Everything you spend is a resource

Lesson

1 of 14

Watch

The lecture, 88 minutes, or a 53 minute cut

Practise

Homework 1, a checkpoint, and a plan for your next game

After this lesson you will look at your own game as a budget. You will be able to name what every decision cost and what it bought, spot money that is doing nothing, and cover a weakness in your play by spending something you have plenty of.

What you will learn

• The four kinds of resource in a game, including the ones the game never counts.
• Why attention is the scarcest thing you own, and how to buy more of it with minerals.
• How to turn a weakness (slow hands, bad scouting) into a budgeting problem you can solve.
• Why a bank is not power, and how long it really takes to turn money into an army.
• The habit every good player has: after each game, name the one thing that decided it.

A resource is anything limited that you can fight for

That is the whole definition. It is limited, and someone (your opponent, or just the clock) wants it too.

Minerals and gas fit. So does supply, energy, map space and time. So does your own body: your hands only click so fast, and your eyes only watch one place at a time. The moment you put yourself on the list, you see the real game. You are one of the things being spent.

Now the key question. Of everything on that list, which is the scarcest?

Most people say time. It is a good answer and not the best one. With all the time in the world you still do nothing, unless you are paying attention to something. Attention is the scarcest resource you own. Every conversion in the game, minerals into units, units into map control, map control into a win, goes through it.

The four kinds

Two of those columns are the ones players skip.

Assistant resources do nothing on the day you buy them. Researching siege mode moves no unit, builds no building and kills nothing. What it buys is the ability to use something you already own in a new way ►1:16 . So researching psionic storm and then not building a high templar is not a small slip. You paid 200 minerals and 200 gas for a multiplier and gave it nothing to multiply.

Physical resources are half the game, and the game does not count them. Your hands, your eyes and your stamina run out in the middle of a fight, the same way minerals do ►1:13 . Treat them as a budget too. A player who gets tired after three games is playing his fourth game poorer than his first.

Move one: spend what you have to cover what you lack

Say you play at about 80 APM. You cannot watch the whole map, and you cannot flick back home every time a drop comes in. Your scouting is not good enough, and it will not be next week either.

Fine. Put two cannons, a turret, a few mines or a lurker behind your mineral line. You have just spent economy to buy reactions you do not have ►1:21 . The defence watches the mineral line so you do not have to.

This is the most useful idea in the lesson if you are newer to the game. A weakness is a budgeting problem, not a verdict on you. Ask: what do I have too much of, and what can it buy?

Worked example. A Protoss player at 80 APM keeps losing 6 to 8 probes to every mutalisk flight. Each probe is 50 minerals, so a bad raid costs 300 to 400 minerals, plus the lost mining while he rebuilds them. Two cannons cost 300. If they stop even one raid, they have paid for themselves, and they keep working while he is busy at the front.

The trade runs the other way too. If you sit at 200 of 200 supply, your supply is full and so it is idle. It is only worth something once you spend it: trade the army for something of theirs, then rebuild.

Move two: holding something is never free

You leave six units on a ramp you never fight over. Is that good?

The wrong answer is yes or no. The right answer is two lists ►1:24 .

• What you spent: attention, six units that are not attacking anywhere else, maybe minerals on defence.
• What you got: their scout does not get past, you know that part of the map is empty, and you own the ground behind it.

If you cannot say both lists, you did not make a decision. You just left some units somewhere. This habit alone fixes the most common mid level mistake: armies parked in places that matter to no one.

Move three: every conversion takes time, so plan the route

Money becomes power only by a route, and every step of the route costs time ►1:26 : minerals become a barracks, the barracks becomes units, the units need your attention to go somewhere, and only then do they win you ground.

Worked example. It is minute five and you notice 800 minerals in the bank. That is 16 marines. But a barracks trains one marine every 24 seconds. With one barracks, those 16 marines arrive in six minutes and 24 seconds. With four barracks, they arrive in 96 seconds. The minerals were never the problem. The route was too narrow, and you decided too late.

So the question is never "do I have money?" It is "where does this money go, and how long does it take to get there?" The player who looks up at 3,000 minerals and realises he needed four more production buildings three minutes ago has already lost those three minutes.

A quick rule you can use tonight: if your bank is above 500 minerals for more than one cycle of production, you are short of production buildings or short of attention. Build the buildings first. Then check which one it really was.

The test to carry into every game

For any decision, in the game or after it:

1. What did I spend?
2. What did I get?
3. For anything I am saving: what will it become, and how long will that take?

The habit: name the one thing that decided the game

One more idea, and it is a habit rather than a theory. Good players become their own coach. They take a loss in stride, and after every game they spend thirty seconds naming the single thing that decided it ►0:08 .

Not five things. One. "I floated 1,200 minerals at minute eight." "I never saw the second base." "My army was on the wrong side of the map when the drop landed." After ten games, read the list back. The thing on it three times is what you practise next.

Players worth watching

You learn faster by watching someone do the thing well. These are names you will meet again in this course, and what each one is worth watching for. For the full story of the scene, read Progaming to 2009, and what happened next.

• BoxeR: doing more with less. Drops, surprise and control, from a player who often had the smaller army.
• iloveoov: the opposite lesson. He always seemed to have more units than you expected, because his production never stopped. Watch his macro, not his fights.
• NaDa: production speed. Watch how few seconds his buildings sit idle.
• Garimto and Kingdom: Protoss unit control. You will see clips of both in lesson 3.
• Savior and Jaedong: Zerg. Savior for economy and reading the opponent, Jaedong for mutalisk control and relentless pressure.
• Bisu and Flash: the standard every Protoss and Terran after them plays against. Watch any of their games and ask, at each moment, what they spent and what they got.

The game also moved over the years from all out attack towards defence: earlier expansions, holding ground, playing for the long game. Keep that in mind when an old replay looks reckless.

Common mistakes

• Researching tech you do not use. An upgrade with no units to use it is money thrown away.
• Watching the bank grow. Minerals above 500 are a warning light, not savings.
• Adding production too late. A new barracks pays off only after it is built, so build it before you need it.
• Parking armies with no reason. If you cannot say what a group of units is buying you, move it.
• Treating slow hands as the end of the story. Spend minerals on defence to buy back the reactions you do not have.
• Reviewing a loss as a list of ten mistakes. Pick the one that decided it.

Watch the lecture

The lecture builds the four kinds of resource on a whiteboard, mostly by asking the room. The short cut is 50 minutes and keeps the opening, the course outline, a tour of progaming history and the resource theory.

The minutes worth your time:

• ►0:18 the whole course outline, built from one question: what is the most basic thing in StarCraft?
• ►0:41 a tour of progaming history and the players who shaped it.
• ►1:06 the resource theory, twenty minutes, the heart of the lesson.
• ►1:21 spending economy on defence to cover slow reactions.

Practise

Homework 1. Three short problems: read a replay, write up one branch of a tech tree, and learn what the great players were known for. All of them are on the homework page.

The first problem uses this replay. Watch it and ask what is significant about the unit mix. Here is the hint: look for what is missing. What a player chose not to build tells you as much as what they did build, and the missing unit is usually where the decision was.

The Economy Lab. Open the Economy Lab and set up your usual worker count. See how many minerals a minute you really earn, and how many production buildings it takes to spend them.

Checkpoint