Archons and Toddlers

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

I won free coaching today

I did a little thinking today about how I want to progress on the ladder.  There are a number of different areas to choose from to try to improve on.
  • Macro mechanics (pylons, probes, expansions, keeping money low, chronoboost)
  • Micro control (unit positioning, moving hurt units, using abilities)
  • Scouting (also ties in to map awareness and watching the mini-map)
  • Strategy (choosing what to build, anticipating and responding to your opponent)
  • Meta-game knowledge (popular builds, trends in each match-up)
I've learned from analyzing my own games so far that it is so very very tempting to concentrate on strategy and micro when analyzing your mistakes.  I'm sure that part of the reason that I've focused on those two is that they are possibly my weakest areas, but it's also where the action is when you watch a game.  It's much less exciting to analyze macro and point out where your cyber core was 5 seconds late and how you weren't building probes for 15 seconds etc...

This may sound strange but what I want to continue to concentrate on is my macro, even though that may be one of my strengths.  Why would I want to do that?  Because macro is the backbone, cornerstone, and foundation (yeah, pick your cliched metaphor) of good play.  Once that's established and solid everything else will be so much easier.  If I can get to the point where my macro requires about as much concentration as breathing then it will be easy sailing from there.

Many times when I've wanted to try a new strategy or micro trick I've found that when I concentrate on doing that right my macro slips and even if I pull off my original goal well I might still lose because my macro fell apart.  So I'm going to concentrate on my macro to the point of absurdity even if it means losing a few more games that I might have otherwise.  I guess I see this as the boring grind that will establish habits and reflexes to make higher level play more fun and easy when I get there.

Now then, what was the title of this post about?  Oh, that's right, apparently I've won 2 free hours of coaching from SC2Plus.com thanks to this contest that they posted to reddit.  I'm not sure yet when I'll be able to fit that into my schedule, but I'm looking forward to it.  How does this fit in with my training plan laid out above? Well I don't want to force someone giving me free coaching to do it some weird specific way so I'll just go with whatever they want to focus on and see how it feels.

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