Uberman update and SC2 update

It’s currently day 5 of the Everyman to Uberman experiment and it has gotten better! I haven’t missed as many naps and sleeping is becoming easier. At first it was very difficult to even sleep at all during my 20 min “naps”. I would just sit there thinking about things like I usually do when going to bed and then 20 mins later my alarm would ring and I would grudgingly have to get up. But today I successfully fell asleep in all of my naps. I only missed one today to go check out the U2 concert that was going on and I figured that it was worth missing 20 mins of sleep for.

My thoughts and observations thus far:

• Sleeping (napping) has gotten easier after the third day. I am able to sleep so that I don’t fall asleep as hard during my core nap time.
• I have noticed some bags under my eyes but I don’t feel tired and I don’t feel un-energized. In fact I really am starting to feel good throughout the day and I feel the urge to be even more active than before.
• A downside to this is that it has been sort of tricky to nail down what time of day it is. I may need to invest in a wrist watch or something because when I wake from my naps my internal clock is being reset over and over and I feel like I am “Groundhogs Day”-ing it around 10 am all day long. That is until the sun goes down.

So it has been good and I am quite excited so far! I have gotten some great tweets and messages from people who have read about or have done the uberman and they have all been very helpful and encouraging! If you have sent me a message I just wanted to say thanks a lot! I appreciate it.

As for Starcraft II: I have hit a small wall. I am getting better, but it’s a slow process and I feel that I need to pull back and to work on some game mechanics and core strategies.

I have started playing Random in all of my match ups. That includes 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4s. I know there are a lot of reasons to NOT roll random, but I enjoy the challenge and I like the diversity of being able to play all three races. This is going to present a problem because I want to be quite adept with all three, but that requires an equal amount of time for all three. So lets say it takes me 6 months to get to “Masters” league using Terran, by all logic it would take me as long for Protoss, and just as long for Zerg. I need to find a way to make this process more streamlined and effective.

I have been having some problems with knowing all the hotkeys for all the units for all the races. But thanks to the “Starcraft II Hotkey Trainer” map made by VindicatorDotCom, I have learned Terran quite well and quite quickly. I am going to try to incorporate a 30 minute hotkey training session in with my playing every day. It can be found here or on B.net with a simple search: http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/starcraft-ii-hotkey-trainer/

Second thing I have noticed that I am struggling with is managing micro/macro at the same time. I have a high APM (Avg 130) but it’s no good if it’s all just spamming. Which I’ll admit some of it is. It’s difficult not to click a bagillion times when you REALLY want your units to move faster. For some dumb reason my brain just thinks “CLICK THE *#&@ OUT OF THAT UNIT!!! GOGOGOGOGGO!!” But that doesn’t help. So what I plan on doing is trying to slow down my games (by go to Normal or Fast) and making all of my actions very precise and with purpose. I will play an hour or so working on getting my APM and my “Useful APM” to match up. Some things that I can improve upon off of the top of my head include:

1. Not spam clicking while commanding a unit. If I have a safe line of travel, I will try to click once and then move on to another action that will be useful. (One caveat will be when I am micro-ing to try to get maximum army effectiveness and whatnot. That can’t really be done with slow single clicks. At least, I don’t think so. If you think so, leave me a comment explaining why and how.)
2. Improving my keyboard hand accuracy with Hotkey Trainer, and trying to also make it less “spammy”.
3. I don’t want my APM to drop below 100, but I will be ok with it dropping down to 30 as long as every single 30 of those APM’s are useful and with a definite purpose.

Third and I think the most important is my decision making. I used to think I had good decisive alacrity when playing this game thanks to hours and hours of watching Day[9] and other replays. I thought I knew all the builds (pffft) and how to counter them and I was totally confident that I could pull any of them off with ease! Ha! But lo and behold as I ladder more and more (with friends and by myself) I find that I am dying more and more to things I thought I knew the answer to. Thanks to a frustrating 50% win rate I have come to the hard learned conclusion that I still have A LOT to learn. Duh.

So my plan is to start doing what Day[9] has suggested in these dailys of his. (Check him out at http://blip.tv/day9tv and at http://justin.tv/day9tv) I plan on playing a few games in the exact same manner, looking at where I forget to do this or that, where I could remove something, and how I can just streamline my builds. Rather than thinking “What can I add to fix this” I am going to go the other way and ask what I can remove to make my builds more effective. Granted they are all quite simple right now, and until I get my useful APM up to where my spam APM is I probably won’t be able to do fancy things like a 3 pronged drop attack whilst moving into the main ramp with the large army.

If you guys have any suggestions (that are constructive) go ahead and toss them my way!