Meoang's Starcraft 2 Beginner's Guide

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If you are a beginner at Starcraft 2, your first step is to master the concepts mentioned in this beginner's guide. Can't wait to read and study the rest of this when it gets finished. Take a quick look at these pages here: No need to go anywhere near memorizing it, but do yourself a favor and start to get familiar with it.

Fortunately, StarCraft 2 provides an extremely flexible system for assigning hotkeys on the fly, and you are strongly encouraged to do so right from the very beginning of your time with the game. Skilled use of both functions are required to be effective in multiplayer matches.

Starcraft 2 Beginner’s Guide

Lesson 10: Armchair General, What is you Goal. Lesson 11: Thus Begins the Cold War, The Arms Race for Expansions and Tech Lesson 12: Aggression Management, or How to Strategically Analyze An In-Game Scenario Why I'm writing this: This is something that is missing from every Starcraft website on the internet: a proper intro to the game for newbies or people who think they know the game, but don't. All comments, criticisms, suggestions, and general feedback welcome. This guide is aimed at those who have just picked up Starcraft 2, are curious about the famous or infamous competitive multiplayer, but have no idea what to do. There is simply too much information for a newcomer to even want to learn. Many times, they learn wrongly or skip over very basic things. They end up having a wrong picture of the game and depressingly go on to become people described in reason 2. Rock, paper, scissors starcraft 2 beginners guide better graphics. A contest to see who can click the fastest. Have you ever said, heard, or read any of these phrases. Ground Zero Lesson 1: Mindset Lesson 2: Units and Purpose Boot Camp: Basic Training Lesson 3: Commands Lesson 4: Hotkeys Deployment: Onto the Battlefield Lesson 5: What is a Build Order. Lesson 6: Armchair General, What is your Goal. Rank and File: Rise of a Battlefield Commander Lesson 7: Thus Begins the Cold War, the Arms Race for Expansions and Tech Lesson 8: Aggression Management, or How to Strategically Analyze an In-Game Scenario Medals of Honor: Your Starcraft Career, Advanced Lesson 9: The Concept of Timing, or How to Strike Before Your Opponent Can Block Lesson 10: Positional Warfare, or How to Checkmate your Starcraft Opponent Lesson 11: Hitchhiker's Guide to Drawing a Gameplan and Using Your Race to the Fullest Lesson 12: Propaganda, Intelligence Gathering, and the Art of Psycological Warfare Red Badge of Courage: The Rules of Engagement Lesson 13: Strategy vs Tactics Lesson 14: Making Your Moves - Attack Paths and Troop Movement Lesson 15: Painting the Battlefield - Controlling Space and As a Result, Your Opponent Lesson 16: The Positional Counter - The Mysteries of Micro-Management Lesson 1: Mindset Fear. This is the first hurdle. It is the biggest challenge for newbies to come to terms with when they first enter multiplayer. Starcraft has a reputation for being one of the most cutthroat and self-esteem-shattering experiences in existence. Unfortunately there is no magical way to counteract this fear. You just have to do it. It's like the first time you ever tried to ride a bicycle. It was hard, wasn't it. You had to go fast to keep your balance, but how could you go fast if you didn't know how to ride a bike. You just had to do it. This is an ongoing theme in Starcraft: nothing is handed to you for free. When you win, you have to earn your win. When you lose, the only person to blame is yourself. That is a hard pill to swallow for many people, but that also makes winning, and improving yourself, even sweeter. A lot of newbies feel the same incoming anxiety attack before starting a game. Find the strength to click the Find Match button each and every time. It is literally the hardest thing to do at this stage. The second hurdle, and the opposite of fear. Courage, in this case, does not mean the absence of fear. It means the willingness to try anything, experiment, and learn as a result, even if it means losing horribly. Too often do newer players lack one of the fundamental keys to successful improvement: aggression. This is what allows you to be out and about on the battlefield. As a guideline, if you are sitting behind a starcraft 2 beginners guide of defense, you are doing it wrong. You can theorycraft all you starcraft 2 beginners guide behind that perfect formation of bunkers, but you will never get better unless you apply what you're thinking. There is no substitute for experience. It's going to hurt, but it shouldn't also surprise you. Unlike ice skating however, if you are unsure how everything went wrong, Starcraft grants you the power to time travel and watch an instant replay. The replay system, with all its numbers and graphs, is there for a reason. Never be afraid to watch yourself lose. If you're not having fun, take a break. Stand up and go do something else. So what happens now that you decided to dive in. First, you have to know what tools you have in that toolkit of yours, what they are good for and more importantly, what they are bad for. Take a quick look at these pages here: No need to go anywhere near memorizing it, but do yourself a favor and start to get familiar with it. Note what buildings are required for each unit; which units are melee, which are ranged; which can attack only air, which can attack only ground, and which can actually do both; and which units might have some dangerous abilities. Now you need some hands-on experience. Play a few games starcraft 2 beginners guide you just try out different units and abilities to see how they work. You may not want starcraft 2 beginners guide play a live opponent. Set up a game versus an easy computer. It will give you ample time to safely mess around with whichever units you want, however long you want. However, don't spend more than a handful of games against the computer. Playing against live opponents is where the real learning begins. There are a lot of uses for many of the different units and abilities. As you play more, you are sometimes going to have your eyes opened by people using them in ways you never thought possible. My kingdom for a horse. Sometimes in life, a situation starcraft 2 beginners guide calls for something you don't have. You never want to let this happen in Starcraft. But the problem for newbies isn't knowing how to get a certain unit for the situation, it's knowing what to get. Let's take an example --- You are playing as Terran. You march out with a group of marines to your Terran opponent's side of the map. You see a defensive line of bunkers. You want to attack but attacking into that fortified position would probably be a bad idea. How do you take care of this situation. The easiest answer would probably to get a few siege tanks. Their long range allows them to destroy bunkers at a distance, and once those are gone you can try to make an attack. That is the purpose of getting siege tanks. Most of the time, when newbies come up against a problem, they look to a unit to solve the problem. What you ought to be looking for is not a unit, but a purpose. When you think about it this way, more options will open up for you. Let's use the previous example. It may not matter what unit you get, as long as it fulfills the purpose you want: clearing out the bunkers so you can attack. Besides the siege tank, what are some other ways to fulfill this purpose. How about some cloaked banshees. If your enemy has little or no units that can detect cloaked banshees, you can break the bunker line even though banshees aren't usually considered a siege unit. How about a few battlecruisers for Yamato Cannons. That could wipe the bunkers off the map in an instant. You might say that's a little far fetched and would take too much time to get, and you're right. So how about we use a simpler answer, the simplest of all answers: just run it over with more stuff. Does it matter what unit you use. You can use anything, as long you just have enough stuff to plow through those bunkers and kill everything. Suddenly, picking the right unit isn't even part of the problem anymore, but it still fulfills the same purpose: running over your poor opponent's bunker line and crushing his base. Ahhh, the feeling of victory. Now let's look at things from a different angle. starcraft 2 beginners guide Imagine you are in a game and the exact scenario we just described comes up. You get to your opponent's base, and they have fortified their front with a number of bunkers. So, we just described a couple ways to take that on. Step back for a moment. What is your ultimate purpose from what we just described. But do we have to take on those bunkers right now. If our ultimate goal is the kill off his base, let's start with the easier and more vulnerable parts first, then come back for the bunkers later. If we had a giant portal gun, we could open up one portal where our army is, and another one at the back of our opponent's base where his bunkers aren't. Too bad we can't, but we do have some other tools at our disposal. Medivacs would be a great choice for moving our army around to the back of his base. If we're playing zerg, nydus worms or overlord drop research could prove valuable. Similarly, we could build a small air force and that would also fulfill the same purpose. Can't Crack that Shell Okay so, we poke at the front and his bunkers are too much. We try some medivac drops, but maybe he has bunkers and turrets there too. Like its namesake, a player who turtles is a player who tries to build a near impenetrable defense and may never leave his base until he has a ridiculously huge army. Something like this can't be dealt with cutesy moves like a little drop into the back of his base. Some problems you solve with a damn sledgehammer. Remember the easiest way to destroy an opponent. Just have a ton of stuff. It means that while he's holed up behind those pretty walls of defense, you proceed to engulf the entire map in your color. As a general goal, double his number of bases if you can. Make sure you have some workers at each of your bases. More production facilities - more barracks and factories and starports. More upgrades - get attack and armor upgrades, and whatever else you might want. Make a few turrets at your bases. If you're not playing Terran, do whatever you need to do to get extra bases up for your respective race. The goal is this: no matter what he's doing, you just have more stuff. Your roaring economy will win the day. This is why the game was designed without an infinite amount of resources. Just like in a real war, your resources are the backbone of your entire war effort. And if you run up against an enemy with more resources, or if you get starved out, you're dead. Lesson 3: Commands That an order. Here I will give you a brief rundown on helpful commands you can issue and what they do on the battlefield. You will understand best if you have Starcraft 2 up and running so you can test things out as I give examples. A lot of this will seem extremely basic, but there may be some things in this section you haven't realized on your own yet. I'm not joking about this. Don't be that person who never properly learned how to ride a bike, wobbling around, looking like they still need training wheels. Be the one sitting sideways, leaning through a corner, with only one hand steering. Maybe you can't do that on a bike, but I'll teach you how to do it in Starcraft. Whenever you need to move troops around, that move command should almost always be replaced by an attack-move command, done by issuing an attack command on the ground where you want your units to go. This way, your troops never give up the opportunity at firing the first shot and never evaporate into a group of enemy units without doing anything. Only when you have a specific task for your selected units will you use the normal move command. One very common example is when you are retreating from a battle. Another example is when you are sneaking a few cloaked units around, and you don't want them to give away their position by attacking anything while they travel. Instead of using the a-move command, it might be more beneficial to kill the 2 colossus first before engaging the stalkers. This isn't limited to army versus army battles. Let's say you commando-dropped 2 dark templar into a Terran base undetected. You'll definitely want to give them some specific targets instead of letting them pick their own targets. This way, they deal as much damage as possible before getting killed. There is a big difference in results between killing a supply depot and killing a crucial tech structure. With battlefield experience comes the ability to judge when to target fire and when to a-move. Stand Your Ground A much underused command by newcomers, hold position deserves special mention as a fantastic way to prevent units from stupidly running off by themselves. This is especially useful in cases where blocking your front chokepoint with units can prevent a zerg rush from getting in, or when your troops must stay back in order to stay out of enemy fire. Hold position makes sure that your army stays the way you want them. Your To-Do List It's tiring as hell having to issue so many commands. Ever wonder how the pros always seem to have everything fall into place. One of their secrets is ample use of shift-queuing. Let's say we're playing Terran again, and we need a supply depot. Select an starcraft 2 beginners guide, hold down shift, and then order him to create a supply depot. Without letting go the the shift key, right-click on a mineral patch. What we just did is queue up a series of commands that your trusty scv will follow one after another. He will automatically return to mining resources immediately after finishing the supply depot, leaving you to devote your attention to more important things. The shift-queue command can save a ridiculous amount of time due to its special properties. It allows you to queue orders for all the units selected, the orders you queue can be anything from construction to movement to special abilities, and most importantly you can come back and add to the list later. Remember that pressing the shift key signals the start of the to-do list, and letting go signals the end. Here are some good uses of shift-queue: Constant supply depots 2 at a time: Select 2 scvs, hold shift, order 2 supply depots. They should each start building a supply depot. Come back any time while the depots are still building, select the scvs, hold shift, order 2 more supply depots, and leave again to go do something else. Covert ops: Select your secret agent, hold shift, right-click along the path you would like it to take. Allows you to manage other things without having to constantly watch over your commando. Applies to any kind of troop movement as well, especially useful for sneaking air transports around the map for a surprise drop attack. Tank repositioning: Select a tank, hold shift, unsiege, right-click where you want it to go, siege. This is great to do mid-battle because you won't ever have to painfully wait for the tank to unsiege to give it more orders. The Minimap A special mention needs to be made for that miniature radar on the lower left corner of the screen. All commands not having a specific target a building, unit, mineral patch, etc. You can shift-click a flight path around the map for an air unit, or a-move your army to a far away part of the map, saving you the trouble of scrolling the screen long distances. Of course this comes at a cost of reduced precision, but in many cases having a starcraft 2 beginners guide area for a target is perfectly fine. Lesson 4: Hotkeys Running the Shortest Distance In life there are rarely any shortcuts, but in Starcraft they are everywhere. Efficiency is the name of the game here. Hotkeys are like the oil to your war machine, making it slick and deadly fast. The second you start using hotkeys is the second you start getting good. Mouse over the icons in the panel on the lower right corner, and you will see every building, unit, ability, and command in the game has a hotkey assigned to it. The way you learn them is simply through using them and building up muscle memory. Think of it like playing a musical instrument. In the beginning your fingers trip over one another, constantly hit the wrong keys, and you can barely play a tune. As you get used starcraft 2 beginners guide the feel of it though, your fingers get faster and it becomes almost second nature. Think of your favorite musicians. They barely ever look at the instrument as they play. Your goal in game is to never ever use the bottom right corner of the screen again. And who knows what will happen when you get good at it. When your friends stare slack-jawed at your sudden prodigy-like piano skills, you can thank Starcraft 2. When they ask how, refer them to your teacher, Jim Raynor of Raynor's Raiders. Or you can run away, on a bike, sideways. Screaming Eagles, the 101st Airborne Just like the military splits its forces into different groups to efficiently handle difficult operations, so can you. Select any unit or structure let's say a zerglinghold down Ctrl, hit any of the numbers 1 through 0 at the top of your keyboard, then release Ctrl. You've just assigned a control group. Press the number key you just assigned to select the zergling again. Double-tap that same number key to select and center your screen on the zergling. If hotkeys are the oil, then control groups are the whirling gears of you machinery. Assigning a unit to a control group is exactly the same as giving a hotkey to that unit. The difference is that these are hotkeys for structures or groups of units already on the battlefield, and that they are customizable on the fly. Don't want that zergling in control group 1 anymore. Unfortunately you can't delete a control group, but you can override it with a different assignment. How to be a Control Freak Here are some unit selection tricks to help make your life easier when creating or changing control groups: Hold Ctrl and click a unit either on the screen or in wireframes in the bottom center panel. Doing this on the main screen selects all instances of that unit type on or near your screen. Doing this in the wireframe panel selects all instances of that unit type in the current selection group. Hold Shift and click a unit the same way to remove or add it to your current selection. Drag-selecting units while Shift is held down also works with this. Hold Ctrl and Shift together and click a unit to remove or add all units of that type to your current selection. Again, click on the main screen vs. Remember to reassign your new selection of units by pressing Ctrl + again afterward. The selection is not automatically saved. Seasoned veterans of Starcraft understand how important it is to have a stable and efficient control group setup. All of them have a core setup that they use throughout their games, often having a specific setup for each race. It's just good use of control groups and hotkeys. Since there are only 10 control groups available in total, you'll want to make sure that you get the best use out of each assignment. Giving each of your supply depots a number doesn't make much sense compared to giving your barracks, your factory, your starport, and your army each a number so you can check their status as needed. It allows you to check on worker production with a single tap, or jump your screen to that base with a double-tap. Hotkey production buildings to build armies without scrolling back to your base. Single tap the assigned number s to check production, tap the hotkeys for the units you want made, all without moving your screen away from important places. Sometimes it's useful to hotkey a building in which a crucial, possibly game-changing upgrade is being researched. It allows you to know when exactly it finishes so you can use it e. Multiple hotkeys for your army can be very helpful. If you have one army fighting on the western side of the map, and another fighting on the eastern side, having both armies together on one hotkey makes it difficult to control either group. Similarly, in a big fight, having important units like colossus or high templar on a separate hotkey makes controlling them and using their abilities much easier. For instance, as Protoss try having your main army - including colossus - hotkeyed to one number, and then having just colossus hotkeyed to another. Whenever performing a sneak attack or drop, always try to give a hotkey to those units for quick access. Always hotkey your first scout. It could mean the difference between seeing a rush coming and not seeing it, which could lead to all kinds of rage. Eye in the Sky There is just one last thing to go over and we're done: location hotkeys. Scroll your screen to some far off place on the map, hold Ctrl and tap any F-key from F5 through F8. Now scroll your screen away and tap that key again. These location hotkeys aren't actually anywhere near as important as what we've already discussed so far, but their usefulness can't be denied. Here Be Pirates Thank you for making it starcraft 2 beginners guide far. You are a true warrior and a scholar. I regret to inform you that we must now leave safety behind, and set sail into the bloodied waters of Battle. I beg of you to have a good night's sleep, and tomorrow I will tell you everything. I will sing you tales of magical water in the six pools, glistening gates at the 4 corners of the world, and ferocious proxies who appear out of the gloom to rob you of everything, even your dignity. In the next few sections, I will talk about strategy and why following a build order doesn't make you a nameless computer bot. I don't know about that. While maybe 20% starcraft 2 beginners guide Day9 videos are out there to help the bronze to diamond leaguers, Day9 himself says a lot of his material isn't going to truly help the novice players as he covers abstract ideas. Abstract ideas get converted into ideas by great players, and get converted into a mantra which isn't recreated in game by novice players. He also goes over things like mouse positioning, how to select units, etc. Which he admits would only help the 3rd best player become the 2nd best player. What I really want to see in this guide is talking about the concept of economy in terms of army: -When I see a novice play, and I keep telling him to make workers all the time, he'll do so, and I'll smile, but he'll still be stuck on 2 bases as zerg, or he'll only have 2 raxs as terran, etc. And his money will sky rocket to a 4 digit number before the 30 supply mark. Jeffbelittle I definitely need to put in a section on importance of economy. Not really sure how much I want to do unit counters. I want to go over a little bit but I'm not sure where to cut it off so it doesn't get too complicated. I guess I'll try to wing it and see how it comes out. Updated the op with lessons 3+4. Also reworked table of contents after I realized how dry it would be to do the original lessons 5-8 after 3+4. starcraft 2 beginners guide The action's where it at. I'll just mesh in 5-8 somewhere in there since they are all just conceptual. Also, I know some would want a link or two to Day9 or whatnot. It's just really hard to do that while I'm still writing. Though it's incomplete, it seems helpful to people like me who haven't touched a Starcraft game before. I'm literally picking up the game this weekend with my paycheck. Can't wait to starcraft 2 beginners guide and study the rest of this when it gets finished. Until then, I'll have to just mess around and find a race I might like. If you ever think you want help on a particular section, I'd be more than willing to do a chapter or two to contribute if you already starcraft 2 beginners guide some solid ideas on what you want but are crunched on time. If not, it's totally cool, I just love to see projects like these that contribute to the community.

How about some cloaked banshees? But do we have to take on those bunkers right now? There is an immediate chain of events that is easily to recognize. A zerg player should have plenty of time to make the tier 2 hydralisk and mutalisk to counter the tier 3 banshee rush. Unless you are going for a specific rush or are being rushed, you should never stop producing workers until you have hit maximal saturation. He will automatically return to mining resources immediately after finishing the supply depot, leaving you to devote your attention to more important things.