Hotkeys

Since I had lost all the muscle memory for hotkeys, I decided to move away from grid and pick up some specialized hotkey setup like TheCore. After some evaluation I went with a slightly customized TheCoreLite because I am only using the left half of a Levinson Keyboard. I am still missing some keys for control groups but for now I have way more buttons for control groups than I can even handle.

Basic Mechanics

In my head it was still kind of present what I needed to do, but it only took one custom game vs the AI to realize I not only forgot all the hotkeys, but also all mechanics. To learn the (new) hotkeys I started playing games (custom and ladder) with a clear focus on basic mechanics.

• Injecting: Camera locations, box queen with mouse, inject
• Building units: Add eggs to control groups

Current Priorities

1. Macro cycles:
   • Don’t get supply blocked
   • Spend larvae
   • Spend minerals/gas
2. Basic map vision:
   • Ring of Overlords around own bases
   • Have Zergling spotters around opponent’s base

What to ignore for now

• Creep spread: Only if I find myself having too much time to spend and it does not affect the priorities.
• Advanced scouting: No ling scout, no Overlord sacrifice.

Game Plan

1. Saturate 2 bases
2. Get a Lair and a Roach Warren
3. Push with roaches as Roach speed finishes
4. Get 3rd and 4th base ➡️ 66 drones
5. Transition into Roach/Hydra with upgrades
6. Continuous Trading and remaxing (powered by Macro and extending)

If I get cheesed, I try to learn defending it. If successful falling back to the original game plan.

Building Habits

1. Rewind replay: After every game revind the replay and watch for mistakes - with a clear focus on the set priorities.
2. Rename every replay: After watching the replay, give it a concise name describing the game in one sentence.

Goals

I try to force myself to have no league or MMR goal at all. These 2 metrics are maybe the biggest factors of stress in Starcraft and can be misleading when measuring progress. Especially when trying to learn something new, build new habits or get cheesed a lot in one session they can go down and give the false impression of going backwards, although the opposite is the case.

So my main goal for now is sticking to my priorities to build good habits from the get go. I am very sure that if I drift off from my priorities I will mess things up and start building bad habits.

As a metric to measure my success I will monitor the count of hard supply blocks per game. So how often am I supply blocked and have no Overlord already morphing. The other metric is related and can be just read from the game summary: Time supply blocked.