I'm trying to help a few friends improve at the game, they're all fairly low level and have little experience in RTS games so I was wondering ways if I could help them improve their APM/Micro. I can go on and on abt strats and build order, tips and etc but that all means nothing if they can barely bring their APM past 10.
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really its just experience. a really good way is to have them join teams and play some games, or have them play campaign. teach them about threats and how to respond to them. how to use army correctly, and what they want to build. good luck teaching them
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for me personally playing vs inactive ai helped a lot. Enable cheats and u can test all u want. For Example: 1. Jacks vs many lotuses. Give ai lotuses and try to not lose any jack in push vs lotuses. Jump away at best moment. Try to be more efficient with each attempt. That will get them used to 'm' 'a' 'j' command, also help know unit limits Similar with other assaults - minotaur, knights, thugs 2. Ravens, phoenixes vs stingers/wind gen. Give ai couple of stingers and big area of wind gem. Try to destroy them with as little forces as possible. Getting used to 'ctrl a' 'alt a' command, also see yourself how it differs from just 'a' command Similar with artillery - badgers would be nice for that 3. Cloaked snitches vs schieldball. Give ai thugs/felons/bandits give yourself iris and snitches and try to explode it efficiently. That is nice one to practise :) Similar with cloaked puppy, imp 4. Effective eco: I used to spend hours speedruning towards some metal income (say 100/sec). See how fast u can get that - it is boring i know, but consistency and good habits will help in real game. I guess in summary u can say: just let them get used to commands and speed will come after (edited) Also there is bug with watching other ppl APM: it show about 10 - 20 for everyone except u. Just ask them what their APM is.
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It's just practise. After a while you get a feel for it. Until then its unfortunately uphill. Maybe watch replays of guys with awesome micro like most perple players. I remember Godde in particular had ridiculous micro, and managed to get units to act in ways they bloody shouldn't be able to.
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IMO starting with micro in ZK is a bad idea. Units behave rather well with move-attack commands as is. No amount of micro can save you from not understanding unit archetypes and map presence. Those should come first. If I were to teach someone, I think what I would do first is go cloakie vs cloakie and limit to only conjurors, glaives, reavers and ronins. Once they have expanding and the basic unit triangle figured out, I would introduce static defenses, slings and knights. Once they have that figured out, I would introduce imps and iris. Once they have that figured out I would have them stick to cloakie and play with other factories. Introducing other factories is difficult for new players because some of the units sort of break the basic archetypes or don't exactly fall strickly into the textbook roles. This is pretty much what the campaign does.
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I personally think that they just need to spend more time, which definitely seems like a cop out answer, but I do think that is just a huge factor. I will say that I have not been exposed to RTS games that much before really getting into Zero-K and I remember that the controls were very uncomfortable. What ended up helping me was literally just having fun with Friends and naturally over time we improved in the game. I will say though one thing that helps the most is limiting how many units people can have. I definitely think that playing in big team lobbies made me improve the fastest, because you just don't have as much income, so in turn have less to worry about and get to focus more on the little things you do own, while having safety in others. My friends actually really like the Zero-Wars mod, because you do basically only have to juggle two units and they get to focus on attack with their hero. I would maybe try to use the ally feature (I don't remember the name) and share all your units and buildings, so that your friends can maybe only focus on building eco or only focus on attacking or only focusing on defending, just so they can get really good at that one thing before switching their task or even giving them more tasks until they can finally develope the skills to properly multitask for everything. But most importantly it's just important to have fun, because otherwise nobody is going to want to play the game.
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I don't think you need terribly good *combat unit* micro to play ZK at a reasonable level, but (especially outside large teams) you need to be able to build up and manage your economy effectively. Which, in my experience, is more a matter of making good decisions efficiently and knowing what buttons to press (for example, areamex rather than making each mex independently) rather than pressing buttons quickly. Making the right actions is more important than making a lot of them. I expect I could beat a Brutal AI with 10 APM (depending on how you define APM I suppose).
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I agree with    Galamesh and     Aquanim. Just want to add this: You cannot FORCE speed, or better, it is counterproductive. Because in the end, you need to make the decision WHAT OR WHERE to spend your APM on. There will always be way more things going on than any human could control. Too much (especially too long) focus on single encounters will actively prevent you from getting an overview. I still have to force myself to remember not to get too caught up with specific units and realize afterwards that my factory was idle for a minute and I am excessing. So I really recommend to listen to what Galamesh and Aquanim already said. Ok, and to adress the question directly: I would think the best way to learn to micro specific units is to play some bot-games and only build this one unit for a few days. Yes, that is definitely a bit obsessive, but that would be my answer. Simulate a clusterfuck -make custom-room, make a 2 bot-teams and join one of them - and simplay have fun with those units. Afterwards try against humans, that is some very different thing. Why bots first? Because it is not helpful in the slightest if you build the unit and it gets killed right away, before you can do anything with it. You will not get enough feedback that way, and its frankly just frustrating instead of effective.
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I agree with the general idea of simplifying the game to only a few units, practice them until you get good and then you practice on other units and situations. Personally I'd work on units that doesn't have too much AI and whose micro is simple, and also help understanding basic unit interactions. I'd start with: Fencer vs Assaults Scorcher vs Lotus Than you move to unit groups, line move, unit hotkeys and 3 unit counters. Glaive Reaver Ronin mirror, if you play against them, is pretty good to start with. After that you can add in econ, unit queues, building queues and build hotkeys. At this level they can probably start playing pot. If they want to work on 1v1 than can work on minimap awareness, multigroup management, working to speed up command after seeing game state and likes.
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I think if you really want to get into the game, starting solo is the best you can do. But ofc, first and foremost do what you like. For me the fun was to see how far I would get in some sport I never tried if I applied all the things I learned in the competitive games before. So that is my take on it, but I sespect that is absolutely not common. The only thing I would really really really support is that playing some bots until you are familiar with the absolute basics (meaning UI) - it will save you a lot of pain and stress later. I don`t think you get much out of pot-games if you are busy to figure out which mouse-button selects/deselects etc.
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I want to emphasize that this is not like "they don't know what they're doing at all" I've taught them basic unit compositions, whats good, how to scale eco, and a lot of other basic stuff. But they unfortunately can't use any of the information I give them because their micro is god awful. Sending units to die single file and not using attack move ever, and HARD tunnel vision. I'm looking for a way to help them overcome bad habits that isn't just playing the game bc my friends aren't passionate about this video as much as I am to spend hours a day practicing.
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quote:
I can go on and on abt strats and build order, tips and etc but that all means nothing if they can barely bring their APM past 10. |
I think having a very good understanding of the game is a great way to improve APM. Low APM can sometimes mean that the player just doesn't know what they are doing, and has to think about every action. When you have a deep understanding of the game, you can spend less time actively thinking ingame, because you will already know the answer. Less time thinking means more time doing, which naturally increases APM. Another very good way to increase APM is to just get used to the UI. learning how to play Zoomed Out, or learning how to watch the minimap, learning how to control group your units, etc. It's probably especially good to get good habits here as a new player, since it can be hard to change your habits later on.
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quote:
I want to emphasize that this is not like "they don't know what they're doing at all" |
"Knowing facts about the game" is just the first step on the path to "being able to bring relevant information to mind quickly and make sensible decisions on that basis".
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You don't need micro to be good at Zero-K. I'm pretty confident any top 10 1v1 player could beat a silver without using more than 10apm. Not using attack move is a very different issue. Do you have an example replay?
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https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1762211He was able to beat a hard AI and decided to fight against a brutal, I’ve been helping him going over basic mistakes and telling him proper build order to counter and how to expand quicker but keeps making the same mistakes over and over again
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i cant even beat a hard :(
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No way, the bots are mad easy tho?
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yeah, well your friends have some potential in them
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quote:
No way, the bots are mad easy tho? |
Yes, if you play the game as intended and not as a tower-defense, 1 brutal is actually not hard. Thats why most of us play against 2 if we want to have a challenge. I still cannot reliably win against 2 brutal. In between in terms of difficulty is 1 v 3 legacy-ai.
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