Connecting APM to the Bible, and the Through Lines

To connect my project to the Through Lines was initially quite hard, but with the help of my mentor, I was able to see that even gaming can worship God. The best Through-Lines to connect to my project are Order-Discovering and Creation-Enjoying. People were given the abilities to be able to make the equipment necessary to be able to game, and Creation-Enjoying is easy when you can not only see how wonderful God has made us, with such creativity to design the maps, and characters in the game, but also that God gave us the ability to create computers as well. Computers are filled with intricate detail, and God gave man the ability to create them. To play StarCraft 2, you can enjoy what God has enabled people to create. Order-Discovering was also another big part of my project, as I discovered the deeply complicated world of StarCraft 2 and its strategies. I learned much about how the gameplay mechanics work, and I also learned a great deal about how Real Time Strategy games are structured. Romans 12:6 tells us to use our skills and 1 Timothy 4:14 says "do not neglect your skills." I have the skills required to work with computers, both as a tool, and as a toy. This project has taught me skills that can be applied to other areas of my life, because just like in StarCraft, life needs to be Macro Managed too. The same ways of thinking can be applied in real life to be able to effectively use what I have been given and spend the resources of life wisely, just like in StarCraft. 

Late Game Macro

Bringing Macro from early game to late game

In between early game and late game is mid game. This is where pressure really starts to fall on your bases, and when attacks are started to ramp up to bigger and bigger assaults. This is where what strategy you picked really starts to affect what you do here, and whether you will hold into the late game. For example it is not a good idea to use "turtling" or Fast Expand because this allows them to control the whole map, unless you start applying pressure as soon as you finish your expansion. A strategy that is pretty much universally good is a 1/1/1, where you can adapt what units you need to protect your expansion, before you start sending in units to pressure their base, and weaken any control they have gained. After This point the game is turning the corner into late game, where you have to possible main strategies, each of which can be very successful.

Once in the late game there are two main choices of either Building another expansion, and overwhelming your opponent with Expensive units, or building enough production buildings to be able to maximize you use of resources. Production is one of the most important parts of StarCraft 2, along with making SCV's. This stays the same into the late game, but since you will have produced a bunch of SCV's early game, you don't need to produce many by the time you are in late game. If you choose to build a third base you should have between five-nine Barracks, and depending if you want to move to a mechanical build or not an additional two Factories or Starports. I haven't worked much with a late game strategy yet, because where I am in the game I do not need it, but will start to practice in preparation for hard and very hard AI's. I have found that you want to keep your Minerals below 500 in stock. When watching my videos you will see that by this time I have about two Barracks, one Starport, one Factory, and around 3000 minerals stored up. To move from rookie to pro you really need to keep your resources constantly flowing, and learn it is okay to have 60 SCV's and 5 Barracks. Even if it seems like overkill to have that many, bunches of people just think, "oh I can just put five marines in the queue and then I will have them in a couple minutes," but this trap is where they will always get stuck. If I have instead five Barracks' I can build five marines in the time a rookie builds one. Needless to say I will quickly demolish the rookie, and it is only because it seems redundant to have many copies of one building. Late game is completely based in how massive an army you can create, and how long it takes you to reinforce it upon its destruction.

The Third Expansion

This is a part of the game where a lot of people have trouble. The Third expansion  is often quite hard to defend, because it can be far away from your original, and your natural expansion. There are two different kinds of third expansions: close and far. A close expansion is as it seems, is located close to you original and natural, whereas a far expansion is not near either of these. Taking a close expansion is relatively easy, because you can use your other bases to keep it protected. These are easy to take and usually have little risk involved. A far expansion is hard to take over, because you lose the ability to keep your enemy at bay due to your inability to reinforce your army. These must be taken very carefully, and the best way to do so is to build the Command Center in your original base, and then fly it over to your waiting troops at your third expansion. Another way to help is to upgrade it to a Planetary Fortress which allows it to defend itself, meaning you can spend less resources defending it. One final thing to do to help the effectiveness of your third expansion is to attack your opponent as you are placing your third expansion. This allows you to keep them focused on defending, and could even give you another advantage if you can aggro their base enough to disrupt their production. Even if you are on a map that offers a far expansion, these tips will make securing it a breeze.

Strategies for Early Game Macro

Fast Expand is a strategy where you build a barracks, and after that as soon as you reach 400 Mineral, you create a command center and grab a new base. After you build bunkers and quickly build protection for it. If you are successful, it gives you a huge advantage, but if failed, may mean an early loss. The Fast Expand method can only work if you scout your opponents base, and find out what their strategy looks like. Many pros use an SCV to scout their opponents base. The longer you keep it alive the more intel you can acquire on your opponent, and the more you will know about what sort of strategy they will be using. Keep in mind that this becomes almost useless against the AI, because they do not strive for a specific plan, and just send hordes of disorganized minions at your base. They do have minimal strategy, but I have seen they mostly just make a balanced assortment of units, and then send them at you.

I think that although Fast Expand is a good method, I might do better to just go for an early push. An Early Push is when you rush as quick as you can into a Barracks (first army building) and make it build faster, then send an army before your opponent has a chance to build good defenses. This sets them back a bunch in their base, and allows you to gain a big lead on your opponent. This strategy seems good, but may not fit to my play style since it involves sacrificing your army. I have found that it seems pros care a lot less about their individual units, and I need to learn about not to. This strategy is always suicide, but since you already have a developed base, the lost resources are worth the detriment to your opponent. I will try both methods, and I will see which I am better at, and which gives me a more effective win, and which increases my APM more. 

Macro Vs. Micro, and their effects on APM

I first thought that Macro was just a super easy skill set for just generally keeping track of your base, but it turns out that it is actually a very complicated (and very important) piece to StarCraft 2 and APM. Macro is all about managing your resources, and making sure you use all of your bases buildings and abilities wisely and efficiently. This is also a lot more in depth than it seems. I am in the process of going through a guide that is very detailed, and shows exactly how your resources become most effective, and gives calculations for an exact strategy on what sorts of units can be produced from a certain number of bases. From this I think the best thing for me to do is to develop a specific order to how I create and upgrade my base. I also think that a way to increase my Micro is to figure also a general layout for my base. This would comprise of actually coming up with a strategy about where exactly I place each and every building I am using to maximize its effectiveness.

I have started to realize that almost everything about StarCraft is making sure you know what you will be doing before you do it. This can be as simple as planning out where you will strike, and in what way you will send them to where you want them to attack, to something like where I will place each building in my base, and what order I will create units in. Since I am doing most of my gaming offline, I am not facing other players, so a lot of strategies become useless, since the AI does not recognize what to do against them, and does not respond the way a person would. This also means that I can develop strategies that are effective against an AI that would not normally work against a real player. I have started to realize things about how the AI normally utilizes its units, and that is that it always builds a group of units to attack, and then sends all of them to attack. This means that the absolute best time to attack an AI is just as it starts to attack you (assuming you have good enough base defenses to survive the AI's assault), because this is when it has very few offensive units in its base. You have to be careful that it doesn't send back the units attacking you, otherwise your attack force can be quickly overwhelmed. This is where the balance is very important to get just right; your defenses need to be in a position where they will destroy the attack force before you attack, but your attack has to come soon enough the next attack force is not coming.

At first I thought that Macro was less important than Micro, but it turns out that this is not the case. Macro is much, MUCH more useful and important when playing an AI. Now the important part here is that against a human player Micro becomes a lot more useful. An AI does not really use Micro much, and because of this using your own Micro becomes less effective. It does help in battles when you use something like StutterStep can help keep your units alive, and kill their units more quickly, but is not as important when you opponent is not doing it. You can not make your attacks work nearly as effectively without Macro, because you will be strung out for resources, when you should be steadily pumping out troops, upgrades, and bases. Macro is where you can really start to outpace an AI, because you will be more effectively using you resources than they do. They already practice a form of Macro, but do not know how to use it in a most effective manner.

Just because Micro is less important, does not mean it shouldn't be used. For someone beginning to play StarCraft Micro is an extremely hard skill to master without sacrificing your Macro completely. This means they ignore it, but if you are looking to increase APM, this is where it happens. Instead of just watching a few minions attack each other, pros are constantly moving their units into different formations, and making them as effective as possible. This is through Micro, which is the art of everything small. When your units are assigned to attack, they don't often adopt a stance that is favorable, or actually shoot the things they should be. Certain units are good against certain armor types, and it is important to learn about these, so that your attack force can quickly dispatch your enemies. Micro involves a lot of seemingly pointless clicking to make your units shoot more, and take less damage. This doesn't seem like a big difference, but it is actually amazing the difference it can make. I am not yet using very many Micro strategies, but once I have my Macro organized, I will be able to start on Micro.

One final part to both Micro and Macro is that both require a lot of memorization. When I started this project I assumed I would only have to memorize some different Hotkeys and then I would be with the Pros, but this is absolutely not true. I am only playing with the Terran race, so for me I am only memorizing the specifics for them. To master Macro you need to know the cost of every unit and ideally the time to produce each unit so that you can effectively make sure you are using your time and money most effectively. For Micro, you need to know the entire list of unit Hotkeys and you need to remember to use the strategies that you learn. This can sometimes be hard, because at the beginning you won't remember to use the techniques you learn. At the end of the day the biggest things to do are to memorize every piece of information about a race (yes this is a very large amount of things) and to always be doing something.

Some quick and easy tips to Macro:

1.       Make sure every base has 6 SCV's getting Ore, and at least 22 getting Minerals

2.       Do not keep more than one unit queued in any one building. Pros never have a unit being queued up, but that means you need to know the times of each unit you create, and you keep track of that. This is very hard to do when doing everything else, but units in the queue means you have resources spent on things that aren't being made, which slows down your production of other things.

3.       Always build SCV's

4.       Build more production structures

5.       Build enough supply

6.       Always know where your next expansion is going to be, and how to secure it

7.       With the above levels of SCV's you should be getting 220-240 Ore per minute and 750-800 Minerals per minute for each base you have. When planning your strategy for a match do a quick calculation to make sure that you are able to sustain that plan continuously.

Posting Some of my Links

Alright, here are the resources I am currently using to learn about the hotkeys in StarCraft 2. They are mostly from a site Liquipedia. I have found a couple threads on the StarCraft 2 forums, but for the most part I am just using the resources on Liquipedia, because it gives me all the shortcuts, and has pages with a basic overview of what you actually want to be doing throughout each match.

Micro Skills
Macro Skills
Hotkeys
Hotkeys (race Specific)
Starting match Terran

Progress Report 1

During these First weeks of My project, I have started to get this blog how I would like it to be. I have started to play StarCraft 2 a little bit, just to get familiar with the controls and the feel of the game. In the near future, I will start to record my matches, because with the use a program (BW Chart) I am able to take the video of my Match and find out what my APM was, and on I can post the videos (or at least pieces of them) to give reference points as to what my APM actually is. I will not actually be playing to much after I get what my starting APM is, because the largest part of getting better is knowing all of the shortcuts.

I have started my research into hotkeys and started to memorize the very useful ones. I have seen that many people use one certain group of hotkeys very extensively. You have the ability to assign units, groups of units, and buildings to one of the number keys by clicking Ctrl + # you want. This is used so that you can quickly select a certain thing quickly, and use an ability of its, or attack your opponent. This is what I see as one of the biggest things that you have to do to keep organised when moving around and using a bunch of different things at one time. I knew a little about this function, but I didn't think to be continuously be reassigning them to different things. I learned that pro players are often switching these keys to what they will need for the time being. Another group of hotkeys that I am not yet sure if they are super useful are those on each of your units. I think these can increase a bit of your speed, but tapping "A" or right-clicking on what you want to attack don't seem much different. I will have to play and test whether or not this is actually going to be useful to me. 

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog, and thank you for taking the time to do so. I would not normally make a web log, but for my bible class I am to learn about something I am passionate about, and then blog about the experience. For this project I have decided to learn about APM (actions per minute), which is an acronym referring to the amount of different things you do per minute in a RTS (Real Time Strategy) game. I will specifically doing my study of APM in StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty. APM is an acronym that is used to describe the amount actions you perform in a minute while playing an RTS game, but it is more specifically a record of your keystroke, which means using keyboard shortcuts are the way to achieving a high APM and increasing your skill at RTS games in general. To Begin I need to find out all of the hotkeys that are available in StarCraft 2 and after memorizing them all, I will have to start to put them into action. I will also need to discern which hotkeys are actually worth using, and which simply use too much of my time to use. To become a pro at StarCraft it is suggested to have at least 300 APM before you even try to compete at that level. I do not expect to get near that, but my goal is to increase my APM to at least 100, pending what my APM is before I get too immersed in the project. I do not foresee many problems in what I plan to accomplish, as I have a large amount of experience in many of the basic skills required to increase APM. These basic skills include things like the ability to spend large quantities of time in front of a computer screen, and knowing your way around a keyboard and RTS game. For the most part this whole project id simply comprised of things that I enjoy doing, so I do not think I will need much motivation to be able to work on the project. One thing that may become difficult is to make sure I am able to continue to learn things over the course of the semester. I have made sure that I should be able to do this, because there is a lot to know in the area of strategy of what to do with the hotkey's that you know. I decided to make my project about StarCraft and APM because I enjoy gaming, and not much else that I actually have room to learn about. Like most people who play RTS games, I haven't bothered ever learning all the hotkeys because I have always seen it as too much work. This project gives me a reason to learn these hotkeys and call it school work, while still allowing me to do what I love doing. This project is a great opportunity to increase my skills at gaming, and find value in the abundance of keyboard shortcuts StarCraft has to offer.