Well not everything, but surely a lot as my new cyber-friend L.Gergõ has taught me. I kinda knew it already, but he led my attention back to the fact that those who has more action per minute, get more done than those of us who have less.
The graph above show his APM at top and mine at the bottom in a recent game we played. His APM was 119 in the game and mine was a lousy 62. And actually that is quite good for me, cause I can see that many of my old games have APMs around 55.
Now I don't think that a high APM rate is all good. Some players have APM in the 3-400 range and that is just plain silly. I even think 119 is higher than strictly necessary, although Gergõ argues that it keeps you on your toes to have a constant high APM, even when it is not absolutely necessary, to play the game well.
I think I'll make it my goal to get my APM up to around 75 soon and without cheating. Just pressing random keys would make it too easy.
Another, and I think much more valuable lesson he taught me, was to use hotkeys more. Hotkeys allows you to keep producing stuff even when your attention is on your units. I now use 0 for my ComSat, 9 to 4 for unit producing buildings and 3 to 1 for unit groups. Even when in battle I press 9, see if anything needs to be queued, put stuff in queue if necessary and so on. The benefit being that I can still watch the combat and adjust that if need be. I need to do this more often.
Another trick that I rediscovered from watching a replay with AiurAdun was how to split the SCVs properly in the opening minutes of the game. Select all SCVS and send them to a mineral patch. Deselect the first and sent the rest to another mineral patch. Repeat until the group consists of only one SCV. It really makes your opening slightly faster if done correctly and it warms you up to the high paced action that is Starcraft when it is at its very best.
Hey dude would you like to Blog on Starfeeder.com? This is Lipton and I run the SC2 Blog community there :)
ReplyDeletewew, now that's a nice tip.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with your "split" strategy. I am no pro but I'm used to using this method:
ReplyDelete1) Select all peons and send to a mineral patch
2) Select 2-3 *on screen* and redirect them to another patch before they get to the first one. I typically select 2 to split my initial group
3) Select a single peon on-screen and redirect.
4) Repeat as necessary
This way your mouse has less distance to travel (Mineral patch -> peon instead of Mineral patch -> HUD). For Terran/Toss you only need to perfectly split 3 out of the 4 to get your 6th peon without delay while zerg should have a perfect split of 4. It is always recommended to get the split perfect with T or P however :p.