I’m on a massive losing streak at the moment in SC2, since I really don’t know what I’m doing; I’ve now started losing to bronze league players rather than being placed against silver league and having a fairly even chance. This is because my four gate, which was getting me my only wins, has become a bit sloppy and so I can’t even get those. Since I clearly can’t “just” win, I’m switching to actually learning how to do certain aspects of the game at a time, as Day[9] recommends. This means focusing on one particular aspect of one’s game until it is up to scratch, deprioritising everything else and crucially not trying to win. If I can’t win anyway, why not lose while learning something? Hopefully I’ll be demoted out of the entirely inappropriate gold league soon.

The skill I’ve chosen to work on is “the tap”, which is the practice of cycling through production structure hotkeys, whenever not actively doing something else, to make sure that all said buildings are producing at all times. Suppose you’re marching a squad of units across the map, keeping an eye on their progress. With no enemy units in sight right now you don’t need to be giving them commands, so you can do a tap: 4 check for probe production, 5 check for units ready to warp in, 6 check the robotics facilities are doing something and occasionally 0 check the forges/twilight council are upgrading, and then finally take a look at the minimap, because this is another good habit. This should also help with maintaining pylon production because I am trying to look at my supply count whenever I hit the key to produce another unit out of any of the structures I tap my way through; if it’s getting close, I can build another pylon.

Keeping my money low with enough production structures? Pah! Attacking/counter-attacking at the right moments? Meh. Expanding when I should be doing? Don’t care. I’m just getting this background activity fixed in my head. It’s actually not that pleasant because it feels a bit artificial, but I need something going for me if I’m going to start winning games, and this is a good thing to develop. Hopefully I’ve not tried to work on too many things at once…