How to become mediocre at StarCraft II really fast – Part II

If you have not read part I, you can find it here.

With the impending release of StarCraft II on July 27th and the mass of Beta keys going out these days, it occurs to me that StarCraft is a fairly deep game with a steep learning curve. It’s tricky in that it has a lot of nuances that are not intuitive to people who have never played a strategy game before. And it would sadden me if knowledge was the only barrier keeping people from playing a great game, so I am here to write a guide to get people from a beginner who has never touched StarCraft or WarCraft to winning some games fairly quickly. This is not a guide that will get you to the Platinum leagues. But after following this guide, you should at least be able to make your way through to Silver, and then maybe I’ll make another guide to get better at the game.

Micromanagent, or micro, is the art of controlling a subset of units indepedently. The simplest form of micro was explained in Part I, where you made Control Groups. Thankfully StarCraft II is a lot more lenient than its predecessor, allowing you to control all your units in one Control Group if you desire. However, this is often not the most optimal way to control your army.  Remember that doing some of these things some of the time is enough – you will never be perfect with your micro. Just try to do as much as you can while still making as many units as you can (otherwise known as macro, covered in Part I). Remember: micro is step 2. Macro, or making units, should be your first priority. So here are four micro tricks, in order of difficult, to be familiar with in order to be mediocre:

1. Organize your control groups
Different people have different ways of organizing them. You may have group 1 as your melee group (Zerglings/Zealots), group 2 as your ranged (Marines and Marauders/Roaches and Hydras/Stalkers and Sentries) and group 3 as your air units. Or maybe you want to have units that are better against Light units in group 1, units that have bonus against armour in group 2, and special units that you need quick access to, like Ghosts/Infestors/Phoenixes in group 3. Try different setups and see what works best for you. Then practice moving your control groups by pressing 1, ‘a’, click, 2, ‘a’, click, 3, ‘a’, click. Remember that even if you put different types of units in one control group, you can still go through the types by pressing tab. For example, if I have a stalker and a sentry in my Control Group 1, I can press 1, ‘b’, click to blink with my Stalker and then tab to select the Sentry and press ‘f’ to erect a force field.

2. Movement and positioning
The goal of this micro is to have every one of your units attacking at all times. When you are moving your units to attack, make sure you are grouped up before heading into the base. The reason for this is that some of your groups will get separated due to different movement speeds, and you do not want to be sending your army one unit at a time into the enemy’s forces. Don’t Ninja Gaiden it. Similarly, when you get to the opponent’s base you’ll find that there’s a narrow ramp, and there are some buildings blocking most, if not all of it. Do not just attack-move (covered in part I) and let your units bunch up on the ramp. Move all the way into the base. I can’t stress this point enough, especially if you’re playing in teams. I yell at my 2v2 partner to do this alot.
If you have melee units in your group, you usually do not have too many options as to their positioning. The sole exception are Zerglings, which move so fast they can gain an ideal positioning. The ideal for Zerglings is to surround your units, so make sure if you’re chasing down a unit that you run slightly ahead of them so that your Zerglings can surround them. Trapping retreating units like this with fast units or Stalkers with Blink is great for getting some free kills at the end of skirmishes.
Another point for positioning is that you always want to be on the high ground. If you’re exiting your base and you run into the enemy, move up your ramp and back into your base and defend from there. Your units will block the ramp, denying your enemy the stated goal of this section.

3. Focus Fire
Units that are mostly dead will still deal full damage. Ergo, you should kill each unit as fast as possible, one at a time, as opposed to damaging a lot of them. The process of focusing on one target is called Focus Fire. This micro gets increasingly harder with more units, as you don’t want units to be trying to walk around obstacles to get a unit in the far back of the opposing army, but with smaller armies you can safely select your control groups and then press ‘a’ and click (or simply right-click) on the unit you want that control group to kill. For example, if you have Marines in group 1 and Marauders in group 2, you would press 1, ‘a’, and click on a Zealot, then press 2, ‘a’, then click on a Stalker. Since Stalkers are armoured, just watch them die to the bonus damage to the Marauders! For extra credit, you can combine your focus fire with shift-queuing (covered in Part I). So for example, you can press 2, hold down Shift, press ‘a’, click on Stalker 1, press ‘a’, click on Stalker 2, press ‘a’, click on Stalker 3, then releasing Shift. Now group 2 will focus fire on those three targets in succession all on its own. This frees up time to make more units or build something at the base while you look like a micro pro. Remember to just press 2 twice to come back to the action.

4. Rescue your units
Unfortunately, focus firing does have a counter, which also gets more difficult as your army sizes grow larger. That is, you can move your units with low health out of range. If your opponent is just auto-firing and not focus firing, then their units will now be trying to attack a new unit until it is dead. At this point you can move your injured unit back into the fight to deal more damage or send them back to base to be repaired or to regenerate shields or health. If your opponent is not paying attention, this means you’ve at least nearly doubled the health of your unit. If your opponent was focus firing, then their units will start chasing your unit, which is also bad news for them because your army will be getting free shots while their army moves. As you can see, Focus Fire and Rescue are counterplays that can make for some intense battles. If there was a battle between four Zealots, two versus two, then these two things will determine the outcome of the battle. For example, I would set both my zealots to focus fire one Zealot, and then my opponent would run him away, and I’d immediately switch to focus firing the second zealot, at which point my opponent might bring the first Zealot back and I would quickly switch to attacking the first Zealot again. When my Zealot is low, then I start running him away and back. In the end, if my micro was better, I might have saved one or maybe both zealots and have a distinct advantage in the early game.

It is vital to remember that micro comes with practice, and just remembering to do these things and doing them some of the time is enough, especially to start. Most people in the Copper and Bronze leagues are not doing these things at the moment, so you should be able to gain some significant advantages by doing these four things.

Well, I think that’s enough homework for now, we’ll save the rest for the next part: Scouting and Unit Composition.