Trying to get to platinum

Hello Snof,

I’ve recently joined SC2 and reached platinum in my first season. I’ve improved greatly, and from what I understand of the game, you made a few mistakes that should be improved.

  1. Consider taking the first barracks before taking gas, because it’s important to have your army asap, in-case of a proxy or all-in rush. The extra few seconds can really save your game.

  2. The way you scout is unnecessary and risky. In the game, you managed to scout the proxy barracks because you were lucky. If your enemy decided the proxy should be somewhere else, you would’ve totally missed it. The better way to scout is at 17 supply, path your SCV to check the enemy base for barracks, as in most Terran matchups, the standard opener is supply depot > barracks in the main base. So if you see the barracks missing, it should ring a bell that it’s a proxy and you shouldn’t expand into your second base and prepare for an all-in by making bunkers and creating as many army as you can. If you are still unsure, you can always expand in your main base and float your base to the natural afterwards.

  3. You build your engineering bays late after 6-7 mins, and you upgrade even later at about 9-10mins. Theoretically, most people build 2 of it only if they are intending to go for a timing attack, because they want the attack and defense upgrade to finish at the same time. So if you build 2 of it, make sure to upgrade it asap. In the game, you upgraded it at 10mins, which is already enough time to have 2-2 upgrades instead of starting 1-1. Also, as a safety precaution, you can always build a turret for every base once you get the minerals to do so, once you already have an engineering bay.

  4. Understand that tech like siege tanks are real counters to bio units, and you shouldn’t really run into them unless you are confident of killing them before they kill you. Running into more than 3 siege tanks is suicidal and can lose you a winning game.

  5. The only way to keep ahead of your enemy is to do timely upgrades and improve your worker count, as well as number of racks/fact/ports. If you see yourself floating >1k minerals, either look to expand or build more unit production structures. This allows you to replenish your army faster than your enemy, eventually overwhelming them if you have the economy to sustain these skirmishes.

  6. Lastly, tech can be scary, but they are really slow. If you know they are approaching your base, try to immediately prepare for a counter attack with MMM, flying to the enemy base to force the enemy to either turn around or suffer huge losses. Personally, I love dropping in the main base because if he ignores the attack, I will essentially remove all his racks/fact/ports and will lose the game if I can defend his all-in tech attack. Remember that most players in this rank use the “all army” hotkey very often. This means that their base will mostly be empty when you attack.

  7. When you do drops with medivacs, try not to shift click your medivac into the enemy’s territory directly unless you’ve scanned before that. Shift click to a nearby location and manually unload to make sure it doesnt die to anything weird. It can lead to a lot of potential damage being wasted if your medivac dies with a lot of units in it, like in the replay as shown.

  8. Lastly, I would prefer that you do not get stressed out to craft the perfect build or anything like that. I have climbed to plat only using MMM, and minimal siege tanks to defend mostly. APM is also overrated, I play on 100 apm alone and have won players with 2-300 APM easily.

Hope this helps!

dont make many marines is the best advice i can give you. Try massing thors and bcs. It is way less work and way more powerful.

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