Starcraft II

[Chew Terr]

Also, as a neat trick, you can spew larva with the queens using the minimap.

Ah! (minor Eureka moment)

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

Whoah, do auto-turrets and PDD not go away? Or do they just last a good long while? I could test this tonight, but if you know off the top of your head, I'd appreciate it.

[MountainGo]

Whoah, do auto-turrets and PDD not go away? Or do they just last a good long while? I could test this tonight, but if you know off the top of your head, I'd appreciate it.

My gift to you: Liquipedia.

[Numsgil]

Also, as a neat trick, you can spew larva with the queens using the minimap.

Ah! (minor Eureka moment)

Yeah, it was for me too when I found out. You can actually macro up during a battle as long as you have 3 seconds to spare (or however long it takes you to do that) while still keeping eyes on your forces.

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

Whoah, do auto-turrets and PDD not go away? Or do they just last a good long while? I could test this tonight, but if you know off the top of your head, I'd appreciate it.

They last like 120 seconds or something insane. They (both I think) have energy that depletes fairly rapidly while actually firing, but 10 ravens spewing 4 auto turrets a piece for 0 minerals and 0 gas makes a wall that is VERY hard to break for Terran. Seige tanks take so long that by the time they're done your ravens have energy again.

As a note, I don't think you can auto turret on creep, so against Zerg this wouldn't work. Er, actually this is false according to that Liquipedia page. Auto-Turret away.

The only trick is to survive long enough to get that far

[Chew Terr]

Sorry to spam the thread, just good to talk games with friends. Yesterday, two friends and I tried something that seemed useful: two of us played against each other while the third watched. In cases where the observer was more experienced (like our local zerg/random expert watching while I played zerg), he gave pointers in party chat 'Don't forget to inject with your queen', 'Run your hellions into his main so you can scout it', and so on. When the observer is less experienced, we just watched build and stuff, and asked questions after. Do you guys do anything similar?

I know the best way to improve (especially at my level) is to play, but it's always fun to do stuff that involves teamwork/cooperation. Are there any other things (similar to the GTL, for example) that we can consider that might let us help each other?

[Numsgil]

There's a team liquid forum for game analysis, I think, but the few threads I've seen seem to be people saying "bluh, macro better" so not really very helpful.

For a proper review ladder, the only tricky thing is deciding on a format for game reviews. Go is nice because SGFs let you not only comment a position, but actually make branches and show some variations. For Starcraft a good format for reviews is a video recording of you talking and pausing and moving around in the game, but that's not something everyone can set up easily, and the files easily get huge if you have video and audio data.

[Solomon]

Do you guys do anything similar?

Nope, just laddered as much as I could. After every game, I ask myself questions and try to answer them the best as I can. If I can't figure things out, I'll go and take a look at the replay.

[MountainGo]

For those concerned with improving their mechanics, check out Day[9] Daily #208. There was a thread today on Team Liquid about study resources, but I can't seem to find it again.

Oh, and macro is far and away more important than anything else in the game. Good macro will get you to Diamond, and assuming you're marginally competent in other areas of the game, great macro will get you to high Diamond. The reason you don't hear the pros talking about it very much is that they've all pretty much hit a ceiling with it, so at their level it makes sense to be thinking mostly about build orders, micro techniques, etc.

Here's something else that might interest some people: SC2 study group

[CSamurai]

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

One of the most successful things I've ever seen against me/protoss is some ravens throwing out PDD to protect their banshees. PDD are the bane of my existance when I forget to build high templar. HT will splat a raven and help to get rid of the PDD, but it's still annoying to have my stalkers suddenly stop working as the pdds eliminate all ranged.

Of course, I'm stuck in bronze, and nothing I do is any good anyway, so you should probably ignore me.

[Numsgil]

So I piqued my own curiosity about game reviews, and I found SC2Gears.

Looks like it decodes sc2 replays. There might be a way to leverage it to embed notes into replays and have it play back inside SC2Gears itself, maybe; I'll have to look into it some more.

[Solomon]

Decided to give DTs a whirl in a PvT...when I say I barely won it, I really mean "barely" : http://i.imgur.com/7DUDR.jpg

[Tooveli]

I don't understand how to inject larvae using the minimap. How do you know that it's time to inject? When I have my queens all on one hotkey and my hatcheries all on another then how can I tell that my larvae have just popped (or when I'm being ridiculously gosu that my queens have just got back to 25 energy)?

I use the 'town center' (or whatever it's called) hotkey and can therefore just quickly cycle through to see larvae timings (as well as hotkeying all my queens to one control group - which is also really useful to stop banshee harass). I've remapped town center to 'h' so it's accessible with my left hand (would use 'y' if I didn't need it for warpgates when I play random). Can't wait for fully customisable hotkeys so that I can find something more appropriate and finally change morph baneling to a different key than explode baneling (grid).

[Tooveli]

I just remembered another control trick I think I'm missing.

I'm pretty sure I saw someone quickly split an army into its two components (eg. have only zerglings selected from a control group of zerglings and banelings) without double clicking the units on the map. Is this possible?

[MountainGo]

Decided to give DTs a whirl in a PvT...when I say I barely won it, I really mean "barely" : http://i.imgur.com/7DUDR.jpg

Haha, can't get much closer than that. By the way, what the hell happened to his main CC? "Aha, those pesky DTs will never find it two feet to the right!"

I don't understand how to inject larvae using the minimap. How do you know that it's time to inject?

When I played Zerg, I put all my Hatcheries on one hotkey and then each one on a separate hotkey. Then you can just tap each Hatch's key and check the progress bar.

I'm pretty sure I saw someone quickly split an army into its two components (eg. have only zerglings selected from a control group of zerglings and banelings) without double clicking the units on the map. Is this possible?

Ctrl + click on the wireframe

[Tooveli]

Thank you!

Hmmm, might have to start doing that with the hotkeys. My method has me having to change view to the base every time I want to check inject timings which is less than ideal. Having said that, I'm using it as a trigger to check drone count and upgrades etc. so it does have its benefits. I don't really like going above 6 for hotkeys and my current setup already uses 1-6. It would be cool if you could also asign hotkeys to 'y,h,n' for example.

[MountainGo]

It would be cool if you could also asign hotkeys to 'y,h,n' for example.

You will be able to in a few weeks when patch 1.2 comes out. (Or start right now on the test server.)