Starcraft II Practicing new units and game changes

Units have attributes and the system is a little more complicated than Warcraft 3.

If you look at each unit it will have one or more of the following descriptors:

• light
• armored
• biological
• mechanical
• massive
• psionic

For example a marine is a light biological unit while a siege tank is an armored mechanical unit and a marauder is an armored biological unit. This is something you will have to memorize with time but usually you can guess which will apply just by looking at the unit or in doubt clicking on it. These are easily viewable on the HUD just below the units description in the center of the screen.

Now each unit may have a bonus against one of these armors making it a good hard counter. You can see this bonus during game by selecting the unit and viewing the HUD in the center of the screen. It will list the damage of the unit and any bonuses it receives against units of a particular type.

For example, Helion's have +dmg vs light armor and are great for killing zerglings, a light biological unit. An Immortal has a large +dmg bonus vs armored units and is a great counter for other armored units such as marauders, siege tanks, roaches or stalkers.

Blizzard has said there will be tutorials in the released version of SC2 to train players for multi-player combat. Part of those tutorials will be explaining by example how these hard counters work and which units to build to counter your opponent.

Queuing is bad because you want to make the best use of your resources as possible, and having them sit there waiting for a unit to build is not good. Additionally, your production rate should generally match your income.

The problem in your case doesn't sound like it is necessarily the queuing so much as the fact that you have the money to queue the units to begin with. If you are starting a battle with enough money to have 2-3 units in every barracks, if you had spent down better you would have every barracks only making a single unit and you would have the extra 1-2 units per building in your army right now. The problem likely lies in one of the following areas:

• You are getting supply blocked at times and therefore building up money
• You don't have enough production buildings for your income
• You are forgetting to continuously build units out of your production buildings

All of these are things you should be trying to improve and are a large part of why queuing is bad. The act of queuing isn't too bad, but the problems it is indicative of are worse. The only time you should have the extra money is if you are already maxed.