vaderseven Profile Joined September 2008 United States 2556 Posts #1 A Focused Approach to Perfecting Mechanics v1.1

Better known as that part of play that gets glossed over



Are you tired of feeling slow? Does the world of the progamer seem like a surreal and unobtainable super human world of the over practiced gamer? Wouldn't it be nice if you could break down your play in a systematic fashion and approach the game with a new mindset that allowed for a natural growth towards an inevitable goal of 300 APM / 180 eAPM play?



Yes?



Ok then. Please read on.



This guide is intended for a player who understands the basics concepts of StarCraft 2 and RTS in general. It is not about build orders or strategy and is instead about the general concept of mechanics and their use in the most correct way possible. The basic idea of this guide is learning a new method of watching your own play, comparing it to progamers, and then being able to follow simple easy steps in order to make your play more like theirs.



About Me:

+ Show Spoiler + You have probably not heard of me. I am not a pro gamer and I haven't beaten your favorite pro in a show match. I am a 17 year gamer living in upper New York. I began playing RTS several years ago in Broodwar and obtained the rather low rank of C on iCCup before StarCraft 2 came out. My approach to the game was rather different from most other players learning the game. I have always been more focused on finding an FPVOD of the most efficient pro gamers instead of a replay of the most solid build. To me, the mechanics of the game come first and the strategies and builds are a secondary result of sound logic applied to solid mechanics.



When StarCraft 2 beta began I was playing another game (HoN) and I didn't begin playing StarCraft 2 until early 2011. I choose the Zerg race rose to high Masters quickly based on my mechanics alone. As I began to face Grandmasters on the ladder I realized that the Zerg race did not offer to me what I was looking for so I changed race to Terran about 6 months ago.









Table of Contents



Part 1: Introduction and Concepts



1.1 What are mechanics?

1.2 "The Macro Cycle"

1.3 What tools do I need to improve?



Part 2: Introducing the "New" Replay



2.1 Why do we use FPVODs instead of replays?

2.2 Watching yourself

2.3 Watching progamers



Part 3: From Slow to Fast



3.1 Step 1: Should I spam and why?

3.2 Step 2: eAPM

3.3 Step 3: Execution speed and accuracy

3.4 A word on micro and its place in mechanical play



Part 4: Examples and other tid'bits.



4.1 FAQ

4.2 TL;DR Version of how to get faster!

4.3 Example VODs of myself with commentary

4.4 Streams that I recommend

4.5 FAQ



Change Log



2/25/12 - Concept and goals for guide established

3/9/12 - Version 1.0 Completed

3/15/12 - Version 1.1 Added a short mini guide [part 4.2]







Part 1 Introduction and Concepts



1.1 What are mechanics?



I assume that if you are reading a [G] thread on TeamLiquid.net that you have a mental definition of the word mechanics and how it relates to StarCraft 2. For the sake this guide, let’s pretend that you have no idea how the word applies to the game. Mechanics, in the world of the StarCraft 2 gamer, are the counterpoint to strategy. Mechanics are the sum total of your methods and ability to input actions into the game. With proper mechanics, any strategy is possible and should make sense. Without proper mechanics, some strategies will feel impossible and the game will become frustrating.



Most people will correctly associate macro, micro, and multitasking as the basic elements of mechanics. What most players will fail to do is to understand that these concepts are really one and the same when you look at the game in a proper way. Many players come close to understanding this and the very good players try to spell it out for us. The most simple way to restructure your understanding of those concepts into a singular concept is to focus in on "The Macro Cycle."



1.2 "The Macro Cycle"



You might be wondering why I am starting off with a discussion on "The Macro Cycle" instead of something like hotkeys or spam. The reason is simple. Everything about your mechanical approach to the game should begin and end with your macro cycle. Your hotkeys, where your eye's are looking, everything about how you play should be built and designed around the macro cycle first.



So, what is "The Macro Cycle"? The Macro Cycle is simply the quick check list of production and macro related commands that need to be done on a periodic cycle. For basic simple strategies the macro cycle is fairly simple. Take a the very common 1 Base 4 Warpgate build that many Protoss players know how to do. The macro cycle after the opening build order amounts to looking at their base every 20 seconds to Chronoboost warp gate research and then, once the upgrade is done, looking at their proxy pylon every time Warpgates come off cool down in order to Warp-in four more units. When the Protoss is not Chronoboosting or warping in units, he is advancing his first few units to place a proxy pylon and then microing his attack. A more complicated macro cycle would be one of a 3 base Zerg player that is trying to mass roaches. The Zerg player needs to focus on his army and then quickly zoom to each hatchery to inject larva, make sure he spends that larva on the correct amount of overlords, and spends the rest on roaches. The second example was simplified for the sake of it just being a comparison. We will go much more in depth into the finer points of how each element of macro and efficient mechanical play in Part 3. As you can infer, the better and more efficient your macro cycles are, the more complicated and interesting the pallet of strategies you are able to comfortably play will be. This is why everything begins with a focus on your macro cycle.



1.3 What tools will I need to improve?



There is several programs that you will want to have in order allow yourself to fully focus in on improving your mechanics. I will provide links to them at the end of the guide. You will need sc2gears as it is the best and most reliable replay analyzer available and can quickly show you your APM/eAPM. You will want some type of software with which you can record your screen during play. Thankfully, there is several great guides on setting up streams that can be found on TL and I will defer to them. Personally, I recommend using xsplit. It has the option to stream to a streaming website or you can just save the video as a local recording.



You should have a decent computer and a comfortable ergonomic setup. Again, the completeness of these items goes beyond the scope of this guide but it is important to mention that they are assumed to be present in order for the user to achieve a satisfying rate of growth. Ensure that have read up and understand how to ensure that your mouse and keyboard settings are correctly set. Please check the links at the end of the guide for some helpful links on how to set your mouse/keyboard up.



You need to have a good hotkey setup. You should have enough number keys devoted to army and production so that you can quickly select things in an efficient way. I suggest having at least 3 keys for your army and at least 2 for Production. You will almost certainly feel the need for more. You should be using either the base zoom key (default is backspace) or the location hotkeys (default are f5 through f8) (or both) so that you can quickly zoom to your base and manage the movement of workers. I am touching on this issue briefly at the moment. I personally feel there is plethora of good resources on this topic on TeamLiquid.net but if there is a large request for more on this subject I shall give it its own section. I feel that more detail than what I gave on the subject here tends to cross the line into strategy and becomes race specific. If you have a specific question regarding hotkeys, please feel free to ask.



The last thing you will need in your pallet of tools is access to the first person view point of pro gamers. Thankfully, we live in the era of streams. FPVODs were the holy grail of learning in StarCraft 1 and they were extremely rare and hard to find. With every other progamer streaming these days, you have access to thousands upon thousands of hours of recorded FPVODs.



Please, take note that while I mention having an ideal setup is, well, ideal, you should never allow your setup to be an excuse. I have first hand seen players that have atrocious laggy setups with broken mice and crappy keyboards play in a way that is just simply beautiful to behold. Don't allow yourself an excuse ever.







Part 2: Introducing the "New" Replay



2.1 Why do we use FPVODs instead of replays?



As we continue through this guide, and as you might have already noticed, you will see a lack of the replay. Replays are great for quickly going through a game to look at timings, the complete game state, decisions making, and finding errors in macro. They are not very useful fine tuning our mechanics. They lack one thing which is just too important: the mouse cursor. It is important that we be able to have as complete a understanding as possible as to how we are playing the game and how others are playing the game. Replays show us where we click but not what the mouse is doing at all other times. In a pinch, you can learn from watching your replays in the first person point of view but it will lack the full impact of what you are looking for. I highly recommend staying away from replays when applying the ideas of this guide and instead turn towards FPVODs whenever possible.



2.2 Watching yourself



*I thought a long time about whether to put this section (Watching Yourself) before or after the next section (Watching progamers). I have come to the conclusion that you could make an argument for either being a good place to start so I encourage you to read either section first.



So you have set up xsplit and recorded yourself playing a few games on the ladder. Great! You are ready to sit down and take a look at how you play StarCraft now. What are you watching for? To put it simply, you are watching for efficiency and/or the lack thereof. Let’s go ahead and make a list of some things to look for:



Mistakes:

Look for times when you are giving the same command several times in a row (right click spamming) (You can do this early on to help spam/warm up but only if it is not causing you to be late on whatever you are supposed to do next)

Look for times when your money floats too high or when you get supply blocked and how you deal with it (missing a macro cycle and how long this effects you)

Look for times when you are not reacting to the Minimap properly (your army or base is attacked and you do not move to handle the situation as soon as it happens)

Look for times when your mouse seems to move slowly to accomplish something that a sure and quick gesture could accomplish (a great example is when you are placing a building, was an almost instant movement and click or was it a slow drag of the building placement indicator to the desired spot?)



Nice Things:

Look for times when you look at your base right when you need to make supply, units, tech, and/or buildings and you do so in an almost instant fashion

Look for times when you give one quick sure command in an exact fashion with one click (sending a probe to scout another main should take exactly 1 right click / movement command [not 5+ which many players do])

Look for times when you react instantly to things on the Minimap



Overall:

Always be looking for how fast you are able to accomplish any given task (a macro cycle, transferring workers, etc) and pay attention to EXACTLY how you accomplish it and ask simple questions and give yourself honest answers about if it could be faster.



Now you have ID'd several things about your play from a mechanical viewpoint. What now? Make connections. Where you late on starting your Forge during a PvZ where you were going Forge Fast Expand? Why was that? Where you busy scouting and giving your scouting probe 6 right click movement commands that were basically to the same exact spot? How bout in a TvT where your minerals went above 1000. What was going on then? Where you reacting to a drop you just saw on the Minimap?



As you begin to make these associations you will be able to make logical step by step improvements to your play. You will begin to make much more precise movements of your probe during early game PvZ which will free up a few seconds of time that allows you to build that forge at the exact timing you want. You will start to automatically send forces via the Minimap to get in place to stop that other Terran's drop so that you have 2 vital seconds to drop 2 depots and start 10 more marines. Without these associations, your mechanical improvements will be of a brute force raw speed nature. This focus in on the whole picture will make it possible to improve your mechanics as an artist improves their work. You will notice that the focus in my examples was completely on fine tuning things that every player of a 'decent' (I assume that most, say, platinum players scout while doing a forge fast expand but I honestly don't know) level is doing but that most of those players are doing in a poor way. Most of the mistakes you will find are when you are doing something slow or redundant in a way that impacts the next thing that you would want to be doing. This method of watching yourself play is by the far the most efficient and honest (with yourself) way of improving that mystical skill that players call multitasking.



2.3 Watching progamers



First off, let’s be honest and clear here. Not every progamer is a progamer for the same reasons. I refuse to insult anyone that is able to take this amazingly difficult game to a level where they are making money because that would be hypocritical. With that being said, this is a guide that is focused on mechanics and improving them. There are players out there, as every race, that are horrible subpar mechanically yet are able to play at a level that earns them a living. Those players offer a player like us something else. Watch their replays/streams/vods when you want to learn about a matchup or find a new build. There is something to be said about a StarCraft 2 gamer who can win hour long games with 1/5th the APM of his opponent and suffering numerous supply blocks. Players like that are amazingly gifted. For our purposes, though, they are useless.



The first time you watch a mechanically sound player play from an FPVOD point of view you will instantly notice how fast they seem. Take a second and ask yourself why they seem so fast. The answer is because their main viewing area shifts focus from task to task or area to area very quickly. It is not unusual for a player like this to spend as little as 1 second of real time looking and acting upon something before shifting the screen to a completely new part of the map. It is downright intimidating at first. Don’t be intimidated. They are just as human as you are and the only real difference between you and them is that they have played longer with a more correct focus on their mechanics than you have. If you were given 3 years to play for a few hours a day and you had the right mindset to find and correct your mistakes you would play just like them. I don't care what your starting point is, this is a factual statement.



Now that we got past the fact that not every pro is worth watching for their mechanics and we have gotten over the awe that watching a player like IM.MVP or oGs.FIN will give you the first you see it, what should we be looking for in order to better ourselves? At the most basic level we are looking for two things. Look for those things that they execute differently than you do, and look for their overall patterns.



You will notice that progamers can place buildings instantly and accomplish amazing micro with fewer clicks. Pay attention to those things! Watch their mouse cursor move. Notice the efficiency and almost mathematical precision. Try to make quantifiable statements about their mechanics whenever possible. I can't say enough how much you should focus in on their mouse cursor (you will find that it is rare for it to stop moving, and that its movements always have logical purpose). When you watch yourself play after watching a pro with this mindset, you will be much more critical of yourself and ask much harder/honest questions such as, "Why do I watch the my entire Dropship unload and literally do nothing during that time?"



Lastly, as you watch a progamer play several games, or sometimes you can even see this in a longer macro game, you will see overall patterns in their mouse movements, macro, and spam. You can pick up very small tricks by noticing these things such as learning the meaning of a strange hotkey setup or an elegant macro cycle that allows you to maximize your multitasking. Always take at least a passing mental note of their choice of strategy as at this level of breaking down a pro's mechanics strategy and mechanics tend to meet and interact. Take special note of FPVODs where a pro does a style or build that you yourself do. You can learn an amazing amount of information on how to optimize your macro cycles and/or mechanics from such FPVODs.







Part 3: From Slow to Fast



3.1 Step 1: Should I spam and why?



If you are looking for a simple one word answer then the answer is YES. The much more important and relevant question is the why part. Spam is step 1 to becoming a fast player. You have probably read a post from a player better than you telling you that you should spam in order to get the raw speed in place and latter on that raw speed will become more and more effective. You have most likely also heard an account of a player claiming that it is easier to spam in the early game so that you don’t have to suddenly ramp up your hand speed as the mid game begins. Whether these things are 100% true or not does not matter to us. What matters to us is what will make us a fast player in the end. To this end, ask yourself one question: Can I play a 20 minute game and have sc2gears say that my raw APM was 200+ (notice that I said play, not win)? Go prove it to yourself if you only 'think' the answer is yes. If the answer is no, then you should work on spamming. Some players push this as high as 300. Do not treat the number of 200 as a hard number. There will be players that hate that sentence more than any other part of this guide but I will direct them to the goals of this guide. We are looking to create top level pro gamer mechanics in the most efficient way possible. The first step to doing this is play at a raw and mindless fast level.



A simple exercise to achieve this first important step is to simply spam your hotkeys the entire game. Try spamming your production hotkeys (456456456) constantly between every single thing you are doing or spam between a scout and a worker that is devoted to making supply (1212121212). I cannot find a fault with either of those methods (modify them to fit your hotkey setup) and if you use those ideas to achieve a raw APM of 200+ then you are doing this step correctly. Focus on this in games until you can do it effortlessly. You will reach that level faster than you think possible. It truly is not a difficult task at all to press 456 or 12. Once you reach this stage, you should feel like you are spamming too much but your APM is always decent. That’s perfect and normal. You have accomplished the first step in going from slow to fast.



3.2 Step 2: eAPM



So now you are a 200+ APM spammer and I am betting that if you check sc2gears you will notice that you are well below 100 eAPM with a redundancy of 50%+. What does this mean? It means you now have excess APM to spend. How do we figure out how to spend this APM on efficient actions instead of spam? FPVODs. Watch yourself play (see section 2.2) and break down the things you see. If you watched yourself play before reaching a fast and raw speed you might have noticed that it just look like you moved the mouse and pressed the buttons on the keyboard slower than the pros you have watched. Now you should notice that you are pressing the buttons at a fast pace but you being extremely redundant. That’s the point of step 1. It is very abstract and difficult to discuss ideas like improving hand speed to accomplish a long list of different tasks so we simplified the matter by taking hand speed out of it. Now you can watch yourself play and make simple statements such as, "Right now as I scout I am just clicking very fast with my mouse and keyboard, what I need to do is as I am scouting his base I should make a single long movement command with as few clicks as possible shortly before I hit the timing of my next building going down, this will allow me to zoom to my base via a location or base zoom hotkey, select a worker, place the building, and reselect my scout with a double tap before he has reached his destination." If your raw APM isn't at a 200+ level, statements like that will lead to situations where you feel like your hands are not moving fast enough to do what you are trying to do. With the raw APM you should have found through spamming, your hands should be used to thinking at a much faster pace or beat.



I encourage you to have friends that you know are better than you or at least at your level to watch your FPVODs or stream and to take note of when you could be doing something else. Tell them to watch for times when you are spamming instead of doing an important task or for times when you are simply watching the screen when something needs to be done.



I also recommend that you keep watching FPVODs/Streams of high level players to keep fresh in your mind at all times the look that you are trying to achieve. The more you watch yourself during this step the more you will become aware of very easy to fix issues within your play.



This is the mechanical stage of improvement where your macro will begin to become much more solid than the average diamond or masters level player. Do not be surprised if your map awareness and crisis management seem to suffer as you correct all these issues.



3.3 Step 3: Execution speed and accuracy



At this point, your APM might or might not have dropped off a bit from where it started at Step 2. That really shouldn’t matter. If you have made your hands able to input commands at the necessary raw speed and you have gained the analytical ability to watch your own play and ID times when you should be more efficient with your allocation of APM you have succeeded with everything this guide has intended for you to attempt up to this point. Now we can talk about accuracy and execution speed.



Lets approach this step via an example question. What is the most efficient and least click intensive way to create one Supply Depot? Let’s leave how you center the screen on the desired area out of it because there is more than one correct answer for that. The answer is three clicks and four keyboard buttons. You should click on the SCV, press B, press S, click exactly where the Depot should be placed, press your keyboard command that will recenter the screen on a mineral line, press and hold shift, right click a mineral patch, and release shift. This should be done extremely quickly and above all else accurately. If it takes you more than one click to select the SCV or if you are having to make a box to select the SCV you are doing it wrong. Take pride in being able to click precisely and accurately. If you are have to make more than one click as you send the SCV back to mine because you missed that mineral patch by just a small amount then you are doing it wrong.



Now the point of that example question is to point out the attitude and desires you should have as you do tasks. You want swift, straight movements of the mouse cursor going to the correct location desired at all times. You will most likely find this difficult to accomplish when you first focus on it. Find ways to practice it all times. You will often see people spamming boxes at he start of a match or even at intervals throughout the match. Take note of how progamers, when they do this, always box specific sizes or locations. They are constantly practicing mouse accuracy. You might see them box over and over the workers that are mining minerals with the a box that barely contains each mineral patch, every probe, and does not actually contain their Hatchery, Command Center, or Nexus. You might see pro players spam the rally command between several different mineral patches very quickly even though they have a specific patch they will eventually send the worker to. When they do things like this, they are practicing the basics of mouse accuracy. I highly recommend useful spam such as this especially early in a game as it helps to refresh how your interface works on a very precise level. Some players recommend flash games such as Mission Red or mouse music games such as Osu to help improve accuracy. I cannot comment on the success or failure of such methods of training but they can be fun benchmarks to check your progress with mouse accuracy.



As you get more and more accurate and efficient in your movements, you will find you gain less and less from watching your own FPVODs. This happens because your sense of awareness and speed have finally tuned into the interface and pace of the game. At this point you should still focus on watching other pro gamers FPVODs/Streams as they might show you ideas or concepts that you were not aware of but you will usually gain very little from watching your own FPVODs. When you reach this level, please give me a shout out when Tasteless and Artosis interview you after your first GSL Code S run.



3.4 A word on micro and its place in mechanical play



You will notice that many players are able to macro with ease up till the point that they actually have to handle a situation where they need to micro. Maybe that’s one thing that you even noticed in your own play. This is a special and important topic and deserves a separation from the other steps. The entire issue can be summed up as the key to being able to win very hard micro fights, especially in the later parts of the game, is a fast and precise macro cycle.



A basic requirement for you to micro while playing a solid mechanical style is that you have to be comfortable with the style you are doing to a point where you can hit every timing of your build and you are not ever looking at the screen and thinking to yourself, “What’s the next step again?” If you are not at that point just go grind out your build in whatever preferred setting you best learn a build order in. Once you are at that point you can begin to focus on your army.



From a purely logical standpoint, the most effective way to control your units would be for you to look at them 100% of the time. As you probably know, this is not possible in practice because it would preclude every macroing at home. The next best thing compared to this ideal control situation would be to only look away from your army when it is safe to do so. This is why we work with the concept of a macro cycle. Ideally, you should be able to shift your focus back home to make supply, make buildings, use you macro mechanics, start upgrades, and anything else that must be done with the focus of the main screen in a quick and efficient series of commands that totals around one to two seconds. During those brief seconds you should glance at the Minimap at every single point possible to ensure nothing unexpected is happening to your army. As you master this idea, you will find that your overall awareness of the game will increase dramatically. You will be surprised by drops less often, your late game army will never be out of position, and your macro will seem to flow on its own accord.



One smart idea you will see some pro gamers do is that they will give their army a command that moves it towards a safe direction, go do their macro cycle, and then go back to their army and re-advance the quarter to half screen their units had moved. The concept at play here is that you never want your units to be unmicro’d during a battle while still never missing a macro cycle. The bigger and larger the battle, the more important this concept is. If you lose 100 food because you were making depots, you need to really pay more attention to your army and make sure it is safe and not fighting as you make depots. If it’s an early game battle with two zealots harassing two marauders, both players should feel like they can afford to very quickly jump out of the battle to make a supply building.







Part 4: Examples and other tid'bits.



4.1 FAQ



COMING SOON.



4.2 TL;DR of the process to get faster



Here is a shortened version of the basic premise of this guide:



1. Watch Yourself

2. ID a mistake or something that you want to improve. Be EXTREMELY specific.

3. Try to play a game where you focus on that alot.

4. Watch the game you did where you tried to improve it.

5. Watch Streams/FPVODs of pros and pay attention to how they do said thing.

6. Play more games where you work on said thing.

7. I suggest focusing on an item for 1-3 days and then moving on to another item. Play a good 5+ games each day and try to watch at least 2-3 of them.



The part that people make a mistake with is #2. They often say "I will macro harder," or "Next game I will keep my money lower."



These aren't specific enough!



Good example things to work on:



1. I will use the fkeys every time I look at one of my bases.

2. I will not watch workers cross the screen as my money reaches the amount needed to make a building.

3. I will use less redundant right clicks when moving units.

4. I will spam more.

5. I will place buildings faster.

6. I will place down Gateways #7-9 as my first Colossus comes out.

7. I will be more active with my obs and try to look at each obs and move it every time I do a warpin.

8. Everytime I warp units in, I will look at the mini map very quickly and then build pylons.

9. I will mouse scroll less and click the minimap more.

10. I will pay attention to my unit that is holding that watch tower and not let it die. If it dies, I will start zooming to it as part of my spam so that I get used to being aware of it.

11. As I spam boxes early game, I will try to click on my gas after each box so that I am ensuring accurate hand eye coordination.

12. When I shift que workers back to minerals, I will be more accurate.

13. If I mis que a worker and miss the mineral patch, I will go do one other action (look at scout for instance) so that I am not starting at the worker as it moves to make the building before I am able to correct the que back to minerals.



These are things you should be taking from you fpvods. Super small but very easy to ID and correct and think about. If you can imagine the problem in its entirety and imagine a solution then you can focus on it. If all you can do is see a vague 'problem' and have a vague 'desire for less of a problem' then you can not correct it. The human mind works in logic and exact goals, not in magic and hope.



4.3 Example VODs of myself with commentary



For now I will be sharing two commentated replays.



http://www.4shared.com/video/8jBfgO2V/2012-03-04_151257767.html

http://www.4shared.com/video/25SOGREM/2012-03-03_095108781.html



There will be more added to this section in the future.



You can also check me out at



4.4 Streams that I recommend



Terran:

http://www.own3d.tv/live/172637/oGsForGG

http://www.twitch.tv/demuslim

http://ko.twitch.tv/coL_Heart

http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/KawaiiRice

http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/GosI[Terran]

http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/ST_Bomber



Zerg:

http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/Sen

(he sometimes plays TvZ as well)

http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/Stephano

http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/IdrA



Protoss:

http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/HuK

http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/oGsVINES

http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/Liquid`HerO



That’s far from a complete list of streamers that are going to be good to watch for solid mechanical play but it should get you started in finding more. They will at the very least show you what you should be looking for.



4.5 Links for additional learning



Some of these aren’t on mechanics but deserve a mention.



(Better Mouse Precision Windows Tweak.)

Are you tired of feeling slow? Does the world of the progamer seem like a surreal and unobtainable super human world of the over practiced gamer? Wouldn't it be nice if you could break down your play in a systematic fashion and approach the game with a new mindset that allowed for a natural growth towards an inevitable goal of 300 APM / 180 eAPM play?Yes?Ok then. Please read on.This guide is intended for a player who understands the basics concepts of StarCraft 2 and RTS in general. It is not about build orders or strategy and is instead about the general concept of mechanics and their use in the most correct way possible. The basic idea of this guide is learning a new method of watching your own play, comparing it to progamers, and then being able to follow simple easy steps in order to make your play more like theirs.I assume that if you are reading a [G] thread on TeamLiquid.net that you have a mental definition of the word mechanics and how it relates to StarCraft 2. For the sake this guide, let’s pretend that you have no idea how the word applies to the game. Mechanics, in the world of the StarCraft 2 gamer, are the counterpoint to strategy. Mechanics are the sum total of your methods and ability to input actions into the game. With proper mechanics, any strategy is possible and should make sense. Without proper mechanics, some strategies will feel impossible and the game will become frustrating.Most people will correctly associate macro, micro, and multitasking as the basic elements of mechanics. What most players will fail to do is to understand that these concepts are really one and the same when you look at the game in a proper way. Many players come close to understanding this and the very good players try to spell it out for us. The most simple way to restructure your understanding of those concepts into a singular concept is to focus in on "The Macro Cycle."You might be wondering why I am starting off with a discussion on "The Macro Cycle" instead of something like hotkeys or spam. The reason is simple. Everything about your mechanical approach to the game should begin and end with your macro cycle. Your hotkeys, where your eye's are looking, everything about how you play should be built and designed around the macro cycle first.So, what is "The Macro Cycle"? The Macro Cycle is simply the quick check list of production and macro related commands that need to be done on a periodic cycle. For basic simple strategies the macro cycle is fairly simple. Take a the very common 1 Base 4 Warpgate build that many Protoss players know how to do. The macro cycle after the opening build order amounts to looking at their base every 20 seconds to Chronoboost warp gate research and then, once the upgrade is done, looking at their proxy pylon every time Warpgates come off cool down in order to Warp-in four more units. When the Protoss is not Chronoboosting or warping in units, he is advancing his first few units to place a proxy pylon and then microing his attack. A more complicated macro cycle would be one of a 3 base Zerg player that is trying to mass roaches. The Zerg player needs to focus on his army and then quickly zoom to each hatchery to inject larva, make sure he spends that larva on the correct amount of overlords, and spends the rest on roaches. The second example was simplified for the sake of it just being a comparison. We will go much more in depth into the finer points of how each element of macro and efficient mechanical play in Part 3. As you can infer, the better and more efficient your macro cycles are, the more complicated and interesting the pallet of strategies you are able to comfortably play will be. This is why everything begins with a focus on your macro cycle.There is several programs that you will want to have in order allow yourself to fully focus in on improving your mechanics. I will provide links to them at the end of the guide. You will need sc2gears as it is the best and most reliable replay analyzer available and can quickly show you your APM/eAPM. You will want some type of software with which you can record your screen during play. Thankfully, there is several great guides on setting up streams that can be found on TL and I will defer to them. Personally, I recommend using xsplit. It has the option to stream to a streaming website or you can just save the video as a local recording.You should have a decent computer and a comfortable ergonomic setup. Again, the completeness of these items goes beyond the scope of this guide but it is important to mention that they are assumed to be present in order for the user to achieve a satisfying rate of growth. Ensure that have read up and understand how to ensure that your mouse and keyboard settings are correctly set. Please check the links at the end of the guide for some helpful links on how to set your mouse/keyboard up.You need to have a good hotkey setup. You should have enough number keys devoted to army and production so that you can quickly select things in an efficient way. I suggest having at least 3 keys for your army and at least 2 for Production. You will almost certainly feel the need for more. You should be using either the base zoom key (default is backspace) or the location hotkeys (default are f5 through f8) (or both) so that you can quickly zoom to your base and manage the movement of workers. I am touching on this issue briefly at the moment. I personally feel there is plethora of good resources on this topic on TeamLiquid.net but if there is a large request for more on this subject I shall give it its own section. I feel that more detail than what I gave on the subject here tends to cross the line into strategy and becomes race specific. If you have a specific question regarding hotkeys, please feel free to ask.The last thing you will need in your pallet of tools is access to the first person view point of pro gamers. Thankfully, we live in the era of streams. FPVODs were the holy grail of learning in StarCraft 1 and they were extremely rare and hard to find. With every other progamer streaming these days, you have access to thousands upon thousands of hours of recorded FPVODs.Please, take note that while I mention having an ideal setup is, well, ideal, you should never allow your setup to be an excuse. I have first hand seen players that have atrocious laggy setups with broken mice and crappy keyboards play in a way that is just simply beautiful to behold. Don't allow yourself an excuse ever.As we continue through this guide, and as you might have already noticed, you will see a lack of the replay. Replays are great for quickly going through a game to look at timings, the complete game state, decisions making, and finding errors in macro. They are not very useful fine tuning our mechanics. They lack one thing which is just too important: the mouse cursor. It is important that we be able to have as complete a understanding as possible as to how we are playing the game and how others are playing the game. Replays show us where we click but not what the mouse is doing at all other times. In a pinch, you can learn from watching your replays in the first person point of view but it will lack the full impact of what you are looking for. I highly recommend staying away from replays when applying the ideas of this guide and instead turn towards FPVODs whenever possible.*I thought a long time about whether to put this section (Watching Yourself) before or after the next section (Watching progamers). I have come to the conclusion that you could make an argument for either being a good place to start so I encourage you to read either section first.So you have set up xsplit and recorded yourself playing a few games on the ladder. Great! You are ready to sit down and take a look at how you play StarCraft now. What are you watching for? To put it simply, you are watching for efficiency and/or the lack thereof. Let’s go ahead and make a list of some things to look for:Mistakes:Look for times when you are giving the same command several times in a row (right click spamming) (You can do this early on to help spam/warm up but only if it is not causing you to be late on whatever you are supposed to do next)Look for times when your money floats too high or when you get supply blocked and how you deal with it (missing a macro cycle and how long this effects you)Look for times when you are not reacting to the Minimap properly (your army or base is attacked and you do not move to handle the situation as soon as it happens)Look for times when your mouse seems to move slowly to accomplish something that a sure and quick gesture could accomplish (a great example is when you are placing a building, was an almost instant movement and click or was it a slow drag of the building placement indicator to the desired spot?)Nice Things:Look for times when you look at your base right when you need to make supply, units, tech, and/or buildings and you do so in an almost instant fashionLook for times when you give one quick sure command in an exact fashion with one click (sending a probe to scout another main should take exactly 1 right click / movement command [not 5+ which many players do])Look for times when you react instantly to things on the MinimapOverall:Always be looking for how fast you are able to accomplish any given task (a macro cycle, transferring workers, etc) and pay attention to EXACTLY how you accomplish it and ask simple questions and give yourself honest answers about if it could be faster.Now you have ID'd several things about your play from a mechanical viewpoint. What now? Make connections. Where you late on starting your Forge during a PvZ where you were going Forge Fast Expand? Why was that? Where you busy scouting and giving your scouting probe 6 right click movement commands that were basically to the same exact spot? How bout in a TvT where your minerals went above 1000. What was going on then? Where you reacting to a drop you just saw on the Minimap?As you begin to make these associations you will be able to make logical step by step improvements to your play. You will begin to make much more precise movements of your probe during early game PvZ which will free up a few seconds of time that allows you to build that forge at the exact timing you want. You will start to automatically send forces via the Minimap to get in place to stop that other Terran's drop so that you have 2 vital seconds to drop 2 depots and start 10 more marines. Without these associations, your mechanical improvements will be of a brute force raw speed nature. This focus in on the whole picture will make it possible to improve your mechanics as an artist improves their work. You will notice that the focus in my examples was completely on fine tuning things that every player of a 'decent' (I assume that most, say, platinum players scout while doing a forge fast expand but I honestly don't know) level is doing but that most of those players are doing in a poor way. Most of the mistakes you will find are when you are doing something slow or redundant in a way that impacts the next thing that you would want to be doing. This method of watching yourself play is by the far the most efficient and honest (with yourself) way of improving that mystical skill that players call multitasking.First off, let’s be honest and clear here. Not every progamer is a progamer for the same reasons. I refuse to insult anyone that is able to take this amazingly difficult game to a level where they are making money because that would be hypocritical. With that being said, this is a guide that is focused on mechanics and improving them. There are players out there, as every race, that are horrible subpar mechanically yet are able to play at a level thatthem a living. Those players offer a player like us something else. Watch their replays/streams/vods when you want to learn about a matchup or find a new build. There is something to be said about a StarCraft 2 gamer who can win hour long games with 1/5th the APM of his opponent and suffering numerous supply blocks. Players like that are amazingly gifted. For our purposes, though, they are useless.The first time you watch a mechanically sound player play from an FPVOD point of view you will instantly notice how fast they seem. Take a second and ask yourself why they seem so fast. The answer is because their main viewing area shifts focus from task to task or area to area very quickly. It is not unusual for a player like this to spend as little as 1 second of real time looking and acting upon something before shifting the screen to a completely new part of the map. It is downright intimidating at first. Don’t be intimidated. They are just as human as you are and the only real difference between you and them is that they have played longer with a more correct focus on their mechanics than you have. If you were given 3 years to play for a few hours a day and you had the right mindset to find and correct your mistakes you would play just like them. I don't care what your starting point is, this is a factual statement.Now that we got past the fact that not every pro is worth watching for their mechanics and we have gotten over the awe that watching a player like IM.MVP or oGs.FIN will give you the first you see it, what should we be looking for in order to better ourselves? At the most basic level we are looking for two things. Look for those things that they execute differently than you do, and look for their overall patterns.You will notice that progamers can place buildings instantly and accomplish amazing micro with fewer clicks. Pay attention to those things! Watch their mouse cursor move. Notice the efficiency and almost mathematical precision. Try to make quantifiable statements about their mechanics whenever possible. I can't say enough how much you should focus in on their mouse cursor (you will find that it is rare for it to stop moving, and that its movements always have logical purpose). When you watch yourself play after watching a pro with this mindset, you will be much more critical of yourself and ask much harder/honest questions such as, "Why do I watch the my entire Dropship unload and literally do nothing during that time?"Lastly, as you watch a progamer play several games, or sometimes you can even see this in a longer macro game, you will see overall patterns in their mouse movements, macro, and spam. You can pick up very small tricks by noticing these things such as learning the meaning of a strange hotkey setup or an elegant macro cycle that allows you to maximize your multitasking. Always take at least a passing mental note of their choice of strategy as at this level of breaking down a pro's mechanics strategy and mechanics tend to meet and interact. Take special note of FPVODs where a pro does a style or build that you yourself do. You can learn an amazing amount of information on how to optimize your macro cycles and/or mechanics from such FPVODs.If you are looking for a simple one word answer then the answer is YES. The much more important and relevant question is the why part. Spam is step 1 to becoming a fast player. You have probably read a post from a player better than you telling you that you should spam in order to get the raw speed in place and latter on that raw speed will become more and more effective. You have most likely also heard an account of a player claiming that it is easier to spam in the early game so that you don’t have to suddenly ramp up your hand speed as the mid game begins. Whether these things are 100% true or not does not matter to us. What matters to us is what will make us a fast player in the end. To this end, ask yourself one question: Can I play a 20 minute game and have sc2gears say that my raw APM was 200+ (notice that I said play, not win)? Go prove it to yourself if you only 'think' the answer is yes. If the answer is no, then you should work on spamming. Some players push this as high as 300. Do not treat the number of 200 as a hard number. There will be players that hate that sentence more than any other part of this guide but I will direct them to the goals of this guide. We are looking to create top level pro gamer mechanics in the most efficient way possible. The first step to doing this is play at a raw and mindless fast level.A simple exercise to achieve this first important step is to simply spam your hotkeys the entire game. Try spamming your production hotkeys (456456456) constantly between every single thing you are doing or spam between a scout and a worker that is devoted to making supply (1212121212). I cannot find a fault with either of those methods (modify them to fit your hotkey setup) and if you use those ideas to achieve a raw APM of 200+ then you are doing this step correctly. Focus on this in games until you can do it effortlessly. You will reach that level faster than you think possible. It truly is not a difficult task at all to press 456 or 12. Once you reach this stage, you should feel like you are spamming too much but your APM is always decent. That’s perfect and normal. You have accomplished the first step in going from slow to fast.So now you are a 200+ APM spammer and I am betting that if you check sc2gears you will notice that you are well below 100 eAPM with a redundancy of 50%+. What does this mean? It means you now have excess APM to spend. How do we figure out how to spend this APM on efficient actions instead of spam? FPVODs. Watch yourself play (see section 2.2) and break down the things you see. If you watched yourself play before reaching a fast and raw speed you might have noticed that it just look like you moved the mouse and pressed the buttons on the keyboard slower than the pros you have watched. Now you should notice that you are pressing the buttons at a fast pace but you being extremely redundant. That’s the point of step 1. It is very abstract and difficult to discuss ideas like improving hand speed to accomplish a long list of different tasks so we simplified the matter by taking hand speed out of it. Now you can watch yourself play and make simple statements such as, "Right now as I scout I am just clicking very fast with my mouse and keyboard, what I need to do is as I am scouting his base I should make a single long movement command with as few clicks as possible shortly before I hit the timing of my next building going down, this will allow me to zoom to my base via a location or base zoom hotkey, select a worker, place the building, and reselect my scout with a double tap before he has reached his destination." If your raw APM isn't at a 200+ level, statements like that will lead to situations where you feel like your hands are not moving fast enough to do what you are trying to do. With the raw APM you should have found through spamming, your hands should be used to thinking at a much faster pace or beat.I encourage you to have friends that you know are better than you or at least at your level to watch your FPVODs or stream and to take note of when you could be doing something else. Tell them to watch for times when you are spamming instead of doing an important task or for times when you are simply watching the screen when something needs to be done.I also recommend that you keep watching FPVODs/Streams of high level players to keep fresh in your mind at all times the look that you are trying to achieve. The more you watch yourself during this step the more you will become aware of very easy to fix issues within your play.This is the mechanical stage of improvement where your macro will begin to become much more solid than the average diamond or masters level player. Do not be surprised if your map awareness and crisis management seem to suffer as you correct all these issues.At this point, your APM might or might not have dropped off a bit from where it started at Step 2. That really shouldn’t matter. If you have made your hands able to input commands at the necessary raw speed and you have gained the analytical ability to watch your own play and ID times when you should be more efficient with your allocation of APM you have succeeded with everything this guide has intended for you to attempt up to this point. Now we can talk about accuracy and execution speed.Lets approach this step via an example question. What is the most efficient and least click intensive way to create one Supply Depot? Let’s leave how you center the screen on the desired area out of it because there is more than one correct answer for that. The answer is three clicks and four keyboard buttons. You should click on the SCV, press B, press S, click exactly where the Depot should be placed, press your keyboard command that will recenter the screen on a mineral line, press and hold shift, right click a mineral patch, and release shift. This should be done extremely quickly and above all else accurately. If it takes you more than one click to select the SCV or if you are having to make a box to select the SCV you are doing it wrong. Take pride in being able to click precisely and accurately. If you are have to make more than one click as you send the SCV back to mine because you missed that mineral patch by just a small amount then you are doing it wrong.Now the point of that example question is to point out the attitude and desires you should have as you do tasks. You want swift, straight movements of the mouse cursor going to the correct location desired at all times. You will most likely find this difficult to accomplish when you first focus on it. Find ways to practice it all times. You will often see people spamming boxes at he start of a match or even at intervals throughout the match. Take note of how progamers, when they do this, always box specific sizes or locations. They are constantly practicing mouse accuracy. You might see them box over and over the workers that are mining minerals with the a box that barely contains each mineral patch, every probe, and does not actually contain their Hatchery, Command Center, or Nexus. You might see pro players spam the rally command between several different mineral patches very quickly even though they have a specific patch they will eventually send the worker to. When they do things like this, they are practicing the basics of mouse accuracy. I highly recommend useful spam such as this especially early in a game as it helps to refresh how your interface works on a very precise level. Some players recommend flash games such as Mission Red or mouse music games such as Osu to help improve accuracy. I cannot comment on the success or failure of such methods of training but they can be fun benchmarks to check your progress with mouse accuracy.As you get more and more accurate and efficient in your movements, you will find you gain less and less from watching your own FPVODs. This happens because your sense of awareness and speed have finally tuned into the interface and pace of the game. At this point you should still focus on watching other pro gamers FPVODs/Streams as they might show you ideas or concepts that you were not aware of but you will usually gain very little from watching your own FPVODs. When you reach this level, please give me a shout out when Tasteless and Artosis interview you after your first GSL Code S run.You will notice that many players are able to macro with ease up till the point that they actually have to handle a situation where they need to micro. Maybe that’s one thing that you even noticed in your own play. This is a special and important topic and deserves a separation from the other steps. The entire issue can be summed up as the key to being able to win very hard micro fights, especially in the later parts of the game, is a fast and precise macro cycle.A basic requirement for you to micro while playing a solid mechanical style is that you have to be comfortable with the style you are doing to a point where you can hit every timing of your build and you are not ever looking at the screen and thinking to yourself, “What’s the next step again?” If you are not at that point just go grind out your build in whatever preferred setting you best learn a build order in. Once you are at that point you can begin to focus on your army.From a purely logical standpoint, the most effective way to control your units would be for you to look at them 100% of the time. As you probably know, this is not possible in practice because it would preclude every macroing at home. The next best thing compared to this ideal control situation would be to only look away from your army when it is safe to do so. This is why we work with the concept of a macro cycle. Ideally, you should be able to shift your focus back home to make supply, make buildings, use you macro mechanics, start upgrades, and anything else that must be done with the focus of the main screen in a quick and efficient series of commands that totals around one to two seconds. During those brief seconds you should glance at the Minimap at every single point possible to ensure nothing unexpected is happening to your army. As you master this idea, you will find that your overall awareness of the game will increase dramatically. You will be surprised by drops less often, your late game army will never be out of position, and your macro will seem to flow on its own accord.One smart idea you will see some pro gamers do is that they will give their army a command that moves it towards a safe direction, go do their macro cycle, and then go back to their army and re-advance the quarter to half screen their units had moved. The concept at play here is that you never want your units to be unmicro’d during a battle while still never missing a macro cycle. The bigger and larger the battle, the more important this concept is. If you lose 100 food because you were making depots, you need to really pay more attention to your army and make sure it is safe and not fighting as you make depots. If it’s an early game battle with two zealots harassing two marauders, both players should feel like they can afford to very quickly jump out of the battle to make a supply building.COMING SOON.Here is a shortened version of the basic premise of this guide:1. Watch Yourself2. ID a mistake or something that you want to improve. Be EXTREMELY specific.3. Try to play a game where you focus on that alot.4. Watch the game you did where you tried to improve it.5. Watch Streams/FPVODs of pros and pay attention to how they do said thing.6. Play more games where you work on said thing.7. I suggest focusing on an item for 1-3 days and then moving on to another item. Play a good 5+ games each day and try to watch at least 2-3 of them.The part that people make a mistake with is #2. They often say "I will macro harder," or "Next game I will keep my money lower."These aren't specific enough!Good example things to work on:1. I will use the fkeys every time I look at one of my bases.2. I will not watch workers cross the screen as my money reaches the amount needed to make a building.3. I will use less redundant right clicks when moving units.4. I will spam more.5. I will place buildings faster.6. I will place down Gateways #7-9 as my first Colossus comes out.7. I will be more active with my obs and try to look at each obs and move it every time I do a warpin.8. Everytime I warp units in, I will look at the mini map very quickly and then build pylons.9. I will mouse scroll less and click the minimap more.10. I will pay attention to my unit that is holding that watch tower and not let it die. If it dies, I will start zooming to it as part of my spam so that I get used to being aware of it.11. As I spam boxes early game, I will try to click on my gas after each box so that I am ensuring accurate hand eye coordination.12. When I shift que workers back to minerals, I will be more accurate.13. If I mis que a worker and miss the mineral patch, I will go do one other action (look at scout for instance) so that I am not starting at the worker as it moves to make the building before I am able to correct the que back to minerals.These are things you should be taking from you fpvods. Super small but very easy to ID and correct and think about. If you can imagine the problem in its entirety and imagine a solution then you can focus on it. If all you can do is see a vague 'problem' and have a vague 'desire for less of a problem' then you can not correct it. The human mind works in logic and exact goals, not in magic and hope.For now I will be sharing two commentated replays.There will be more added to this section in the future.You can also check me out at www.twitch.tv/Racenilatr and chat with me in the chat as I stream and I can show or demonstrate various concepts or learning ideas.Terran:Zerg: http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/MorroW (he sometimes plays TvZ as well)Protoss:That’s far from a complete list of streamers that are going to be good to watch for solid mechanical play but it should get you started in finding more. They will at the very least show you what you should be looking for.Some of these aren’t on mechanics but deserve a mention. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=299316 (Better Mouse Precision Windows Tweak.) (Day9 daily on mechanics, decent stuff.)

(Mouse accuracy game.)

(Thread on RSI prevention and treatment, good mechanics shouldn’t lead here but going here and reading on ergonomics and prevention will help make sure of that.)

(CecilSunkure’s Guide on how to Improve; check here if there is a basic question such as hotkey setup or basic concepts.)

(Ver’s guide on improving at StarCraft 1. A guide that is focused on learning strategy through mainaly FPVODs. A must read.)

(Plexa’s guide on how to look at your replays and figure out why the game played out like it did.)

(infinity21’s guide on developing a build order. Good read for developing your own decisions and builds.)



I hope this guide was of help to you in learning a new approach to mechanics. I truly believe that some of the concepts I present in here will be new to most of you because I simply have never seen this approach documented before. Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, do not hesitate to post!



I would like to extend a huge and heartfelt thanks to my friend, VaderSeven. Vader took hours of his own time to take the concepts and ideas that I have and to put words to them. He wrote the actual words you just read and deserves credit for that hard work. Thank you. I could not have done this without him. (Day9 daily on mechanics, decent stuff.) www.missionred.com/ (Mouse accuracy game.) http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=134466 (Thread on RSI prevention and treatment, good mechanics shouldn’t lead here but going here and reading on ergonomics and prevention will help make sure of that.) http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=208343 (CecilSunkure’s Guide on how to Improve; check here if there is a basic question such as hotkey setup or basic concepts.) http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=135766 (Ver’s guide on improving at StarCraft 1. A guide that is focused on learning strategy through mainaly FPVODs. A must read.) http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=195389 (Plexa’s guide on how to look at your replays and figure out why the game played out like it did.) http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=202592 (infinity21’s guide on developing a build order. Good read for developing your own decisions and builds.)