You don’t build stuff like this just because it looks cool.

There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.

It’s tempting to get ahead of ourselves. It’s why folks rack up debt.

In the context of StarCraft 2, though, you may begin to think that what you’re doing in the process of learning macro skills is boring. You see live casts and replays of pro gamers, seeing the builds they use very effectively. You want to do the same, because they win and because it’s more interesting than what you need to do to build fundamental skills.

Stop that.

I humbly refer you back to these two entries in which I talk about what you should be building and how often you should be spending your resources. If you do this, over and over again until at least a couple promotions have gone by, you’ll be laying a stronger foundation for pulling off those daring gambits you see the pros execute. If you focus instead on some other strategy, you may get past Bronze or even Silver, but the higher ranks are going to be more of a frustration. Experienced players are already well-prepared for your cheese.

So you’re building basic units, builders and the means to keep building both. What do you do with them, though? Should they stand around your base protecting your pretty buildings? It can be an effective defense, sure, and if you want to play that way, go for it.

In my humble opinion, however, the quickest way to end the fight is through direct, uncompromised aggression.

As long as your production buildings are humming along and churning out more units, there’s no reason not to send the bulk of the units you’ve already built up your opponent’s ramp. Especially in, say, the first six minutes of the game. Before they can reasonably get any sort of high-tech response mounted, you should make them spend their resources on replacing whatever you manage to destroy. You can’t do that staying at home.

Now, I’m not saying you should follow every move your units make. At low levels, micro-management isn’t nearly as important as macro skills. But if your forces manage to past their defenses, there’s no reason not to direct them to the mineral line. Be it in their starting base or an expansion, blasting workers slows down their economy and is annoying as hell. While they recover their lost time and units, you’re building away for an even bigger assault.

Worried they’ll do the same? You should be. But if you’re building as much as you should, constantly producing units and ensuring you have enough food for everybody, the assaults your opponent mount in response should not do a great deal of damage. You might lose a few units but you have more on the way.

If your opponent gets behind you with air units or some sort of stealth attack, chances are you haven’t been attacking enough. It takes time to get air units, time you could be spending sending ever-growing waves of basic infantry against them to distract, harass, inhibit and destroy.

Sure, you’ll play the occasional hour-long macro game, with top-tier units slugging it out while you trade bases. But you learn little from such experiences. Quick wins, and quick losses as well, teach us a lot more about the strengths and weaknesses in our styles of play. Learn these lessons well, refine your style as much as possible, and just keep building and attacking.

It’s the advice I’ve gotten and am trying to follow. I’m sure it’ll get me out of Bronze league.

Someday. Hopefully before Heart of the Swarm gets here.

Choose your moves carefully.

To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.

It’s difficult not to panic when you’re being shot at.

It may seem an obvious statement, and I don’t wish to downplay the severity of real-world situations in which soldiers, police officers and the occasional innocent bystander find themselves involving supersonic hunks of metal flying at them. But as StarCraft 2 is a wargame, and wars involve combat, it’s important to remember that combat is going to happen at times inconvenient for you. When our operations get interrupted in real life, we get annoyed. When it happens in a competitive situation, we can get nervous. And when it happens in ways that involve fire and blood, we can panic.

It takes practice, but you can work to downplay this natural reaction, to channel that nervous energy into productive activities. I’m not going to claim to be an expert on this, but there are steps I’ve taken to minimize the impact of the enemy’s plans upon mine, anticipating his moves and doing useful things as much as possible.

Know It’ll Happen

You’re going to get attacked. Things you build will blow up. Your troops are going to die.

It happens all the time. As Terran playing Protoss or Zerg, it’s common to wall off your ramp with a couple Depots and a Barracks. If the alien player’s on the ball, some basic units are going to run up the ramp and start taking shots at your buildings. Depending on your rate of production, you may only have a couple of Marines to defend. It’s a situation that’s bound to happen, so anticipate it if you can.

Likewise, when you gather up enough forces to send against your opponent, they might be ready for it. You might be able to scout them, using scans or spies, and build an appropriate response, but you might get attacked yourself in the meantime. Either way, if you anticipate potentially negative outcomes to your actions, their impact will be less shocking.

So if these things are going to happen, how can we prepare and respond?

Gather Intelligence

From the basic builder scout at the start of the game to the cloaked unit just outside the opponent’s front door keeping an eye on his massive forces, intelligence is essential to anticipating what’s coming next. A Drone, Probe or SCV zipping around the opposing opening base can give you an inkling as to what they’re thinking, and if you tech your way to a cloaked spy or use another, less costly means of observation (a Supply Depot on high ground for example), you can see attacks coming a mile away.

As your play improves you can also use this to your advantage. If your opponent zips into your base and sees you going for a particular build, don’t be afraid to change gears on him. And if you attack with a specific unit or group of units and he musters a defense in response, shift to a different type of unit or attack to render his intelligence moot.

Maintain Production

This goes back into the basics I’ve addressed previously. Always be building something. New means of maintaining your army’s supply, tech for your units and new supplements to your existing forces are all good things to invest in. As your macro skills grow, you will find it easier to do this even in the middle of battle.

An exercise I recommend that helped my macro skills greatly isn’t necessarily a winning one, but it might surprise you. Practice hotkeying your buildings and switching between them to check your status, and when you attack, use the minimap without watching the fight. I know, it’ll be more difficult to see and anticipate what your opponent is doing which directly contradicts what I said in the previous section, but bear with me. Hotkey your main base and production buildings (I put my Command Centers on 4 and Barracks on 5), switch between them and keep pumping out your basic units. When you feel you have an adequate number, for example with your first 4 Marines, use your minimap to A-move your forces to the enemy base.

As they move out, stay focused on your base. Keep producing units even when your expeditionary force comes under attack. Chances are, by the time the last one has expired, you’ve built twice as many troops. Send those. Keep building and expanding, again, without watching the battles. Attack, lather, rinse, repeat.

I did this after I ended up in Bronze, for a few matches. I was surprised how often my opponents would GG after my fourth or fifth push. Watching replays, it was clear they were trying to tech into a clever solution or were focused on what my Marines were doing, instead of maintaining their production. They panicked, and it was their downfall.

Now, since then, I’ve panicked a few times. Its a natural reaction, and you can’t always prevent it. All I can say is the more you practice, the more you can minimize this reaction. If you know an attack is going to come, get a notion as to where it’ll come from and build constantly to respond in kind, even if you feel a jolt of panic when they start chewing your brave soldiers faces off you can probably fight your way through it. The more you do this, the more success you’ll have and the faster you’ll rise through the leagues in StarCraft 2.

Somebody’s gotta feed these boys before they go out fightin’, and that somebody is you.

Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been associated with long delays.

You don’t get bonus points for unspent resources at the end of a match.

It’s a concept that can be difficult for new players to wrap their heads around. The biggest, baddest units in any given race’s arsenal costs quite a bit of minerals and gas. However, while you’re saving up for that shiny fleet of capital ships primed to rain death and destruction on the foolish folk arrayed against you, they’re likely to be churning out squadrons and legions of lesser units for a fraction of the cost. And those ‘lesser’ units just might walk into your compound while you’re sussing out all of the tech necessary for that pinnacle of your race’s achievements.

Let’s do a bit of math on this very subject.

“This is my C-14 Impaler Gauss rifle! There are many like it, but this one is mine!”

This is a Terran Marine. He costs 50 minerals, consumes 1 supply (“food”) and is produced in 25 seconds. He comes from a Barracks, a structure costing 150 minerals built after a construction period of 60 seconds. In turn it cannot be produced until you make a Supply Depot, costing 100 minerals and 30 seconds. And you need an SCV to build all this stuff. That’s another 50 minerals, 1 food and 17 seconds production time.

So the total cost of your first marine is 350 minerals, 2 food and 132 seconds total.

“The Yamato is loaded. And so am I!”

Arguably the most powerful single unit in the Terran arsenal, the Battlecruiser costs 400 minerals and 300 gas by itself. It is produced at a Starport, which cannot be built without a Factory. The Factory is dependent upon the Barracks. Additionally, you must produce at least one Refinery and sortie a number of SCVs to harvest Vespine gas from it. Oh, and you can’t build one without a Tech Lab on the Starport and a separate building called a Fusion Core. So, crunching numbers like so, here’s the total cost of your first Battlecruiser, listing minerals/gas/time for each building and minerals/gas/food/time for each unit:

Supply Depot (100/30) + Barracks (150/60) + Refinery (75/30) & 4 SCVs (50/1/17 x4) + Factory (150/100/60) + Starport & Tech Lab (200/125/75) + Fusion Core (150/150/65) + Battlecruiser (400/300/6/90) = 1425 minerals, 675 gas, 10 supply & 478 seconds.

See where I’m going with this? For the cost of a single Battlecruiser, you could field 10 Marines quite comfortably. And with the surplus gas you could give them a weapons upgrade, combat shields or stimpacks.

Now, if your macro is good and your economy humming along, you can produce a cadre of bloodthirsty, Gauss-toting Marines while teching you way up to a Battlecruiser or two, but the point of this little exercise in arithmetic is to demonstrate how much easier it is to produce the basic units of a race, and how important that habit can be to a burgeoning player. Any race’s macro can and should include constantly producing workers and basic units along with climbing up a chosen tech tree as a strategy begins to grow. As your skills improve, producing a ‘backbone’ of basic warriors concurrently with your shiny high-tech units will become second nature. And when thinking about this process no longer becomes entirely necessary, your mind will be free to worry about things like counters to your opponent’s units and canny ways to apply pressure and exploit map advantages.

But you have to walk before you can run, and in StarCraft terms that means spending your resources quickly and effectively. Start with the basics, and go from there.

“Oh, hello, BlueInk. That’s a nice base you have. But you don’t have anybody there to defend it, huh? Oh, well. Guess I’ll just Prismatic Beam everything to death. GG”

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

It sometimes takes a humbling experience to help us realize how much we don’t know.

My first loss after a hot streak of 6 wins knocked me out of Silver league into Bronze. Granted, I knew I had been placed in Silver due to a lucky in during my placement matches, and it was unlikely that this ‘grace period’ would last forever. I had a long string of failures in my first few ladder sessions, and it was bound to catch up with me sooner or later.

But seeing the notification, saying that I was placed in bronze “based on performance” had me sitting back and evaluating what I was doing wrong.

Reflecting on my matches and replays, it slowly dawned on me that I was focused on the wrong things. Many of my wins came from clever uses of cloaked Banshees and canny Siege Tank placement – showcases for micromanagement. What the pros will tell you, what any player with a record of wins greater than losses knows, is that micromanagement (hereafter called ‘micro’) is just about the last thing you focus on as you develop your playstyle.

Instead, one must first develop their macromanagement, or ‘macro’. Basic principles, like when and where to build, how often to produce units and where one’s focus should be at any time. These are the building blocks of better play, like footwork in fencing, keeping one’s guard up in boxing or the use of one’s pawns in chess.

As a Terran player, there are three things one must always, always be doing to be successful. They’re things I plan on focusing on as I struggle to return to Silver-level play and rise beyond.

Build SCVs

The Space Construction Vehicle – SCV for short – is the Terran building unit. Like Protoss Probes and Zerg Drones, a player can’t maintain an economy or expand their base without them. From the beginning of a match to its end, one must constantly be producing more of these little guys to ensure bigger, better things down the road. One of the first things an SCV will build in a Terran base is a Barracks, and the Barracks should always be producing Marines.

Build Marines

The Marine’s a well-rounded unit. Balanced for both ground and air targets at range, just a few of these Gauss-rifle-toting power-armored colonists and former convicts can keep the enemy at bay. Collected in Bunkers or upgraded with better weapons and armor, if the Barracks is churning out Marines you’ll have a potent force for attack or defense before you know it. This isn’t to say that every Barracks you build should just build Marines. The other Terran infantry units compliment the Marines quite well in certain situations. But if you send out your army to assault the enemy base and aren’t producing constantly from your Barracks, when the enemy attack comes (not if – when) they’ll happen across a ghost town.

Build Depots

Getting supply blocked sucks. It happens when the amount of units being produced exceeds the amount of supply resource available to your forces. In Warcraft this resource was called ‘food’ and made a touch more sense. You don’t want to make an army you can’t feed. Bad things happen. The solution is to have your builders taking a break from mining minerals and gas to make the structures that produce more supply. In the case of Terrans, that means Supply Depots. Once the initial structures are in place – Barracks, Refinery, etc – it behooves you to pepper a Supply Depot or two into the mix as you expand your base and build more advanced structures.

In addition to keep you from getting supply blocked, building Supply Depots will help you spend your resources. You don’t get bonus points at the end of the game for minerals unspent or gas sitting in your Command Centers. Build more buildings, units and research to soak it up. When in doubt, as Terran, build more Depots and Barracks. No matter what your force composition, more Marines won’t hurt and you’ll want to be able to support them.

I wouldn’t have been able to refocus my play without help. From bouncing my initial reactions to demotion off of my wife to getting advice from the folks at the TeamLiquid forums, I doubt I’d be as enthusiastic to wade back into an arena that’s so thoroughly kicked my ass. But just like rejection for the writer, 404s for the programmer and calls from bill collectors for the responsible adult, this is how we learn. Without our failures, we’d never know enough about ourselves to reach for, achieve and enjoy our successes.

More on that tomorrow. For now, I will continue to build my macro skills and learn the ins and outs of cutting and commentating replays for public consumption. I might hold off on posting such supplements until I return to Silver league, however. I mean, who wants to watch a Bronze level newbie stumble through basic gameplay?