Playing with Fire at Dreamhack!

So I am going to do some shameless promotion of my awesome clan Playing with Fire because Dreamhack is coming up and the groups have now been released on teamliquid, you can find them here.

There are a lot of unknowns in the first group stage and among them are as many as 10 guys from Playing with Fire, almost our entire team. Basically our team is going to the Dreamhack lan just for fun and giggles (I am not joining because I live far up north and I did not manage to fix transportation of my computer there in time). Since they are all there they are going to compete in the tournament though! The players from PwF are:

• Zypher (zerg)
• Bubbas (protoss)
• Lunar (zerg)
• Megashira (zerg)
• ClockWise (zerg)
• Raest (terran)
• Pluffs (zerg)
• Tails (terran)
• Carnage (protoss)
• Groet (protoss)

Several of these guys are definitely good enough to get out of the first group stage, I don’t know if you need to get first or if second place is enough to advance but I guess Tails despite being I think our best terran is probably fucked due being in Stephano’s group 😛

Watch out for Lunar who constantly beats grand masters or former grand masters on the ladder. I definitely think that he can take games off the people in that group despite it being quite stacked.

Basically though I think that pretty much everyone has a theoretical chance to get out of the first group stage. Except Pluffs and ClockWise 😛 But I will cheer for you anyway 😉

More Bio Madness

So as you might have guessed from my last rant I have been trying out some bio in TvZ on the ladder. For numerous reasons really. First of all I have been interested in bio tvz for a long time but just not gotten around to it. Since I have switched my hotkey setup and I am still not very fluent with it I find it useful to play a style with less different types of production facilities and units to make to build a core of solid macro, but also MLG Anaheim was the final nudge I needed. MKP showed off some really awesome bio play against Stephano but I was also very inspired by watching Flash in the Kespa Invitational going for just ridiculous amounts of medivacs and retaining them essentially making his army never die.

It turns out that bio is a very good fit for my standard opener in TvZ. As the regular readers might know I use the demuslim opener in TvZ which is a fast expand where you follow up with a hellion/marine push at 9 minutes with stim, combat shield and +1 weapons. While you push you take a third and add tank production. Since you have so much bio upgrades so early and you have the factory allowing for starport tech without having invested in tanks this is a very good opener to lead into bio. I just skip tanks, get the reactored starport and keep adding raxes, going for +2+1 while setting up my third.

Macro with bio play is both harder and easier than with marine/tank. Infrastructure is really easy, you only need one starport for medivacs all game and everything else is just more expansion and more raxes and remembering to hit the infantry upgrades. However actually macroing out of your buildings is harder because you are engaging almost non stop all game long which leaves way less AMP to macro in between, bio production cycles are short and you are trading units so much that you can’t afford to miss a cycle or you are dead.

Basically the way I feel you should play bio is to just go for the overwhelming macro style where you after the initial 9 minute push go for a follow up push pretty much every minute or two minutes. You can expand aggressively but you should not take gas after your third, make other expansions into planetaries to force zerg to commit a lot of stuff in order to take them out. Essentially you have two goals with the constant pushes, deny expansions and trade armies cost efficiently. Make it really really difficult for zerg to saturate new expansions and always try to push one location and drop another. You are not trying to kill zerg, the number one focus when zerg engages your pushes is to trade as efficiently as you possibly can and then go again with the new army you have macroed up behind. As long as you are trading well and denying expansions zerg is on the clock. The constant pushing is also preventing zerg from teching up to tier 3, every time you trade armies you have a new one on the way and unless zerg macroes up with ling/bling the next push is going to do too much damage.

Bio only works if you are controlling every engagement well, infestors is not a huge threat to bio if you have a high medivac count, a good marauder count and split well. In fact infestors are really really bad against this. What zerg wants to do is invest that gas in banelings instead. Banelings are only really cost efficient against marines, and not even against them if you split well. Split your bio, make marauders soak damage and retain medivacs and every engagement should give you a slight macro economical edge.
I can not stress enough how important it is to retain medivacs, quite often you will end up doing engages where you split well but zerg has so many banelings that your two armies just ends up annihilating each other. This is good for you as long as you pull all your medivacs back to your reinforcements. The thing is that even if you trade exactly even with zerg in every engagement the fact that you are constantly attacking means zerg can’t take out your expansions. A planetary can’t be taken down by a small skirmish force but you can snipe zerg expansions with very little bio. If zerg is to take out your expansions he needs to either baneling bomb the planetaries which just means that in the following engagement you are going to roll his low baneling count army, or he has to commit the entire army to take it out which means you are either going to be able to fight his army with a PF next to you, or you are just going to use your mobility to take out 3 hatches in exchange for your one PF.

I am going to try and add in ravens with seeker missile into this style as seeker missile is just so good against banelings. 

TvZ Bio

I was talking to someone on tl about bio in TvZ yesterday and bio is something I have been tempted by in TvZ for a very long time but never actually tried it out very much, mostly because I just have not had the energy to learn the ins and outs of a new style when I already have one.

When it comes to matchups and the styles that are played I think you can easily group TvT and TvZ closely together with TvP having very different features. In standard play, pretty much all styles are viable in the first two, pure bio, pure mech and everything in between. They are all viable but they play out very differently and they put very different demands on people. I often hear players say that bio in TvZ is less viable than the other styles because you are playing on a razors edge where miss control of an engagement will lose you the game but what people do not realize is that this is always the case with any style, it just takes on slightly different shapes.

Basically the way the terran race is built and I think the reason the terran race is so strong is because of the huge contrast between control and positioning which is illustrated through the different unit types. Everyone knows this pretty much intuitively but there is always a trade off with units over how much mobility a unit has and how much raw power it has. You can imagine a linear scale with mobility on one side and power on the other side, the further a unit is towards the mobility side of the scale, the less raw power it will have and vice versa. But the scale will also tell you what a unit composition will benefit from the most. The more towards the mobility side that a unit composition is, the more it will benefit from control, and the less it will benefit from positioning. Just like that the further towards the immobile side of the scale you get the more the composition will benefit from positioning and the less from control.

Positioning or control never truly disappears no matter how far you get in any direction on the scale. Even pure bio obviously gains from positioning but the impact positioning has is way outweighed by the impact control will have, on top of that most of the positioning you can do with bio is very control oriented. Mech on the other hand benefits extremely little from control, but gains everything from good positioning. And let us be clear, positioning does not ONLY mean how your units are placed, it also includes reading where the opponent’s army is constantly readjusting your position as he moves, shutting down attack lanes.

But the input that a unit composition will benefit from the most, will also be the input which when misapplied will lose you the game swiftly and absolutely. Bio gains the most from control, and the least from positioning which obviously also means that if you fuck up your control you will lose your army and likely the game, whereas if you attack through a bad position you are going to pay for it but likely not as severely. The opposite being true with mech, if you move all of your tanks unsieged and get caught you are dead, instantly.

So when people are saying that bio is very vulnerable because of how much control it requires, they are correct but also giving the incorrect impression that bio is more vulnerable than mech, it is just that mech is vulnerable in a different way, make no mistake about it bad positioning is to mech exactly what bad control is to bio. If you are interested in these edge builds this allows you to go for one that suits your strenghts if you for example are good at positioning but bad at control.

The scale also shines some light on why exactly bio-mech is standard. Marine/tank is a lot more forgiving on both positioning and control while requiring a balanced dose of both. This does not mean that marine/tank is “better” than mech or bio. It is just more flexible, while a mech army can siege the low ground at the natural on Tal’darim, and bio can drop over the cliff and into the mineral line. Marine/tank can do both and allow the mobile bio to buffer the tanks and support the positioning. But it also means that marine/tank is not as strong on neither mobility nor raw power as bio or mech is on their own, and you can get punished for both bad positioning and bad control at the same time, just like how you can compensate for an engagement in a bad location with good control, or compensate for bad control with having a good position.

In conclusion all three ways to play are just as viable, but you should really understand how and why they work and what they need to function if you are going to play any one of them and which ones might play to your strengths. If you have insane control and multitasking you will probably get an edge with bio. If you are very methodical and have a great sense for positioning you might get an edge with mech, if you are well rounded and about as good on either you might get an edge from the flexibility of biomech.

Obviously maps play a role too, and if you think about these attributes on the scale you can think about which maps are good for which styles and why.

TheCore Transition Day 4

Yep I am feeling it. I am almost there now where I can go back to play standard ladder games at about the point where I left off. I have been practicing this new hotkey setup for 4 days now but keep in mind these have been 4 extremely casual days. I have had so much work and so much distractions that I have actually only played a handful of games a day.

Right now this is where I am at. I can macro very efficiently I feel that my macro is as good as it was now before I switched hotkey setup. I still have to pause and think for a moment with lesser used hotkeys such as ghost academy, fusion core etc. 

My unit control is not where I left off but I am getting used to the control groups and where I have the main spells, I have to stop and think a lot before I do stuff and I am bad at less used spells and abilities but I am not far off on this one.

Basically my plan from now on is to just keep grinding games while trying to spend a lot of time in the micro tester doing late game engagements against all races.

I posted this on the TL thread for theCore but I will obviously put it here too, I have based on the experience I have had for the past four days outlined what I feel is a good methodology to learning a new hotkey setup. Basically I advocate learning it in layers because of how you can utilize being good at one element of your mechanics to support your learning of a different element. To be more precise, back in the day I redid all of of my spells and abilities hotkeys on standard layout. I transitioned ridiculously fast because I still had all of my macro on the same keys and that allowed me to play at 100% when it came to macro and that supported my learning of the new ability hotkeys.

With something like theCore you are going to end up chaning EVERYTHING drastically which leaves you completely in the dark. For this reason I feel it is important to try and learn one element really good first and then you can use that as a stepping stone to learn the rest. 

STEP 1 – Basic Macro Mechanics
Play against no opponent and ONLY make workers, supply and expansions until you are maxed. Take very base on the map and try to not miss a single worker or get supply blocked once. You only have one goal, get maxed on workers as fast as you can, restart and do it again.
Once you are doing this comfortable you add more stuff to do, start adding basic production. In the case for terran just add gas and raxes and make scvs and bio. Again just make workers and expansions without getting supply blocked, add raxes to constantly keep money down and max out on bio, rinse and repeat. Then you add all production and make all units. Then you add on upgrades. Try to identify if there are units you are not as comfortable with, you will probably struggle with hotkeys for making battlecruisers because of not doing that so much. So just do one game where you only max out on bc’s, run a game where you just max out on ghosts etc. When making units make sure to bind them to their correct control groups.

STEP 2 – Macro Under AI Pressure
 I suggest you do step 1 until you feel like you are maxing as fast as you can, or no longer have any trouble finding the macro hotkeys instantly. Now go play against whichever ai you feel you can beat when you are playing well. The insane AI I don’t feel is necessary, the very hard will do because you just want to be attacked and be forced to react because your macro will fall apart when you are put under pressure because of how loosely you know your new hotkeys.

STEP 3 – Micro and Unit Control
 Practice unit control specifically, get someone to play in the micro tester against you to play out all kind of late game army situations. Start up a custom game and practice just controlling stuff, running around, switching between ghosts and bio, stim and emp, load medivacs and do drops etc . Do marine split challenge and try doing cheese or all in against the ai to practice builds that rely on unit control.

STEP 4 – Casual Games
 Play real games without ruining your ladder stats, if you don’t care about your ladder stats by all means just go with your main account but otherwise try using a smurf in a lower league or play 4v4’s, FFA or anything else where you are playing real games but in a more casual setting. 

STEP 5 – Back to Business
 Once you are feeling comfortable enough go back to laddering as usual, expect to still lose more than you used to before but only for a short period of time.

 

At all times just keep checking with yourself and try to make note of your weaknesses, if you are failing your macro go back and play some more custom games against no opponent. If you feel you are weak on a certain tech or set of keys, go custom against no opponent and build only that stuff. If you feel like your control is way behind, just go and run around with an army using spells or play micro tester. As long as you don’t feel that any one of these are further behind than the rest just keep playing team games or ladder. Most people say that you need 50-60 games to transition relatively well. I have only played 10 actual games, 4 ladder and 6 team yet I am really comfortable with these keys now due to custom and vs ai. It is all about refining muscle memory now.

TheCore Transition Day 3

I feel semi unmotivated to start up practice today because of how frustrating it is to be reduced to a silver player mechanically 😛 I played ladder games last night on a smurf and realized I can not control my army if my life depended on it. But I got to push through. I have already gotten part of the way, would be stupid to waste the effort.

But first! This is so god damn legendary.

Update 1:

Another progress update, I am very seriously considering switching scan from M to K. M feels really really awkward. I am not sure if I am supposed to have my keyboard more tilted  to make it easier to reach M but I am not sure that this is really going to be a groundbreaking fix anyway because if I tilt it more I end up messing up shift control instead.

Update 2:

Closing in on the end of day 3 of my transition to theCore hotkey layout. This is indeed a painful process that I would by no means put myself through if I did not think it was worth it in the end. Sadly I have not had the time to grind out as many games in these 3 days as I had wanted to and as a result I am further behind in my progression than I had expected. I can basically macro and micro relatively fine when I don’t need to react in real time to stuff. But going from macro to micro with these keys or having to make instant reactions in a game just wrecks my game. From most people who have changed the entire layout before I have gathered that 50-60 games is a good target for how long it takes to really learn to use a new setup relatively well. I don’t think that SALT or build order trainer games with no opponent really counts to those 60 even though it is a necessary start to play on your own. Actual games against other people though I have played very few still, maybe 10-20 so I still have a long way to go. Right now I think the hardest thing is just to overcome the frustration over being so clumsy in game, it is harder to keep yourself from giving up than it is to actually learn the new hotkeys efficiently.

 

TheCore Transition Day 2

Well I am on my way to see Prometheus (please don’t be shit, please don’t be shit) but after that I will go back to my one on one with hammering build orders until I cry.

The second day of any transition is always the interesting one, it is also often the one where you need to be strong and just push through. I did a few build order runs as I got up just to get some practice in before leaving for the movies and I am starting to be able to macro with all of my buildings, I don’t use any kind of army control yet by choice, I only bind everything I produce to 0 and I bind my scouting scv to the key right of the P. This is the point where I am feeling both delight and horror at the same time, I am starting to progress and get more comfortable with this, this is also the part where you start to notice just how bad your macro is at this point. The fact that it takes so much brain power to constantly think about which key you are hitting is a major obstacle to smooth macro and I go up to massive banks of minerals very fast still. That is a bit discouraging but I also know it will be temporary. I still don’t have a good prediction for when I will be able to ladder again or practice against clan mates. I hope to keep macro grinding all night today and with any luck I will be comfortable enough to add on unit control tomorrow and rinse and repeat for all of that day. Currently my modest goal is to start laddering on a low league smurf on Thursday or Friday and be completely transitioned by the end of the weekend.

Here are some early conclusions about theCore though!

• It is really comfortable for the hand once you get used to it.
• While my macro currently sucks due to transitioning, I can see how having almost all of my macro on the JIOP keys on which I rest my fingers will in the long run actually improve my macro by reminding me to constantly macro.
• It is weird and awesome to have so many control groups within such easy reach, frankly I can hardly figure out enough stuff to use all of the control group buttons. I have seen people on tl talk about how it is useless because no one uses that many control groups. Well I would argue that no one uses that many control groups BECAUSE they are playing standard and it is just not smooth. You don’t need harass control groups to micro your drop and the push at the front at the same time, but guess what it will still give you an edge and now you actually can do it comfortably if you want. I will definitely force myself to use all of the control groups in time.
• I am somewhat apprehensive about going into unit control because what unit you put on what control group, combined with which hotkey is used for which spell is very very integral especially for terran that is so micro intensive in the late game. I imagine that for army control I might have to do some very slight rearrangement of stuff just to make it as effective as possible.

Update 2:

Right, Prometheus was awesome actually. I am happy that they did not manage to fuck it up completely.

Anyway, back to theCore, I still have so much hard work before me. Right now I am stepping it up a notch to play some troll 4v4 ladder with the clan, taking the opportunity to practice using theCore in actual games without it being serious. I would stream but there is just way too much chatter in Swedish right now on teamspeak for me to wish to put humanity through watching it.

Update 3:

Going to keep grinding out solo games for the rest of the night. It is incredibly frustrating but I can feel the macro-mechanical benefits of this layout with every game. One minor adjustment I have done to my control groups is that instead of having upgrades on a separate key as I had for the first day I have now clumped it together with my command centers. I don’t want upgrades on the same key as production since it means one more tab for something you only build from a few times a game. But since I don’t need to tab when on command centers anyway it is a perfect location. Every time I make workers I see if I am forgetting upgrades, and I still don’t need to actually tab to it.

Selecting which units to have on which keys though is still a struggle, I mentioned before that I was apprehensive about the positioning of skills etc, by that I don’t mean that I want to change the hotkeys for the actual skills, I am sure those are fine. The thing I can not fully decide on is which control groups to use for which units as the flow from control group to spell is important, but so is the flow from control group to spell and to a different control group in a late game scenario. What I mean is that in a TvZ push situation, I dont consider just select bio + stim and select tanks + siege as individual commands that each need to be smooth. It is going to be a very fast sequence of selecting tanks, siegeing, selecting bio and stimming which means I need to look at the flow of the entire sequence, in this case it would be for example L+I+9+I as a sequence and the move from I to 9 needs to be as optimal as the move from L to I because it is all a single sequence performed in a second.

When performing sequences like these my experience is that the fewer fingers I use for the sequence the slower it will be. Assuming I am not mistaking finger placement I would hit 9 with the middle finger, then I with the ring finger, then L with the middle finger and again I with the ring finger. This means that for a sequence of 4 commands I am using only 2 fingers and I feel that using 3 fingers for a 4 command sequence makes it flow much better. With this logic this sequence would be much smoother if I have tanks on Ö for swedish keyboards or semicolon for us keyboards. Since I hit that key with the index finger I remove the more awkward move of pulling my middle finger down to hit both control groups. So far so good, just put the damn tanks on this key instead right. The thing is once I am at that point going 9+I+Ö+I it actually suddently makes more sense to have siege on K instead of I. Why? Here comes another personal revelation in hotkey control. On top of not using too few fingers for a long sequence the direction that your finger movements flow matters as well. 9 to I to Ö is a left+down movement pattern, if I go back to I for siege I am going back against the pattern which is much more awkward than if the sequence continues the pattern. If siege was on K and I went 9 to I to Ö to K that is a consisent downward zig-zag pattern where the keystrokes for all fingers flow downward.
But then If I arrange the keys based on that specific sequence, is that then still as optimal in other sequences of using siege? You see where this becomes a clusterfuck and I bet 99% of you think I am fucking nuts for even spending time thinking about these things but to me having these micro sequences absolutely optimized is as important if not more important than having the macro sequences flow well. Mainly especially because I play terran which requires quite a lot of late game army commands and is equally unforgiving if you slip up just slightly.

Actually hold that thought, I am a fucking moron I did the sequence backwards.. Siege should stay on I because I siege first which makes the sequence Ö+I+9+I which feels like a smooth flowing movement. I still think I should not have the tanks on L though for the reasons I specified.

Download for Swedish version of theCore

People have been asking me for my modified version of theCore where the keys are corrected for Swedish keyboards so here it is, it is also linked in the thread on teamliquid now.

http://www.filebox.com/us7vskoayugg

 

TheCore transition: Day 1

So starting off my first day of learning to use theCore I unfortunately had to spend the first hour messing with Blizzards ass backwards hotkey system. Since theCore uses several keys on the far right of the keyboard, keys that are different on my Swedish keyboard compared to the US keyboard that the layout were designed for, I had to remap all of those to make them set on the correct keys. As I was doing this I realized just how retarded the way that Blizzard saves hotkey information in the hotkey files is.

If you want to set a hotkey while in Starcraft 2 that is really easy, for example the hotkey in theCore which for american keyboards is the [ key is the å key on Swedish keyboards. Fine if I go into sc2 and enter the å key manually for anything it gets saved properly. So in theory I could go through the hotkey layout while in game and change every [ to å. Ofcourse this is just begging to mess something up when there is so many keys, a much better way would be to open the actual text document and just replace every [ with å right? WRONG.

This is where this gets annoying, the [ key which is labeled BracketOpen in the text file can not be replaced with å because when you enter å in game it might get instantly recorded as å in the in game interface but in the text document it gets coded as BracketClose. A third key which has nothing to do with either of the two ones I am changing! The BracketClose key is a different key on both the swedish and the us keyboards.. So long story short I had to make a test hotkey setup in game and enter all of the swedish keys, and then look in that document to figure out what Blizzard “translates” the keys to. Then I could replace the keys with the search and replace function in notepad.

 In any case, I am fucking done! Screw notepad I am now ready to go. I am playing with the setup that does not use the mouse keys btw. The windows key and that other key next to it ( I have no idea what that key is) are now gone from the keyboard and on the floor somewhere, unless the cat ate them. I am now going to go and just practice build orders against no ai just to start getting the basics for my macro down.

Update 1:

Okay, I just played my first “game” with theCore and I am optimistic. Obviously because I started using this thing I was optimistic about it in the first place but I was also apprehensive that it might be really really awkward to learn this. However my first impressions is that it feels kind of natural, having so much of your macro commands on the same key really makes things smooth, there is a massive risk early on of mistakenly issuing commands on the wrong building or unit because you messed up hitting the right controlgroup but that should go away when I stop missing control groups. Having the thumb to control the shift and the two keys to the left of it feels really really good as well.

At the moment I am trying an iterative approach to learning this where I will be adding layer upon layer of stuff to use. Basically right now I am starting up a custom game against the easy ai and I am building ONLY command centers, scvs and supply depots and nothing else and I am going to keep doing this until I am doing those flawlessly, not missing scvs and correctly shift queuing workers back to mine after making depots. Then I will be adding on more and more things to do as I go until I can comfortably practice my actual ladder builds. After that I will start adding on army control.

Update 2:

So I have been having the dullest time of my life just building nothing but scvs and supply depots on ohana over and over again. I have increased the amount of stuff to make now by adding gas, raxes and upgrades. I just keep playing against easy computer playing until I max out and then I start over again. I only need to add the remaining production facilities now  but I need to make a decision first. Basically I do not like to have all macro on one hotkey. I do not mind having some of them on the same key but I really dislike having to tab more than twice at the most to go through macro tabs. This is not a huge problem, theCore has a multitude of control groups easily accessible, of these 8 are used for army, 1 for cc and 1 for macro. But even while allowing for multiple harass keys, I do not need 8 army control groups so I will definitely use one of these keys for upgrades instead. That is ebays and what not. I am also thinking about using yet one more key for starports because I like having starports on a separate key however that might be only due to habit so I am going to leave starports with raxes and factories for now and see how it feels and I am going to put upgrades on one of the two keys to the right of P, I just try to decide which one  would be optimal.

Update 3:

Last entry for today, I am off to work the night shift now. But I feel like I have gotten a good start today. I have been grinding out macro mechanics with theCore and I am starting to get there, I still often misclick stuff and I am not comfortable with tabbing through subgroups at all. I have taken one of the harass control groups and devoted it to upgrades and I think that works fine. I will have to do some thinking though on how to use all of the control groups beyond that since it is quite individual I feel how you separate that. All in all I can really feel why this is optimal when it comes to macro, once I have this nailed I think it is going to be a huge edge for my macro mechanics. I await starting to try army control before I say anything on how the unit control works. But anyhow, so far so good! More grinding tomorrow.

TheCore transition: Day 1

So starting off my first day of learning to use theCore I unfortunately had to spend the first hour messing with Blizzards ass backwards hotkey system. Since theCore uses several keys on the far right of the keyboard, keys that are different on my Swedish keyboard compared to the US keyboard that the layout were designed for, I had to remap all of those to make them set on the correct keys. As I was doing this I realized just how retarded the way that Blizzard saves hotkey information in the hotkey files is.

If you want to set a hotkey while in Starcraft 2 that is really easy, for example the hotkey in theCore which for american keyboards is the [ key is the å key on Swedish keyboards. Fine if I go into sc2 and enter the å key manually for anything it gets saved properly. So in theory I could go through the hotkey layout while in game and change every [ to å. Ofcourse this is just begging to mess something up when there is so many keys, a much better way would be to open the actual text document and just replace every [ with å right? WRONG.

This is where this gets annoying, the [ key which is labeled BracketOpen in the text file can not be replaced with å because when you enter å in game it might get instantly recorded as å in the in game interface but in the text document it gets coded as BracketClose. A third key which has nothing to do with either of the two ones I am changing! The BracketClose key is a different key on both the swedish and the us keyboards.. So long story short I had to make a test hotkey setup in game and enter all of the swedish keys, and then look in that document to figure out what Blizzard “translates” the keys to. Then I could replace the keys with the search and replace function in notepad.

In any case, I am fucking done! Screw notepad I am now ready to go. I am playing with the setup that does not use the mouse keys btw. The windows key and that other key next to it ( I have no idea what that key is) are now gone from the keyboard and on the floor somewhere, unless the cat ate them. I am now going to go and just practice build orders against no ai just to start getting the basics for my macro down. 

TheCore hotkey layout

I have always been interested in custom keyboard layouts, I have previously altered a lot of my keys but in a semi random fashion. I have looked at various layouts such as darkgrid and I have been tempted to redo my own layout completely, not just rearranging some keys because I am convinced that it is worth the effort to switch to a more optimized hotkey layout.

However what has held me back, especially in my own customization is that it is still a lot of effort to relearn your layout, and if the one you learn is not optimal then you have wasted a lot of time. Essentially, before switching to a new setup I wanted to be assured to a certain extent that the layout I were switching to would be worth the effort.

Recently a new layout has gone into open beta if you will, it is called TheCore and it looks very very interesting to me. Not only does it appear to be more ergonomical by being placed on the right side of the keyboard while taking into account how you move your fingers while playing, minimizing weird moves and excessive and long moves but this layout also really do appear to be more mechanically optimized. From what I can gather, in depth analysis of pro replays have been used to get real data of which keys are used the most and in what combinations and then from this mapped out a key layout. Science + Starcraft = I am on board.

So while I can only go by what the developers of this tells me so far, I find it interesting enough to give it a shot and find out for myself if this is in fact a good layout. This is going to mean that I will likely not be able to ladder for a few days because relearning hotkeys takes time, and relearning something this drastically different will take even more time. I expect it to be quite frustrating and I will probably be tempted to give up but I am going to try and stick with it for 3 days and after that I will make a first assessment on whether or not I will keep going. I am going to document my progress with this hotkey setup here ofcourse to keep you up to date on how I am faring. It might help people who are interested in theCore but not really willing to start learning it until they get more feedback from people who did try it.

 

For those interested this awesome new hotkey layout can be found and read about on teamliquid in this thread:

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=341878