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Macro Practice: Mineral Drill for Gold and below

Discussion in 'StarCraft 2 Strategy Discussion' started by PRUSSIA, Aug 13, 2012.

Macro Practice: Mineral Drill for Gold and below

  1. PRUSSIA

    PRUSSIA New Member

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    From:
    Tarsonis
    I saw this on youtube and I'd thought I would share. This is a practice to help improve the macro of even players that are slow and deliberate, as well as demonstrating the strength of macro. The point of this build is NOT that it is strong and an end all be all...

    If you are gold or lower, odds are this will help you. If you're higher than that, don't bother.

    As Terran, go with the standard opening:
    10 supply build depot
    12 build rax, pump marines
    14 build depot
    16 orbital command

    From this point on, queue 3 SCVs for your CC and 2 marines for your rax as well as 2 supply depots at all times. The reason for this is because SCVs take 17 seconds to build and rines take 25, meaning that you'll only have to macro once per minute, roughly, in case something happens like you get distracted or the enemy attacks. Hotkey the marines group 1, CCs group 2, rax group 3. Whenever you finish queuing up your marines, depots, and SCVs, check your minerals. Do you have more than 150? In that case, build another rax and queue 3 marines from that. Expand when you see fit (I usually do so around 3 SCVs before I reach saturation). Do not build more than 80 SCVs. The rest go to marines.

    If you do everything right, then when the enemy comes knocking at your door your army should be much larger than theirs. The funny thing is even with just unupgraded marines this build will win you almost every bronze game, a majority of silver games, and even a couple of gold games.

    Another cool thing is that this build is easily modifiable. Once you have the basic mineral drill down and you feel comfortable with macroing just once per minute, you'll have plenty of time to try adding other things to this build. With 3 full bases and 200 supply of marines and SCVs (it happens quickly when you build nothing but barracks) you can easily start getting vespene when you feel comfortable with it, and get medivacs, shields, stims, and upgrades for your marines. You could sub getting all barracks for some factories and starports. The idea is that this build asks for the basics of macro to come FIRST, and then come things like micro and unit composition.

    After getting this in my head and feeling comfortable with remembering to build more production facilities and saturating my expos, I became a much better player. I hope this guide helps anyone who is struggling in their macro game!