7 Steps To Victory Supply & Demand
Hello, and welcome to the first issue of the “7 Steps to Victory”. This is called “Supply and Demand”; I thought that the first subject matter that needs to be brought up is about your Starcraft 2 economy. The backbone to any victory in SC2 is a strong economy; meaning you have plenty of recourses (minerals and vespene gas) to build your army and wipe out your opponent. One of the key principals to getting a strong economy is to constantly be creating workers (drone,scv,probe) throughout the entire game. NEVER stop making more workers; you will need more and more as the game progresses! That sounds pretty straight forward and easy to do, correct? Well for many people it isn’t! In fact most players break this rule constantly. Starcraft 2 is a game which requires a lot of multitasking, and particularly as the game continues into the mid-late game phase. The early part of the game is considered the first ten minutes. Mid game takes place over the course of the next ten to fifteen minutes, and then late game is anything after a half hour of play. As the game progresses more and more multitasking is necessary and this is usually where the rule is broken. People quite simply get too overwhelmed with the many tasks they are doing: creating units, upgrading units, expanding, attacking, defending, building more unit producing buildings. And as a result of all this multitasking often times players will forget to continue the production of their workers. There are a few reasons why this rule is so necessary to your success at building an economy and winning. The first is pretty simple, and that is you need A LOT of resources to mass up, especially with higher tier units that cost more money. Throughout an SC2 game you are going to need to expand to win, unless of course someone won early in the game with a rush (which is a whole other topic entirely!). At each of these expansions you want to have workers gathering resources to build your army. This means you will have at some point in the game somewhere between 3-5 bases to manage. So if you are going to have workers at every expansion you will need to CONSTANTLY create more throughout the game. Now there is a second and equally as important reason to have many workers. And that is because there is a good chance some may get attacked and killed throughout the game. The old cliché “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” applies greatly here. Most players in SC2 try and attack an opponent’s mineral line and kill their workers. In most situations wiping out an opponent’s work force will win you the game. So is it safe to say it would be smart to have many workers in many places; therefore not leaving you so vulnerable. If someone attacks one of your expansions and has a head start on attacking your workers before you can successfully defend, wouldn’t it be good to know you have more? Far too often I see people breaking the rule of constantly creating workers and then to make matters worse, leave most of them together just asking for the opponent to end the game! If you follow the rule, you will always have a strong economy helping you create a large powerful army and you will be able to survive an assault on your workforce; and rebound for the victory. Now for the next topic that must be addressed, and that is supply. In Starcraft 2 you need to have a certain number of supplies available to build a unit. Some small units like Marines only use one supply, while others like Thor require six. For each race you create units or construct buildings to expand your supply, for Terran it’s a Supply Depot, for Zerg it’s an Overlord and for Protoss a pylon. Each one of those supply units will add eight more supply to your current limit, therefore now allowing you to create more units. Starcraft 2 is all about timing and that timing needs to be fast to win; you need to create units quickly and advance the tech tree quickly, to gain an edge for victory. Now there is something referred to as the “supply wall” that can slow your timing down. The supply wall is when you go to create a unit and then get that error message saying to get either more supply depots, overlords or pylons. At this point now you must create that supply unit in order to increase your supply, and get more attacking units. The period you are waiting for that supply unit to be built is the “supply wall”. It may not seem like that big of a deal because it does not take that long to build a supply unit; but nevertheless this does actually slow down your army production. If you run into enough supply walls throughout a game you can really set yourself back and all that time you wasted your opponent may have built an extra ten units. Those ten units could end up costing you the game seeing you did not have a big enough army to defend your opponents attack. So the point of all this is to help you understand and make sure to stay on top of your supply count. Make sure you are keeping pace with creating enough supply units, so that you don’t hit the wall when going to create attacking units. If you follow the two main principals I laid out above you will give yourself a very good edge to victory. You will always have enough resources to build a large army with multiple bases, and you will do it much quicker due to a lack of running into supply walls.
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