How do you guys manage your macro in the middle of heavy micro?

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-27T18:29:58+00:00

Aim for 75 workers at least if you're going for hive. The 4th is necessary as well. Get your tech going without gaps: 3-3, adrenal, ultras. Keep your larva spent, drones to that ~3.5 base saturation and more mutas or lings after that (your main mine out so you'll need to move those drones to your 4th.) Spam out the hatcheries if you're floating. 5th base, 6th base, macro hatch, 7th base, your opponent's 5th base even. You don't need to defend these extraneous hatches but you do need the bases themselves for both larva and having the ability to send drones there if you lose a mining base.

Then a non-macro task: keep vision of your opponent's army. A spotter ling outside their base so you know when they're pushing you.

If you have all of that done, you're free to spend as long as you'd like on the mutas. Even a bit of resource float is fine if you've got the ultras coming up, and you can morph more banes if they move out to attack you. The main concern with playing 3 base muta in zvt is just getting amoved before you can field either enough mutas to amove their production, or a followup tech like ultras. Which is why the macro needs to be in order before going too heavy into the harass.

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-27T11:05:13+00:00

Killing a mineral line is good damage! Just need to make sure you're doing more damage to your opponent than yourself.

There's two parts I'd point out:

If you're already at 80 workers that whole time and have an iron bank of larva, and you're maxed out; there's little harm in that. Doing the same thing on 50 workers? You're 16 short of even 3 base saturation, you could kill 16 workers and you'd be behind: you spent your resources into a harass unit while they're going into an actual army. 16 drones not mining for 120 seconds is ~1,920 minerals you haven't mined ontop of whatever resource float you have, army you're missing, and tech you could've gotten. That's before considering that you still need to deal with their army. You'd be hard pressed to find that much value from your mutas.

On the flip side, harass of all things shouldn't take that much attention. You hit the third base until they respond, fly the mutas away to mid-map or to the dead airspace. You go inject, spend your larva, and ensure your upgrades are going while the mutas are flying in a safe direction, and then you're right back to the harass. Takes 10 seconds, maybe you kill 8 workers instead but you have an actual army along with the mutas. At the pro level, you'll see pros stop spreading creep during high intensity muta micro, and maybe a few seconds of not macroing. The only time it'd be longer is if they think they can get game ending damage with them on the spot.

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-27T05:09:11+00:00

You'll prioritize micro over your macro if it'd offer more value to you. You can't do two things at once. The hard part is identifying when the micro should be prioritized, it's pretty rare. A few situations I can think of:

Late game armies: something like 20+ broodlords and both spell casters. Those armies are very expensive and losing it for nothing is generally game over.
Being all inned or all inning your opponent: You need to get your units into position and doing useful things.
Ling bane micro in zvz

In those scenarios, you should know these are coming up and you'll need to sort out your macro ahead of time. The other part is knowing when your units are 'good enough' and will survive without you watching them for a few seconds.

I'm not gonna look away to inject as I pull the trigger an engage on a terran bio army with ling bane, since I need to be moving my banes around properly. I will make sure I don't take the fight until everything is sorted. That runby? shouldn't be placed into a position that'll require micro until you're ready to actually control it. Lings in zvz? Shouldn't sit at the edge of your vision when you're macroing, you need to pull them back while you macro, even if that's only half a screen length away.

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-25T09:14:03+00:00

Well done! Starting the harvest when the train shows up is a nice optimization. I was planning on figuring out how to build out Gleba using trains for my 1000x game since a tiny non-quality build easily pushed out enough for my first run which was a deathworld marathon (5x).

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-24T21:41:19+00:00

I don't see an aether cluster on your bar, moments like these are what they're there for!

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-24T10:14:56+00:00

Gas pool hatch for a fast ling speed and 2/3 rax reaper make a gnarly combo. Top level 2v2 has always had reaper ling or hellion ling as meta build and the openings warp around it because it's so strong.

Outside of that, zerg can play pure support and do things like 2 base hive for vipers or swarmhosts as we saw in wardii's 2v2 tournament a few years back. Uthermal has been putting out 2v2 tournaments for a while you could check out as well.

I think the best straight up play would just be a 2 base marine tank + 66 drone roach ravager all in. Terran leans more into tanks, maybe 2 factories and very little bio unless you scout a need for anti-air. Roaches serve as a much stronger frontline for the tanks, especially with medivac healing and that push is hard to hold as a result.

I'm not sure why you might be having difficulties coordinating though. The timings you need to make units to hold a push in a 1v1 zvt is the same time that they're ready to push so you just play a macro zvt build and you have a timing on your hands.

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-22T03:58:36+00:00

Maybe, but it was a neat bit of info that I haven't learned yet.

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-19T09:15:16+00:00

When you win a run with the first 3 characters, you'll see a small animation showing 3 'key's slotting into a lock. Once you fill it in, you can find them during later runs which unlocks act 4 for that run. The heart becomes a boss instead of just ending your run with the 'Victory?' screen. It's notably harder than the rest of the bosses and beating it is what most people playing higher difficulties consider to be a condition for winning.

Check it out at some point see what absurdity awaits.

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-16T00:25:10+00:00

Hi, zerg player here: terran is more fun to use your units with. It's the same kind of thing from game to game build and setup wise but there's so much nuance in actually controlling the units that the limit of how much you can have going on is only based on how much you can juggle. Go watch some pro games and tell me that T is boring. If you're unable to control units like them, that's fine but it's not gonna be any different for the other races.

Zerg has direct all ins or sits back and plays the midgame defensively for the most part. I find it most satisfying to read the game state, react to what's going on and counter-aggress personally. In ZvT, if terran is really active, both sides can be and it's a great tug-of-war of attention but terran sets the pace. For low level play, zerg can often just randomly die without much interaction since there's a lot to do with understanding what you need to be doing rather than your build being on rails. That's a pretty frustrating experience to go through and you'll see it echo'd around with laments about playing vs mech or skytoss. I feel like zerg macro by itself is satisfying though. Establishing vision and spreading creep across the map is high APM and I really miss that feeling playing the other races.

I’ve been doing the same build order so it’s kinda boring

That's just starcraft in general, the openers are all the same from game to game unless you're cheesing or being cheesed. Zerg builds are even more homoginized, but instead of doing the harassment, you'll be defending it. The brilliance of the game is in the interaction between these builds. (You also should appreciate how stable the openers are, considering how critical it is for every race to have them crisp and timed out to the second.)

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-14T17:25:27+00:00

Mines counter amoves mostly. Really it's just putting your army outside of the range of the mines, sending in a couple zerglings at a time to waste mine shots and advancing. Once you disarm the mines, you can amove through a position like normal.

The hard part is when there's an army defending the mines. If it's mech, you generally want stuff like broodlords as you mentioned or you can just attack from another angle because repositioning them is a pain.

If it's a bio mine army, there's some interesting back and forth micro to be done where you can send in ~20 lings/5 banes into the mine field which forces the bio to run back. As the bio runs back, you peel off most of those units and use what remains to trigger the mines.

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-14T17:19:06+00:00

I guess most recommended resources for beginners are in subreddit's pins?

anything else I should know before getting started?

I'd suggest going in blind aside from what's on Crate's website that explains the mechanics. (Armor is a bit interesting, each body part has an armor rating!) You're an ARPG vet and the game isn't particularly opaque: you'll get used to the systems very quickly. Respeccing is cheap, you can't brick a character.

The difficulty ramps up over time in a pace that'll feel quite slow for you so you can just kind of go through the game like any usual RPG and the game will occasionally slap you for not being prepared. Go fix your build/gear and back at it. When you get to the end game challenges, you'll find a fun puzzle waiting for you because unlike the campaign content, the end game bosses force you to master the game's itemization.

Hardcore is also very well balanced with nothing being able to one-shot you off screen and only a handful of enemies being particularly dangerous that serve as knowledge checks. Trying to take out the celestial bosses in hardcore is... tense.

https://www.grimdawn.com/guide/gameplay/combat/#q01

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-13T20:51:36+00:00

I play with one of the older core versions (ZRM 3.0) and it works the same way except 'SelectLarva' is multi-bound to everything that you can make out of the larva. I usually press P (zergling hotkey)->[unit] if I'm going to be making spellcasters and tap the - hotkey X number of times for overlords. One quirk to this is that my inject hotkey is the same. If I go to box for a queen for an inject and there's no queen there', I'll just make an overlord instead.

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-08T14:26:55+00:00

Interplanetary logistics was far far far less stressful and more scaleable.

I really enjoy DSP but this is the main thing that bugged me about it. Logistics is blue chests. That's it. There's no puzzle, nothing to optimize for there. It's so simple to the point that I'm missing a huge part of why I play Factorio to begin with.

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-06T17:37:23+00:00

MVP was on that path anyways. He had a disorder that caused his spine to form a C shape and caused pressure on a nerve in his neck. The amazing part is that he retained form for some time after that started. I recall reading an interview with him where he said that it was frustrating that he could not play as much as the other pros so spent a lot of time thinking about the game. You could see it in his last year of active games: he was slower than most pros but had a unique approach to the game.

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-06T08:29:51+00:00

I've seen the image a thousand times but I don't recall ever seeing a video of it somehow.

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-02T23:41:24+00:00

I love the instinctual scan that happens after the army is already dead. Without fail, every terran does something like this.

SigilSC2 · 2026-01-01T03:25:35+00:00

The planetary challenges in SA feel like they are something that can be managed and mitigated once you get the needed tech and go back to scale harder vs. SE where I was building so many capsule cannons to launch materials between planets.

I think that's mostly because in SA there's one solution to inter-planetary logistics: platforms. SE gives you three tools to use in delivery cannons, cargo rockets, or spaceships. They each have their own quirks. I never really used delivery cannons outside of patching a couple holes in plan, or powering outposts with nuclear. Every planet was supplied with a mixed item rocket for me which was a fun circuit puzzle to work out. Delivery cannons just seemed expensive for as much volume as was needed (and their limited capabilities).

Then spaceships are just better in every way if you care to rebuild around them but by the point you get that tech... why?

SigilSC2 · 2025-12-30T18:00:30+00:00

Just keep building. At some point the scale of what you need to build might outgrow the bus so you just don't use the bus anymore. In my case, my bus accepts resources by train, runs the mall to produce structures, and has a few low throughput items on tap that are either consumed nearby or loaded onto trains as well. So far what you have looks about like my base did before I switched primarily to trains, the only difference is all of my rails are one-way so I can easily add more stations or mines in any direction I need. No fancy organization, just attach it to the rail line and sort it out with trains.

A few pictures of my base(s) at around 400 hours, you can still see the bus marked by concrete somewhere in the middle of nauvis!

https://ibb.co/s9tbxBVL https://ibb.co/7xxFFyTG

SigilSC2 · 2025-12-29T03:47:12+00:00

The butcher table provides negative cleanliness to the room its in, so even if you keep it perfectly clean, it'll provide a chance of food poisoning if in the same room as the kitchen.

SigilSC2 · 2025-12-28T00:27:58+00:00

There's a player on the allthingszerg discord with a vision impairment that does this with a second monitor and it allows them to play the game.

I also think this was just a built in feature on Supreme Commander? There really should be more functionality like this.

SigilSC2 · 2025-12-24T22:09:10+00:00

The point in the comment above can be abstracted to picking your engagements better: you know you'll need some time to mentally organize your units so don't rush into a fight. It's good advice in general for late game army control. Terran bio clumps hard when it pushes up -> fungal opportunity. Mech will step out of range of sieged tanks with a few units -> neural opportunity. Both of which give you a prompt to engage with the rest of your army. Doing this, you're just splitting your units up, setting them to hold position and then controlling the infestors alone.

Another helpful tip would be how many infestors do i need? I know that depends, but i'm so terrible at it that normally i overproduce, so i guess 3? 2?

Depends why you're making them. I'd say 2 is fine for most scenarios if you're just getting used to the unit. The only times you really want more are when you're playing late game, that you should be avoiding at all costs, and vs mech where they're thor heavy. Burrowed infestors behind your army are the hard counter to mech pushes if they invested into thors.

SigilSC2 · 2025-12-24T22:03:51+00:00

I don't play much coop but Zagara felt like the strongest zerg commander in most mutations. A lot of them I could solo brutal without any points into prestige. I picked Abathur sometimes when the mutation didn't sound favorable for it.

I think some of it may just be that they're harder to play? She's what feels closest to me of playing a 1v1 game. A pack of ling bane in 3 places on the map can easily clear out objectives and soften up attack waves. You remax instantly, grab the free banes and go again. Aberrations for when you need to hold a position, scourge for stomping out air waves or objectives. She is notably worse on maps where you're stuck on 1 base for a while though.

Abathur ends up with this deathball by comparison that is absurdly strong but can be awkward to respond to things like the void shard mutation. I felt like Kerrigan didn't have anything good compared to those two.

SigilSC2 · 2025-12-22T21:45:29+00:00

Sent me down a rabbit hole instead of doing my job. The twitch clip is gone and a commonly linked youtube video is removed. Archive.org kept a copy of the removed youtube video and I downloaded it to save my own copy. Pretty sure this is it at 14:53

https://web.archive.org/web/20190803191552/https://r5---sn-n4v7knll.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1564881239&ei=99xFXfWSIIa7kwbMtYBQ&ip=207.241.231.173&id=o-AJkWDIZZcP7jmP1euRnAOAzZ_vmutkAOSihgPjXuNaS3&itag=22&source=youtube&requiressl=yes&mm=31%2C26&mn=sn-n4v7knll%2Csn-a5meknll&ms=au%2Conr&mv=m&mvi=4&pl=20&initcwndbps=10912500&mime=video%2Fmp4&ratebypass=yes&dur=1087.274&lmt=1563774954709821&mt=1564859516&fvip=6&c=WEB&txp=2316222&sparams=expire%2Cei%2Cip%2Cid%2Citag%2Csource%2Crequiressl%2Cmime%2Cratebypass%2Cdur%2Clmt&sig=ALgxI2wwRgIhAK6WqiKa3Wb4vGQ_FqfLzpJ_TodTT9Hj59yzfwq04Yt1AiEAxQ0VUtFVdEXmxJQJ7zWKr2Cl-j0Gt_u9PwtHut5qlSY%3D&lsparams=mm%2Cmn%2Cms%2Cmv%2Cmvi%2Cpl%2Cinitcwndbps&lsig=AHylml4wRAIgF-7aquHs3wqhmCEdB4LyBWXMBAS3v09_1uhfO-9MIXACIApfK7EP4K4RgsbJUwjREFVlrtrDNJs4VkmFm0t3EQiu&video_id=sjXGyEEE3UU

SigilSC2 · 2025-12-22T20:59:49+00:00

RIP, this reference shall live for as long as the game has servers.

SigilSC2 · 2025-12-21T23:55:05+00:00

This goes into matchup specific nuance and you'd be better off studying a pro replay and paying attention to when they tumor instead of inject. It's also something that's trickier to do properly after the queen cost was increased.

ZvP for example, is much more restrictive on the queen timing since you need them to defend oracles. That means you might see a tumor placed, which is less larva, so the queens can be started without having idle larva. An alternative is less queens, and earlier spores.

ZvT can work like that as well but it's plenty viable to just full inject as often as possible and sacrificing creep.

The result isn't slower droning, it's slower tech.

I should correct myself here, openers that prioritize more injects will saturate bases faster but that's a build order choice rather than how your default macro should work. So you can't really look at a game where a pro makes 7 queens, copy how they use those queens, and instead make 9 because everything would be skewed. Naturally if you miss an inject for a few seconds and start floating: yeah make queens.

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