Starcraft 2 General Guide | RTS Guide | Strategy Guide

[Kreeper]

Whether you're new to the RTS genre, or already a strong player, read this guide and you'll gain either the basic knowledge of the game, or advanced concepts you need to get on your way toward success in Starcraft 2 (SC2).


“RTS” stands for “real-time strategy”. In Starcraft 2, you have to make decisions and actions in real time against an opponent who is doing the same. This is opposed to turn-based strategy games (TBS), which are played one move at a time in turn. Playing against live players online in real time can be quite stressful and is a rigorous test of each player’s speed, skill, smarts, and endurance. Over the course of our guides, we at CraftingStars.com will seek to provide wisdom and advice that will help you to build yourself up to meet these challenges.

Before I go on, I would like to say that you will not get more out of these guides than you put into them. A speedy perusal will net a small increase in your Starcraft games; similarly, an in-depth study followed by careful practice will yield much more substantial results. Knowing what to do isn’t the same as actually executing it, and when it comes to Starcraft, execution can be extremely difficult and take quite a bit of practice.

We’re going to assume you play the Protoss race for the duration of this guide for simplicity's sake. If you would like to play a different race from the get-go, much of what is listed in this guide will still apply, but please bear in mind that some examples are written specifically from the perspective of a Protoss player. It’ll be a little like transposing a song to a different key: the relationships will be the same, but the individual notes will have different names.
Each of the following chapters hold extremely important knowledge to a player of any skill level. Although the chapters are written with the assumption that the reader has no knowledge of the game, some concepts discussed may be sophisticated. If the explanations to any given advice is too much to take in, just remember the advice itself, and worry about the “why” later.


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Chapter 1 - Basic Game Concepts

So, let’s start off with some basics, and some terminology:

There are three races in Starcraft 2. They are the Protoss, Terrans, and Zerg. Each race has its own unique buildings and units, each with their own names. However, there are sure similarities between the races, and the concepts learned in this guide will apply to all three. For example, the worker for Protoss, Terran, and Zerg are “probe”, “SCV”, and “drone” respectively, while their roles are almost identical.



The goal of Starcraft is to eliminate all of your opponent’s buildings. There are two kinds of things that you can build and control in Starcraft: buildings, and units.

• Units are things like marines or siege tanks – they’re men or vehicles that you can use to defeat your opponent. You can order them to move around the map or do other things. Most units can attack things to eventually destroy them. Some units have special abilities that do special things, like prevent other units from moving, or take control of them temporarily. There are three very special units, called workers, one for each race, that can collect resources and spend them in order to construct buildings.

• Buildings are for the most part largely immobile, big things that you can use to construct units at the cost of resources, research upgrades at the cost of resources, or unlock the ability to construct additional kinds of units or buildings (we call this moving down the tech-tree). Each kind of building differs in how it specifically fulfills these roles: a gateway, for example, can construct zealots, stalkers, sentries, high templar, and dark templar, and it also unlocks the ability to construct cybernetics cores. A forge, on the other hand, does not produce any units at all, but enables you to build photon cannons, which are stationary defensive buildings. Forges can also be used to research upgrades that make all of your ground units stronger.

• Buildings are also called structures. We’ll try not to confuse you too much over the course of our guides by rapidly switching back and forth, but do be aware that both words mean the same thing.

• A “proxy” is a structure built outside of one's base, either somewhere hidden on the map, or built near or even inside of an enemy's base. This is a bit advanced, don't worry about it for now, but keep it in mind for later chapters.
  Both buildings and units have a value called ‘hit points’ assigned to them. Whenever a unit or building attacks another unit or building, it takes away some of that unit or building’s hit points. When a unit or building runs out of hit points, it dies and is removed from the game.

• Most buildings cannot attack. Some exceptions: photon cannons, spine crawlers, spore crawlers, missile turrets, and planetary fortresses.

In order to build new units or buildings, we need to have resources to spend. There are three kinds of resources, each of which is acquired in different ways.

• Minerals are the most basic resources. You get minerals by telling your probes (Protoss workers) to mine from mineral patches by right-clicking on them with the worker selected. The worker will gather several minerals and then return them to your nearest nexus, then it will go back to the mineral field and mine some more, repeating the process. All buildings, units, and upgrades require some amount of minerals, so make sure you always have workers mining! The group of mineral patches at an expansion is called the “mineral line”.
• Vespene gas is the second resource. Gas is used in upgrades as well as in advanced units and buildings. The more powerful and exotic an individual unit is, the more gas it takes. Advanced air units like carriers and spellcasters like high templar take a lot of gas to make. You get gas by building an assimilator on a vespene geyser. Once it’s built, you can order workers to harvest from it the same as with minerals: by right clicking. The workers will again move back and forth between the resource node (in this case the assimilator) and your nexus, harvesting on each journey. Think of vespene like oil, and think of assimilators like an oil derrick – it allows you to get at the resources that would otherwise be hard to reach. Your workers still have to collect the little gas packets, though, so make sure you don’t forget!
• Food is the third resource, and it works slightly differently than the other two. You only need food in order to produce more units, but all units take some amount of food. In order to get more food, you need to build pylons, which give 8 food supply each. Nexuses also give food supply, but you shouldn’t build them for that alone. Think of it as a nice perk instead.
• Food is in the game, called “psi” (For Protoss), “supply” (For Terran), or “control” (For Zerg). These three names are simplified by most players to “Food”, because the resource functions the same way for all three races. We’ll try not to use those too much, but do be aware that the other names exist.
• Food behaves a little differently than minerals or gas. Instead of subtracting the build cost of a unit from your food stockpile, the food that a unit takes to build is added to your current food count. You cannot build more units if those units would cause your current food count to exceed your maximum food supply. When your units die, though, they are removed from your current food count, freeing up the ability to construct additional units to replace them.
• Food is displayed as current food count, followed by a slash, followed by your current maximum food supply in the upper right hand corner of your screen.
  
  
  
  
  Let’s go through an example:
  • I have 6 probes. Probes count as 1 food each, so my current food count is 6.
  • I have one Nexus. Nexuses give 10 food supply each, so my maximum food supply is 10.
  • This is expressed in the corner of my screen as 6/10.
  • If I build a zealot, which takes 2 food, my current food would go up to 8. My total food supply would not change, bringing me to 8/10.
  • If I build another zealot which takes 2 food, my current food would go up to 10. My total food would still be the same, bringing me to 10/10. I now cannot build new units, since that would place my current food over my maximum food.
  • If I were to lose a probe, which takes 1 food, my current food would go down to 9. Now, I can build another probe to replace it, since that would take me to 10/10, but I can’t build another zealot, since that would place my current food over my maximum food.
• When your pylons die, you lose the food supply that they were giving you. You’ll need to reconstruct them in order to continue producing units.
• When you don’t have enough food supply to build any more units, you’re “supply blocked”.
• There are three other resources that we’ll talk about in later guides: APM, Production Cycles, and Time. These are all significantly more abstract and complex, though, so don’t worry about them for now. So how do we win at Starcraft? We use our workers to collect resources and build buildings, and use those buildings to construct units to destroy our opponent's buildings. Of course, our opponent is going to be trying to do the same thing – and that’s where it gets interesting!

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Chapter 2 - What to do (The fundamentals)

There are several things which you should be managing at all times while playing Starcraft 2. These things are the fundamentals to having good macromanagement (managing/developing the overall game as opposed to controlling individual units), and are the most important step to being a good player in general. To have good fundamentals, a player needs the mental capacity to multitask, and the APM (Actions per minute) to execute the fundamentals, while at the same time formulating proper strategy and executing tactics. This requirement to multitask is one of the biggest reasons for why SC2 has such an intense skill curve, and why even professionals vary significantly in the mastery of the fundamentals. Study this chapter carefully, practice daily, and soon the fundamentals will become second nature to you.

There are three basic things that you should always do while playing SC2: Spend your resources, Obtain and control information, and maintain an adequate food supply.


Spend your resources:


Resource investment in Starcraft 2 works within a function of exponential returns, as with any investment in real life.

• For example, investing 100 dollars into Google in September of 2005 could give you returns of 250 dollars in 2007, whereas investing 100 dollars into Google in September of 2004 would give you a return of 500 dollars in 2007. Waiting that year meant that year's potential growth in the investment was lost, so then, in 2007, when you needed the returns back, you only had half as much as you could have had, had you been quicker to act!

• Similarly, the faster you gather your first minerals, the faster you can produce more workers to gather more minerals, and so on. Thus, your efficiency in the early game will have an exponentially greater impact on your strength in the mid game, and even more so in the late game. The extra 500 minerals you had 5 minutes into the game could have been 5000 minerals 10 minutes into the game, had you invested it! The importance of constantly spending all of your resources can therefore not be overstated.

However, it is extremely important that you invest your resources appropriately. There are three basic categories in which you can spend your resources: Economy, Army, and Technology. You will typically want to split your investment in all 3. However, knowing which one to invest in at any given time is crucial to having strong fundamentals.


Economy:


Investing in Economy will give you more resources to spend later in the game. You can invest in economy by building more probes(workers) or by expanding. During a typical game of SC2, you should almost always be producing probes.

• Worker production: Once you have a certain number of probes gathering from a single mineral patch or assimilator, you stop gaining any benefit by assigning more probes to gather from that node. In most cases, this occurs when you have 3 probes per mineral patch or assimilator. This is called being “fully saturated.” You typically will want 3 probes in each assimilator, from the moment the assimilator finishes until it runs dry. You want as many probes as possible mining from your minerals, but when you start getting more than 3 per patch, it’s time to transfer some to a new expansion.
  • Why? The more probes you have gathering minerals or gas, the more saturated your mineral line or assimilators. However, there is a diminishing return in probe investment, while saturating your mineral line. This is because workers spend a certain amount of time gathering from a mineral field or assimilator, and a certain amount of travel time going to and from your nexus. As the number of workers per mineral patch or assimilator increases, the time that those workers, as a collective, can spend gathering increases, as additional workers can gather while the others travel. Because of the distance between a properly placed nexus and a mineral field, the travel time is short, and having three probes is enough to ensure constant gathering from that node 100% of the time This is called being “fully saturated”. It’s usually a bad idea to have more than 3 probes gathering from a single assimilator. You should also generally never have more than 3 probes per mineral patch (this is called “super saturation”), but there is one exception (intent to maynard).

• Adding additional probes to gather from a mineral field increases your income by a constant amount per probe until you have 2 probes per mineral field, and then by a decreased amount until you have 3 probes per mineral field. After that, you get no additional benefit from adding more probes.

• Expanding is building a new nexus by a mineral line and/or vespene geysers. This area is called an “expansion”. In almost every map of SC2, there is an expansion very close to the starting location (or main) of each player. This intuitive expansion location is called the “natural”. The natural will be the typical first place to expand to in any given game.
  • It's important to remember that the cost of expanding is not only the minerals for the new nexus, but also for the probes you will need to gather at the new expansion. When expanding, remember that it's always best for both bases to be equally saturated. However, remember that the two vespene geysers will require an extra 6 probes for full saturation. With this in mind, when you get a new expansion going, you should do one of two things:
    • if you have more than 2 probes per mineral patch at your existing bases, you should divide your probes evenly amongst all of your bases, such that the ratio of probes per mineral field at every base is equal. This is called maynarding: transferring workers from a saturated mineral line to an unsaturated mineral line, to quickly equalize saturation and greatly increase efficiency (by reducing the aforementioned diminishing returns).
    • if you have 2 or less probes per mineral patch at your existing bases, you can simply produce probes at your new expansion without needing to shift them between bases and still mine optimally. It’s generally easier to just divide them evenly (maynard them) anyway, as that allows you to use every nexus to produce probes simultaneously and still receive optimal benefit.
  • whenever you mine out an expansion, it’s a good idea to evenly split the idle probes between your existing bases in a similar fashion. Alternately, if a new expansion is just going online, you can forgo the usual transfer and simply send all of the ones from your mined-out base instead for instant saturation.

During a typical game of SC2, you should almost always be producing probes. The exception to this is when you have to devote every mineral to your army; or for teching more quickly, with a specific build order in mind (more on this in chapter 3). Please do remember, though, that this only applies when you are trying to achieve a specific goal; if you do not have a specific planned use for the additional minerals, always produce probes.
You should typically seek to expand when you have either put yourself at an army advantage (by killing significantly more of his combat units than you've lost), or when your current mineral lines are approaching full saturation. Expanding is a big investment, and will always reduce the potential size of your army in the short run. The earlier you expand, the bigger the relative investment.

Try to always produce probes and often consider expanding, to remain economically competitive with your opponent.

Don't forget to build your economy, even while battles are taking place!

Army:


Another way you can spend your resources is by building combat units, like zealots and stalkers. Army production is limited by the amount of resources you have, and production cycles. For example, it takes 42 game seconds to produce a stalker from a gateway. This means that you can produce one stalker every 42 seconds with a single gateway. If you build another gateway, then you can build 2 stalkers every 42 seconds(one production cycle), or one stalker every 21 seconds on average. The more production buildings you have, the more units you can produce per cycle, the more quickly you can build an army. You should try at all times to spend all of your resources left over after building probes and teching on combat units. If you find yourself with a lot of minerals or gas left over after using all of your production (this is called floating), make some more unit producing buildings to spend it! Have a contest with yourself to see how close to 0 you can keep your minerals and gas all game, while still expanding and making probes!

• Seek to have a balance between your income and the number of unit producing buildings you have. If you have too many, you will not have the income to produce a unit every production cycle, and thereby lose efficiency. If you have too few, you will not be able to produce units quickly enough to use the resources you are accumulating.
  • For example, stalkers cost 125 minerals and 50 gas. With 2 gateways, you can make one stalker every 21 seconds -- or about 3 every minute on average. Therefore, if you have an income of 375 minerals and 150 gas per minute, then you can produce stalkers out of 2 gateways nonstop.

• It is important to always maintain an army which is comparative to or greater in strength than your enemy's. If you invest too heavily into economy or technology, and your enemy scouts your vastly inferior army, he may decide to attack immediately and eliminate you.

Even if you have more production buildings and resources than your enemy, he can still out produce you if he more consistently uses his production buildings every single cycle. Make sure that you use as much of your production as possible whenever you can, unless you’re certain that no units you can make from that building would be helpful at all.

• The correct units to build and include in your army will depend upon what units your enemy is building, and what tech is available to you. Both of these things are other parts of the fundamentals.

Don't forget to build your army, even while battles are taking place!

Technology:


The last way to invest your resources is in technology, or tech. Tech is what allows you to build new buildings and units, to access new abilities for your spell casting units, and to research upgrades for your units. Investing in tech is as important as in economy or army, because without the right tech, your army will likely be largely ineffective!

• For example, before you can build units which can attack flying units (air), you must build a cybernetics core. If all you have are zealots, you will have no way of defeating an air army.

• Tech is limited by resources and time, required to build the tech structure, or research the ability or upgrade.

It is important to tech quickly enough to be able to appropriately deal with anything your opponent throws at you. Knowing what to tech to, and how quickly, will depend upon scouting. You have to know what your opponent is doing before you can counter him. It is also important to know whether your opponent will be able to counter your tech before you ever get it.

• For example, Dark Templar require the Dark Shrine before they can be constructed. Dark Templar rely largely upon their permanent invisibility. If your enemy already has detectors (allowing him to see your Dark Templar) then the Dark Templar will be largely ineffective and a Dark Shrine may be a poor investment.

Investing too much into tech too quickly can, of course, hurt your economy or army. However, you should always steadily tech throughout a game, as it opens many more strategic and tactical options for you. We’ll talk more about this later on. For now, though, remember to stick around at each level of tech for a short time while making units before moving on to the next one in order to keep yourself from being overwhelmed.

Don't forget to advance your tech, even while battles are taking place!


Obtain and control information:

We've just gone over the ways you can spend your resources, but knowing what is the appropriate investment at any given time depends largely on your collection and control of information in the game, which includes hiding information from your opponent. Information is obtained by scouting, and information is hidden by denying scouting. There are multiple ways to do both, and are all limited chiefly by your APM.



Information in SC2 can be simplified to two main subjects: What you are spending your resources on, and where your army is located.

• What you are spending your resources on is very important to your enemy:
  • Are you expanding? This will mean that your army will suffer, so now might be a good time to attack you.
  • What way are you teching? Knowing how you tech tells your enemy what you are capable of doing, and lets him know exactly what he should do to respond. As in the previous example, if he scouts your dark shrine, then he knows to be prepared for dark templar.
  • What kind of army are you building? Knowing how you tech, and knowing how you use it in your army are two different things. Seeing exactly what kind of army composition you have assembled will allow your enemy to more appropriately build a counter force.
  • Also keep in mind that “gas doesn't lie”. For example, if he has both of his geysers before mid game, then he has a reason. If he doesn't have both geysers, you can be pretty confident he isn't building air, or any high gas tech, etc. Just keep in mind that the amount of gas he's taking in determines what he can build as much as anything, so keep an eye on it.
• The location of your army is equally important to your enemy:
  • Is your army heading toward his base? If he scouts this, he knows he should prepare for an attack.
  • Is your army far from one of your expansions? He may find an opportunity to attack your expansion before you have a chance to defend it.
  • Knowing the location of your army will tell him where to position his army in general.

So how do you scout? There are many ways.

• The earliest scouting method in most SC2 games is sending a worker straight into the enemy's base before he has any defenses, to see how he is teching in the early game. This allows you to check for any early aggression that he might have in store for you, so you can quickly build an army to defend against it (a good example of when you might want to not build probes or tech). Depending on how long you keep your worker alive, you may also see what kind of mid game tech he has in mind as well. Sending a probe to the enemy base in the mid game and later can also be a useful scout. The probe will likely die before ever setting foot inside the base, but it will see exactly what kind of army killed it, which is information you need. You can also send a probe to various expansions around the map, to check if your enemy has expanded to them.

• Protoss observers are very powerful scouts, as they are permanently invisible and thus naturally discreet. They’re also flying units, so it easy to get them into your enemy's base.

• Any flying unit is a possible scout, because it can possibly circumvent any ground forces that would otherwise physically block an attempted scout.

• Moving your actual army up to your enemy's base to “poke” at him will often reveal important information, such as his army composition and defenses, allowing you to determine whether you are ready to actually assault his base or not.

• There are other creative ways to scout as well. For example, the Protoss sentry has the hallucination ability, which allows you to create a phantom protoss unit of your choosing. Experienced players will often use this ability to create a quick flying unit (the phoenix) to fly through the enemy base, without the risk of losing any real units.

How to deny scouting or fool your foe:

Denying an enemy from scouting you can be just as important, or more important than scouting him. Certain strategies rely on surprise more than others.

• Hide tech buildings. You can hide tech buildings in back corners of your main, or even proxy tech buildings some place hidden on the map. Proxying tech is an extremely effective way of hiding it from the enemy, but also risky, as it puts the building far from the protection of your base.

• Kill would-be scouts before they have a chance to gain the information they want. If you're teching in a new direction, don't let your enemy get into your base to find out. If you are playing against Zerg, kill his overlords if they try to fly into your main, before they get a chance to spot your new tech.

• Build the tech or production building just after the enemy scout has left your main. One of the most deceptive methods of information control is to make the enemy think he knows what's coming, and use it against him. This will fool him into believing he doesn't have to worry about whatever it is you are about to do, at least for a few minutes until he tries to scout again.

• Do the above after canceling a building in construction. If your enemy sees you constructing a certain tech or production structure, he will be rather certain that you are going to use it. After you get his scout out of your base, you can cancel the structure and build something entirely different.

• Don't forget to scout, even while battles are taking place!

Maintain an adequate food supply:


This final part of the fundamentals is certainly the simplest, but just as important. In order to spend your resources (building probes and army), you must have the food supply available to do it, and often times even scouting will depend upon having the food available to build the necessary unit immediately.

Supply can mean the difference between easily defending against an attack, and losing horribly.



The key to maintaining an adequate food supply is knowing how much food you are using each production cycle, and building an appropriate number of pylons every time you go back to build more units.

• For example, if I'm building zealots, stalkers, and sentries out of 4 gateways, I need to build a new pylon every single production cycle, because each of those units requires 2 supply, and a pylon gives only 8 supply. But I have to keep in mind that I'm also producing probes, meaning I actually need more than one pylon every single production cycle.

• Glancing back to check your supply very often is a good habit to avoid becoming supply blocked. This simply takes practice.

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Chapter 3 - Micromanagement

Micromanagement is the management of individual units, as opposed to developing your overall game. Although macromanagement is more important in a basic sense, a player slightly worse macro and slightly better micro can certainly win a game. Micromanagement will prove the efficiency and effectiveness of your army. If you lose half the resource value of units in each battle compared to your opponent, you can have an income almost half of his and still come out even. If you mismicro when going for a base assault, your attack can easily be defeated with heavy losses.

There are three main ways to micro: Positioning, Focus fire, and Spell Casting.


Positioning is, by far, the most important part of micro. It also has extreme depth, and so it will have a guide of its own. In this guide, I'll just lay down the basics so you have a general idea of what to do.

• Keep your shorter ranged units in front of your longer ranged units. For example, always keep your zealots in front of your stalkers, before engaging in battle. Otherwise, your zealots will be blocked from attacking by the stalkers themselves.

• Keep your tougher, cheaper units in front. Again, another good example is to keep your zealots in front of your stalkers. Zerglings kill stalkers extremely quickly, but if there is a line of zealots between the zerglings and your stalkers, your survivability increases dramatically.

• Use bottle necks to your advantage. If your army has more ranged units than your enemy's army, then forcing the enemy to fight you in a bottleneck will reduce his DPS (damage per second), and give you an advantage.

• Keep your army where you need it. This goes back to the scouting fundamental. Keep an eye on your enemy's army, and keep your army in a position to defend against his. No matter how much stronger your army is, it won't do any good if it's completely out of position while he destroys your base.

Kiting and Reverse kiting:

• Move your army closer to the enemy if part of it is out of range. For example, say you have a lot of stalkers. If you simply attack-move (pressing “a” and then left clicking in a direction) an enemy army, the front line of your stalkers will attack from max range, while the stalkers behind them will be out of range and do nothing useful. You can fix this by attack-moving, waiting until the front line fires its first shots, and then right clicking to move forward, and then quickly attack-move again. Repeat this process until your units are close enough for every single one of them to fire. If you do this correctly, the units should fire as quickly as if they were standing still, but move in between shots. This technique is called “scoot and shoot”, because that's what it is. You can do this toward the enemy as described above, or to move away from an enemy, which is also called “kiting”.

• Kiting is extremely important, because it can increase the survivability of a unit by an extremely large amount. A good example is a stalker fighting a zealot. If a zealot and stalker stand still and attack each other, the zealot will win the fight. However, if a stalker kites the zealot, the stalker can kill the zealot without taking a single hit, because stalkers are faster than zealots and have a much longer range.

Focus fire is directing all of your units to attack specific enemies, instead of finding targets on their own. So, instead of fairly evenly damaging an entire army slowly over time, you can direct your army to attack a single enemy at a time. This can give you a huge advantage in a fight.

• For example, say 10 stalkers fight against 10 stalkers. If no focus fire occurs, both armies should destroy each other evenly. However, if one army is micro'd to focus fire specific enemies one at a time, then the enemy will lose DPS much faster, meaning the micro'd army will take much less damage by the end of the fight. Imagine if the 10 stalkers for the micro'd army are all at 50% hp, whereas in the other army, 50% of the stalkers are now dead. The micro'd army would have twice as much DPS and just as much hp remaining, putting it at a huge advantage.

• 
  Focus fire is important in all battles. Good targets for focus fire are units which deal abnormally high damage, or which can cast powerful spells. Other targets might be detectors, allowing your cloaked units (such as dark templar) to freely destroy the enemy army.

Spell casting is the use of special abilities that certain units possess. Each spell caster unit has a different ability from any other, so the proper use of any given spell depends on knowledge and experience of that unit. Using spells effectively, however, requires that you keep the caster in range of its target, as opposed to being blocked off out of range by your own army, or picked off and killed by the enemy.

Pay careful attention to the positioning of your spell caster, and his energy (which is required to cast spells), or you'll find, at the end of the battle, that your investment in the unit was a waste.

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Chapter 4 - Specifics (Builds, Timings, and Polish)

If you've got the fundamentals to macro and decent micro, you should be well on your way toward being a decent player. However, even the best macro or micro player will still lose if he doesn't have a logical build order, good timings, and polish.

A build order is the order in which you construct your buildings, units, or research upgrades. Build orders are often numbered by the supply count at which something is built, but can also simply be based in chronological order. For example, a “10 gate” is a gateway made when you have 10 probes. This could be followed up with a cybernetics core “immediately afterward”, meaning as soon as the gateway is completed, but at no particular supply count.

• Build orders are designed to give you utmost efficiency and effectiveness in your strategy. If you plan for early aggression, when is the best time to build your first gateways? When should you attack? When do you transition out of this early build? The only way to know is with experience and theorycraft. You need to know when your enemy will be ready for you, and when he won't be. This will take scouting and the experience to extrapolate information from what little you'll be able to see. You'll have to theorize when and where he'll do what, and form your build around it.
• For example, if you scout a Zerg player Fast Expanding (FE, expanding very early in the game, often before any combat units are constructed), then you know he won't have very strong defenses for a certain amount of time. If you quickly build a second gateway and “pump” (build nonstop) zealots out of both of your gateways, straight toward his base, you can do serious damage before he has time to defend. On the other hand, if you wait too long, he will have ample defenses, and any attempted attack will easily be repelled, and you'll likely lose the game for missing your opportunity. As I said before, to know when is the right time to do anything, you need a bit of experience to know what is coming next, based upon their build.

Timings are the times throughout a game when something noteworthy takes place. For example, in the previous example, the Zerg will be in a weak defensive position for a window of time. However, knowing the best precise time to attack is more than being aware of the window. A precisely timed attack is called a “Timing Attack”. So when would you want to attack this Zerg player? Every game varies somewhat, but a general rule is to attack right before a player gets a return on his investment. This is because the Zerg player's army will grow more slowly than yours up until the point he starts getting a return. If he is building an army half as quickly as you until his expansion is saturated, then your advantage will steadily grow for the entire duration of the window. His army will be weakest in relative to yours the moment his expansion becomes saturated. A common timing attack, therefore, is when the enemy is maynarding workers from his main to his natural.

• Specific example: Zerg players will often “14 hatch” “16 pool”, meaning they build their expansion hatchery (Zerg equivalent to the nexus) at 14 supply, and then their spawning pool (allows them to build combat units) at 16 supply. An appropriate response from a Protoss player who already made a 12 gate (before scouting Zerg) is to, immediately after scouting the enemy expansion, build another gateway, probably a 13 gate. Save chronoboosts for the zealots to be produced from these structures, make sure you build another pylon at about 14, and send your first zealots immediately to the Zerg base to try and kill drones before he is ready to defend. If done correctly, this attack is very hard to hold off, depending on the distance between your mains.

This timing rule can be used for every kind of investment. If the enemy has spent a significant amount of time and resources on tech, then attack just before he can use that tech in his army.


Polish is otherwise known as perfection of a strategy or build. Polish, although subtle, can mean the difference between crushing defeat and clear victory. Having one extra unit to defend an attack can mean the successful defense of your expansion, and your eventual victory by superior economy.

The only way to polish is to carefully observe your own games from an objective perspective, find the places you could improve, and then practice. This goes for games whether you win or lose.

For example, after successfully attacking an enemy, watch the replay of the game. Were you doing the fundamentals the whole time you carried out your attack? Was your attack timed correctly; could you have attacked a bit sooner or later and been more successful? Was your attack executed with proper micro?

Polishing all of these things will give you a smaller margin of error, and greater chances of success.

Another part of your build is your building placement. Building placement is the way you arrange your buildings for strategic purpose. The two most important kinds of building placements are walling your ramp/choke and simcitying.

To wall your ramp or choke, build your buildings at the top of the ramp that leads into your main, or the choke that leads into your main or natural. As Protoss, you should leave one cell (game unit of distance) unblocked by buildings, to allow for your own units to pass through. To keep any enemies from getting inside, you can leave a single unit (such as a zealot) on hold position in that cell.

The point of walling your ramp or choke is to severely limit the number of enemy units that can actually attack your units or buildings. This is especially effective against melee units.

To simcity, place your buildings in such a way as to create a wall of buildings, minerals, and vespene geysers, around your worker lines. There are several reasons why you might want to simcity instead of walling your ramp: It's easier to pull probes(have probes attack invading units instead of gather, for a short time). If your ramp is very wide (such as on Scrap Station), it can be easier to complete a simcity instead. It doesn't choke your ramp, meaning you can move large numbers of units out of your base more quickly. It concentrates all of your important structures in one small area, making it much easier to defend everything into the mid and late game.

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Chapter 5: Meta Game Part 1: Knowing thy enemy


SC2 is largely dictated by metagame, perhaps more so than the typical player realizes. Metagame is the game outside of the game. For example, if you are a Protoss player, and have just watched a Protoss player attempt an early double gateway zealot aggression build 4 games in a row against other Protoss players, and then face against him, what would you do? You would probably prepare for his aggression before you even get the slightest in-game hint that he had that in store for you, just because you know that he, as a person in real life, prefers that strategy. Taking that a level up, he might know that you expect it, and do a completely different strategy, using metagame knowledge against you.

Metagame can determine how a match begins to how it ends, and can vary from region to region. For example, in the US, the most common timings and strategies that any given Terran player uses might differ substantially from the timings and strategies of the average Terran in Korea. This can lead the players who go against Terrans in the US and Korea to also create timings and strategies that differ from one another. Players naturally base strategies somewhat on what they expect the enemy to do, regardless of whether they scout it or not. This can make things more efficient for you, but also riskier.

There is not much to guide you in metagame, as there isn't a whole lot you can do to fool someone with it, beyond the above examples. It's just important to keep in mind that a unit or strategy may be more or less powerful simply due to how the enemy player uses entirely different units or strategies.

=========================================


Chapter 6: Meta Game Part 2: Knowing thy self

This chapter gets a lot more personal than the previous chapters, as a lot of it goes back to personal experience.

Now, I know it's pretty cliché to say that you need to know yourself, but in gaming and any competitive profession, it's more true than some might like to admit. There are two archetypal goals in which you need to change the way you play or even think, in order to get results. Those two things are Self Improvement and Competitive Success. There is a big difference between playing to improve, and playing to win. If you want to become successful, you need to know how to improve yourself most efficiently, and you need to know how to get the right mindset to win.

Self Improvement:

Self improvement is not playing to win, and you should expect to lose a lot. Losing is fine, and you have no reason to be upset or embarassed by a loss. Frustration is understandable, but just remember that you aren't playing games to prove anything, and you aren't playing to win. You are playing to improve, so you can play to win later, when it matters.

If you lose a game, take a break, maybe get a drink, and let your mind settle on something else, then come back and watch the replay. Find out exactly what happened. Don't just look for the big obvious reason that you lost (if there is one), look for other more subtle things you could have improved upon to, perhaps things that directly lead to your defeat, or not. It's important, though, to not feel emotional or biased when watching the replay. It's also important to look at things you weren't looking at when you played the game. Don't watch the battles if you already know how they go down, or if you already know your micro is fine. Watch your production facilities. Did your macro slip? If you got hit by a surprise strategy, look at all the times you could have scouted, and try to next time.


How to improve yourself most efficiently is a subject not covered by almost any guides on SC2, or gaming in general, but is essentially the most important topic of all. Everyone learns in different ways, but there are some very important facts about the physiological way humans learn that you should know.

• Grinding out games is likely not an efficient method for you to learn the game. Learning proper macro and micro is a system that your brain has to learn to adjust to. Excepting specific build orders (which vast repetition helps to perfect), grinding out huge amounts of games as fast as possible will likely make it harder for you to learn to play. Starcraft 2 is an extremely complex game, and there is a lot of information to pick up on. You have to give your brain time to “chew on” all of the information it's taking in. This could mean a few seconds, or minutes of break after each game. It will also almost certainly mean that after every several games, you should take a significant break (an hour or so, depending person to person), or even stop for the day.
  • Personally, I have always been a grinder as far as learning a new activity. When I learned to play any game in the past, such as WoW, and when I learned to play guitar, I did it by spending many hours each day playing. This wasn't by design; I just enjoyed playing. However, when it came to SC2, my goal was to become as good as I could as efficiently as I could. What resulted was a lack of motivation to play large numbers of games, and instead focusing significant amounts of brain power to thinking about SC2 all day long, every day, even while not doing anything related to it. I'm sure you know what it's like, where a subject “feels” relevant just after doing the activity. Not specific thoughts, just a lingering feeling, all day long.
    If you can maintain this feeling, your mind will adjust to the system of macro and micro within SC2. However, practice is always vital to self improvement. The key is moderation. “Don't bite off more than you can chew”, or in this case, “Don't bite off more than your mind can process”.

• Another extremely important key to improvement is very similar to the above, and it's sleep. Sleep is what allows humans to write temporary “on the top of your head” thoughts into permanence, which is where you want it. I wouldn't advise forcing yourself to sleep when you aren't tired, but I would advise going to sleep when you are.

These things may seem a bit abstract and unrelated to the actual game, but these are real physiological mechanics to learning a new activity. Learn how your brain works and you can learn SC2 twice as quickly and efficiently as the next person.


Playing to win:


Playing to win is simple in concept: Do everything you can to maximize your chances of victory. Give yourself no arbitrary metagame rules. Nothing is “cheesy” if it makes you win. If you think it will lead to your victory, then do it. There's more to it than that though.

• Play with the right mindset. Your mental state is extremely important to your success.
  • Don't invest your emotions in the outcome of the game.
  • Don't expect to win.
  • To play at your best, you have to give up the intent or confidence to win. You must invest all of that intent and confidence in making the right decisions and playing well. You're playing to win, not playing to want to win. Victory is an abstract concept which is achieved through a combination of many other smaller goals. Intend to achieve those goals, and you will achieve victory as well.
    • You shouldn't feel happy that you've won a game; you should instead feel happy that you played well enough to succeed. The same way, you shouldn't get upset if you lose either, and instead analyze, objectively, the cause (which goes back to the improvement section).
  • Don't feel confident or unconfident about beating any given player. I don't care if you're going against the “best player” in the world. Don't let it bother you, because if you win, now you're the best player in the world. All that matters is that you play well, not you or your opponent's history.

• How to take a frustrating loss: There are two steps.
  • 1) Breathe.
  • 2) Do nothing.

• We all know what it's like to play well, feel like you did everything right, and then lose in the end anyway, after a long game. It's frustrating. However, you always lose for a good reason. Always remember that there is enough room to improve that no matter how you lost, there was a way you could have avoided it. So, when you are frustrated and have lost, just breathe and do nothing. Don't say something you will regret. Just don't act at all until you have calmed down. For some people, this happens in a fraction of a second, and for many, it can take minutes or longer to get over the frustration.
  
  Personally, years of forcing myself to think logically instead of emotionally has conditioned me to get over the frustration before I physically have a chance to speak. What it hasn't done, however, is remove the emotion. No matter who you are, the emotional effect of frustration will linger for some time and will always hurt your performance. This is an extremely important concept to accept if you want to win.
  
  Don't play while frustrated. Take a break for as long as you need, or for as long as possible, before playing the next game. You might be in a tournament, but they will give you a 5 minute break (or longer) between two games, and you should take it. You might just be playing the ladder, and there's always the urge to queue again instantly and try to avenge yourself for the loss. Don't give into this urge. The importance of this can not be overstated, as frustration almost always leads to unnecessary losses and more frustration.
  
  
  How to take an exciting win: This can be significantly harder than taking a frustrating loss. There are two steps.
  • 1) Breathe.
  • 2) Do nothing.
  Again, there is always a reason your opponent lost, and you always have room enough to improve significantly. Don't say or do anything for at least a few moments, as again, the excitement of an important victory can affect even the most disciplined of minds into taking less than optimal actions.
  This is much less obvious than with a frustrating loss, but playing immediately after an exciting victory is not a great idea. Give it at least a minute's break, so you can gather your thoughts again, and start thinking wholly objectively again, instead of thinking about how well you just played. You need to play well in the next game too, and even positive emotions will throw you off your game.
  
  Have fun. As with any activity, you have to be self motivated to improve and to succeed, otherwise it simply will not happen.
  
  

Source - www.craftingstars.com

Written and edited by Buddhist and Rainbows

Also feel free to apply to Cybernetic Punks Starcraft 2 division here

[Kreeper]

I'm going to update this continually to make it easier to read. But this is one of the best most detailed beginner guides I've ever read. Very impressive.

[BSOS]

I'm going to update this continually to make it easier to read. But this is one of the best most detailed beginner guides I've ever read. Very impressive.

agreed

[Smoov]

Very nice. Thank you. A RL friend of mine was talking about buying the strategy guide for the game. I linked him to this site, and now going to link him to this thread.

[Kreeper]

Very nice. Thank you. A RL friend of mine was talking about buying the strategy guide for the game. I linked him to this site, and now going to link him to this thread.

Yeah this is definately some good information for newer players and even more skilled.

[Buddhist]

Hey, this is Buddhist from CraftingStars. I'm happy to see you're sharing the guide, and thanks for sourcing our website! Is there any chance you could include the "Written and edited by Buddhist and Rainbows", however?

I'm glad you appreciated the guide, and I'll be keeping up with your improvements :3 gl hf

[RivaCom]

*Added =).

[Kreeper]

Hey, this is Buddhist from CraftingStars. I'm happy to see you're sharing the guide, and thanks for sourcing our website! Is there any chance you could include the "Written and edited by Buddhist and Rainbows", however?

I'm glad you appreciated the guide, and I'll be keeping up with your improvements :3 gl hf

I'd be interested in working a bit closer with you guys on some other projects for SC2 down the road once our new site gets released. I think we could possibly both help eachother.

[Hellbinn]

Sigh i suppose this guide is good for people who havent played, hehe but that bout it.