In any game of Starcraft 2, your macro abilities will have a huge impact on whether or not you'll win the match. Even if you rush your opponent and get out to a great lead, if he macros better than you, more often then not he will eventually come back and just overwhelm you with units.
To put it quite simply, in Starcraft 2 the player with the better macro wins (most of the time). I'm going to share 3 tips that will help you get ahead in the macro game and out produce your opponent.
To learn even more about macro and how to improve step by step, check out my Starcraft 2 macro guide.
Terran Macro Tip #1: Expand Early
Many players enjoy sitting in their one base building up and army because it's less strenuous and easier to worry about just one small area. So instead of expanding and building more bases, they will happily sit in their one base and defend until they get overwhelmed by their opponent's forces. Has this ever happened to you?
To overcome this problem, you must get used to expanding early and building another Command Center quick. Depending on your build you could have another out as early as 5 minutes, or as late as 10 minutes. But pushing past that is just a bit too late and will put you behind in the resource count.
As you practice, you'll get a feel for when it's best for you to expand. If one game you find that you expanded really early, but didn't quite have the forces to defend it, then next time produce some more units first, then expand. On the other hand if you find that your mineral fields are getting low and you haven't expanded yet, learn from that and get that second CC out much earlier!
Terran Macro Tip #2: Never Queue Multiple Units
Starcraft 2 has a feature that allows you to queue up more than one unit at any of your unit producing buildings (CC, Barracks, Factory, Starport, etc.) At first, this seems like a convenient thing to do. If you have extra resources, just go ahead and queue up more units and they'll be trained in due time.
However, you should never queue up more than 1 unit in any building…ever! If you queue up 2 tanks at the same time, you've just wasted 150 minerals & 125 gas that could be used to buy something else. Instead whenever you have extra resources and are tempted to queue up multiple Tanks, just build another Factory instead. Then the next time you have too many resources, you can build 2 tanks at the same time, doubling your ability to reinforce your army.
As long as you've got multiple bases (as you should) then you'll never be able to spend all the resources you're raking in. So instead of just queuing up a ton of units that will be made eventually, build a bunch more structures and start pumping out massive amounts of units at a time.
Terran Macro Tip #3: Hotkey Your Buildings For Quick Unit Production
In any game of Starcraft 2 there is two different aspects that you have to control: the macro game and the micro game. The only problem is that it's really hard to get good at doing both at the same time. How you keep your unit production up when you're in a heated battle that requires a lot of micro?
The answer is hotkeys. Starcraft 2 allows you to hotkey your buildings in a much easier fashion than any other RTS game out there. Let's say you have 3 Barracks that are training Marauders. Instead of clicking back to your base on the mini-map, then clicking each Barracks and clicking "Train Marauder" (that's a lot of clicking) you can simply bind all three Barracks to a hotkey, let's say 5. So then to train three Marauders, all you have to do is hit 5, d, d, d on your keyboard and three Marauders will start training and be ready for battle in 30 seconds, and you didn't even have to go back to your base!
So when you're in that micro battle, all you have to do is take a second and hit 5, d, d, d as fast as you can and then continue with your micro. This will obviously get more complicated when you get Factories, Starports and mix tech labs and reactors on them, but that's why you need to practice!
When you have a plan that you're following, the ability to hotkey your buildings just makes it that much easier to follow through with your plan and multi-task your macro and micro to play your best game possible.
It will take a lot of practice to master all these abilities. That's why it's important to work on your macro skills in every game intentionally. If you lack in all 3 of these areas, just pick one to work on first. Then once you get good at expanding early, then you can you work on the next one, and so on. When you get to the point that you are consistently out-macroing your opponent, you'll see your win/loss ratio increase drastically. To learn even more about macro, check out my Starcraft 2 Macro guide.
| If you enjoyed this article, then I know you'll learn more great tips & tricks from my Starcraft 2 Macro Guide. Download it now to learn more about the most important skill in Starcraft 2 - Click here to download |
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