| Basic Strategies |
| ||| Main ||| Maps ||| Zerg Strategies ||| Terran Strategies ||| Protoss Strategies ||| |
|
The first thing you need to know about playing on battle.net is that speed is everything. You have to use the keyboard to command all your units. Instead of wasting valuable time pointing your mouse to the command you need, memorize what keys you need to use for what commands. For instance, if you're playing with Zerg and you want to make a spawning pool, all you have to do is highlight a drone and press b, then s. A spawning pool will automatically appear. The basic commands are a for attack, g for gather, and m for move. You should know exactly what keys to press for every structure you build. All the great players use the keyboard much more than the actual mouse
|
Always scout in the beginning of games. Scouting can make the difference between a win and loss, you should always know where your opponent is hiding. If you're playing with Zerg, send your initial overlord to scout because your opponent won't be able to fight flying units until he builds a forge or cybernetics core (protoss) or barracks (terran). If you're playing under protoss or terran, you can just send a worker to scout. |
| When you're fighting, you have to keep in mind that attacking one enemy at a time with all your troops is better than all of your troops attacking multiple targets. Why? The less troops your opponent has, the less damage you take while fighting. The quicker you kill individual units, the less troops he'll have and the better your chances of winning(think about it). So how do you make all your units attack a single enemy and not attack randomly? Highlight a group of attackers and manually enter each troop they attack. Start by highlighting a group of attackers. Hold down the shift button and press a (for attack) and highlight different units with your mouse, pressing a each time before you highlight a unit. Then let go of shift. This is called a queue. You can make up to twelve commands and as soon as the first is done (your guys kill the first unit you selected), they'll move onto the next task (killing the next guy you highlighted). This strategy is VERY important and makes the difference in battles where you're evenly matched. |
You also have to keep in mind when you're playing on battle.net that a lot of people like hacking and cheating during games. Hacking can do a lot of things. It can upgrade speed, give you unfair advantages with minerals, etc. The most common hack is having shared vision for everyone playing in the game. That means that you are more viable to a rush attack because the enemy can find you right away. So what can you do to prevent hackers? If you are playing with someone who you think is hacking, try this trick. Place a unit next to a fighting unit that normally would not be within your opponent's field of vision. If the unit automatically tries to attack it, the game recognizes a flaw and disconnects the user. You will get that annoying popup saying that your waiting for your opponent but eventually he'll be disconnected and you don't have to worry about it anymore. |
| Something you should keep in mind is terrain. A lot of people don't know that terrain gives certain advantages and is not for design only. For example, if two units are fighting and one is hiding in trees, it will only take 70% of the damage that the unit in the open field will take. You can take advantage of this statistic by taking units that fire projectiles (hydras, marines, dragoons etc.) and hiding them in brush. |
Another thing about terrain that is probably more useful than the jungle trick is fighting uphill versus fighting downhill. On a lot of maps, the choke points will be accesible only by a ramp. Why is this important? Say your units are on top of the ramp and your enemy's are trying to advance up the ramp. Your units do more damage to the ones going uphill. Blizzard put this in on the premise that in real combat, if you were firing uphill you would be more likely to miss (WOW, this game is detailed). What this means is TAKE ADVANTAGE OF RAMPS! Place your units near ramps, don't let your enemy get a free pass up the ramp. You can also take advantage of uphill/downhill fighting by placing units with a far range (siege tanks, reavers, etc.) on cliffs or directly in the entrance of the ramp. This does two things. It has a higher defense than approaching troops and it blocks off the exit to the ramp so essentially your opponent is stuck on the ramp and will continue at a defensive disadvantage. |
| When you're mining with your troops, make sure that you only send three units max to gather from each gas site and two to three units to gather from each mineral deposit. It makes a big difference if you send all your drones to gather from one set of minerals. Any time you see a drone waiting for another to finish to get to resources, it means that it's not doing anything and you're wasting valuable resources and time. Try to spread your drones out as evenly as you can and only double up when you run out of deposits for each individual drone to go to. |