After many months after I said that I would talk about Starcraft, finally, I found a right topic to start, micromanagement.

What is micromanagement?

Micromanagement relies on getting more juice from your units, which means doing more for less and doing it better. The most important things may be: getting information from your enemy ground, correct unit placement and little but highly mobile engagements with few units avoiding his army. And of course, micromanagement on a battle.

Scouting

Scouting is the most important thing on the game since your strategy will be based on how to defeat your opponent strategy (which means that is also very important to avoid being scouted).

An example of scouting could be looking into your Protoss enemy ground and see a very early Twilight Council, a heavy gas production, a low gate count and probably Chrono Boost on Cybernetics Core. Based on that, anyone should know that getting detection should be a priority. Dark Templars are coming. This early game scouting is essential but you need to do it throughout the whole game to reveal your enemy strategy and act in consequence.

I took this little list from Liquidpedia that describes what an early scout can reveal by seeing just the basics.

• Proxy: Lack of buildings in base.
• Cheese: Lack of workers and more unit-producing structures.
• Double gas: Would indicate a fast tech build.
• No gas: Usually indicates a fast expand.
• Structures: The type of unit producing structures will give an indication of what build or what units the opponent will use
• Placement – the placement of the buildings can indicate if the opponent will turtle or play aggressively.

Scouting will reveal what your opponent haves now and what he will have on the next 5 minutes, at least, as long you know how to read this. This will allow you to get a counter or doing a timing attack.

Each race have a different approach of how to scout on mid/late game more effectively and cheaper. Terrans do buildings, Zergs do overseers and changelings and Protoss have observers and hallucinated phoenixes.

Positioning

While scouting focus on knowing your enemy, positioning is more about how your own army must engage your enemy. This is hard, as your enemy will try to avoid awkward grounds where is possible to set up a concave, this heavily depend on which match are your playing and the map. This video will give you an idea of how important positioning is and how to deal with it on TvT for example.

Positioning can be approached using different techniques depending on your unit composition and how to use ranged units as BroodLords, Tempests and Tanks and also having enough of other units to tank damage and by using terrain. You can also put units as this ones on unreachable places for your enemy. Other terrain techniques are used with units like High Templars, so they can use storm from places without visibility for the enemy while his army goes by. There is a full article about this on Liquidpedia that is a must-read.

Engagement micro

This is more about keeping your units alive and attacking for more time, so they can be repaired/healed/recharged for the next engagement. This can be done on big fights and little ones to get more juice from each unit. An usual kind of micro could be the stalker blink or something very usual (at least for me) wait until the enemy targets the colossus and bring it back, so all enemy units try to get my colossus while his units are being attacked by the rest of the army.

How to get better at micro?

There are lots of games at arcade such as Starcraft Micro Tournament that can be play with your friends and Starcraft Master that allows you to learn the basics and also gives you a new avatar.

Source: Liquidpedia