Understand the concept of balance. When you do anything in Poker, your range of hands should never be completely defined. A lot of it comes down to knowing yourself and how you play.
An example would be a preflop situation where you have a decision to re-raise or call: the hands that you raise with can't all be super good hands because that is completely exploitable if your opponent just folds every time you re-raise (which, in turn, is also exploitable). You have to play the same way with weak hands as you do with strong hands sometimes, so you become less predictable. Whenever the opponent puts you on what you have, you've lost the hand even if you end up winning chips. This doesn't mean you can do crazy unpredictable stuff, you have to be aware of the math that's involved. Beyond math and balance (which can be summed up as "knowing yourself") you can move on to logic and deception (aka "knowing your enemy"). This is where adaptation occurs, and exploitable actions become potentially profitable with the right information. At this stage it's easy to lose track of the math and the balance; people get carried away with trying to outplay the opponent that the basics end up biting them in the butt. Remember that exploiting ALWAYS opens yourself up to be exploited.
I've heard good things about this game already so I will probably get it soon. I've been looking for a good turn based strategy game since HoMM 5. Also I like the name :]
Thanks for the reply, can you explain why Protoss is the most noob-friendly? I figure I should just stick Terran now since that's what I've been using since the beginning. I'm playing again tonight at my buddy's for a few hours I'll let you know how it goes, lol.
My "doing stuff" has gotten much better since WOL believe it or not. I'm usually able to keep training workers for the first 10 minutes without too many slip ups. My command grouping is so-so. I always set my starting command center to 1 right out of the gate and try to get barracks on 2, factory, on 3, starport on 4, etc. Now let's say you build quite a few barracks, do you try and group them all on 1 or does it depend on the circumstances of the match?
Please please what is the easiest way to get your forces (for a drop or even for retreating from a drop) into medivacs? Sometimes we waste WAY too much time on this step when it should probably be instantaneous. I usually just select everything and then shift-click my medivacs but there must be something better.
Any tips for general early game harass? Sometimes this messes me up bad. A Zerg player drone-rushed me the other day and I just rage quite after a minute or so.
I play Random but my hotkeys are pretty consistent between races. For Terran I use 1-3 for units, 4 for Orbital Commands, 5 for Raxes, 6 for Factories, 7 for Starports (altho I almost always forget to hotkey my facs and ports).
For loading forces, select the forces you want to load and just spam right click on all your medivacs, no need to shift click. The game is usually very intelligent with loading units.
As for early game harassment, it depends a lot on the matchup. Versus Zerg you can do a variety of openings. If he goes for a hatchery first fast expand, which most zergs do, you can go for a bunker rush. The rush isn't really meant to kill him, just delay him as much as possible. If he has no overlord at his expansion, you should place the bunker out of sight of his hatchery and rally your barracks to it. If you get him to place more than 1 spine crawler, you've pretty much succeeded in delaying him. 1 Rax Reaper harassment into expo is decent, but once he gets ling speed your reapers will die so don't invest too much into it unless you're destroying him. The alternative to reaper is quick hellions, which seems to do better mid game - make reactor on your Rax while your factory is in construction, lift your Rax once your Fac finishes and land it on the reactor to start making hellions really quickly. Important thing to remember for these builds is that they are fast expansion builds meant to secure an economic advantage. If you don't want to fast expo you can do a variety of timing pushes, like getting 3Rax (1 tech 2 reactor) and hitting their expo when you get about 20 marines 6 marauders with stim. Timing attacks are a lot less adaptable than expanding, because you're essentially telling your opponent that you want to end the game early.
Mid game depends a lot on what happened early game. If you decided to go hellions early you can consider going full mech (tank hellion thor viking). Meck vs Zerg is like an unstoppable force that moves at snails pace; if you're maxed and you have good micro there is no way he can win a head on battle. It can get tricky if he goes for base trades. Anyway the standard atm is marine/medivac/mine, which is extremely strong against Zerg in mid-late game as mines are effective vs all of zerg except Hydras and Broodlords or the rare case of epic Life Micro. Doing drops on multiple expansion at the same time can work really well - I'm constantly amazed at how much damage just a few terran units in the right place/time can deal. Eventually you'll probably need to push out with a big army to win. Micro is so important in TvZ battles it's hard to overstate it. Splitting marines vs banelings is something few players can do very well but with the introduction of Widow Mines, Terrans have a lot easier time dealing with banelings (kiting the opposing army into mines isn't too hard). Anyway in my experience TvZ midgame is mostly about the Terran trying to stop the Zerg from taking too many bases (2 base Terran is slightly behind 3 base Zerg with equal worker saturation) and it's quite easy for the Zerg to get more bases. Muta harassment is popular but also easy to defend against, so mutas have become more of a protection vs drops.
Late game is dictated by the Zerg's decision whether to go Broods or Ultras (or both). If Ultra then Terran can keep doing the same M/M/M composition but they'll have to deal with Vipers too. It's hard to engage Ultras with M/M/M unless you have a food lead so there's a lot of guerilla warfare needed to harass the Zerg. If you can take out his tech (esp stuff like Pool, Spire, Hive) it will stop his unit production completely, sometimes enough to win the game. If Zerg goes Broods then you'll probably need at least 2 Starports pumping Vikings. Broods are slow so it's possible to successfully base trade with just an infantry army.
An example would be a preflop situation where you have a decision to re-raise or call: the hands that you raise with can't all be super good hands because that is completely exploitable if your opponent just folds every time you re-raise (which, in turn, is also exploitable). You have to play the same way with weak hands as you do with strong hands sometimes, so you become less predictable. Whenever the opponent puts you on what you have, you've lost the hand even if you end up winning chips. This doesn't mean you can do crazy unpredictable stuff, you have to be aware of the math that's involved. Beyond math and balance (which can be summed up as "knowing yourself") you can move on to logic and deception (aka "knowing your enemy"). This is where adaptation occurs, and exploitable actions become potentially profitable with the right information. At this stage it's easy to lose track of the math and the balance; people get carried away with trying to outplay the opponent that the basics end up biting them in the butt. Remember that exploiting ALWAYS opens yourself up to be exploited.
I play Random but my hotkeys are pretty consistent between races. For Terran I use 1-3 for units, 4 for Orbital Commands, 5 for Raxes, 6 for Factories, 7 for Starports (altho I almost always forget to hotkey my facs and ports).
For loading forces, select the forces you want to load and just spam right click on all your medivacs, no need to shift click. The game is usually very intelligent with loading units.
As for early game harassment, it depends a lot on the matchup. Versus Zerg you can do a variety of openings. If he goes for a hatchery first fast expand, which most zergs do, you can go for a bunker rush. The rush isn't really meant to kill him, just delay him as much as possible. If he has no overlord at his expansion, you should place the bunker out of sight of his hatchery and rally your barracks to it. If you get him to place more than 1 spine crawler, you've pretty much succeeded in delaying him. 1 Rax Reaper harassment into expo is decent, but once he gets ling speed your reapers will die so don't invest too much into it unless you're destroying him. The alternative to reaper is quick hellions, which seems to do better mid game - make reactor on your Rax while your factory is in construction, lift your Rax once your Fac finishes and land it on the reactor to start making hellions really quickly. Important thing to remember for these builds is that they are fast expansion builds meant to secure an economic advantage. If you don't want to fast expo you can do a variety of timing pushes, like getting 3Rax (1 tech 2 reactor) and hitting their expo when you get about 20 marines 6 marauders with stim. Timing attacks are a lot less adaptable than expanding, because you're essentially telling your opponent that you want to end the game early.
Mid game depends a lot on what happened early game. If you decided to go hellions early you can consider going full mech (tank hellion thor viking). Meck vs Zerg is like an unstoppable force that moves at snails pace; if you're maxed and you have good micro there is no way he can win a head on battle. It can get tricky if he goes for base trades. Anyway the standard atm is marine/medivac/mine, which is extremely strong against Zerg in mid-late game as mines are effective vs all of zerg except Hydras and Broodlords or the rare case of epic Life Micro. Doing drops on multiple expansion at the same time can work really well - I'm constantly amazed at how much damage just a few terran units in the right place/time can deal. Eventually you'll probably need to push out with a big army to win. Micro is so important in TvZ battles it's hard to overstate it. Splitting marines vs banelings is something few players can do very well but with the introduction of Widow Mines, Terrans have a lot easier time dealing with banelings (kiting the opposing army into mines isn't too hard). Anyway in my experience TvZ midgame is mostly about the Terran trying to stop the Zerg from taking too many bases (2 base Terran is slightly behind 3 base Zerg with equal worker saturation) and it's quite easy for the Zerg to get more bases. Muta harassment is popular but also easy to defend against, so mutas have become more of a protection vs drops.
Late game is dictated by the Zerg's decision whether to go Broods or Ultras (or both). If Ultra then Terran can keep doing the same M/M/M composition but they'll have to deal with Vipers too. It's hard to engage Ultras with M/M/M unless you have a food lead so there's a lot of guerilla warfare needed to harass the Zerg. If you can take out his tech (esp stuff like Pool, Spire, Hive) it will stop his unit production completely, sometimes enough to win the game. If Zerg goes Broods then you'll probably need at least 2 Starports pumping Vikings. Broods are slow so it's possible to successfully base trade with just an infantry army.
So yeah that's TvZ in a nutshell.
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