Chew Terr wrote:Also, as an aside, I'm working on learning all three races, though I've only used protoss 'til now. I'm practicing with friends and getting zerg-pointers. Is there anything important and non-obvious that I may not know about those races? I DO know that creep tumors can spread themselves, which apparently people don't always know.
I play random semi-successfully, so some thoughts from that:
Usually you should look to expand with zerg more than your opponent. As in, you should probably have one more up and running base than your opponent at any given time. Also, don't be afraid of using banelings. I had an aversion to them when I started because when they 'splode you don't have an army anymore, but they're powerful, so use them.
Also, as a neat trick, you can spew larva with the queens using the minimap. So I usually do:
6 (my hotkey for all queens), hold shift, 'v', click on hatchery on minimap, click on other hatchery on minimap, click on third hatchery on minimap, etc. So long as there are queens near every hatchery, the closest queen will always do the spewing.
I'm failing with Terran in the higher ranks, so I prolly don't know what I'm doing with them. I will say that if you're feeling uncomfortable, a planetary fortress at your natural expansion will crush any sort of early mid game pressure (from ground anyway).
Then there are of course general strategies that apply to all races.
Day9 is good for that. Basically:
1. Just like in go, attack in profit, instead of to kill outright. That means throwing down an expansion, or getting upgrades, etc. since you know your opponent is too busy with your attack to harass you.
2. Be sure to know when to retreat. It's better to lose 80% of your forces killing 90% of his forces and taking down an expansion than to lose 100% of your forces killing 91% of his forces and taking down an expansion
Other things like that. But those are the two big ones.
Edit: Also, is there any reason ravens aren't used more? Between PDD and auto-turrets, they seem rad, but I never see them used.
They're used in (much) higher level play sometimes. There's a replay somewhere that involved a guy building just about nothing but ravens. Spewed PDD and auto-turrets like a carpet over the map, and the opponent (Terran) got boxed in and died. I did ravens some when I was just starting for probe harass. If you have a starport with tech lab and the gas, go for it
Esp. in the bronze league, you should be able to win doing almost literally any combat unit, because your opponent isn't playing that well anyway. Find a silly idea and try playing games with it.
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