Starcraft II interface tips (and questions!)

Games
1

A friend of mine referred me to this breakdown of the Starcraft II interface, which has some pretty helpful stuff. But I have a few questions.

Workers are now targeted by default by enemy units, but repeatedly hitting “S” will lower their priority if you have the workers selected.

Huh? Is the idea that basically forcing workers into a idle state lowers aggro or something? I’m not sure this is very useful at any rate.

Hitting the Space Bar button after you heard a tactical nuke callout may bring you to the location of the red dot.

May bring you to the location of the red dot? Uh, what determines that? Because if it’s possible, I sure would like to know where it’s going to land.

When queueing up attack commands with Siege Tanks it will allow them to conserve their fire and not waste all their shots on just one unit.

Can someone explain that one?

MULEs can be used to either scout, supply fresh expansions or repair mechanical units or buildings. While they have infinite cast range, they must be cast in a visible area.

Ooh, I love this! MULEs as orbitally dropped repair bots!

Hatcheries can all be assigned to the same control group such that when the Larvae is selected, it will select every Hatchery’s Larvae simultaneously, which can all be given the same rally point.

Whoa! I’ve played well over a hundred games as Zerg and never knew this one!

Nydus Worms can have their own rally points. They can even be used to manually and “safely” mine from a separate mineral spot.

Wait a minute, what? Is this implying that I can open a Nydus Worm conduit between my main base and a location with gold minerals, and the drones will pass back and forth through it with golden minerals? I gotta test this one!

[Using shift-queued commands] an Infestor can be instructed to move to a location, burrow, move to another location while underground, unburrow, cast two Infested Marines, and then sneak out again all in one go.

God, I love Infestors.

-Tom

2

Spacebar brings you to the most recent place of importance on the map. For example any time research is completed, you can hit spacebar to go to the building at which it was researched. The “may” comes into play because SO many things count for this, I think even units being built counts. So it’s likely some other random thing happened between the nuke and you hitting spacebar.

Siege tanks will intelligently avoid over-killing targets. Only enough tanks will shoot to kill the unit. So it won’t waste a bunch of shots killing the same guy while other ones come in right behind him.

3

About the Nydus worm thing, take a look at this video. Keep in mind while it’s very possible it requires an incredible amount of micro.

4

Oh, Hell. That Nydus trick is awesome. That guy also has a video for another cool trick: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrDemA_6xsw&feature=channel

5

Oh you mean smart blinking? I thought everyone knew that ;)

6

Told you guys that Nydus worms are awesome in all sorts of weird ways.

7

This is more applicable in AI matches than in regular matches, but if a worker is repairing something, they’ll become the target of the enemy units, so you can dance an enemy unit against a bunker if you are good at micro (They’ll move to attack your scv when you repair, then you hammer S, they stop to move to attack the bunker again, then you repair again and hit S etc etc).

May bring you to the location of the red dot? Uh, what determines that? Because if it’s possible, I sure would like to know where it’s going to land.

Depends if you’ve got sight on the dropping nuke, or if you can see the ghost. Or if you’re quick enough, like stated above.

Can someone explain that one?

Already sufficiently explained.

Ooh, I love this! MULEs as orbitally dropped repair bots!

They really shine as miners above anything else. It’d be better to sacrifice a few SCv’s who can also then build a forward base if you need it, and also don’t die after 30 seconds or whatever the Mule timer is.

Whoa! I’ve played well over a hundred games as Zerg and never knew this one!

Yes, this is awesome. It can give you a big army without a lot of bouncing around the map. I just started doing this more.

Wait a minute, what? Is this implying that I can open a Nydus Worm conduit between my main base and a location with gold minerals, and the drones will pass back and forth through it with golden minerals? I gotta test this one!

[quote]

The video shows it, but this is really time consuming and can only really be used if you’ve already got map control or a lot of downtime. Another great use is in a team game, where your ally can focus on the enemy while you quick mine on the high yield minerals to quickly tech up.

[quote]
God, I love Infestors.

-Tom

You made me a convert of the infestor strategy.

8

I think I can actually answer all of these.

You pretty much nailed it. Unlike military units, workers have two levels of aggro depending on if they are attacking/repairing or gathering/doing nothing. Have you ever noticed that if you take zerglings and attack-move into a set of peons in the middle of mining and they bring a military unit nearby but don’t take the peons off mining then the zerglings will all run at the military unit? Note that if they do tell the peons to fight back then the zerglings will stay attacking the peons.

This is a myth that got started because the ghost will occasionally take a pot shot at a unit or building if he isn’t given the explicit “hold fire” command. If the ghost does shoot something the space bar is taking you to where the last attack occurred which just happened to be where the nuking ghost is. Note that a complaint in beta was that if you tell a ghost to hold fire and then load/unload from a medivac he forgets the hold fire command and will immediate shoot as soon as he unloads - this inability to prevent the attack makes the space bar trick “work”. To my knowledge this still remains unfixed.

Siege tanks love to waste their splash damage by all firing at the nearest target. I believe that queuing the attacks on them causes them to fire at different targets instead of dropping 500 damage on one spot to kill 6 zerglings.

This is highly useful if your command center is in the red and burning down and you don’t have time to build an SCV to repair it. Fun Fact: You can also drop MULEs to kill siege tanks. Seriously. Drop a MULE on top of a tank and if there are 4-5 other sieged tanks nearby they will splash kill the tank while taking the MULE out.

You can use the shift-queuing for a ton of things. Other popular uses are to build multiple building and return to gathering on peons (drones excluded, of course), move to X location and then go into siege mode, and even shift queuing rally points from buildings if you want units to avoid walking through a specific area.

9

I’m having some trouble with queen management, shift queuing doesn’t seem to split the task between multiple queens. Just had a match that I had two queens selected and shift queue spawn larva and instead of having each one do it, my first queen started going to the distant hatchery. Is it possible to shift queue multiple queens or do I just do it without holding shift?

10

Do it without holding shift. The nearest queen to that hatchery will spawn larva.

11

If you have all your queens selected and then hit spawn larva and click a hatchery it will automatically use the nearest Queen that has enough energy. The fact that you shift-clicked could have messed this up though.

12

I’m pretty sure you don’t have to unburrow Infestors to spawn Infested Terrans. You can throw 'em out while underground!