A Dose of Reality

Yesterday, I replayed Stryxis. He beat me before and I've told him I wanted a rematch over a week but postponed it because I didn't think I was prepared - wanting to practice against the computer a few times beforehand.

The game lasted 35 minutes. Check it out (click here). Sorry for the bad manners on my part at the end.

If you watch the replay, there is a game observer that says things at random. I found out later that he was acting like he was a noob. He explained that he would play people three times, the first time he would play as a complete noob, the second would be seemingly even with the other player, and the third he'd be serious and roll over them. He likes to mess with people's heads :-) It was a good thing I was suspicious when he repeatedly asked me to play him. This is the exact kind of skill that I plan to have one day. I would surely enjoy the game even more.

Anyway, I observed two replays of his and was blown away by how good he is. Here he is as dave-ex (click), and he says he was just playing around. I acknowledged that he was good and asked what he thought I should work on. He let me know that my build order was off. He said it seemed I was making more factories then necessary (moreso at the beginning). He pointed out that my macro was terrible. I only hotkeyed my vultures, and that itself could lead to a loss. Basically, he said I should work on pumping units out and hotkeying my units. When I pump, I should try not to take more than half a second to go through my buildings.

He pointed out my bad unit placements, that along with bad hotkeying. To follow up pumping units with good hotkeying, and laying good mines down. He says if I work on my macro and hotkeying, I'd have much more time to focus on an attack. I should have pumping units as just about second nature (of course), for that is very important and necessary throughout the game.

I knew he gave very good advice. I can see that at the beginning of the game, I can't make units with both of my factories because of lack of minerals when I expo. I've always had in mind to hotkey my units on the battlefield, but thought I could cut corners yet again. I wish I could take back that advice I gave to Fafner... kind of. It's important to hotkey but sometimes it's not necessary when you plan to turtle. Styxis hotkeyed his units whenever he attacked and it did a lot of damage after the fact.

I'm trying not to feel overburdened from what I need to learn.

In other news, remember the guy on Iccup with the terrible record that used to be 3-28 He's now 57-175. There is some obvious improvement in his game. How interesting.

One last thing I want to mention is that iCCup has finally upgraded to 1.16.1 -Very good news! I'd love to test myself out on some people :-)