buildings<\/li>\n<li>forgot key structures<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A few games in, I smoothed out a lot of this and was playing much smoother than before.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;m low on gas because I don&#8217;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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>figured out when I needed to pay attention and not in the first few minutes so I could scout without forgetting a building<\/li>\n<li>learned when I would hit gas shortage later and built refineries earlier for that<\/li>\n<li>sequenced add-on building more optimally for the units I wanted<\/li>\n<li>played around with the timings (absolute and relative) for Starport\/Raven, vehicle upgrades, and another Factory for production<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s been quite awhile since I have hammered out games against the computer, and I don&#8217;t think I ever quite did it for mech. The ironic part of this is that the focus on macro meant that I didn&#8217;t really figure out how to use the battle hellions or widow mines. That hopefully will happen soon.<\/p>\n<p>Hopefully, I&#8217;ll also do some matchmaking as well. There are a lot of good things going for HotS right now that aren&#8217;t true for WoL (Wings of Liberty):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>unranked matchmaking is less stressful<\/li>\n<li>the metagame and balance are shifting rapidly, so expectations should be low<\/li>\n<li>the novelty is just that much more exciting<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ll report back on how that&#8217;s going if there&#8217;s anything interesting. In the meantime, let me know if you&#8217;re on the HotS beta and want to play. <a href=\"http:\/\/us.battle.net\/sc2\/en\/blog\/7831333\/Heart_of_the_Swarm_Arrives_March_12_2013_\u2014_Presales_NOW_LIVE-11_13_2012\">Preorders<\/a> are now giving out beta keys for a lot of vendors, so they should be easy to come by.<\/p>\n<p>Also, there&#8217;s a ton of good pro StarCraft happening until the end of the year. Specifically, the <a href=\"http:\/\/us.battle.net\/bwc\/en\/\">Battle.net World Championship<\/a> starts tomorrow night, and I&#8217;ll definitely be tuned in. It really looks like WoL has matured, and I&#8217;ll report on anything interesting I see in the games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;t play &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/?p=135\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rambling","tag-practicing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":253,"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions\/253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.spawningtool.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}