gamboneee:
- probably a mistake, but make OL on 9 not 10
- Your first OL is out in no man's land, on most maps I try to find a way to sneak it behind my opponent's natural or main, on Akilon I always send it as pictured below. Against Protoss they'll have stalkers out later so you can just rally it directly to that spot instead of having to move along the edge of the map once marines might be out and about. That's a good spot vT on Akilon, you can easily see both a.) when they expand b.) what buildings they're placing at their main ramp (which is usually where all the tech goes).
first OL path: blue = ZvT, green = ZvP
- Learn to add eggs to hotkeys. It takes a few games to get used to but is SO WORTH IT. SO WORTH IT. If you're making lings, then press 4szzzzz, then hold control and click an egg in the unit selection view at the bottom of the screen; now all the eggs you just made are selected. Then shift+1. Next time you right-click your army control group, your eggs will be rallied to the spot where you sent your army. No more going back to your rally spot to add units to your control groups! The big adjustment you need to make when doing this is that units need to be made in clumps; like, you don't want overlord eggs getting mixed in with your army hotkey, so you'll want to do something like 4svv4szzzz to make sure that you're only selecting zergling eggs and not getting any overlords mixed in there.
- Similarly, once you're making your units in those clumps, rally overlords after you make them - like, 4svv, right-click on the minimap where you want them to go - usually I throw them in the back of my main or something. You typically don't want them rallying to your main rally point, because then Protoss sends their first 4 stalkers over to your base and sees 4 overlords chilling at the front of your natural and put you into supply block hell basically for free.
- 8:00: yeah, we all learn the hard way to make that early baneling nest
- When you get more comfortable controlling lings and banes, one thing you'll want to start doing (at least, I think it's pretty helpful) is to put them on separate control groups; when you engage, r-click lings past their units, r-click banes towards the units, switch back to ling group, do an a-move when they're in a good position to surround, then switch back to bane group and spam r-clicks onto marine clumps. When the marines all die, move the banes away. This is a pretty efficient way of keeping banes from detonating on tanks or marauders or what have you, which is super cost-inefficient.
- Focus on upgrades a little more; baneling speed is super necessary against T, if you want to use roaches a lot then roach speed is important, hydra range/speed really good too if you utilize those, basically get whatever is necessary for your units to be as effective as possible.
gg!