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.

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

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.

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.

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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

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).

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?

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!"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.Ctrl + click on the wireframe

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.

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

Blizzard really wants me to buy a US account.

You'll be telling me that there is going to be a L19 starcraft tournament on the US server next.

Oh it took forever for me to realize why it was so close. For the longest time I just saw DTs=gg. To preserve the exasperation for others, don't click the spoiler if you're still confused like me.



Tooveli: The US server is the funnest playground on Earth, filled with rainbows, unicorns, and double robobays all the way. Join us for the low low price of 60 dollars (US of course) in the L19 tourny this Saturday.

If the group with all types is currently selected, you can also just use the TAB key.

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I think you'll get a "bizzaaaap" noise or a warning message or something if it's not time yet. If you're waiting too long, there isn't really any indication. But you could put a hatch on 0 that you use just to check timings since you can see the gray bar for larva spew (keep in mind you can assign a hatch to more than one hotkey, so you can still group all your hatches in one hotkey).

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I'm apparently having fun playing an OP race and being a Hacker today.

On the offchance I was to buy this a) how likely is a European like me able to get to match up with those from the US (either random ladder or actually seeking you guys out), and b) how steep is the learning curve for an ex-Starcraft I enthusiast?

SC2 has different build timings and unit balances than Sc1. But, the general skills will transfer pretty well, just ask Jinro.

The biggest strangeness is that the quick keys are different from what I remember, but I didn't play a lot of sc1 Multiplayer, just the single player.

I think that Europe and NA are seperate zones, but I think you can buy a NA copy of the game, if you want to play on the NA server.

There's something about that earlier in the thread...

Many thanks - presumably I can't watch sc2replay files without the game installed? (a brief search around seemed to suggest that this was the case, but it was a big vague).

Right. A replay file is just a list of the inputs from each player, so you need the game to be able to compute what the results of those inputs are. That's why sc2gears, for example, can't tell when something is destroyed or when a unit couldn't be made for lack of resources.

If I were you I would try to find out what the lag would be like playing on the NA servers from the UK. If it's not too bad, you're probably better off getting a NA copy of the game (or, obviously, both, if you have that kind of money to throw around).

If you've already played SC1, the learning curve is almost nil. I came from a WC3 background where I played actively over 5 years ago (before I played Go), and even that was enough for me to get the ball rolling in a matter of minutes and dive straight into SC2 multiplayer.