A very common question people ask is, “How can I improve my micro?” To be honest, generally you just have to try harder and practice; however, one thing you can control to help your micro is to have well-designed groupings.

Speed is most important. Can you move quickly? Focus fire easily? Can you access the units you need quickly? Are you able to unselect weak units in few clicks(my groupings are weak in this point)?

As a rule of thumb, you want units that are going to move together and attack the same thing in one group. I also have individual unit types sub-grouped in other numbers, so that I can access the specific unit type I want in one click without having to tab through groups or click them on the screen. Consequently, when I remove units I have to remove them from more than one group but I haven’t had a big problem with this after a bit of practice.

For example, with orc at tier 2, I’ll have:
   1. Tauren Chieftain, grunts, spiritwalkers, and maybe kodos
   2. Blademaster, raiders
   3. spirit walkers
   4. raiders
   5. kodos
   6. any siege, following TC

If I have bats or wyverns, they would go with another unit depending on what they’re going to focus fire or if there is an unused group then it will go there. Another example, with say human vs orc, I group summons in number 2 with casters, so they can focus fire wyvern together. Also I might have summons subgrouped on 3 so they can run into his base to remove healing salve or chase a unit.

Uploaded my autohotkey file and custom keys.. site is starting to feel less naked! Find them at the right menu.

ahk – allows me to use inventory slots with my mouse. i have 7 & 8 on left side mouse buttons and 4 & 5 on ctrl-left side mouse buttons. alt-f will act like f (so you don’t mess up formation) caps lock acts like backspace (so you can center on hall easily) and on the same topic my left windows key is ripped out.

 custom keys – basic movements are changed as well as human/neutral hero/merc abilities only buildings aren’t changed. Orc is also changed a bit cause I have some conflicts as my move is “w.” I’d stay away from my keys if you play orc a bit and not only human.. or you can just not use my basic movements and then I think it’s all fine.

Major finals are OVER! Only a few more things left to do and then after Friday I am DONE! WEWTSAUCE!

wNv translated a post-wc3l finals interview with WE’s manager, King from ogame.net. He talks about how they decide lineups, comments on NGL, the Deadman issue, and what’s in store for the future.

Flame and crew bringing Skynet back lawl. I bet it dies like nGe :p

West search time is so long I am like stuck at 35-5.. whatever I’m going to try to play less this summer anyway.

Some really close matches. Check them out

I haven’t watched them all yet, but the deciding game – game 3 of the 2s was soo onesided. Grubby randomed to orc and it was orc/elf mirror on TM and he got owned really hard. Sky I’ve only watched his g1 vs ToD.. his arcane tower placement was weird. =\ We’ll have to wait and see if he continues placing it there in future games!

After finals this week I’m gonna install the 10 day WoW trial to play with Curt :p Let me know if anyone wants to play too ^^

No WCG regional news yet =\

Soooooo any strategy post requests or something? WCR traffic must suck such high bounce rate.

I first saw it on 4K forum and it seems multiple sources including zax of wern confirm it.
sk’s forum thread about it apparently he got in a fight with ownitsch.. here’s translated statement from readmore.de

statement by sk|ownitsch:
deadman is immediately released form the line-up of skgaming in therefore wont attend the wc3l finals.
at the moment we wont give out any details, an official statemnt will follow on sk-gaming.com.
until then the team should have the chance to concentrate on the upcoming games.

lol i hope grubby or tod comments on this. last time grubby had something to say about ownitsch it was pretty funny. i guess this shows what he said was true though! anyway rumors are that deadman was playing dota instead of training lol. sk benches deadman

in an interview, Zeus says Creo will go inactive to study. Not surprising. He also dismisses the rumor that ToD will join a new team. LoL, count on ToD to be ambiguous and not give details.

WC3L:

so far, sk 1-3 we with insomnia defeating reign again after beating him in bnet season 5.

as for mym vs 4k, I think 4k perhaps got the best possible lineup.

My prediction:
1on1: Secret Valley
Susiria 0:2 ToD
1on1: Twisted Meadows,
Lucifer 1:2 Grubby hard to judge this one
1on1: Turtle Rock
Moon 2:0 Creolophus maybe Creo will pull an upset!
1on1: Gnoll Wood,
FoCuS 1:2 Zeus19 I think Zeus will impress us in this finals and help his team out
2on2: Twisted Meadows
Lucifer, Moon 2:0 Grubby, Creolophus I almost said 2-1 or 1-2 but it’s just predictions. gotta be more daring!

update:

 according to wcr.. ToD is refusing to play due to it being too hot in there haha!! that’s the spirit ^^ after all, europeans sweat more lol

 long tower rush game on tr

after 10+ min moon finally loses his base and has to build elsewhere, and the human soon runs out of gold. notice how moon built his 2nd moon well in the back lol.. that loss to nilknarf and maybe others must piss him off. the close spawn rush is definitely pretty broken imo

 i think creo or other elves might be better against this type of human tower rush than moon. creo talked about it in his inteview with fnatic which you can look up.

 anyway, in this situation as the human i would have canceled the aows being built in front first, while peasants are still militia. yeah moon did a good job killing peasants early though.

 some points i remember from creo’s i-view for stopping the t-rush:

-build moon wells in back to heal hero asap
-continue making a few more archers to shoot down towers right before they’re done
-after militia turn to back to peasants is when you want to put down a couple ancient of wars near where the human is building towers

yeah and i think he said you should wack AM too with your dh but i might be making that up. it’s always a good idea to wack the archmage anyway, can’t go wrong.

After 2-0ing Creo and before grand finals vs lucifer.. moon did a really hilarious interview with mym army.. Here’s it again if you haven’t seen it:

so funny ahaha, very korean mannerisms. i watched the 2 grand final games(moon starts with 1-0 from wb).. pretty disappointing from lucifer, especially the TM game. he did beat creo though lol, in whose favor jaczie predicted the outcome.

wc3l season xi finals this weekend! it appears that all teams are going to use their best lineups, no visa problems this time.

My prediction: 1. WE 2. MYM 3. 4K 4. SK

Ceteris paribus, I think WE just has a really solid lineup with no weak players nor weak matchups. My guess is that the deciding games will be between an elf and moon(as usual).

mr hurricane aka cane[0wn] aka cane[skynet] did his first ac on a bo3 series i played with murder yesterday(my orc vs hum) pretty bad games imo but lol whatever i still won ^^

yesterday, broke the record with a whopping 23 visitors!! xD

keeping a bot in channel clan box must really help. ^^

replay database is dying though.. =( but it’s my fault i haven’t had any quality replays..i’ll get james to custom with me or something lol (cause that always gives really high quality replays)

 Flame and I will probably start a team league this summer..stay tuned for more information. It’s going to be BIG and EXCITING. I am NOT joking.

So yeah if you haven’t been (ab)using mercs, it’s time to start. These guys are game winners man!

So for a quick post today(cause I need some new content lawl so sue me), let’s talk about the merc priest!

So yeah against orc I’ve been using mercs for many months, and TS was my best map BY FAR. Level 2 summons + mercs just really allow you to play agressively and push early, win early. I promise I’ll get some new replays, but for now if you haven’t seen them already, drak on ts and early on ei for a couple examples. It just kind of sucks when you get the priest and they have blade though; usually it won’t matter cause you can use dust and focus fire their blade but sometimes it just becomes like free experience.Anyway, it wasn’t until more recently that I changed the way I use the merc priest slightly and it has helped me win a lot more mirror games as well.So all this talk about nothing and I haven’t even said what my new trick is yet! LoL I always say I dislike people who say a lot about nothing but it truly is a skill. Hypocrisy at its best folks! So yeah the thing I changed, here it is..Ready?Yeah so I just realized that you should turn autocast heal off, and the troll’s main, if not only, purpose should be for abolish. The priest only has like 200 mana. Heal is like 5 mana for only 15 hp and it drains his mana FAST – he has like zero mana regeneration. You should instead save its mana for abolish which requires 75 mana. I don’t know the exact damage value. But 1 abolish kills a level 2 wolf and 2 abolish + a couple hits kills level 2 water. 1 abolish + a few more hits kills level 1 water, but I usually just abolish it twice so I don’t ruin my army formation chasing a ranged unit and can kill foots or something instead.

Also, the shadow priest dies really fast so you wanna always be careful, keeping it behind with your ranged units and moving it back as soon as they try attack something past your melee units in front. If you’re good, you can get 3 abolishes before the priest becomes like useless, but if you get 2 and it dies that’s pretty good too. And of course, you should still use heal on low hp units or Archmage(cause this old man is like always low hp), just keep autocast off.

Lately I don’t really know what I’m doing against elf, and I’m kind of back in the ‘test and tweak’ process.

First game: 4tw.slayer(i think)

This game was played after the next one, but I want to talk about it first since it’s closer to what I used to do a long time ago. It’s similar to the old level 3 AM Sky push, but some minor creep pattern differences, and I got an arcane tower. Right at the start, something I will do differently next time is not build the arcane tower until after you tier so my naga is not so late, and also build it a little farther back so he can’t just shoot it down from outside. Its main purpose is to help with the skelly harass.

I kind of thought I would beat him really easily so having such a difficult time really bugs me. Rifle push vs elf never was easy, and it is definitely NOT getting easier. From now on I’m just going to dual sanctum + mortar if I decide to not expand, and come what may. Rifles just do not push bases very well.

There’s some mistakes I saw. Probably won’t play human much longer anyway.

Game vs 21 aka g3.revelations

If you’ve known me awhile, you should know that I’ve never been fond of fast expanding unless it’s necessary. But lately, it’s becomes necessary, so been using it even though I’m not very familiar with it. Really in this game I just want to talk about 1 or 2 mistakes. First when expanding, you should not leave your home peasants open the way I did. Next time, I would build an arcane tower the way I explained in 1, and perhaps completely wall the base so there is no entrance – then DR and archers cannot walk in. Also, with a delayed tech, I think you should just try to tank. The critical mistake was really losing so many peasants at the start.

So as you can see, arcane tower placement should be such that it is difficult for opponents to take down, and where it can protect your workers. Since I mine from the lower trees, I would place my tower accordingly.=) Hope that gives you something to think about and try. Let me know if it helped at all! or didn’t help! The way I see it, you can get strats from replays of pros who are much better than I am; but you may not always pick up subtleties, and they definitely aren’t the only ones who have tricks. :O there’s my justification for pretending to write about strategy but really not, haha.