Day 2 - Bit of an Update

I didn't get to play yesterday, but did manage to get some playtime in tonight. On day one I started the single player on the normal difficulty. Currently, I'm working on the 'New Haven' mission. Up to this point I've managed to beat every mission on the first try, however I aborted the 'New Haven' mission because I knew I was going to be able to beat it, and I have a few ideas as to why.

First of all, I realize now that I had the wrong idea about how refineries worked. I assumed I could continually set SUVs to gather at a refinery, and the gather rate would increase with each new SUV. However, I was constantly in need of more vespene gas, mostly due to the fact that the majority of SUVs I had set to gather were just standing outside the refinery, as two unmolested gas geysers waited to be refined.

Another problem I have is in my combat unit production. As new units are introduced in the campaign, I generally try and include them in any army I build. However, I have no concept of the balance I should be looking for. Medics seem important, so I try and have a couple of them in each group. Marines seem akin to pawns, so I try and compose 25%-33% of a group with them. However past that, with firebats, marauders, goliaths, vikings, etc., I just throw in a bunch for good measure. This ended up biting me in the ass, because (I believe) goliaths cannot attack air units. On the 'New Haven' mission the player is mostly tasked with destroying air units, so a large amount of the units in my groups couldn't actually attack the enemy. I really am trying to focus on my macro, with constant SVU production, steady food and combat unit production and keeping my money down, so the micro is suffering. I'm just trying to build a large group that I can send in, spam 'A' and achieve what I need.

So, I think that accurately describes the state of my SC2 play. I macro well enough to keep things moving, I build large arbitrary groups of combat units and I pass missions. I'm pretty inefficient, though I would say I use the keyboard more than most new players would (this is a totally random guess but I like to believe it). Most importantly, I'm having fun! The campaign is great and has gotten me pretty sucked in, and I feel the small amount of RTS ability I have is coming out and making itself useful.

We'll see where it goes from here!